Enter, Night (42 page)

“Yeah, the priests taught us that you were lucky to be born white,
too.” Billy realized that it sounded cruel when he said it. He forced himself
to smile because it wasn’t Christina’s fault and she was obviously trying
to understand.

“I remember when we were in school here, we had to memorize that
poem from Kipling. The one about other children. What was it called?”

Billy smiled bitterly. “You mean, ‘Foreign Children.’ That was the
title. ‘Foreign Children.’ They taught it to us, too. But we had to learn to
recite it after we were punished. After the strap. Or worse. ” Billy looked
away and recited. “
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow/Little frosty Eskimo/Little
Turk or Japanee/O! don’t you wish that you were me?”

“Billy . . .”

“You asked,” he said with another shrug. “You wanted to know me.
Well, this is part of me. The government took me away from my birth
father when I was a little boy. My mother had just died. My dad was all
I had. I still have nightmares about that day—I was
six years old
. The
priests shaved my head and put me in a dormitory with twenty other
little boys. The first night, all I heard was crying from the other beds.
When my hair grew back, they put a bowl on my head and cut around
it. The priests started every day with a sermon about the love of Christ
and the grace of the Catholic Church. They taught us that the price tag
for acting like an Indian was an eternity of torment in Hell. But that
was just after we were dead and away from the priests—they made sure
that we had a taste of what was coming to ‘bad Indians’ in the afterlife
right then and there. One kid I was friends with was given thirty lashes with a leather strap for speaking his own language. The food was rotten—
literally rotten, sometimes. But not eating it could get you chained to the
dining room table for days at a time.”

“Billy, my God. My God.”

“I ran away once,” Billy said. “Do you know what they did to me when
they caught me and brought me back to St. Rita’s? The principal pushed
me down a flight of kitchen stairs. And when I couldn’t get up, he and
another priest dragged me to his office, stripped me naked, and beat me
unconscious. Afterwards, they took me to the infirmary and found out I
had a broken arm. They weren’t sure if it was the stairs, or the stick they
used to beat me with.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I got off easy. Other kids
ran away and didn’t make it. They’d bring their bodies back frozen with
parts missing. I don’t need to tell you how godforsaken cold it gets up
here in the winter, or how hungry the animals get when the snow comes.”

Christina’s horror couldn’t have been more obvious if someone had
written it across her forehead with a grease pencil.

In many ways, Billy was appalled at himself for telling Christina
about St. Rita’s. She could not possibly have expected to hear what he was
telling her when she asked him about his childhood. On those levels, he
was ashamed of himself for using the truth as a cudgel, always knowing
that, if push came to shove, he could always exonerate himself using her
sheer decency and his terrible childhood history to grease those wheels.

On several other levels, including his own heart’s measure, he
wanted this woman to know him. He wasn’t sure why, but he did. And
he wanted her to know the worst as well as the best. He could see that
she was impressed with his credentials—maybe too impressed, in that it
seemed to cost her some dignity, maybe causing her undeserved shame
about her own relative lack of formal education. He didn’t want Christina
Parr to think his life began as a tenured college professor without also
knowing about what he had endured at St. Rita’s, and how the blows of
that hammer and chisel had helped shape his life.

“Didn’t you say anything? Didn’t anybody check up on the children?
How could this happen right under the noses of the authorities? I mean,
didn’t anyone
tell
?”

He shrugged again. “We didn’t tell,” he said flatly. “We didn’t say
much of anything at all. If anyone did, after the inspectors left, the
punishments were brutal. It was worse to tell than not to tell. They
wouldn’t have believed us, anyway. Everyone knew Indians were lazy,
and that they lie. Especially bad Indian kids.”

“What about your mother and father? Did you ever tell them about
it after you were adopted?”

Billy shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I kept it to myself. They loved
me so much, I didn’t want them to have those images in their heads.
It would have been too horrible for them. Sometimes I wanted to tell
them, but I always stopped myself in time. At St. Rita’s, we learned the
value of keeping quiet. Some lessons are hard to unlearn, even today. I
can’t believe I’m telling you this. I’ve never told anyone about his before.
Christina, I’m sorry—please, don’t cry. I’m sorry I even brought it up. It
wasn’t fair.”

