The Seduction of Water (29 page)

The letter is signed Sister Amelia Dolores, mother superior. It’s disconcerting to read, twice in one day, of my mother being accused of petty theft. I’d rather believe that it was Rose McGlynn who stole the money, but then I remember finding the gold medal in my mother’s jewelry box and my mother tearing it from my neck when she saw me wearing it. My father said she reacted like that because of how she felt about the Catholic Church, but now I wonder if the necklace had reminded her of this crime and its shameful aftermath.

When I fold the note and slide it back under its paper clip I notice that something is written on the back, on the half of the paper that had been facing the folder. This note is written in a different, larger and rounder, hand.

“Dear Monsignor, please note that the boy in the picture is only Rose McGlynn’s younger brother, John McGlynn. I suspect that he is the one responsible for the collection plate theft and that the girls are protecting him.” This addendum is signed Sister Agatha Dorothy.

I open the folder and the black-and-white photograph, turned yellow and brown with age, falls into my lap. They’re leaning against a wooden railing in front of the ocean—John McGlynn, whom I recognize from his St. Christopher’s picture, flanked by two pretty girls. At first glance the girls look like they could be sisters. They’re both wearing tightly cinched skirts and lacy white blouses. Their hair is styled in the same swept-back pageboy, their lips painted an identical dark shade. I can just make out oval shapes at the girls’ throats but it would take some magnifying glass to identify their necklaces as saints’ medals. It doesn’t take a magnifying glass, though, to pick out the differences between the two girls. My mother’s hair curls buoyantly in the light breeze; her green eyes, fringed by dark lashes, are arresting even in a black-and-white picture. The other girl is a pale shadow; it’s clear she’s trying to imitate my mother, but her hair falls slackly to her shoulders, freckles mar her complexion, and she squints at the camera. It’s not that she’s not pretty, it’s just that Rose McGlynn can’t hold a candle to my mother.

I look over at Gloria but she’s muttering over her knitting, having apparently dropped a stitch. I let the picture slide from my lap into the open book bag next to my feet. Then I quickly skim through the rest of the file, but there’s nothing much to see here. Both girls got good grades. I notice that Sister Agatha Dorothy was their English teacher and that she’d given both girls A’s in her class. It was Rose McGlynn, though, and not my mother, who had won the composition award their junior year. Even though there’s not much of interest here, I find myself oddly reluctant to leave the two folders moldering at the feet of the reject saint, even when I notice that, fittingly, the plaque at the bottom of the statue identifies her as Santa Catalina, the “folk heroine” whose medals the girls had bought with the stolen collection plate money. Gloria is still ripping stitches out and unleashing a stream of Italian invectives at the unraveled mess of pink wool, so I slide the folders into my book bag along with the photograph, then straighten my aching back and tell Gloria I’m ready to see the church.

The church is beautiful; its soaring space a balm after the dank confines of the basement. The slim young man in ponytail and overalls—he introduces himself as Anthony Acevedo—flicks on the lights one by one as I walk down the center aisle, illuminating each section of the vaulted ceiling until I reach the main apse and the altar springs into light. Radiant stained-glass windows pierce the heavy stone walls, so that the figures in the window seem to float above the altar. In the center window, the Virgin Mary stands on a rock in a storm-tossed sea. What’s disappointing is that except for her blue cloak her head is bare. There’s no jeweled crown, no net of tears.

I turn to Anthony, who’s come to stand beside me. “Thank you for showing me the church,” I tell him, “it’s really beautiful.”

He nods, but then tilts his head at me and touches a finger to the skin below his right eye and tugs. “You were looking for something else,” he says, “I can tell.”

“I thought she’d have a crown,” I say, trying not to sound like a petulant child, “I mean, I saw another painting of Mary Star of the Sea in which she’s wearing a crown.”

Anthony looks delighted. He leans forward and, even though we’re alone in the huge church, whispers in my ear. “You’re looking for Santa Catalina. Follow me.”

“But I thought she was de-sainted,” I say, following Anthony down the length of the nave, away from the altar. He turns into a small chapel near the front door. There’s a bank of candles here, most burned down to nubs, some still sputtering from the previous night’s Mass. Underneath the smell of melting wax there’s another smell, something sweet, and then I notice that floating in the liquid wax are rose petals.

“The women who come to light candles bring the rose petals because of her name—Catalina della Rosa. Katherine of the Rose.” Anthony points at the oil painting above the candles. A century and a half of candle smoke hasn’t done it any good—I can barely make out the blue-cloaked figure in the painting.

“Isn’t this a picture of Mary?” I ask, recognizing the traditional red-and-blue color scheme from my college art history classes.

“Yes, which is why it’s still hanging in the church. But there’s a legend that the model for the painting was actually Catalina della Rosa.”

