Dear Old Dead (3 page)

S
ISTER AUGUSTINE HAD BEEN
seventeen years old on the day she entered her order, stubborn and exhilarated and panicked all at once. Those were the days when nuns wore tight white wimples fastened around their throats and so many skirts it felt like wading in water just to walk down a hall. Those were the days when Sisters barely spoke except to ask Sister Anne to pass the salt to Sister Josepha at breakfast. Those were also the days when nuns were never allowed to ask for anything for themselves. Sister Augustine remembered it all without regret. She was not a radical. She didn’t care if women were ever ordained into the priesthood or not. She felt no urge to think of God as a goddess or to call her Heavenly Father “She.” Sister Augustine simply preferred to spend her days in sweatsuits and sneakers rather than habits and nun shoes. She also preferred to be called “Augie.” Sister Augustine had been born Edith Marie Corcoran, which she hated. She had been named “Mary Augustine” by the Mother Superior of her order on the day she received its habit. She had first been called “Augie” here, about ten years ago, by one of the girl junkies in the refuge program. The street kids all thought she was cute. It annoyed her sometimes. She tried not to show it.

Sister Augustine regretted nothing of the passing of the old order after Vatican II, except this: Before the changes, there always seemed to be hundreds of people milling around, willing to do everything and anything and willing to do it for free. That wasn’t true, of course, not really. Augie knew her own selective memory when she caught it in the act. Even so. Her order used to run two dozen elementary schools, paid for by their parishes and provided to parishioners for free. These days, with no nuns to speak of and lay teachers having to be paid just like public school teachers and provided with benefits besides, it was a miracle if a parish school’s tuition wasn’t just as high as the tuition of the fancy private school down the road. And then there were the hospitals…

Sister Augustine looked out the window of the emergency-room nurses’ station at the man with his cardboard sign walking back and forth on the sidewalk outside and shook her head. In a minute she would have to go out there again, where all hell was breaking loose. In a minute she would have to pretend she was competent and wise and no more prone to hysteria than anybody else. For just this second she could contemplate the center’s most faithful protester and wonder to herself what had happened to all the nuns. Even if the habits had disappeared and church discipline had been relaxed—why should that make a difference? Doing good was doing good, no matter how you justified it to yourself. Doing good didn’t become less important than climbing the corporate ladder to vice president in charge of operations for IBM just because the Mass was being said in English.

The door to the nurses’ station opened. Augie turned around to see Sister Kenna Franks coming in with a large tray of cafeteria food. Sister Kenna Franks was a Franciscan from an order in Boston, an order that, like Augie’s own, had almost no nuns left in it. Back in the old days, Augie might have been assigned to a place like the Sojourner Truth Health Center, but the Sisters under her direction would all have been Sisters in her own habit. These days, they took any nun whose order was willing to sponsor her for a year or two, they took nuns the way they took acts of charity from rich old men whose anti-Papism was only just beneath the surface. Augie had quite a lot of nuns on her staff. She had many more nuns than any other Catholic medical facility in the city. Only one of them was a nun of her own order.

Sister Kenna Franks wore a loose black cowl-necked robe tied at the waist with a rope. It fell to her feet and covered up the fact that she was wearing socks and sandals. Sister Kenna Franks was very young and very thin and never ate much of anything at all. She put the cafeteria tray down on the desk and cocked her head.

“We figured you were hiding out,” she said. “Is there something interesting going on out there on the sidewalk?”

“What’s his name with the sign,” Augie told her.

Sister Kenna Franks went to the window and looked. “Oh, him. The others are gone, you know. The ones from that group that wants civil rights for homosexuals. Sister Victoria said this morning at breakfast that that was because of all the stories in the newspapers.”

“They’ll be back,” Augie told her.

“Really?” Sister Kenna sat down at the desk and looked over the tray of food. “You really ought to sit down here and get something to eat. Mrs. Angelini sent up all the things you like best. And you need your strength. Dr. Pride is down in OR bellowing for you right this minute.”

“OR being kept busy?”

