Charisma (17 page)

Still, the prostitutes gave her heart. They looked her up and down in disbelief, checking out her jeans and her parka and her clunky L. L. Bean hunting shoes—baggy jeans now, because the one piece of shopping she had done since she got back to New Haven was to replace the tight ones Dan had bought for her. When she was a third of the way up Congress Avenue, one of the girls came up to her and said, “You ought to get out of here. You ought to get out of here now,” and Susan wanted to say something just as pertinent, to find a way through the cosmetic shell. It was more nun stuff, and she knew it, but it was nun stuff that seemed necessary. Surely this girl, with her small undeveloped breasts and her skin as smooth and unmarked as an infant’s, didn’t want to be standing out here in the subzero cold in less clothing than most people wore to lunch at a beach resort, waiting for men. Then the moment passed and was gone. The girl stepped back into the line and functionally disappeared. A moment after she’d stepped away, Susan could no longer have picked her out of the lineup.

Her guilt at that didn’t last very long. It was taken over by fear, and then by confusion. She almost missed Amora Street, because in her mind it was a turn off a dead stretch of Congress Avenue. Two hours from now, there might even be a dead stretch of Congress Avenue. Half an hour might be enough to leach the life out of the place. At quarter after six, it was still spurting blood.

Susan never noticed the beginning of the burned-out buildings, because they were hidden behind a road show. A pimp had set his girls out on the sidewalk like the Rockette line at Rockefeller Center. They were kicking and laughing and blowing white breath into the cold, while he sat on the curb picking his teeth with the edge of a matchbook and flexing the tattoo on his arm. In the weird light, Susan couldn’t see what the tattoo was of, but the pimp could see her. He spit into the sides of her boots as she passed and said, “Too fucking old.”

The turn for Amora Street was right there, and she missed it. She walked into a ring of men huddled around a fire they had built in a garbage can. God only knew where the garbage can had come from—Congress Avenue didn’t seem to have any—and God only knew what had been in it. The fire, smelled funny. The men had all shot up, or smoked something. Susan didn’t know enough about drugs to tell. She just knew they were all falling asleep in spite of their thin clothes, and some of them were giggling.

Once she got beyond them, she found she was in terra incognita. The landscape in front of her was not burned out but wild. If it had ever been part of the city of New Haven, only an urban archeologist could tell. She backed up, spun around, and headed toward where she had come. She even made herself stop paying attention to the people and start paying attention to the signs. She found Amora Street where the Rockettes started up again.

Standing on the corner, looking into the dark, she found the burned-out buildings she had been looking for. They were out there, in the side streets, like gangrenous limbs on an otherwise living body.

“Jesus Christ,” one of the Rockettes said, right into her ear, “if it isn’t Polly-wally-anna-all-the-day.”

That was when she realized the Rockettes were men.

Ten minutes later, Susan was pushing the front doorbell at Damien House, looking back at Congress Avenue through the black around her and wondering what she thought she was doing. The place looked as dead as it had on the day she had come to see it with Andy, just when she thought it ought to be jumping, lit up and ready to take in all those children—like the girl who had spoken to her in kindness back on the Avenue—who were desperately looking for a way into a different life. Then she began to feel like the worst kind of fool—a do-gooder fool, with a head full of nun stuff and naive certainties about what the People want. Who was she to tell that girl how to live her life? Who was she to assume that girl didn’t already like her life? Who was she—

She might have given up the whole thing, turned and run and fled back to Edge Hill Road, but she had been leaning against the buzzer the whole time. The dim light above her head was joined by two more, turned on by someone inside. Susan jumped at the little click the lights made and turned to see someone behind the door, a tall, spare, middle-aged woman she didn’t recognize, in a robe. Obviously she had gotten this poor woman out of bed and, just as obviously, that made it impossible for her to go. Instead, she stepped back and waited while the woman opened the door.

“Excuse me,” Susan said. “I didn’t realize I’d be waking anyone up. I assumed—”

The middle-aged woman was already waving this away. “I’m supposed to be woken up,” she said. “Come in and sit down if you’ve got a mind to.” Then she looked Susan up and down very carefully, nodded thoughtfully to herself, and added, “Sister.”

