Ahead of him, by the great doors, the blind eyes of the saints seem to widen in sudden understanding. The demons grin more boldly from their concrete resting place. A gargoyle laughs aloud.
Beyond the doors lies the hall of worship; beyond that, the convent. Here he will begin his search.
It will not be easy, he knows. He will have to be subtle about it. And persuasive. The sisters will be suspicious of a stranger's interest, and reluctant to confide in him.
He will have to win them over first. It is going to take time.
After all, he can't just walk into a convent and say, 'I need a virgin.'
June Twenty-fourth
Carol was staring out the window of the children's section when the little old man walked in. She looked up with surprise. Most adults remained downstairs, in the library's general reading room, and seldom ventured onto the second floor without a boy or girl in tow. Those who did were usually young mothers with a child home sick, or else had wandered up here by mistake.
But this man was far from young – he looked sixty at least, perhaps a decade more – and he appeared anything but confused. He made directly for where she was standing, a battered leather briefcase tucked beneath his arm and, peeping from it, the tip of a stubby little umbrella, even though there hadn't been a hint of rain all day. In his baggy blue suit, wisps of fine white hair catching the sunlight, he cut a rather comical figure.
Carol readjusted the shade and turned to meet him. She decided that he must be somebody's doting grandfather; from the way he gazed at the little girl who ran mischievously across his path, it was obvious he adored children.
Approaching the window, he brought his face close to hers as if about to offer a secret. Suddenly he smiled, an impish little smile that made his eyes twinkle.
'I think,' he said, 'you're just the person I've been looking for.'
It was Friday, the ending of an uneventful week and the prelude to another empty weekend. She had spent the morning in bed, too tired to get up, lying naked on the sheets and staring lazily out her window. Beyond the padlocked grate that stretched across it, beyond the iron railing of the fire escape, she could see the dark bricks of the building next door, the topmost branches of a tree, a narrow ribbon of sky.
Lying there in silence in the gathering heat, she'd been daydreaming of a ballet she had seen the night before, the whole cast dressed in bright red leotards against a field of snow. How beautiful it had been! – and how unearthly! They had looked like whirling roses
… She had started a letter about it to one of her older sisters, married and living in Seattle, but had put it aside before finishing the page; somehow, as if disturbing the waters at the bottom of a pond, the very act of writing had stirred memories of a different sort – not of the ballet, but of a dream it had inspired that same night. Not a good dream, either. Something about roses, something better left forgotten… And forgotten it had been; but all morning long a certain apprehension had remained, a flicker of unease, dancing in the shadows just beyond her reach.
With an effort she had roused herself at last, shaken off the dream, turned her thoughts to job and clothes and food. Her roommate had gone out after having eaten the one remaining orange and the last of the cottage cheese. The refrigerator was practically bare save for half a dozen eggs, and she'd recently begun to wonder if it wasn't wrong to eat even these; she had renounced meat while back at St Mary's. Better not yield to the temptation; God, she knew, would reward her for her strength. She settled for a cup of instant coffee and a thick slice of Italian bread toasted on a fork over the top burner of the stove. Rochelle, she gathered from the emptiness of the refrigerator, was on one of her periodic diets; lately she had taken to calling Carol 'anorexic' with undisguised envy. The girl could be impulsively generous and good-hearted, but Carol had begun to see signs of a selfishness beneath, perhaps even a growing resentment. They had been rooming together for less than a month. Carol suspected, occasionally, that it might have been a mistake to move in with her, and wondered what changes in their relationship the future would bring.
She herself had always been thin; her goal was to keep her weight just below one hundred, and the last time she'd checked it – old Mrs Slavinsky, whose apartment she had shared until last month, had owned a scale – she'd been pleased to see that she'd succeeded: ninety-seven pounds. Food was, like so many other things in life, a test of will, something to steel herself against.
