"You know, it's a bit on the early side to eat, don't you think? So as long as we're heading into the city, let's stop at Aunt Grace's."
Jim groaned. "Anyplace but Grace's. I'll even hang around Saks with you."
"Come on. She's a sweetheart, and she's special to me."
Carol loved her spinster aunt who had acted as a sort of stand-in mother during Carol's college years, giving her a family to come "home" to over the holidays and to live with during summer break. Carol had always got along well with her. The same could not be said for Jim, however.
"Yeah, but that apartment of hers gives me the creeps."
"Nothing gives you the creeps. Besides, I don't feel right going into town with this much time to kill and not stopping in to say hello."
"Okay," he said as they crossed the East River and headed down the ramp into Manhattan. "To Gramercy Park we go. But promise me. As soon as she starts trying to save my soul, we leave."
"Promise."
Interlude on Central Park West—I
Mr. Veilleur wasn't sure what it was at first.
It came as he was half sitting, half reclining, half dozing on the living-room sofa while a news special on the effects of the Tet offensive in Vietnam filled the nineteen-inch screen of their brand-new color television. A feeling, a sensation, a prickling in his hindbrain. He couldn't identify it, but there was an ominous feel to it.
A warning?
As it grew stronger it seemed in some way familiar. Like something from the past, something he'd known before but had not encountered for many years.
A presence!
Suddenly alarmed, he shook himself awake and sat up.
No. It couldn't be.
He rose from the couch and went to the window where he stared out at the naked trees of Central Park below. The park was bathed in an orange glow from the setting sun except where it was blocked by the buildings rising along Central Park West. His own apartment building cut a thick swath of shadow into the light.
The feeling was growing, getting stronger, more defined, flowing from the east, from straight across town.
It can't be!
He saw his ghostly reflection in the window glass: a large-framed man with gray hair and a lined face. He looked sixtyish but at this moment he felt much older.
There was no doubting the feeling, yet how could it be? It wasn't possible!
"What is it, dear?" his wife said in her thickly accented English as she entered the room from the kitchen.
"It's him! He's alive! He's here!"
Three
1
Grace Nevins munched a Ry-Krisp as she dusted the largest of her Infant of Prague statues. It wasn't really an infant; actually, the twelve-inch porcelain figure looked more like a young boy wearing a golden crown and holding a globe before him. A cross jutted up from atop the globe. There were four such statues in the front room of her apartment, one at each point of the compass. All were still garbed in their Christmas raiments, but soon it would be changing time. Lent was fast approaching. Ash Wednesday was next week. That called for somber purple robes on each of the statues.
She moved on to the crucifixes. All told, she had twenty-two of them, and some of the more ornate ones were real dust collectors. After that she worked on the eight statues of the Blessed Mother, from the little six-inch one she had picked up in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., to the three-foot marble beauty in its own miniature grotto in the corner opposite the door. There were six pictures of the Sacred Heart, each with a blessed palm frond behind the frame. The fronds were brittle and brown with age, each being almost a year old. That was all right. Their time was almost up, anyway. When Palm Sunday came again in early April, she'd get fresh fronds for all the pictures.
She was about to start on her praying hands and relics when the buzzer rang. Someone was down at the front entrance. When Grace recognized Carol's voice on the intercom, her heart gave a little extra beat of joy as she buzzed her in.
Always nice to see her only niece.
As she waited for Carol to climb the three flights of stairs, Grace became aware of a vague uneasiness within her, a gradually mounting tension, with no object, no identifiable cause. She tried to shake it off.
"Carol!" she said at the door when her niece arrived, reaching up to give her a kiss and a hug. "So good to see you!"
She was a good quarter of a century older and three inches shorter than her niece, but probably weighed twice as much. Sometimes Grace fretted about her weight, and had even gone so far as to join that new group, Weight Watchers, but then decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Who was she trying to impress? There was no man in her life, and certainly the Lord didn't care how much you weighed when you came to Final Judgment. She told herself, The color of your soul is more important than the size of your waist. It was far more important to watch the shape your soul was in. Say, that was a great idea for a religion discussion group—Soul Watchers. Catchy.
"How are you, Aunt Grace?" Carol said. "I hope you don't mind. We were in town and—"
" 'We'?"
"Yes. Jim came along."
Grace's enthusiasm for this surprise visit dropped a few notches at the sight of Jim's face peeking out from behind her niece, but nothing could dampen it completely.
Except perhaps the nameless uneasiness growing within her.
She pushed it down.
"Hiya, Aunt Grace," he said, putting his hand out.
Grace gave it a quick shake. "Hello, Jim. I'm surprised the… both of you came."
"Oh, Jim's the reason we're in town," Carol said brightly.
Grace ushered them into the apartment. As she took their coats she held her breath, waiting for Jim to make one of his comments about her religious articles. It took a moment, but then he started.
"Have you added to your collection, Aunt Grace?"
"A few items, yes."
"That's nice."
She waited for a skeptical remark, but he merely stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, smiling blandly.
This was not the usual Jim. Perhaps Carol had warned him to be on his best behavior. Carol was such a dear. Yes, that was probably it. Otherwise her husband would be behaving as he had the last time he was here, commenting on the Infant of Prague's taste in clothes or citing the fire hazards of keeping old, dried palm fronds around the apartment.
She took a deep breath. The tension was beginning to stifle her. She needed help. She went to her curved-glass china cabinet and took out her latest treasure: a tiny fragment of dark brown wood on a bed of satin in a clear plastic box. She prayed that holding it would ward off the strangling uneasiness but it did nothing. She handed it to Carol.
"Look. It's a relic. A fragment of the True Cross."
Carol nodded. "Very nice." Then she handed it to Jim.
Grace saw that Jim's face was bright red and that he was biting his upper lip. She saw Carol hurl him a warning look.
Finally he let out a sigh and nodded.
"Yes. Very nice."
"I know what you're thinking," Grace said as he handed it back to her. "That if all the wood that's been sold as splinters of the True Cross were assembled in one place, the amount of lumber would probably equal the Black Forest in Germany." She replaced the relic within the cabinet. "Many religious authorities are skeptical too. Perhaps they're right. But I like to compare it to one of Jesus' miracles. You remember the story of the Loaves and the Fishes, don't you?"
"Of course," Jim said.
"Same principle."
And that was enough on the subject. She offered them tea but they refused. After they all found seats she said,