A Density of Souls (7 page)

The terrace was larger than the entire suite and the bellhop informed them in broken English that heads of state sometimes held banquets on it.

After his mother had drifted off to sleep, Stephen would rise from his bed and pad silently to the sliding deck door.

From the edge of the terrace, Stephen breathed in the city from a safe distance. Five stories below, the melodic pump of European dance music drew Stephen’s attention to the throng of Roman teenagers gathered on the Spanish Steps, jiggling to their handheld stereos.

Their allegiances shifted easily, boys and girls drifting from group to group. Their laughter echoed up the Hassler’s façade. Boys groped girls visibly, even from the height of five stories.

Herded with the other tourists through the Vatican Museum, Stephen and Monica wound their way down the corridors leading them through a labyrinthine series of frescoed rooms. Stephen became frustrated. And then all of a sudden, as they trudged through a single doorway that seemed to promise another empty library and unimpressive frescoes, they landed beneath the ceiling of one of the greatest works of art ever painted. Monica watched the reactions of surprise all around her as, one by one, the members of their group found themselves stepping into the Sistine Chapel.

Stephen moved deep into the crowd. He found a clear spot on the The Falling Impossible

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floor and lay down on his back to stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling with a wonder he had last felt watching summer sunsets with his three best friends.

A security guard had to ask him three times to get up off the floor before he complied, his eyes still on Adam’s pointed finger.

At night, Stephen and Monica descended the Spanish Steps. To steady her, Monica would reach one arm out awkwardly and Stephen, his mother’s well-trained child, would take it and support her without being asked. While exploring the winding streets, Stephen would suddenly feel his mother’s hand in his, and he would leave it there. He was the escort—the male Conlin who had not died.

As Stephen tossed a penny over his shoulder into the Fontana di Trevi, he caught the open gaze of a beautiful Italian boy sitting amid the guitar-playing students next to the fountain. The boy looked at Stephen with what Stephen realized was fascination tinged by lust.

Jeff Haugh saw Carolyn Traulain’s obituary in The Times-Picayune. He was working that summer as a stock boy in his father’s office supply company and was leafing through a discarded copy of that day’s paper left in the stockroom. He sat sweating and smelly on top of a stack of shipping crates staring dumbly at the brief paragraph sketching his old drama teacher’s entire life, noting her few survivors. He knew he couldn’t attend her funeral. She had died thinking the worst of him and it was now too late to correct the misunderstanding that occurred outside her office.

He got a pair of scissors out of the supervisor’s office and clipped the obituary from the paper.

left looked up Stephen’s address in the Cannon directory before driving to the darkened, shuttered Conlin residence on the corner of Third and Chestnut Streets in the Garden District. He slid the clipping into the mailbox attached to the wrought-iron front gate and noted how much bigger Stephen’s house was than his own. A peculiar sensation burned in his stomach as he held the spokes of the front gate with both hands.

The night before they were to board a flight for New York, Stephen asked Monica how she had met his father.

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The question surprised her. “At a streetcar stop. I told you,” she said flatly.

They were eating dinner at the Hassler’s rooftop restaurant. Monica had allowed Stephen several glasses of red wine, which had slightly stained his teeth and tongue and left him peculiarly curious.

“I know that. But I mean . . . what happened after that? You just met and then what?”

With her food untouched on her plate, and the skyline of Rome sparkling behind her son, Monica felt weighted with the responsibility of being Stephen’s sole source of information about his father. Her words would shape Stephen’s memory of him. A daunting prospect, when she felt he might do better without any memory of his father at all.

“He rode the streetcar to school. I rode it to work. We met one day at the streetcar stop. Well, we didn’t really meet. He saw me and I saw him looking at me. So when we boarded, he walked by my seat and dropped a piece of paper into my lap. It was a poem. A very sweet one . . .”

Actually, the poem had baffled and offended Monica. On that afternoon in 1964, Jeremy had been staring at her as Monica attempted to dig a cigarette out of her tattered leather satchel. At nineteen, Monica interpreted “Angel of Smoke” as an insult about good girls and nico-tine.

“What did it say?” Stephen asked.

