Cat's Pajamas (16 page)

F
ATHER CORNELIUS DENNIS MONAGHAN
of Charlestown Parish, Connie to his friends, sets down the Styrofoam chalice, turns from the corrugated cardboard altar, and approaches the two young women standing by the resin baptismal font. The font is six-sided and encrusted with saints, like a gigantic hex nut forged for some obscure yet holy purpose, but its most impressive feature is its portability. Hardly a month passes in which Connie doesn't drive the vessel across town, bear it into some wretched hovel, and confer immortality on a newborn whose parents have grown too feeble to leave home.

“Merribell, right?” asks Connie, pointing to the baby on his left.

Wedged in the crook of her mother's arm, the infant wriggles and howls. “No—Madeleine,” Angela mumbles. Connie has known Angela Dunfey all her life, and he still remembers the seraphic glow that beamed from her face when she first received the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Today she boasts no such glow. Her cheeks and brow appear tarnished, like iron corroded by the Greenhouse Deluge, and her spine curls with a torsion more commonly seen in women three times her age. “Merribell's over here.” Angela raises her free hand and gestures toward her cousin Lorna, who is balancing Madeleine's twin sister atop her gravid belly. Will Lorna Dunfey, Connie wonders, also give birth to twins? The phenomenon, he has heard, runs in families.

Touching the sleeve of Angela's frayed blue sweater, the priest addresses her in a voice that travels clear across the nave. “Have these children received the Sacrament of Reproductive Potential Assessment?”

The parishioner shifts a nugget of chewing gum from her left cheek to her right. “Y-yes,” she says at last.

Henry Shaw, the pale altar boy, his face abloom with acne, hands the priest a parchment sheet stamped with the Seal of the Boston Isle Archdiocese. A pair of signatures adorns the margin, verifying that two ecclesiastical representatives have legitimized the birth. Connie instantly recognizes the illegible hand of Archbishop Xallibos. Below lie the bold loops and assured serifs of a Friar James Wolfe, M.D., doubtless the man who drew the blood.

Madeleine Dunfey,
Connie reads.
Left ovary: 315 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 340 primordial follicles.
A spasm of despair passes through the priest. The egg-cell count for each organ should be 180,000 at least. It's a verdict of infertility, no possible appeal, no imaginable reprieve.

With an efficiency bordering on effrontery, Henry Shaw offers Connie a second parchment sheet.

Merribell Dunfey. Left ovary: 290 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 310 primordial follicles.
The priest is not surprised. What sense would there be in God's withholding the power of procreation from one twin but not the other? Connie now needs only to receive these barren sisters, apply the sacred rites, and furtively pray that the Eighth Lateran Council was indeed guided by the Holy Spirit when it undertook to bring the baptismal process into the age of testable destinies and ovarian surveillance.

He holds out his hands, withered palms up, a posture he maintains as Angela surrenders Madeleine, reaches under the baby's christening gown, and unhooks both diaper pins. The mossy odor of fresh urine wafts into the Church of the Immediate Conception. Sighing profoundly, Angela hands the sopping diaper to her cousin.

“Bless these waters, O Lord,” says Connie, spotting his ancient face in the consecrated fluid, “that they might grant these sinners the gift of life everlasting.” Turning from the vessel, he presents Madeleine to his ragged flock, over three hundred natural-born Catholics—sixth-generation Irish, mostly, plus a smattering of Portuguese, Italians, and Croats—interspersed with two dozen recent converts of Korean and Vietnamese extraction: a congregation bound together, he'll admit, not so much by religious conviction as by shared destitution. “Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity, and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water, I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through these baptisms, Madeleine and Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom.” Connie faces his trembling parishioner. “Angela Dunfey, do you believe, by God's word, that children who are baptized, dying before they commit any actual evil, will be saved?”

Her “Yes” is begrudging and clipped.

Like a scrivener replenishing his pen at an inkwell, Connie dips his thumb into the font. “Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours.”

“M-M-Madeleine Eileen Dunfey.”

“We welcome this sinner, Madeleine Eileen Dunfey, into the mystical body of Christ”—with his wet thumb Connie traces a plus sign on the infant's forehead—“and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross.”

