Charisma (8 page)

The Green would have been beautiful in the snow, except that its benches were covered with bums.

There were no bums on Congress Avenue. Like Edge Hill Road, its sidewalks were clear of all but businesslike traffic. Unlike Edge Hill Road, on Congress Avenue there was a lot of it. Susan saw a line of girls standing under the chipped blue paint on a plate-glass window that said
WASH-CENTER,
a man changing a movie marquee from
SOMETHING-PASSION
to
HOT-GIRLS-SOMETHING-ELSE,
another man laying out watches on an orange crate covered with a piece of turquoise felt. It was early. Congress Avenue didn’t really get moving until after dark. Even so, the girls were wearing skirts that barely reached the tops of their thighs and fishnet stockings that revealed more skin than they covered. Susan thought they had to be freezing. She also thought they had to be fourteen.

Andy tugged on her arm. “You can’t stand around and sightsee, for Christ’s sake. You’ll get them nervous. Either that, or they’ll think you’re buying.”

“Do I look like someone who’s buying?”

“Why not?”

Susan let him pull her along. There might be a point to that “why not.” She’d never been in a place like this. There were orders that sent their sisters to work among the poor in red-light districts, but hers hadn’t been one of them. She’d done her time at the Motherhouse and in parish schools. Oddly enough, though, this place bothered her less than the Green had. She liked the rhythm of it. There was music blasting out of a window somewhere, a big radio turned up loud and pushed against a thin pane of glass. She didn’t recognize the song, but the backbeat was eternal. It reminded her of the Chuck Berry records they’d played in their rooms at Sacred Heart when the madames were all safely tucked in bed.

“It doesn’t look anything like those pictures of the South Bronx,” she said. “It looks—happy.”

“Anything would look happy on three vials of crack a day. A rock would look happy. That’s why people take crack.”

“I thought you could tell when people were on dope. None of these people look like they’re on anything.”

“Maybe they’re not, at the moment. Will you come on? If you keep this up, we’re going to get mugged.”

“I know why people come down here,” she said. “If I was stuck in New Haven and I didn’t have anyplace to go, I’d come down here too. It would be better than staying in the middle of town.”

Andy stopped. He had to. Susan had stopped already. They were standing in front of a movie theater called the Snake Charmer. A poster in a frame beside the ticket booth showed a woman in stockings and garters and no underwear, her legs spread wide. She was holding her ass in the air with hands tipped by sequined fingernails. Her face rose in the background, not quite clearing the knobby mountains that were her knees. Susan stepped closer and read the teaser line, half-obscured by a wash of mud at the bottom of the frame.

“ ‘They can’t get enough and they like their men rough,’ ” she said. “Wonderful.”

“Wonderful?”

“I was being sarcastic, Andy.”

“You were getting suckered.” He took her arm again. “You can’t walk around this place and look at these people as if you were walking through a zoo. They won’t like it. And they’re not stable.”

“I’m not looking at these people as if they were in a zoo. I like it here.”

“You like the exoticness of it.”

“That’s not true.” It wasn’t, either. Andy had dragged her along a little farther. They were standing in front of a shop door covered by a hinged iron gate. The gate had been pushed open a little and the glass door beyond it propped back. Susan came to a stop again, to watch a frazzled old woman push a rack of Indian print shirts out onto the sidewalk.

Andy was getting angry. Susan knew that. She was going to have to say something, but she didn’t know what. She didn’t know Andy very well anymore. She didn’t know anyone. She’d gotten out of the habit of talking about herself. That was one thing nuns were never allowed to do. They were supposed to take the lives they’d lived in the world and lay them down on Christ’s altar, to burn them as sacrifices in the fire of religious meditation. God only knew she’d never been able to do that, but she had learned to fake it very well. Her self was in a box somewhere, buried out of sight.

She started moving on her own this time, but slowly, so she could take it all in. She did like it here. In fact, she loved it. It was like a heart that never stopped beating, but pumped up, fast—a runner’s heart hitting its stride in a marathon. The music had changed into something that really wasn’t music at all, just a voice talking in endlessly relentless meter and a background of percussion sticks. A bookstore was opening across the street. A young man with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a black leather jacket torn at the shoulder seams was dragging a stand-up board onto the sidewalk. When he got it where he wanted it, he took out a handkerchief and tried to wipe it off.

