Recessional: A Novel (21 page)

“But your Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister,” St. Près pointed out, and she snapped: “Yes, and didn’t they get rid of her as soon as possible? And in the ugliest way, primarily because she was a woman.”

While the dishes were being cleared and dessert orders taken, Mrs. Quade progressed to her most contentious points: “When I was stationed briefly in Israel, working with the rabbis, I attended a synagogue each Friday at sunset. No prayers could be said, nor the Torah read, unless ten men were present, a minyan. Women did not count.
And those women who did attend the services—there weren’t many—had to sit in an upper balcony behind a gauze drape to keep them from contaminating the worship below, and perhaps—who knows?—to keep from casting an evil spell on the Torah itself as it perched there in its sacred scroll.”

“Ridiculous!” Jiménez cried. “I’ve known scores of Jews. They revere their women,” to which Mrs. Quade said in a low voice: “And what prayer, centuries old, does the Jewish man say as he admires himself in the bathroom mirror each morning? It ends: ‘And thank God I am not a woman.’ ”

She was also harsh on the Mormons, saying that they kept their women in a secondary status, disciplining them severely if they stepped out of line, and when the men at the table protested because they knew Mormon men who treasured their womenfolk, she said: “The public record is too clear. You don’t have to accept it if you don’t want to, but women of other faiths know it’s accurate.”

She ran into vigorous opposition when she started to speak about the Bible itself and its constant placing of women in an inferior position, but she could point to Saint Paul and his almost savage disciplining of women as if they were troublesome children, and she quoted some of Paul’s more famous remarks, such as “It is good for a man not to marry,” and “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man,” and “Women should remain silent in church. They are not allowed to speak. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home.”

St. Près said: “We all know that Saint Paul was a misogynist—he spoke only for himself,” but it was Jiménez who struck the decisive blow: “I don’t think you’re quoting Saint Paul correctly. I remember the English words as being somewhat different,” and she had to confess: “Like many modern clergy, I use the
New International Version
,” and each of the men said: “Oh!” as if that removed her from serious consideration.

The arrival of dessert provided a recess from an argument that might have taken a tense or even ugly course, but when the plates were removed, St. Près made a suggestion that all approved: “Your attitudes are so concisely phrased, Reverend Quade, that we’d profit from hearing more. This is all rather new to us,” and Senator Raborn agreed: “Yes, the voice of the New Woman.”

Unfortunately, editor Jiménez got the postprandial discussion off
to the worst possible start by giving it as his judgment that “at least the Catholic Church has always held women in the highest regard, certainly the equal of men and often their superiors.”

“I do not find that in the record of your Church,” Mrs. Quade said, trying not to sound contentious, but Jiménez bristled: “I think if you look at the way my Church has glorified the Virgin Mary, giving her every honor mentioned in the Bible, you’ll have to admit that we revere Mary, and have always honored her as the symbol of womanhood.”

Mrs. Quade at first seemed to accept this defense in silence, looking down at her fingers, clasped together as if to form a steeple. Then, looking up at the four men and not speaking exclusively to the editor, she ticked off a series of facts that she knew to be accurate through long study of original documents: “The Bible says little about Mary’s deification, nothing about her perpetual virginity except that Jesus had brothers, born Presumably after his birth, and nothing about her assumption into heaven.”

Editor Jiménez threw down his napkin: “Those very attributes form the soul of what our Church teaches about Mary! Truth irrefutable.”

Very quietly Mrs. Quade said: “None of those concepts appears in the Bible, nor in any other source until the Church Fathers promulgated the belief in
A.D
. 431 at one of their great councils—at Ephesus, I believe—and they did it, we think, to satisfy the growing complaints by women that they had no place in the Church. It was a bold move, and a thoroughly responsible one, a happy invention to save the Church.”

“I cannot believe that,” Jiménez protested, and the other men’s agreement was voiced by St. Près: “From what I’ve witnessed in the Catholic countries, the Virgin Mary stands at the very heart of the Church. You could almost say that she defines it.”