“You didn’t bring it up, I did,” she said. She blew her nose on the
paper napkin beside her plate. With the clean end of it, she dabbed her
eyes. “I wanted to know. Now I know.”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“I don’t know where you buried all of this, Billy. I don’t know how
you got past it.”

“I was lucky,” he said. “Two wonderful people took me out of it
and did their best to raise me as their own. They didn’t try to make
me ‘not be an Indian.’ They just loved me as I was. When they found
out I was interested in history, they bought me books and took me to
museums. They gave me the best education they could afford. And then
they encouraged me to reclaim my Ojibwa heritage, and to be proud of it.
But you know,” he said thoughtfully, “all it takes sometimes is someone
like your brother’s friend—that G.I. Joe white cop, McKitrick—to look
me up and down the way he does, like I was just a dirty, falling-down drunk, mouthwash-swilling nitchie, and suddenly it gets really hard to
remember who I actually am. Or to have to sit in that funeral parlour
your mother-in-law calls a dining room, eating her creamed snake, or
whatever the hell she served me for lunch today, and listen to her tell me
how ‘grateful’ I should be to the priests who ‘founded’ this town—her
words, not mine—in 1631 for saving my soul and making me civilized.
All I could think of was my birth father not being able to keep me safe
from the government when they took me away from him. Thank you
very
much,
Mrs. Parr.”

“My mother-in-law is such an
asshole
!” Christina gasped. Shocked at
her own audacity, she burst into horrified laughter. Billy, equally shocked
at her use of the very unladylike word “asshole,” joined her.

They doubled over, their laughter leavening the horror of Billy’s
story as nothing else could have. Instinctively, he reached for her hand
and held it. When their eyes met, they realized they’d breached some
perimeter of distance that neither of them had believed was permeable.
Christina didn’t pull her hand away from Billy’s until she saw the waitress
shambling over to their table, and then she withdrew it reluctantly, her
cheeks warm with flush.

But when the waitress asked in a bored voice if they wanted their
tapioca now, all bets were off and they laughed till they wept.

When the waitress asked them what was so funny, their laughter
redoubled, and all Billy could do was wheeze, “Nothing, nothing is funny.
Nothing is funny.” Which, naturally, made them laugh even harder—so
hard that Christina excused herself from the table to powder her nose
before she had an accident.

Adeline Parr was outraged.
Why, there’s a man standing in my driveway!
She gathered the collar of her cashmere bathrobe close, instinctively pulling away from the window.
And he’s staring up at my bedroom, bold as can be. It’s nearly ten o’clock at night. For the Lord’s own sake.

Adeline found it very difficult to believe that any of the locals would dare trespass on her property at any time of the day or night, but the fact remained that there was someone standing in her driveway. The moon and the stars that broke out from behind the rain clouds were bright white. They lit the driveway and the grounds with resolute clarity, and there was indeed a man standing there, looking up at her bedroom window.

The figure wasn’t Jeremy—he was upstairs in his room. Adeline could hear her son’s radio playing behind his closed bedroom door. Her whore of a daughter-in-law wasn’t at home. She was out cavorting in some gutter somewhere. Jeremy had given Adeline some codswallop about Christina visiting high school friends for the evening, but Adeline knew better. The whore was getting her bug scratched in some basement or back alley somewhere. And Beatrice and her husband lived in town, so it wasn’t either of them.

So, who on
earth
was standing in her driveway?

Adeline shrugged off her bathrobe and took her twenty-year-old sable coat off the padded hanger in the armoire. She slipped it on over her nightgown and stepped into a pair of shoes. Then she stalked out of the bedroom and swept down the stairs.

As she crossed the marble foyer, she wondered if she shouldn’t
perhaps alert Jeremy or Morgan that there was a man outside and that
she was going to investigate it herself.
Yes, indeed,
she thought.
Which
member of my illustrious, stalwart family shall I call to protect me from
intruders? My pansy son? Or my fifteen-year-old granddaughter, who’s already showing the moral laxity of her mother, the whore?

