“Quite all right,” Mary said, “some of them.”
“Really? If you say so. But you’re a very tolerant person.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mary Pick. “I’ve never been told that before.”
Jo sat and watched her elegant friend.
“I want to ask you something. I have to ask it. But I’m afraid you won’t be my friend anymore after I do.”
“Oh, my,” Mary said. “Let’s see.”
“How can you align yourself — a person like you — how can you ally yourself with such terrorizing by such people?”
“I can’t, because I don’t. I am not an activist or an agitator. I can only tell you why I couldn’t have had an abortion. Why I think people shouldn’t do it. But you’ll know all about that.”
“Yes.”
“If anyone asks me,” Mary said, “I’ll say don’t do it. There are people who don’t believe human life starts at conception. I can’t prove them wrong. We are taught that the universe is beautiful. We believe it is good. We believe its phenomena reflect a perfection beyond our understanding but that we can partly experience. Sort of. Man — I should say humankind, shouldn’t I? — is also sacred. Reflecting that being we know as God. Matter, stuff, quickened to human life, is therefore sacred. At the moment, we are taught this quickening happens on conception.”
“At the moment.”
“We don’t argue, do we, because this is dogma, isn’t it?” Mary said. “That is the inspired teaching at the present time. Faith. A being sacred in that way is not to be destroyed at will. Cannot be judged worthy of destruction for individual or general human advantage. That’s the Church’s teaching and that’s the faith one practices.”
“And everyone else has to practice it too?”
“I hold sacred what is declared sacred. The law of the state cannot justify abortion. It isn’t the law of the state that makes human life sacred. It can’t determine what is mortal sin or blasphemy. It can’t punish spiritual crimes. It can’t presume to speak for God.”
“I never thought you felt any other way, Mary.”
Mary looked at her watch. “Got to make dinner for Deano. Ask me if he hates being called Deano. Plucked it from an inspired moment.”
“Wish I’d been there.”
“Right,” said Mary Pick. “You’re never there. No one’s ever there when I’m inspired.”
Jo walked to the door and they looked through the glass at the rain. Mary borrowed an umbrella from Jo’s enormous stash of forgotten ones.
“Not to worry, Josephine,” Mary Pick said, her hand on the knob. “We’ll get things put right for Maud’s father. The church… thing.”
“Hey, Mary? Did you think Maud’s piece was good? Religion aside, sort of?”
“Religion aside? A writer lost to us there. I’m going to pray for her. I like to pray that all will be well in spite of things. You know, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ In spite of it all. You should try it, really. Why not?”
“I’ll leave it to you. I’m glad you liked her piece.”
“I didn’t say I liked it.”
“But you thought it was good.”
“Oh, yes! Time loves language, you know. Forgives the writer, the poet says. And here we are.” She gestured in the direction of the college’s well-known library. “Books everywhere. We do too.”
34
ACCORDING TO THE afternoon timetable, Stack had to change trains at what had been a derelict station in Connecticut he had not seen in a few years. His last time through it had been a crack scene, a rat-haunted vault of pissy shadows. It had been improved somewhat since the downtown bombings. Maybe, he thought, one thing had to do with the other. Graffiti had been painted over. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were as yet unvandalized, but the ticket counter was closed and the only person in the station with him was a suspiciously sleepy teenager in a hoodie. Stack went over and looked at him — a police impulse. The boy’s eyes were half closed. The kid never reacted, and it was as though he were trying to hide in plain sight.
Stack, in his best wool pants and rather shabby sport jacket, walked tilted against the weight of the semi-automatic pistol he had taken to carrying. New York cops had been issued Glocks while Stack was in the job. Glocks, which replaced the old revolvers, were fearsome, fateful pieces, and they could set a running man into an airborne spin. It was a weapon to display on a twenty-first-century coat of arms, Stack thought. If there was a piece of weaponry used to claim the streets, it would be the Glock, exploding into random fusillades. A carelessly drawn breath might set it blazing. A gun with a mind of its own, in the world that had come to be after 9/11—heavy, hard to use, ready to take out half the room in seconds. They had become popular. Prestigious weapons, they tempted bozos toward casual display.
The Glock had led to a pandemic of bizarre shootings. Things happened inexplicably, the gun creating absurd occurrences on the streets. He had not packed it since leaving the job, and it felt strange.
On the next train to the college Stack had his choice of seats. At New Haven he rose to change again and walked across the refurbished station’s interior. By Maud’s time they had cleaned it up, as befitted the classy young passengers who used it. Of whom Maud had been one. From New Haven a slow local train tunneled through the hills and up the river to Amesbury.
35
JO WAS IN THE OFFICE, closing it down for the holiday break. Amid the spreading tremors of accusation and fear that attended Maud’s death, she’d been giving the semblance of advice to students preparing to return transformed to their families. The home folks would be welcoming conditions as various as bird flu, drug addiction, kundalini yoga, and Salafism, and offering returnees a few unexpected variations on the lives they’d left behind. In short, it was a tough time anyway, compounding the elements of Christmas, the kids’ ages and so on. Mercifully for the college, the repercussions, for the most part, didn’t have to be acted out on college property.
Jo was almost finished with the mailings when an old man came through the street door upstairs and descended to her office.
“Miss Carr?” the old man asked. Jo smiled. “I’m Eddie Stack. I used to be Maud’s father.”
His way of putting it cut off her polite greeting.
“You’ll always be her father, Mr. Stack. Through eternity.”
“We talked on the phone,” Stack said. “You and me. The night before she died.”
She told him to sit down and took a place opposite him.
“I took her to the hospital that night because she was so upset. But she got away from me. You mustn’t say you used to be her father, Mr. Stack.”
She rose and shook his hand across the desk.
“Whatever you say,” he told her.
“I’ve told you how desolate we’ve been here. It makes such an awful Christmas.”
“Yeah,” Stack said. “It’s too bad. I see they got the streets in town decorated. I came up from Long Island.”
“We miss her so much,” Jo said. Stack was trembling a little. She wondered whether he had been drinking, and for how long.
“I know they liked her here. I heard.”
She could only take it for bitterness, and what could she say? That Maud was admired and loved here in ways with which she could not cope, before her time. That Maud herself had loved it here, that it was the fullness of life to her. That it almost certainly would have been fine in the end with a little luck and a little less of God’s appalling mercy.
“But you got her now, right?” Stack said. “You got her from me.”