The Pagan House Read online

‘I’ll find you in the kids’ room. Be about twenty minutes, just get a little pre-breakfast action, you know what I’m saying?’

  The room with the pool and ping-pong tables was occupied by three sandy-haired youths and the most beautiful girl Edgar had ever seen, whose proximity made it difficult to breathe. Edgar took sanctuary in the video-games room. He was carrying no money so he took on the role of a connoisseur, examining each machine in turn as if he was finding disappointing reasons not to play. He carried on his performance long after it was exhausted, but his father had yet to show.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Edgar. What’s yours?’

  This was the fifth time he had revealed his new name, and how he hoped it would guide him through this extraordinary moment.

  ‘Lisa.’

  Lisa was even more beautiful than the Lucy that his imagination had invented as her precursor. She was a perfectly tanned girl of, he would guess, about fourteen, in a white halter-top and cut-off blue jeans and sneakers.

  ‘Do you play ping-pong, Edgar?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure I do,’ he said expansively, to indicate that ping-pong was just one of his many talents, one he probably played to a championship standard, but not one he was going to be bragging about, because there were all those other things that he could do miraculously well also, including the sexual pleasuring of extraordinary beauties called Lisa.

  ‘Do you want to play ping-pong with us?’

  ‘I’m supposed to—’

  He had been about to say, supposed to be meeting my dad, but that, Edgar decided, would reduce him, establish his status of dependent child rather than the independently minded, and acting, man of the world he had chosen to project, so, instead, lightly, he said, ‘Sure,’ and followed Lisa to the games room, watching the movement of her buttocks beneath worn denim, the pinpricks of goosebumps at the top of her waist, and he was glad that he was wearing his baggy jeans today, they gave him room, with just an adroit flick of hand inside pocket, to move his erection safely, more or less invisibly, vertical.

  They required a fourth for their game. Edgar’s predecessor, a glowering boy named Jackie, had hurt his knee and his ankle and his pride and was sitting on the pool table, viciously caroming the white ball around the cushions while staring lustfully at Lisa and balefully at her three companions, of whom Edgar was nervous to find himself the youngest and, at ping-pong, the worst. Lisa didn’t seem to care. In his desire to impress, Edgar would try to command too much of the table, and once their bats clashed, and once he nearly hit her, and several times the physical confusion that he pushed them into of waving arms and Lisa’s long hair flying and her breasts rising in laughter and exertion meant that the ball went past or sometimes even through. The boys they were playing were brothers, perhaps twins, who wore identical frowns and Red Sox T-shirts and baggy shorts. They called Edgar Junior, even though Lisa told them what his name was, twice, and Jackie latched on to the nickname as something worthy of derision and kept up a bantering sardonic commentary: ‘… and Lisa to Mickey who whips in a backhand and Junior—Oh, big surprise, ladies and gentlemen—Junior hits the net!’

  When the game was over the victorious Red Sox twins invited Lisa to join them for a milkshake. Jackie was already heading for the door to the ice-cream stand, walking in a monkey lope that he exaggerated for unfunny comic purpose.

  ‘Do you want to come?’ Lisa asked Edgar, whose stomach was desperate for any kind of substance.

  ‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone.’

  ‘You met me,’ Lisa said.

  Her hair was long and brown and streaked with sun. There was grandeur about her, in the way she stood and carried herself: she knew perfectly well how beautiful she was and it didn’t intimidate her. Jackie was gone, the Red Sox twins were waiting at the door, and Edgar was familiar enough with the wiles of women, in imagination at least, if not experience, to realize that Lisa’s attentiveness towards him probably lay more in her lack of interest in the twins than in any attraction to Edgar.

  ‘How old are you?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘I’m thirteen.’

  He managed not to say the wow! that he was thinking. ‘I’m fourteen,’ he said. ‘It’s my birthday.’

  ‘Happy birthday.’

  Which was when his father appeared. Edgar would never lose the image of Lisa in his mind and, in some superstitious way, he came to associate it with the moral qualities of honesty and integrity. ‘I got to go, that’s my dad.’

