Innocence: A Novel (35 page)

“He got to the child before we did. She’s contaminated, too.”

He was silent, not because he had nothing to say but because he had too much. Then: “Though I always hoped for better circumstances, I’m honored to have you in my home at last. Addison Goodheart is a more appropriate name for you than Son of It.”

TEAGUE HANLON, BOTH GUARDIAN TO GWYNETH
and the benefactor who had given Father a key to the food bank and the associated thrift shop, was not the high-priced attorney that I might initially have imagined. Once a fighting marine who’d gone to war, he was now a priest and the rector of St. Sebastian’s, the man to
whom Gwyneth’s father and mine had turned when in need, the man who worked through Judge Gallagher’s mother, his parishioner, to ensure the transfer of the nameless girl into Gwyneth’s custody. He was the nexus of our intersecting lives.

We were in the basement of the rectory behind St. Sebastian’s on this terrible night, and Father Hanlon didn’t wear the Roman collar here that identified his office when he was in public.

Prior to his revelation, the chalice of my heart had been filled to the brim with emotion, and now it overflowed. I sat on the edge of the armchair, searching for an adequate response and at first finding none. The intense tide of feelings did not wash me away. I had taken a master’s degree in stoicism before I learned to walk. I needed only to sit quietly for a moment, seining those deep waters for the right words.

I said, “You fed us all these years.”

“The food wasn’t mine. It was all donated.”

“You clothed us.”

“With secondhand garments also donated.”

“You kept our secret.”

“The least expected of a priest who hears confessions.”

“You never raised a hand against Father.”

“I saw his face only a few times.”

“But never harmed him.”

“I was able to meet his eyes only once.”

“And didn’t harm him.”

“I should have made myself meet them again and again.”

“But after each encounter with him, you fell into despair.”

“I suffered periodic depression before I ever knew about you and the man you called Father.”

“Yes, but the very thought of us made those depressions blacker.
You said so yourself in your note to me, and we gave you nightmares, yet still you sustained us.”

Standing with his face in his hands, he spoke in Latin, not to me, but perhaps in prayer. I listened, and though I didn’t understand the words, his great distress was evident.

I rose from the armchair, took a couple of steps toward Father Hanlon, but halted, for it was not given to me, in my difference, to be able to comfort people. In fact, quite the opposite. As on the night when Father had been brutally murdered while I lay watching from under an SUV, I felt inadequate, useless, and I was ashamed of my helplessness.

The Latin words crumbled in his mouth, falling from his lips in broken syllables, and he faltered in the prayer, taking deep shuddery breaths and expelling them with tortured sounds that might have been half sobs of grief and half expressions of disgust.

Given my twenty-six years of experience, I could only imagine that my presence was the cause of such powerful, unchecked emotions. I said, “I’ll go. I never should have come here. Foolish. I’ve been foolish. And reckless.”

“No. Wait. Let me pull myself together. Give me a chance.”

He had given us so much that I owed him anything he asked.

When he regained control of himself, he went to the door through which we had arrived and seemed to check the locks to be certain that he had secured them. He stood listening to the storm, his back to me, and at last he said, “It’s an east wind, like the one that parted the sea.” That thought led him to another, and he quoted: “ ‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ ”

Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

He said, “The North Koreans, what’s left of them, announced a short while ago that birds don’t contract the disease, but they do carry it. There’s no quarantine that can prevent birds from flying.”

They made movies and wrote books about planet-killing asteroids, stories that evoked a frisson of horror in audiences and readers. But in the end, no million-ton mass from outer space was necessary to put an end to civilization. The murder of one man could be committed with something as small as a few drops of nectar from the oleander plant instilled in honey, and all of humankind could be murdered most efficiently by something even smaller, a mere microbe of malevolent invention.

Still turned to the door, the priest said, “Your father didn’t know what he was, but there was no reason that he should. Do you know what you are, Addison?”

“A monstrosity,” I said. “A miscreation, freak, abomination.”

