GOOSE

AS THE PUSH OF NAUSEA BROKE THROUGH HER SLEEP, Eva ran to the chamber set, tripping on her nightclothes. She was pregnant—she was sure now—she knew it at the same moment she heard the unfamiliar squawking. She’d become accustomed to the accompaniment of roosters at this hour, the barking of dogs and thud of horse hooves making their way out of town, the gamblers cursing—their voices strained and desperate—having lost their very last coins, but here was a honking most unfamiliar and yet she swore she’d heard it long ago. As she rinsed her face with cold water that did nothing to stop her insides from turning, she had a shameful first impulse to abort the baby (was she to have a baby and not Henriette? Could God be just that insane?).

Then she realized the squawking belonged to a goose.

Under the vigas, with a shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, she stood sucking down the palliative of new dawn air. The squawking had stopped, there was no goose in sight and she laughed out loud then, knowing she’d only imagined a goose and it was because—despite or because of her nausea—her appetite was actually returning for the first time since arriving in Santa Fe over six months ago. There was no goose, only stinking burros swinging filthy tails and a lone drunk who staggered down the center of the alley, seemingly attracted to both sides of the street and fiercely unable to choose. She hid behind the door, so he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her, but she refused to close the door entirely. The early morning sky was one of the few truly glorious aspects of this undignified life in which she’d found herself and a deadly winter was fast approaching, so that to stand in an open doorway without badly shivering could only be counted as a blessing. A winter chill was on the air, but it was as if it were already in her bones: These mud-walled quarters would be that much closer when one could not let in the cold, and she envisioned spending her days waiting for a shipment of woolens—a shipment perpetually delayed or held-up by robbers, one band more frightening than the next. She could imagine being told how Billy the Kid and his men made off with a shipment of ladies’ woolens, while the other shipments—the snuff, the razors, the Mexican cigars—were somehow left alone. She could already hear the conversation play out with Abraham—in a tone she was ever more accustomed to, somewhere between teasing and hostility—as he’d remind her how she had a fine education in needlework, conveniently not understanding that all the fancy embroidery of her youth was no preparation for a life of sewing woolen undergarments, that such an intention was hardly planned. Winter would be brutal indeed.

But after standing in the doorway—goose or no goose—after breathing this revelation of an October morning with a secret of a baby finally in her belly, she was suddenly full of what she slowly realized was pride. While what she’d told Abraham was true—she had done nothing to prevent being pregnant up until now—it was also true that she had not exactly welcomed it. How could she allow herself such a full life, a life that her sister would never have? “Henriette,” she said, the way she did sometimes, as if the name had transformed itself into now what was only a changeable word—for help or heavens or even hello. Sometimes she said it when Abraham did not come home for dinner or when he raised his voice in answer to her question: When will you build our house? During those times she sometimes hissed it damningly—Henriette. And once she called another name right into her husband’s pillow, a name that remained strange and beautiful because she never said it out loud, a name she still did not know whether to love or hate. She mouthed this name when she knew she had chosen this life in response to the possibility of another, when—on certain mornings—her husband’s pillow smelled of lard oil and pretzels and she knew without asking that he’d been at the cheapest saloon that was also the closest, where a Mexican whore offered whiskey and women—brown-skinned, cigarette-smoking women—who moved slowly through the streets on their way to work, as if to say: Have a look, we’re not hiding, you should know. But it was her sister’s name that she whispered now and it was said with appreciation, as the rising sun cast the sky as sand sifting slowly into more sand; a wan sky nearly impossible to distinguish from the faded adobe buildings, from the earth itself.

When she looked away from the shifting layers of the horizon, she realized she hadn’t imagined the squawking after all. The goose stood before her quietly—even somberly—his beady black eyes boring into Eva’s as if he could see into her mind, at a daguerreotype of Henriette at twelve years old as she gathered blackberries for a sauce. The goose (whom, she quickly decided, did not belong to anyone) was stippled brown and gray with rumpled, white-edged feathers, and stood close enough to nip her ankle; it stared squarely as she remembered how blackberries had stained the thin cotton of her sister’s skirt and how Henriette had been so upset about the ruined skirt that she’d lost her appetite for her favorite dish of nicely crisp roast goose.

