Bear and His Daughter Read Free Page B

the rectory’s quiet. Then she asked, “Prodded by conscience, are you, Father?”
    “I think we’re wrong on this,” he said with sudden force. “I think women have a right. I do. Sometimes I’m ashamed to wear my collar.”
    She laughed her pleasant, cultivated laughter. “Ashamed to wear your collar? Poor Frank. Afraid people will think badly of you?”
    He summoned anger. “Kindly spare me the ad hominem,” he said.
    “But Frank,” she said, it seemed lightly, “there is only ad hominem.”
    “I’m afraid I’m not theologian enough,” he said, “to follow you there.”
    “Oh,” said Mary, “I’m sorry, Father. What I mean in my crude way is that what is expected of you is expected personally. Expected directly. Of
you,
Frank.”
    He sulked. A childish resentful silence. Then he said, “I can’t believe God wants us to persecute these young women the way you people do. I mean you particularly, Mary, with your so-called counseling.”
    He meant the lectures she gave the unwed mothers who were referred to her by pamphlet. Mary had attended anti-war and anti-apartheid demonstrations with pride. The abortion clinic demonstrations she undertook as an offered humiliation, standing among the transparent cranks and crazies as a penance and a curb to pride. But surprisingly, when she was done with them in private, over coffee and cake, many pregnant women brought their pregnancies to term.
    She watched Father Hooke. He was without gravitas, she thought. The hands, the ineffectual sputter.
    “For God’s sake,” he went on, “look at the neighborhood where you work! Do you really think the world requires a few million more black, alienated, unwanted children?”
    She leaned against one of his antique chests and folded her arms. She was tall and elegant, as much an athlete and a beauty at fifty as she had ever been. Camille sat open-mouthed.
    “How contemptible and dishonest of you to pretend an attack of conscience,” she told Hooke quietly. “It’s respectability you’re after. And to talk about what God wants?” She seemed to be politely repressing a fit of genuine mirth. “When you’re afraid to go out and look at his living image? Those things in the car, Frank, that poor little you are afraid to see. That’s man, guy, those little forked purple beauties. That’s God’s image, don’t you know that? That’s what you’re scared of.”
    He took his glasses off and blinked helplessly.
    “Your grief…” he began. A weakling, she thought, trying for the upper hand. Trying to appear concerned. In a moment he had lost his nerve. “It’s made you cruel … Maybe not
cruel,
but…”
    Mary Urquhart pushed herself upright. “Ah,” she said with a flutter of gracious laughter, “the well-worn subject of my grief. Maybe I’m drunk again tonight, eh Father? Who knows?”
    Thirteen years before on the lake outside Boston, on the second evening before Christmas, her husband had taken the children skating. First young Charley had wanted to go and Charles had demurred; he’d had a few drinks. Then he had agreed in his shaggy, teasing, slow-spoken way—he was rangy, wry, a Carolina Scot like Mary. It was almost Christmas and the kids were excited and how long would it stay cold enough to skate? Then Payton had demanded to go, and then finally little Emily, because Charles had taught them to snap the whip on ice the day before. And the lake, surrounded by woods, was well lighted and children always skated into the night although there was one end, as it turned out, where the light failed, a lonely bay bordered with dark blue German pine where even then maybe some junkie had come out from Roxbury or Southie or Lowell or God knew where and destroyed the light for the metal around it. And Emily still had her cold and should not have gone.
    But they went and Mary waited late, and sometimes, listening to music, having a Wild Turkey, she thought she heard voices sounding strange. She could remember them