THE WIND RATTLED THE BASEMENT DOOR THAT
Father Hanlon faced, and as if he knew my thoughts, he said, “It may seem to be the wind that tests the door, but on this night of all nights, it’s more likely to be something far worse than wind. These aren’t the times of which Saint John the Evangelist wrote in Revelations. Armageddon would be an hour of horror
and
of glory, but there is no glory in what’s coming, no final judgment, no new Earth, only bitter tragedy on an unthinkable scale. This is the work of men and women in all their perversity and transgression, the love of power in the service
of mass death. On such a night, the darkest spirits are likely to be drawn from their usual pursuits, taking to the streets in gleeful celebration.”

The delicious aroma of coffee gave way to the stench of burning marionettes. Remembering Gwyneth’s words to me as we left the yellow-brick house with the girl, I said, “That’s how the marionettes smelled in the archbishop’s fireplace. But the stink is deception. Nothing’s out there.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he cautioned, and pointed to the doorknob, which worked violently back and forth, not as the wind could ever have moved it. “Whatever wants in, it will bring with it doubt. Did you know that the artist Paladine’s last will and testament required that a marionette be included in his casket?”

“There were only six, and Gwyneth found them all.”

“This one wasn’t like the six. Paladine carved and painted this one in his own image, and they say it looked uncannily like him. His mother was his sole living relative and heir. A woman with unhealthy interests and strange beliefs that perhaps she had inculcated in her son. She had him buried precisely as his will directed, in a little-known cemetery that attracts people who wish to be laid to rest in ground that isn’t hallowed, that has never been blessed by anyone of any faith.”

The foul odor had grown stronger, and although the door stopped rattling and the knob stopped turning, I said, “Deception.”

“You must learn what you are, Addison, so that you won’t doubt anymore and won’t any longer be vulnerable.” He turned his back to the door but still didn’t look at me. He stared down at his hands, which he turned palms up. “Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that’s good and true.”

The storm wind struck great blows at the house, and although the
rectory was a sturdy structure of long-standing brick, it creaked overhead.

Father Hanlon lowered his hands and took two steps toward me, but he didn’t attempt to make eye contact. “You’re not a monster, miscreation, freak, or abomination. You’ve seen yourself in mirrors, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you see?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I’m blind to it, I guess.”

He pressed me: “What is the deformity that makes you an object of such instant hatred and rage?”

“Father and I spent many hours in speculation and conjecture, but in the end there’s no way for us to know. It’s something in our faces, especially in our eyes, even in our hands, that others see in the first instant they look at us, but it’s something we can’t ever see. Lots of people recoil from spiders, don’t they? But if spiders had the capacity for complex thought, they wouldn’t have a clue why they were so often loathed, because to one another, spiders look appealing.”

“You’ve come close to the truth,” the priest said. “But you are not to be compared to spiders.” He came to me, stood before me, but didn’t look up. He took one of my gloved hands in both of his hands. “The man you called Father told me about your arrival in the world. Your biological father was shiftless, irresponsible, perhaps even a criminal, and he was never known to you. Your mother was a damaged woman but not entirely lost. You were born of man and woman, as are we all, but with one crucial difference. You were born with that difference perhaps because the world was moving toward a time when such as you would be needed.”

“What difference?” I asked, breathless in expectation of the answer. I knew that a difference shaped my life and made of me an outcast, though I didn’t know the nature of it. In this mysterious world, I was the central mystery of my life.

“Though born of man and woman, you aren’t an heir to Adam or to Eve, and neither was your second and better father. By some grace beyond my understanding, beyond anyone’s, you don’t carry the stain of original sin. You have a purity, an innocence that the rest of us can sense in an instant, as surely as a wolf can smell the spoor of a rabbit.”

I began to deny that I possessed such innocence, but he silenced me with a squeeze of my hand and a shake of his head.

“Addison, I dread looking at you worse than I have dreaded anything else in life, because I see not only you, but also what you are and what I am not. When I look at you, I see into myself as I never do otherwise, every sin of my life in a vivid kaleidoscopic collection of past toxic moments, more than I could recall in a lifetime of examining my conscience. When I look at you, I see what should be, and I know that I am not as I should be, and I recognize in totality every time in my life that I have gone wrong, every small unkindness, every meanness, every lie and unworthy thought relived simultaneously and in an instant.”

“No,” I protested. “You’re a good man.”

