Quoth the Raven (36 page)

All around her, Maryville, New York—founded by Irish immigrants just after the Civil War and sustained by them for more than a 125 years since—was getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day. It was getting ready in ways that had nothing to do with the conscious will of the people living in it, too. There were so many deliberate things—like the polished ’57 Chevy Stu Morrissey kept on the roof of his body shop on Corrigan Street, wrapped now in green ribbons and sporting a larger-than-life-size leprechaun at the wheel—but what struck Brigit were the undeliberate ones. The rain and the thaw had done their work. Grass was sprouting in thick emerald green carpets on all the lawns. At the library, the border made of a deeper green plant Brigit didn’t know the name of had gone wild. It was at least half an inch taller than the grass beside it, and thick, and very dark. It reminded Brigit of a dust ruffle. She stared at it for a moment and shook her head.

If she had any sense, she would go right down to the bottom of the hill and in through the library doors, get her job done, and then go right on home. That was what she owed Sister Mary Scholastica and the Sisters of Divine Grace and the Catholic Church. It was called religious obedience and she had made a promise to practice it all the way back in September. The problem was, she no longer knew what religious anything meant any more. Ever since she had entered the convent, religion had been falling apart on her. Neila Connelly was always telling her it was a very bad sign, that it meant she had no vocation, but Brigit didn’t like to think that. She was one of those girls who had “always” wanted to be a nun, the way other girls “always” wanted to be mothers or ballet dancers or models. She couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else.

There was an old-fashioned lamppost at the intersection to Londonderry Street, where she would have to turn if she wanted to go on her extracurricular errand. It had been left standing by the town as a gesture to the “history” of Maryville, and festooned with green satin ribbons with gold harps and mock shillelaghs at their hearts. The ribbons were drooping in the rain and the harps were losing their gold. Brigit stopped beside the mess and looked first toward the library and then down Londonderry Street. Londonderry Street seemed to stretch out into fog and blackness, mysterious.

When she had set out from the Motherhouse this morning, Brigit had had a whole set of rationalizations. Her errand was important, maybe even a matter of life and death. Her errand would hurt nobody and take nothing away from the Sisters of Divine Grace. There wasn’t any reason not to bend the rules a little to help a friend. Now it struck her with particular force that it wasn’t the errand she was desperate to carry out, but the person who had asked her to do it that she was desperate to keep as a friend. Like most girls her age, Brigit would never have admitted to anyone that she was unsophisticated or naive—but she was both. She had grown up in a small town in New Hampshire where the rest of the population had been made up of people exactly like herself, except that some of them had been Protestants. Before coming to Maryville, she had never met an atheist or a Jew, never mind a really rich person or a really poor person or someone from an entirely different culture. Maryville hardly seemed the place to throw her into contact with things like that, but it had. In the process, it had taught her something that disturbed her greatly. In Maryville, all the things that weren’t supposed to matter—beauty and money, surface brilliance and superficial shine—actually did.

Brigit looked at the lamppost again, and then at the library. The plant border down there looked an even darker green than it had a moment ago. She turned away and looked down Londonderry Street again. The choice seemed so plain. The library was safety and submission. Londonderry Street was adventure and risk. It couldn’t have been plainer if it had shown up in her senior year psychology book back at North Frederickson High.

She shifted the umbrella to her other, not yet sweated hand, and made the turn. Even if she didn’t have a million other reasons to be doing what she was doing, she had this: If she went to the library, she would have to pick up books on snakes. Brigit Ann Reilly hated snakes.

They hissed.

“W
HAT I DON’T THINK
you realize is what the scope of this thing will be,” Don Bollander said. “I don’t think you have the faintest idea. Of course, it could turn out to be nothing, but it doesn’t have to be. It could turn out to be—Lourdes.”

Lourdes, Miriam Bailey thought, and then: If it were forty years ago, I’d call for my smelling salts. Since it was not forty years ago, she picked up her twenty-two-carat gold Tiffany T-pen and sucked at the tip of it as if it were a cigarette. She had quit smoking back in 1966, and since then she had sucked on a variety of objects, all of them expensive. She took that thought and held on to it for a moment, smiling secretly to herself. She could think of a perfectly filthy interpretation of a line like that, and one that would, in her case, be true. Miriam Bailey was sixty-two years old. Three days after her sixtieth birthday, she had been married for the first time. Her husband’s name was Joshua Malley. He was very poor; very beautiful; and very, very young. He also cost as much to maintain as an eighty-four-foot sloop.