“Va!” Eva cried, testing out her español, which she could rarely bring herself to do in front of live human beings, not since Chela had somehow made it clear that her voice sounded as though she had something lodged in her throat. She’d refrained from telling Chela that it was the entire German language that was stuck there, the language that she loved.

“Va!” she cried again, louder this time, but the fowl merely shifted its weight until it was she who retreated back inside the adobe hut that Abraham called their home. She stood in the center of the kitchen, and recalled how, only hours after her arrival, she’d set out to organize their separate sets of dishes—one for milk and one for meat—and Abraham had stood watching her briefly (she’d imagined he was pleased, even moved) before saying, “We’re done with all that, puss. There’s no need for it here.” He’d smiled, almost beatifically, as if proclaiming the laws of kashruth quaint, and walked off to work on a Saturday. During those first weeks she had stubbornly looked to her Kosher Gastronomy—a parting gift from Father—as small as her hand and bound in brown leather, with mottled beige pages covered with proclamations regarding the compatibility between Jewish ritual and culinary refinement. She’d looked to this book to provide some kind of solace to those who were far away from home, but instead found a punitive set of directions written by one very self-righteous Jewess, whose primary focus was how ignorance in the kitchen lent itself to either “bountiful excessiveness” or “frugal tedium.” There was a recipe for waffles, which of course required a waffle iron, which the author promised could be found at any fine ironmonger of the Hebrew persuasion. After reading that bit of nonsense (a Hebrew ironmonger?), Eva put down the book for days, before searching for a lard substitute and—after numerous tries at melting down beef suet with rosemary, after stirring in a few precious drops of flower water with a wooden fork—she shut the book and gave up entirely, dipping into Chela’s lard and learning to enjoy the hiss it made when it hit the frying pan. She learned two things from that lard-rich meal: The roof did not fall in (as she half-expected it would), and (to her dismay) she truly loved the taste of it.

Abraham was not at all ashamed to have people to dinner in such tight quarters, between uneven whitewashed walls that looked cavelike in the dark and perpetually dirty by lamplight. He proclaimed their situation temporary with great confidence and a broad smile, as if naming it “temporary” landed the whole living arrangement squarely in the realm of great fun. If the topic of building more comfortable homes happened to come up in mixed company, Abraham tossed off the reassuring sentence that Eva had heard daily for the past few months: The plans for the house were being drawn. After that he could be counted on to boast how much he enjoyed livin’ like a real Santa Fean.

He somehow painted a romantic picture of their spartan life, a charming fiction for various dinner guests, in which Eva was not the melancholy girl from Berlin whose idea of spartan life, until joining lives with Abraham, was a summerhouse in Karlsbad, but she was Eva the healthy Fräulein, who cared nothing for city comforts and who had jumped at the chance to marry a Man Who Takes Risks. It was almost amusing how completely he diverted the talk from houses, and heartily convinced others that he and his wife were not scraping along in squalor amid large insects, peculiar cooking smells, and refuse from frequently emptied chamber pots, but that they were rather great adventurers and this living arrangement was no different than taking a long trek in the mountains or sailing out to sea.

He was adamantly not ashamed of the kitchen in plain view where, as the starry-eyed guests finished their strudel (or her primitive approximations of a strudel with dried apples or meticulously pitted dried chokecherries), Chela soaked the first-course plates—the Frank family china!—in a slimy bucket full of scalding water boiled over an open fire. Abraham promised her a cast-iron stove each and every week, but somehow never delivered on that promise.

And so, while she heard whispers in the store and in the plaza of how her husband was un rico Israelito, he was strangely selective about how he spent his rumored wealth, for all she had to work with was a fireplace shaped like a horseshoe that left burn scars not only on Chela’s and Eva’s hands but also on the walls. While he either “forgot” to have a stove delivered, or claimed that he enjoyed the smell of piñon smoke, that nothing made a man feel so right peart as a home with a roaring fire, he also felt perfectly comfortable pointing out to his colleagues the square Steinway, or Eva’s beautiful dresses (that had of course come with her trousseau), or that theirs was the first bathtub in Santa Fe—even if the pale porcelain sat on the ground out back, and was mostly used as a bird bath. When at first Eva had insisted the house was not fit for entertaining, Abraham merely laughed. “We live in the great American West—not a somber mansion in Charlottenburg.”

