A Ship Made of Paper (25 page)

glass wall. She glances at him and it seems as if her eyes are asking,
What
are you doing?
but he cannot move.

At last, Hampton and James emerge. All of the levity and grace and joyousness and even youthfulness seems to have been beaten out of James, while Hampton, in victory, seems not noticeably different than he was in the beginning of the game, when he was losing. His long slender legs are bright with perspiration, his shirt has dark circles at the armpits, a long ragged icicle-shaped sweat stain down the middle, and his scalp glistens in the overhead light.

“You lost!” Nelson cries accusingly, jabbing his finger at the air between him and his uncle, as if to create a shock wave that would knock James to the ground.

“Sorry, O Great Leader,” James says. His voice is weak, exhausted.

“Your daddy’s too much for me.”

Pleased to hear this, Hampton smiles at James.

James slumps onto the bench next to Iris. “I feel sorry for
you,
” he says to her. “The man is tireless.”

Daniel is offended by James’s little joke. It is unbearable to think about Hampton’s untiring ardor, the sexual machinery going on and on.

“He rinses his cottage cheese to take out the last one percent of milk fat,” Iris says. “What do you expect?”

“Hello, Daniel,” Hampton says. He opens his gym bag and pulls out a small white terry cloth towel with which he carefully dries, first his forehead, then the wings of his nose, then his chin.

“I was watching you play,” Daniel says. “I’m just learning.” He is acutely aware that everything he says could very well be subject to mul-tiple interpretations, and that one day if—no,
when
—Hampton learns the truth, then it will all be remembered, ransacked for meaning.

Nelson has scrambled off Iris’s lap. He takes the racquet from his uncle’s hands and grabs the ball and hits it. It bounces and then rolls down the long hall, and then over the ledge, where it falls to the ground floor.

Hampton snaps his fingers and points in Nelson’s face.

[ 169 ]

“Get it,” Hampton says. “Now.”

Nelson doesn’t say anything, but the skin on his face is suddenly drawn, mottled, he looks like someone who has been in the freezing cold.

“Take it easy, Hampton,” Iris says. “That doesn’t work with him.” She turns to the boy. “Go on, Nellie, do as your father says.”

“No!!” Nelson screams. “You get it.”

The vehemence startles Iris and she lets go of the leash. Scarecrow goes straight for Daniel. After bounding up on Daniel and uncoiling her long tongue in the direction of his face, she suddenly lies down before him, resting her chin on her forepaws. Then, with a couple sharp barks, she rolls onto her back, exposing the bare pink-and-black skin of her belly, her eyes glazed with adoration.

“Scarecrow!!” Iris calls out, her voice sharp, nervous. “What are you doing?”

Hampton has folded his long arms over his hard, flat chest. “Seems like you’ve gone and won my doggie’s heart,” Hampton fairly drawls.

Meanwhile, on court number one, Bruce is hitting the ball to himself, harder and harder, until it sounds like gunshots.

“Do you mind if I sit next to you for a minute or two?”

Kate is sitting in the back pew of Saint Christopher’s Church, which is eight miles outside of Leyden, on a curving dirt road, surrounded by open fields, where the dried remains of the harvested corn stalks rise and fall with the undulations of the land, in neat rows like markers in a cemetery. Startled by the soft, questioning voice, she turns to see the young priest next to her, tall, narrow, with an ascetic face and prematurely gray hair. He is the sort of man people say looks like a priest, even if he happens to be selling dress shirts in a department store, or walking in his baggy plaid bathing trunks on the beach.

“I didn’t hear you sit down,” Kate says.

“I’m sorry. Did I startle you? Were you praying?”

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“I was really just closing my eyes. I’m collecting my thoughts.”

“I see you come in here from time to time,” the priest says. “I thought it was time we met.”

“My name’s Katherine Ellis. I’m not Catholic.” She extends her hand.

“I’m Father Joseph Sidlowski. And I
am
Catholic.” He takes her hand, shakes it. His touch is spectral, she could be dreaming him.

“I go to a lot of churches,” Kate says. “But this one is just so lovely, it’s one of the nicest in the area, I think.”

Father Sidlowski looks up at the planked ceiling, the simple blue-and-yellow stained glass windows. “It really is,” he says, as if the beauty of the place had never occurred to him before. “Do you know its history?”

