—
In the event, it was the girl who spoke first. “Does ‘Padre’ mean you are the…” She paused and cleared her throat, as though unused to the sound of her own voice. “The head person?” Until then, her face in profile projected a severity, sharpened by the high bridge of her nose, by the ink-stroke of her eyebrow. Now that she had turned toward him, however, her face seemed younger, her lips full and pursed around an uncertainty. In his confusion at finding himself the object of that gaze, he registered somewhere in it the glint of gold, a rivet or staple piercing her septum or eyebrow, or was it the hood of her ear? Less an adornment, he thought, than a mortification of the flesh. He thought: How intolerable it is to the young, their beauty.
“Head person? I like the sound of that,” he said, putting on affability. She did not smile in return, so he said, “Yes, I am the rector here, Nelson Spurlock. How can I help you?”
He would never forget what she said then: I believe you might have something for—for a Clementine Abend. Something my father sent you.
Her father? Whose daughter was this? Had she mistaken him for someone? Had he met her somewhere and forgotten? But that, he knew abruptly, was an impossibility. Impossible that such a face—that he could ever have forgotten it.
“I’m sorry—” he had said. “Your father? He sent you something?”
“A letter maybe. I don’t know exactly. Maybe some papers.”
“Your father is a parishioner?”
“No, a—he was a psychoanalyst. But I believe that a patient of his—I believe you performed the funeral for a patient of his, a person named Jessica Burke.”
Jessica Burke. Of course he remembered. Hers had been the first funeral he had conducted after his “installation” as rector. Twenty-eight years old Jessica Burke had been when she died of an overdose, not much younger than Spurlock himself was at the time. He had never met her, but the sacristan had placed a photograph on a little easel by the coffin, a portrait that Jessica Burke, a struggling artist, had made of herself in a mirror, standing behind an expensive-looking box camera, a Hasselblad or Rolleiflex, her face downturned toward the viewfinder, one thin arm, heavily tattooed, crooked behind her head to keep her hair from falling down over her face. The picture had given the impression that Jessica Burke had showed up to serve as photographer at her own funeral, underdressed, uninvolved, annoyed to have to work on a Saturday morning.
“Your father knew me only because I buried a patient of his?”
The girl had spread a handwritten sheet of paper on the counter between them. “He says here—” she began, but interrupted herself. “This document,” she began again, “it’s a testament, a will, or at least a piece of one.”
“Your father’s will?”
“Yes. It’s in French. I can translate if you like.”
He said something about having studied a little French in high school, but she had already begun.
“ ‘Maître,’ it begins,” she said, following the line of precise cursive with her finger.
“Master?” Spurlock ventured.
“Yes,” she said with a flush of what might have been impatience, “but that’s just how you address a lawyer or a jurist. ‘Maître,’ it begins—” she said, then recommenced her fluent rendering of the French, pausing now and again, waiting for a satisfactory English expression to present itself, the legal phrases coming obediently to her (he thought afterward), as they might to one already well acquainted with the wishes of the dead.
“ ‘I, the undersigned,’ ” she read, “ ‘currently residing at 152 West Seventy-ninth Street, Apartment 8A, New York, New York, do hereby declare this to be the codicil to my last will and testament. As the habitation—’
“No, that’s wrong,” she said, “not habitation—dwelling, maybe—domicile…
“ ‘As the domicile I shared with my daughter throughout the period of her minority shall forthwith be vacated and sold, I do hereby authorize and direct that following…’ ” She paused again. “ ‘That pursuant to the settling of my estate all future correspondence concerning said estate be forwarded to my one child and only inheritor—’
“No, not only, not inheritor—heir, sole heir is better.
“ ‘To my sole heir at the following address.’
“That’s this address,” she said, turning the sheet toward him so that he could read it himself.
Miss Clementine Abend
c/o the Reverend Nelson Spurlock, Rector
The Church of the Incarnation
New York City, NY, USA
“Which is this church, right?”
He nodded, but she had already begun to translate the two remaining sentences on the sheet: “ ‘Except for the limited provision stated herewith, I confirm and republish my last will and testament duly witnessed and signed 15 August 2008, on file at the law offices of Crulwich, Labrie, and Steiner. I pray you to accept, Master, my most respectful salutations. 29 August 2008.’
“That’s the end of it,” she said. “He didn’t even sign it.”
“I am Nelson Spurlock,” Spurlock heard himself say, unnerved to see his name on a page written hardly two weeks ago, snared in a stranger’s handwriting, in a language he could not read.
“So, anything that would have been sent would have been sent to you.”
“Is that what it says?” said Spurlock.
“You haven’t received anything?”
“Received?” he repeated, as though that word too were in another language.
“In the mail, like it says, anytime in the past month or so?”
“No, although—no—perhaps my secretary—” Spurlock stammered, as though any piece of mail could possibly arrive without Mrs. Nickerson opening it immediately. “No,” he said finally. “I haven’t seen anything.”
“No letter? No package?”
“Nothing,” he said, surprised by how it pained him to say so. But why should it hurt him to disappoint her, this stranger little more than half his age?
“I am sorry, Miss Abend,” he said. “But if you could write
