Charisma (30 page)

“This,” the bishop said, “is off the subject.”

“No, it isn’t,” Pat said. “I know you think we—the police—are being held back from investigating these things because of pressure from criminal groups, because of official involvement in child prostitution, because of—because of a lot of things—and it might even be true. I’ll check all this out to see if Father Kelly was right about what Dan Murphy is doing to Tom Burne. I wouldn’t put it past Murphy, at any rate. But most of the pressure we get not to investigate these people, not to make a big deal about any of this, not to rock the boat—that’s right out front and it comes from the juvenile authorities.”

“Mr. Mallory, that is
insane.
”

“Is it? There are thousands of people sitting over there at juvenile. They’ve got social work degrees from tenth-rate colleges. They’re overworked and they’re underpaid—but they’re paid a million times better than they would be waitressing or hairdressing or any of the other things most of them would have been stuck with if it hadn’t been for the great bureaucracy in the sky. They have a vested damn interest in making sure the public doesn’t find out that the most dangerous home a child can be in is a foster home. They have a vested damn interest in making sure that the public doesn’t find out that the result of the billions of dollars that this country has poured into child abuse management over the last ten years has made matters worse and not better. Do you know there are poor parents in this city who will not take their children to hospital emergency rooms for any reason whatsoever short of death, for fear that those children will be taken away from them summarily by a bunch of people who do not have to
prove
anything, who just have to have a
suspicion,
to whisk a child away into a never-never land his parents may never recover him from? And of course these people always have suspicions, Your Grace. These are middle-class white people come down to give the gospel of therapeutic living to poor black people and the poor black people just absolutely refuse to listen.”

“Don’t call me ‘Your Grace,’ ” the bishop said.

Pat Mallory stared at the bishop’s cigar and wished he smoked. He delivered that lecture of his only once a year, and it always made him suicidal.

A
LL SUSAN MURPHY REALLY
knew about him was that he was in the Yale-New Haven Hospital, which was a little like knowing he was in Detroit. If she had only read about him in the papers or heard about him on the evening news, she would never have gone looking for him. She would have realized how impossible it was. Everybody still called it the Yale-New Haven Hospital, but it wasn’t that, not really, and hadn’t been for years. It was a medical complex, part hospital, part research center, part medical school. It wasn’t even in New Haven anymore. Parts of it were, but most of it was strung out across the countryside in the small towns that had once been considered New Haven’s suburbs and were now known to be its hemophilia, housed in a series of ultramodern, underwindowed buildings that looked like spaceships that had taken root. Susan had forgotten about all that because of what the cops had been saying at Damien House. They had been talking to each other, not to her. She didn’t even think they realized she was within hearing distance. She’d sidled up to them because she hoped to get some information on the death of Marietta O’Brien. What she’d gotten instead was the saga of this boy, who was in the Yale-New Haven Hospital and who was not dead.

If it had been an adult she’d gone looking for, she would never have found him. There were too many wards, too many specialties, too many intensive care units, too many subclassifications she didn’t even know the names of. Looking through the Directory under “Yale-New Haven” in the phonebook was like reading a litany of disease. Fortunately, the categories that applied to children—ranged neatly under a subhead that said
PEDIATRIC MEDICINE
—were less complex. There was
Pediatric Center,
which was not what she was looking for. There was
Congenital Disease,
which was not what she was looking for either. Beyond that, there were only two possibilities:
Pediatrics
proper and
PICU.
To Susan’s mind, PICU was the only possible place. Anyone who’d had the back of his head assaulted by a gun and the rest of his body assaulted by a winter river had to be in an intensive care unit.