“Oh, yes. All three theaters. We’ve got those back-up doctors Dr. Pride set up last summer, you know, those men he used to know in medical school who said they’d come down if there was ever a real emergency. Two of them who said they would wouldn’t, but the other three are here. It’s a good thing, too, because it’s all very bad out there.”

“Any news as to how soon it might get better?”

Sister Kenna shook her head. “I haven’t had time to watch the news, but the television set is turned to Channel two down in the cafeteria and people report when they have a chance. There seems to be some kind of impasse, but there hasn’t been an end to the shooting. Three police officers are already dead.”

“Wonderful. It’s drugs, I take it.”

“I think so.”

Augie went over to the desk and looked at the cafeteria tray. A hot turkey sandwich, piled very high with turkey and gravy on white bread. An enormous slice of Mrs. Angelini’s killer chocolate pie, with whipped cream and a cherry. A cup of coffee. Augie got a chair from near the window and sat down to eat. It was embarrassing how accurately Mrs. Angelini had her pegged. It was embarrassing how much of a rut she’d let herself get into. Back on the day she had entered the convent she’d told herself, secretly, that it would be good for her figure. She would become an ascetic and a saint and live on Holy Communion wafers and air, like Saint Catherine of Siena. Instead, she’d become thoroughly addicted to chocolate and even rounder than when she’d started out.

Mrs. Angelini had included four little cups of cranberry sauce. Augie picked up the closest one and began eating that.

“Tell me,” she asked Sister Kenna. “How are the Sisters taking all the newspaper stories? What are they saying about Dr. Pride?”

“Saying?” Sister Kenna looked confused. “They’re not saying much of anything, Sister. Just that it’s a shame.”

“A shame that he did it or a shame that he got caught?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think of it myself, Sister. I mean, Dr. Pride is a kind of saint, isn’t he? Starting this place and working here. He could have been a doctor in private practice and made a lot of money. He wasn’t just stuck with a situation like this.”

“True.”

“And then there are these—these glory holes. Do you know what a glory hole is, Sister?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, I don’t, and most of the other Sisters don’t either, but some of the girls in the refuge program—they know. And they laugh.”

Augie winced. “I’m sure they do. Are they upset about all this?”

“No,” Sister Kenna said. “No, they’re not. One of them, Julie Enderson—do you know Julie Enderson, Sister?”

Augie knew Julie Enderson. Julie was a prostitute who claimed to be eighteen years old. Augie was fairly sure she was no more than fourteen. Julie was the great good hope of the refuge program at the moment. She was bright and energetic and good at schoolwork when she put her mind to it. She had a chance to make it out of this place if she really wanted to. Everybody at the center knew Julie Enderson.

“I hope Julie isn’t off her stride,” Augie said carefully. “That would be unfortunate.”

“Julie says it’s just like Dr. Pride, that he’d pick a vice where there was no question whatsoever that he wasn’t forcing anybody else into anything. And the other girls agreed with her.”

“Well, that’s one way of thinking about it,” Augie conceded. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but that’s one way of thinking about it. Anything else going on over there?”

“Not really.” Sister Kenna stood up. “But I do think you ought to talk to the girls about Mr. van Straadt, Sister. I mean, I don’t like him either, but the things they say about him—and he does give us so much of our money, and we need the money, don’t we?”

“Yes,” Augie said. “We need the money.”

“I’ll leave you here with your dinner,” Sister Kenna said. “You eat up and then come down to OR and calm Dr. Pride. There’s talk that the police are going to send in a whole set of SWAT teams this time. The last time they sent in one and it didn’t work. But you know what that means. It’s going to get even worse around here than it already is.”

“Yes,” Augie said. “Yes, I do know.”

“Fine,” Sister Kenna said. She went to the door, opened it up, and looked outside. Augie caught a sudden rush of noise, made up of the groans and screams of injured people and the hard clang of metal instruments being used with too much haste and too much force.

“See you later,” Sister Kenna said, and slipped outside.

