Mary waited at the light, and it was really easier to think about the poor slaughtered Gujaratis than about the frozen lake. She prayed for them, in her way, eyes focused on the turn signal. It did not suit her to utter repetitions. Rather the words came to her on all the music she had heard, so many settings, that prayer sung over and over since the beginning of music itself.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
Miserere nobis.
Then there was Route 4, the American Strip. And this was New Jersey, where she had ended up, its original home and place of incubation, whence it had been nourished to creep out and girdle the world. It had come in time to her own stately corner of North Carolina, looking absolutely the same.
Since her widowhood and recovery, Mary Urquhart had lived in a modest house in what had once been a suburb of this New Jersey city, only a few blocks beyond its formal border. At the suburban end of her street was a hill from which the towers of Manhattan were visible on the clearer mornings. All day and most of the night, planes on a southward descent for Newark passed overhead and, even after so many years, often woke her.
But Mary was not, that afternoon, on her way home. A mile short of the city line, she pulled off Route 4 onto Imperial Avenue. The avenue led to a neighborhood called Auburn Hill, which had become an Italian enclave in the Spanish-speaking section of the ghetto. Auburn Hill could be relied upon for neat lawns and safe streets, their security reinforced by grim anecdotes of muggers’ and housebreakers’ summary punishments. Young outlaws nailed to tar rooftops with screwdrivers. Or thrown from an overpass onto the Jersey Central tracks fifty feet below. At Christmastime, the neighborhood sparkled with cheery lights. Mary had come to know it well and, comprehending both the bitter and the sweet of Auburn Hill, was fond of it.
Camille Innaurato’s was like the other houses in that end of town. It was a brick, three-bedroom single-story with aluminum siding and a narrow awning of the same. It had a small lawn in front, surrounded by a metal fence, and a garden in the back where Camille grew tomatoes and peppers in season.
When Mary pulled into the driveway, she saw Camille’s pale, anxious face at the picture window. Camille was mouthing words, clasping her hands. In a moment she opened the door to the winter wind, as Mary emerged from her car and locked it.
“Oh, Mary. I’m thanking God Almighty you could come. Yeah, I’m thanking him.”
Camille was one of those women who had grown older in unquestioning service to her aged parents. She had helped raise her younger brother. Later she had shared with her father the care of her sick mother. Then, when he died, she had assumed it all — her mother the house, everything. Camille worked in a garment-sewing shop that had set itself up on two floors of a former silk mill; she oversaw the Chinese and Salvadoran women employed there.
Her younger brother August, was technically a policeman, though not an actively corrupt one. In fact, he had no particular constabulary duties. The family had had enough political connections to secure him a clerical job with the department. He was a timid, excitable man, married, with grown children, who lived with his domineering wife in an outer suburb. But as a police insider he knew the secrets of the city.
The Innauratos, brother and sister, had inherited nothing from their parents except the house Camille occupied and their sick mother’s tireless piety.
Mary Urquhart stepped inside and took Camille by the shoulders and looked at her.
“Now, Camille, dear, are you all right? Can you breathe?”
She inspected Camille and, satisfied with her friend’s condition, checked out the house. The living room was neat enough, although the television set was off, a sure sign of Camille’s preoccupation.
“I gotta show you, Mary. Oh I gotta show you. Yeah I gotta.” She sounded as though she were weeping, but the beautiful dark eyes she fixed on Mary were dry. Eyes out of Alexandrian portraiture, Mary thought, sparkling and shimmering with their infernal vision. For a moment it seemed she had returned from some transport. She gathered Mary to her large, soft, barren breast. “You wanna coffee, Mary honey? You wanna biscote? A little of wine?”
In her excitement, Camille always offered the wine when there were babies, forgetting Mary could not drink it.
“I’ll get you a glass of wine,” Mary suggested. “And I’ll get myself coffee.”
Camille looked after Mary anxiously as she swept past her toward the kitchen.
“Sit down, dear,” Mary called to her. “Sit down and I’ll bring it out.”
Slowly, Camille seated herself on the edge of the sofa and stared at the blank television screen.
In the immaculate kitchen, Mary found an open bottle of sangiovese, unsoured, drinkable. She poured out a glass, then served herself a demitasse of fresh-made espresso from Camille’s machine. In the cheerless, spotless living room, they drank side by side on the faded floral sofa, among the lace and the pictures of Camille’s family and the portrait photograph of the Pope.
“I used to love sangiovese,” Mary said, watching her friend sip. “The wine of the Romagna. Bologna. Urbino.”
“It’s good,” Camille said.
“My husband and I and the children once stayed in a villa outside Urbino. It rained. Yes, every day, but the mountains were grand. And the hill towns down in Umbria. We had great fun.”
“You saw the Holy Father?”
Mary laughed. “We were all good Protestants then.”
Camille looked at her in wonder though she had heard the story of Mary’s upbringing many times. Then her face clouded.
“You gotta see the babies, Mary.”
“Yes,” Mary sighed. “But do finish your wine.”
When the wine was done they both went back to look at the fetuses. There were four. Camille had laid them on a tarpaulin, under a churchy purple curtain on the floor of an enclosed, unheated back porch, where it was nearly as cold as the night outside. On top of the curtain she had rested one of her wall crucifixes.
Mary lifted the curtain and looked at the little dead things on the floor. They had lobster-claw, unseparated fingers, and one had a face. Its face looked like a Florida manatee’s, Mary thought. It was the only living resemblance she could bring to bear — a manatee, bovine, slope-browed. One was still enveloped in some kind of fibrous membrane that suggested bat wings.
“So sweet,” Camille sobbed. “So sad. Who could do such a thing? A murderer!” She bit her thumb. “A murderer the degenerate fuck, his eyes should be plucked out!” She made the sign of the cross, to ask forgiveness for her outburst.
“Little lamb, who made thee?” Mary Urquhart asked wearily. The things were so disgusting. “Well, to work then.”
Camille’s brother August had discovered that the scavenger company that handled the county’s medical waste also serviced its abortion clinics, which had no incinerators of their own. The fetuses were stored for disposal along with everything else. August had fixed it with the scavengers to report specimens and set them aside. He would pass on the discovery to Camille. Then Camille and a friend — most often Mary — would get to work.
Mary knew a priest named Father Hooke, the pastor of a parish in a wealthy community in the Ramapos. They had known each other for years. Hooke had been, in a somewhat superficial way, Mary’s spiritual counselor. He was much more cultivated than most priests and could be wickedly witty, too. Their conversations about contemporary absurdities, Scripture and the vagaries of the Canon, history and literature had helped her through the last stage of her regained abstinence. She knew of Julian of Norwich through his instruction. He had received her into the Catholic Church and she had been a friend to him. Lately, though, there had been tension between them. She used Camille’s telephone to alert him.