The papers Maud had given him the day before lay on the desk. He pushed them away, then opened the envelope and took them out. The piece proved to be an article she had written for the weekly Gazette. The text seemed to be an objection to the anti-abortionist demonstrators who picketed Whelan Hospital each week.
One page that hadn’t come through clearly showed photographs of some animal or other. Brookman put it under the light to see more, but the shades blended into invisibility. The captions were unreadable too. On one of the following pages the pictures were similarly obscured, but the caption was plain: “Cute kiddie pictures courtesy of the right-to-life folks.”
“Ever ask,” the text read, “in the name of what authority do they harass women who choose to exercise their rights as full human beings? Most of them are dispatched by the Holy Romantic Megachurch. We know the Holy Romantic Megachurch loves cute kids. It’s in the papers every week; the priests of this religion can hardly get enough cute kids. If women decide to terminate pregnancies, how will the guys get their hands on enough institutionalized or semi-institutionalized adolescents to instruct? Think about it!”
This was the paper he had left unread, the one she had specifically asked him to read.
He read on.
“This intrepid band of intimidators treat us to their visits and their cunning fetus pictures about fifty-seven times a year. If they don’t come in the name of the Holy Romantic Megachurch, they represent the Assemblies of God, assembled by God for the purpose…”
Of course there was more. Brookman put the page under the light to see the picture. He thought it might have been a person, a child.
“Holy shit,” Brookman said aloud.
Of course it was the kind of thing she would do. I could have talked her out of it, he thought. If he had read it. If he had not been dodging her phone calls.
“You guys might not be able to tell, but these deformed children are made in the image and likeness of the Great Imaginary Paperweight in the Vast Eternal Blue. It’s true that the Great Paperweight is also the Great Abortionist — a freeze-chilling twenty percent of the sparkly tykes he generates abort — but he don’t like some girl doin’ it.
“His eye is on the sparrow and he’s got all his creatures covered, even those who aren’t as cute as the wee life forms his assembled fusiliers carry. Remember, there’s life after birth, as the Assembled Ones never tire of reminding us. That’s what prisons and lethal injections are for. He’s the Great Torturer, and he wants nothing more than to fry your ass eternally — not for just an hour, not for just a year, but always.”
She had gone too far in writing it. She had gone too far with him. She would go too far all her life. As for him, there were boundaries to his foolishness and selfishness. He had gone briefly to prison for it once, otherwise he had always been lucky. He had loved her. Loved would be the word. Lover, older brother. Father almost — she confided in him, maybe said to him what she would have said to her father but dared not. In loco parentis, one might cynically say. Or not cynically say.
Maud’s father was a widowed New York policeman from somewhere out in Queens and Maud was plainly crazy about him. At length she would mock and jeer this man, do impersonations of him, imitate his hard-edged accent, unaware that she sounded like him without trying. The idea of a policeman with a personality like Maud’s was frightening. Is he a religious fanatic? Because Maud is, regardless of the side she’s on. She had come to the college impacted in the sort of antique Catholicism Brookman thought had disappeared from literate circles a generation ago, thin-lipped and bitter, to every man his cross. Now she dealt the same card reversed. Armed with the childish energy of a parochial school minx, reciting every dirty word that’s ever occurred to her.
What she thought of instinctively as her moral derelictions were at once deliberate, heedless and passionate. She has described her own petty thievery to him in a state of fascinated self-laceration. She has told him that as a teenager she was “abnormally devout.” Now this, which will probably go viral online. It will circulate online and be darkly cherished by the wrong audience.
She’s a policeman’s daughter, he thought; does she not know what’s out there? Does she expect nothing but cheers from all directions? He was, after all, her faculty adviser; he might have talked her out of this folly, which would surely bring down on her more trouble than she knew. But of course he had commenced to abandon her.
The telephone, he noticed, had stopped ringing. He went to the window and looked out at the quad. Her cell phone was off when he tried it, and no one answered the phone in her room. He wondered if he might hear the Morse tattoo against his door.
The Gazette was due out the next morning. It occurred to him that the other editors there might have the sense not to run it. But those editors were kids like her. Why would they feel they should restrain the general rage at the overreaching, corrupt harassment of the churches?
Then it came to him, outside reason, that she might have effected some kind of curse on his marriage — his wife and the child she carried. Of course: the child unborn. At the same time, he thought, he could not leave Maud alone and friendless in that place, and he went out to find her.
It was getting cold again outside. Across the street from his quad gate in the Taylor Library someone had lit a fire in the Great Hall, a quasi-medieval concoction from the prime of Stanford White. It was beautiful beyond the sneers of modernists and postmodernists, beyond authenticity. The firelight glowed invitingly in the leaded windows. Why this is hell, Brookman thought. Nor am I out of it.
8
ON FRIDAY MORNING Maud woke up to sleety rain. Though she could hear his telephone voice in her head, she realized that he had never picked up. She had not reached Brookman, and she only partly remembered making her way back to the dorm room from a booth in one of the bars near the river. She thought they must have told her to leave. Shell was searching their closets when she saw that Maud had awakened. She picked up a fresh copy of the Gazette and laid it on Maud’s bed.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Shell said, “notoriety is driving you to drink. You were staggering last night.”
“Shit,” said Maud softly.
“Well, there’s your story.”
Maud stared blearily at the college paper. Her column was front page left, with the jump on page three.
She got painfully out of bed and drank from her warm bottle of water and dressed.
“They left the pictures out.”
“Well, somebody looked the conditions up and put them online. With your picture too. Like you may get some shit over this.”
“Good.”
“Me, I love it,” Shell said, “but I ain’t gonna be standing next to you in any pictures in case you get famous like Joan of Arc. I got semi-stalkers already. Like my lately old man who just got born again again.”
Maud rose slowly and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom.
“Your beloved mentor was up here looking for you last night,” Shell told her. “Like he came twice. A big old professor coming to the squalid chambers of us waifs. For you, his sweetheart. Only he was on his way to the airport to pick up his wife, I guess, ’cause he got a call from her.”
“Shut up!” Maud shouted and slammed the bathroom door.