“Ever since I got here,” she said, “not just since I got home, but ever since I got back to New Haven—the whole place has seemed dead. At first, I thought it was just the house. I wasn’t even surprised. I kept asking myself what else I could possibly expect. I mean—”

“You mean nothing.” Andy had his arm braided around hers now. He was doing more than just pulling her along. She resented the hell out of it. “The house is not dead. The house isn’t anything. You’re making all this up.”

“No, I’m not. But when we got to the Green today, I changed my mind. It isn’t just the house. It’s the whole city. It’s as if sometime while I was away the place lay down and turned over and decided to sleep its way to the grave. It just decided to give up and check out.”

“This is where people give up and check out,” Andy said. “This is Suicide Hill.”

“Don’t
pull
me.”

Andy stopped instead. In anger, he looked like their father. His face got as red as if he’d drunk a quart of vodka in the last half hour, straight.

“I’ll tell you what they didn’t do for you in that convent,” he said. “They didn’t make you grow up.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means they sell people down here, Susan. This place is a fucking slave market. Come six o’clock there are girls on this street not fifteen years old who’ll blow you off for a ten-dollar bill and let you cram your prick up their asses for forty. They don’t do it out of dedication to black-market capitalism. They do it because if they don’t their pimps will cut them up.”

“And there are the boys,” Susan said.

“Yeah,” Andy said. “There are the boys. Most of them are only ten.”

“Let me tell you what they don’t do,” Susan said. “They don’t buy a bottle and sit down and let themselves go. They don’t pickle themselves into insensibility and call it relaxation. They don’t—”

“They do. They just don’t use booze.”

“Like Daddy,” Susan said.

Andy blew a stream of white breath into her face. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I should have known. All the way back at the house, I should have known you’ve got to talk about Daddy.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. I didn’t know it myself.”

“Yes, you did.”

He turned his back to her and started walking up the street, away from the bus stop, away from the Indian print shirts and the bookstore with its stand-up board and the movie marquee that now read
HOT GIRLS HOT CITY.
Susan stood where she was for a moment and wondered what she was supposed to do, as if she had a choice. Then she followed him. After a while, she even picked up speed. She knew there were people watching her, faces behind curtains at the windows of apartments on the upper stories of the buildings across the street, but she couldn’t make herself feel afraid.

When she reached Andy she took his arm and said, “It’s just that back there on the Green everything seemed hopeless. Nothing seems hopeless here at all.”

“I’ll show you hopeless,” Andy said. “Hell, I’ll show it to you like you’ve never seen it before.”

Later, she had to admit he’d been right. It got bad, and not long after it got worse. First the stores and theaters and laundromats petered out. Then everything did. It was eerie, like walking through an abandoned movie set. The buildings were all there, intact and solid, but there wasn’t anyone in them. There wasn’t anyone anywhere.

The weather was clearing. The wind had pushed back the clouds and the sun was shining through. It illuminated nothing.

They turned onto Amora Street, and the landscape changed again. The buildings were no longer intact. Whole walls had collapsed into vacant lots. There wasn’t a pane of glass in a window anywhere. Even so, Susan could tell the street was inhabited. There was laughter everywhere, high hysterical laughter bubbling up out of the ground, floating into the wind, sounding insane. Sounding insane and homicidal.

She stopped in the middle of the street, finally scared to death, wanting nothing except to go back.

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

Andy tugged at her arm. Again. “Look up there.”

She looked. Two blocks away there was a building with a sign in front of it, a plastic cross lit from the inside by fluorescent bulbs. Under the cross a smaller sign spelled it out in heavy black letters:

DAMIEN HOUSE.

Andy tugged at her arm one final time and said, “If we’re going to get there, we’ve got to go.”

