A Stillness in Bethlehem(55)
Down in the park there was a great deal of movement, a shifting of lights, a flurry of men and women in thick woolen robes and rope cinctures getting in place. Gregor looked up to see two women taking their places to Bennis’s right. One of them was relatively young but not very attractive. Her hair was dark and her look was sullen. The other had to be in her late thirties or early forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and tiny crease lines at the corners of her eyes. She was not sullen at all, and the thick, brightly colored wool of her coat—tangerine orange, for God’s sake—spoke of serious money. The unattractive sullen one sat down, shucked her parka and stared resolutely out into the park. The one in the tangerine orange coat looked the three of them over and smiled. Gregor knew that smile. It was the smile of a woman who had read last week’s paper.
“How wonderful,” the woman in the tangerine coat said. “A seat so close to Peter Callisher’s favorite person, Gregor Demarkian.”
“Say it louder, why don’t you?” the sullen one said. “Maybe you can talk the crowd into making life perfectly miserable for him.”
“I hope I’m not trying to make life perfectly miserable for anyone,” the one in the tangerine coat said. Then she held out her hand to Bennis Hannaford. “I’m Gemma Bury. I’m the priest at the Episcopal Church here. This is my assistant, Kelley Grey.”
“Bennis Hannaford,” Bennis said.
“It says here they take down the bleachers every night and put them up again every evening,” Tibor said, biting his lip as he stared at his brochure. “If you’re the Episcopal priest here, you must live in town. You must know.”
“Know what?” Gemma Bury was puzzled.
“Why they take the bleachers down and put them up again all the time.”
“Oh. Well, that’s because if they don’t, there are people in town who complain that they can’t use the park, and tourists who complain that the bleachers make the place look less like New England, and all kinds of things. It makes things a lot simpler just to take them down and put them up.”
“I do not think simpler is the word for it,” Tibor said. “I do not think it is simple at all. It shows a lack of cooperation that is not a good sign for the enterprise.”
Gemma Bury raised an eyebrow. “Is that what this is, an enterprise?”
“To Father Tibor, almost everything is an enterprise.” Gregor Demarkian nodded politely at Gemma Bury and waited, but nothing happened. Gemma did not seem inclined to pursue this or any other conversation. She took a brochure of her own out of one of her voluminous pockets and flipped it open. “This is going to be very interesting,” she said. “I’ve never actually seen the Nativity play before. I’ve always meant to go, but I’ve just never had the chance. I’ve always thought the Christian Nativity myth was one of the more beautiful stories to come down to us from the ancient world.”
“Winter solstice,” Tibor muttered under his breath.
After that, it might have gotten sticky, but fortunately there wasn’t enough time. The bustle around them had grown louder as people arrived from the inns and motels and buses, all looking frantically for their seats. The noise from the center of the park grew louder, too. A huge cluster of children ranging in age from about three to about ten—as far as Gregor could tell—had gathered to the side of the gazebo and begun to sing. The words floated in the air above them all like a benediction.
“O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.”
Tibor pulled a brown paper bag out of his cassock pocket and handed it to Bennis.
“Here,” he said. “This is chocolate cake, Bennis, very good. I had it sent up with room service. Eat it and it will make up for you because you have not had any dinner.”
Gregor folded his arms across his chest and let himself drift into the sound of children’s voices, Christmas music, thoughts of Gemma Bury and her odes to the winter solstice, anything at all—as long as he didn’t have to let himself think about Tibor thinking about Bennis’s diet. Assuming that Bennis was on a diet.
It was impossible.
2
Gregor Demarkian had heard a great deal about the Bethlehem Nativity play over the years, and a great deal more over the last few weeks, and he knew that it was supposed to be much like the Passion play staged every ten years at Oberammergau, only more frequent. The point of such a comparison was to indicate that the production was professionally done, of a quality more likely to be found on Broadway or in London’s West End than in a small hamlet in Vermont. Reflection would have made it clear that that was necessary. No rankly amateur production could have attracted the crowds this one consistently did, not even with the rest of the town thrown in for atmosphere. According to the brochure, the play had had the same director for the last ten years, who had apprenticed with the previous director for ten years before that. It was all very well put together and carefully planned, with spontaneity limited to the fringe operations and the naturally effervescent enthusiasms of local craftspeople presented with a captive buying public. For some reason, none of this seemed to have sunk into Gregor Demarkian’s brain. The play ended up shocking him—with its power, with its elegance, with its flawlessness. It helped that most of the words had come from the King James Version instead of some earnest playwright’s pen, and that the young girl playing Mary was so luminous. At one point during the Annunciation, Gregor thought Mary was actually going to float. She seemed naturally farther above the ground than the young man playing the angel. She moved with a slightly stiff, slightly awkward grace that gave her infinite dignity. Gregor almost found himself falling in love with her the way he had once fallen in love with the women in the movies he had seen as a child, sitting in a darkened place far from home and spiritually transported to another dimension. The livestock and histrionics came and went without affecting him. He found it hard to pay attention to anything else when Mary was in sight, whether she was speaking at the moment or not.