Ghost Country (10 page)

“Thank You, Lord, yes, Lord,” Cynthia Lowrie muttered at intervals. Some of the other women chimed in more loudly. “Yes, Jesus,” “Praise Jesus,” they murmured as Lowrie continued to badger them in his rasping voice.

Others, like Jacqui, sat expressionless. Hector wanted to think that Jacqui shared his distaste for the proceedings, but he had no idea what her beliefs were, Madeleine Carter, the woman from the wall, was sitting between Jacqui and Nanette. Although the Prolixin Hector had given her calmed her most extreme symptoms, she still twitched badly. Her lips moved incessantly as she communed with presences invisible to Hector. Perhaps Brother Rafe, his mind attuned to the spiritual, knew what voices Madeleine heard. If he did, Rafe would no doubt dismiss them as demons, but what if they came from angels?

Looking at Madeleine’s gray skin, the sharp points of bone in her cheeks and wrists—all of her body that was visible outside her
swaddling of sweaters and dresses—Hector wished he’d given her a vitamin injection along with the antipsychotic drug. At least she’d left her wall for the evening.

“And the woman taken in adultery”—Lowrie had moved on to sexual themes while Hector’s mind was wandering. “Jesus tells us that whoever is without sin may cast the first stone. Well, we become free of sin when we wrap ourselves in the mantle of His blood.”

Making us free to throw stones? Hector wondered. The words set up other associations in Madeleine’s mind.

“Jezebel’s blood splattered on the wall,” she cried, her hands kneading her outermost skirt. “The Holy Mother tried to speak through Jezebel but no one would listen. But She’s at the wall now. We can all go there now and drink Her blood and be healed.”

“Sh-sh.” Jacqui took one of Madeleine’s agitated hands and held it firmly. “No one wants to go out tonight, honey. We’re going to stay here and sleep. But, Brother Rafe, maybe you could tone down talk about blood: it upsets Sister Madeleine here.”

The group in the activities room could hear Patsy Wanachs, the shelter director, talking to a woman outside the door, and then the newcomer’s rich voice, slurred from drink.

“Bible study? How quaint. No, no, I wouldn’t dare inarupt praying women. The leader is a Bible expert? Then must ask his perfesh—professional opinion about something,’

Luisa Montcrief appeared in the doorway of the meeting room,
Patsy Wanachs at her elbow. “Brother Rafe? I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is a newcomer, Luisa Montcrief. She says she wants to sit in on your session, but I’ve warned her that she isn’t allowed to create a disturbance.”

“Everyone who is striving for understanding is welcome here. Come in, Sister—Luisa, is it?—and sit down.”

Luisa was dressed as a parody of a diva, in a black silk suit whose skirt had slit up one seam, black stockings that were a mass of ladders, and a gold blouse soiled with food and a dried trail of vomit. She lurched on her way in, and Hector saw that the bottom of one of her high heels had broken off. Alcohol had flushed her cheeks and brought an angry glitter to her eyes.

She swept over to Rafe Lowrie. “You in charge here? King Ahashuerus with his docile harem? You’re an expert on the Bible, I understand.”

Lowrie smiled. “Not an expert. Someone struggling to comprehend it along with the other seekers in the room. Cynthia, get Sister Luisa into a seat and give her a Bible so she can follow along in First Samuel. We’re discussing alcohol and women; you would benefit greatly from the text.”

“Ah, yes. Alcohol and the Bible.”

Luisa was very drunk; she almost fell when she leaned over the table to pick up one of the cheaply bound Bibles the church had donated to the shelter. She spoke more clearly than most people would at her stage of drunkenness—after years on the stage good diction was automatic—but Hector thought Lowrie was underestimating how close she was to blacking out. She lurched to a chair, lost her balance and fell to the floor.

“The Bible and drunks, yes. Do not look upon the wine when it is red. Isn’t that in there someplace? You should stick to chardonnay.” She rocked with laughter.

“Sister Luisa!” Lowrie snapped. “Get up from the floor and sit in a chair. If you can’t listen with respect to what we’re trying to do here, get out.”

Luisa cast him a reproachful look but climbed to her feet and
managed to perch on one of the folding chairs. “I respect what you’re saying. Alcohol and the Bible. Lot’s daughters, getting him drunk so he could commit incest with impurity. Not impurity. Im—what’s the word I mean? Anyway, he wouldn’t get punished. He gets to do what he wants without getting punished. That’s a beautiful story. If you’re a man and in the Bible you get to do what you want and they make you a saint, but if you’re a woman they banish you. Isn’t that right, Mr. Preacher?”

Some of the women shifted uneasily, but one said, “She’s telling it, Jesus.”

“Cynthia, what are you doing just chewing on your hair? Get over there and quiet this woman down,” Lowrie commanded.

His daughter, flushed with misery, stumbled over to Luisa. “We’re not doing Genesis tonight. Let’s look at what’s in Samuel. It’s an interesting book, too, don’t you think?”

Luisa let Cynthia open the Bible to the relevant passage, but her outburst had upset the other women. One named Caroline, who’d been thumbing through her Bible looking up Lot, cried out, “Here it is, here’s the place she’s talking about, where Sodom and Gomorrah get destroyed, and oh my, look, first Lot was going to throw his daughters to the mob. Let the mob rape his own daughters just to keep them from attacking his house. Then he rapes them himself, pretending he’s drunk and doesn’t know what he’s doing. How do you like that? What kind of Bible lesson is that?”

