Madeleine's Ghost (48 page)

T
HE LAST
light has sunk under the dark bulk of the continent to the west. It is too dark to read anymore. I close the Bible, its heavy vellum pages stiff with age.

“You can't just stop there,” Father Rose says as I put the book away. “What did she do?” His eyes are red in the red light of the heat lamps.

“We have a restless ghost on our hands and a saint that never became a saint. What do you think she did?”

Father Rose considers for a minute. He folds and unfolds his hands on the metal tabletop. The Mexican music floats into the darkness. The clubhouse is lit up like an ocean liner. “I think that Sister Januarius acted for the good of the parish community,” he says at last. “She put the needs of the many over the whims of the one. She did the right thing.”

I shrug. “Sister Januarius took money that did not belong to her, money earned through great suffering and marked for a special purpose. As a consequence, Madeleine de Prasères is buried in the churchyard at St. Basil's and not at Belle Azure, where she belongs. You know the black obelisk; it looks so out of place among all the other, humbler tombstones. You've hit the thing with many a practice ball. I went out to look at it yesterday. The word
Repentant
was added to the word
Whore
by Sister
Januarius after Madeleine's death, carved in a different hand by someone unaware that the addition was something of a grim joke. The five thousand dollars were used to rebuild the church when it was burned down again by the anti-Catholic mob of Know-Nothings in 1848. You know the rest.”

Father Rose hesitates, but his mouth is drawn down stubbornly at the corners. “According to you, Sister Januarius is currently working miracles,” he says. “Appearing in hospitals. Appearing to you”—he seems a little rueful at this—“curing diseases, fixing hip joints. These are the actions of a woman blessed by God, a saint.”

“Yes, but she's not a saint yet,” I say. “You know better than I do that's up to Rome. She made a bad mistake with Madeleine, an unsaint-like error in judgment. And it seems to me she has been working for a long time to repair the damage caused by her error. To tell the truth, I felt something when I moved into the apartment years ago, something I did my best to ignore. Not just the ghost, something else waiting. A guiding presence. Now I know it was Sister Januarius, waiting patiently for the pieces to fall into place. Waiting for human agents to help her finish her work in the world, to help her repair the wrong she did to her cousin in life. Those agents are us, Father.”

“You're kidding,” he says.

I shake my head.

“You're talking about an exhumation.”

I am silent.

“That sort of thing requires a dozen different permits and is very expensive.”

I am silent.

“But who is going to care if a skeleton comes home to rest? Everyone concerned in this terrible story is gone. Dead a hundred-odd years! The woman's husband, her friends, her family—”

“Madeleine de Prasères de la Roca's descendants live in Louisiana still,” I say quietly. “I've seen the crypt at Belle Azure. I know the family pretty well.”

Father Rose is surprised at this. “You do?”

“Yes. And I think that's why I was chosen for this … work. I think you'll agree there is something here, Father. A divine symmetry. A coming together of lives.”

Father Rose thinks this over for a while. He drains the last of his drink. The sky glows faintly orange in the direction of New York. Winter is coming.

Then, suddenly, he throws up his hands. “What do you want me to do?” he says.

I smile.

T
HE APARTMENT
ticks quiet and empty at midnight. They've changed the bulbs in the spotlights on the facade of the power plant across the street, and now an opal fluorescence floods my dusty rooms.

For a while I sit in this bright darkness with a beer in the orange Naugahyde chair and watch a baseball game sound off, on television. The Detroit Tigers are playing the Cleveland Indians in an unlikely pennant race that sounds like something out of
The Jungle Book.
I can still smell the dark moon of the golf course in my clothes, and the priest's uncertainty. But now I know that everything the last ten years has led up to this quiet midnight, this dusty silence. I hold my breath. What next?

It is not till I am in my striped pajamas and about to retire that I notice the number flashing on the answering machine. A single message. I replay it three times, then make ready for a journey in the morning.

T
HE
8:20
A.M
. train from Penn Station pulls into Philadelphia Thirtieth Street at ten o'clock. I am forced to use the public bathroom in the
station and find to my dismay that some madman has taken a crap in the urinal.

