Baptism in Blood Read online

  “I think you did.”

  “Melissa Jeanne. She didn’t name her after me. Not that I would have wanted that. Carol is such an—an ordi­nary kind of name.”

  “We should have talked to old man Martin upstairs,” Joshua Lake said. “That would be the best way to do this. Move all the stock up to the second floor.”

  “Martin would go through all the titles and reject the ones he thought were full of atheistic humanism,” Maggie said. “He thinks Charles Dickens is full of atheistic hu­manism. Just pack, Joshua.”

  Carol sat down in one of the beige metal folding chairs that were scattered around the center of the store. She still had the Madonna in her hands, and her shoulders hunched.

  “I wouldn’t try to see the baby when she didn’t want me to,” she said. “I wouldn’t just go to the hospital and visit when I knew Shelley didn’t want me to see her. I’m really not a person like that.”

  “I’m sure you’re not,” Maggie said.

  “It’s what I have such a hard time explaining to Shel­ley about all of this,” Carol said. “That I’m not different than I ever was. That I haven’t changed. Because I haven’t changed. I just understand some things about myself now that I didn’t understand before.”

  “I’m sure it will work out, Carol. You have to give it time.”

  “I could understand her reaction if she was religious or something. If she went to church and believed in God. I remember from Catholic school that God wasn’t supposed to like lesbians.”

  “I think he’s supposed to like them well enough, Carol. I think he’s just not supposed to like what they do in bed with each other.”

  “Whatever. The thing is though, she’s not religious at all. I mean, she’s having this christening, but it’s at some church I’ve never heard of. Congregationalist. We were never Congregationalists.”

  “Lots of people have their children christened who don’t even believe in God, Carol. It’s a ritual. A rite of passage.”

  “I know,” Carol said eagerly. “That’s the point. She’s having this christening, but she really isn’t religious, and so I don’t understand. Why she’s so upset about all this. About me. Why she hates me for it.”

  “Are you sure she hates you for it?”

  “She won’t talk to me, Maggie. She won’t answer my letters. She won’t even open my letters. The last one I sent to her came back stamped ‘addressee unknown.’ But I know that isn’t true. I know she hasn’t moved. Her address was in the christening announcement. It’s the same as it always was.”

  Maggie got a box-filled with paperback copies of Aga­tha Christie mysteries and started to tape it shut. “Maybe you ought to just let it go for a while, Carol. Maybe you ought to give Shelley a little time to get used to the idea. To get used to you.”

  “It’s been months, Maggie. Months.”

  “I know.”

  Carol looked down at her hands. Like everything else about her, they were heavy and graceless and shapeless and dull. Maggie turned her attention to her books, forcing her­self not to notice.

  “Anyway,” Carol said. “I bought this picture. For my granddaughter. For Melissa.

  “But I was thinking,” she went on, “that if Shelley knows it’s from me, she’ll just send it back, and that won’t be any good at all. So I thought there might be a way to send it without anyone knowing it came from me. If you see what I mean.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well,” Carol said. “I thought you—you know. You go up to New York every month practically. You could maybe take it up, all wrapped and everything, and mail it from there.”

  “Does Shelley know anybody in New York?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. But she knows I’m not in New York. She knows I’m here. I’m in touch with—with her father.”

  “Are you really? That must be interesting.”

  “We have to stay in touch. It’s very complicated when you’ve been married for twenty-five years. There are con­siderations.”

  “Move out of the way a little, Carol. I’ve got to get at the Linda Lael Millers.”

  Carol got up and pushed the folding chair along the carpet. Then she sat down in it again. She put the Madonna back in its brown paper bag and put the brown paper bag across her lap.

  “You wouldn’t have to do anything about it,” she said. “I would wrap it up and address it and all that. On a typewriter, so that Shelley can’t recognize my handwriting. I’ll be very careful. It’s just—you know. She’s my grand­daughter. I want to do something for her. I want to give her something just from me. I wish they’d had a picture of her in the paper.”