“And Jezebel.” Madeleine stood up in her agitation. “They fed Jezebel to the dogs. Her blood splashed on the wall and they didn’t care. The Mother of God weeps tears of blood, Her blood comes out of the wall, but nobody cares.”

She started to cry. “I have to go back, I’ve left Her too long. The Holy Mother will think I’m like all the others, that I don’t care what happens to Her.”

Hector sprang to his feet and followed her from the room. “Madeleine, the Holy Mother knows you love Her day and night. And if She loves you, She wants the best for you. Isn’t the best for you right now to let me take you to the hospital for a rest?”

’I’m not going, you can’t make me leave Her. I never should have left Her tonight.”

“Then let me give you another injection,” Hector urged. “It will make you calmer.”

“I don’t want a shot, when you gave me that shot I couldn’t hear Her so well. It made Her angry, that I was trying to turn away from Her.”

Jacqui and Nanette came into the hallway. “Madeleine, you can’t go back out there tonight. It’s dark, it’s too dangerous for you and we want to stay here to rest. You know there’s a bed here for you tonight. You could even take a shower. Stay here with us.”

Madeleine wrenched her hand from Nanette’s and ran down the hall and out the door. Hector started after her.

“What are you going to do?” Jacqui demanded. “You can’t make her come back. You can’t force her to go to the hospital if she doesn’t want to, even assuming they’d let her have a bed, which the word on Midwest Hospital is, most definitely not. It’s only a mile and a half to that wall: she’ll make it.”

“I’ve had enough of Brother Rafe’s preaching, although that drunk who just showed up is making the place more interesting,” Nanette said. “Only I don’t like watching Patsy Wanachs throw people out, and that’s what’s going to happen next. I’m going to get me a cup of coffee. You want one, Doctor?”

Under the shelter’s rules, beds were available from ten o’clock until six the next morning. Until Bible study finished, no one could watch TV, because the class was held in the shelter’s activities room, where television, art projects, and such games as the church didn’t think involved gambling took place. If someone didn’t care for Bible study, her only choice was not to come to the shelter until ten—when all the beds might already be allotted—or to sit in the refectory with a cup of coffee under the gaze of a bored volunteer, assigned to make sure the women didn’t ransack the pantry.

Hector went back to the doorway of the activities room. Caroline, who’d found the passage where Lot slept with his daughters,
was arguing with Rafe about the meaning of the passage he’d selected from First Samuel.

“It doesn’t say women shouldn’t drink, only that this priest, this Eli, thought Hannah was drunk.”

“But we know if the word is in the Bible it is the true word of God, and a guide for us,” Rafe said. “And it’s clear that God, through Eli, is condemning drunkenness in women very specifically.”

“But drunkenness in men is all right.” Luisa, who’d been lolling on her chair, picking at the threads in her stockings, sat up. “When Shahwerwus—Shawer—Hasherus sent for Vashti you’d better believe he’d been drinking, yes, sir, golden goblets for the king. But she gets sent away and is condemned forever for not wanting to go to this drunk. Is this right, should she have to let him fuck her when he’s drunk? It’s not fair. Are you saying it’s fair, you holy roller, whatever your name is, for kings to get drunk, but women can’t?”

Lowrie’s smile became fixed with the glue of anger. “The Bible is the just word of God. But it is never right for anyone to get drunk, least of all for you to show up here drunk and disrupt this class. If you cannot be—”

“Who’s saying I’m drunk?” Luisa was on her feet, swaying. “It’s that bitch Cesarini, isn’t it, jealous because they wouldn’t let her sing Fenena in Covent Garden—”

Patsy Wanachs shoved her way past Hector into the room. “Luisa! Come with me.”

The shelter director grabbed Luisa’s hand and yanked her into the hall. “I suggested that you might not be ready for Bible study, but you insisted you wanted to attend, that you wouldn’t disrupt the meeting. Now look what’s happened: Madeleine Carter leaving the shelter in hysterics, everyone in the room in an uproar, all because of you.

“We have rules here, as I told you when you came in. One is against drunkenness, two is against creating a disturbance. You’ve
violated both of those. If you want to stay tonight you will sit quietly in the refectory until we can give you a bed. But if you ever return here in a drunken condition you will not be admitted. Do I make myself clear?”

“As a broken windowpane, my good woman.” Luisa’s disdain was hampered by her slurred consonants and her unsteady legs, but she followed the director down the hall to the refectory.

Hector decided he, too, had heard all he could take of Brother Rafe’s preaching. He made his way past the homeless women drifting into the shelter, some with shopping carts, most with all their belongings slung over their backs in plastic bags.

He sat in his car for a long time. A man came to the gate at one point and became furious at being denied admission. He stormed around and swore, threw a bottle at the fence, stomped down the street, then came back and tried to muscle his way through the gate in company with some of the entering women. One of the volunteers came out. Hector thought her very brave, to confront the man in person, but whatever she said was effective: he left the gate and took up observation across the street.

After Hector had been sitting for half an hour, Luisa lurched out. She was singing, in a very loud voice, “Sempre libera,” Violetta’s first-act aria from
La Traviata.

H
ARRIET FIRST LEARNED
about the woman at the wall the day Mrs. Ephers had her heart attack. That’s why she didn’t bring her usual energy to the problem. The senior partners at Scandon and Atter couldn’t believe it when the president of the Hotel Pleiades complained to them: Harriet had always given both clients and firm what they wanted in the past; no one could believe she wasn’t doing it now.