6.

The meetings with the Swiss banks are over within the next forty-five hours. Hundreds of thousands of Temple dollars counted out, deposited into high-interest and tax-free accounts, the paperwork signed at shining mahogany tables. No questions asked by the neutral gentlemen in their gold-rimmed spectacles and Italian wool suits.

Mona d’Angelo boards the next afternoon train to Milan. She has a different cover story to the rest of them: family in Verona; returning to the US via Rome. Meanwhile, they change out of their businesswear in the station bathroom and purchase tickets back to Paris; buy magazines and Swiss chocolate; pass the hours before their train, weary of each other’s company.

In Paris, they do not linger. They purchase separate flights on separate airlines to separate Canadian cities; wait in separate lounges for stretches of time like mundane crucifixions.

It’s not until the earliest, darkest hours of Monday that Evelyn pulls up in a cab outside her parents’ house in Berkeley. She thanks the driver. She needs no help with her luggage. She has her own keys, slots them quietly. In the hallway, she switches on the lamp just long enough to slip off her shoes and navigate to the back room.

Solomon Tom, to her surprise, is wide awake in his crib. Silently staring as though he’s been expecting her.

‘Soul,’ Evelyn coos, scooping him up.

Evelyn loves her baby. A love as unremarkable as her need to breathe, perhaps, and yet a miracle to her, a startling thing. Of course, she and Jim hadn’t planned him. Of course, her first impulse had been to book an appointment to get rid of him, as she would a troublesome tooth. Now, her body shifts to accommodate his weight; her nose hunts for that sweet, rosy smell at the crown of his head. Soul. Her Soul. Soul-baby.

‘Sleepy baby,’ Evelyn whispers teasingly, though she can already tell he isn’t, really.

Watchful as a painting, Evelyn’s baby follows her with his eyes as she opens her suitcase and puts her soiled clothes in the hamper, finds herself a fresh nightgown. Though she slept little during her flight, during the layover, during the journeys that preceded it, she isn’t tired; anyhow, doesn’t feel like sleeping; her exhaustion so deep as to seem existential. ‘Not sleepy, baby?’ She smiles over her shoulder, and Solomon Tom smiles back; he’s old enough to do that now. Five months old and his development perfectly in line with the books she’s read; she records it in a soft-bound pastel-blue diary.

‘Not sleepy, huh,’ Evelyn repeats. She notices a dusting of dog hair on the comforter and, annoyed, cracks a window. Checks the clock, then the ceiling.

She puts on a Donovan record, from the pile Sally-Ann left behind when she joined the Temple, moved out of home and into one of the Temple’s student communes.

Solomon Tom likes Donovan.

Evelyn curls up on the bed with her baby in her arms, beneath the wall-sized peace mandala painted by Sally-Ann. With insomniac eyes, she gazes at the silky brown hairs on his head, the barely-there brows, the tiny pug nose. He gazes back, his own eyes inky-blue, bottomless. When, after a century of gazing, he lets out a mewl, paws the front of Evelyn’s nightgown, she acquiesces gently; tugs the gypsy-like ruffle from her shoulder. He latches on. The feeling is strange, borderline shameful, borderline painful, until he finds his rhythm and that tingling sense of familiarity takes over.

It occurs to Evelyn, even as her mind numbs, her body relaxes, that she would like to put an end to this nursing business as soon as possible.

Once Solomon Tom has had his fill, his inky eyes begin to flutter shut. She tickles him with her fingertips, prods him as she would a warm loaf of bread. She murmurs things, brainless and sing-song. He slides into unconsciousness, just the same; grows heavier in her arms, and her eyelids heavier with him. There are some files in the closet, reports to be read on the Temple’s Agricultural Project in South America, better known as ‘the Promised Land’. She feels a grip of hopelessness, commingled with satisfaction, at her inability to move. She closes her eyes. Fragments of song crawl into her mind.

Diamonds in the sea …

I dug you diggin’ me in Mexico …

Perhaps it is Mexico she dreams of. Sun-baked stretches of coast. Strange granite outcrops in the ocean. Bright flowers that morph into Sally-Ann’s graphic floral comforter. She hears, faraway and cheery, her mother declare, ‘Little Mother is hibernating!’ Her sleep-fogged brain trips over the comment: But I can’t be a mother yet! I’ve only just returned from my honeymoon. Then she notices her breast, milk-large, whiter than milk, hanging loose as in some Renaissance painting. Then, like a rib stolen in the night, her baby’s absence. She fixes her nightgown, wipes the sleep from her eyes. From the depths of the house, Picnic barks and Jim’s voice resounds, rustic and insistent; his high-pitched laugh.

Her parents dislike Jim. Somehow, the sound of his laugh reminds her of this.

Evelyn is still drowsy, cheeks flushed, when Jim tiptoes into the room. He has Solomon Tom bundled in his arms. He is wearing a maize-yellow guayabera. He has his sunglasses on. He looks, to her temporarily objective eyes, quite fat and a little ridiculous. Within a split-second, however, she has glossed over his imperfections; the chin doubled with his grin, the cosmetically-enhanced sideburns. She sees his pug nose, a grownup version of Solomon Tom’s. She feels an overwhelming gratitude.