“It was about how beautiful I was,” Monica responded flippantly, taking her first bite of food.

Stephen furrowed his brow.

“It was a love poem, Stephen,” she said.

“What kind of love poem?”

Monica went silent. She recalled the words as they had been written in Jeremy’s severe cursive:

her eyes cut knives

through the smoke she breathes,

a dragon mistaken for a witch.

What beauty waits to come

From an angel hidden in her smoke.

When Stephen looked into his lap, embarrassed, Monica realized she had been silently mumbling the words of the poem. He changed the subject.

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• • •

That night, after Stephen had drifted into sleep, the memories he had stirred in his mother came to life. Monica lay awake in her double bed next to Stephen’s, listening to her son’s slow and easy breaths punctuating the sounds of Rome winding down into the deeper part of night.

Jeremy Conlin was the first person not to laugh when Monica told him she had been named after a moon.

Monica was working the candy counter at Smith’s Drug Store on a hot, sticky afternoon in June of 1964, doling out scoops of ice cream that was practically milk. Other girls were sauntering in, sporting longer hair and bared midriffs, sashaying over the dirt-caked linoleum floors with a freedom Monica envied. Jeremy made his entrance at around three o’clock in the afternoon—the moment when the day seemed interminably stuck and Monica was forced to polish the counter furiously to rid herself of the panicked feeling that the day would never end. As Jeremy perched on one of the stools, it seemed that the counter was the only thing in the entire store that had been touched by human hand. It glistened with care, courtesy of Monica Mitchell, her blonde hair spilling over her face and threatening to conceal her ferociously blue eyes.

Jeremy slid a second poem into the path of Monica’s rag. She slapped the cloth down with exaggerated annoyance, unfolded the piece of paper, and began to read. Jeremy pressed his stomach against the edge of the counter, looking dizzy with a joy that seemed guiltless and earned.

Monica read the new poem without concentrating on a single word.

She had to keep her eyes off of Jeremy’s gaze. He was obviously tortur-ing her. She could tell he was one of the well-heeled Garden District boys. Darkly handsome, olive skin, undeniably attractive broad frame.

He obviously thought he was better than she, simply because from birth he was rich enough to fend off fever and rats.

“You look like someone who has watched people die,” Jeremy finally said in a low voice. She glanced up from the poem.

“People who’ve watched people die”—his tone was almost clinical—“they aren’t as easily distracted by loud noises. Things don’t bother them as easily.”

“My mother died last year.” Monica could almost not hear the sound of her own words.

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“I’m sorry . . .”

“She was . . . She was a drunk,” Monica said evenly. “She didn’t want to go to the hospital, so I watched her, if that’s what you mean!”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“She used to throw up in the bed and I had to clean it up, if that’s what you mean!”

Monica’s voice had tripled in volume. A customer threw a startled glance in their direction.

“I didn’t want to—” Jeremy stammered.

“Then just what the hell are you doing here, then?” she hissed.

Jeremy eased back down onto the stool, looking defeated, something Monica needed to see. Her hand rose to her neck. She found she would repeat this gesture often, each time Jeremy pierced some thing inside of her.

“What’s your name?” he asked quietly.

Monica decided to test him. “My mother named me after a moon,”

she said flatly.

She was prepared for any response: The cock of the head that hinted at some lunacy in her lineage, or the look of amused surprise that told her she lived outside of a big joke she didn’t get, possibly because she had never been privileged to hear the punch line in full.

“What kind of a moon?” he asked.

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T
hree weeks after they attended Carolyn Traulain’s funeral, Monica bought Stephen a car. He did not yet have his driver’s license but he did have an overwhelming need to drive. Stephen wept so openly at Carolyn’s service that when he looked up through blurred eyes he realized to his horror that some mourners were paying more attention to him than Carolyn’s wig-crowned body in the open casket.

The Jeep Grand Cherokee was delivered with a giant red ribbon on its hood to the corner of Chestnut and Third Street, where it sat for three hours as Monica waited for Stephen to emerge from the house and stumble upon it.

