Charisma (21 page)

“No,” Susan said.

“Well, think about it. How much power do you assume Mother Teresa has?”

“Mother
Teresa
?” Susan blinked.

“Good God,” Andy said, going white again. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you think you’re going to get away with it.”

“Get away with what?” Susan said. “He can’t arrest Mother Teresa. She’s in Calcutta.”

“The problem with people like Mother Teresa,” Dan said, “is that they appeal to the emotional in people. They get everyone all gushy and mushy. They totally circumvent all common sense.”

“If you mean it’s not common sense to spend your life doing good for the untouchables in India, I agree with you,” Susan said. “Fortunately, not everyone is all that wedded to common sense.”

“They ought to be. Mother Teresa is a very dangerous woman. People like Mother Teresa are dangerous people. They—wait.”

Dan stared at the radio, which was sending out a little jingle about a used-car place in North Branford. The song was soprano-sharp and unoriginal, and he frowned at it.

“I wouldn’t go there,” he said. “I know the guy who runs it. I would go to Stephen’s World of Wheels out in Bristol.”

“Stephen’s World of Wheels sells new cars,” Andy said.

“You’re a fool to buy a used car anyway. Not that you ever buy cars.”

The jingle stopped and was replaced by a gong, a contralto sequence dangerously close to the one NBC used to use in the early days of television. Dan grabbed the radio and turned it first toward him and then away, toward them, as if it were a defective loud-speaker and they needed to have it pointed directly at their ears to hear anything at all. The gong stopped ringing and the tinny, perky, whiny voice from two minutes before came back, saying,

“It’s one
P. M.,
and this is WNHC at the top of the hour with the news.”

“There,”
Dan said, and then he sat down, abruptly, like a sitcom drunk collapsing into his chair.

Susan found herself reaching for her cigarettes automatically, lighting up without looking to see if there was an ashtray on the table. The room was suddenly very tense, with Andy wound up tight and Dan oddly deflated. Susan thought Dan was like a small child who had waited all week for a party, only to begin being disappointed as soon as the party got under way. Andy was something else again. There was too much going on for her to be able to think about Andy.

The tinny announcer had been replaced by the basso voice of an actor pretending to be a newsman. “At the top of the news this hour,” the actor was saying, “sources close to the top of District Attorney Dan Murphy’s office report that the New Haven prosecutor has ordered a hush-hush investigation of Father Thomas Burne, founder of New Haven’s Damien House, on charges of child abuse…”

“
Child
abuse,” Andy burst out. Then he picked up his wine glass, broke it off at the stem, and said, “Son of a bitch.”

F
ROM THE BEGINNING, THERE
was one thing he had always been careful about, and that was drugs. He had seen too many people flying to believe in them. The high never lasted very long and it never solved anything. When the crash came you were just where you had started out to be, except that you were sick. Even so, it had been hard to stay away from them. Five years ago, crack had been practically a medium of exchange on Congress Avenue. Young boys who sold themselves to chickenhawks almost had to be junkies, because they had no pimps to negotiate for them and the johns expected to pay off in dope. He thought it was wrong of all those clean and shiny people to be so outraged about the pimps. The pimps served a purpose—the way lawyers and tax accountants served a purpose on Prospect Street and Edge Hill Road.

It was getting late in the day now and he was tired. He was cold, too, but he thought he was going to be cold for a while. It was better to pretend that he was warm than to try to do anything about it. There were a thousand different ways of surviving on the street and he knew them all, but he wasn’t really good at any of them except shoplifting. He’d already picked up enough to eat so that he wasn’t hungry, and there wasn’t any point in going looking for anything else. All the best places to steal would be getting ready to close.

He was in a part of town he didn’t know very well, just walking. The streets were lined with dry cleaners and delis and religious-articles stores, stuffed into the ground floors of six-story buildings. Above him the sky seemed to be composed of plate-glass picture windows, lit up, tortured into odd shapes by the curtains that hung at their sides. Every once in a while he would see a woman—always a woman—carrying a vase of flowers or a glass of something to drink.

Not knowing what else to do, he turned right at the next intersection and kept going. He wanted to see if he could get himself lost.

Twenty minutes later, he was still walking, now on streets too well-kept to be abandoned but too dark to be inhabited. The people who lived in the houses around him were Catholic, but probably Hispanic Catholic. There were stained-glass window-hangings of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart in the windows, but there were also a lot of those rainbow-colored roosters. He didn’t know what the roosters were supposed to represent, but he did know they had something to do with being Catholic, at least for people from Latin America. Someone—maybe Theresa Cavello—had tried to explain it to him once.

