Serpents in the Cold (16 page)

_________________________

Poor Clare Sisters, Franciscan Monastery of Saint Clare, Jamaica Plain

THE MONASTERY OF
Saint Clare faced Centre Street, on which, after the recent snow, few cars traveled. A city plow growled past him, and Cal had to veer at the monastery entrance as sand, salt, and gravel thumped and banged against the sides of the car. He sat for a moment in the circular driveway and looked at himself in the rearview mirror, saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and glassy. He got out of the car and closed the door. He turned up his collar, instinctively blessed himself as he limped through the entrance.

The gardens were covered in snow—a curving hillside of sweeping, glistening white. A column of sisters, dark shapes pressed black against the snow, trudged the far rise into the woods, and their soft chorus—a working prayer song—came to him across the field.

There were two three-story brick wings flanking the main entrance, and Cal looked up at their small windows in which lights blazed behind drawn curtains, and that offered a sense of warmth. A sister, bundled in a heavy brown overcoat reminiscent of a soldier's field coat and shoveling the walkway, looked up as he approached. Another nun was spreading cinders from a bucket onto the steps.

“Hello, Sisters,” he called as he climbed the steps to the door. “Good day for the work.”

They smiled approvingly. “Thank God,” they chorused. “Bless the work.”

Beneath a Romanesque arch the door was wide-planked oak with heavy iron hinges and riveted crossbanding. The doorknocker was a bull's iron nose ring, cold to his hand, and when he let it fall, it reverberated like a hammer in the hallway beyond. He let it fall twice more and, after a moment, heard footsteps upon tile.

The sister who answered the door had quizzical eyes and rotund bright cheeks in a soft, pale face. A tawny patina of reflected light shimmered about her as if the hallway beyond were made of honeycombs.

“I'm here to see Sister Bridget.”

She motioned for him to step into the vestibule and said, “Wait here, please.” He considered the broadness of her, imagined the heft of her thick calves beneath her habit, not a city girl but a farmer's daughter reared on the prairie or plain, used to rising at dawn and working until the light faded from the sky. He stared after her wide hips for a moment and then glanced about the room.

In the sister's absence the sounds and smells of the place brought warmth and a sense of peace: the muted hum of prayer and chanting, the smell of Styrax, sandalwood, beeswax, and polished wood, the light ashy dust of smoke still in the air from extinguished candles and incense, almost as if the priest had passed through the hall with a censer; on the wall to his right the pictures of the saints and priests of the order, the Blessing of Saint Clare:
May Almighty God bless you. May He look upon you with the
eyes of His mercy, and give you His peace. May He pour forth His graces on you abundantly, and in Heaven may He place you among His Saints.

Cal blessed himself again, stared at his knuckles, red and cracked and swollen, and then Sister Bridget was approaching him from the other end of the hallway, smiling in that way that was at once filled with surprise and sincerity, a happiness in simply greeting the world and all that it had to offer. She was as he remembered her. She greeted him warmly, taking both his hands in her own small, misshapen ones, and then gestured toward a chair in a sitting room directly off the hallway. He waited until she'd settled herself opposite and then sat slowly, extended his bad leg out before him, and placed his hat in his lap.

She laughed slightly. “I remember,” she said, and brought a small hand, gnarled by arthritis, to her mouth. “The first moment seeing you just now, how you, Dante Cooper, and the Mulligan twins were the bane of my existence, God help me. I spent many hours praying for patience.”

He smiled and shook his head. “I don't know how you managed it, Sister Bridget. We were hell on two feet. I think God must have a special place reserved for you in heaven for how you put up with us.”

“We shall see, we shall see.” She grinned. “Hopefully at the end I will have done more good than bad. Now, come, on the phone you said this was an urgent family matter and that Father Nolan directed you to us?”

“Yes.” He nodded, tapped his fingers on the top of his hat. “It's about Sheila Anderson.”

“Sheila Anderson?”

“I understood you taught her at Saint Mark's?”