I move closer and recognize the painting from the slide Gordon showed—was it only a week ago?—at the end of his lecture, the portrait of Mary on the beach that was copied from the bridal portrait of Catalina della Rosa. I look up at her face, and there, half hidden by old varnish and smoke damage, is the emerald teardrop suspended from a crown of diamonds and pearls. My mother’s net of tears. I reach into my book bag and take out the faded photograph of my mother and John and Rose McGlynn at the beach, their new golden medals gleaming on their throats. They all look so happy. It must have seemed like a perfect, innocent day. Was Sister Agatha Dorothy—I picture her as plump and round like her handwriting—right when she guessed that John McGlynn had stolen the money? Did he steal the money and then take his sister and girlfriend for a day at the beach and the rides at Coney Island and then buy them the medals of their beloved saint? I’ll probably never know, but I feel sure that the day—the beach, the medals—must have seemed like the beginning of the end to my mother once she was expelled from school and later when John was convicted of a more serious crime. No wonder she remembered the saint’s headpiece as a net of tears.

Anthony touches my elbow gently. I expect him to be embarrassed by my tears, but instead he’s guiding my hand to the metal box where the tapers are kept for lighting candles. I hold the slim piece of wood over one of the lit candles until it catches, but then hesitate before touching it to one of the unlit candles.

“What do the women who come here pray for?” I ask him, remembering Sister Amelia Dolores’s letter. “To get married?”

“Not exactly,” Anthony tells me. “According to my sister, they pray to Santa Catalina to protect them from marrying the wrong man.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Before I leave St. Mary Star of the Sea, Anthony gives me directions to St. Christopher’s Home for Boys—now St. Christopher’s Social Services. It’s only a twenty-minute walk up Court Street and across Atlantic Avenue.

“Ask for Sister D’Aulnoy,” he tells me, “and say Anthony at St. Mary’s sent you.”

Sister D’Aulnoy,
I think walking up Court Street. At least she’s only got one name, unlike Amelia Dolores and Agatha Dorothy. After a lifetime of having very little to do with nuns, now I’m besieged with them. My aunt Sophie told me one other story—other than my late baptismal—to sum up my mother’s feelings about the Catholic Church. After I’d had my soul belatedly saved from limbo at age three my mother had tried sending me to a Catholic preschool in Kingston. One day she and Sophie had come to drop me off and I pitched a fit on the steps. “A full-scale tantrum,” Sophie said, “something to do with your lunch box being the wrong one. Your mother was plenty mad at you herself, but then a nun stopped and told her what she would do if that were her child. ‘Well,’ your mother responded, ‘maybe that’s why God made me a mother and you a nun.’ That was your last day in Catholic school.”

The building I see across Atlantic Avenue is large and square and plain, six stories of yellow brick. The wall facing Atlantic Avenue has the blank look of a wall that was once hidden by a neighboring building that has since been torn down, a sort of surprised expression like a kid who’s been caught daydreaming in class. To make up for it, St. Christopher’s has painted its logo—a giant hand holding up a small, stylized infant—and an advertisement for its social services, all in a pale green that matches the architrave on the front of the building. Angels, carved in bas-relief from the same yellow stone, spread their wings just below the architrave.

It’s an imposing building to approach and I find myself hoping, as I cross Atlantic, that Sister D’Aulnoy is more like Agatha Dorothy than Amelia Dolores. The person I find, after the security guard’s phone call brings her to the front entrance, is a small, compact woman with short gray hair in civilian clothes that look like they’ve been ordered out of L. L. Bean or Land’s End. Other than the small silver crucifix hanging from her neck and an enamel
RC
pin on her navy cardigan, there’s no external sign that she’s a nun.

She takes me to her office. We could be in any office building, except that at the end of the hallway glass doors open into a small chapel.

“Anthony Acevedo called and said you were researching a book about your mother,” Sister D’Aulnoy says, seating herself behind a desk piled high with file folders.

“Yes, my mother grew up in this neighborhood and went to St. Mary Star of the Sea . . .”

Sister D’Aulnoy removes her half-moon glasses and lets them dangle from a bright orange cord around her neck where they soon become tangled with the silver crucifix. She folds her hands in her lap and sits back in her chair, waiting to hear my story. There’s nothing at all in her demeanor to suggest impatience, but looking around me, at the stacks of folders, the brightly colored Post-it notes decorating every surface of her desk with messages like “Cookies!” and “Basketballs for Staten Island Home!,” the pictures that line her walls of boys—young boys, black, Hispanic, white, boys in military uniforms and graduation caps and basketball jerseys—I know that Sister D’Aulnoy probably has at least half a dozen pressing demands on the time I’m about to take up. Which I suppose is a poor excuse for lying to a nun, but that’s exactly what I proceed to do.