  He knew Lisa was looking at him as he left, and he walked stiffly, envying for a moment the joker Jackie with his monkey repertoire of ludicrous gestures to mask his embarrassments. And he knew Lisa would be looking at his father’s face and admiring it, because women did, and he hoped her admiration of it would reflect well on him. He turned to wave to her as he left and he knew she had just been looking at him, waiting for the farewell, and he waved to her departing back instead, noticing how her left sneaker was more worn on its inside, because of the way her ankles tended slightly towards each other. He waved goodbye to her and surreptitiously blew her a kiss, and she looked back at him a fraction after he had done that, and said, ‘I’ll be in the Chinese restaurant for supper.’

  ‘Cute girl. You’ve been making out like a bandit,’ his father said.

  Edgar followed his father out of the games room towards the elevators, searing light through Plexiglas windows. Edgar presumed his father had lost money, because Mon said he usually did, but it was difficult to tell, especially when he was wearing sunglasses.

  ‘Could you wait for me a moment? I got to …’ Edgar said, pointing to the sign for the rest rooms.

  Edgar’s father snapped his fingers three times, to register disapproval, impatience, reluctant assent. Then something in him softened; Edgar wondered if it had been the sight of Lisa that had changed his mind about who Edgar might be.

  ‘Yeah. Sure. I’ll call Fay. Promised I would.’

  He leaned into the bubble of a pay-phone and patted his shirt.

  Edgar went into the men’s room and had to take the nearest cubicle because the other two were occupied. He locked the door, and unlocked it, to make sure that it had been locked, then locked it again. The panting coming from the neighbours on his right was at first scary and then unmistakable. Modestly keeping himself, and his breathing, quiet, Edgar masturbated. There was a brisk efficiency to the image of Lisa, the squeeze of her breasts beneath white halter-top nylon, the curve of her shoulder when she executed a smash, her laugh, the matching gold-flecked brownness of her skin and hair and eyes.

  When he was done, he efficiently wiped away the traces and flushed the toilet and zipped himself up. He worried that he had cheapened Lisa, debased her, even, that he should have kept her image separate from the cruel urgency of his body’s needs. As he came out of his cubicle the Red Sox twins came out of theirs. That he and the Red Sox twins had been cubicled beside each other to the same purpose, performing the same function, with the same white halter-top image in their heads, did not bring them closer together. Edgar nodded curtly at each boy in turn but neither acknowledged the greeting as they went to simultaneous sinks to wash their hands and do watery things to their hair. Edgar felt their mirror eyes watching him as he left the men’s room.

  When they got back to their room, his father convivially cracked open two Diet Cokes from the minibar. ‘I made the mistake of calling home,’ he said, in the tone of someone comfortable in the knowledge that the person he was talking to was as equally amused and irked by the exigencies of duty as he.

  Edgar was zapping through the remote control. He was wondering how much authority he could bring to selection of TV programme. Should he politely give his father first choice or would that set an unassailable precedent? Deciding to be bold, he left the channel on a Three Stooges movie and compromised by turning the sound down. Moe fell over. Moe got up again. Larry and Curly fell over. Edgar laughed.

  ‘I called for Fay and that over-age Playboy bunny
of Frank’s is who I got. Fay’s in the hospital. I don’t think it’s serious, but the Irish guy isn’t around and Lucille is hysterical. I said sit tight, we’d check in with her tomorrow. Monitor the situation. I told her we want our time together.’

  Even if his father was lying, even if it was only a charming alibi to account for his need to be at the casino, the claim filled Edgar with pride. He wanted nothing to change this day, or threaten the forthcoming evening. The two hotel pencils that he had used as drumsticks before were now the chopsticks he was practising with in preparation to impress Lisa at supper.

  His father was approaching with a packet of very desirable chocolate-chip biscuits. ‘Want a cookie?’ his father said. Edgar shook his head decisively. No matter how hungry he was, he had put away childish things. He would breakfast on the bunch of grapes on the side-table.

  ‘I think we should go back,’ Edgar said, breaking his own heart. ‘We might be needed.’