She meant to ask: What exactly is the matter with a mansion in Charlottenburg? And just where could possibly be a more pleasant place to dine? But she said nothing—nothing about how her dowry was meant to set up a household, and if the dowry wasn’t doing that, then what exactly was it doing?—and she gave Chela the fine serviettes for washing. If they were to receive guests, then the guests would—at the very least—always have fine linen in their laps. Her mother had offered the family linens only after Eva agreed that she would put them to use even if they were laid nowhere but across the desert floor, even if she was reduced to serving traif to naked savages, and though Abraham laughed when he repeated these conditions in order to illustrate both his mother-in-law’s sense of humor and the absurdly formal ideals of their homeland, Eva thought this promise was as touching as the linens were beautiful. She’d repeatedly told Abraham, “I will use them until they are worn down to nothing but lovely dust.”

“Of this I have no doubt,” he’d responded, patting her gently on the head. “Now please go with Tranquilo to Fort Marcy and enlighten our guests as to what time we shall expect them.”

One evening in June, as the sky went from orange-purple to ghostly pearly green, they’d sat outside with their Yankee guests and she’d served champagne and canned oysters from a recent Shein Brothers’ shipment. When Abraham tilted his chair back, setting his feet up on the portal post, she was mortified until—much to her surprise—the other men followed suit. With his rakish hat, full whiskers, and a supply of evidently amusing Western expressions, Abraham held the Easterners in thrall with tales of the trail—tales that Eva had never once heard, and she wondered, almost in passing, if any of them were true. As she watched her husband, she was aware of sitting severely straight and yet she found herself reeling back and forth, perpetually adrift between skepticism and awe until the mosquitoes swarmed and the rains came, sending them all inside to light candles. Her hair was secured in a chignon adorned with eighteen hairpins—enough to not only hold her hair in place but to make her head ache miserably, but even in spite of her aching head, she couldn’t deny it was a gay affair.

Among the guests was a phrenologist, a quiet man who’d held her aching head and insisted that her skull was unusually smooth, full of secrets, and that, in addition to protecting these secrets, she needed to consume more animal food. “Meat,” said the phrenologist. “The answer for you is meat! It will act on your mind as manure does on flowers, forcing a degree of expansion and bloom not otherwise possible to attain.” The other guests—a remarkably short officer and his flirtatious wife, a newspaperman, and a handsome engineer—were too high on champagne to notice how strongly she blushed as the strange man held her head, and Abraham was too busy enjoying the strange prognostications to give much thought to what his wife’s secrets might be. Contrary to his expressly practical nature, Abraham adored the idea that life could be revealed, and that fortunes could be cast in shapes, in cards, or leaves. But she knew how fortunes were cast—and she didn’t need any parlor scientist to tell her. Fortunes were cast by making decisions.

After months of insisting Chela sweep the portal at least twice a day, Eva now instructed her to discard all the apple peels and cores there to attract the elusive goose, in addition to tossing handfuls of cornmeal at the very suggestion of a squawk. The portal quickly grew filthy with meal and apple mush, and Chela grew so cross after one near-biting incident that Eva was terrified of losing her the way she’d already lost two other girls who’d cleaned and cooked before her (Luz fat and quiet, Juanita tearful and loud), but Chela stayed and the goose finally built a nest on the low, flat roof, and soon it began to guard the doorway with no less effect than a watchdog. It was a wonder that Abraham didn’t shoot it immediately, considering the way it announced his frequent late-night entrances, but contrary to what a skilled shot Abraham had been on the plains, he didn’t much care for doing away with anything at close range. He claimed it wasn’t worth the effort, but Eva liked to think she had chosen a husband who—though unquestionably up to the task—did not have great enthusiasm for killing. For while she had initially attracted the goose for nothing other than their dining pleasure, she had become undeniably and irritatingly attached to the poor thing. When she told him so late one night as he cast off his gravy-stained clothes, he balked and took his pistol from where he’d cast it off on her carefully lace-cloaked dresser. In nothing but his unmentionables he returned to the moonlit street and fired a hasty shot, but the goose flapped its wings in a distracting riot, and when the bullet was swallowed by a slanted hitching post, Abraham returned to the bedroom, cursing the son-of-a-bitch-no-account-goddamn goose, and Eva was silently relieved.