Unraveling Madeleine from her christening gown, Connie fixes on the waters. They are preternaturally still—as calm and quiet as the Sea of Galilee after the Savior rebuked the winds. For many years the priest wondered why Christ hadn't returned on the eve of the Greenhouse Deluge, dispersing the hydrocarbon vapors with a wave of his hand, ending global warming with a heavenward wink, but recently Connie has come to feel that divine intervention entails protocols past human ken.

He contemplates his reflected countenance. Nothing about it—not the tiny eyes, thin lips, hawk's beak of a nose—pleases him. Now he begins the immersion, sinking Madeleine Dunfey to her skullcap… her ears… cheeks… mouth… eyes.

“No!” screams Angela.

As the baby's nose goes under, mute cries spurt from her lips: bubbles inflated with bewilderment and pain. “Madeleine Dunfey,” Connie intones, holding the infant down, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The bubbles break the surface. The fluid pours into the infant's lungs. Her silent screams cease, but she still puts up a fight.

“No! Please! No!”

A full minute passes, marked by the rhythmic shuffling of the congregation and the choked sobs of the mother. A second minute—a third—and finally the body stops moving, a mere husk, no longer home to Madeleine Dunfey's indestructible soul.

“No!”

The Sacrament of Terminal Baptism, Connie knows, is rooted in both logic and history. Even today, he can recite verbatim the preamble to the Eighth Lateran Council's
Pastoral Letter on the Rights of the Unconceived.
(“Throughout her early years, Holy Mother Church tirelessly defended the Rights of the Born. Then, as the iniquitous institution of abortion spread across Western Europe and North America, she undertook to secure the Rights of the Unborn. Now, as a new era dawns for the Church and her servants, she must make even greater efforts to propagate the gift of life everlasting, championing the Rights of the Unconceived through a Doctrine of Affirmative Fertility.”) The subsequent sentence has always given Connie pause. It stopped him when he was a seminarian. It stops him today. (“This Council therefore avers that, during a period such as that in which we find ourselves, when God has elected to discipline our species through a Greenhouse Deluge and its concomitant privations, a society can commit no greater crime against the future than to squander provender on individuals congenitally incapable of procreation.”) Quite so. Indeed. And yet Connie has never performed a terminal baptism without misgivings.

He scans the faithful. Valerie Gallogher, his nephews' zaftig kindergarten teacher, seems on the verge of tears. Keye Sung frowns. Teresa Curtoni shudders. Michael Hines moans softly. Stephen O'Rourke and his wife both wince.

“We give thanks, most merciful Father”—Connie lifts the corpse from the water—“that it pleases you to regenerate this infant and take her unto your bosom.” Placing the dripping flesh on the altar, he leans toward Lorna Dunfey and lays his palm on Merribell's brow. “Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours.”

“M-M-Merribell S-Siobhan…” With a sharp reptilian hiss, Angela wrests Merribell from her cousin and pulls the infant to her breast. “Merribell Siobhan Dunfey!”

The priest steps forward, caressing the wisp of tawny hair sprouting from Merribell's cranium. “We welcome this sinner—”

Angela whirls around and, still sheltering her baby, leaps from the podium to the aisle—the very aisle down which Connie hopes one day to see her parade in prelude to receiving the Sacrament of Qualified Monogamy.

“Stop!” cries Connie.

“Angela!” shouts Lorna.

“No!” yells the altar boy.

For someone who has recently given birth to twins, Angela is amazingly spry, rushing pell-mell past the stupefied congregation and straight through the narthex.

“Please!” screams Connie.

But already she is out the door, bearing her unsaved daughter into the teeming streets of Boston Isle.

At 8:17 P.M., Eastern Standard Time, Stephen O'Rourke's fertility reaches its weekly peak. The dial on his wrist tells him so, buzzing like a tortured hornet as he scrubs his teeth with baking soda.
Skreee,
says the sperm counter, reminding Stephen of his ineluctable duty.
Skreee, skreee:
go find us an egg.

He pauses in the middle of a brush stroke and, without bothering to rinse his mouth, strides into the bedroom.