“No.”

“The farm right behind us and all the land around us, about four hundred acres, used to be owned by the Bailey family. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“I know Bailey Road.”

“We’re on Bailey Road, and there’s the Bailey Building right in the village. The patriarch of the Bailey family was named Peter Bailey. He outlived three wives and ten of his thirteen children. In his seventies—

this was in about 1880—he converted to Catholicism and built this church for himself and his family.There were no other Catholic churches nearby. It has something of the barn about it, don’t you think? Anyway, he died in his nineties and he left an endowment to the archdiocese to keep Saint Christopher’s open for one hundred years. The churchyard is filled with the remains of Baileys, as well as the graves of the priests who have worked here. Part of my own pastoral duties is to make certain those graves are well kept. The Bailey family is scattered now, and most of the priests who are buried here have no family to speak of. I think sometime in the next few years we’ll see the doors to this chapel closed for the last time.We have a modest congregation and I suspect that when the hundred years are up and there is no income to support Saint Christopher’s, they’ll turn this place into an antiques shop.”

“Just what the world needs.”

[ 171 ]

Sidlowski shows his teeth in a slow approximation of a smile. “May I ask what brings you to Saint Christopher’s?” His voice is low, confiden-tial, though there is no one else in the church.

“It’s very peaceful here,” Kate says. She looks around the small church—the dark, heavily varnished painting of the dying Jesus recumbent in his stricken mother’s lap, a few votive candles twinkling in their red glass holders, the simple wooden cross, unusually austere. “I’ve been thinking a lot about . . . things, and it’s easier for me to have my thoughts in a church than it is at home.”

“May I show you something?” Father Sidlowski asks Kate. “It’ll only take a moment.”

Kate follows the priest through the church. Their footsteps echo in the stillness and she wonders how he could have sat next to her without her hearing his approach. He leads her through a small doorway off the nave of the church and into his office. It’s a small, windowless room, with books and magazines piled in every corner. A banged-up metal desk and a swivel chair are the only furniture.The fax machine on the edge of the desk is receiving a transmission as they walk in; Kate sneaks a peek at what’s coming in—it seems to be from a travel agency, she sees a drawing of an airplane and the words “Christmas Travel Bargains.” The walls are bare, except for one old painting in an ornate gilt frame. The image on the canvas is of a dark-haired woman in a modest brown robe, on her knees before a child’s crib. Her hands are clasped prayerfully and blood drips from them. The crib is suffused with golden light.

“That’s Saint Mary Frances,” Sidlowski says, his voice suddenly intimate, suffused with gentleness, as if this were upsetting news he must break to her. “She died at the end of the eighteenth century and was can-onized about sixty years after her death.”

“I never heard of her,” Kate says. “I don’t really know very much about saints. As I said, I’m not—”

“Catholic,” Sidlowski cuts in. “I realize that. But she’s a lovely saint, one of my favorites. Not very well known here, but greatly loved in Naples. But do you see why I wanted you to see this painting?”

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

Kate redirects her attention to the image. The canvas is old, the paint is muddy, and the surface veneer is cracked into a thousand little jigsaw sections.

“She looks so much like you,” Sidlowski says. “Don’t you see the re-semblance?”

Kate shakes her head. She sees nothing of herself in the face of Mary Frances. All there is in common is the dark-brown hair, brown eyes; everything else about Mary Frances seems merely average, even generic: average height, average weight. Oh, maybe a little something in the mouth, after all, that thin, broad upper lip, and maybe, also, a certain boyishness of chin. And the shoulders.

“I still think of myself as having blonde hair,” Kate says. “Though I haven’t since I was ten years old. But it was such a part of my identity, and such a part of my parents’ celebration of me.The picture of myself that I carry within me will always be of some pink little girl with white-blonde hair. Oh my God, how my parents suffered when my hair went dark.”

“It’s not just the coloring,” says Sidlowski.Whatever tact he had when first pointing the saint out to Kate is falling away now. His voice is eager, insistent. “It’s the face, the shape of the head, and something else, something ineffable.”

“I don’t really see it,” Kate says apologetically. “But thank you, I guess.

I don’t relate to saints, Father. I don’t really believe in them.”

“But it’s a matter of historical record. And this is her birthday month.

She was born October 6. October 6 was the day of the storm,” Sidlowski says. “It made me think of her.”

