You read this message repeatedly. You must wipe your eyes to do so, also using the linen tail of your blouse to towel the keyboard and your hands.
Upsettingly, you have something else to tell Father H— about Elise, and indeed about yourself.
The young woman, or young man, from the Mail Room gives you directions to your next stop. You ride a slow glass-faced elevator up two gallery levels to the Guest Suite, which has this legend in tight gold script across its smoky door:
A bellhop — or an abrupt young man in the getup of a bellhop — takes your duffels. I’ll carry these to the Sleep Bay, ma’am, he says. Stow them there later, under your cot or whatever. And he swings away.
Old people in brown evening clothes stand at the bar sipping whiskey or imported dusky beer. A gaunt pretty woman detaches herself from the bar and moves insouciantly into your space. Her nose tip halts only inches from your own.
It’s terrible when a child dies, she declares, but people treat you so well, at least for a while.
You take a step back. Is that right?
Didn’t you find that to be true after your son was killed?
I suppose. I didn’t know much of anything then. I just sort of— You stop, stymied by the task of saying exactly what you found to be true.
An IED transformed our son into rain. It fell red, you understand, but he scarcely suffered. And afterward — afterward, everyone was very sweet. For as long as they could stand to be, of course.
You gape at the woman.
To save him from an IED, I could have used an IUD — but that occasion was so long ago I never imagined a child of mine facing such danger. You just don’t think.
That’s true, you reply, because You just don’t think rings with more truth than any other utterance out of her mouth.
(And, by the way, has she just equated an Improvised Explosive Device with an intrauterine contraceptive?)
And, she continues, people’s kindness toward the bereaved merits our notice and gratitude. She waves at the bar — at the banks of flowers, an alcove of evening clothes, the teeming buffet, a table of architecturally elaborate desserts.
You say: I’d prefer people rude and my children still alive.
Come now, the woman counters. Bereavement bestows glamour. Pick out a gown, have a dry martini.
No, you say. You plant a dismissive kiss on the woman’s papery brow and weave your way back to the door.
The nearby glass-faced elevator drops you into the mazelike basement of the Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, where you sashay, as if by instinct, to the Chantry. The Chantry now accommodates Father Hand several old-looking women, virtual babushkas, so unlike the denizens of the Guest Suite that they appear to belong to a different species.
These women groan on kneelers before the altar at which Father H— stands, his arms spread like those of the military effigy impaled on an olivewood cross hanging overhead. They wear widows’ weeds, which strain at the seams about their arms, waists, and hips. Maybe the father has shrived them. Now, though, he blesses a monstrance of tiny spoiled rice cakes and a syringe of red-wine vinegar, and moves along the altar rail to dispense these elements.
Ms. K—, he says upon noticing you. ’S great to see you again.
You stand inside the door, appalled and humbled by the warrior Christ floating in shadow above the altar. It wears Brice’s face, but also Elise’s, and surely the faces of all the babushkas’ lost children. You see that two or three of these wrong-way orphans have stuffed their smocks with tissues or rags, and that a few, whatever their burdens of flesh, look barely old enough to have babies, although they wouldn’t be kneeling here — would they? — if that were true. They gaze up raptly, not at the padre but at the suspended effigy: Sacrificer and Sacrificed.
The father nods a welcome. Care to join these communicants?
I’m not of your creedal persuasion, Father.
Oh, but you are, Ms K—. He gestures welcomingly again. The Church of the Forever Bereft. Come. I’ve got something better than mud pies. He lifts the chalice and nods at the monstrance: A little better, anyway.
You walk to the front and kneel beside a woman with a heart-shaped face and the eyes of a pregnant doe. She lays her hand on your wrist.
Our kids didn’t deserve to die, she says. Them dying before us turns everything upside-down. And when our high and mighty mucky-mucks aren’t having whole towns blown up, they spew bunkum to keep us quiet.
Bunk cum? you ask yourself, too confused to take offense. But maybe you should tell the father how you slew Elise.
Says Father H—: The more the words the less they mean.
—Yeah, say several women. —We know that’s scriptural. —You said a throat’s worth. —Selah to that, Padre. And so on.
Let me give you vinegar peace, he interrupts their outburst. Take, eat; take, drink: the flesh and blood of your offspring in remembrance of a joy you no longer possess; in honor of a sacrifice too terrible to share.
He lays a rice cake on each tongue and follows it with a ruby squirt of vinegar.
You can hardly keep your head or your eyelids up. The evening — the devastating news — your exile from your life-help cottage — have exhausted you beyond mere fatigue, and you collapse over the altar rail. Father H— lifts your chin and pulls your lip to give you the elements.
The babushka with the heart-shaped face braces you to prevent your rolling to the floor. You behold her from one bloodshot eye, knowing you must seem to her a decrepit old souclass="underline" a fish with fading scales and a faint unpleasant smell.
The Eucharist clicks in: You see Brice and Elise as preschool children. In stained shorts and jerseys, they dangle a plump Siamese kitten between them and grin like happy little jack-o-lanterns. Click. In some adolescent year they are videotaping each other with recorders long since obsolete. Then — click — you’re gaping at a ticket stub, drawn months later from a jacket pocket, from a ballgame you attended the day before you got word of Brice’s death. Click. Elise poses saucily in an icegreen gown with a long-stemmed rose between her teeth. Click. Much too soon: Elise in khaki.
O God, you say under the floating soldier Christ. Forgive, my children, my failure to march ahead of you….
Who helps you to the Sleep Bay on an upper gallery you cannot, in your febrile state, tell. But when you arrive, you find this space larger than the fenced-in confines of a refugee camp, with so many used adults milling about that it seems, also, a vast carnival lot. TVs on poles rest at intersections amidst the ranks and files of cots and pallets, most of these showing black-and-white military sitcoms from your girlhood, with a smattering in color from more recent years:
There’s Rin Tin Tin. There’s F Troop. There’s Hogan’s Heroes. There’s Sergeant Bilko. There’s McHale’s Navy. There’s Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. There’s M*A*S*H. There’s China Beach Follies. There’s My Mama, the Tank. There’s I Got Mine at Gitmo. There’s Top Gun, 2022. There’s… but they just go on and on, the noise of gunshots, choppers thwup-thwuping, IEDs exploding, and combatants crying out in frustration, anger, or pain punctuating almost every soundtrack.