Kate lies on the sagging mattress, smoking an unfiltered cigarette as she balances her nightly dose of iced Arbutus rum on her stomach. Baby Malcolm cuddles against his mother, gums fastened onto her left nipple. She stares at the far wall, where the cracked and scabrous plaster frames the video monitor, its screen displaying the regular Sunday night broadcast
of Keep Those Kiddies Coming.
Archbishop Xallibos, seated, dominates a TV studio appointed like a day-care center: stuffed animals, changing table, brightly colored alphabet letters. Preschoolers crawl across the prelate's Falstaffian body, sliding down his thighs and swinging from his arms as if he is a piece of playground equipment.

“Did you know that a single act of onanism kills up to four hundred million babies in a matter of seconds?” asks Xallibos from the monitor. “As Jesus remarks in the Gospel According to Saint Andrew, ‘Masturbation is murder.'”

Stephen coughs. “I don't suppose you're…”

His wife thrusts her index finger against her pursed lips. Even when engaged in shutting him out, she still looks beautiful to Stephen. Her huge eyes and high cheekbones, her elegant swanlike neck. “Shhh—”

“Please check,” says Stephen, swallowing baking soda.

Kate raises her bony wrist and glances at her ovulation gauge. “Not for three days. Maybe four.”

“Damn.”

He loves her so dearly. He wants her so much—no less now than when they received the Sacrament of Qualified Monogamy. It's fine to have a connubial conversation, but when you utterly adore your wife, when you crave to comprehend her beyond all others, you need to speak in flesh as well.

“Will anyone deny that Hell's hottest quadrant is reserved for those who violate the rights of the unconceived?” asks Xallibos, playing peekaboo with a cherubic toddler. “Who will dispute that contraception, casual sex, and nocturnal emissions place their perpetrators on a one-way cruise to Perdition?”

“Honey, I have to ask you something,” says Stephen.

“Shhh—”

“That young woman at Mass this morning, the one who ran away…”

“She went crazy because it was twins.” Kate slurps down her remaining rum. The ice fragments clink against each other. “If it'd been just the one, she probably could've coped.”

“Well, yes, of course,” says Stephen, gesturing toward Baby Malcolm. “But suppose one of
your
newborns…”

“Heaven is forever, Stephen,” says Kate, filling her mouth with ice, “and Hell is just as long.” She chews, her molars grinding the ice. Dribbles of rum-tinted water spill from her lips. “You'd better get to church.”

“Farewell, friends,” says Xallibos as the theme music swells. He dandles a Korean three-year-old on his knee. “And keep those kiddies coming!”

The path to the front door takes Stephen through the cramped and fetid living room—functionally the nursery. All is quiet, all is well. The fourteen children, one for every other year of Kate's post-pubescence, sleep soundly. Nine-year-old Roger is quite likely his, product of the time Stephen and Kate got their cycles in synch; the boy boasts Stephen's curly blond hair and riveting green eyes. Difficult as it is, Stephen refuses to accord Roger any special treatment—no private trips to the frog pond, no second candy cane at Christmas. A good stepfather didn't indulge in favoritism.

Stephen pulls on his mended galoshes, fingerless gloves, and torn pea jacket. Ambling out of the apartment, he joins the knot of morose pedestrians as they shuffle along Winthrop Street. A fog descends, a steady rain falls: reverberations from the Deluge. Pushed by expectant mothers, dozens of shabby, black-hooded baby buggies squeak mournfully down the asphalt. The sidewalks belong to adolescent girls, gang after gang, gossiping among themselves and stomping on puddles as they show off their pregnancies like Olympic medals.

Besmirched by two decades of wind and drizzle, a limestone Madonna stands outside the Church of the Immediate Conception. Her expression lies somewhere between a smile and a smirk. Stephen climbs the steps, enters the narthex, removes his gloves, and, dipping his fingertips into the nearest font, decorates the air with the Sign of the Cross.

Every city, Stephen teaches his students at Cardinal Dougherty High School, boasts its own personality. Extroverted Rio, pessimistic Prague, paranoid New York. And Boston Isle? What sort of psyche inhabits the Hub and its surrounding reefs? Schizoid, Stephen tells them. Split. The Boston that battled slavery and stoked the fires beneath the American melting pot was the same Boston that massacred the Pequots and sent witchfinders to Salem. But here, now, which side of the city is emergent? The bright one, Stephen decides, picturing the hundreds of heaven-bound souls who each day exit Boston's innumerable wombs, flowing forth like the bubbles that so recently streamed from Madeleine Dunfey's lips.