CHAPTER 10
THE GALA
POV: RONAN
“Say the rule, dove.”
“No one touches me.”
“And?”
She turns from the car window. Streetlights slide over her face in bars of gold. “And if someone does, I don’t say God bless you.”
Theo, driving, coughs into his fist.
I look at her.
I sent three dresses up for tonight. Black, black, and midnight blue. She came down the stairs at seven in a fourth.
Red.
Deep red, the color of the ribbon on the box I left on her pillow.
Long sleeves. Bare shoulders. A neckline cut straight across her collarbones, fitted to the waist and then falling to the floor like wine poured out of a glass.
She found it at the back of the closet, behind the coats, where Rosa hung it in October and I forgot it existed.
My veil over her hair, pinned at the crown, falling down her back like a mantilla.
And the bite on her throat. Yellow at the edges, still dark at the center. Above the red, it looks like a brand.
“You didn’t cover it,” I say.
“You didn’t ask me to.”
“Would you have?”
She looks back out the window. “No.”
***
At the Copley, the doorman takes my coat. Hers, I take myself.
The coat-check alcove is small and warm and smells like wet wool. The girl behind the counter looks at us, and then at the ceiling.
I stand behind my wife and slide the black velvet off her shoulders.
Slowly.
The red silk. Her bare shoulders. The veil falling down her back. The bite on her throat. Under the lobby chandelier, with three hundred people on the other side of the doors, I let myself look.
She holds very still.
I bend my head until my mouth is beside her ear. Close enough that the lace touches my lips.
“One more rule,” I say.
“You said four.”
“I said four you’d hear.” I breathe in. Vanilla. “If anyone touches you in there, you won’t have to call me. You won’t have to look for me. I’ll already be walking.”
She turns her head a fraction. Her cheek almost touches my mouth.
“And if you touch me?”
I hand the coat to the girl. She gives me a brass token. I put it in my pocket.
“Then you won’t want me to stop,” I say.
Her breath catches. I hear it.
I offer her my arm.
***
The Copley’s ballroom is gold leaf and mirrors and three hundred people who think they’re important.
The diocese throws this every year on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
The Advent Gala. Bishops, donors, city councilors, two judges I own and one I’m still pricing.
A string quartet in the corner playing something with too many violins.
Candles in every sconce. A painted Madonna over the dais, eyes lowered, hands folded.
We walk in and the room stops.
Not all at once. It goes in a wave. The people nearest the door first. A woman in silver turns and her mouth opens.
The man beside her follows her eyes. Then the next table, and the next, the conversation dropping out like someone’s turning a dial, until even the quartet loses its place for half a bar.
Three hundred faces.
All of them on my wife.
She feels it. I feel her feel it. Her hand on my arm tightens, her chin comes up, and she walks into the silence like it belongs to her.
It does.
I take her to the head table. The Draven Foundation paid for the new roof on the cathedral last spring, so I sit where I like.
Bishop Harlan Crewe rises to meet us.
Sixty-two. Tall, silver-haired, a face that belongs in a stained-glass window, and a voice like warm milk.
Purple skullcap. A gold pectoral cross the size of my palm.
He came to my office last year to ask for the cathedral roof and thanked me afterward in a handwritten note so warm I checked it for poison.
“Ronan.” He takes my hand in both of his. “And this must be the bride. Magdalene, isn’t it? Mother Clare speaks so highly of you.”
“Your Excellency.”
She dips her head. The veil slides. Crewe’s eyes go to her throat, to the bite, and stay there one second longer than a bishop’s should.
I note it.
“Married so quickly,” he says, sitting. “In Advent, no less. The Church does love a surprise.”
“So does my husband,” Mae says.
Crewe laughs. It’s a good laugh. People turn to look at it.
***
Dinner is five courses I don’t taste.
I watch the room. Exits: two doors behind the dais, three at the back, the service corridor past the quartet. Theo against the east wall with a club soda. Two of mine at the bar. Nobody from Southie.
Not yet.
Crewe talks. He talks to Mae across the tablecloth like she’s the only person in the ballroom. About St. Agnes. About vocation. About how young she is, how brave, how quickly a life can change.
She answers him. Politely. Yes, Your Excellency. No, Your Excellency. Hands folded on the tablecloth.
Under the tablecloth, I put my hand on her knee.
She goes still.
Then, where no one can see, she opens her knees.