  “Can’t you get your ex-husband to send you one? Or are you worried that Shelley wouldn’t like that, either?”

  Carol blushed. “My husband wouldn’t help me. My husband is with Shelley on all of this. He goes around and tells people I left him for another woman.”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even meet Zhondra until after the divorce. He’s the one who left me.”

  The Linda Lael Millers were all packed away. Now she had to put the historical romances into something. Maggie brushed the palms of her hands against the front of her apron.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  Carol brightened up. “You will? But that’s wonderful. Thank you.”

  “But I won’t do it today,” Maggie said. “I don’t have time. And I can’t take the picture today, either. Not with all the things I have to do. You’ve got to take it back up to the camp until the storm is over with.”

  “Of course I’ll take it back up to the camp. I have to package it. I told you.”

  “Yes. Well. Whatever. Take it back up to the camp. Then bring it down to me tomorrow or the day after that and I’ll put it in my suitcase for New York so I won’t forget it when I go. I’ll drop it in the mail at Grand Central Sta­tion.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “Go back up to the camp, Carol.”

  Carol stood up. She held the bag as if what was in it was easily breakable. She held her body as if it were al­ready broken.

  “Well,” she said. “Thank you. Again. You don’t know how much I thank you.”

  Maggie could imagine having a daughter like Shelley, and what she would do about it. Carol was folding up her metal chair and putting it neatly against a wall of now-empty bookshelves. Outside, the wind was the strongest it had been all morning. The trees were beginning to look as if they were under siege.

  Carol went to the door of the shop, opened it, and looked out onto the sidewalk. Maggie couldn’t tell what was out there, because the window was boarded up and the door was a plain wooden one.

  “Well,” Carol said. “I suppose I’d better go.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Carol. Or the day after. De­pending on the damage.”

  “I hope there isn’t any damage. I hope it all just goes away. I hate the idea of a hurricane.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Carol.”

  Carol nodded quickly and scurried out into the street, letting the door swing closed behind her.

  Maggie popped another packing box into shape and brushed hair out of her face. Joshua Lake, up on a ladder and too close to the ceiling for comfort, looked down.

  “Strange lady,” he said. “They all that strange up at the camp?”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie told him. “I only know about three people from up at the camp. How are you doing up there?”

  “Getting along.”

  “We better start taking some of these boxes into the back room. There isn’t going to be space enough for all of them up there.”

  “Anything you say.”

  Anything I say, Maggie thought.

  Then she started to throw American Indian romances into the empty box, one after the other, without bothering to look at the titles. She had nothing to say these days. That was the problem. She had nothing to say to people like Carol and
nothing to say to herself. The world seemed full of grief and loss and pettiness and hate, and there wasn’t a single damn thing she was able to do about it.

  If Maggie Kelleher had believed in God, she might even have welcomed the hurricane, as a kind of cleansing water, a second flood, to wash the sin and sorrow all away.

  5

  ZHONDRA MEYER HAD ALWAYS been very, very rich, and for a time in her life she had been ashamed of it. She could get a clear picture of herself, even now, at the age of fif­teen, walking across the broad green quad at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. She was wearing a Villager skirt and sweater set, just like everybody else, and behind her was a plump blond girl from Atlanta named Mimi Dobbs.

  “Shhh,” Mimi was whispering to her friends, under a waterfall of sharp little giggles. “Shhh. You know what she is? She’s a filthy rich New York Jew.”

  Zhondra’s mother, who had been an active Zionist, would have worried about the anti-Semitism of it. She had wanted Zhondra to stay in the city and go to Brearley, where there was less of that kind of thing. Zhondra had a hard time (then) thinking of “Jew” as a category she be­longed to. It was her history, and her religion, but it was being rich that really seemed to peg her. Up in her dorm room, she had a dozen cashmere sweaters and six pairs of shoes custom-made for her at a specialty shop in London. At the end of the term, instead of going to the train station in a cab like everyone else, she would be retrieved by a uniformed driver in an enormous Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, and he would tip his hat at her. Girls watched the way she walked and what she wore. Sometimes their re­sentment was as thick and slick as butter on her skin. She imagined her father losing all his money, and being re­duced to selling apples on the street.

