"James Morrow - Auspicious Eggs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

tiny eyes, thin lips, hawk's beak of a nose -- pleases him. Now he begins the
immersion, sinking Madelaine Dunfey to her skullcap ... her ears ... cheeks
... mouth ... eyes.
"No!" screams Angela.
As the baby's nose goes under, mute cries spurt from her lips: bubbles
inflated with bewilderment and pain. "Madelaine Dunfey," Connie intones,
holding the infant down, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The bubbles break the surface. The fluid pours
into the infant's lungs. Her silent screams cease, but she still puts up a
fight.
"No! Please! No!"
A full minute passes, marked by the rhythmic shuffling of the
congregation and the choked sobs of the mother. A second minute -- a third --
and finally the body stops moving, a mere husk, no longer home to Madelaine
Dunfey's indestructible soul.
"No!"
The Sacrament of Terminal Baptism, Connie knows, is rooted in both
logic and history. Even today, he can recite verbatim the preamble to the
Fourth Lateran Council's _Pastoral Letter on the Rights of the Unconceived._
("Throughout her early years, Holy Mother Church tirelessly defended the
Rights of the Born. Then, as the iniquitous institution of abortion spread
across Western Europe and North America, she undertook to secure the Rights of
the Unborn. Now, as a new era dawns for the Church and her servants, she must
make even greater efforts to propagate the gift of life everlasting,
championing the Rights of the Unconceived through a Doctrine of Affirmative
Fertility.") The subsequent sentence has always given Connie pause. It stopped
him when he was a seminarian. It stops him today. ("This Council therefore
avers that, during a period such as that in which we find ourselves, when God
has elected to discipline our species through a Greenhouse Deluge and its
concomitant privations, a society can commit no greater crime against the
future than to squander provender on individuals congenitally incapable of
procreation.") Quite so. Indeed. And yet Connie has never performed a terminal
baptism without misgivings.
He scans the faithful. Valerie Gallogher, his nephews' _zaftig_
kindergarten teacher, seems on the verge of tears. Keye Sung frowns. Teresa
Curtoni shudders. Michael Hines moans softly. Stephen O'Rourke and his wife
both wince.
"We give thanks, most merciful Father" -- Connie lifts the corpse from
the water -- "that it pleases you to regenerate this infant and take her unto
your bosom." Placing the dripping flesh on the altar, he leans toward Lorna
Dunfey and lays his palm on Merribell's brow. "Angela Dunfey, name this child
of yours."
"M-M-Merribell S-Siobhan..." With a sharp reptilian hiss, Angela wrests
Merribell from her cousin and pulls the infant to her breast. "Merribell
Siobhan Dunfey!"
The priest steps forward, caressing the wisp of tawny hair sprouting
from Merribell's cranium. "We welcome this sinner -- "
Angela whirls around and, still sheltering her baby, leaps from the
podium to the aisle -- the very aisle down which Connie hopes one day to see
her parade in prelude to receiving the Sacrament of Qualified Monogamy.