“If you don't mind my asking, what is your interest, Mr. O'Brien?”

“She was a good friend of mine.”

She hesitated; confusion flickered in her eyes. “Why, yes, many of the sisters taught Sheila, but I'm afraid I don't understand. You said ‘was'?”

“Sheila is dead, Sister. She was killed about a week ago. I'm sorry, I thought you would have heard.”

Sister Bridget's eyes widened, and though she tried to hide it, she seemed visibly shaken. She sank down into the chair, clasped her hands together on her lap.

“How well did you know Sheila?”

She blinked at him. “I remember her as a younger woman, a sweet girl, but troubled.

“A troubled girl,” she repeated. It seemed that she couldn't hide her discomfort. Cal eased forward off his chair. “Are you okay, Sister? Do you want me to go get you a glass of water?”

She raised a hand. “No, I'll be fine.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “She came to us in labor last month, and was already heavily medicated. It was a difficult situation. Terrible, actually. She was lucky to survive.”

“Really? I'm afraid I didn't know that.”

“We do what we can here, and the rest is in God's hands. I don't feel comfortable saying any more, Mr. O'Brien. I'm sure you understand.”

“Yes, Sister, I do. But the thing is, she was killed, brutally killed. It might have had something to do with this birth.”

“Birth? Oh, you're mistaken, Mr. O'Brien. There was no actual birth. The child was stillborn.”

“Stillborn? Where did they bury it?”

“Why, out back, in the children's graveyard. I can take you there, if you like, and show you.”

“If that's all right, Sister. I'd like to see.”

“Of course. I think the fresh air will do me some good.”

They walked through the main house and into a scullery, where Sister Bridget took a heavy coat from a coatrack. Cal held it for her and she worked her thin arms shakily into its bulk. A clatter of cutlery and plates came to them from the kitchen. Warm, food-scented steam fogged the glass.

“Take my hand,” Sister Bridget said. “My legs aren't as strong as they once were.”

“I hear you, Sister.” Her birdlike hand grasped at his forearm and exerted such a powerful pressure on his arm that it surprised him. He smiled and placed his own hand over hers.

A loggia in the rear formed a protected walkway, and they followed this between the buildings. Cal looked out over the shoveled pathways and the snow-covered gardens to the ice-topped statues of the Blessed Mother and Child, Saint Anthony, Saint Francis, and Saint Clare.

They stepped into a sheltered cloister with open archways looking out onto a courtyard. Small snowdrifts had accumulated beneath the windows and arches, and though it was cold, Cal was glad for the momentary reprieve from the wind. As they crossed the courtyard, Cal looked back at the building. Lights were blazing in windows here and there and the sky above formed a low vault of dark cloud.

They passed a stone chapel, where amber light glimmered diffuse and warm through the mullioned windows. The haunted chanting of the Divine Office came to them, the wind taking the sound and whipping it back and forth across the courtyard so that it might have come from miles away. A bell tolled from somewhere in the arbor. Although he held her by the hand, it seemed as if she was the one urging him on, insistently, as if he were a recalcitrant child being forcibly led by a parent.

Rock salt crunched beneath their shoes as they walked the stone pathway. Sister Bridget nodded to novitiates and other, older sisters, making their way to the main house or to the chapel.

“I seem to remember an incident,” Sister Bridget said after a moment, and a smile touched the edge of her lips, “where you and your friend there, Dante, were responsible for looting the church poor box?”

Cal smiled, thankful for the levity, and shook his head. Sister Bridget squeezed his arm. “No? That's not true?”

“It was the Kinneally brothers who looted the poor box.”

“Ahh, and you were their accomplices then?”

“We were witnesses.”

“Oh, yes, is that how it was, Mr. O'Brien?”

