Cat's Pajamas (17 page)

Blessing the Virgin's name, he descends the concrete stairs to the copulatorium. A hundred votive candles pierce the darkness. The briny scent of incipient immortality suffuses the air. In the far corner, a CD player screeches out the Apostolic Succession doing their famous rendition of “Ave Maria.”

The Sacrament of Extramarital Intercourse has always reminded Stephen of a junior high prom. Girls strung along one side of the room, boys along the other, gyrating couples in the center. He takes his place in the line of males, removes his jacket, shirt, trousers, and underclothes, and hangs them on the nearest pegs. He stares through the gloom, locking eyes with Roger's old kindergarten teacher, Valerie Gallogher, a robust thirtyish woman whose incandescent red hair spills all the way to her hips. Grimly they saunter toward each other, following the pathway formed by the mattresses, until they meet amid the morass of writhing soulmakers.

“You're Roger Mulcanny's stepfather, aren't you?” asks the ovulating teacher.

“Father, quite possibly. Stephen O'Rourke. And you're Miss Gallogher, right?”

“Call me Valerie.”

“Stephen.”

He glances around, noting to his infinite relief that he recognizes no one. Sooner or later, he knows, a familiar young face will appear at the copulatorium, a notion that never fails to make him wince. How could he possibly explicate the Boston Massacre to a boy who'd recently beheld him in the procreative act? How could he render the Battle of Lexington lucid to a girl whose egg he'd attempted to quicken on the previous night?

For ten minutes he and Valerie make small talk, most of it issuing from Stephen, as was proper. Should the coming sacrament prove fruitful, the resultant child will want to know about the handful of men with whom his mother connected during the relevant ovulation. (Beatrice, Claude, Tommy, Laura, Yolanda, Willy, and the others were forever grilling Kate for facts about their possible progenitors.) Stephen tells Valerie about the time his students gave him a surprise birthday party. He describes his rock collection. He mentions his skill at trapping the singularly elusive species of rat that inhabits Charlestown Parish.

“I have a talent too,” says Valerie, inserting a coppery braid into her mouth. Her areolas seem to be staring at him.

“Roger thought you were a terrific teacher.”

“No—something else.” Valerie tugs absently on her ovulation gauge. “A person twitches his lips a certain way, and I know what he's feeling. He darts his eyes in an odd manner—I sense the drift of his thoughts.” She lowers her voice. “I watched you during the baptism this morning. Your reaction would've angered the archbishop—am I right?”

Stephen looks at his bare toes. Odd that a copulatorium partner should be demanding such intimacy of him.

“Am I?” Valerie persists, sliding her index finger along her large, concave belly-button.

Fear rushes through Stephen. Does this woman work for the Immortality Corps? If his answer smacks of heresy, will she arrest him on the spot?

“Well, Stephen? Would the archbishop have been angry?”

“Perhaps,” he confesses. In his mind he sees Madeleine Dunfey's submerged mouth, bubble following bubble like beads strung along a rosary.

“There's no microphone in my navel,” Valerie asserts, alluding to a common Immortality Corps ploy. “I'm not a spy.”

“Never said you were.”

“You were thinking it. I could tell by the cant of your eyebrows.” She kisses him on the mouth, deeply, wetly. “Did Roger ever learn to hold his pencil correctly?”

“Fraid not.”

“Too bad.”

At last the mattress to Stephen's left becomes free, and they climb on top and begin reifying the Doctrine of Affirmative Fertility. The candle flames look like spear points. Stephen closes his eyes, but the effect is merely to intensify the fact that he's here. The liquid squeal of flesh against flesh grows louder, the odor of hot paraffin and warm semen more pungent. For a few seconds he manages to convince himself that the woman beneath him is Kate, but the illusion proves as tenuous as the surrounding wax.

When the sacrament is accomplished, Valerie says, “I have something for you. A gift.”

“What's the occasion?”

“Saint Patrick's Day is less than a week away.”

“Since when is that a time for gifts?”

Instead of answering, she strolls to her side of the room, rummages through her tangled garments, and returns holding a pressed flower sealed in plastic.

“Think of it as a ticket,” she whispers, lifting Stephen's shirt from its peg and slipping the blossom inside the pocket.

“To where?”