When he got to the next intersection, he stopped. In heavily Catholic neighborhoods there were heavily Catholic churches, often churches that were open all night. If he could find the one that belonged to these people, he could go in there and think. He had a lot to think about. All day the street had been full of stories about Stevie Marks. His first name hadn’t really been Stevie and his last name hadn’t really been Marks, but it didn’t matter much.

He’d heard first about Stevie Marks while he was standing on the corner of Congress and Strove, long after he’d followed her down from Edge Hill Road and realized she was going to disappear into Damien House for hours. He’d gone back to Congress Avenue to decide what to do, and one of the girls had come up to him and told him. Like most of the girls, she got paid in money, but she doped to take her mind off her life. She was supposed to stay clean on the street, but she hadn’t. When she came up to him her eyes were small and hard and bright.

“It was dumb,” she’d said, after she’d told him the story. “It’s the stupidest thing in the world, coming back from the dead.”

He had wanted to tell her about resurrection, but he hadn’t. She wouldn’t have understood and it wouldn’t have done him good. His charism was like the fine soft skin on a fashion model, a gift of God that had to be carefully taken care of, a grace that could too easily be lost.

Now he walked another block and looked down another intersection, into blackness, into nothing, and wondered how long it would take for him before he found what he was looking for.

A church.

And a chance.

It was called Saint Mary of the Pines, and its name was written, in Spanish as well as English, on a square little painted sign on the street-end of the lawn out front. He read the Spanish words in the light streaming out of the church’s open front door—
Santa María de los Pinos
—and decided that, Hispanic or not, this was a better neighborhood than Margaret Mary McVann’s. In Margaret Mary McVann’s, no one would have considered leaving the church doors open at night.

He walked to the bottom of the steps, looked in through the door, and saw nothing. Then he walked up the steps and looked in from the porch. Not only the front doors, but the vestibule doors were open. He could see straight up the center aisle to the altar. The altar had been covered with a cloth, and there was a monstrance on it with the host exposed in a circle of gold. There was one old woman leaning just inside the aisle rail of the left front pew. He dipped his fingers in the holy water and blessed himself and went inside, genuflecting automatically. The consecrated Host was the real body and blood of Jesus Christ, made present, and he knew he ought to be in awe of it. In fact, he had never been able to make himself take it seriously at all. The knife, in the right pocket of his jacket again, just the way it had been the day he went to Margaret Mary McVann, felt more real.

He backed all the way out into the vestibule again, and there she was, a small dark girl in a long blue skirt and a white blouse. She was wearing a Miraculous Medal around her neck. It was one of the ones with a blue glass covering that was supposed to look like sapphire.

“You,” she said, and then went off in a stream of Spanish, incomprehensible but musical, an alto chant.

He shook his head.

She looked disgusted. “Of course not,” she said. “You’re not here for the Forty Hours Devotion.”

“Is that what that is?”

“Twice a year. What are you here for?”

“I was walking around.”

“In the cold?”

He shrugged.

She went up to the vestibule door, looked inside, and shook her head. “I’ve got a list here, all these old ladies. That’s all who ever volunteers. Sister Annacita says it’s a scandal.”

“Who’s Sister Annacita?”

“She’s my history nun. She’s a hag, really, a woman without blood. That’s what my mother says. She’s not really Annacita.”

“What is she?”

The girl made a face. “Anne. An Anglo. They come down here and they’re so proud of themselves, lifting us up from poverty. We lift ourselves up from poverty as long as we stay away from them. You’re an Anglo. You don’t look proud of yourself.”

“I’m just tired.”

“I’m tired, too, but I have to be here all night. I have to do the baking. Then when the old ladies come in I have to check them off on a list, and if they don’t come in I have to call up and find out what’s happened to them. Not that that’s going to do any good. Most of them don’t have phones. If somebody doesn’t come in I’ll just go next door to the convent and get one of the nuns. They ought to be here. Letting old ladies ruin their health in this cold kneeling all night in front of the Blessed Sacrament.”

“You don’t like nuns,” he said.

The girl shrugged. “Nuns are nuns. None of them has any blood and none of them makes any sense.”

She turned away from him and looked off toward the right, where there was a door he hadn’t noticed before. The door was open and a faint shaft of light was spilling out of it.

“I’ve got to go down there,” she told him. “I’ve got to take calls and I’ve got to pretend I’m being alert. You can come with me if you want.”

