Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [19]
I peered right and left as I rolled to stop at each corner until I saw something along the lines of what I wanted—a neat white stucco church with a red barrel-tile roof. It was a Catholic church, as uniformly tasteful as everything else in this town. It had a Christ on the cross in relief on the stucco steeple. I can’t now remember the Saintly name of it, even the town’s name escapes me—this was a moment of such stressful fatedness that the surroundings remain in my mind only as bodily impressions. I remember the sun on my neck as I carried the car seat by its handles as a portable carryall for the baby after Karen had been in there a few minutes, I remember my instructions to her beforehand as we sat in the van with the motor running in the neatly ruled empty parking lot around the side, and though the air-conditioning was on I felt the sweat dripping down the small of my back.
It was very peculiar that she seemed as ready as I was, as if somewhere, at some moment—I couldn’t have told you when—we had made magnetic contact. As if it had never been otherwise than that we were both sane and synchronized in our thought. So I experienced something also like a feeling of estrangement as I realized, looking at her, that I loved Karen Robileaux. I loved her. I mean it just came over me—an incredible welcoming rush of gladness that welled up in my throat and threatened to spill out of my eyes. I loved her. Her frail being was strong. Her kookiness was mystical. And it was even eerier to hear in my mind, at last, what she had been telling me time and time again before this all happened—how she adored me, how she actually did love me in all the ways that people understand as love. It was a bonding that was true if it was this scary. Of course I said nothing, and did not declare myself. I really didn’t have to. She knew. Our intimacy was in the fact of our conspiring together as she concentrated on what I was saying with her pale wolf eyes staring into mine, so much so that, once she got out of the car and walked up the steps into the church, I wondered if this hadn’t really been her plan and that she had brought me to this moment as I believed I had brought her. Because I remember her only problem was technical, whereas you might have expected much more in the way of resistance.
Lester, she said, I don’t know the right words for confessing.
It’s okay, I said. Just go in there and sit down in that box they have. It is somewhere off to the side. You don’t have to be Catholic for them to listen to you. When he hears you, the priest will sit down on the other side of the screen, and you just tell him you want to confess something. And he will listen and never betray your trust that it is just between the two of you. And you don’t have to cross yourself or anything—he will tell you what to do if you put it in the form of asking for his advice. I mean you know what he will say. And you will thank him, and you will mean it, and maybe thank God too that there are people who are sworn to do this for a living.
And what will he do then?
See, I have to believe priests read the papers and watch the TV like everyone else, so he will know what baby you are talking about. He will say, And where is the Wilson baby now? And you will tell him, Father, the baby is here. You will find him in his carryall just inside the front door. And a paper sack with his formula and his diapers and a tube of Polysporin for his bellybutton.
And when he gets up and runs down the aisle, you slip out the side door to right here where we are parked.
Karen is a brave woman. She has always been brave, and never more than in this moment. She walked in there with her skirt swaying from her lovely hips and her hair, which she had tied up in a ponytail given the solemnity of the occasion, also swinging from side to side, and for the same reason her usually bare feet in a pair of sandals.
But before she took her deep breath and stepped down from the Windstar, she held the baby in her arms and caressed his round little head and brushed his dark hairs with the tips