“Do your orders say anything about preventing a uniformed officer from shouting in the street?”
“I guess they don’t, specifically, but—”
“Then, specifically, follow your orders as they were written—guard the door, if you have to, but don’t improvise, and don’t pay any attention to what’s going on the sidewalk; the sidewalks of New York are not your kingdom right at the moment.”
“Sir,” the young man said, blushing; but he didn’t contradict me, and I called out Calyxa’s name several more times, until the head of my beloved wife at last appeared at an upstairs window.
I could hardly contain my happiness at the sight of her. How often I had imagined seeing her again, during the long Goose Bay Campaign! Calyxa’s form, recalled in the interlude between waking and sleep, had become a deity to which I inclined as predictably as any Mohammedan to Mecca. Framed in the upstairs window of Mrs. Comstock’s stone house she looked at least as lovely as any of my visions of her, though a little more impatient, which was not surprising.
I called out her name once more, just to feel the throb of it in my throat.
“Yes, it’s me,” she called back.
“I’m home from the war!”
“I see that! Can’t you come in?”
“There’s a guard on the door!”
“Well, that’s the problem!” Calyxa turned away for a moment, then reappeared. “Mrs. Comstock is here also, though she doesn’t like to shout at the window—she sends her regards.”
“Why are you locked up? Is it the trouble with the Dominion you wrote to me about?”
“It’s too long a story to bellow into the street, but Deacon Hollingshead is in back of it.”
“Julian won’t let this go on!”
“I hope he hears about it quickly, then.”
The soldier on guard, during this exchange, peered at me with a frank curiosity, his jaw agape. I didn’t enjoy his close attention. I wanted to ask Calyxa about our child—I wanted to proclaim my love for her—but the draftee’s blunt stare, and the public circumstances in general, made me feel awkward about it. “Calyxa!” I called out. “I have to tell you—my affectionate feelings are not diminished—”
“Can’t hear you!”
“Undiminished! Affection! Mine, for you!”
“Please don’t waste time, Adam!”
She left her place at the window.
I turned to the guard, my cheeks burning. “Are you enjoying the show, soldier?”
But he was immune to irony, or had been raised somewhere outside its orbit. “Yes, sir,” he said, “thank you for asking. It’s quite a distraction. This is tedious work, as a rule.”
“I’m sure it is. You look cold. Wouldn’t you rather go someplace warm, take a meal perhaps, this close to Christmas?”
“I surely would; but my relief isn’t due for two hours.”
“Why don’t I relieve you? I know I can’t go inside—that would violate regulations—but I believe a ranking officer can assume an enlisted man’s duties for a short period of time, as a kindness on a cold December night.”
“Thank you, Colonel, but that dodge won’t work. I can’t afford to eat at my own expense. I haven’t been paid since last month, with the turbulence in the government and all.”
“There’s a place around the corner that serves beef tongue and lozenged pork, piping hot. Here,” I said, pulling a pair of Comstock dollars out of my pocket and pressing them into his palm, “go on, enjoy yourself, and Merry Christmas to you.”
The recruit looked at the money with wide eyes, then clapped the coins into the pocket of his duffel coat. “I suppose I could leave the ladies in your custody for an hour or so—no more than that, though.”
“I appreciate it, and I’ll make sure they’re safe when you get back.”
* * *
Delicacy prevents me from recounting every detail of my reunion with Calyxa, but it was a warm and at times tearful meeting, and I made many demonstrations of my affection, and perceived with amazement and a melting pride the way her feminine form had softened and enlarged. Mrs. Comstock watched these displays with uncomplaining indulgence, until our intimacies began to embarrass her; then she said, “There are important subjects we need to discuss, Adam Hazzard, unless you mean to carry Calyxa off to the bridal chamber instantaneously.”
I might have liked very much to do just that; but I submitted to the implied suggestion, and left off kissing my wife for a time.
“I’ve bribed the guard away,” I said. “We can escape now, if you like.”
“If it were a matter of bribery,” said Mrs. Comstock, “we would have been away long ago—but where do you imagine we would go? We’re not criminals, and I at least don’t propose to behave like one.”
“This is confusing to me,” I confessed. “I’m less than two hours off the boat from Newfoundland , and I’ve had no answer to the letters I sent.”
“They didn’t arrive, or were turned back. And Julian is here as well?”
“That’s what the ringing of the city bells was all about. He was carried off to the Executive Palace to be inaugurated, or whatever they do with new Presidents.”
Mrs. Comstock was relieved to hear the news, so much so that she had to sit down and compose herself. It was a long moment until she took notice of me again. “I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “Take a chair and keep still while I explain the situation. Then we can discuss the important question of what to do about it.”
Her explanation was discursive, with much back-tracking, and heated interjections from Calyxa, but the gist of it was this: Since Deacon Hollingshead’s arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption.
“Corruption” is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose. In the present case it referred to the growing number of non-tithing churches in this city—churches, that is, which were not just unrecognized by the Dominion but disdained that recognition; for they regarded the Dominion as a worldly institution, feeding on forced donations while it suppressed genuine apostolic brotherhood and individual salvation in Christ.
I had heard of these renegade churches. They existed in all the large cities, but were especially common in Manhattan , where several varieties of them catered to the poor and malcontent, to the lowest echelons of mechanical workers, or to the Egyptians and other newly-arrived immigrants. But I could make no connection between these institutions and the confinement of Calyxa and Mrs. Comstock.
“We were found in, ” Calyxa said bluntly, interrupting Mrs. Comstock’s more nuanced narrative.
“What do you mean, found in ? Found in what ?”
“It’s a legal term,” Mrs. Comstock said. “We were arrested with a dozen other people when one of these institutions was raided by Hollingshead and his clerical police—‘found in attendance,’ in other words.”
“You were attending a renegade church?” That surprised me, since Mrs. Comstock’s religious devotions in the past had been wholly conventional; and Calyxa, who was educated in a Catholic institution, often told me she had garnered from that experience just as much religion as she expected to need, and then some.
“Not for religious purposes,” Calyxa said. “The church allowed its premises to be used for political meetings. I had been telling Mrs. Comstock about the idea of the Parmentierists, and she was interested, and we went there so she could take a sample.”
“Isn’t that an extenuating circumstance?”
“Not in Deacon Hollingshead’s eyes,” said Mrs. Comstock. “Parmentierism hardly constitutes an alibi, under the current regime. I almost suspect the Deacon pursued us for the explicit purpose of incriminating us. It may have been part of some scheme he worked up with the Executive before Deklan was deposed.”