Eagle Eye by Hortense Calisher Page B

way—you’re only a supplier.”
    “What a fate. Well, nice to have met you again, Bunty, we must get together.”
    “See you at the Mowzel.”
    “That lovely place. But we needn’t go so far.” He slouched across the room to a Rothko, slid the panel aside, and slipped out. Buddy watched, scowling.
    “I think he has an effeminate interest in you, Bunt.”
    He was touched. Buddy could be as naive as Maeve. “Not to worry.”
    “Where’d that come from?”
    “It’s English. Like the Mowzel.”
    “What’s the Mowzel?” Buddy said sullenly. “One of those haunts?”
    “I made it up.”
    Maeve laughed.
    A bad pause then. Why should that be? Maybe they weren’t looking to him to cheer them. Maybe the dog did it now.
    “Chickie, Bunt,” his father said suddenly. “Here come the cops.”
    The two priests were coming their way.
    “You sicked ’em on me.” Wasn’t like his father, to play both ends through the middle. He reached up and slid the yarmulka, still on his own head, forward and sideways. Half and half.
    “Father Melchior, my son Quentin,” Maeve said. Quentin. Was she so impressed with the cloth after all, then? Or only with the father himself, a huge man with an oversized, fresco face. She looked inquiringly up at the other one. “Father always brings us somebody new.”
    “Archie Dunham, ma’am,” the second one said, looking down even on Bunty, from an elegant, yellow-skinned face that sat like a finial on his seven-foot bones. “But I reckon your son and I already know each other.”
    This time it was true. “You were graduating the year I came.” He’d been the basketball star at Bunt’s last prep school. And their star black. “You ordained already?”
    “Seminarian. Like you?”
    “What? Oh, you mean my hat? Just my at-home hat. You know, like a smoking jacket.”
    “Smoke?” Archie offered his pack.
    “Thanks, I don’t.” He laughed at himself, and up at Archie, much too hard. How explain his elation? Fancy meeting you, anybody, here. Maybe the town had begun.
    “You were swimming team, weren’t you?”
    “Second string.”
    “Hear you’re going to be an architect,” Father Melchior put in. “I was a curator before I took orders. In Denmark. Hear you been in Bruges and Amsterdam. See any of my favorite churches? See St. Sauveur?”
    Clearly they knew everything about him. Maybe Archie had even been sent.
    “No, guess I only saw girls.” He reached out to touch Buddy’s arm. “Not to worry.”
    He took advantage of the pause. “One I knew in London, her father wrote a history of the Vatican.” Why did he always feel he had to talk Catholic to Catholics?
    “I think I know that book” Melchior said. “Came out in the fifties. And of the author. Very old family in the church, they are. Since Henry the Eighth.”
    “Uh-huh. Lots of yummy childhoods, they talk about.”
    They’d talked about hers all night, in the family house on the edge of Paddington. With her, it had been like foreplay; every time he touched a further zone, some old nurse or old goody gardener had jumped out. None of her family was home though, and toward dawn, when she’d been finishing a raunchy tale of what the girls had once dreamed up at St. Hilda’s, he’d had reasonable hopes. Then the family sheep dog had walked in, a ringer for Peter Pan’s, and the night was over. Always woke her for breakfast, the dear pet did—ever since she was a child.
    “I think we use that book at the seminary,” Archie said.
    “Approved by the Vatican, I understand,” Bunty said. “But banned in Ireland.” He hadn’t made that up, just retained it. Hopefully. He looked down. Maeve was gone again. It was like a tic.
    For the second time he watched her take up the key at her waist, rest her hand on the knob for a moment, then enter, closing the door’s perfectly bent line behind her, her shadow diffusing behind the plants. In that moment before, holding the knob, she bowed her head—could she be