Brave New Worlds

'Want help?'

'I need the exercise. '

Valerie extends her arm and they shake hands, mitten clinging to mitten. 'Made any special plans for Saint Patrick's Day?'

'I'm going to bake shamrock cookies. '

'Green?'

'Can't afford food coloring. '

'I think I've got some green — you're welcome to it. Who's at the end of the block?'

'Angela Dunfey. '

A shadow flits across Valerie's face. 'And her daughter?'

'Yes,' moans Connie. His throat constricts. 'Her daughter. '

Valerie lays a sympathetic hand on his arm. 'If I don't have green, we can probably fake it. '

'Oh, Valerie, Valerie — I wish I'd never taken Holy Orders. '

'We'll mix yellow with orange. I'm sorry, Father. '

'I wish this cup would pass. '

'I mean yellow with blue. '

Connie loops his arms around the font, embracing it as he might a frightened child. 'Stay with me. '

Together they walk through the serrated March air and, reaching the Warren Avenue intersection, enter the tumble-down pile of bricks labeled No. 47. The foyer is as dim as a crypt. Switching on his penlight, Connie holds it aloft until he discerns the label Angela Dunfey glued to a dented mailbox. He begins the climb to apartment 8-C, his parishioner right behind. On the third landing, Connie stops to catch his breath. On the sixth, he puts down the font. Valerie wipes his brow with her parka sleeve. She takes up the font, and the two of them resume their ascent.

Angela Dunfey's door is wormy, cracked, and hanging by one hinge. The mere act of knocking swings it open.

They find themselves in the kitchen — a small musty space that would have felt claustrophobic were it not so sparely furnished. A saucepan hangs over the stove; a frying pan sits atop the icebox; the floor is a mottle of splinters, tar paper, and leprous shards of linoleum. Valerie sets the font next to the sink. The basin in which Angela Dunfey washes her dishes, Connie notes, is actually smaller than the one in which the Church of the Immediate Conception immortalizes infertiles.

He tiptoes into the bedroom. His parishioner sleeps soundly, her terrycloth bathrobe parted down the middle to accommodate her groggy, nursing infant; milk trickles from her breasts, streaking her belly with white rivulets. He must move now, quickly and deliberately, so there'll be no struggle, no melodramatic replay of 1 Kings 3:26, the desperate whore trying to tear her baby away from Solomon's swordsman.

Inhaling slowly, Connie leans toward the mattress and, with the dexterity of a weasel extracting the innards from an eggshell, slides the barren baby free and carries her into the kitchen.

Beside the icebox Valerie sits glowering on a wobbly three-legged stool.

'Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity, 'Connie whispers, casting a wary eye on Valerie,' and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water' — he places the infant on the floor near Valerie's feet—'I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through this baptism, Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom. '

'Don't beseech me,' snaps Valerie.

Connie fills the saucepan, dumps the water into the font, and returns to the sink for another load — not exactly holy water, he muses, not remotely chrism, but presumably not typhoidal either, the best the under- budgeted Boston Water Authority has to offer. He deposits the load, then fetches another.

A wide, milky yawn twists Merribell's face, but she does not cry out.

At last the vessel is ready. 'Bless these waters, O Lord, that they might grant this sinner the gift of life everlasting. '

Dropping to his knees, Connie begins removing the infant's diaper. The first pin comes out easily. As he pops the second, the tip catches the ball of his thumb. Crown of thorns, he decides, feeling the sting, seeing the blood.

He bears the naked infant to the font. Wetting his punctured thumb, he touches Merribell's brow and draws the sacred plus sign with a mixture of blood and water. 'We receive this sinner unto the mystical body of Christ, and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross. '

He begins the immersion. Skullcap. Ears. Cheeks. Mouth. Eyes. O Lord, what a monstrous trust, this power to underwrite a person's soul. 'Merribell Dunfey, I baptize you in the name of the Father. '

Now comes the nausea, excavating Stephen's alimentary canal as he kneels before the porcelain toilet bowl. His guilt pours forth in a searing flood — acidic strands of cabbage, caustic lumps of potato, glutinous strings of bile. Yet these pains are nothing, he knows, compared with what he'll experience on passing from this world to the next.

Drained, he stumbles toward the bedroom. Somehow Kate has bundled the older children off to school before collapsing on the floor alongside the baby. She shivers with remorse. Shrieks and giggles pour from the nursery: the preschoolers engaged in a raucous game of Blind Man's Bluff.

'Flaying machines,' she mutters. Her tone is beaten, bloodless. She lights a cigarette. 'Peeling the damned like. '

Will more rum help, Stephen wonders, or merely make them sicker? He extends his arm. Passing over the nightstand, his fingers touch a box of aspirin, brush the preserved Epigaea repens, and curl around the neck of the half-full Arbutus bottle. A ruddy cockroach scurries across the doily.

'I kept Willy home today,' says Kate, taking a drag. 'He says his stomach hurts. '

As he raises the bottle, Stephen realizes for the first time that the label contains a block of type headed The Story of Trailing Arbutus. 'His stomach always hurts. ' He studies the breezy little paragraph.

'I think he's telling the truth. '

Epigaea repens. Trailing arbutus. Mayflower. And suddenly everything is clear.

'What's today's date?' asks Stephen.

'Sixteenth. '

'March sixteenth?'

'Yeah. '

'Then tomorrow's Saint Patrick's Day. '

'So what?'

'Tomorrow's Saint Patrick's Day' — like an auctioneer accepting a final bid, Stephen slams the bottle onto the nightstand—'and Valerie Gallogher will be leaving Boston Isle. '

'Roger's old teacher? Leaving?'

'Leaving. ' Snatching up the preserved flower, he dangles it before his wife. 'Leaving. '

'. and of the Son,' says Connie, raising the sputtering infant from the water, 'and of the Holy Ghost. '

Merribell Dunfey screeches and squirms. She's slippery as a bar of soap. Connie manages to wrap her in a dish towel and shove her into Valerie's arms.

'Let me tell you who you are,' she says.

'Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish. '

'You're a tired and bewildered pilgrim, Father. You're a weary wayfarer like myself. '

Dribbling milk, Angela Dunfey staggers into the kitchen. Seeing her priest, she recoils. Her mouth flies open, and a howl rushes out, a cry such as Connie imagines the damned spew forth while rotating on the spits of Perdition. 'Not her too! Not Merribell! No!'

'Your baby's all right,' says Valerie.

Connie clasps his hands together, fingers knotted in agony and supplication. He stoops. His knees hit the floor, crashing against the fractured linoleum. 'Please,' he groans.

Angela plucks Merribell from Valerie and affixes the squalling baby to her nipple. 'Oh, Merribell, Merribell. '