There should have been something else to worry about—meaning the police guard that would surely be around this boy’s room—but heading out to YNH, Susan didn’t think about it. She was doing something that might have been enormously naive or enormously sophisticated, depending on how she was going about it. She wasn’t aware enough of anything to pick between the two. Going out in the cab she was only startled to discover that she was as “centered” as she had ever been in her life, when her novice mistress had once despaired of getting her ever to “center” at all. “You’re not going to get any use from divine contemplation,” Sister Marie Bonaventure had said, fretting, and it had been true, until now. Now Susan could feel herself anchored in a world of visions. The visions were all of a small damaged child whose hands reached out to her, looking for something simple, like candy.

By the time the cab let her off, her vision had dragged itself around her imagination and come to rest not in a hospital, but back at the Motherhouse, so that she kept seeing a small boy sitting in the big yellow wing chair in the front parlor, drinking hot chocolate. It was insane and she felt dizzy. She paid the driver and tipped him too much and got out of the cab. She told herself that if her life ever got sane again she would consider going back.

She didn’t think she had anyplace else to go.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the cop on duty outside PICU was someone Susan had met. The other three, ranged around the observation room like sentries in a toy castle, were complete strangers. The observation room was called that because of the big window behind the receptionist’s desk. It looked in on a line of beds full of sleeping children. Susan was reminded of the nurseries on hospital maternity wards, except that she was sure the nurses here wouldn’t hold the children in the air for the contemplation of fond relatives. Most of the children here were tied down to their mattresses anyway—if not by the thin gauze restraints used to keep children still after surgery, then by wires and tubes and intravenous systems for glucose and blood. The receptionist was missing from her desk, so Susan went to the window and pressed her face against it. There was no way to tell which of the children he was, or if he was any of them. Through the glass, she could dimly see the back of the PICU. There were other children there, in muslin-curtained cubicles like convent cells. He might have been one of those. Susan wanted to ask the cop she’d met, but knew it wouldn’t be a good idea. The entire New Haven Police Department was probably waiting for some jerk to show up in this place to finish the kid off.

Dan was right. She was beginning to think like a television cop show.

There was a little girl at the left front edge of the window, blue around the eyes but peaceful. There was a small boy—too small to be
the
boy?—who was smiling in his sleep. Susan wondered if the receptionist was on a break or gone for the night.

She was just backing up, deciding to go home, deciding she had been an idiot to come, deciding that she should stop running off to do things when she hadn’t even nailed down what it was she was running off to do, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned, expecting to find a cop, and found instead a wan woman, makeup-less and tired, who should have been young. Under the lines of fatigue and worry she was young, certainly younger than thirty, maybe younger than twenty-eight. Her hair was blond and thick without a trace of gray in it, and without that telltale shadow at the roots. Susan hadn’t noticed it at first because it was pulled back so tightly into its bun.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, and then blushed, as if it embarrassed her just to be talking. “Excuse me—you’re—you’re a nun, aren’t you?”

“No.” It was Susan’s turn to be embarrassed. “No, I’m not a nun.”

“Oh.” The woman looked back at the plate-glass window and bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m very tired. I’ve been here, it seems like forever, days, it hasn’t been that long, you know, but it feels that way and my husband—my husband—”

“Actually,” Susan said, “I used to be a nun. I left my order—”

“So many people do that these days,” the woman said. “All my friends who joined the convent after high school—there weren’t so many of them—three or four—but none of them stayed—”

“My mother superior was always giving lectures on how in the old days everybody used to stay.” Susan smiled. “I stayed for seventeen years. Maybe I at least gave them their money’s worth.”

“My husband went down to talk to that doctor again,” the woman said. “He’s always going down to talk to that doctor. I don’t know why. There isn’t anything more to say. That doctor doesn’t like talking to people, I can tell. He only puts up with Ken because—because—well because he has to. He just has to.”

“Why?”

The woman looked surprised. “Because the reporters would notice,” she said. “There’s a reporter downstairs right now, right in front of that doctor’s office. They’re here all the time. Waiting for Denny to wake up. If you’re not a nun anymore, are you a reporter?”

“I’m Susan Murphy. The district attorney is my brother. I haven’t not been a nun long enough to be anything else yet.”

