Baptism in Blood(12)
“But I won’t do it today,” Maggie said. “I don’t have time. And I can’t take the picture today, either. Not with all the things I have to do. You’ve got to take it back up to the camp until the storm is over with.”
“Of course I’ll take it back up to the camp. I have to package it. I told you.”
“Yes. Well. Whatever. Take it back up to the camp. Then bring it down to me tomorrow or the day after that and I’ll put it in my suitcase for New York so I won’t forget it when I go. I’ll drop it in the mail at Grand Central Station.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“Go back up to the camp, Carol.”
Carol stood up. She held the bag as if what was in it was easily breakable. She held her body as if it were already broken.
“Well,” she said. “Thank you. Again. You don’t know how much I thank you.”
Maggie could imagine having a daughter like Shelley, and what she would do about it. Carol was folding up her metal chair and putting it neatly against a wall of now-empty bookshelves. Outside, the wind was the strongest it had been all morning. The trees were beginning to look as if they were under siege.
Carol went to the door of the shop, opened it, and looked out onto the sidewalk. Maggie couldn’t tell what was out there, because the window was boarded up and the door was a plain wooden one.
“Well,” Carol said. “I suppose I’d better go.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Carol. Or the day after. Depending on the damage.”
“I hope there isn’t any damage. I hope it all just goes away. I hate the idea of a hurricane.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Carol.”
Carol nodded quickly and scurried out into the street, letting the door swing closed behind her.
Maggie popped another packing box into shape and brushed hair out of her face. Joshua Lake, up on a ladder and too close to the ceiling for comfort, looked down.
“Strange lady,” he said. “They all that strange up at the camp?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie told him. “I only know about three people from up at the camp. How are you doing up there?”
“Getting along.”
“We better start taking some of these boxes into the back room. There isn’t going to be space enough for all of them up there.”
“Anything you say.”
Anything I say, Maggie thought.
Then she started to throw American Indian romances into the empty box, one after the other, without bothering to look at the titles. She had nothing to say these days. That was the problem. She had nothing to say to people like Carol and nothing to say to herself. The world seemed full of grief and loss and pettiness and hate, and there wasn’t a single damn thing she was able to do about it.
If Maggie Kelleher had believed in God, she might even have welcomed the hurricane, as a kind of cleansing water, a second flood, to wash the sin and sorrow all away.
5
ZHONDRA MEYER HAD ALWAYS been very, very rich, and for a time in her life she had been ashamed of it. She could get a clear picture of herself, even now, at the age of fifteen, walking across the broad green quad at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. She was wearing a Villager skirt and sweater set, just like everybody else, and behind her was a plump blond girl from Atlanta named Mimi Dobbs.
“Shhh,” Mimi was whispering to her friends, under a waterfall of sharp little giggles. “Shhh. You know what she is? She’s a filthy rich New York Jew.”
Zhondra’s mother, who had been an active Zionist, would have worried about the anti-Semitism of it. She had wanted Zhondra to stay in the city and go to Brearley, where there was less of that kind of thing. Zhondra had a hard time (then) thinking of “Jew” as a category she belonged to. It was her history, and her religion, but it was being rich that really seemed to peg her. Up in her dorm room, she had a dozen cashmere sweaters and six pairs of shoes custom-made for her at a specialty shop in London. At the end of the term, instead of going to the train station in a cab like everyone else, she would be retrieved by a uniformed driver in an enormous Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, and he would tip his hat at her. Girls watched the way she walked and what she wore. Sometimes their resentment was as thick and slick as butter on her skin. She imagined her father losing all his money, and being reduced to selling apples on the street.
Today, with the storm rising outside and the heat acting up in the west wing again, Zhondra was worried less about being rich or being Jewish than she was about what they would do if the utilities went out because of the hurricane. The designation “lesbian” didn’t occur to her at all. This house had been built by her great-uncle Samuel back in the 1920s. It had two wings and a thick central core, seventeen thousand square feet in all, with thirty bedrooms and a ballroom big enough to serve as a wedding chamber for the Unification Church. It had been Samuel’s “hobby,” because he was a younger son without much money, and because he had no ambition to make anything of his life. What he had done with his life was to collect art, almost all of which Zhondra sincerely hated. Tintoretto. Titian. Raphael. The painters were good, and expensive. It was the subjects that drove Zhondra wild. All those fat Madonnas and fatter children. All those round little cherubs and heavenward-gazing saints. The first thing Zhondra had done, after coming down here from New York, was to call Sotheby’s and put the whole mess up for auction. Then she’d bought art that suited her.