They passed beneath a stone arch and stepped into the cloistered space of a small graveyard enclosed by a crumbling low wall and by the overhanging boughs of trees, black and bare of leaves. Beyond, the grounds sloped in a sheet of pewter ice toward the dense, wooded lands of the Forest Hills arboretum. Here the wind stilled, and he was keenly aware of their breathing, the long, tired wheeze that came from their lungs, aching from the sharp, cold air. Perhaps two dozen rows of small graves in uneven, staggered lines lay before them. Sister Bridget led him between the rows, stumbling every now and again as she sank into the snow, then righted by Cal's grip on her hand.

“Well, here we are,” she said. Her hand squeezed him once again with surprising strength and then let go.

Cal stared at a mound of raised snow and at a small black marble headstone, a white onyx centerpiece in the shape of a cherub with wings. Even with the snow dusting its top, the cuts in the black marble glittered, its surface shone as if lacquered. The child had no name, nor were there the names of loved ones, merely:

“There's a headstone on the grave already, Sister? It's barely been a month.”

Sister Bridget stared at the headstone, bowed her head, and clasped her hands together at her chest. A blackbird cawed in the trees at the wall edge then lifted into the air, causing them both to look up, startled. Heavy snow cascaded down from the branches and thumped the ground. He looked at Sister Bridget's face. She appeared to have aged slightly, as if the walk here had taken its toll on her.

“Why would you rush to put up a headstone?” He glanced about the graveyard, at the empty spaces between the rows of crumbling gravestones and upon bare, snowy mounds where lay a child's doll, an infant's rattle, fresh garlands and wreaths.

“If you don't mind me asking, but who donated the headstone? I think her family would want to know, to thank her benefactor.”

“Why, I believe it was Congressman Foley. He has been incredibly charitable to many of the unfortunates from the neighborhood. He's always provided us with funds, has for years. Thank God for him and his kind.”

Sister Bridget continued to stare at the grave, her lips pursed. “This child's headstone isn't the first he's contributed to.”

Cal looked about the graveyard again. “Unfortunates? Is that what Sheila was?”

“Sheila's life story, her upbringing, as I'm sure you know, was terribly unfortunate. It shaped her life, the paths she took, the choices she made. Sometimes I think that she was determined to fulfill that destiny, that she was hell-bent, if you'll excuse the phrase, on coming to a bad end.”

He nodded, rolled his shoulders to bring some life back into them. The cold was getting to him, and there was nothing else to do here. New snow spun down around them, and when he looked up, the sky had darkened to the same gray of the stone walls, the undulating hard-packed ice of the surrounding fields, the older headstones. A snowstorm was swirling in the low, dense clouds, and he wondered how long it would hold off.

“C'mon, Sister,” he said. “Give me your hand. I've kept you out in this long enough.” She reached for him gratefully; they remained quiet and pensive on the walk back to the convent.

The scullery was warm and welcoming, but Sister Bridget kept her coat on as they passed through the house. Everything seemed as it had been before, but he knew that something had changed for her at the graveyard.

At the door he sighed before giving her an appreciative nod. “Well, thank you, Sister, thank you for your time. I'll pass all this on to her family, and our thanks to Congressman Foley.”

“Yes, he has done so many wonderful things for us, for the parish and all its constituents.”

“Just like Mayor Curley, back in the old days.”

“Yes, I suppose you could say that. They both came from hard backgrounds, hard neighborhoods, good working-class people. Please offer Sheila's family our condolences. We'll pray for her and for them.”

Cal turned to her as he stepped out of the convent. “Exactly what happened to the child, Sister? At the end—you said it was stillborn?”

Sister Bridget stared at him from the darkness of the vestibule. She appeared a small, fragile-looking thing now, a dark shape all the smaller, furtive and lost in the shadows. Heavy footsteps padded on the landing above the staircase, and the balustrade shuddered. Sister Bridget moved forward, out of the vestibule. The starkness of her face, the prominent bone of her cheeks, was shocking. The light had gone out of her eyes, and he realized how old and sick she truly was.

“The child, Mr. O'Brien,” she said, “is in a better place now, and that is all that matters,” and then pushed the door closed.

