Charisma (7 page)

Father Thomas Burne. The name rolled around in Susan’s head and finally poked a hole through the fog it was in. She had heard of Father Thomas Burne.

“I think we used to get brochures for his place at Saint Michael’s,” she said. “Requests for money and food. Damien House. A place for runaway children.”

“What they’re mostly running away from is pimps.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Susan, I’m sure. And I personally think Tom Burne is a saint. The problem is, every time they give him air time he starts talking about pornography, and every time he starts talking about pornography he starts talking about censorship. And that—”

“What does censorship have to do with turning children into prostitutes?”

Dan smiled. “Go down to Congress Avenue and take a look at the pornography he’s talking about.”

“Pornography about children.”

“Of course.”

“Is that legal?”

“Probably not. The legality of it isn’t the problem here. The existence of it is the problem here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” Dan said, “I don’t suppose you do.”

“What about all those investigative reporters I’ve heard about? Wouldn’t they be interested?”

“I don’t know that either, Susan. They haven’t been so far. And Tom Burne has certainly tried. Hard.”

“Obviously not hard enough.”

“As hard as anyone could. Look, I’m sorry. All right? I keep forgetting how long you’ve been away and what kind of an environment you’ve been in. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I don’t care if you
upset
me.” Actually, she wasn’t upset anymore. The fog was gone, and so was her nausea. In their place was a hard little clicking computer, making calculations.

She looked into the clear brown water of her tea. It was getting cold. She ought to drink it. She just wished she could remember pouring it.

“This Damien House,” she said, “is it here in New Haven?”

“Off Congress Avenue on Amora Street.”

“Do you know if Father Burne is a diocesan priest or from an order?”

“No.” Dan was amused. “Does that matter?”

“It might.”

“I’ll find out for you if you want to know.” He got out of his chair and stretched. “Just do me a favor, if you don’t mind. Don’t go wandering down to Amora without a police escort. One of Burne’s people was murdered in the kitchen down there less than a week ago. That didn’t make much splash either. Maybe the press doesn’t like the feel of Father Tom Burne.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the office. It may be seven o’clock in the morning, but I do want to be out of the district attorney’s office one of these days. That takes work.” He straightened his suit jacket and tucked his shirt a little more neatly under his belt. “Do me a bigger favor,” he said. “There are a pile of invitations cluttering up the mantel in the living room, all of them for you. Answer a couple of them in the affirmative.”

“It’s a lot earlier than seven o’clock in the morning.”

He made a face at her. “There’s a dinner party at the Hanrahans’ next Friday night at eight. Go out to Lord and Taylor or one of those places and buy yourself a dress. Katie Hanrahan thinks you’ve spent the last seventeen years growing mustaches and a butt.”

“Have I?”

“You look like Mother, Susan. You always did.”

He turned around and walked out through the kitchen’s swinging door, letting it swing back after him, like a wave.

Susan finished her tea, poured herself another cup, then went searching around in the breast pocket of Andy’s shirt for her cigarettes. She lit one and coughed. She wasn’t sure why she was smoking again. Cigarettes tasted terrible and they made her chest ache. Maybe it was some kind of reaction to leaving the convent.

After a while, her cigarette grew a long column of ash and she had to get up. The ashtray was tucked away in the cupboard with the teacups and the bowls.

Andy didn’t wake until quarter to ten. When he came down, she was waiting for him, not in the kitchen but in the foyer. He had to pass through that after he came down the stairs. She had exchanged his flannel shirt for a plain green sweater. It had been hard to find. Most of the sweaters in the drawers of the cedar chests upstairs were either her own from her days at boarding school—and therefore too small—or her mother’s. Her mother’s looked much too rich. She might be going crazy, but she wasn’t going stupid yet.

Andy stopped at the bottom of the stairs when he saw her and raised his eyebrows. He was good at it, and Susan laughed. He had always been her favorite brother. Unlike Dan, he was short and stocky and powerful, a throwback to ancestors who had come over on the boat and never expected to have any money. And he was fun. Dan was always so serious all the time, so driven. He would go to the Hanrahans’ dinner party, but that was probably because Dec Hanrahan was a power in the Democratic State Committee. He would buy her a beautiful dress, but only so that she could look good for a purpose. Andy was a float.