‘Little Mother ain’t sleepin’,’ he tells Solomon Tom, with an indulgent smile at Evelyn. ‘See? We knew, didn’t we, Soul? Little Mother done slept enough.’

‘Too much,’ Evelyn agrees, flattening the sheets with her palms.

Jim’s weight dents the narrow bed. He places Solomon Tom between them. A fresh scent of baby powder rises up, making Evelyn aware of her own less-than-fresh smell.

‘I need a shower.’ She shifts aside. ‘You shouldn’t sit so close. I stink.’

This only provokes Jim to slide closer, nestle his face in her armpit. ‘Mmm, you do.’ He sniffs at her crotch like a dog. ‘Little Mother’s got her period.’

Evelyn scowls, crosses her legs. She does need to shower, and to pee, desperately. Yet she remains where she is, because of the way Jim is looking at her, mostly; his gaze through those sunglasses as humble and loving as ever, seeming to see everything, and forgive it. He reaches to stroke the fine, glossy hairs at her temple. She waits for him to mention Paris.

‘You finished next quarter’s budget for the Promised Land yet?’ he asks instead.

‘I’m still working on it.’

Jim inclines his head at the baby. ‘I can get Frida and Terra on it, if your hands are full.’

‘No,’ she says, too quickly. Jim looks smug. She continues, poker-faced, ‘If you’d like their input, of course, that’s your decision. I do think we should factor in the latest profits forecast though. This isn’t a time for cutting corners.’

‘Terra did a damn fine job on last quarter’s commune budgets.’

‘I agree … and her expertise will be invaluable as we move toward complete communalization of our meals service. But there are more complex factors at play, and it’ll take time to teach her the sort of long-range planning we need—’

Before she can finish, Solomon Tom gurgles peevishly, smacks his lips. Then he wails and stretches his clumsy half-fists toward Evelyn. Jim catches her eye with a smirk.

‘G’on, honey,’ he purrs. ‘My son’s thirsty.’

Evelyn takes up their baby obediently, hushes him. Her fingers fumble to clasp the fragile back of his head, the folds of his neck, and she feels a shiver, just a shiver, of revulsion. She gives Solomon Tom her pinky finger to suck and it quiets him. She looks cagily at Jim.

‘I’ll get Mom to give him some formula.’ Wiggling her finger inside Solomon Tom’s mouth, she lets herself feel an appropriate measure of guilt. ‘I think it’s time to start weaning. He may begin teething any day now. After all, he’s very advanced.’

Though Jim shows no sign of disapproval, only that curious tilt of the head, that animal benevolence, she feels compelled to explain further:

‘I want to move out of home — Well, not home.’ She smiles sardonically. ‘This house isn’t home, nor is America. What I mean is, I want Soul to know his true home, the Temple.’

There are unspoken things between her and Jim. She feels them, rippling and lurid as sea corals, as the innermost parts of her body: the walls of her uterus, the folds of her intestines, the valves of her heart, the glands of her brain.

‘Alright,’ he says, with an air of almost-formality. And yet, more inconspicuous still, a note of pride. ‘Alright, Evelyn.’

Of course, the moment cannot last. Solomon Tom rejects her pinky, shrieks anew, and she is quick to spirit him away from Jim, so sensitive to noise, bright light. Telling Jim to rest. Telling him: a pill, if he needs it, in the purple ceramic turtle on the nightstand. Her voice calm, though Solomon Tom is attempting to drag her nightgown down her shoulders. She twists her way into her robe, and is immediately glad of the cover, for already upon entering the hall she hears the blare of the TV in the den, the broken voices of Jim’s teen sons. Always, on his visits from across the bay, Jim brings a couple of them along for security: puberty has made them tall and strong, and his need for trusted guards has become more urgent since Wayne Bud and all those other young people defected. In the cozy oak kitchen, Evelyn finds her mother cleaning up after the boys’ latest fridge-raid, and a look passes between them that encompasses this, and other things. Jim beached on the bed in his sunglasses and guayabera. Solomon Tom’s squalling hunger. Evelyn’s desperation to shower and relieve her bladder. The certainty that this arrangement cannot go on forever.

‘Here, come to Grandma,’ Margaret coos, unburdening her of Solomon Tom.

Under the scalding rain of the showerhead, Evelyn’s scalp tingles; her skin flushes. She imagines her milk drying in the heat, her breasts shrinking to their former, merely ornamental state. Her mind reels forward to a time, soon, when she will return to the Temple with Jim’s baby in one arm, a clipboard in the other. And if the people whisper, it will only be of the tales he has told them. A perilous mission for the Cause. Mexico. Prison. Her body brutalized by enemy guards, impregnated against her will. Her baby born out of wedlock, yet into the holy light of revolution — and what a beautiful baby, beloved by Father, this baby called ‘Soul’.