An inch. No more.
It’s enough.
The silk is heavy and cool. I gather it slowly in my fingers until I find the slit at the side of the skirt that I didn’t know was there and am very grateful for. Then my hand is on her bare thigh, and her skin is warm, and she forgets to answer the bishop.
“—don’t you think, child?”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, Your Excellency.”
I slide higher.
She’s wearing something under the dress. Lace. The white set from the second drawer. I know because I chose it.
I ease it aside.
She’s wet.
I stop. Only for a second. Only to let her know that I know.
Her fork is in her hand. She sets it down very carefully on the edge of her plate.
Crewe leans in, lowering his voice. “I only say this because I care for the souls of our young women, Magdalene. If there is ever anything—anything at all—that troubles your conscience, the Church has remedies.”
I stroke her once. Slow. Up the center of her.
Her breath catches. Crewe takes it for emotion.
“A marriage entered in haste,” he says gently, “can always be examined. Doors that close can be opened. Come see me. My office is always open to you.”
His office.
I push one finger into her.
Her hand closes on the napkin in her lap and crushes it. Her face doesn’t change. Her face is perfect: polite, lowered eyes, a faint pink across the cheekbones that anyone would read as a young wife’s modesty.
Under the table, she clenches around my finger like she wants to keep it.
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” she says. Her voice is almost steady. “That’s very kind.”
I find her clit with my thumb and circle it. Slow. Patient. The way I learned her on Thursday night.
The quartet swings into something with a long, rising line. Waiters clear the fish.
“The Church,” Crewe says, “is always kind to those who come to her.”
I press.
She comes.
She comes at the head table of the Advent Gala under a painting of the Virgin, with a bishop’s hand six inches from her wine glass and three hundred people at her back, and nobody sees it but me.
Her thighs lock around my wrist. Her eyes close for one second, two. Her lips part and nothing comes out, not a sound, and a flush runs down from her face to the edge of the red silk and disappears beneath it.
Then she opens her eyes, picks up her wine glass, and takes a small, steady sip.
“Excuse me,” she says to Crewe. “It’s very warm in here.”
I take my hand back. I put two fingers to my mouth like a man considering the wine list.
Crewe smiles at her, benevolent, and then at me, and I smile back.
***
The dessert plates are going down when Liam Kavanagh crosses the room.
I see him at the back doors first. Thirty, his father’s red hair and none of his father’s patience, a rented tux, a small white box in his left hand. Alone. That’s either stupid or a message.
With Conor, it’s a message.
He comes straight to the head table. Two of mine drift in from the bar. Theo moves off the wall.
I lift a finger. They stop.
“Mr. Draven.” Liam doesn’t offer his hand. “Your Excellency.”
Crewe inclines his head. Something passes between them that could be nothing.
Liam turns to my wife.
“Mrs. Draven.” He smiles. It’s his father’s smile, all teeth and no eyes. “My father’s sorry he couldn’t make it. He wanted you to have a wedding present.”
He sets the box beside her plate.
Then he puts his right hand on her bare shoulder.
Easy. Friendly. Fingers spread over the curve of it, thumb resting on her collarbone just below the bite.
Mae doesn’t move.
“Congratulations,” Liam says, and squeezes.
Every man at my table stops breathing.
Mae looks up at him. Down at his hand. Back up.
She doesn’t say God bless you.
“Take your hand off me,” she says, very quietly, “or my husband will.”
Liam laughs. But he takes it off.
“Open it,” he says. “Dad picked it out himself.”
She pulls the white ribbon. Inside, on white tissue, lies a slip of cardboard. A printed stub, the kind they hand out at the freight gates. Stamped and dated.
PASSENGER: M. HOLLOWAY
DEC 24 — CONLEY TERMINAL — BERTH 11
My terminal. My berth.
Liam watches her read it. Then he looks at me.
“Holloway,” he says. “Dad never was good with new names.”
He walks away. Nobody stops him. I don’t let them.
Mae sets the stub back in its tissue. Her hands are steady. She closes the lid.
Crewe clears his throat. “What an unusual gift.”
“Isn’t it,” I say.
I watch Liam Kavanagh cross the ballroom. The way he rolls his shoulders. The way he flexes his right hand as he goes, like it’s still warm from her skin.
I watch him all the way out the door.
Liam Kavanagh touched my wife with his right hand.
I’ve always been good with right hands.