Philadelphia is a gloomy city, mute and crumbling, its great days as the first capital of the Republic long forgotten. One hears of the most gruesome murders committed here—remember the man who mutilated and ate a half dozen retarded girls in his basement? And the other one, in whose apartment they found nine bodies buried in waist-deep trash? It is no longer possible to imagine the calm cobbled thoroughfares upon which Dr. Franklin once walked, munching his crust of bread, the future like a bright animal waiting just around the corner from Chestnut Street.

On impulse, I decide to catch a cab from the station. This proves to be a mistake. The driver takes me on a long and roundabout route through bad neighborhoods and over half the rutted streets in town. According to his registration, he is a Rwandan named Mboku Himombatu. Tribal scars slash across his cheeks. He refuses to answer questions and plays weird music full of wooden gongs and silences at top volume as we bump over nameless streets, beneath the rusty elevated and past bombed-out buildings rotting on either side like bad teeth.

I see half naked urchins playing in piles of garbage, police in leather jackets arresting a dozen suspects lined up against the wall. A man wearing only boxer shorts walks barefoot along the stained concrete median, a nickel plated automatic strapped to his waist. From all around comes the high wail of sirens, and I reflect that our cities have become as foreign and dangerous as Kabul was to Cavagnari in the last century, as unknown as Timbuktu to Mungo Park. Blank spaces on the map under the sway of strange and savage tribes, where life is cheap, law is unknown, and wild, inexplicable passions rule the mob.

But at last we are out of the city on the Main Line, and we turn down a fine neighborhood of tree-lined avenues, Saabs and Mercedes-Benzes parked casually on the drives of beautiful large homes. The sky above is overcast, heavy as lead. A light rain begins to fall, speckling the windshield with tiny black beads. We stop before an ivy covered gate. A guard post and high brick wall follow the curve of the street. The tops of mimosa trees inside wave over barbed wire. The driver turns around.

“Sixty-seven dollars,” he says. The Bryn Mawr train stop is no more than five blocks away.
I
could have made the same trip for a lot less. I tell him so.

“You come over here,” he explains. “Main Line swank, you know? I figure you for a rich white man. Sixty-seven dollars is nothing to a rich white man.”

I pull out my pockets to show him a few crumpled dollar bills and change. After a half hour of haggling, I get the price down to $12.50, plus a 15 percent tip.

They are expecting me at the guardhouse. I am buzzed in and crunch slowly up the long gravel drive. A large Georgian style main building with portico and cupola stands correct as a retired officer at the center of outbuildings arranged around a quad. In the days when Anglo-Saxon rectitude was deemed a virtue, this place used to be an exclusive finishing school for girls of wealthy Main Line families. They were taught how to walk and speak properly, how far to go on first, second, and third dates, which opinions were expressible at the dinner table, which were not. Upon graduation they were given a set of wedding china bearing the school crest and the single-word motto
Modesty
in Latin. All that is gone forever.

The school was sold in the sixties and has since become one of the most highly regarded and exclusive sanitariums in the country, more fashionable with celebrities than the Betty Ford Clinic. Well known movie stars, whose names shall not be mentioned, check in for the treatment. Rock stars are a fixture, as are certain European princes whose families have been prey to congenital weaknesses since the days of Louis XV. More like a country club than a hospital—with private rooms, valets, and personal diagnosticians—still, the success rate here is undeniable. Two months sequestered inside these ivied walls, stuck with hypodermics, analyzed, and dieted, and the substance-abusing patient is clean for a good decade to come.

Behind the main building a football field-sized oval of grass slopes gently to a pond full of ducks and other migrating birds. I am taken out by a pretty nurse whose name tag identifies her as Ms. Longbutt, though
ironically, her behind beneath the tight starched uniform is round and dimpled as a peach. The nurses here look like nurses from a film, down to the white hats, short white dresses, white shoes, and Red Cross pins in their lapels. Such familiarity I suppose is comforting for the inmates, a few of whom lounge outside now in lawn chairs despite the slight pattering of rain.