_________________________

Jacob Wirth's, Theater District

BLEARY-EYED AND
disoriented, Dante stared up at the high tin ceilings of Jacob Wirth's and at the numerous steel fans rotating there. The smoke-yellowed tin seemed to be lowering onto him, like one of those funhouse rides, the Shrinking Room, which made you feel that if you didn't run fast enough, you'd be crushed and snapped in two, pulverized bone and gore left behind for some sap to scrape up. Since they'd arrived for lunch, the woman sitting across from him hadn't stopped. When she wasn't chewing, she was talking aimlessly about best-selling books, movies and their stars. How
Point of No Return
and
The Egyptian
were downright bores and took her months to finish. How Bogart's character in
In a Lonely Place
turned her stomach; how
All About Eve
was a hands-down masterpiece, and if she ever wrote a script, it would be penned just like it; how unbelievable and ridiculous and juvenile
Rocketship X-M
was, and how the man who took her to see it, well, she'd never accept another one of his invitations.

“Mr. Cooper, are you sure you're okay?”

He gave her a slight grin. “I'm fine, Miss Grubb. Guess my appetite isn't quite as sharp as yours today.”

On her plate was a fat Reuben: thick black bread glistening with a swath of melted butter, folds of maroon marbled meat hanging thickly out of its sides. He'd suggested a quiet bar off of Boylston, but Miss Grubb had coaxed him to this place because it had her favorite sandwich, one in which she indulged once a week. As she began to eat, he had to look away. He took a slow sip of his beer, placed the mug back down, and then licked at the foam across his upper lip.

“I told you already, don't be so formal. Please call me Pam.”

Dante kept his eyes off her as she took another bite, stared at the curls and wind gusts nature had designed within the grain of the table.

“You're missing out by not ordering one of these,” she continued. “Just the proper amount of dressing, and the rye toasted perfectly.”

He turned and scanned the room at eye level, and immediately the same sense of vertigo pulled horizontally and teased his eyes. Off to his left, the long bar was shoulder to shoulder with people, still wearing their coats and jackets, stretching their lunch hour into two. Hazy, threaded smoke twined in the air above them. Most of the men at the bar appeared to be Dante's age or a bit older, and from a distance he could tell that many of them showed signs of too much drink and a weariness in their eyes that made them glisten as if made of glass. But at least they seemed happy, Dante thought, or at least they pretended to be.

“You have the same last name as him, maybe that's why,” she said.

He attempted a smile and nodded, even though he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Are you sure you don't mind it here?” She took a napkin to the corners of her mouth, an inquiring look in her brown eyes.

“I'm more than fine, thank you.”

“So, back to my question that you're evading: Is there any relation to him?” She looked down at her plate, not eyeing him, perhaps playing some manner of game.

“I'm afraid I lost you there.”

“Gary Cooper.” She laughed. “I was asking if you're in any way related to him.”

Realizing he was slumping, he shifted in his seat, straightened his spine against the hard wooden back. “Excuse me?”

“No kidding, you look like him. No one has ever told you that?”

“Not that I remember.”

Her cheeks reddened, and she laughed without offering him the punch line. Is this the way it was with women these days? He had no idea why she would be laughing. Was she merely insecure, or did she find him funny-looking?

“Really, if you put on some healthy weight, washed your hair, and got your proper sleep, I'm sure you'd hear such a compliment much more frequently.”

Her lips tightened as if she'd just realized she had offended him, but it didn't seem to stick, for she carried on again, sinking her teeth into the sandwich, chewing for a bit, and then talking around the food in her mouth.

“I adored him in
Ball of Fire,
you know. I'm not that keen on Barbara Stanwyck, a bit too risqué, but Gary Cooper, he's a swoon, I tell you. His eyes are so sad. I think that's what gives him away. Like yours, Dante, such sad, sad eyes.”

“Sad eyes, is that right?” He'd heard it before, many times before—from his mother, his aunts, Margo, even Sheila—as if one look at him and they knew that he was suffering, even if he wasn't.