         

SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN AWAKE LONG BEFORE HIM IN ORDER TO serve breakfast, but her limbs felt too heavy, and even as she registered the slant of light through the small window, she pretended to be asleep. She pictured herself from up above and saw her now-four-months-pregnant body as a leech affixed to bed sheets, a leech gorging itself on the lingering pleasures of sleep. And there was also the pleasure of watching him—when he wasn’t aware she was doing so—in the early morning light. On especially chilly mornings, armed with the excuse of being with child, she stayed under the covers and watched his breath gather on the increasingly bluish air; she watched as he tried not to shiver. At all other times of day he seemed so comfortable, so entirely at home amid so much dirt, among such a motley population speaking strange languages, but during cold mornings he looked alone and uncomfortable. There was—she was not unaware—a tinge of cruelty that accompanied her enjoyment as she watched and felt a vicarious morning chill.

After nearly nine months of marriage he’d remained in most ways a stranger, and she was content to watch him move through his morning routine. There was still novelty in the black hair curling on his barrel chest, in his big, white feet and their heavy stomping, and the way he raised a racket even when his task at hand required a far gentler touch. She stared through half-closed eyes as he buttoned a button with so little grace, hurling his suit coat over his shoulders as if it were not a coat but rather a beast he’d wrestled to its grizzly death only minutes before. Somehow all of these rough measures produced a puzzlingly magnetic effect. She could watch him—mysteriously compelled to do so—for a rather long time. When he disappeared toward the kitchen she sat up and reflexively looked into her hand mirror. Abraham did not like her to wear a nightcap—he claimed it made him think of hospitals; he spent a frightening month in one as a child with a nearly fatal bout of influenza—and so with each morning there came a hair-taming struggle, a rush to gather crude curls from their various directions and crush them into one presentable shape. She swung her feet out of the bedclothes and onto the floor and embarked upon the task of getting dressed.

Within minutes there came the scent of frying, a sizzling of butter and cornmeal and chilies that invariably made her long for a simple dry roll. “Buenos dias, Chela,” Eva ventured. “My darling”—she approached Abraham in their language—“are you certain you wouldn’t prefer plain potatoes?”

He looked at her as if she were suggesting he eat a hog.

“I only mean to say that Chela’s desayuno—delicious as it may be—it is a touch…rich.”

“This is a fine Mexican breakfast,” he answered her in English. “Nothing wrong with that. On the contrary—we could use some fire in our blood.” Then he rattled off something in Spanish to Chela, who stood at the stove laughing quietly, cracking eggs.

“What did you just say to her?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

“Well you said something. Certainly you said something.”

“Have you been practicing your Spanish?”

“You are perfectly aware I have been.”

“And so you’ll understand soon. You’ll understand all the meaningless things I say to Chela.” He laughed, and Chela—boldly now—laughed with him, as she presented his eggs and frijoles.

“Gracias, Chela,” Eva said, as Abraham tucked a serviette beneath his collar and began to eat.

“My dear,” Abraham said with his mouth full. He chewed and swallowed quickly, took a swig of coffee. “You look pale. You should stroll around the plaza. Take some exercise.”

“I feel embarrassed,” Eva said, in nearly a whisper, as she sat in the chair beside him. “To walk without a corset? Everyone will know.”

“Oh balderdash,” he offered, with his mouth full again.

“What does this mean? Bald and Dash?”

He waved his hand, impatiently. Sometimes it was as if he spoke not three but ten different languages.

“If you have respect for yourself you will have nothing but respect from others,” he continued, indulging her with German, slicing charred green chilies into very small pieces and eating them one by one. “Are you not proud of your condition? And please, no false modesty, now—you know how I loathe this aspect of your sex.”

“It feels…I feel as if it should be my secret—a sacred secret.”

“Like a little fox, you and your secrets.”

“Not a fox.”

“Oh no? What then, a bird?”

She shook her head.

“A bear?”

“It’s you who is a bear.” She couldn’t help smiling. “A big brown bear.”

“Ferocious?” he asked, his face growing flushed from the chili.

“Fat,” she said, feeling light. “A big fat bear.” She sighed and gave him a weary smile. “I am only cautious.”