Her name was Marietta O’Brien, and the reason Susan hadn’t seen her on the day she came down with Andy was that Marietta had been out shopping. “That’s what I do,” Marietta said, moving around the kitchen, getting coffee for them both. “I shop. I clean. I go out to the mayor’s office and pick up forms, or the welfare office for that matter. What do you do, if you’re not a Sister, I mean?”

Susan took a drag on her cigarette, put it in the ashtray Marietta had given her, and sighed. She had gone from fear and elation to comfort and confusion. She was no longer entirely sure what she was doing here. Her penance for this state of mental disorganization was Marietta O’Brien.

“I don’t do anything at the moment,” she said. “I live with my brothers in the house where we grew up. I read a lot. I’ve started to smoke too much.”

“Nobody smokes anymore,” Marietta O’Brien said. “What do you want? You gonna come down here and volunteer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about volunteering. I don’t even know what volunteers do.”

“Get themselves killed,” Marietta said, “or mugged anyway. I’ve been mugged half a dozen times since I got here. Once I got mugged on the back porch of this very house, by a boy who ought to have known better. He lived here three years, for the Lord’s sake, before he went back out into that.”

“Why do you stay?”

Marietta looked surprised. “I have to stay,” she said. “Everybody has to stay. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you know what I mean,” Marietta said. “I think that’s the only reason some ex-nun would wind up on our doorstep at six o’clock in the morning.”

“Actually,” Susan started to say, “it was six-thirty—”

She never got the words out. Marietta had made some coffee and poured Susan a mug of it. The mug was made of thick white ceramic and cracked. Marietta had gotten milk from the refrigerator and sugar from the cabinet, too, and put them down, with a bent spoon, at Susan’s elbow. Now, in the middle of Susan’s automatic explanation, she stopped in her tracks and stared at the ceiling above her head.

“There,” she said, “that’s Father Tom. If Father Tom’s up, the rest of them will be too, in a minute.”

Then she turned and marched out the kitchen door, into the bowels of the house, leaving Susan alone.

Susan wondered if that was going to be the end of it—if she would drink her coffee in solitude, put the things she had used into the sink, and leave by the back door, never talking to anyone at Damien House who could give her any answers.

She was still wondering that, ten minutes later—and even deciding it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, since she didn’t know what questions she wanted to ask—when the kitchen door opened again. The man who came in was small and stiff and very Irish, and still looked as wrong to Susan as he had the first time she had seen him. Susan wanted Father Tom Burne to be charismatic, tall and strong and wide. Looking “straight out of the Baltimore Catechism,” as Andy had put it, like Barry Fitzgerald playing some immigrant Irish priest, didn’t quite do it.

It was a train of thought so intrinsically embarrassing, it made Susan incapable of looking Father Burne in the face. She stared into her coffee and missed the quick sharp shake of his head, the decisive gesture of recognition, with which he ended his examination of her. She had the feeling he was staring at her, but she didn’t look up.

After a while he said, “It’s Susan Murphy, isn’t it? Dan and Andy Murphy’s sister. You were here the other day.”

Now Susan did look up. She felt she had to. She was a little startled to see that Father Tom had taken the seat across from her, and somehow acquired a cup of coffee of his own. Had she really been avoiding any notice of him for that long?

She took another drag on her cigarette, put it quickly down into the ashtray, and said, “Yes, yes, that’s who I am. I was here the other day. I mean—”

“You were curious the other day.”

“Something like that.”

“A lot of people are curious.” Father Tom shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder what they’re curious about. It’s not as if this place is exotic.”

“It is where I come from.”

“Where you come from,” Father Tom repeated. “What did somebody tell me? Maybe it was you who told me. Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns?”

“That’s right.”

“They used to have beautiful habits. Blue. I remember them from when I was first out of the seminary. No wimple cape to clutter up the line.”

“We gave them up a long time ago. IHM out in Montecito gave them up in sixty-eight or sixty-nine.”