“Better than some, perhaps, but far from perfect. In my youth, in that unconventional war, when the enemy was never easily identified, sometimes I shot in fear, when I couldn’t be sure that shooting was entirely justified—”

“But, sir, self-defense—”

“Is never a sin, but sometimes I
knew
shooting wasn’t justified, a delay was necessary, further consideration, further inquiry, but I
didn’t inquire or delay. Surrender to fear is an invitation to doubt. There is lust and greed in every heart, son, and bitter envy. Perhaps there’s envy more than anything, and it’s worse than most passions. Even as a young priest, I had unworthy ambitions, a desire for praise and position that outweighed the desire to counsel, save, and serve.”

I didn’t want to hear his confession. I asked him please to stop at once, be quiet, and he fell silent. He still held my hand. He was trembling. So was I. Quaking.

If my difference was as he identified it, I would rather have been an abomination, a freak so hideous that my twisted face drove men to sudden insane violence. How much worse to be a mirror to their souls, to know that when they looked at me, they experienced in an instant all the errors of their lives, both petty and profound, that they felt the pain they had caused others and knew themselves to an extent that they were not meant to know themselves while still in the flesh, to a degree that no one could bear to know himself until he was but a spirit, in the docket, and free from the possibility of further error.

The priest raised his head, and though I still wore the hood, there was sufficient light for him to see my shadowed features and to stare into my eyes. Across his face came such a look of mental agony and profound sorrow that, even though no rage accompanied it, no antipathy, I was distressed for him, anguished that I should have such an effect on anyone, and afraid for both of us.

Shaken, I looked away from him. “You’re the first I’ve ever known who isn’t driven to violence by me, by Father, by just the sight of us.”

“It’s despair and hatred of their own errors that makes them want to kill you, to put an end to that painful self-awareness. I feel the same urge and resist it, though I doubt that I could ever resist it with the courage of your mother. Eight
years
.”

With that statement he put my childhood and my mother in a new light, and I stood astonished to think of her as a woman who remained moral enough—who
loved
me enough—to endure the intense mental and emotional anguish that Father Hanlon had just described.

“And if your mother had something of a saint in her character, well then a case might be made that Gwyneth’s father ought to be canonized. He not only endured
thirteen
years, but he loved her with all his heart and would have endured much longer if he hadn’t been murdered.”

The house creaked in the buffeting wind, the basement door shook in its frame as though it might break loose of its hinges, the knob rattled back and forth, back and forth, but at that revelatory moment I didn’t care what might be loose in the night or what might burst in upon us.

MINE IS THE KIND OF STORY IN WHICH NAMES
should not much matter, certainly not full names, first and middle and last, not for every person stepping onto the stage. Had a story of this kind been told in the third person instead of the first, by some writer just two centuries earlier than my time, he or she would have used even fewer names than I have employed, and some characters would have been identified only by their occupation, such as Archbishop or Priest. Back in that time, had the story involved royalty, the king would have been known as nothing more than the King, and the queen’s name would have been the Queen, and the valiant little tailor would
have been known as only the Little Tailor. Even in that long-past age but certainly centuries prior, the story might have been told with animals in all the roles, and their names would have been only what they were, such as Tortoise and Hare, Cat and Mouse, Lambkin and Little Fish, Hen and Mr. Fox. That would have been the way because, in those times, life was simpler, and people had a clearer sense of right and wrong than they possessed later. I will call that long-ago period the Age of Clarity. No writer or reader would have imagined that an analysis of a villain’s childhood traumas was needed to explain his wickedness, for it was well understood that a life of wickedness was a choice that
anyone
could make if he loved wickedness more than truth. For twenty-six years, I lived in the Modern Age, when it was said that human psychology was so complex, the chain of motivations so recondite and abstruse, that only experts could tell us why anyone did anything, and in the end even the experts were loath to render a definitive judgment of any particular person’s specific actions. But although this story is
of
the Modern Age, I have not written it
for
that age. Nevertheless, though we know Gwyneth’s father by his deeds and by his selfless love for her, and though I have gotten this far without saddling him with a name, it seems to me that because he was
not
representative of his times, not emblematic, that I should use his name, if for no other reason, to signify that he was a light in a darkening world. Surnames do not matter much anymore, so I will use only his first, which was Bailey. The name derives from the Middle English word
baile
, which means “the outer wall of a castle.”