The door closed again and the station was silent. Augie thanked God for the decision, made three years ago, to get this station in the emergency room soundproofed. They’d done that because the nurses were finding it impossible to do the necessary work on dosages and diagnoses in the middle of crises like this one. Augie stood and went back to the window, taking the chocolate pie with her. There were a pair of ambulances pulling up outside. The attendants jumping out the backs of them looked worse than strained. The picketer had stopped his pacing to watch the action. He had his sign up over his shoulder, resting on his collarbone, so that the ambulance men could read it.
THIS CENTER IS A DEATH CAMP
, his sign read. The ambulance men weren’t paying any attention.

Augie went back to the desk and began to attack the hot turkey sandwich. Sister Kenna was right. She had to get moving and be a help to Dr. Pride. She had to be a help to somebody.

As for the rest of what Sister Kenna had said—

Augie put her fork down and stared out across the desk. She knew exactly how the girls felt about Charles van Straadt. She knew better than they did why they felt that way. The man was a snake, that was the truth, sneaking around Michael the way he did, insinuating himself where he didn’t belong, stocking the center full of his own grandchildren and expecting the rest of the volunteers to put up with them. There was something… sly about this whole operation, something
wrong.
She only wished she knew what it was.

In the absence of knowledge, Sister Augustine wished she had the guts to poison the man’s tea.

W
HEN VICTOR VAN STRAADT
first heard that his grandfather was thinking of changing his long-standing will to one that left virtually everything to Victor’s cousin Rosalie, he panicked. It wasn’t the loss of the money itself that bothered him—although that did, of course, bother him. He got mixed up whenever he tried to think about it. No, the real problem was time, his own time, the way he would spend it and what it would mean to the dozens of people who knew him, but not very well. Victor never allowed anyone to know him very well. Victor was twenty-two years old and very good-looking, in a cover-of-a-J. Crew-catalog sort of way. He looked best in cotton crewneck sweaters and baggy khaki pants and the kind of overly expensive sun visor that litters the slopes of Aspen at the end of every season. The adjective
preppy
might have been invented to apply to him. Beyond what he looked like, though, he had very little. He had graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in classics, but his grades had been no better than mediocre and classics wasn’t good for anything. He had done his grandfather-mandated eighteen-month stint at the Sojourner Truth Health Center, but he had done it with such a commitment to laziness, he hadn’t got much out of it. Now he had a job at the New York
Sentinel,
but it wasn’t much of a job. They had started out trying to train him as a reporter, but that had been impossible. Now he ran the contests the paper was so fond of, like the Father’s Day contest it was red-bannering over the masthead daily now—except he didn’t. Victor never did his own work if he could help it. He got his sister Ida and his cousin Rosalie to help with the contests, because they were both so much smarter than he was and so much better with money. Sometimes he got his cousin Martha to help, too, but he didn’t like Martha very much. Victor didn’t like much of anything that required a lot of work, and work was what he would have to do if grandfather changed his will. Victor thought he really had to do something about that. His parents were both dead. Who would support him? If he never accomplished another thing in his life, he had to stop his grandfather from handing eight hundred and fifty million dollars into the hands of dear cousin Rosalie, that world-class bitch.

Victor’s appointment to meet Martha and Ida for dinner at the Sojourner Truth Health Center had been set up over a week ago. If he watched the news on television or listened to any radio station besides the all-music Rock Bop on 107.7 FM, he would have known not to come. If he had bothered to look around his own newsroom, he would have known not to come. But Victor had spent the entire day in his office, his Walkman earphones glued to his head, listening to the Beach Boys moan peppily about hot cars and tanned girls and places where it never, ever got any snow. No one had bothered him, because no one ever bothered him. The people he worked with had long ago realized that Victor was useless.

If Victor had had to take a cab uptown, he would never have gotten there. The cabdrivers were listening to the news, even if he wasn’t. Victor didn’t take a cab because he had learned from previous forays into Harlem that cabs didn’t like to go there. It was easier on the nerves to take his very own car and his very own driver, which is what he kept a car and driver for. Victor’s driver didn’t listen to the news any more than Victor did. He couldn’t. Victor’s driver was from an obscure little town in Brazil. He spoke ten words of English and a dialect of Portuguese so rarefied he shared it with no other person in the city of New York.