“You weren’t at Montecito?”

“Hobb’s Point,” Susan said. “We never completely gave up habit at all.”

“Were your modified habits blue?”

“Yes.”

Father Tom nodded. “That’s good. I’m always telling the sisters around here, and the ex-sisters, giving up the habit was the stupidest thing the nuns ever did. Bad for recruiting. Bad for the public image. Bad for everything, really. Nuns in makeup, Why did you come out?”

“What?”

“Why did you come out?” Father Tom insisted. “You must have had a reason. You were in for—what?”

“Seventeen years.”

“Seventeen years is a lifetime. You don’t walk out on that for no reason at all. Are you one of those women who won’t be happy unless the Pope lets you be ordained?”

Susan had never given a thought to female ordination—she’d had much more basic things to think about—but for some reason this comment irritated her. It was as if Father Tom Burne thought of women in favor of ordination as a different kind of animal, not-human, not-Catholic. She had half a mind to tell him that yes, she wanted to be ordained, even though the very thought of it appalled her. Being a nun had been bad enough.

She saw that her cigarette had gone out and lit another one. She saw that half her coffee remained undrunk and took a sip. The real problem, she decided, was that this felt like some kind of test.

“I think,” she told him, “that the real problem is that I walked in on it for no reason at all.”

“None?”

“Let’s just say that, back in my senior year in high school, it seemed like a good idea. I’m still not entirely sure why.”

“That was something else that was a mistake,” Father Tom said. “Asking the girls to wait a year after high school before they entered. Giving them just enough time to be corrupted by the world, and not want to enter at all.”

“You don’t believe in mature vocations?”

“I don’t believe in maturity at all. Maturity is another name for carefulness. There’s nothing careful about heeding the call of God.”

“There’s a mouse up there in the third-floor dormitory and the girls have turned it into a pet,” Marietta O’Brien said, coming through the door like a bad wind. “They’ve tied a ribbon around its neck and made a nest for it in a bureau drawer. If they hadn’t left me a present this morning, I’d have murdered them all in their sleep.”

“What kind of present?” Father Tom asked.

Marietta put her hand in the pocket of her dress—changing out of the robe must have been one of the things she was doing upstairs, besides finding mice in bureau drawers—and came out with an amber rosary with hard clear beads that glittered even in the dimness of the kitchen light. I’ve seen a rosary like that, Susan thought, but the memory was unclear and she couldn’t get hold of it.

Father Tom was turning the rosary over in his hands, frowning at it. “Where did you get it?” he asked her. “Who gave it to you?”

“It was on my pillow when I went up to change. One of the girls must have left it. That’s the only way it could have gotten in there. I must say it was a nice sight to see. It’s amazing, the way people stop giving you religious things when you stop being a nun. Even though religious things are what you need most.”

“Where were you a nun?” Susan asked her.

“Sacred Heart,” Marietta said. “If you can believe that. Me, and all those girls from the best Catholic families.”

Later, Susan would wonder what had kept her from leaving then—when the house was waking up, when she was in the way, when she was invisible. People kept coming in and out of the kitchen, getting cereal they ate standing up at the sink, crossing themselves with the holy water that was kept in a little basin just under the crucifix on the west wall. People drank half-cups of coffee and left them on the counters for Marietta to clean up. Small children—too small, Susan thought, to ever have been wandering around alone on the streets—were relieved of the coffee they tried to sneak into their milk glasses and provided with the milk instead. Men and women, girls and boys, religious and clergy and lay people all seemed to be jumbled up together, without “defined roles” or “distinct lines of authority,” the way her social work course had insisted that all work with “people in need” ought to be. The scene would have reminded her of breakfast in an old-fashioned “fine Catholic family” if the conversation hadn’t been so off-handedly and unself-consciously bizarre.

“Jenny McCormick ended up in detox out in Orange,” somebody said. “She had a baby and it was all screwed up, so the welfare people just knew she was on crack, and you know what that means.”

“Jenny McCormick won’t last fifteen minutes with the welfare people,” someone else said. “The last time they tried to mess around with her, she bit one.”