“. . . and her brothers came here to St. Christopher’s after their mother died.” It’s easy once I start. All I have to do is transpose my mother’s story with her friend’s. Besides, a little voice inside me pleads in self-justification, my mother made it her story. She took what happened to the McGlynns and turned it into a whole world—Tirra Glynn. Rose was her best friend; John, I feel sure, her childhood sweetheart. Their story caused her to flee the city in 1949 and their story brought her back to Brooklyn in 1973 where she died. It was because of them that I lost her, so in a way, they owe me a family allegiance.

“I believe one of my uncles, Arden McGlynn, died here and the other two, John and Allen, eventually ended up in prison. At least that’s what the newspaper story said.” I take out the photocopied story of Rose’s plea to the court and hand it to Sister D’Aulnoy, but she gives it only a cursory glance and keeps her soft blue eyes on me.

“And your mother never spoke of them?”

“No . . . it must have been painful having her family broken up like that.” As I say it, sitting in this cramped office which, for all I know, could be the very room where Rose saw her brothers when she came to visit, I realize for the first time how painful it must have been. Like me, Rose lost her mother when she was young, but unlike me she lost her whole world as well. Her father fell apart, her younger brothers were given over to strangers. In her plea to the judge she said she regretted not keeping them herself—but how could she have? She was only seventeen.

“I can understand that it must have been painful for your mother’s family,” Sister D’Aulnoy is saying, “but it wasn’t unusual. When St. Christopher’s was founded the boys who came here were orphans, often living on the streets, making a living—if you could call it that—as newsboys. But then, during the Depression, many families who couldn’t feed their children turned to St. Christopher’s to take care of the younger ones. Our records from that time are very spotty—children came and went sporadically—but I’d like to help you attain some sense of closure. What exactly do you want to know?”

“I’d like to know how old the younger brothers were and how Arden died and . . .” I pause, suddenly unsure of what I expected from coming here, and scan the faces on the wall. I notice that some of the photos aren’t of boys, but of men in middle age standing in front of homes or businesses, with families, in front of Rotary Club daises. Alumni of St. Christopher’s showing off their successful lives to their alma mater—orphans who’ve graduated into family men.

“I’d like to know if Allen or John is still alive. I mean, they could be, and they could still be in touch with you, right?”

Sister D’Aulnoy doesn’t answer at first. I see her studying me and I’m afraid that she’s somehow seen through my deception. If she doesn’t believe these McGlynn boys are my uncles she’s unlikely to provide me with any information of their whereabouts.

“I’d have to check the archives in the subbasement—” Another basement! My trip to Brooklyn is turning into a spelunking expedition, but then Sister D’Aulnoy must sense my reluctance, or else she wants to look at those files first by herself. “—I suggest you wait in the chapel. If I find anything I’ll bring it to you there.”

After the soaring space of St. Mary Star of the Sea this chapel seems low and plain. The stained-glass windows, deeply recessed into thick white plaster walls, let in only the murkiest trickle of greenish light. The ceiling is coffered into pale blue squares, which I suppose are painted to represent sky, but instead the effect is of standing under water.

“Did the chapel look like this in the forties?” I ask Sister D’Aulnoy.

“As our population became decreasingly Catholic the pews and altar were removed. But we’ve left the windows that depict St. Christopher carrying Christ across the river. They’re more river than saint anyway. Here—” She motions me toward one of the chairs that stand against the walls. “—why don’t you sit here while I go to find your uncles’ files—” She touches her hand to my arm. “Many find it a place of peace.”

She pads out of the chapel—silent on crepe-soled shoes—and I sit staring at the wall of stained-glass windows. The truth is I’ve never known quite what to do with myself in churches and synagogues, having had little practice or training. I’m never sure what to do with my hands or my eyes or my thoughts. I usually resort to art history lectures—ticking off vaults and naves and quatrefoil windows instead of stations of the cross—and today is no exception. I look at the stained-glass windows. Sister D’Aulnoy is right, there’s more river than saint in them. Ranged along the long wall of the nave they depict a single episode: the giant St. Christopher carrying the child Christ across the river. At first the river is calm and shallow, but as St. Christopher begins his journey the waters become turbulent and deep. By the middle window the water is nearly over Christopher’s head, his toes, pointed and arched like a dancer’s, barely touch the river bottom, his neck strains to keep his head above water, and his right arm holds the Christ child just above the water’s surface. Nor does the water recede in the next two windows. Instead, the river’s current—swirls of blue and green glass—wraps around the giant’s legs and arms like pieces of seaweed and even—I get up to get a closer look—snakes or eels biting into the saint’s flesh. I’ve never seen this particular episode in Christ’s life depicted quite like this, but it reminds me of something else: my mother’s description of the selkies shedding their skin under the drowned river, in the place where the salt water meets fresh.