“Well, my little fox, I am not. I am, as you know, a man who thinks large, and it is because of this thinking that I am able to tell you officially, and”—he stuck his finger in the air as if to check the wind’s direction—“with great pride: The house—your house—is being framed.”

“You mustn’t tease me about this,” she said reflexively, before allowing herself a pang of hope.

“Tease?” Then he shook his head with a smile only barely suppressed. “You must have faith, my fox, faith.”

She nearly kissed him on the mouth right in the spill of morning light, right in front of Chela. “But this is wonderful news!”

He nodded, and she could tell he was trying to contain his pleasure and pride at seeing her so elated. “And so if you would like to see the truth of it, I suggest you take your newly plump and perfect little self out for a stroll.” He took a final swig of coffee. “It’s a fine day.”

“I only think of my sister and…”

He shook his head.

“But I do.”

He banged his hand on the table, but instead of shouting at her, instead of demanding more spicy food, he announced, “The bishop is coming to dinner.”

“Oh?” she said, surprised but not displeased with this patent shift in subject. “So he does exist after all? I was beginning to think he was a cultivated character invented just for me.”

She’d in fact heard not only from Abraham but from copies of newspapers as far and as widely read as The New York Herald how toward the end of his nearly yearlong absence, after having traveled to Rome in his tireless pursuit of more Jesuits, and to France and Lyon for more funds for the construction of the new cathedral of Santa Fe, the bishop and his new recruits had been not only killed somewhere near Fort Larnet, but scalped and horribly mutilated. Eva had witnessed grief manifest itself throughout the town as requiems had been sung, tears had been shed; Abraham, in addition to Mr. Isinfeld, Mr. Sheinker, and Mr. Spiegelman, had said a rip-roaring Kaddish in his name. So when Bishop Lagrande and his people came trotting into town, they were—despite heavy rains and thunder—greeted by joyous throngs and all the bells the town could ring. It had been, she gathered, the most excitement Santa Fe had ever seen.

“He is rested from his terrible travels and has decided to pay us a visit. He would especially like to meet you.”

“I cannot imagine why.”

He pushed his plate away and stood to leave, ignoring her modest comment. “You have an important job today.”

“Why does he wish to meet me?”

“One of the meaningless things I was telling Chela was this: The bishop is a Frenchman.”

“I am well aware.”

“He narrowly escaped being murdered by savages. No doubt he would like some pâté.”

         

BECAUSE OF HER CONDITION, SHE SAT IN THE BEDROOM UNTIL THE slaughter was over. Because of her condition, she wasn’t to see how Chela snapped the strong neck and dunked it into scalding water. For Eva was weak—allegedly weaker than usual—and she was to exercise extreme care, which meant—in this new life—not lying on the divan and listening to her sister play the piano, but rather it meant sparing herself from participating in a goose’s noisy death. But not the evisceration or the plucking. Not the plucking and plucking and endless plucking. And she’d made certain the blood was drained, for although she had quickly given up on adhering to any dietary laws, Abraham did like, when at all possible, to have the blood drained from the animal—a practice that she suspected he approved of due to the meat’s superior taste and not because he possessed any lingering interest in preserving a kosher tradition. Only remain firm, he liked to call out in his play-acting version of a rabbi, whenever he brought home a chicken from Manuel the chicken man, not to eat the blood, for the blood, it is the soul, and thou shalt not eat the soul with the flesh! Abraham would then likely snack on a piece of ham and biscuit, declaring: “Deuteronomy.” As if reciting a bit of Bible in the home could counterbalance the existence of the ham. Up until now she had grudgingly drained the blood herself, but today she’d attempted to show Chela how to tie the goose upside down over a pot, before realizing shortly into the instruction that poor Chela thought she meant to drink its blood, as if she and Abraham were a pair of Nosfaratus—pale-skinned, blood-sucking Jews. “No,” Eva repeated, with a horrified expression. “Not to drink! No tomar! No, no.” And then, because she tended toward the dramatic when attempting other tongues: “Dios mio! Chela, no!”