Andy crossed the foyer to her, an oversize leprechaun under the shower of rainbows sent out by the prisms on the chandelier.

“What’s the matter? Has the Catholic representative of the Puritan Ethic made you so crazy you want to go back to the convent already?”

Susan laughed. “He left at six forty-five. He had a press conference at nine.”

“That’s our Danny. Two hours to rehearse the six words it takes to make a sound byte.”

“Maybe you ought to take some time to rehearse something. Don’t you ever do anything, Andy?”

“No. And I don’t intend to. You want to do something, though.”

“You’re right, I do.”

“If it requires physical labor, I won’t help.”

Susan had been sitting on a loveseat, the only piece of furniture in the foyer. She stood up and started walking around the checkerboard marble floor. “Do you ever think about it? About Mother and Daddy and everything that happened?”

“No,” Andy said. “You shouldn’t think about it, either.”

“I know. I don’t, usually. Something Dan told me this morning got my mind on it.”

“Well,” Andy said, “that makes Dan a jerk, but we always knew he was a jerk. You don’t have to be a jerk along with him.”

“Maybe I can’t help myself. I told Reverend Mother all about it when I was, I don’t know. A novice. A canonical novice? A senior novice? I don’t remember. I thought I’d tell her and then she’d kick me out.”

“She didn’t, though.”

“No,” Susan said. “I should have known better. I’m sorry. I know I’m acting morbid. And I want a favor from you, too.”

“What kind of favor?”

“I want to go downtown. I want you to come with me.”

Now it was Andy who was sitting on the loveseat. He always claimed he was indolent. He didn’t like standing up for long. “If you want to go buying dresses,” he said, “I don’t want to come. The last time I did that with a woman, I ruined a beautiful relationship.”

“I don’t want to buy dresses.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to go down to this place off Congress Avenue. It’s called Damien House.”

Andy tilted his head back and stared up, at the chandelier, at the domed ceiling beyond it. His body had gone very still.

“Does Dan know you want to do this?”

“He probably suspects.”

“He probably told you not to go.”

“I’m thirty-five years old, Andy. I’m not a baby.”

“You’re not a baby, but this is a bad idea. A very bad idea. You don’t know the half of what you’re getting yourself into. They had a murder there last Friday night.”

“Does that mean you won’t take me?”

Andy sighed. His head was at a normal angle again. His arms were wrapped around his chest. Susan thought he looked infinitely tired, as if he’d taken a sleeping pill when she wasn’t looking and it had just started to hit him.

“Oh, I’ll take you all right,” he said. “But I want you to know up front I think you’re crazy.”

S
USAN HAD DRIVEN TO
New Haven from Saint Michael’s. She could remember it in detail, mostly because she had been so terrified. Nuns in traditional orders weren’t handed car keys as a matter of course. There were designated drivers and designated riders. Susan had always been one of the latter. Getting into a car again, bumping along beside the Housatonic River on the Derby Road, had been the second most frightening thing Susan had ever done. She’d thought the particulars of that trip had been burned into her brain: the shacks that had once been summer cottages now lying in ruin next to the water; the patches of ice in front of every stoplight along the new six-lane stretch between Derby and New Haven proper; the car dealerships that cluttered the intersection at the turn-off to Orange and promised Mazdas and BMWs for practically no money at all. Searching her memories of that trip, she came up with a picture so complete it was almost documentary footage.

Sitting in the bus next to Andy, she realized she didn’t really remember anything. She’d been so wrapped up in her fear, she’d barely taken anything in. The people around her, on the bus and at the curbs where the bus stopped, were so alien they made her dizzy. Most of them were black. A fair proportion of the rest were Hispanic. What few whites there were were all men and all what her mother would have called muscle-headed Irish, or some other ethnic culture’s version of the same: big, fat, ham-handed, rough, and obsessively reading the numbers on their lottery tickets. Among these people, she felt like Tinkerbell. Worse. She felt like a fraud. The clothes Andy had made her change into—all of them worn and all of them pulled from the junk closet in the service hall—made her feel as if she were wearing a sign on her forehead that said
SLUMMING.