There was a twenty-two-carat gold Tiffany letter opener lying on her green felt desk blotter. Unlike the T-pen, which had been given to her by her only real lover before she married Josh, it had belonged to her father. It might have belonged to her grandfather. Miriam was always stumbling over the gaps in her knowledge of what had gone on down here, at the office, in the years when she was being forced to be a girl. Sometimes she looked up at the portrait of her father on the north wall and lectured him about it. He should have realized she would never marry the kind of man who could take over the Bank. Even back in the forties, when women never ran banks, she had intended to run this one.

Don Bollander was hopping from one foot to the other, aware that he didn’t have her full attention, impatient. Miriam found herself thinking idly that, in the end, she had been forced to be a girl on a permanent basis, at least in the minor matters. Since she’d moved in to the president’s office, she’d worn makeup and very good suits from Chanel and had her hair done. Since the fashion in women’s bodies had shifted in the mid-sixties, she had made sure she was always exceptionally thin. It was too bad she never wanted to retire. There were days when all she wanted was to sit down in front of a table full of hot fudge sundaes and eat.

Don Bollander had passed beyond foot shifting to hopping. He was getting positively apoplectic. Miriam sat forward, took a deep breath, and dragged herself into the present. Don Bollander’s present.

“All right,” she said. “Lourdes.”

Don Bollander looked hurt. He was a tall, abstemious-looking man who always wore a very bad toupee. When he looked hurt, his lips swelled.

“I’m only trying to look out for the interests of the company,” he said. “The company has a lot invested in local real estate.”

“I own half the town. Say what you mean.”

“I am saying what I mean,” Don said. “Do you know anything about the process by which people are made saints in the Catholic Church?”

“I know a little.” Miriam knew a lot. She had attended parochial school right here in Maryville, then the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, then Manhattanville in the days when it was still a Catholic college. Her early life had been a paradigm of the proper upbringing for a rich Catholic girl.

“The thing is,” Don Bollander told her, “now that Margaret Finney has been beatified, the nuns on the hill there will probably begin running a campaign to collect evidence of miracles that have occurred because of Margaret Finney’s intercession. That’s what they have to have to get Margaret Finney canonized. Evidence of miracles after her death.”

“Yes, Don, I know.”

“Well, think about it. Miracles. Here. Pilgrims. The town full of people even in the winter. It could be—a bonanza.”

“A bonanza,” Miriam repeated.

“Of course. We just have to manage the publicity. We could get our people in New York right on it. The Sisters would probably welcome the help.”

“Help, Don? What kind of help do you want us to give them?”

“I told you. Publicity help. And maybe other kinds. Maybe we could build a shrine on one of the properties we own out on Clare Avenue or Diamond Place. God only knows we aren’t doing anything with the stuff out there anyway. It’s falling down.”

“It’s probably being washed out to sea, at the moment. Look at this rain.”

“I wasn’t talking about the rain.” Now Don looked not only hurt, but angry. He always got angry when his more ridiculous ideas weren’t taken seriously. “I’ve been working on this all night, Miriam. I really have. It’s not a stupid way to go about things. This is going to make the news around here any minute now. It’s going to be all over this part of New York State.”

Miriam hauled herself out of her chair, walked to her window, and looked out at the rain. It was ten minutes after ten in the morning. Two stories below her, sheltered under the broad black expanse of a nunly umbrella, one of the postulants from St. Mary of the Hill was making her way along Londonderry Street. Miriam knew it was a postulant because of the shoes and the ankles. Nuns and postulants and novices all wore the same shoes, but only postulants showed their ankles. Miriam wondered who it was and what she was doing here. The Sisters of Divine Grace were a very conservative order. You rarely saw any of them wandering around town on their own.

