But she couldn’t have done it without Joseph. And that’s why he’d been chosen, the marriage, as they’d all been then, arranged, made by their parents, the young man timid as herself, with as little desire, more brother than husband, more good friend than brother.
They had never touched each other. Something beyond purity and beyond aversion, too. (What am I? she wondered. What’s Joseph?) It had been comfortable to think that they lived under some proscription. It was, she knew, what the world thought. But nothing had been proscribed. The fact was that Joseph was frightened, the fact was that she was.
(She was too old now, of course. But God wasn’t. Not Him, not the Lord. He was the Creator and He’d been around the block a few times. With Leda, with Semele, with Alcmene, with Ino and Europa and Danaë. In all His kinky avatars and golden bough Being and beginnings. He was a resourceful lover and came at you as holy livestock or moved in like a front of gilded weather. Who knew but what there wasn’t life in the old dog yet?)
So the Queen of Heaven and Joseph, her consort, lived at court under a sort of house arrest. Coming and going in politest society, leashless as God Himself, or Christ, or the Holy Ghost too, given free rein, carte blanche, but neither of them ever testing the waters of that freedom.
They said miracles still happened, that from time to time her statues wept. Why not? She knew how they felt.
She summoned a page.
“Ma’am?”
“You’re the new boy,” said the Holy Mother.
“I’m Flanoy, Ma’am.”
“Flanoy, yes. How do you like Heaven, Flanoy?” The cherub flushed. (More places one must not stare, Mary thought. New parts one must avoid. Where the wings were joined to the back. The space they fit into between the shoulder blades when they were retracted. The complicated secret parts of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels, saints, the elect, and all the ordinary saved. Stigmata. One must not look at stigmata. The inner edge of the nimbus. The fabulous scalare of God.) “Not used to us yet?”
“I miss my friends,” Flanoy said. “I miss my parents.”
“Ah,” said the Virgin. “Well, they must be very proud you’re here.”
“Yes, Ma’am. If they know.”
“They’re not believers?” Flanoy shifted uneasily. The coverts of his wings thickened with color. “It’s all right,” said the Virgin Mary, “I’ve no say in these things.”
“I don’t know, Ma’am,” Flanoy said.
She wanted to say something else to him. She liked to be on good terms with the help. “Well you mustn’t be frightened,” she said. “Heaven is quite nice really.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Flanoy said uncertainly, “it’s just that—”
“Yes?”
“It’s so high.”
The Holy Virgin smiled. “Yes. Heaven is very high,” she said. “Play something for us please, Flanoy.”
“Play?”
“Your music.”
“I’m only in the second book of Suzuki.”
“Play something for us while we nap,” said the Virgin Mother gently.
The child raised his fiddle.
Quiz, in Hell, heard the first faint strains of “Sheep May Safely Graze” and looked in the direction of the music. The others, unaware of it, flared by like tracers, like comets, like shooting stars, like some unquenched astronomy white with reentry. Look at them, Quiz thought. Like teams of horses. Runaways, their harness on fire. No longer in pain himself, he could enjoy the spectacle, their aurora borealtic frenzy and lasered essence charming as fireworks to the appreciative ex-groundskeeper. “Hey,” he called, “hey. You guys are beautiful, you know? You look like a World Premier.” He laughed. “You look like fucking Chinese New Year’s. Come on,” he said when they snarled at him, “you got to stop and smell the flowers.” One of the damned, infuriated, came raging to embrace him, uselessly attempting to ignite him. “No you don’t,” Quiz said, “it won’t work. I’m asbestos now, I’m cool as a cucumber.”
“You’re a dud,” the tormented man screamed, “you’re a dud,” he said, helplessly weeping.
“Yeah,” Quiz said, not without kindness, “I’m a dud. I won’t go off.”
The lost soul beat at him with his fiery fists, then, looking at Quiz with wonder, opened his hands and touched him, not with hatred now but as if struck by a sudden solace. “What?” Quiz asked. “What?”
The man smiled and continued to hold him, relief moving across his face like sunset. “You’re cool,” he said. “You’re cool. I can douse myself in you. He’s cool,” he shouted. “My hands are cool where I touch him.”
“Hey,” Quiz said, “hey.”
Others moved toward him, groping for space on his body, desperate to get at least a finger on him. And “Hey,” Quiz called, “hey. There isn’t enough of me. I ain’t any Hell’s olly olly okshen free. Let go. Hey. Let go. Hey, get me out of here,” he cried, and suddenly the music was louder in his head and he felt himself floating free of Hell. “I’m being translated,” he called as he rose above them, their heat lending him lift, loft, the demon aerodynamics of Hell. He rose. He rose and rose. Climbing the Gothic spaces of the Underworld, floating up beyond the eaves of Hell, carried high impossible distances, escaped as a balloon from the grip of a child.
His stepson had already seen him.
“Pop,” Christ said, “how are you?”
The old man shrugged and the boy embraced him, kissed his cheek. “You need anything, Pop? Are they taking care of you?”
“What I need I got,” he said.
“So,” said the stepson cheerfully, “what’s doing, Pop?” The old man made a sly deprecative gesture. “You should have been up there on the Cross with me,” he kidded. “No fooling, Pop, I mean it. You’ve got miles on me long-suffering-wise.”
Joseph looked at him steadily, sizing him up, measuring him as he might, in the old days, have measured wood.
“Say it,” said the stepson. “Shoot.”
“Why should I say it? I said it already a million times. Why should I say it? You like hearing it so much?”
“A million this, a million that. What is it, Pop? That the only number you know?”
“I’m a humble fella. A humble fella says a million he’s got in mind maybe six or seven.”
“Humble shmumble,” said Jesus.
“Tinhorn,” said Joseph.
“There you go, Pop. I knew you’d get round to it.”
“You started.”
“Me?” the Christ said innocently.
“You. You. With your vaudeville Yiddish, your Pop’s and What’s doing’s, your mocky mockery. You, Tinhorn, you.”
“Come on, Pop. Look around. Be a little realistic please.”
“Get your legs fixed.”
“Here we go,” Christ said wearily.
“Get your legs fixed, take a therapy for your hands, you shouldn’t go in the streets like you have on boxing gloves.”
“Pop.”
“You wanted to hear it? So hear. You ain’t him.”
“That’s not what He says.”
“When the Holy One, Blessed be He, makes a joke He shakes the world with His laughter.”
“I’m him, Pop.”
“Sure, and I’m the contractor who built this place.”