“I don't mean anything by it. Some people have bedroom eyes, fiery eyes, rat eyes…yours are just a bit, you know, weary and pained.”

“I'm okay with it,” he said.

“You look offended. Are you?”

“Not a bit, not one bit,” he lied. “Mind if I smoke?”

“I do mind, actually. I'm filling up so a few more bites. Cigarettes while I'm eating kind of ruins a meal.” She feigned a sophisticated air, even went so far as to tilt back her head and show him her upturned nose. He wondered if she knew how much of a fool she was acting.

After he pulled off three mouthfuls from his beer, his eyes steadied and he gave her a closer look-over: thirty-odd years old, a bit full in the face with a fine long nose and thin but nicely shaped lips, brown hair conventionally styled over a lofty domed forehead. From her shapeless office suit came the cloying scent of lavender; whenever she moved, tossed her hair, or returned her food to the plate he could smell it. She wanted to be more than merely a townie, with her antique pin tacked onto her lapel and the affected accent that she slipped in and out of.

She pushed her plate forward an inch, signaling she was done, dabbed at her lips, and laid the crumpled and soiled napkin at the side of her plate. Dante lit his cigarette. When she offered her hand for one, he hesitated, but only for a moment. She placed it in her mouth and leaned over the table toward him. He stared at the cigarette propped like a set piece between her lips, and took his time bringing the lighter to it, watched as she puffed to keep the tip lit and then as she pretended to relish the smoke.

“You weren't all that close with Sheila, were you?” he said.

“No, not really, but we did chat every now and then. I don't think she liked me much. But then that's the way it is with all the other girls. Maybe it's just because I'm a bit older than them.” She smiled for no apparent reason, exposing a sharp tooth under a curved pink upper lip.

“She didn't work in the office for very long?”

“Only for two months. Not even that long.”

“Last spring?”

“February, March, I think.”

“What did she do for the office?”

“What we all do there. Lots of filing, answering phones, meeting and greeting, taking notes. Basic office work. And even though it's not rocket science, she didn't do too well at it.”

“Did you know her outside the office, ever go out for lunch or drinks?”

“A group of girls used to go out sometimes after work. Sometimes I'd tag along. Like I said, the young girls often feel threatened by me, so you couldn't say I was part of their circle or anything.”

“Was Sheila?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Was she part of their circle? Did she have friends among the other girls?”

“No, she pretty much kept to herself. I always thought she preferred the company of men anyways.”

“Why was that?”

She shrugged. “Just by the attention she received.”

“Do you know about any men in particular?”

She reached across the table for her glass of wine, put it to her lips delicately but took a big swallow from it as if it were a beer. “I guess a girl like that has many suitors, Mr. Cooper. Gets tough to decide which one is best when there's so many offering up their hearts and wallets to a girl.”

He ground his cigarette into the ashtray, then lit another. “She used to go on and on about Bobby Renza. And another guy named Mario. I think she had a thing for the both of them.”

The name Bobby Renza caught Dante off guard; he felt his lungs tighten, and a sudden sweat gathered on his forehead. He reached for his beer with a shaking hand, took a generous pull off it.

“Why is that first name familiar?” he asked, feigning nonchalance.

“Don't you listen to the radio?”

“Of course I do. He's a singer, yeah?” Dante flicked the long head of his cigarette into the ashtray.

“He
was
a singer. He had a big hit a couple years ago with ‘Let's Fly Away.' Kind of a local hero when his song went high up on the charts. But the way I heard Sheila talking about him, he was working at a photo shop in the North End, doing pictures of weddings, communions, that kind of thing. Can you imagine?”

Dante vaguely remembered the song—a pop tune that radios played in the summer months, and he knew it was something he and Margo would never have paid attention to. Every major city had one Renza, local talent with a bit of gold in their tonsils, attempting to be the next Frank Sinatra, Alan Dale, Mel Tormé, or even Gene Lindell. They all flamed briefly and then faded away. This Renza was the same slick asshole on the Common, the same man at the Pacific Club when he saw her last.

