Bleeding Hearts(133)

“Mmm,” Frannie said, and then she noticed that Albertus, being a Catholic college, was really done up for Christmas. There were colored lights everywhere. There was a life-size crèche on the grass at the front just inside the gate, with a life-size Mary and Joseph inside it.

Sometimes, Frannie thought, you don’t get a second chance. Some things come without second chances built into them. The way the world worked, these were always the things you most wanted to be able to take back and do over again.

Out on the street, the asphalt was wet and shiny under streetlights whose globes were grease free and clear. The houses were getting larger and more elaborately gingerbread. College girls were walking in groups, dressed from head to toe out of J. Crew and L.L. Bean catalogs.

Time ought to make things better, Frannie thought, and-distance ought to make them fainter, and after a while she should be able to look out on a street or a day or a woman walking in a park without feeling that her stomach was full of glass and iron shavings, that she wanted to double over and die. That was what ought to be happening, but it wasn’t happening. She had come three thousand miles across the country, and it had done her no good at all.

What would happen to her if nothing did any good? she wondered. How would she get along? She had accepted this job. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to do it. She couldn’t imagine standing up in front of a couple of dozen women, bouncing on and off a little plastic step and making it look like it mattered.

“We’re just up the hill here and to the right.” Tim’s determinedly cheerful voice filled the car the way helium filled a balloon.

Frannie had to stifle the impulse to break his neck, and wreck the car, and take off on her own again.





2


MAGDA HALE HAD NOT been named Magda when she was born. She had been named Margaret Jean, after her father’s two sisters, and from the beginning she had known what that was supposed to mean for her.

“Margaret is a good plain name,” Magda’s mother always said. “Jean is much too French. She’s never going to know what kind of person she’s destined to be.”

Actually, Magda Hale had always known quite well what kind of person she was destined to be. She knew everything there was to know about destiny by the time she was five, because her mother was addicted to the idea. Susan Burnham Hale was a True Believer without a True Religion to anchor her. She drifted from spiritualism to mesmerism to Theosophy to astrology the way the other women on their block drifted from one brand to another of dishwashing detergent. This was back in 1942, in Kettleman, New York, where Magda grew up. The men were all away in the War and the women and children were wedded to their radio sets, hoping for a scrap of cheerleading or news. Susan Hale had been a Seeker long before this. She had worn a little net sack around her neck under her wedding dress, containing two slivers of garlic, a sprig of rosemary, and a half-drowned nettle plant. She had attended the christening of her own daughter with a juju bag stuffed inside her purse. She had bought the juju bag from a lady she had gone to in New York, who claimed to be a gypsy fortune-teller and a voodoo expert as well. If Susan had known anything at all about voodoo, she would have known that the woman had to be lying. Magda didn’t think her mother would really have cared. What mattered to Susan was not the efficacy of the magic. Susan didn’t believe that anything was truly effective against Fate. What mattered to Susan was the rigid, unyielding nature of the universe itself. Everything was set in eternity and in advance. No amount of effort or talent or will or hope or prayer had any effect at all against the blind force of the universal will. If Susan had been a Christian, she would have been a Calvinist. She would have believed that God destines the great majority of people to hell before they are ever born and that nothing on earth was strong enough to thwart His omnipotent destructiveness.

Magda Hale’s universe was not rigid, or unyielding, or controlled by destiny. It was a very fluid place where actions very seldom had consequences and no deed was so irreversible that it could not be undone. Magda Hale had a horror of all things final. The idea of death made her sick to her stomach—not because it meant the end of consciousness, but because there didn’t seem to be any way to escape from it. Escape, to Magda, was the key. Life and death, good and evil, health and disease, none of it mattered in itself to Magda. All that mattered was the extent to which any part of it was inevitable.

“You’re going to be a plain woman when you grow up,” Susan Hale had told her daughter. “You’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”