Adeline smiled to herself. She realized that, at the end of the day, it would always be up to her to settle things. It had always been that way and always would be.

Her husband had been weak. One son was a pervert and the other had been a traitor. Adeline had only ever known one real man in her life, and even he hadn’t been man enough to leave the simpering titmouse to whom he was married, much less his jumped-up adopted redskin brat, now a so-called “professor.”

In the meantime, there’s a man standing in my driveway.

When Christina came back
to the table, Billy saw that she had indeed
powdered her nose. Himself the son of a fastidious woman, the gesture
touched him and reminded him of his mother, in the best possible ways.

He checked his watch and said with mock reproach, “It’s well after
ten. Didn’t you have a nine o’clock curfew, Mrs. Parr?”

“Good God, is it, really?” Christina looked shocked. “I didn’t even
wear a watch! I have to get back home. I want to see my daughter before
bed.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe I let the time get
away from me like that. What was I thinking? God, I’m such an
idiot
!”

“I’d guess you were thinking that you needed a break, Christina,” he
said gently. “Don’t make this into something it wasn’t. You’re entitled to
some time off from being what everyone else in that house needs you to
be, for good or bad. Remember that.”

Billy walked her to her car. As they said goodbye, he had the
preposterous notion to kiss her on the cheek—a notion he overrode,
shaking her hand instead. He told himself it was because of gossip, but
he suspected it was really that he wouldn’t want to stop kissing her. He
wanted to take her away with him, back home to Toronto, even back home
to Michigan with him. Somewhere he could watch over her. Anywhere, as
long as it wasn’t here.

Adeline pushed open
the front door of Parr House and stepped out
onto the portico.

“You there!” she called out. “What are you doing on my property?
Identify yourself at once!” She waited, hands on hips. But the man in the
driveway didn’t move, nor did he speak. “Are you
deaf
? Answer me! This
is
Adeline Parr
and you are trespassing on my land. Identify yourself at
once.”

When the man still didn’t move, Adeline stepped off the portico
and took a step towards him. She leaned forward and squinted, but the
moonlight was behind him and she couldn’t see his face.

“This is your last chance to identify yourself and state your business,”
Adeline said coldly. “In one minute, I shall go back inside my house and
summon the authorities. And you’ll find out exactly what it means to
trespass on my land.”

The man took a step towards her. Then another. Adeline squinted,
but the shadows seemed to follow the figure as he walked towards her.
The moonlight seemed to fall
around
him without once touching his face,
or lighting on his clothes. He was dressed in from head to toe in black,
however—that much she was able to ascertain, if only by the way the
night seemed to fall away from him as he moved, the shades of black
separating and reforming themselves in his wake. She felt dizzy watching
him . . .
drift
? No, he was
walking,
she was sure of it. He was wearing some
sort of long black robe—that’s why he seemed to be floating, his feet not
appearing to touch the ground. She hadn’t been able to see his legs.

Is that . . . a priest? Why is there a priest on my front lawn in the middle
of the night?

Adeline felt light headed. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment
and shook her head.

When she opened them, the man was still there. But he had stopped
moving and was standing close enough that she could touch him, his face
still wreathed in shadows.

Adeline hissed, “Get out of here, whoever you are! I am going to turn
around immediately and summon the authorities."

“
Laissez-moi entrer.
”

“What did you say?” she seethed. “Speak up. Speak English. I have
no idea what you’re saying.”

Adeline stopped. The moon was behind where he stood beside the
denuding phalanx of topiary bushes. Their shadows lay against the gravel
drive, but where the priest stood, there was no shadow at all.

Too, she’d heard his voice—a beautiful, cultured voice, speaking . . . French? A language she didn’t speak or understand herself, but she
hadn’t seen his lips move, and somehow she’d understood him anyway.
He wanted her to invite him into her house. Into
Parr House,
of all the
insolence!