“That’ll be the falcons,” says a man. “Breakfast.”
Moses jerks out of the pew. A few yards away stands an elderly priest, dressed in black pants and a black shirt, his white collar glowing. Most priests give Moses the willies, but this one radiates something like—like sanctity, he admits to himself. Moses doesn’t believe in sanctity, but here it is, obvious as a suntan. The priest appears to be in his seventies. He has a face designed for Christmas, a diminutive stature, and rimless spectacles.
“Sorry?” says Moses.
“A peregrine falcon built her nest here, in the spring,” says the priest, “and we haven’t had the heart to do anything about it, so we’re just kind of coexisting. In fact, we’ve set up a live camera. You can watch them online whenever you want. There are three little chicks. I call them Ruby, Radish, and Rhino.” He grins. “I don’t know; it just makes me happy. She swooped down during communion, yesterday. The mother. Stole a wafer! Wasn’t consecrated yet, luckily. It scared off some parishioners, but.”
He waits for Moses to speak. Moses does not oblige.
“They’re on the verge of extinction, peregrine falcons,” adds the priest. “So we’re keen to keep them safe.”
The statement gently dissolves a wall inside Moses. “Oh.”
“Anywho. I know it can be alarming. A falcon!”
After a pause, Moses asks, “What do you call her?”
“Who?”
“The mother. Did you name her?”
“Oh, yes. Dorothy the Second.”
“Who’s Dorothy the First?”
“My mother.” The priest blushes. “My human mother.”
Moses clenches his jaw and nods.
“I loved her very much,” mutters the priest. He studies his shoes, then steps forward. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Father Tim.”
“John,” says Moses, shaking the priest’s warm hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Welcome to St. Jadwiga, John. Are you new to the parish?”
Moses hesitates. “Yes.”
“What brings you here?”
Moses begins to sweat.
“Are you here for confession?” asks Father Tim helpfully.
“Confession?” This had not occurred to Moses; he has only been to confession once before. “Yes.”
“Great. It’s right over here, whenever you’re ready. Take your time.”
Father Tim smiles again, then disappears into an archaic confessional booth on the other side of the church. A flash in the rafters catches Moses’s eye: there she is, Dorothy the Second, yellow feet and matching beak, delivering something that Moses does not want to see into the mouths of her chicks. Her chest is speckled, her beak hooked, and she is pretty but haggard, like she works the night shift on the highway. He wishes that this bird had a spouse and a nanny, that she got paid time off, that someone would give her a massage. She sees Moses, stops what she’s doing, and glares at him, her creepy animal wisdom confirming that he is the intruder in this place. Not she.
Moses checks the time, ignoring a screenful of vacuous sympathy messages. The fans will be crowding the pavement outside the funeral now—strangers who believe they know her, love her. They will flood blocks, these blank grievers, wielding their spectacularly fabricated relationships with Elsie Blitz, beloved American starlet, like tickets to the fair, trying to catch a glimpse of the corpse, even though she was cremated. Elsie would have adored the attention at first, then hated it. Adoration and hatred—the only energies she knew how to dispense and accept. “I used to think all relationships were imaginary,” she told Moses from her nine-thousand-dollar mattress. Her hair, skin, and sheets were three shades of snow. She was eighty-six years old. “But now that I’m dying, I see the consequences. I see people existing outside my mind, making decisions, making dents. I see you—my Moses, my sweet angel boy. Do you see what I’m saying? I see how I’ve ruined you.”
In the beginning, there was a mother and a baby. But the mother was not much mother and the baby was too baby. He needed everything; he was raging id. The baby would die without her, and the mother did not like to look at him. She needed everything, too.
The mother’s problem was that she never turned around when she heard Mom? in a public space. She was an actress first and only. When she was four years old, her scarlet hair and greedy parents won her the professional lottery, and she had been working since the age of five, baptized in binary waters of worship and disgust.
You’re perfect. You’re doing everything wrong. Hush. Speak up. You’re clever. You pretty little idiot. Show us your dance. Hold still. Give us a song. Be quiet. Imitate. Be an original. You’re just like her, and her, and her. Dazzle us. Don’t draw attention to yourself. All eyes on you. You’re not the center of the universe. You’re perfect. What’s wrong with you?
She was the nation’s supply of sugar in the acrid years following World War II. A time of traumatized fathers, economic prosperity, and an international deficit of psychological health. Her job never allowed her to be a child, so her psychology never allowed her to age. It was not advisable for a child to have a child, but she, so childish, liked to disobey.
In her teens and twenties, the actress built herself a fortress of glass and mirror and held whimsical parties there. Bad things happened to the young actress, as they often did: rejection, rape, anorexia, addiction. Cast aside by an older married man, her first love, as the director warned. Horrible wigs! But mostly, the violence was administered by the attention, which was the wrong kind of light—radiation that burned her, gave her melanoma of the spirit. She learned to grip and collect the things she liked, learned that pleasure was the intravenous nutrient that could keep her alive. To frame it that way was dramatic, she knew, but then again, she was dramatic. So what? she could say to the army of bad nights that appeared at her gate. I still have all these strapping good nights. She invented a religion of pleasure and dedicated herself to it.
She was petite; all her friends were enormous. She liked alcohol and drugs; she liked traveling between realms of consciousness without going through security or stamping her passport. She liked force—how, if you were strong enough, you could make anyone do anything. She liked avocado three days ripe. She did not like the ocean and accused people of bragging when they claimed to love it. Sometimes, she’d sit in front of the Pacific and try to feel something, but her heart was too landlocked. Too Midwestern. All she felt, when she looked at the ocean, was the presence of the absence of awe. She was too afraid of it to swim.
Her mother was Irish; the actress liked to listen to Irish jigs, Irish people reading books, Irish prayers. She liked making everyone wear blue to her parties. She liked growing orange trees in the yard, liked watching other people pick the fruits. Honeysuckle, lilacs, chlorine, thunderstorms, pine, bar soap, unwashed hair, matches, the incense of midnight mass, cigarettes, campfires, gasoline, fur: she liked these scents. When she told people about this, they lied and called her unique. She liked when people lied to make her feel good. She liked revenge plots and physical deformities. She loved Whiskey I, the miniature schnauzer who played her dog on Meet the Neighbors. She liked Whiskey II, his replacement, but not as much. She liked foam—all kinds. She liked having her photo taken, her figure drawn, her body examined at the doctor’s office. She hated to be described.
Improbably, the actress reached adulthood. Because her childhood was a renunciation of childhood, she treated adulthood like a crackdown on adulthood, which is to say, she abdicated most responsibilities of living in a body and a world. Voting. Taxes. Dentists. Lunch. These things could terrorize her whenever she was forced to endure them on anyone’s terms but her own.