“Why is that?” Kate is uneasy with any mention of that unexpected, chaos-inducing snow.The storm has come to mean two things to her: her narrow escape from the roaming Star of Bethlehem boys, and Daniel spending the night with Iris, a night that, the more she thinks about it, almost certainly became the occasion for Daniel’s long desire to finally find consummation. Kate cannot see a broken tree—and there are still thousands in Windsor County—without pain in her chest.

“Are you all right?” Father Sidlowski asks.

[ 173 ]

“Tell me about her,” Kate says, gesturing toward the painting. “What’s wrong with her hands? Why is she bleeding?”

“She was called Mary Frances of the Five Wounds.” He waits to see if Kate understands those wounds refer to the five stabs of the Roman spears in Jesus’ crucified body. “She had a very difficult life. Even after she joined an order, her father, who detested her, and, if you ask me, harbored and perhaps even acted upon incestuous feelings toward her, insisted she continue to live in his house as a servant.When Mary Frances’s father was done with her, he passed her along to a local priest, a fanatic in the Jansenist tradition, who continued Mary’s ill treatment. She remained the priest’s personal servant for the rest of her life, thirty-eight more years. Yet even in the midst of her degradation, Mary insisted on caring for others. She practiced regular personal mortifications, many of them quite painful, asking God to place in her own soul the suffering of all those trapped in Purgatory, and asking, as well, to share the pain of her sick neighbors, most of whom treated her with contempt.”

He looks at Kate, sees her pained expression, and lowers his voice, almost to a murmur.

“You said you were going from church to church. Would you mind my asking why?”

“I’m being treated with contempt, too, Father,” Kate says. She steps toward him.The floor is soft, it seems as if her feet are sinking in through the wood. A sudden dizziness, the world spins, once, twice.
What’s happening to me?
She grabs Sidlowski’s arm to keep her balance.

Daniel is wracked with jealousy now that it is the weekend and Hampton is home. He suspects that there is no one in the world who would sympathize with his agony, not even Iris. And what puts him even further from sympathy’s comforting embrace is that he is harming other people.

He is lying to Kate, though he tells himself that he would tell her the truth and take the necessary steps to separate their lives if only he hadn’t promised Iris not to make any precipitous moves. The fact is that Iris’s a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

swearing him to silence fits in with his own reluctance to say the terrible thing to Kate. He is betraying Hampton, who is not really a friend or a man toward whom Daniel has ever had warm feelings, but who is, at least, a fellow human being, and worthy of respect and decent treatment. And he is betraying Iris—he has slept with Kate as a way of keeping a modicum of domestic peace, simply a matter of slapping up some wallpaper to cover the cracks in the plaster.

His only comfort is the Windsor Bistro, which he discovered a couple of weeks ago quite by accident. Before the storm, the Windsor Bistro seemed well on its way to being a losing proposition, a small, pleasant place, with a little gas fireplace and a Colonial chandelier, but there were never more than six or eight people eating at the same time. The owner and cook, Doris Snyder, a shy, frugal woman with a starburst birthmark on her forehead, stocked as little fresh food as possible, afraid, as she was, that most of it would end up in the garbage. By the time of the October snow, the Windsor Bistro was beginning to have that doomed air of a fighter looking for a place to fall. But then the storm hit, and the Bistro was the first place in Leyden to reopen, and anyone who was brave or restless enough to leave home gathered there for companionship. Doris’s confidence grew each time the door opened, and soon she was greeting everyone personally, serving free drinks and complimentary desserts.

After a couple of nights, she convinced her boyfriend, a mentally unstable but handsome man named Curtis, who had not left their house in six months, to bring his guitar in and sing his repertoire of Neil Young, Jim Croce, and Jackson Browne songs.

Daniel has become a regular.The place is crowded tonight and it is only his position as one of the original, favored customers that allows him to oc-cupy a table all to himself.The owner’s boyfriend has not come in; his place on the stool to the side of the bar is taken by an old grade-school friend of Daniel’s, a bushy-browed man named Chris Kiley, who accompanies himself on a little Yamaha keyboard while he sings sultry rhythm and blues songs about marital chaos, such as “Me and Mrs. Jones” and “Who’s Making Love to Your Old Lady (While You’re Out Making Love).” These songs