Valerie holds an erect index finger to her lips. “We'll know when we get there.”

Stephen gulps audibly. Sweat collects beneath his sperm counter. Only fools considered fleeing Boston Isle. Only lunatics risked the retributions meted out by the Corps. Displayed every Sunday night on
Keep Those Kiddies Coming,
the classic images—men submitting to sperm siphons, women locked in the rapacious embrace of artificial inseminators—haunt every parishioner's imagination, instilling the same levels of dread as Spinelli's sculpture of the archangel Chamuel strangling David Hume. There are rumors, of course, unconfirmable accounts of parishioners who'd outmaneuvered the patrol boats and escaped to Quebec Cay, Seattle Reef or the Texas Archipelago. But to credit such tales was itself a kind of sin, jeopardizing your slot in Paradise as surely as if you'd denied the unconceived their rights.

“Tell me something, Stephen.” Valerie straps herself into her bra. “You're a history teacher. Did Saint Patrick really drive the snakes out of Ireland, or is that just a legend?”

“I'm sure it never happened literally,” says Stephen. “I suppose it could be true in some mythic sense.”

“It's about penises, isn't it?” says Valerie, dissolving into the darkness. “It's about how our saints have always been hostile to cocks.”

Although Harbor Authority Tower was designed to house the merchant-shipping aristocracy on whose ambitions the decrepit Boston economy still depended, the building's form, Connie now realizes, perfectly fits its new, supplemental function: sheltering the offices, courts, and archives of the archdiocese. As he lifts his gaze along the soaring facade, Connie thinks of sacred shapes—of steeples and vaulted windows, of Sinai and Zion, of Jacob's Ladder and hands pressed together in prayer. Perhaps it's all as God wants, he muses, flashing his ecclesiastical pass to the guard. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with commerce and grace being transacted within the same walls.

Connie has seen Archbishop Xallibos in person only once before, five years earlier, when the stately prelate appeared as an “honorary Irishman” in Charlestown Parish's annual Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Standing on the sidewalk, Connie observed Xallibos gliding down Lynde Street atop a huge motorized shamrock. The archbishop looked impressive then, and he looks impressive now—six-foot-four at least, Connie calculates, and not an ounce under three hundred pounds. His eyes are as red as a lab rat's.

“Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan,” the priest begins, following the custom whereby a visitor to an archbishop's chambers initiates the interview by naming himself.

“Come forward, Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan.”

Connie starts into the office, boots clacking on the polished bronze floor. Xallibos steps out from behind his desk, a glistery cube hewn from black marble.

“Charlestown Parish holds a special place in my affections,” says the archbishop. “What brings you to this part of town?”

Connie fidgets, shifting first left, then right, until his face lies mirrored in the hubcap-size Saint Cyril medallion adorning Xallibos's chest. “My soul is in torment, Your Grace.”

“‘Torment.' Weighty word.”

“I can find no other. Last Tuesday I laid a two-week-old infant to rest.”

“Terminal baptism?”

Connie ponders his reflection. It is wrinkled and deflated, like a helium balloon purchased at a carnival long gone. “My eighth.”

“I know how you feel. After I dispatched my first infertile—no left testicle, right one shriveled beyond repair—I got no sleep for a week.” Eyes glowing like molten rubies, Xallibos gazes directly at Connie. “Where did you attend seminary?”

“Isle of Denver.”

“And on the Isle of Denver did they teach you that there are in fact two Churches, one invisible and eternal, the other—”

“Temporal and finite.”

“Then they also taught you that the latter Church is empowered to revise its rites according to the imperatives of the age.” The archbishop's stare grows brighter, hotter, purer. “Do you doubt that present privations compel us to arrange early immortality for those who cannot secure the rights of the unconceived?”

“The problem is that the infant I immortalized has a twin.” Connie swallows nervously. “Her mother stole her away before I could perform the second baptism.”

“Stole her away?”

“She fled in the middle of the sacrament.”

“And the second child is likewise arid?”

“Left ovary, two hundred ninety primordials. Right ovary, three hundred ten.”

“Lord…” A high whistle issues from the archbishop, like water vapor escaping a tea kettle. “Does she intend to quit the island?”