Stephen first saw the Jeep as David Carter dropped by his house to pick him up for a coffee date. Stephen slid silently into the passenger seat of his teacher’s station wagon, his eyes on the Jeep. To break the silence, David asked whose car it was. Stephen answered that his nextdoor neighbor must have bought a new Jeep for his wife. When he looked up, he saw Andrew Darby’s Bronco coming down Third. As David pulled away from the corner, he watched as the Bronco slowed slightly next to the Jeep. Before David rounded the corner, he saw Greg and Meredith staring openly at the Jeep with its garish red bow.

Stephen realized the Jeep was his.

David bought Stephen an iced coffee. Stephen could tell he was trying to atone for what had happened the day they had discussed Lord of the Flies almost a year earlier. The teacher talked about his experience in college theatre, and gradually Stephen realized that the coffee date had a purpose: David was letting him know that he had been picked to replace Carolyn as the head of theatre. Stephen hardly listened, watching the teacher’s nervousness spell itself out in darting glances and hands that repeatedly embraced his coffee mug.

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“Carolyn was quite a person and I’m sure she was quite a director,”

David said.

“She was really great,” Stephen offered blandly.

“She wasn’t someone you wanted to mess with, was she? I mean, she was really . . . Don’t tell any of the faculty I said this . . . but she didn’t put up with bullshit, did she?”

There was a long pause. Stephen watched a harried woman rap her fingers on the counter, waiting impatiently for her cappuccino. He halfheartedly wondered if Mr. Carter was going to apologize for doing nothing the afternoon some student slapped a brand on his book bag for all the school to see.

Instead, he said, “Well, I’m looking forward to the coming year. I think it should be really great. And wherever Carolyn is, I think she’s looking forward to it, too.”

He smiled. Stephen glared at him. “And where is Carolyn, exactly?”

Stephen asked.

“I have some belief in a life after this one,” David Carter managed.

Stephen nodded slightly. “I don’t believe in God.”

There was another empty pause. David broke it by rising from his chair. Stephen followed. On the ride back to Stephen’s house, they hardly spoke. They rounded the corner and discovered Monica with one hand poised on the hood of the new Jeep.

“I can’t drive,” Stephen mumbled, as he climbed out of David’s car.

After his new drama teacher pulled off down the street, Stephen hesitantly fingered the enamel. Monica stood firm on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips. “I’m going to teach you. In this.” She gestured to the Jeep.

Stephen looked back at her, startled.

“You deserve a car. How’s that, Stephen? Can you allow yourself to be excited now?” she barked. “Oh shit . . .” she whispered, as Stephen bowed his head with the first sign of tears. Monica curved one arm around her son’s waist and set her chin into the nape of his neck. She held him.

“All right, all right,” she whispered. “I didn’t raise you Catholic. You don’t have to atone for everything.”

Stephen’s laughter punched through his tears. “It’s a beautiful car, Mother,” he said with forced determination as he slipped out of her grip. He studied the Jeep again, walking in a slow circle around the The Falling Impossible

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sparkling vehicle until his mother smiled with triumph. Stephen knew she thought she had brought on his tears.

Kate Duchamp decided to have a party. Her mother and father were in the Mediterranean on a cruise, and Kate had free rein of the four bedroom Victorian, complete with swimming pool and wet bar.

Meredith Ducote would help Kate set up. In Kate’s words, Meredith

“knew stuff about drinking”.

It was an August evening. The air was thick and heavy. By eight o’clock, the street outside Kate’s house was clogged with sport utility vehicles and luxury sedans borrowed from parents. Jeff Haugh arrived driving his Honda Civic. Cameron Stern—the closest Jeff had to a pal on the team—had pressured Jeff into going. As Cameron explained it, they were both obligated to go because they were football players. But Jeff knew that Cameron not only needed a ride but was participating in a pool of senior football players who had placed bets on who could sleep with the youngest Cannon girl. Jeff had bowed out of entering the pool, but he had been pressured into attending the party nonethe-less.

More people showed up than Kate expected. Jeff found a corner in the kitchen, sipped his beer, and watched with mild amusement as Kate had the requisite panic attack before downing three shots of Southern Comfort that Cameron poured for her, before the two of them disappeared upstairs into Kate’s parents’ bedroom.