“We can’t take my car,” he’d told her, back at the house. “It’s a Porsche and it’s practically brand new. It’d get ripped off with us in it before we got halfway to where we were going.”

Now he sat with his legs stretched out across the aisle, just a little too broad for the plastic seat he was sitting in. If it hadn’t been for the intelligence in his face, he would have looked like all the other white men here. Susan thought the white men might not notice the difference. They weren’t staring.

“We’re going to have to make a transfer,” Andy was saying, “and then when we get to Congress Avenue we’re going to have to get out and walk. That’s what I’m worried about.”

“There isn’t a bus that goes to Amora Street?”

“There isn’t anything that goes to Amora Street. Except for Damien House, there isn’t anything on Amora Street. The place was abandoned years ago. It looks like those pictures you see of the South Bronx.”

“Oh.”

Andy shook his head. He’d already told her he wouldn’t have come with her at all if she hadn’t “still looked so much like a nun.” Whatever that meant. Susan supposed he was thinking now that she still thought like a nun. She pressed her great mass of black hair more firmly into her combs and twisted until she could see out the window behind her. The view was dislocating. There was Yale: a medieval landscape of turrets and lawns. Then there were the bums. A little colony of them had set up a cardboard housing project under cover of a stand of leafless trees on a street off Prospect. Every one of them had his own brown bottle and his own paper bag.

Susan turned back. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not the New Haven I remember.”

“It hasn’t been the New Haven you remember for ten years.”

“I guess not. I’m surprised you and Dan haven’t sold the house.”

“We can’t sell the house,” Andy said.

Susan flushed. “The Hanrahans could have sold theirs, and they haven’t. Dec is living where he grew up. I saw the address on that invitation Dan is so crazy about. Why haven’t they moved to the suburbs like everyone else?”

“Maybe Edge Hill Road is a special case.”

“Why? We had a murder at the bottom of it the day after I got home.”

“Is that what you want to talk about? Murders? If I’d wanted to talk about murders, I could have gone into the D.A.’s office and had a chat with Dan’s secretary. She’s got a running file in her head of every death in the city of New Haven back to 1962. She’s especially fond of murders.”

Susan turned away again. This time, the window behind her looked out on the passing of small, neat streets of two-story houses. The houses were old and painted strange pastel colors, but they were reasonably well kept up. She turned back again and folded her arms across her chest.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand either of you. How can you live together in that house?”

“It’s convenient and it’s cheap.”

“A lot of things are convenient and cheap. What do you two do when I’m not around? Fight?”

“I haven’t had a fight with Dan since Mother died.”

“Mother or Daddy?”

Andy didn’t look at her. The bus was pulling up to the curb. They were at the Green, and the Green was where half the people in the city changed directions. Andy stood up and zipped his jacket shut.

“This is where we get off,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry. If we miss our connection, we get stuck in the cold for half an hour.”

But Andy wasn’t really hurrying, so Susan didn’t hurry either. She just wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck and thought: We’re going to have to talk about this sometime. I haven’t had seventeen years to get it out of my system. I haven’t had seventeen years to make myself forget.

Of course, she should have had. That was what she’d gone into the convent for, something she hadn’t realized until much too late. But going into the convent hadn’t worked, and coming home hadn’t worked so far either. She still found herself tripping over it all at the most unlikely times, like now. She’d have her mind on something else and it would sneak up behind her, just to kick her in the rear. She was surprised she hadn’t started imagining things, like ghosts rattling chains through the hallways of the house on Edge Hill Road. Ghosts would have been appropriate in more ways than one.

Maybe she was a ghost of a kind herself.

When the bus stopped, it skidded into the curb and cut off abruptly. Andy fell halfway over, saving himself from landing on the floor only by keeping both hands wrapped around a metal pole. Susan didn’t, only because she hadn’t yet stood up. Seconds later, she was not only standing but running, chasing Andy down the ridged metal steps into the wet and slithering wind.