  It was as much the raw fact of Edgar’s exertion of moral authority as what the authority dictated that influenced his father, who grumbled as he threw hotel writing-pads and complimentary jars of hair products into a gift-shop bag. Edgar ate grapes and watched the Three Stooges with the sound turned down and waited for his father to be finished.

  ‘You know they’re going to stiff us for the whole stay? You know that?’

  In the car going back his father chewed gum and didn’t talk. Edgar switched the radio on and his father stabbed it off again. He would never see how Lisa dressed for dinner—he had supposed a variation on her daytime wear, tailored designer jeans, open-toe high-heel shoes, diamanté spangle on her evening-wear halter-top. Edgar mourned the passing of everything glimpsed, half tasted.

  3

  The marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. I call this woman my wife—she is yours, she is Christ’s, and in him she is bride of all the saints.

  from the Second Annual Report of the Onyataka Association,

  John Prindle Stone, January 1851

  The church on earth rises to meet the approaching kingdom in the heavens and, correspondingly, its representative Mary Pagan is to travel into New Haven darkness to bring light to a woman whose part in the pre-history of the Association had been, so might have been supposed, so might have been hoped, fixed, and finished. George Pagan is to travel with her. He has volunteered for this mission and refused all dissuasions. He stands awkward in a corner of the room as Harriet Stone helps Mary dress for her journey. Harriet comments upon how easily Mary slips inside her old clothes.

  ‘I could not do that,’ Mrs Stone says, without spite or envy. ‘My body is not so docile an instrument.’

  ‘These are like a chap-book of former days,’ Mrs Pagan says.

  From the fallen dispensation, these taints of a sinful past: in this dress she had sat in a New York parlour where an ardent Methodist had pressed his kisses and his lust upon her; and here, beneath, a bloodstain on her bodice from where she had pricked her finger in self-mortification at her duplicity; and here, above, a burn mark on her collar, a smudge memento of ash from the fire of the old stone house at Rondout, where Abram Carter, that imperfect instrument of grace, had led her, through passion, to John Prindle Stone and the promise of perfection.

  Harriet remarks on the pallor of Mary’s face, the tremors of her limbs. ‘Are you anxious?’

  Mary does not reply. It is unclear whose feelings she is protecting, Mrs Stone’s, Mr Pagan’s, or her own.

  Harriet, the original Mrs Stone, pulls straight the lacy collar of former times and her capable fingers provide the rough soothing touch of a mother or a nurse.

  George carries the luggage into the hall and Mary waits for John Prindle Stone to make his appraisal. His speech is humorous, if not quite mocking. ‘We had thought you were embarking on an expedition to New Haven, not a journey through time.’

  ‘My clothes? I—we—had judged these more suitable.’

  ‘You are an ambassadress from the Association. When dignitaries visit foreign lands they wear their own clothes. Soldiers do not put off their uniforms for battle.’

  ‘I feel far from being a dignitary or a soldier.’

  ‘Nonetheless.’

  He smiles and so does she, and George can taste the longing now, as she waits for John Prindle’s touch to guard her, the warmth of his breath on her skin to serve as armour for the soldier that she feels herself far from ready to be.

  The only words John Prindle says as he leads her back to her room are, ‘Mary, you know that we will always be in perfect fellowship, no matter where the success of your mission may lead.’

  George waits in the hallway. It is a long wait, but he could wait for ever if need be. When Mary returns she is dressed, perhaps by her consort’s own hands, in her customary black blouse and pantalets and overskirt, the court uniform of the dignitary, the soldier’s garb, which she epaulettes with tears as they leave the Mansion House.

  George and Mary Pagan, the ambassadors, travel by post-coach, railroad, hackney carriage and on foot to sit opposite Mary’s rival in a chilly New Haven parlour whose walls are papered a dull green that has no correspondence to anything in nature. A wintry fire dies in the grate. George wants this mission to succeed. Mary is desperate for it to fail.