But Chela merely made the sign of the cross and watched dark crimson drip and gather in the pot until it was time to proceed. They worked side by side in the windowless kitchen. Eva chopped walnuts and dried apricots as Chela pounded spices between two heavy stones. Outside the day exploded into sunlight. Outside there were cavalry parading through the plaza, a hanged man swinging from a tree. There were Navajos filling skin bags with well water, Spanish women with wing-like rebozos carrying black-haired babies, drunkards moving through rubbish as if wading through algae in the ocean. Outside a house was being framed against a startling sky. A group of men called out to one another as wood beams were hauled from street to lot, as hammers struck down on each dark nail, insistent on possibility. As long as she imagined and envisioned instead of checking to see if it were true, then she could not—she would not—be disappointed. And so there would be no taking a walk—at least not for today.

Outside there was possibility. Outside there was chaos and contrast, but inside this cocoon of endless tasks there was no room for such distinctions. There were no windows, there were two women, and the light sparked not from the sun but from the open flame on which Chela baked tortillas, doing delicate battle with the sneaky flames which flared like tongues of desert snakes at any given moment. Two women with dark hair wound in coils, with wound-tight constitutions. Four small hands not playing a nocturne, but chopping and pounding and prodding with, if not sisterly grace, if not the transcendental effect of time melting class and skin color away, then with economy and a similarly pressured style of working, a style which Eva—had she been able to look in on this scene—would not have recognized as hers. She had been a drowsy girl, a girl who dreamed frequently if not always pleasantly, and she was not a girl anymore. She knew this: Long before she stepped foot on American soil, she’d lost all claim to that word. But she was also not yet a mother. It was as if the baby in her belly was a hard stone sunk to the bottom of her sea—a solid reminder of all that was in betwixt and between and most importantly irreversible. And it was a strange but not altogether unpleasant sensation to be so solidly between two states of being; it was one of many strange sensations that accompanied living in a small mud house with a forceful man, and working not on conversational French or fine needlework, but preparing a goose with a Mexican girl in honor of a Catholic bishop. The charred edge of tortilla caught fire once again—which, for Chela, did not merit a single utterance. She fanned the flame and then herself and then the flame once more.

When the goose was ready for roasting, Eva stuffed it full of apples and nuts, sugar and cinnamon, toasted strips of tortilla. Chela shook her head disparagingly and indicated the pot she’d prepared, full of onions and chilies and water, and Eva—very much to her own surprise—stared Chela down in exactly the way she’d seen Tranquilo stare down a burro. She had essentially, until now, deferred to Chela. Though she’d been raised with servants and knew no good could come from such obsequious behavior, she had been too nervous to suggest so much as a less munificent sprinkling of spices. But now she was staring into Chela’s eyes—the unusual topaz color all but blocked out by huge pupils—and Eva felt afraid only of her own unfortunate tendency to blink, for she was sick with the thought of another stew, of everything boiled with chilies and onions as if whatever was being rendered—be it a cut of beef or this long-awaited delicacy of a goose—was nothing when compared with the true players of the meal, the stars of spice and heat.

And a Frenchman was coming to dinner. A Frenchman! Yes, he was a man of the cloth, but surely he was not entirely ascetic—he was a Catholic, after all, not a disciple of Luther. As she finally averted her eyes from Chela’s and tied up the goose’s cavity with a needle and thread, she saw Chela head outside to dump water from the pot, and Eva realized she had won. The goose would be roasted.

In challenging Chela, she had conquered one of her many fears. She had so many fears they were tiresome, even to her: the fear of dying (actually a specific way of dying that she would not dare to articulate, not even in the far recesses of her mind) and the fear of giving birth; the fear of cholera, madness, poverty; the fear of Indians, robbers, scorpions, and snakes; but mostly there was the fear of her past coming back to greet her. She was afraid of this: something her own conscience had no trouble identifying with absolute certainty—that she and no one and nothing else had caused her sister’s death. But for now, in the hot kitchen, those fears kept their distance. The baby in her belly acted as a scepter, beating them back with an accumulating presence and bestowing Eva with a new sense of importance. The cult of motherhood! What could be more powerful? What else could trump religious affiliation and create a common ground? The bishop wanted to meet her? Let him come, she thought. Let him step down onto our mud floor. At the moment, she had nothing to hide. For Abraham was right: If she respected herself, then she would have the respect of others; she was a wife and an expectant mother. She would soon have a house. She was hungry.

