“That’s Saint Mary Frances,”Sidlowski says, his voice suddenly intimate, suffused with gentleness, as ifthis were upsetting news he must break to her.“She died at the end ofthe eighteenth century and was can-onized about sixty years after her death.”
“I never heard ofher,”Kate says.“I don’t really know very much about saints.As I said, I’m not—”
“Catholic,”Sidlowski cuts in.“I realize that.But she’s a lovely saint, one ofmy favorites.Not very well known here, but greatly loved in Naples.But do you see why I wanted you to see this painting?”
Kate redirects her attention to the image.The canvas is old, the paint is muddy, and the surface veneer is cracked into a thousand little jigsaw sections.
“She looks so much like you,”Sidlowski says.“Don’t you see the resemblance?”
Kate shakes her head.She sees nothing ofherselfin the face ofMary Frances.All there is in common is the dark-brown hair, brown eyes; everything else about Mary Frances seems merely average, even generic: average height, average weight.Oh, maybe a little something in the mouth, after all, that thin, broad upper lip, and maybe, also, a certain boyishness ofchin.And the shoulders.
“I still think ofmyselfas having blonde hair,”Kate says.“Though I haven’t since I was ten years old.But it was such a part ofmy identity, and such a part ofmy parents’celebration ofme.The picture ofmyselfthat I carry within me will always be ofsome pink little girl with white-blonde hair.Oh my God, how my parents suffered when my hair went dark.”
“It’s not just the coloring,”says Sidlowski.Whatever tact he had when first pointing the saint out to Kate is falling away now.His voice is eager, insistent.“It’s the face, the shape ofthe head, and something else, some-thing ineffable.”
“I don’t really see it,”Kate says apologetically.“But thank you, I guess.
I don’t relate to saints, Father.I don’t really believe in them.”
“But it’s a matter ofhistorical record.And this is her birthday month.
She was born October6.October6was the day ofthe storm,”Sidlowski says.“It made me think ofher.”
“Why is that?”Kate is uneasy with any mention ofthat unexpected, chaos-inducing snow.The storm has come to mean two things to her:her narrow escape from the roaming Star ofBethlehem boys, and Daniel spending the night with Iris, a night that, the more she thinks about it, al-most certainly became the occasion for Daniel’s long desire to finally find consummation.Kate cannot see a broken tree—and there are still thou-sands inWindsor County—without pain in her chest.
“Are you all right?”Father Sidlowski asks.
“Tell me about her,”Kate says, gesturing toward the painting.“What’s wrong with her hands?Why is she bleeding?”
“She was called Mary Frances ofthe FiveWounds.”He waits to see if Kate understands those wounds refer to the five stabs ofthe Roman spears in Jesus’crucified body.“She had a very difficult life.Even after she joined an order, her father, who detested her, and, ifyou ask me, har-bored and perhaps even acted upon incestuous feelings toward her, in-sisted she continue to live in his house as a servant.When Mary Frances’s father was done with her, he passed her along to a local priest, a fanatic in the Jansenist tradition, who continued Mary’s ill treatment.She re-mained the priest’s personal servant for the rest ofher life, thirty-eight more years.Yet even in the midst ofher degradation, Mary insisted on caring for others.She practiced regular personal mortifications, many of them quite painful, asking God to place in her own soul the suffering ofall those trapped in Purgatory, and asking, as well, to share the pain of her sick neighbors, most ofwhom treated her with contempt.”
He looks at Kate, sees her pained expression, and lowers his voice, almost to a murmur.
“You said you were going from church to church.Would you mind my asking why?”
“I’m being treated with contempt, too, Father,”Kate says.She steps toward him.The floor is soft, it seems as ifher feet are sinking in through the wood.A sudden dizziness, the world spins, once, twice.What’s hap-pening to me?She grabs Sidlowski’s arm to keep her balance.
Daniel is wracked with jealousy now that it is the weekend and Hamp-ton is home.He suspects that there is no one in the world who would sympathize with his agony, not even Iris.And what puts him even further from sympathy’s comforting embrace is that he is harming other people.
He is lying to Kate, though he tells himself that he would tell her the truth and take the necessary steps to separate their lives ifonly he hadn’t promised Iris not to make any precipitous moves.The fact is that Iris’s swearing him to silence fits in with his own reluctance to say the terrible thing to Kate.He is betraying Hampton, who is not really a friend or a man toward whom Daniel has ever had warm feelings, but who is, at least, a fellow human being, and worthy ofrespect and decent treat-ment.And he is betraying Iris—he has slept with Kate as a way ofkeep-ing a modicum ofdomestic peace, simply a matter ofslapping up some wallpaper to cover the cracks in the plaster.
His only comfort is theWindsor Bistro, which he discovered a couple ofweeks ago quite by accident.Before the storm, theWindsor Bistro seemed well on its way to being a losing proposition, a small, pleasant place, with a little gas fireplace and a Colonial chandelier, but there were never more than six or eight people eating at the same time.The owner and cook, Doris Snyder, a shy, frugal woman with a starburst birthmark on her forehead, stocked as little fresh food as possible, afraid, as she was, that most ofit would end up in the garbage.By the time ofthe Oc-tober snow, theWindsor Bistro was beginning to have that doomed air of a fighter looking for a place to fall.But then the storm hit, and the Bistro was the first place in Leyden to reopen, and anyone who was brave or restless enough to leave home gathered there for companionship.Doris’s confidence grew each time the door opened, and soon she was greeting everyone personally, serving free drinks and complimentary desserts.
After a couple ofnights, she convinced her boyfriend, a mentally unsta-ble but handsome man named Curtis, who had not left their house in six months, to bring his guitar in and sing his repertoire ofNeilYoung, Jim Croce, and Jackson Browne songs.
Daniel has become a regular.The place is crowded tonight and it is only his position as one ofthe original, favored customers that allows him to oc-cupy a table all to himself.The owner’s boyfriend has not come in;his place on the stool to the side ofthe bar is taken by an old grade-school friend of Daniel’s, a bushy-browed man named Chris Kiley, who accompanies him-selfon a littleYamaha keyboard while he sings sultry rhythm and blues songs about marital chaos, such as“Me and Mrs.Jones”and“Who’s Mak-ing Love toYour Old Lady (WhileYou’re Out Making Love).”These songs feel like anthems in the confines ofthe Bistro, which, aside from being the only place in Leyden open past midnight, seems to have become a refuge for people whose deepest impulses have brought them into conflict with what society expects ofthem.There at the bar sits the principal ofthe high school with the new second-grade teacher fresh from college in Colorado.