  Today, with the storm rising outside and the heat act­ing up in the west wing again, Zhondra was worried less about being rich or being Jewish than she was about what they would do if the utilities went out because of the hurri­cane. The designation “lesbian” didn’t occur to her at all. This house had been built by her great-uncle Samuel back in the 1920s. It had two wings and a thick central core, seventeen thousand square feet in all, with thirty bedrooms and a ballroom big enough to serve as a wedding chamber for the Unification Church. It had been Samuel’s “hobby,” because he was a younger son without much money, and because he had no ambition to make anything of his life. What he had done with his life was to collect art, almost all of which Zhondra sincerely hated. Tintoretto. Titian. Raphael. The painters were good, and expensive. It was the subjects that drove Zhondra wild. All those fat Madonnas and fatter children. All those round little cherubs and heav­enward-gazing saints. The first thing Zhondra had done, after coming down here from New York, was to call Soth­eby’s and put the whole mess up for auction. Then she’d bought art that suited her.

  Now a very modern painting by an artist named Kalla Havila hung in the hall where a Titian Madonna once had, and right inside the front door there was a sign on a tripod that read: Bonaventura Camp. A Retreat for Gay Women. There was a sign like that down by the gate, too, in full sight of the road. Zhondra was convinced that you had to approach all this very directly. She had to be on the offen­sive. You couldn’t let your guard down no matter what. This was the Bible Belt, after all. It might be a little better than Alabama or Mississippi, but Zhondra didn’t think it was better by much. Every time she turned on her radio, the air was full of preachers. Every time she went to town, she had to pass a dozen of those big new concrete Evangelical churches. Town had the Episcopalians and the Baptists and the Methodists, and the United Church of Christ. If there had ever been a synagogue in Bellerton, North Carolina, it must have been burned to the ground in a pogrom.

  Zhondra opened one of the big metal front doors. Un­cle Samuel liked to do everything he could in etched and molded brass. She stepped onto the broad platform at the top of the steep rose-marble front steps and looked around. Alice was coming out of the trees on the left, her short-cropped bright orange hair looking painted onto her skull. Ginny Marsh was trudging onto the drive through the front gate, baby Tiffany strapped to her like a cartoon papoose. Bobby Marsh really ought to get his act together and let that woman have a car, Zhondra thought. The thought left her immediately, because Bobby Marsh would never get his act together. Bobby Marsh was the walking definition of someone whose act was not together.

  Alice reached the front steps and shook her head a little, to get some of the water out of it. It wasn’t raining yet, but the air was wet. Zhondra felt it against her skin like a soaked washcloth.

  “I’ve tried and I’ve tried,” Alice said, sitting down on a step as close to Zhondra as she could get, “but they won’t listen to me. Maybe you ought to go out there and talk to them.”

  “Maybe they’ll hurry it up a little,” Zhondra told her. “We’ve probably got half an hour to forty-five minutes before the storm hits.”

  Alice shook her head again. “I don’t think so. They’re just setting up out there. They haven’t even started yet. They’re waiting for Carol to get back.”

  “Where’s Carol?”

  “In town.”

  “What for?”

  Alice shrugged. “You know Carol. Walking around. Feeling sorry for herself. Sitting on park benches and burst­ing into tears.”

  “When is she expected to get back?”

  “She’s expected to get back when she gets back.” Alice sounded near explosion. “Listen, Zhondra, you’ve got to do something. I can’t talk any sense into them. They’re out there with all these trees that are thin as tooth­picks and they’re stark naked, too—”

  “—Oh, Lord—”

  “—although, really, why you have to be naked to wor­ship the goddess is beyond me. And Dinah’s saying that litany about pubic hair or whatever and the rest of them all have their eyes closed and Carol might not get back before the storm at all, and then you know what that would mean, they’d all be rained on and probably killed in the storm.”

