17   

Faith, hope and Charity
Stovall

Charity didn’t dare stop for long. Of all the terrors hell might hold, she most feared that unknown voice pursuing her, though she could no longer hear it following on the wind. No real time in this place, no real distance she could measure with any certainty. The gray velvet gown was a Hollywood dream but not much for traveling, sodden and heavy with mist.

She stopped suddenly. Just ahead through the swirling fog hulked a large house surrounded by a high iron fence. No lights showed but smoke curled from one chimney. The gloomy presence of the house contrasted with a gleaming, fresh-waxed taxi near the front steps. The driver’s door bore the device:

BELOW STAIRS CAB

“ANYWHERE TO HELL AND BACK”

CALL 666-JAKE

Charity pushed at the wide gate. At the groan of rusty hinges, a huge hound raised his head from a nap on the crumbling stone steps with an inquisitive woof.

“Got no time for games,” Charity told the dog. “Hope you don’t bite.”

“Not at all.” The hound yawned to his ears. “But beware the owner. He thinks.”

Charity was only moderately surprised. After a monster made out of television, an earthquake and a thrill-packed but exhausting interlude with Dane, a talking dog was not all that new, except he sounded kind of snooty. City people were always putting you down, trying to sell you something or draft your friends. “You got a funny accent. Where you from, doggie?”

“Boston, girlie,” said the hound with audible disdain. “I will not comment on your accent. Similes founder, metaphors fail.”

“I speak good American.”

“And I only English, alas. Yale,’52. Summa cum maxima, Skull and Bones.”

“Plattsville High School, class of’85.” Charity would not be outdone. “You don’t have to be so stuck-up about it. Everybody goes to school.” Will you listen to me? she caught herself. I’m arguing with a watchdog. “Anyway, is your owner home?”

“He’s not my owner.” The hound indulged in a thorough fore-and-aft scratch. “But he’s in. What do you want?”

“I guess a cab to town. Somewhere. Maybe get warm first.”

“The cab you can get; the warmth comes harder. His name is Jake. With a J.”

“I know, I know.” Charity grasped the heavy bronze knocker and banged it twice.

“Oh, go on in, it’s never locked,” the dog told her. “Jake had only a few things he valued and lost them ages ago. Some ideals and a friend.” He licked his chops and settled down again into his nap.

Charity had to ask. “How does a hound dog go to college?” One eye opened. “I’m only a dog on duty. Good hours, great for catching up on sleep, which was very difficult for a successful embezzler. Worries, occasional conscience. This is like keeping a lighthouse, not much traffic. So if you don’t mind, sayonara.” The eye closed.

Charity pushed the door in and found herself in a dark hall, musty with the long absence of light. The only illumination flickered feebly on a wall from a room far down the passage. Charity moved unsurely along the hall to pause in the entrance to a large living room lit only by a fireplace.

There was a man in front of the fire. He didn’t look up. “Prince?”

He slumped in his armchair, absorbed in a chess game on a small table on his near side. Charity saw at first only a brooding profile. Too young to read men with any accuracy, Charity still felt the profound sorrow of that presence. He barely acknowledged her, first moving a piece on the board.

“Yes?”

“The door was open,” Charity attempted, a little embarrassed. “The dog said just come in.”

“Of course.” Jake rose with a distant courtesy and came to meet her. His head canted at a weird angle as if the neck had been broken and badly set. A small leather bag hung around his throat and chinked dully with his movement: seemed an odd place for a cabdriver to carry change.

“Come in. Warm yourself if you can.”

“I saw your cab out front. Thought maybe you could drive me out of here.”

“There is no out.” Jake looked right through her, clearly disinterested. “Where would you like to go?”

“Somewhere,” she guessed with her small knowledge of Below Stairs. “Just I don’t have any money. I’ll have to owe you.”

“Don’t worry about that. Come by the fire.”

She spread her hands to the pale flame that she could barely feel. “What are you burning?”

“Old vanities, dry regrets,” Jake told her. “They don’t throw much heat. Shalom, Miss Stovall. Have a chair.”

“Do we know each other?”

“New arrivals: the news gets around. We don’t recruit as many as you’d think. It’s still a small town. You came with Roy Stride. He was my last fare.”