Eva fried the liver and Chela sulked but learned quickly, chopping it up and mixing in onions, dashes of brandy and cream. By the time the pâté was covered and placed under their bed—the coolest spot in the house—it was late afternoon and the house was thick with the scent of rendered fat. If she were going to faint, she thought, it would be now and it would be lovely, falling not immediately to the dirty floor but slowly—surely it would be slowly—through a haze so intoxicating she felt as if she could crawl right up inside of the scent, that the scent alone would support her. She could instruct Chela, they could both take a rest, floating through the air like smoke or snow and nobody would recognize them. No one would know where they’d gone.

         

HIS FACE WAS SQUARE, WITH DEEP-SET EYES, A THIN, CROOKED NOSE, and a line of mouth that curved downward in the caricatured opposite of a smile. He was long-boned and not particularly handsome but certainly grave and important-looking enough that Eva could not help but think—as he bowed his head in greeting—of how many women might have loved him. She guessed he was fifty-plus in years, although his weathered skin suggested a higher number. He presented a small bottle of wine. “This is,” he said slowly, softly, “made by me.” He lowered his eyes. “From Auvergne. I cut the vines myself. We need wine for the sacrament here, and also,” he said, with one side of his down-turned mouth twisting up, “we need for the table. Something decent, no?”

“Merci beaucoup,” said Eva, and his stern face came alive.

“Parlez-vous français?”

“Mais oui, bien sûr,” she said, as she encouraged their guest to sit down in the high-backed chair facing two large candles she had made herself from sheep’s tallow. As she apologized for the modesty of their table, she felt simultaneous pride in how the melted tallow ran evenly down the candles onto polished tin, only to immediately feel foolish for not only her pride but her apology. This was a man whose face bore the ravages of sun and wind, having clearly toiled for many years outside the walls of any cloister. “Forgive me,” she said, dropping the flirtatious tone she knew she donned reflexively whenever speaking French. “You must think me very spoiled.”

“I think you are lovely,” he said simply.

“My wife is also a very accomplished pianist,” blurted Abraham in English.

“Nonsense. I am merely adequate.”

“Adequate,” scoffed Abraham. “How German of you.”

“Yes, adequate.” She was afraid her tone was peevish, but it was only the truth. “Très bien?” she said lightly. “Non.” She would not inflate what little talent she possessed. “I was the worst player in my family. My sister—”

“Bishop,” Abraham interrupted, slapping the bishop right on his back, as if he were a common faro dealer, “although you have lived without society for many years, you cannot have become immune to a proper roast goose and pâté.”

“No certainly not, certainly not.” He had a full smile now and took in his surroundings, his eyes fixing once again on Eva. “Forgive me, Mr. Shein,” he said without averting his gaze, “but your wife looks astonishingly like the village patroness from my boyhood. Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle. She was all-knowing, and all she knew was good. I would visit her each afternoon in the sanctuary. But, alas,” he said gaily, “she was only ten inches tall. You are, if I may say so, far more formidable.”

Abraham laughed too loudly and uncorked the bottle of wine.

“I stole away from the town I love so dearly,” the bishop mused, in the manner of one who lives far from home and has—having been pressed for his personal story of flight far too many times—become a sporadic and often gratuitous raconteur. “I wore civilian clothes because I knew my family would disapprove if they knew I was to leave them.”

“But why?” She couldn’t help but ask, “Why did you want to go so terribly?”

He did not look taken aback by her question or the exposed intensity—perhaps even impatience—in her tone.

“I wanted, as I still want, to be of use.”

“To change people?”

“Oh we can change little.” He laughed a bit. “But perhaps one small corner of a soul…And what of your sister, Madame?” His voice was so kind; she imagined telling him everything.

“Do you know that my Uncle Alfred lives in Paris?” she said brightly, and she could feel Abraham’s sigh of relief that she did not answer the bishop’s question, steering the promising conversation in the dour direction of Henriette’s death. During his brief tenure as her husband, Abraham had had numerous occasions to point out how nothing cursed an evening quite so efficiently as launching a meal with talk of mortality. He liked to remind his wife of how death was all around them, it was simply the way of the world, and as they sat together under solid roof, by fragrant piñon fire—there were poor, green pilgrims, at any given moment, receiving Indian haircuts.

The bishop unfolded his napkin slowly. He fingered the navy stitching; he touched the linen briefly to his cheek.