As she showered, she ran her fingers through her hair, trimmed almost as short as a boy's now, and felt a wave of relief. Until last week, reluctant to waste a quarter of her paycheck at one of the city's over-priced styling shops where rock music blared and dead-eyed young men and women chattered to one another over the inert heads of their customers, Carol had left her hair long, wearing it pinned up in a style she liked to think of as old- fashioned but which she'd realized, in the end, was just plain ugly. Her roommate had offered to cut it, more in the spirit of adventure, Carol suspected, than of friendship, but the thought of the slovenly Rochelle wielding a scissors over her was enough to discourage such experiments. Finally, one day last week, after returning stiff and sweaty from her dance class, she had gone and cut it herself. This, too, had been an act of will; her hair was, after all, her best feature. She knew that in other respects she was no beauty; she looked as if she might – and did, in fact – have an extremely pretty sister. Yet heads would turn to watch her, even in a crowd, for her hair was thick, silky, and strikingly red: as red, so her father had once told her, as sunset through a stained-glass window.
She missed her father. Poor old man! she sometimes thought, at odd moments in the day. Old he had been, as long as she'd known him, gaunt and white-haired, the pale skin hanging wearily from his bones. Old to have fathered five children: nearly two decades his wife's senior, and she herself had married in her thirties. That infant after infant had sprung from their loins seemed at once miraculous and obscene. Somehow together they had found the energy to create four daughters, Carol the third of them, until on the fifth try they'd produced a son. Here they'd stopped, presumably contented, but by then Carol's mother was herself a worn-out, shapeless woman with shadows beneath her eyes and hair that Carol had watched go grey; and her father, with the first demoralizing taste of surgery behind him and a series of operations on the way, was suddenly preoccupied with his own mortality. Until ill health had forced his retirement he had made an unsuccessful living selling advertising space on billboards; his only legacy, Carol sometimes thought in anger and humiliation, was an endless parade of ugly highway signs. He had died last December, shortly before Christmas, his energy exhausted. She remembered him in his final days, sitting transfixed before the television and, later still, lying spent in the hospital ward, waiting for death with what first had seemed stoicism but had proved in the end to be mere resignation, something close, even, to boredom, no strength left to be frightened, no strength to contemplate eternal life ahead.
Carol understood something of how he felt; she had seen it before. She had lived all but two of her twenty- two years in a drab little mill town up the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, and she knew what it was to be bored. She remembered her brother shooting endless solitary baskets at the hoop in their yard; and a neighbor's boy who spent each evening driving aimlessly up and down the highway; and her grandmother on her mother's side, solemn and alone in her room at the end of the hall, who'd told her why she always slept past ten: 'Because if I get up any earlier it makes the day too long.'
There'd been times, in her girlhood, when Carol had felt the same. But not often. Life had been too full of possibilities. She had been a princess from the fairy tales, blessed by an auspicious moon and accustomed to getting what she wanted. Inevitably a prince would come to marry her, and together they would accomplish great things. It was only a matter of time.
To this day she couldn't have said just how poor her family had been, but her years of girlhood in a tottering old two-family house near the railroad tracks had been comfortable ones, and she could recall nothing she'd really longed for which, while her father was alive, she hadn't received, save, perhaps, a milk-white stallion, a dragon's egg, and, at one brief stage, the habit of a nun.
Like her two older sisters, she had attended St Mary's, a large, well-to-do parochial school for girls in nearby Ambridge, though by Carol's turn the family had found it necessary to accept, not without shame, some aid with the tuition. The two youngest children ended up in public school; once again Carol counted herself lucky – or even, perhaps, blessed.
She'd survived the years at St Mary's with her confidence intact, though by then she'd come to think of it as 'faith.' God, or someone, would look after her; God, or someone, always had. Not once had she stopped to question what the future really held in store; she'd been far too busy flirting with more agreeable ideas – ballet lessons, a film career, a modern-day Saint Joan – and even, on occasion, with the school's youthful priest (who'd been surprised to find himself mistaken for a prince). She'd met few boys her own age except at functions with other schools or at home in her neighborhood, and the ones she'd met had seemed, without exception, ignorant and