“Roy?” She twisted to him in her deep chair. “How is he? Where is he?”

“Doing quite well,” Jake reported. “Stiffed me for the tip.”

“Take me to Roy, please. Can you?”

Jake nodded. “Anywhere you want. I’d imagine there’s a great deal you want, Charity.” He ranged about the large room, turning up lamps here and there. “You haven’t changed for hundreds of years, and your sins, such as they are, have not grown in complexity. A moment of yes in a lifetime of thou shalt not. Certain punishment out of a steaming Protestant imagination.” He laughed as at an old, familiar joke. “Not that Catholics lack melodrama. In the thirteenth century, they imagined me hanging feet downward from Satan’s mouth. Next to Brutus.”

“Who?”

“A man with similar questions, similarly resolved.”

Nobody in this whole damn place can talk straight, Charity thought restlessly. She couldn’t understand a word of Jake although he had his own fascination, quieter — thank goodness — than Dane, who had been exciting as could be, but he could wear you out. Now, Jake was... definitely good-looking, even a hunk by back-home standards; not so much the looks but the manner and voice. He reminded Charity of James Mason on the Late Show. Hell might be a strain, she concluded, but you couldn’t beat it for the new and different or the interesting men. Not that Jake put himself out to be polite. She wondered if folks were this hard to talk to in heaven.

“Sure is quiet here.”

“You object to that?”

“No, no, it’s a nice change.”

“One can think,” Jake mused over the chessboard. “If thought is desirable. For me it was a curse, an obsession, like chess. Always the intellectual yearning to be the man of action. To be, like Brutus, a fulcrum of history. That was denied me until one day when I — acted. I’ll never know whether I was right at the wrong time for my own sake or wrong at the right time for the sake of history.”

Well, how does a person answer something like that? “Gee, I got good marks in history, but...”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

His quiet bitterness shriveled Charity. He could be a nice man if he let himself; what would that cost him? This was no way for a man to live, all alone in the dark, even visitors kept at a distance. Dane made her feel woman enough to be a fire hazard, but this Jake, it was like she was wallpaper or something. Not natural. The worst thing in the world, even in hell, was being alone. He didn’t notice her. He irritated the living Jesus out of her.

“You don’t have to be so mean about it.”

Jake waved it away. “Nothing personal. History’s full of sinkholes. Today’s moral bedrock is tomorrow’s quicksand.”

He really ticked her off, partly for what she couldn’t understand, mostly for what she could. Real men like Roy or Clint Eastwood didn’t talk so wimpy. “When it comes to morals, right is right and wrong —”

“Is debatable. Don’t argue morality or guilt with a Jew. We invented them.”

“You don’t look Jewish.”

“My God, she said it!” Jake’s laughter was a dry, wondering bark that had no warmth in it. “She actually said it. You must have been an evangelical.”

“Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior,” Charity owned with wistful pride. “Not that it helped a whole lot.”

“Indeed.” Jake sank again in his chair. “Tabernacle of the... the more shriveled the existence, the more elaborate the credentials. Virtue measured by what you wouldn’t do, at least under scrutiny, and others judged for what they would and got caught at. You don’t want Grace, Miss Stovall. You want to get even.”

She didn’t get that at all. “Get even with what?”

“I’ll show you.” Jake touched a button on the arm of his chair. Across the room a four-foot screen jumped to life in ravishing color subtly enhanced by soft music.

“This is the ultimate,” a deep male voice oozed from the screen. “This is Ultimate Rise. What you’ve worked for and deserve, and it’s waiting for you.”

The camera moved over stunning vistas of sunken living rooms in luxurious cream leather, each casual furniture piece worth a fortune. Bedrooms of imperial opulence, kitchens that inspired domesticity and did all the work, cozy dens, conversation pits cunningly designed around fieldstone fireplaces, bathrooms of unbridled hedonism with heart-shaped tubs and frothing Jacuzzis. Charity ogled.

“Where’s that? They don’t have that in Pittsburgh even.”

“I’d say not,” Jake remarked with a sideways glance. “I’ll bet you never missed Dynasty or Knots Landing.”

“Course not. I even wrote a letter to Alexis telling her what a slut she is.”