He was going to tell her he didn’t want, but she didn’t give him time. She went for the door in a run, pulled it open, and rushed through. She reminded him of the street girls just after they’d taken a hit of speed, except that she hadn’t taken anything.

When she was gone, he put his hand in his pocket and felt along the blade of the knife. It was nicking him the way it had the last three times he’d brought it with him, the sharp tip stabbing into his flesh over and over again like an angry wasp. He pulled it halfway out and wrapped his hand around it, squeezing it until the blade cut into the flesh under his knuckles. When he felt blood he began to feel dizzy.

He also began to change his mind.

The Holy Spirit was a bird, a dove, and birds sang. The Holy Spirit sang out His charisms and poured His music out over the men and women who listened to the Word of God. The Holy Spirit gave the gift and gave the power and you could hear about it any night you wanted to on television. Somewhere in this place filled with Hispanic people and Anglo nuns there was someone he was looking for and all he had to do was listen to the music, listen to the music, feel himself fill up with the Holy Spirit and then start to fly.

When he looked down the front of his jeans were soaked with blood. His hand was a mess and his knuckles ached. Everything hurt and all he could think of was crucifixion. He’d been nailed to a cross once, but the cross was upside down and that had been another life.

Besides, this was a charism, too.

When she saw him bleeding she would take care of him.

Taking care of him, she would tell him what he had to know.

T
HIRTY YEARS AGO, FATHER
John Kelly’s job would have been very straightforward: take care of the Knights of Columbus, and make sure none of them, in the local chapters or the national office, got upset. Thirty years ago, New Haven was not only the world headquarters of the Knights, but the most fiercely loyal Catholic city in the world. Unlike the Catholic cities of Europe, like Dublin and Paris and Rome, it had never developed a hard strain of anticlericalism, a visceral suspicion of priests. Unlike the Catholic pockets of New York and Chicago and Boston, it had never had its feelings hurt by the Vatican. Even that old fart of a papal legate who had served under Pius XII, whose personality had acted like sandpaper on a raw wound on every other collection of prelates and laymen in America, had managed to be charming here. John could remember the building of the world headquarters in the late sixties, how impressed and shocked everyone had been. The Church was falling down around their ears. Nuns and priests were defecting en masse. Every product of a parochial school over the age of twenty-one was writing a book on how terrible it had been to be raised Catholic in the days before birth control was a sacrament—and the Knights had calmly collected a few million dollars, put up a building the size of a New York City flagship hotel, and dedicated the project to the Mother of God. Maybe, Father John Kelly thought, that was why his job hadn’t
existed
thirty years ago.

At the moment, it existed with a job description that did not match its duties, because no one—least of all the bishop—wanted to admit in public that the Catholic church in New Haven now needed a referee. What Father John Kelly was supposed to do was simple: keep the liberals on one side of the fence and the conservatives on the other, and make sure they didn’t beat each other to death in front of a dozen television cameras. It wasn’t easy. As an order priest, locked away for the most part on college campuses where “dissent” meant desperately sincere, studiously intense discussions of the possible connections between the theology of the Trinity and sexism, he had had no idea how bad it had gotten. On his desk at this moment, at eight o’clock in the morning, there was a pile of message slips an inch and a half thick. Twenty or thirty of them would be from Saint Michael’s Parish out on the Milford border, where the bishop had made the mistake of assigning a sweet old priest, close to retirement, to what John Kelly considered a nest of sharks. Every time the old man gave a homily that so much as mentioned the word
sin,
the whole parish council called in, demanding to be assigned a priest who wasn’t so “negative.” Father John Kelly thought the parish council at Saint Michael’s could have found negativity in the Resurrection if they’d really tried—and if they’d had it preached to them by a priest who insisted on upholding Rome’s ban on altar girls. Then there would be the calls from Saint Rita’s, which was close to being an inner-city parish, but not quite. The “not quite” meant that the place was full of charismatic Hispanics threatening schism, and being badly served by a nice young man from the local seminary who thought speaking in tongues was the province of Protestant holy rollers. Parishioners at Saint Rita’s got up in the middle of Mass and went into religious ecstasies. Their priest, forbidden by the bishop to throw them out, was near to a nervous breakdown. Somehow or the other, John was supposed to calm them all down and make sure none of them, or few of them, left the Church. He was beginning to wonder why the bishop wanted him to bother. In these days of democratic governments and religious pluralism, the Catholic Church was a voluntary organization. If you didn’t want to belong to Her, you ought to be allowed to leave in peace.