T
HE BOY WHO ANSWERED
the door at Damien House was tall and thin and wrapped in uncertainty. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. For a while, Susan thought there had to be something wrong with him, that he was retarded or a deaf-mute. She and Andy were standing in the cold on the stoop. The boy was standing in the doorway, blocking their path in. He seemed to be staring at Andy, but he might have been staring into space. It was impossible to tell. He wasn’t saying anything.

Susan heard the sound of heavy walking coming out to her from deep within the house, and a moment later the boy stepped back—proving at least that he was not deaf. The space he’d left at the door was filled with the body of a thickset woman with gray hair and patched black plastic glasses. Her face was set into a mask of distrust she seemed to have to work at to maintain. It held for Susan, but it slipped a little when she first saw Andy. Then it dissolved altogether. A smile like melting butter spread across her face.

“Andy
Murphy
” she said. “Good Lord. Mark, what’s the matter with you. You know Andy Murphy. He was here the last time you were here.”

“I know Andy Murphy,” the boy said. Still, he hung on to his place at the door. It was only when the woman nudged him that he moved back,

“I think Mark must be a little tired,” the woman said. She propped back the door and shooed them in. “Lord only knows, we’re all tired around here these days. After what happened to Sister Theresa, we can’t sleep nights. Sister Theresa. Listen to me.” She turned back to the boy. “Go get Father Tom, Mark. Or go get someone to get Father Tom. He’s going to want to see Andy.”

“Right,” Mark said.

“Right is right,” the woman said. “If you don’t want to go upstairs yourself, you can get Kirsten to go. She’s in the library.”

“Right,” Mark said again. Susan thought he was going to move right away. His body seemed to shift into flight mode, to become fluid. Instead, he stood his ground, giving her a long look and Andy a longer one. It was only when the situation became completely uncomfortable that he made his escape.

The woman with the gray hair stared after him, watching him disappear under a staircase at the back of the hall. They were standing in a small foyer, long and narrow, with the front door at one end and a collection of other doors—metal, by the look of them—at the other. The front door was metal, too, and bordered by thick metal panels painted to imitate mosaics. The only light came from an old-fashioned frosted fixture on the ceiling above their heads. It was, however, a very bright light. It lit up the foyer like an interrogation room.

The woman started locking the front-door locks, shooting in one dead bolt after another, mechanically. “It was because of Theresa Mark came back,” she said. “The word’s out all over the street. Business has been terrible. They know what it’s like when things like this happen. They know the police are going to be in and out of the house for weeks. So they don’t come, of course, but Mark—”

Andy cut in. “Francesca, this is my sister Susan. I don’t think you’ve ever met.”

Francesca stopped in the middle of throwing the last bolt and flushed. It was a bright, painful, adolescent flush, and Susan suddenly felt sorry for her. She had known women like this in the convent, women who had never quite gotten over the awkward confusion of puberty, who still didn’t know what to do or what to say or where to put their hands and feet. Francesca covered it by securing that last bolt and wiping the palms of her hands on the skirt of her gray flannel dress.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just been babbling along, and I haven’t even said hello.”

“That’s all right,” Susan said.

“It really has been very hectic around here.” She stopped wiping her palms and looked directly at them, more relaxed now. The hump had been gotten over. She was on familiar ground. She gave Andy another big smile. “And I was so surprised to see your brother,” she said. “The last I remember, he was threatening never to darken our doors again.”

“Well,” Andy said. “That was a long time ago.”

“A long time we haven’t seen you in. Did you come because of Theresa? Pat Mallory’s here, you know, up with Father Tom. He’s taking an interest.”

“He would,” Andy said.

“Who’s Pat Mallory?” Susan said.

Francesca sighed. “He’s the chief of Homicide for the New Haven Police Department. And he means well. We all know he does. But when we have police in the house the children are afraid to come, and the children are the point.”

“Better him than whoever killed Terry,” Andy said.

Francesca shrugged. “We all know who killed Terry. Some poor child on crack. She was in the kitchen by herself and she let him in and that was that. Father Tom was in the study when it happened and now he’s having a nervous breakdown. She should have known better not to let in someone she didn’t know on her own.”