“I hate reporters,” the woman said. “I hate everybody but Ken and Denny and the police. They had to throw the reporters out of here this afternoon. They were—the reporters were—they were causing a fuss and getting all the children upset. You can’t upset children in an intensive care ward.”

“No, no you can’t.”

“I thought you went on talking to me because you knew who I was. I’m not making much sense. I know that.”

“I think you’re making perfect sense.”

“Denny is the one in the middle.” She walked over to the window and looked down at him. He was, Susan realized, the one who looked the least sick. There was an IV in his arm but nothing else. The other children must all have come down from surgery recently, or been on some kind of maintenance.

“I look at him and he looks just the same,” the woman said. “It’s been so long and yet he looks just the same. I can’t understand it. And then Ken starts talking about God and I—I—what are you doing?”

“Doing?” Susan said. She was standing in the middle of the room. She was trying not to move.

The woman had turned away from the window. “Now,” she said. “What are you doing now? Do you have a little time?”

“I have all the time in the world.”

“I can’t leave here, you see,” the woman said. “He might wake up. I want to be here when he wakes up. But I don’t know where Ken is and I don’t know where that receptionist is and the nurses are all busy—”

“What do you need?” Susan asked gently.

The woman blushed again. “Food,” she said. “I forget to eat. There’s a cafeteria downstairs, I know that, but I don’t want to go there. Usually Ken brings me something, but he’s gone and I don’t know when he’s going to be back. And I’m dizzy.”

“Do you remember the last time you had something to eat?”

“No.”

“Could you tell me what you like to eat?”

The woman shrugged. She was looking through the plateglass window again, pressing her face against it just as Susan had. Her shoulders were squared and her spine was as straight as a pre-Vatican II mother superior’s, but her head was sagging.

“Food,” she said again. “I don’t really care. I’m allergic to strawberries.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be right back,” Susan said.

The woman swayed a little, put her hands on the edge of the window, and steadied herself. “It’s not just that I don’t want to leave here,” she said. “It’s that I hate it down there. I went there once and I hate it. They’re all over the place down there, the people who ask questions. They won’t leave me alone.”

If they were all over the place down there, the people who asked questions, Susan didn’t see them—or didn’t recognize them, which was the same thing. She picked up a tray and a pile of silverware at the beginning of the cafeteria line: two forks, three spoons, a knife. It was a collection with very little rationale, because she hadn’t the faintest idea what she was going to buy. What she imagined herself buying was “everything,” meaning everything that didn’t have to be cooked to order. It was the first time in her life she could remember being a Murphy of Edge Hill Road being any use to her. The one thing she didn’t have to worry about was money. Her wallet was stuffed with it, residue of the ridiculous “allowance” Dan insisted on giving her and that she never spent. What in the name of God he thought she was going to do with two hundred and fifty dollars a week was beyond her comprehension.

She picked up a chef’s salad, a large bowl of clam chowder, and another large bowl of French onion soup, four rolls and twenty pats of butter. Butter was supposed to be bad for you because of the cholesterol but good for you because of the tryptophan, which was a natural tranquilizer. Or something. Her last health course had been in junior high school. She picked up a plate of macaroni and cheese, a plate of Swedish meatballs on egg noodles, and a plate of chicken a la king on rice. The tray was full, but the line behind was blessedly empty. She went back to the trays and got another one. A pair of very young men in white coats came up behind her and got trays, too. They were both wearing black plastic tags above the breast pockets of their coats, imprinted in white with their names and the designation, “M.D.” They both looked twelve years old.

“The problem with your ordinary kitchen stabbing,” one of them was saying, “is that these women always use serrated knives. It’s crazy. It just rips the shit out of everything in there, shreds it, you know, and then you’re standing down in emergency and—”

“What I don’t like is the cocktail cases,” the other one said. “They come in, they’re showing symptoms of sixteen different drugs, all they want to do is tear the hair out of their heads. They just lose it. I had one the other day, bit his tongue clean off.”