Never raising her voice, because she knew she was on solid ground, Reverend Quade said: “Today, yes, the Church has adopted Mary most effectively. But in the beginning three centuries she was not conspicuous, either in the Bible or in Church doctrine.”

“Then where did her glorification come from?” Jiménez demanded, and the clergywoman replied: “From a handful of popular treatises, and would-be additions to the Bible, and from legend. Remember that when the Church Fathers finally decided to present her
to the world with the attributes we revere today, the general public went wild with celebrations. It was one of the most widely accepted judgments ever handed down by the Church, that henceforth Mary was certified to have been a perpetual virgin, born and living with no knowledge of sin, and the special mediator between human beings and the Godhead. It started with that.”

Jiménez, outraged, rose from the table, bowed to the other members of the tertulia, ignored Mrs. Quade and stomped off with this parting shot: “I do not wish to associate with heretics. Popular legend! It defames the word of God as given in the Holy Bible.”

When he was gone, Senator Raborn said: “Well, you certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest, Mrs. Quade.”

“It’s only the truth.” She nodded to her hosts, then added a telling point: “Everything I said was developed by Catholic scholars, the great men of the Church, centuries before Martin Luther was born. Catholics produced some of the finest theologians the world has had. They knew they needed Mary.”

For three days editor Jiménez was absent from the tertulia, but his chair was taken one night by Lewandowski, who spoke further about developments in the Human Genome Project. Specialists in various nations were identifying one gene after another which accounted for specific diseases and imperfections in human development: “Last month it was discovered that an irregularity on chromosome seven seems to be a principal cause of cystic fibrosis. At the speed we’re working in even the little laboratories we can expect miracles by the end of the century.” St. Près spoke for all when he said: “I’m not sure I want to see all your miracles, Lewandowski,” and the others laughed.

On the fourth evening editor Jiménez returned to the tertulia, pulled up a fifth chair, walked sedately to where Reverend Quade was sitting alone and said, as if he were a courtier addressing a queen: “Would you grace us with your presence tonight?” With a slight bow she rose, took his arm and accompanied him to the corner table.

“I have invited Helen to join us,” he explained, “because I owe her an apology,” and as the men wrote out their dinner orders, he continued: “I’ve spent the last three days in libraries, checking on the veracity of what she said the other night about the history of the Virgin Mary in the life of the Catholic Church. I used Catholic studies mostly and can now assure you that almost all she told us that night is true. I apologize,” and he leaned across the table to kiss her hand.

“What exactly did you find?” President Armitage asked, and Jiménez replied: “Most fascinating. The Church Fathers wanted desperately to find in the Bible some proof that would substantiate the idea that had become so popular with the general public, because of the legends and the colorful tracts. In the New Testament they could find nothing, not a word, just as Helen said. But a very clever scholar at the end of the fourth century, when Mary had been dead for more than three hundred years, found in the Old Testament a cryptic passage written by the priest of the Temple, Ezekiel, some six hundred years before the birth of Christ, which the scholar was convinced proved the perpetual virginity of Mary. He had to do some fancy rationalizing to reach his conclusions, because the passage itself is totally obscure.” Taking from his pocket a small piece of paper he began: “I copied it, word for word, from the real Bible, and I shall read it to you now,” and he bowed to Mrs. Quade: “It all depends upon the word
gate
:

‘Then the man brought me back to the outer gate, and it was shut. The Lord said to me, “This gate is to remain shut, It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it.” ’ ”

When none of the men could figure out what this crucial text was saying, Jiménez continued: “With full apologies to Reverend Quade for the word I must use, the church fathers explained that the word
gate
meant the vagina of the Virgin through which Jesus would enter the world, and through which no other mortal would ever pass.” Raising his hands in a kind of triumph as if he himself had solved this puzzle, he said: “In the passage written about 600
B.C
. Jesus is not identified, nor the Virgin Mary and certainly not her private parts, but nine hundred years later the Church was so eager to find proof of her perpetual virginity that they accepted this strange interpretation of a text almost a thousand years old.”