“I certainly hope not, Your Grace,” says the priest, wincing at the thought. “She probably has no immediate plans beyond protecting her baby and trying to—”

Connie cuts himself off, intimidated by the sudden arrival of a roly-poly man in a white hooded robe.

“Friar James Wolfe, M.D.,” says the monk.

“Come forward, Friar Doctor James Wolfe,” says Xallibos.

“It would be well if you validated this posthaste.” James Wolfe draws a parchment sheet from his robe and lays it on the archbishop's desk. Connie steals a glance at the report, hoping to learn the baby's fertility quotient, but the relevant statistics are too faint. “The priest in question, he's celebrating Mass in”—sliding a loose sleeve upward, James Wolfe consults his wristwatch—“less than an hour. He's all the way over in Brookline.”

Striding back to his desk, the archbishop yanks a silver fountain pen from its holder and decorates the parchment with his famous spidery signature.

“Dominus vobiscum,
Friar Doctor Wolfe,” he says, handing over the document.

As Wolfe rushes out of the office, Xallibos steps so close to Connie that his nostrils fill with the archbishop's lemon-scented aftershave lotion.

“That man never has any fun,” says Xallibos, pointing toward the vanishing friar. “What fun do you have, Father Monaghan?”

“Fun, Your Grace?”

“Do you eat ice cream? Follow the fortunes of the Celtics?” He pronounces “Celtics” with the hard C mandated by the Seventh Lateran Council.

Connie inhales a hearty quantity of citrus fumes. “I bake.”

“Bake? Bake what? Bread?”

“Cookies, Your Grace. Brownies, cheesecake, pies. For the Feast of the Nativity, I make gingerbread magi.”

“Wonderful. I like my priests to have fun. Listen, no matter what, the rite must be performed. If Angela Dunfey won't come to you, then you must go to her.”

“She'll simply run away again.”

“Perhaps so, perhaps not. I have great faith in you, Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan.”

“More than I have in myself,” says the priest, biting his inner cheeks so hard that his eyes fill with tears.

“No,” says Kate for the third time that night.

“Yes,” insists Stephen, savoring the dual satisfactions of Kate's thigh beneath his palm and Arbutus rum washing through his brain.

Pinching her cigarette in one hand, Kate strokes Baby Malcolm's forehead with the other, lulling him to sleep. “It's wicked,” she protests, placing Malcolm on the rug beside the bed. “A crime against the future.”

Stephen grabs the Arbutus bottle, pours himself another glass, and, adding a measure of Dr. Pepper, takes a greedy gulp. He sets the bottle back on the nightstand, next to Valerie Gallogher's enigmatic flower.

“Screw the unconceived,” he says, throwing himself atop his wife.

On Friday he'd shown the blossom to Gail Whittington, Dougherty High School's smartest science teacher, but her verdict had proved unenlightening.
Epigaea repens,
“trailing arbutus,” a species with at least two claims to fame: it is the state flower of the Massachusetts Archipelago, and it has lent its name to the very brand of alcohol Stephen now consumes.

“No,” says Kate once again. She drops her cigarette on the floor, crushes it with her shoe, and wraps her arms around him. “I'm not ovulating,” she avers, forcing her stiff and slippery tongue into the depths of his mouth. “Your sperm aren't…”

“Last night, the Holy Father received a vision,” Xallibos announces from the video monitor. “Pictures straight from Satan's flaming domain. Hell is a fact, friends. It's as real as a stubbed toe.”

Stephen whips off Kate's chemise with all the dexterity of Father Monaghan removing a christening gown. The rum, of course, has much to do with their mutual willingness (four glasses each, only mildly diluted with Dr. Pepper), but beyond the Arbutus the two of them have truly earned this moment. Neither has ever skipped Mass. Neither has ever missed a Sacrament of Extramarital Intercourse. And while any act of nonconceptual love technically lay beyond the Church's powers of absolution, surely Christ would forgive them a solitary lapse. And so they go at it, this sterile union, this forbidden fruitlessness, this coupling from which no soul can come.

“Hedonists dissolving in vats of molten sulfur,” says Xallibos.

The bedroom door squeals open. One of Kate's middle children, Beatrice, a gaunt six-year-old with flaking skin, enters holding a rude toy boat whittled from a hunk of bark.