“Yeah, the song,” he said, and she pinned on it quickly and began singing. “Let's fly away, and find a land…”

It was a voice meant for the back row of a choir, and he couldn't have been more embarrassed for her. The waitress with pale blue eyes turned from a table to look at them, paused with her weight on one hip, accentuating its sharp angle, and smiled at Dante, almost in a sympathetic manner. When Miss Grubb had sung the refrain, he gave her a grin to appease her, hoping she'd stop, but she continued humming the rest.

“Sorry about that,” she said before taking a quick sip of water.

“No problem. We all sound better in the shower sometimes.”

She laughed. Color flushed her face.

“So did Sheila and Renza last long? Did she talk much about it?”

“Not much to me. Mostly to the other girls. As far as I know, she was with him the couple of months she worked there.”

“So like a boyfriend, not just a tryst.”

“That's right.”

“What happened to this other guy? What's his deal?”

“Mario? She was always talking about him. I don't know how she had time for it with everything else.” She waved her hand dramatically.

“Just Mario, no other name?”

“Just Mario.”

“And you never set eyes on either guy?”

“Neither ever came to the office, so, no, I never did.” She took another swig of the wine. “Aren't you family…shouldn't you know these things about her?”

“We haven't seen each other in some time, that's all.”

A sudden shrieking filled the room, a woman's high-pitched laughter ringing in the air like some wild animal's call, and they both glanced toward the bar. A woman, flushed-cheeked and inebriated, was laughing at something the man sitting next to her had said. When the laughing subsided, she began to snort, pressing a hand to her chest as if to quell the pressure, and the man next to her laughing as well and shaking his head at the noises she was making.

 “You mentioned that she seemed to like the company of men. Did she have any suitors within the State House?”

Miss Grubb's lips became rigid and her eyes widened, pulsing with anticipation. He had struck a nerve.

“I've been in this office the longest, and I know to refrain from mixing business and pleasure, but these young pretty faces don't see it that way. They become impressed that somebody from the top compliments them, remembers their names and so on. The big sin is these men are married, and the sadder thing is that these women don't even care. It truly is improper, don't you think?”

Dante nodded.

“She got flowers, and I mean every day of the week, Monday through Friday. Not your everyday bouquet, either.”

“So they weren't from the old Greek hawking daisies outside Park Street Station?”

“Ha! They certainly were not. These flowers cost a pretty penny.”

“Any other girls get such attention?”

“New women come and go, come and go. This is a farm for bigger and better things. It's a stepping-stone, and because I've been here the longest, I feel like the caretaker. Or one of the stones.” She sighed, laughed to herself. “And yes, I can tell there's lots going on there that shouldn't be.”

She had her napkin in her hand and was wringing it, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't an act. Her eyes widened, and her demeanor vibrated with the type of excitement that moves through a circle of women gossiping. She bit down on her bottom lip, leaned over the table, and gestured for him to come closer.

When he leaned in, he could smell the wine on her breath, the grease of corned beef and sauerkraut. “Sometimes I'd think of it as a meat market instead of a State House office,” she said and began to talk about Senator Gibbons, State Reps. McGhee, Tobin, and Hillsdale, Congressman Graziano, Councilmen Tupper and Millen—matching those names with women's names he knew nothing of. Dante took it all in, finished his beer, and ordered them another round. After she'd listed the names, she gave him the tawdry morsels of rumor that she heard in the lunchroom, the bathroom, and in passing through the State House hallways. By the time Miss Grubb was done talking, they'd finished their second round of drinks. Her eyes shone as if she were in the grip of a fever, perhaps guilty excitement. Maybe she realized how drunk she was getting, and that she was telling too much. But Dante knew she wasn't through yet.

“You've saved the best for last,” he said without emotion.

She grinned widely, teeth stained purple by wine. “Yes,” she said. “The best.”