  “I’d hope they had sense enough to come in out of the rain,” Zhondra said.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” Alice was grim. “I told you back in New York. Religion is an evil thing. I don’t care if you worship Jehovah or the Goddess Sophia or the elder­berry bush in your backyard. It makes people crazy. And I don’t like the knives they use.”

  “I don’t think they’d hurt anything with them,” Zhondra said. “They’re all for being at one with the earth and that kind of thing.”

  “They’re going to hurt themselves, that’s what I think,” Alice said. “They do everything with their eyes closed. And I refuse here and now to go into the emergency room with them when they do and try to explain it all to the doctors. Especially here.”

  Ginny Marsh was better than halfway up the drive now. Zhondra ran her hands through her thick hair.

  “Look,” she said. “Here comes our visiting Holy Roller—”

  “Oh, God,” Alice moaned!

  “—and we don’t want her getting wind of this. Re­member all the fuss she made last time? Go back out there and tell them I said to cut it out. Tell them I said I’d go make them cut it out if they didn’t come back in right away. See if that works.”

  “What’s Ginny doing here today, anyway?” Alice asked. “Shouldn’t she be hiding in her basement or what­ever you do in a hurricane?”

  “Basements are for tornadoes,” Zhondra said. “I don’t know what she’s doing here. She should have called me. I would have told her not to bother.”

  “Maybe she needs the money. That husband of hers can’t make a dime.”

  “Maybe she just wants to be safely out of the storm,” Zhondra replied. “We’re the highest ground around here. Go out and talk to them, Alice, will you? I’ll come out as soon as I get Ginny settled.”

  “You mean you’re going to give her something to do?”

  “Why not? She’s here. And I can’t send her back into town with the storm this close. I couldn’t do that to the baby.”

 
; “It’s a cute baby. Too bad it doesn’t have better par­ents.”

  “Go, Alice.”

  Alice stood up, stretched, and started down the steps. “You be careful,” she said. “I don’t trust that woman. Baby or no baby.”

  “She’s harmless,” Zhondra said automatically. “She’s stupid.”

  “Stupid is never harmless.” Alice shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “I’ll do what I can, Zhondra, but then it’s going to be up to you. They never listen to me, you know. They just tell me I’m blind to the feminine forces of spirituality in the universe. I keep wanting to give them all copies of The Case Against God.”

  Then Alice was gone, and Ginny was there, starting up the steps, smiling that bouncy queen-of-the-cheerleaders smile she had—that all of them seemed to have, all the women in this place. Zhondra came from a place where women were shrill and sarcastic and nasty, but never too eager to please. All this sweetness and light made her dis­tinctly nervous.

  “Hello, Ms. Meyer,” Ginny sang out. “Here I am now. Ready to get to work.”

  Right, Zhondra thought. Tiffany gurgled in her carrier. All the molecules in Ginny Marsh’s body seemed to be bouncing around at random, like the balls in the demonstra­tion chamber of an old Mr. Wizard show. Zhondra turned around and headed up the steps again, saying nothing at all.

  Less than five minutes later, Zhondra and Ginny were standing together in the large west wing study. Ginny was putting Tiffany in a plastic baby seat to one side of the computer on the broad oak desk. Zhondra was thinking that the big chandelier looked dirty and ought to be cleaned. All around them, velvet wall hangings fought with aggressive modern art, and both sides seemed to be losing.

  “Well,” Ginny said, checking the strap on Tiffany’s baby seat one more time. “There we are. Do you have a minute to talk to me now, Ms. Meyer? There’s something I have to bring up.”

  “Is there? Maybe we can talk about it later, Ginny. There’s something I have to do.”