bitterly. This must have been on her mind from the beginning, when she first lit the fire, lost her checkbook, and gave him a drink. The demand abraded his lust, but only for a moment, for now she was back in his arms, marching her fingers up and down his rib cage, saying, “Creepy, creepy, creepy mouse, come to live in Charlie’s house.” His need for her was crippling; it seemed like a cruel blow at the back of his knees. And yet in some chamber of his thick head he could see the foolishness and the obsolescence of his hankering skin. But how could he reform his bone and muscle to suit this new world; instruct his meandering and greedy flesh in politics, geography, holocausts, and cataclysms? Her front was round, fragrant, and soft, and he took the key off its ring?a piece of metal one and one-half inches long, warmed by the warmth of his hands, a genuine talisman of salvation, a defense against the end of the world?and dropped it into the neck of her dress.
The Pasterns’ bomb shelter had been completed that spring. They would have liked to keep it a secret; would have liked at least to soft-pedal its existence; but the trucks and bulldozers going in and out of their driveway had informed everyone. It had cost thirty-two thousand dollars, and it had two chemical toilets, an oxygen supply, and a library, compiled by a Columbia professor, consisting of books meant to inspire hopefulness, humor, and tranquility. There were stores of survival food to last three months, and several cases of hard liquor. Mrs. Pastern had bought the plaster-of-Paris ducks, the birdbath, and the gnomes in an attempt to give the lump in her garden a look of innocence; to make it acceptable?at least to herself. For, hulking as it did in so pretty and domestic a scene and signifying as it must the death of at least half the world’s population, she had found it, with its grassy cover, impossible to reconcile with the blue sky and the white clouds. She liked to keep the curtains drawn at that side of the house, and they were drawn the next afternoon, when she served gin to the bishop.
The bishop had come unexpectedly. Her minister had telephoned and said that the bishop was in the neighborhood and would like to thank her for her services to the church, and could he bring the bishop over now? She threw together some things for tea, changed her dress, and came down into the hall just as they rang the bell.
“How do you do, Your Grace,” she said. “Won’t you come in, Your Grace? Would you like some tea, Your Grace?or would you sooner have a drink, Your Grace?”
“I would like a Martini,” said the bishop.
He had the gift of a clear and carrying voice. He was a well-built man, with hair as black as dye, firm and sallow skin deeply creased around a wide mouth, and eyes as glittering and haggard, she thought, as someone drugged. “If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace.”
This request for a cocktail confused her; Charlie always mixed the drinks. She dropped ice on the pantry floor, poured a pint or so of gin into the shaker, and tried to correct what appeared to her to be a lethal drink with more vermouth.
“Mr. Ludgate here has been telling me how indispensable you are to the life of the parish,” the bishop said, taking his drink.
“I do try,” said Mrs. Pastern.
“You have two children.”
“Yes. Sally’s at Smith. Carkie’s at Colgate. The house seems so empty now. They were confirmed by the old bishop. Bishop Tomlinson.”
“Ah, yes,” the bishop said. “Oh, yes.”
The presence of the bishop made her nervous. She wished she could give the call a more natural air; she wished at least to make her presence in her own parlor seem real. She was suffering from an intense discomfort that sometimes attacked her during committee meetings, when the parliamentary atmosphere had a disintegrating effect on her personality. She would, sitting in her folding chair, seem to go around the room on her hands and knees, gathering the fragments of herself and cementing them together with some virtue, such as, I am a Good Mother, or, I am a Patient Wife.
“Are you two old friends?” she asked the bishop.
“No!” the bishop exclaimed.
“The bishop was just driving through,” the minister said weakly.
“Could I see your garden?” the bishop asked.
Taking his Martini glass with him, he followed her out the side door onto the terrace. Mrs. Pastern was an ardent gardener, but the scene was disappointing. The abundant cycle of bloom was nearly over; there was nothing to see but chrysanthemums. “I wish you could see it in the spring, especially in the late spring,” she said, “The star magnolia is the first to bloom. Then we have the flowering cherries and plums. Just as they finish, we have the azalea, the laurel, and the hybrid rhododendron. I have bronze tulips under the wisteria. The lilac is white.”
“I see that you have a shelter,” the bishop said.
“Yes.” She had been betrayed by her ducks and gnomes. “Yes, we have, but it’s really nothing to see. This bed is all lily of the valley, all this bed. I feel that roses make a better cutting than an ornamental garden, so I keep the roses behind the house. The border is fraises des bois. So sweet, so winy.”