“But such a rich slut, eh? All that scheming and immorality in the middle of all that wealth. The painful fascination of pressing your cold little nose against the windowpane and deciding that rich is nasty, virtue is just plain folks and the American Way. The envy of the have-nots: Alexis will get what’s coming to her, evil will be punished. And you sure as hell want yours. Religion is what you sing on Sunday, Miss Stovall. Your true faith is what you want all week.”

“Hey, you make me sick, you know that?” Charity flared, surging out of the chair. “What do you know how hard it is to get anything nice? There was a factory in Plattsville, now there’s nothing. Just a mis’rable piddly little town full of people that have to stand outside — that’s true, that much, what you said — stand outside looking in at folks no better than us taking the best while we get the leavings.

“What do you know about living on welfare checks or credit run out at the store? Huh? I grew up with not enough; with stepparents because my own was... were a couple of God knows what from God knows where. You try that, Jake: nothing to call your own and nowhere to go but down or dead. You watch all the pretty, silky commercials like this one about all the nice things you can buy with the money you’ll never have. You try that —”

“Admirable,” Jake acknowledged. “At least you’ve learned to state the problem.”

“Don’t you laugh at me,” Charity seethed. “Don’t you laugh at us. All we got in Plattsville, all the rest of you goddammit left us is the kind of God and Jesus Christ we can understand. Look at me! Forget this bullshit movie dress that’d take me six months to buy if I didn’t eat or pay rent. Do I look fat? Like I never missed a meal or a trip to the dentist? Last one we had moved out three years ago, couldn’t make a living. You get a toothache now, you gotta drive twenty miles. If the car will make it.

“Your kinda people laugh at us for crying in church when we feel like crying all the time. Why shouldn’t we want a Jesus with sword and fire? If He’s got no sword and fire when He comes, by God, we’ll give Him ours. We got lots of that.”

“And anger. Envy. Getting even.”

He seemed to be goading her. With nothing at hand to throw at him, Charity threw the truth. “Damn right we want to get even. Everyone else does.”

Until she heard it, Charity never guessed such a rage lived in her, that rush of deep emotion always prayed and sung out of her in the Tabernacle, cleansed and released until the need built up again. She always thought it was the Holy Spirit. More frightening than that, but damn right she wanted hers. Why not?

Jake moved another piece on the chessboard, considered the consequences, then rose and took his cabby hat from the mantel.

“You sound ready to get some of yours.”

“I sure am.” Charity clawed at her hair gone frizzy and hopeless from damp. “Between Dane and his poetry and you, gimme a break. I want to find Roy.”

Jake escorted her down the hall to the entrance. “No fear, he’s doing very well. The Paladins pounced on him the minute he arrived. No different here than on earth. Messiahs are a weekly special.”

“Oh. Where can I find him?”

Jake gave her a searching glance. “Why not let him find you? Ultimate Rise just happens to have a vacancy, and I’d say you’re entitled to the good life for a change.”

Charity remembered that sinful bathtub and the acre-wide living room and was tempted. “Maybe for a little. Just to rest.”

“You’ll love it,” Jake promised. “Fully automatic, live-in butlers, magnificent view. On a clear day you can see Robin Leach. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t expect you. What’s the matter, woman? I’m tempting you to a freebie paradise and you look positively ill.”

She did feel sick, cold with a winter thought. “Gol-lee. Jake. All that stuff I said...”

“All quite true.”

Was that what all my praying was about? “Lord Amighty, no wonder I’m damned.”

“No, Miss Stovall. Love and hell are alike in that respect; they are what you bring to them. The script is yours; only the props are furnished.” Another keen scrutiny. “And growing always hurts.”

Damn, Charity yearned as Jake’s cab whisked her away. Doesn’t anybody around here talk straight?

Drained, quivering with the release of emotion. Not even Roy would guess there was so much mean in her. Or maybe he did.

Was that what got us together, each wanting to get even any way we can and seeing the same thing in the other?

“The weather’s better in the high-rise district,” Jake tossed over his shoulder as they drove through clammy fog.

“That’s nice.” Charity sat back with her own thoughts. Strange thoughts with a disturbing familiarity, like ugly cousins met for the first time who resembled her too closely for comfort.