Charisma (16 page)

“You’ve changed your mind?”

“I don’t know. We found cash. If he was stealing the clothes, he had to have been stealing cash, too, and I don’t know where he’d have done that. We don’t keep a lot of cash in the house. It couldn’t have come from us. And we kept a pretty tight leash on Robbie. He was only fourteen. He wasn’t wandering around in the middle of the night sticking up gas stations.”

“How much money was involved?”

This time, Catherine Sargent’s smile was thin. “Once I went through one of those new blazers of his and came up with a thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills.”

John Kelly blinked. A thousand dollars. Where would a fourteen-year-old boy come up with a thousand dollars? He couldn’t have come up with a thousand dollars himself, in cash, if his life depended on it. He hazarded the only explanation he could think of, aware all the while that Catherine Sargent’s face had frozen into an expression of amusement that was somehow irredeemably horrible.

“Was it dope?” he said.

“I’m pretty sure not,” Catherine Sargent said.

“What was it, then?”

She had smoked another cigarette down to the butt. She lit up for a third time, then stood and walked to his window. She kept her back to him and one arm wrapped around her waist.

“Two days after his fifteenth birthday,” she said, “Robbie disappeared. He didn’t tell us he was running away from home. He didn’t leave a note. Things had been tense for a long time—even his father was beginning to see something was seriously wrong—but we hadn’t had a fight recently and we hadn’t had a confrontation. He was just gone. We went to the police.”

“Did they find him?”

“Nobody found him. We didn’t hear anything of him for almost a year. I used to worry that he’d gone to New York City. I used to worry, period.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I should have been more worried than I was. What do I call a bishop, anyway? Your honor?”

“I’m only an auxiliary bishop. You can call me ‘Father’ if you want to.”

“Well, Father, about a month ago Robbie surfaced. According to what he told the district attorney’s office—and what the district attorney’s office told us; I’m getting this secondhand—he’d been living on the streets of New Haven all the time, eating out of garbage cans. He said his father was abusive and he was afraid to go home.”

John Kelly felt his mood shift. You could never tell in abuse cases. Anybody could be lying and anybody could be telling the truth. With this on the table, Catherine Sargent looked a little shabbier to him. Then, suddenly, he was ashamed of himself. He didn’t know anything about this, or about her, and the mere suggestion of abuse had started a litany of accusations in his mind. He felt like an Inquisitor.

“Did the district attorney’s office send Robbie to Father Burne?”

“They did indeed,” Catherine said.

“Did they file abuse charges against your husband?”

Catherine Sargent turned her back to the window. The smoke from her cigarette rose in front of her face like the smoke from an incense stick and curled around her head. The prettiness was gone from her face. In its place was something both cruel and triumphant.

“The district attorney’s office hasn’t filed charges yet,” she said. “Robbie got a lawyer and filed suit all by himself. But he isn’t suing us, Father Kelly. He’s suing Father Tom Burne. He’s saying Father Burne fucked him and Father Burne would only let him stay at Damien House as long as he went on being fucked.”

O
N THE DAY DAN
announced at breakfast that he would be home for lunch, Susan decided to go down to Damien House by herself. It was Monday, December 16, and she didn’t actually decide. That would have taken forethought, and there were times she thought she’d lost all capacity for forethought in the weeks since she’d left the convent. Sometimes she thought she’d even lost consciousness. In her first days of being out, the holdover habits of being in had been so slight, and surfaced so erratically, she’d thought they’d disappear in no time at all and with no effort on her part. Then, as morning followed morning, she’d begun to catch herself doing things that would have looked crazy to anyone who didn’t know her history. Swinging her feet out of bed so that they landed on the floor with a dull but violent slap; praying in Latin before she had her eyes open; walking against the wall on her way to the bathroom: what was coming out in her was something old enough to be ancient, the routine of convent life before the changes of Vatican II had made themselves felt. Her order had been laggard in that respect. While all the other nuns in the archdiocese of Hartford were already experimenting with lay dress and lunches at McDonald’s, Susan had still been wearing a wimple, five layers of underwear, and a veil that reached down her back to her knees. All that had lasted well into the 1970s, so that Susan had spent her first five years after tertiary profession looking—as a man who stopped her on the street had once put it—like a “real nun.” If there was anything she remembered from that period, rather than simply had fused into her bones, it was the older people who would stop her, their eyes pleading and desperate, anxious and afraid of hope. They all had the same question, which was not really the question they wanted to ask at all. They wanted to know if they would get their Church back.