I find Antoinette down near the water's edge. She's sitting stiffly in a wheelchair, is wrapped in a blanket though the temperature is nearly seventy degrees. A few ducks nestle at her feet. They waddle away as I approach.

“Antoinette?”

Her head above the rumpled mass of blanket looks small and childlike. Her hair hangs limp and dry to her shoulders. She hardly looks up, her eyes are fixed on the green water of the pond.

“I guess you got my message,” she says, a distance in her voice.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.”

“Then why the wheelchair?”

“The lawn chairs were all wet, so I got in a wheelchair up at the hospital and wheeled myself down. I kind of like wheelchairs, actually. Makes me feel like I've got something real to recover from.”

But I'm still not convinced, so she leaps up, the blanket falling from her shoulders, and swings her arms out and does a chorus line kick toward the pond. She's wearing an old pullover full of holes that used to belong to Papa, and she's lost a lot of weight. She's got that tired, ribby look I remember from Jillian's anorexic days. When she's settled back down again with the blanket, she says, “See? How was that?” but she still won't meet my eyes.

I am silent. I come around and squat in the wet grass by her side, my knees creaking. “I've got a few things to tell you,” I say. “A couple of very strange stories. First, let's start with those oysters we ate at—”

“Papa died.” She interrupts suddenly. Then she bites her bottom lip and pulls the blanket tight around her throat.

“I'm very sorry. When?”

“A month ago, right after you left. He just dropped dead, like that.” She snaps her fingers. “He and Mama were watching television, and he sort of stood up and coughed, then fell back on the couch, unconscious. Some kind of heart attack. Poor Mama, she didn't know what to do. She thumped on his chest, tried to give him mouth-to-mouth, nothing. It took fifteen minutes for the paramedics to get there, and he had pretty much stopped breathing. But then—and this is the worst part—the bastards, they kept him alive on life support for ten days like some kind of goddamned vegetable. It was awful, Ned. I sat with Mama in the hospital the whole time. We watched him and held his hand, but he wasn't there. He was dead as a stone. Just kept breathing by those awful machines.”

“Yes, I know how that is.”

“Then Jolie and Manon, they came in and actually started arguing about who was going to get what in the will. I couldn't believe it! Papa lying there, and all they can think about is money. Know what I did?” Now she looks at me, and there is a slight gleam in her eye.

“What?”

“I stood up without saying a word, and I punched Manon in the gut, I mean hard! Then I gave Jolie a nice backhand right across the face, and her lip split open. They took off pretty quick after that, I'll tell you.”

Antoinette's glee is momentary. In a moment the gleam fades, and she goes back to staring at the pond. We are silent for a while. The ducks bob motionless on the surface, like decoys of themselves.

“So why are you here?” I say at last. She frowns, squirms in her wheelchair, pulls the blanket tight.

“I OD'd,” she almost whispers.

“On what?”

“On Hash's little yellow pills, that's what. After the funeral I just started eating them like candy. It was terrible. Couldn't face things with Papa gone. And no one in the family would talk to me after I socked Manon and Jolie in the hospital. I mean, they were in shock; they thought I was going nuts or something. I can't explain it, but Papa was my standard. I guess I measured myself by what he thought, and when he was gone, I just cut loose. At least that's what the doctors here say.”

“What do you say?” My foot is fast asleep, so I take off my jacket and put it on the grass and sit by her side.

“What do I say?” She hesitates. “I guess for a minute there I wanted to die.”

“So you tried to commit suicide?”

She squirms in the wheelchair. “Not exactly. I just took a whole lot of the yellow pills.”

“How many?”

“Fifty, sixty. I don't know, I kept taking them, just to see what would happen. I just kept swallowing, and before I knew it, I had taken the whole batch. I remember a lot of light and loud noises and wandering around the Quarter at four in the morning. Then I remember this weird blue color, then nothing. I woke up in New Orleans General while my stomach was being pumped. They said it was a good thing I passed out facefirst in the gutter because otherwise I would have choked to death on my own vomit like Jimi Hendrix. That's what saved me, though. I puked up most of the pills; my stomach couldn't digest them fast enough.”