“They’re unusual, aren’t they?” I startle as if caught desecrating the holy water—or stealing from the collection plate as my mother had been accused of—but it’s only Sister D’Aulnoy on her crepe-soled shoes crossing the chapel to stand beside me before the windows. “They were done at the turn of the century by a graduate of St. Christopher’s. I think you can see the influence of art nouveau in the sinuous curves of the current and the way the water turns into various creatures. I’ve read in his letters to the monsignor that he wanted to show how St. Christopher carried the Christ child safely above the roiling river just as the home had borne him safely through the turmoil of his orphaned childhood.”

I look at the last window, which depicts St. Christopher emerging from the water. The saint looks exhausted and battered by the deluge, not triumphant. The staff in his hand springs into luxuriant green foliage, which shelters him. It reminds me of my mother’s book when the selkie Deirdre climbs out of the drowned river, flayed of her selkie skin, and walks through the forest, which clothes her in its foliage. And then I remember the stained-glass window at the Red Branch Pub of Naoise and his brothers—of course, they were named Allen and Arden!—carrying Deirdre across the water away from the evil king Connachar. The two stories must have become intertwined in my mother’s mind. I feel sure my mother was thinking of these windows when she described Deirdre’s transformation under the river, which suggests that she visited John McGlynn here.

“Would you like to see your uncles’ files?”

I’m thrown for a moment by my forgotten lie. Not uncle, I think, my mother’s sweetheart, the boy she left behind in a prison by the river.

“I’m surprised you found it so fast,” I say to deflect Sister D’Aulnoy’s probing glance—I imagine she’s had years of experience detecting lies. “Down in the subbasement.”

“It wasn’t in the subbasement,” she says, gently steering me back to the chairs across from the windows. “I thought the
McGlynn
name sounded familiar and then I remembered that one of our board directors had asked for the boys’ files a few months ago. It was still on my desk.”

“Who? . . .” I begin to ask the name of the director, but Sister D’Aulnoy is already fitting her glasses on to read something to me. I don’t want to seem more interested in the board director than my “uncles,” but I promise myself I’ll get the name before I leave.

“I remembered it too because the nun who did their admittance papers wrote a full account of the family situation—a Sister Dominica—she was admirably thorough. Do you want to hear it?”

I nod, wishing Sister D’Aulnoy would give me the paper, but she seems determined to mediate between me and her predecessor.

“John McGlynn—that would be the father—came to St. Christopher’s in March 1941 seeking shelter for his three sons because his wife, Deirdre—”

“Deirdre? His wife’s name was Deirdre?”

Sister D’Aulnoy gives me a puzzled look over the half circles of her glasses. “Yes, Deirdre. That would be your grandmother’s name. Didn’t your mother tell you her own mother’s name?”

I shake my head. The truth is, my mother never did tell me her mother’s name—a fact that makes me blush with shame now. Seeing that, Sister D’Aulnoy lowers her eyes to the file and goes on.

“Because his wife, Deirdre, had recently died in childbirth. It was to have been Mrs. McGlynn’s seventh child—” Anticipating my interruption, Sister D’Aulnoy holds up an admonishing hand. “—she’d lost the last two children she’d borne at home soon after childbirth and she’d been so anxious to deliver this one safely that she’d gone to the Hospital of the Holy Family. Unfortunately, Mr. McGlynn, perhaps out of the disorder in his mind resulting from grief and, I’m sorry to say, heavy drinking, blamed his wife’s demise on the hospital. He thought the doctors had put the life of the baby before the life of his wife. He also believed that his wife’s weakened condition was a result of having so many children—and he blamed the church for that.”

“As if he had nothing to do with it.” I actually clamp my hand over my mouth as soon as the words are out. No wonder my mother took me out of Catholic preschool. Nuns seem to bring out the worst in me. Surprisingly, though, Sister D’Aulnoy takes my comment in stride and, even more surprisingly, has more compassion for John McGlynn than I.

“He wouldn’t have been the first—or the last—to blame the church for encouraging large families and prohibiting birth control. Poor woman. Imagine having seven children—and I see from the boys’ birth certificates that she was only thirty-nine when she died! I’m afraid though that Sister Dominica had few words of compassion for him here. ‘I warned him against impugning the church, especially in the presence of his young daughter who’d accompanied him, but he was too far gone in his grief to heed me and the girl, instead of thanking me, told me that her father wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t thought already. I’m afraid that since the girl is old enough to be on her own she’s outside the realm of our help and we’ll just have to do the best we can with the boys.’ ”