Miriam raised her head a little and looked into the parking lot across the street. She owned that parking lot, just as she owned every building on this block, but she wasn’t interested in the condition of it or the business it was doing. She had a maintenance department to keep track of the condition and an accounting office to keep track of the business. What she wanted to see was whether the bright red Jaguar XKE was still parked along the east wall, which it was. She didn’t expect it to be there for long. When she asked herself if she expected Josh to be with her for long, she didn’t come up with an answer. The proposition should have been straightforward. It made her a little crazy that it wasn’t. Josh was a young man without skills and without prospects. He had his body and his docility to sell, and he could get a good price for it or a bad. Miriam thought she had given him a very good price for it, and that that should be enough. Millions of young women had made the same bargain over the centuries and managed to keep up their end of it. Why should it be any different for men?

Out on Londonderry Street, the postulant was slipping out of sight in the direction of the river. Across the way at the edge of the parking lot, the back door to Madigan’s Dry Goods swung open and let out a slight figure in a bright blue slicker. Her name was Ann-Harriet Severan and she had hair almost as brightly red as the slicker was blue. Miriam knew that even though the hair was invisible under a thick plastic rain hat, just as she knew that Ann-Harriet wore size seven narrow shoes and size twelve dresses. It was all contained in the private detective’s report she had commissioned over a month ago. Ann-Harriet stopped at the side of the Jaguar, fumbled in her pockets, and came up with the key. For a moment, she seemed to be frozen in contemplation, maybe of the postulant still making her way in the rain out of Miriam’s sight. Whatever it was didn’t hold her attention long. Ann-Harriet shook her head, rubbed the key dry on the lining of her slicker, and then opened the Jaguar up. Seconds later, the exhaust began to belch white smoke and the windshield wipers began to sweep and pulse. The Jaguar had cost $92,528, not including tax. Miriam had bought it for Josh on his last birthday. She had bought him other things during their time together, including a menagerie that had once held a lion and now kept an eclectic collection that ranged from a llama to snakes, but Josh had shown no inclination to share that with Ann-Harriet Severan.

Miriam turned away from the window, went back to her desk and sat down. “Don,” she said, “do you know what it takes to get a miracle accepted by the Catholic Church?”

“What it takes? Why should it take anything? I thought the Church
wanted
miracles.”

“I don’t know if it does or not,” Miriam said. “In a case like this, where there is a chance of canonization, once a miracle has been claimed, Rome will send an investigator. Rome may send several. One or more than one, it doesn’t matter, because if there’s more than one, they’ll be clones. Priests, of course, and very well educated priests. Priests who don’t believe in miracles.”

“I didn’t think that was allowed,” Don said stiffly. “Priests who don’t believe in miracles.”

“All Catholics are required to believe in the miracles attributed to Christ and his apostles in the Gospels and any other miracles directly asserted in Scripture. Beyond that, they aren’t required to believe in miracles at all. The Church doesn’t declare miracles to be authentic. It merely declares that belief in the miraculous nature of certain events is not contrary to reason—meaning they’ve investigated the event and can explain it in no other way—and not contrary to faith. That’s it. Not real, just not contrary.”

“But Lourdes—”

“What about Lourdes? The Church has declared three specific healings to be ‘not immediately explicable in any other way’ and belief in the intercession of Mary in those cases and in the appearance of Mary to Bernadette to be ‘not contrary to faith.’ Just three, Don, in over a hundred years. And any Catholic who wants to is free to think that even those three are a lot of superstitious bunk and that Bernadette herself was an hysterical girl who was seeing things that weren’t there.”

“I don’t see—”

“I do.” Miriam hauled herself to her feet again, she didn’t know why. Ever since she had been absolutely sure of the affair between Josh and Ann-Harriet Severan, she had been restless. It bothered her, because the only other time she had ever been restless in the same way was when she was waiting for her father to die. Then she had had a perfectly sensible reason to be restless. Only after her father’s death had she been able to make her move to take control of the Bank. The old chauvinist fool would never have allowed it. If he’d realized what she’d intended to do, he would never have left her the stock that made it possible for her to do it. This thing with Josh was an entirely different matter. If he proved unsatisfactory he could always be fired—meaning divorced. If a boy toy was really what she required at this stage in her life, she could always find another one. She had picked Josh up in a bar in Corfu. Greece was a good place for things like that.