Hearing her feet slap the floor that morning, she pulled them back under her, ran her palms over her face, and shook her head. It was still dark out, probably before six in the morning. That was a habit that had lasted all her seventeen years inside, and that she thought she would never break. She played her fingers through her hair until her scalp hurt and then stood up.

The only light in the room was coming from one of the security arcs outside. She went to the window and pulled the curtains shut, realizing as she did that she had left the window open the night before, in spite of the fact that it was freezing. That was more nun stuff, as she was beginning to think of it. Back in canonical year, her novice mistress, old Sister Marie Bonaventure, had believed in fresh air the way the Nazis had believed in the Blitzkrieg.

Susan put on her robe, stopped herself from fastening it too tightly around her waist, the way she had been taught to do, and let herself into the hall. With no lights burning, the hall was pitch dark and eerie, full of imaginary cobwebs. Full of imaginary skeletons, too, Susan thought, and let herself into the bathroom. Like a lot of other things in the house, it had been renovated. There was ceramic tile on the walls and floor and ceiling and a big oval tub Dan had told her proudly was a “Jacuzzi for four.” Every time she saw it, Susan wondered: four
what
? She didn’t like to imagine Dan with all those women at once.

She got her toothpaste and her Camay soap out of the little green bag she had brought to put them in—
more
nun stuff—looked at herself in the mirror, and sighed.

It didn’t matter how hard she tried to block it, to fill her head with memories and excuses. It didn’t matter how hard she tried to tell herself she was afraid. Theresa Cavello, the Congo, the faces of children drifting in the street—going back wasn’t sensible, but it was what she kept feeling she had to do. God only knew she was sick and tired of hanging around this place, brooding about herself, brooding about Dan. Brooding wasn’t getting anybody anyplace and it wasn’t making her less bored.

Or less anxious.

She turned on the tap, threw water on herself, and scrubbed.

She was in the hall half an hour later, putting on her boots and fretting about her coat, when she heard a sound on the stairs and, looking up, saw Andy coming toward her. He looked as much of a mess as always, but less alert and less intelligent. She turned her face away from him and thrust her arm into the sleeve of a parka she had bought for herself when she was sixteen years old.

“Where are you going?” he asked her.

“For a walk.”

“It’s quarter to six in the goddamned morning,” he told her.

Susan shrugged and stuffed the other arm into the other sleeve. She was used to getting up at four and getting to work by five—and besides, what did the time have to do with it? The kitchen was behind her and it was a pit of vipers, her private arena for her private disintegration. She went to the front door and pulled it open, letting in the dark.

“I’m going for a walk,” she repeated. “I’m feeling antsy.”

“I didn’t think
antsy
was the kind of word a nun used,” Andy said.

“I’m not a nun.”

She stepped out onto the porch and looked down Edge Hill Road, at the street lamps, at the dark. Then, thinking she knew what Andy was worried about, she turned back and said, “I’ll be home for lunch. You can promise Dan.”

H
E WAS WAITING FOR HER
when she came out of the house, sitting in the front bushes instead of the trees at the back, knowing she would bolt. That was one of the things he was good at, knowing when people would bolt, what the limits were to their self-control. He had been watching her for a while now and he had her all figured out.

She came down the porch steps and started across the front walk, keeping carefully in the center of it, as if she were
willing
herself to walk in the center of it. She let herself out the front gate onto the street.