Folding his paper with its quotation from Ezekiel Chapter 44, verses one through three, he concluded: “It seems that drastic measures, tortured interpretations, were required, but in the end a great good was accomplished, delivering a noble portrait of a noble woman to the peasants of the time, men and women like us, who desperately wanted to believe.” Again he nodded toward Reverend Quade: “And it was Helen’s obstinacy that brought the truth to us.”

From that moment on, the tertulia referred to the brilliant woman who often ate with them as Helen. She had established her own credentials.

The widow Clay had finally decided to have a lumpectomy as planned, and when the chemotherapy caused her hair to fall out, she also inherited Mrs. Mallory’s expensive French wig, but when it came time to sort out the various medical bills she found that her troubles were just beginning. The problem was that her various doctors and experts each seemed to have his or her unique pattern of submitting bills, so that she could never determine whether she should pay the doctor immediately or wait till some governmental agency or private insurance company would reimburse him or her for part of the bill, whereupon Mrs. Clay would be responsible for the remainder.

Of course she had Medicare plus minimal additional coverage from her dead husband’s company, but each of these organizations operated in such mysterious ways that she never knew who owed what or who was to pay for each procedure. So she was harassed by eight different agencies: five doctors, the hospital, Medicare, and private insurance in a jungle so tangled and uncharted that in total frustration she sought guidance from Dr. Zorn. He found he could answer almost none of her questions and became so fascinated by this aspect of American health services in day-to-day operations that he started to “bird-dog each of the steps.” Knowing that he was not well enough informed to unravel the paper trail he suggested to Mrs. Clay that she consult with Miss Foxworth, who had made herself the Palms expert in the workings of health-care bureaucracy. The widow thanked him: “I graduated from a good college, but on this I’m totally lost,” and before she left Zorn’s office she showed him a threatening letter she had received that morning. It dealt with a visit to a local doctor’s office, warning her that if she did not pay the balance of her overdue account her case would be put in the hands of a local bill collection agency with possible damage to her credit rating: “Patrons have found that if delinquency is once reported, it is a difficult matter to get it removed. Please protect your good reputation. Pay this arrears now, and no action will be taken. You have two weeks to comply.”

She explained to Zorn that her deceased husband, a meticulous businessman, had always paid every bill presented to him by the doctor
in question and had been assured that the doctor’s office would handle the rest of the paperwork: “I’ve done the same, and now I get this threat. What can I do, my credit rating is important, because if a widow loses it she has a difficult time getting it restored.”

“That’s what Miss Foxworth is skilled at. May I listen in on what happens? In my job I ought to know.”

The conference was held in the accountant’s crowded office, where she kept a vast number of important addresses and phone numbers to help her unravel the mysteries of American health care: “First let me get the facts straight. You were treated by five doctors?”

“Yes. There are so many involved in treating a cancer patient. And I paid each one the part of his fee that he wanted. His office staff promised me they’d take care of the rest of the paperwork.”

“You have your canceled checks proving payment?”

“I don’t know. I have their bills, which I marked ‘Paid in full’ and the date.”

“Could you get the canceled checks?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“But some of the doctors have sent additional bills, the unpaid balances, asking you to pay up?”

“Yes. But they promised me Medicare would pay that. Or my husband’s company insurance, Home Health of Minneapolis.”

“And you paid your hospital bills?”

“Yes. This long sheet of paper is the bill.”

“How many days in the hospital?”

“Only seven. I recuperated fast.”

“So the total hospital bill, before any payments, was this figure? $18,950? Has the hospital threatened you?”

“They demand that I pay, but they haven’t made any threats.”

“Have you spoken with anyone in the Florida Medicare office?”

“Several people, but I don’t recall their names, since each time I called I spoke with someone different.”