Alligator - Lisa Moore [110]
Some people are fond of italics, he said.
Isobel turned around and looked up at him. He lifted weights, she could see. The shirt was ironed and she could smell fresh air. There was no scarring on his face. That was why she had come. They’d said in the papers the more serious burns were on his torso and limbs. She wanted to know for certain about his face.
The business card has to work, she said.
What it does, Frank said. It gives people an idea.
I almost wish the card could be empty, she said. Imagine if it didn’t say anything at all.
Frank felt the building pulse. Pa-boom. It was the furnace, or the water pipes. This woman was undeniably beautiful — shiny hair in loose curls, her eyes were big and blue and her mouth was wide.
The insurance money had come through and it was just enough to keep her going for a year or two if she lived in an apartment. The dinner theatre might fail, everyone said it would fail, but she would try. She wanted to try. She’d got a government grant for publicity — posters, business cards, a few radio spots.
A business card has to have the name of the business on it, Frank said. She suddenly looked very fierce.
I guess, she said.
I have something, Frank said. He left her for a moment and came back into the foyer with a sheaf of paper.
This has weight, Frank said. He opened the package and worked a piece out and handed it to her. She held it to the light.
I’d like to leave it blank, she said.
The point of a card, he said.
They have to know what it says at a glance, Isobel said.
So you’re going to have to say something, Frank said.
MADELEINE
SHE’D HAD COFFEE with Beverly. They’d stood for a few moments on Water Street while the wind lifted a paper cup up off the pavement and dashed it against the concrete. Mike Dower passed by. Mike Dower ran the Roman Catholic Archives and had shown her Archbishop Fleming’s letters.
Not a man at all, an instrument of God, Mike Dower said.
That is what she’d wanted: to bring the instrument of God down onto the snow-swept barrens, Archbishop Fleming’s brute desire to colonize the shore with Catholics, to have bells clanging in the grey sodden skies all over the island. Madeleine saw wan-faced children in rags watching wide-eyed as the archbishop ranted from the pulpit, his frosty breath hanging in the air.
Colleen is back, Beverly said.
It’s too hot to run away, Madeleine said. The girl had rebelled — of course she had. Look at the world — there was a blast of flame on the front page of the paper, flame in every news box along Water Street. Was it Iraq or the Sudan? Why wouldn’t the girl rebel. Who could walk past these boxes and do nothing?
The pain in her chest is monstrous in the late-August afternoon and she sits in her armchair and reads. She cannot work. She imagines Fleming standing in the room, by the wardrobe. First, it was as if he were in the room. Then a presence in the corner of the room made itself indisputably felt.The archbishop’s presence accumulated like a snowdrift in the corner, except the heat in her room is unbearable. She should get up and draw the curtain but she’s too tired. They all thought the film was her swan song. There were the letters about Fleming’s decrepit mother, and the soup he’d made her, onion soup. Fleming had the Vatican’s ear. He had put up a number of churches. What is the word: raised churches. He would have obeyed the summons from the Vatican, coming as it did from the Holy Father himself, but he was on his knees in the dirt pulling up onions for his ailing mother. I’m certain His Holiness will understand.
She sees Fleming with the ocean behind him, robes billowing with wind and he raises his arms and so begins the hammering, the sawing; the hoisting of a bell. He wanted silver chalices in every church along the coast.
We all want something.
Some mention of horses in a letter, says Fleming, standing in the corner. He was ingratiating and acerbic