If she went down the hill, she would pass directly in front of him. If she went up, she would move away. He closed his eyes and prayed, hard, until he heard the sound of her feet on the rock salt just a few inches from his ear. He thought he knew where she was going—he had been watching her for so long—but he could never be sure.

When he opened his eyes again, she was already halfway down the hill. She moved quickly and with purpose, as if she knew where she were going.

He swiveled his head around just in time to see a man turn off the light in the house’s foyer and head up the stairs. Then he looked back at Susan, in her jeans and old sweater and worn coat. She had to be going where he thought she was going. There was no other reason for her to be dressed that way.

He waited a few moments, just to be sure, and then he swung out on the street himself, following her.

Sometimes, thinking about his charism, he was afraid. Sometimes it all seemed so nebulous and diffuse, like the nightmares of the junkies who slept in the boxes in the vacant lots that took up so much of the Congo. It was wrong to call it the Congo now, really, even for the worst kind of racist fool. It had sunk now beneath even the tenuous respectability of a ghetto, and most of the people who slept there were white.

He stepped into the street and began walking downhill that way, watching her slipping and sliding down the sidewalk ahead of him. The rock salt hadn’t been spread as thickly at the bottom of Edge Hill as at the top. Below a certain economic level, the city of New Haven stopped worrying about your chances of breaking your neck on the ice.

 She reached the bottom of the hill, turned the corner, and went on walking. He speeded up and kept following, keeping his distance and varying his pace. He had been thinking about not coming out this morning, thinking how tired he was and how it wouldn’t matter if he missed a single day. Now he was glad he had listened to that insistent voice of God in his head and come in spite of himself.

Right now, his charism didn’t seem nebulous and diffuse. He was omniscient and invulnerable, guided by the light. He was on the cusp of a prophecy.

Two blocks ahead of him, she turned another corner. When he came around that corner himself he found her stopped under a bus sign, her hands in her pockets and her teeth biting against her lips to keep them from hardening in the cold. He had forgotten that the buses to where she wanted to go started running at six.

He gave her a shy little smile, and stepped back.

She paid no attention to him at all.

He had to remember: she was the start of it all, the bad seed of faith who had begun the betrayal and caused the rest of it. She was not like Margaret Mary McVann or any of the others. She had to be handled carefully. Everything that happened to her had to be planned.

Then, too, it was harder to kill a general than a soldier. It took practice. It took rehearsal.

He thought she had to be a general because she was his sister. She had to be the explanation of him.

It was getting fuzzy in his head again, but he knew what he meant.

This was his charism: to find the soldiers of Judas Iscariot and lay them down.

C
ATCHING THE BUS AT
the Green, even making the change at the very last minute in a blackened landscape that looked less and less familiar by the minute, Susan had thought it was going to be easy. Certainly she knew how to get where she was going, even after she reached the point where the buses stopped running and she would have to walk. The memory of her trip with Andy was burned indelibly into her brain, like the memory of where she had been when she heard that JFK had been assassinated. Certainly she knew New Haven. She had been born and brought up there. What she hadn’t counted on was the peculiar ebb and flow of city life. The city changed from hour to hour, especially in places like Congress Avenue, becoming unrecognizable to itself in transformations that took split seconds and altered everything. When she got off the bus at Congress Avenue it was nothing like she remembered it. The small novelty stores seemed to have disappeared into the dirt and concrete. The people who crowded the street seemed to have come from some Hollywood censor’s fantasy of the evils of prostitution. The light was glaring, neon and jerky and never white. An enormous sign that said
GIRLS! GIRLS!
25¢! 25¢! 25¢! seemed to take up an entire block. In the Congo it was still night.

She knew she only had to keep walking along the avenue until she found Amora Street, and so she did, pushing against girls in halter tops and thigh-high sarongs who looked younger than her eighth-grade students back at Saint Mary of the Rosary Parish School. Their makeup was inexpert and halfhearted, but the men who stood behind them were intense. Susan was startled to realize how many of those men there were. Somehow, she had always thought of prostitutes as free agents on the street—with their pimps hidden off somewhere, where the customers couldn’t see them.