  George wonders if Mrs Duckworth, the former Hester Lovell, is so haughty that she will not lower herself to place more wood on the shivering flames, or if it is some kind of challenge, to test the softness and submissiveness of her female visitor. George Pagan knows that Mary will not complain of the cold or comment on it either by word or physical inflection. He introduces himself and his once-wife, then hardly talks at all. He listens to the women duel, as they talk of Mr Stone, and of Christ their mutual Saviour, and Mrs Duckworth is as fluent in tongue as Mr Stone had warned (and how Mary had striven to ignore the admiration almost amounting to pride in his warning), and Mrs Pagan must be on her guard. She has come here—why has she come here?—because Mr Stone had asked her to and because she had been curious, more than curious, frantic; this is from need, she has been giddy with it, to see the woman who still commands Mr Stone’s heart. Part of her, almost an absent part, conducts the theological discussion, which is, in truth, a skirmish, a battle for betterment that requires all her energies and intelligence, while the worldly, womanly part of her examines her rival, her frame, her complexion, her manners—and who is to say, heresy though this doubtless is, which part of her is more authentically her own?

  ‘You are his ambassadress,’ remarks Mrs Duckworth.

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Mrs Pagan. ‘Tho’ I would say that our places are distinct and appointed us by God.’

  ‘The chapels and meeting-houses are filled with God’s messengers. Or so they claim.’

  ‘And mistakenly so.’

  ‘But who is to be so sure of another’s mistake? These false prophets are as sincere in their mission as you no doubt are in yours.’

  ‘Mr Stone tells us that these mistaken messengers tap from the same currents. Things are at hand. The rappings in Rochester, the Shakers in New Lebanon, even the silly Millerites waiting for the world to end on their lonely hilltop. They are not so insensitive, the age rings through them also. Mr Stone says they are like tuning-forks that sound the wrong key.’

  ‘Mr Stone was always fond of musical metaphors,’ says Mrs Duckworth, reminding Mary of their order of precedence in John Prindle’s affections. ‘But Mrs Pagan, what precisely is your mission? I had not heard of you before today.’

  ‘But we have heard of you.’

  If it had not been for Mrs Duckworth then her own life would have been so different, and so unutterably unenriched. It had been Mrs Duckworth’s rejection of Mr Stone’s wedding proposal that had led to the banishment of marriage from the earthly dispensation. So many lives have been altered by Hester’s disavowal. And so infinitely for the better. Is she then, in some way, a sacrifice? Those lines by her eyes have been cut by sorrow, not joy
. Mary Pagan is somewhat ashamed of the pleasure she gains in her reading of her rival’s skin and soul. But she is not sufficiently without egotism not to exult in these signs and not sufficiently without sin not to paint an envying picture of twelve years previous, a room not unalike this one, where John Prindle Stone and Hester Lovell would have sat with a Testament and tracts, his ardour no doubt quickening her own—how could it not?

  ‘Mr Stone has often spoken of you. More recently, more so.’

  ‘Since he learned of the death of my husband.’

  Mrs Duckworth has the grey eyes and pale papery skin of an English gentlewoman, which is flushed now with a becoming indignation. There is something of the girl about her, high-spirited, self-conscious, proud, untouched, maybe untouchable. Mr Stone has mentioned her skill with horses.

  ‘He describes you as the prodigal son.’

  ‘He is not my father, nor yours.’

  Said more tartly than her conversation thus far, which indicates that her passion is aroused as much as her temper.

  ‘The Association to which I belong considers itself a family, and Mr Stone is at its head,’ remarks Mary Pagan, as lightly as she is able, pursuing the high ground of her advantage in this struggle.

  And continues: ‘Fourteen years ago you publicly confessed the doctrine of holiness in this city, and it was through your influence that Mr Stone gained admission to the Free Church; and it was through your withdrawal that the testimony of salvation from sin has been repressed here. Christ has many people in this city who are captives, and you are holding the door shut which would liberate them.’

  ‘I cannot believe the power of my influence is as great as you say. Let me assure you, and whoever might be interested in your report, I have not altered my position. Christ is in me, a present saviour. I am not perfect in every word or thought, but Christ gives me the power to overcome.’

  ‘And when you deserted Mr Stone? Did Christ give you the power then? Was it Christ who made you deny him? This was not proper treatment, giving him no chance for explanation, whatever you may have thought of him.’