Madeleine's Ghost (25 page)

“Not at all, Cipriano,” he says quickly. “I am just giving you a possible situation here. I am not trying to suggest that it necessarily applies to you. If your fiancée is a virgin—”

Cipriano explodes at this. “If!” he shouts. “If—!” But he is too excited to speak. He shakes his fist at Father Rose, makes an incoherent gesture to his companions, and they rise in a single movement and follow
him to the door. One of the young women does a curtsy as she leaves the auditorium, but Cipriano pulls her back roughly.

“Marriage classes!” he calls from the hallway. “We don't need no stinking marriage classes!” Then the door slams, and they are gone.

On the stage Father Rose sighs and wipes the offending word from the blackboard. He gathers his notes and comes down and sits heavily beside me on a rusty folding chair.

“I'm fine with the usual Ten Commandment stuff, Mr. Conti. You know, adultery and thy neighbor's wife and all that. But it is foolish of the church to require priests to act as counselors in more specific sexual matters,” he says. “We are men who have renounced the sensual in favor of the spiritual. It's like asking a golfer to play baseball. Other than the fact that we both wear shoes with cleats, there's no comparison.”

I'm not sure what he means by this metaphor, but I nod and express my sympathy. Then, as I turn toward him, he notices the swollen lump on my temple.

“That's a good solid bump you have there,” he says. “An accident?”

“Mugged,” I say.

“In the neighborhood?”

“Yes.” He doesn't seem surprised.

“I'll pray for you,” he says simply.

“Thanks.”

After a moment he stands, smooths out his cassock. It's obvious I've come about something important.

“Well?” he says.

“Bones,” I say.

I
AM PLEDGED
to absolute secrecy. Father Rose makes me swear on the great gilt-backed Bible at the altar in the church. Then he makes me swear again on the chalice used for the communion wine during mass,
the vessel in which takes place the sacred miracle of transubstantiation. When he is satisfied with the sincerity of my vow, he takes me downstairs to the crypt and unlocks a nondescript door I hadn't noticed before. We descend a short flight of steps and come to a halt in front of another more impressive door inlaid with the Chi-Rho initials of Christ, in a yellow metal that might be gold.

“This is the secret of St. Basil's,” he says, in a solemn Charlton Heston voice, and I can't help feeling a tingle at the back of my neck. “I turned down a posting as assistant golf coach at Holy Cross to accept this charge. I could have instructed generations of young men in the art of the sport, but I chose to come here instead. Do you understand?”

I am suitably impressed by his sacrifice, and I tell him so, but I am more impressed by what I see when he unlocks the door and we step into the inner chamber: At the center of the windowless stone room sits a glass coffin containing a mummified body in a nun's habit. I approach in awe. It is like something out of a B-grade horror movie. Sharp brown teeth grimace out of the collapsed leathery face; wax eyes, an artificial shade of blue, stare from lidless sockets. A few twists of white hair curl from beneath the wimple gone green with age. Bony hands clutch a thick black Bible which has long since fallen to one side. A string of Christmas lights around the ceiling lends the final garish touch. A small spider, I notice, is making a web in between the clumpy nun shoes.

For what seems like five minutes I cannot take my eyes off the shriveled corpse. Father Rose stands at a respectful distance. At last he approaches.

“This is Sister Januarius,” he says as if introducing us. Then he sinks to a faded velvet kneeler, says a brief prayer, crosses himself, and leads me back up the stairs to his sunny office on the third floor of the rectory. Even here, surrounded by golf trophies and cheery flowered wallpaper, I cannot quite shake the maudlin atmosphere of the hidden crypt. Hands clasped thoughtfully, Father Rose steps over and sits in the big leather swivel chair behind his desk. This is the first time I have seen him use this corporate-looking piece of furniture, and our conversation is a little like an interview with the chairman of IBM.

“Granted, the presentation down there is unfortunate,” he says. “I go often to the chapel of Mother Cabrini in Washington Heights and envy her beautiful wax work, the crystal sarcophagus, the modern chapel, and wonder why our Sister Januarius is so neglected. Of course, the answer is a simple one. Our saint is still a secret. To this day the bishop does not know, the cardinal does not know. Do you understand?”

“I'm not sure I do,” I say. Suddenly I picture Snow White asleep and waiting for the kiss of Prince Charming in her glass coffin, and it seems the brown mummy downstairs is waiting for a kiss from me to wake from her catacomb slumber. A dry historian's kiss on those desiccated brown lips. How horrible.

“As you know, the establishment of a cultus for a saint is strictly regulated by the Holy See,” Father Rose says, “and is dependent on the decision of the Congregation of Rites in Rome. Any veneration of relics, any preservation of the body must follow the granting of this status. What you saw downstairs, what was done here with the earthly remains of Sister Januarius by Pastor John McCarty nearly a hundred years ago was outside the laws of the church and punishable by excommunication. But Father McCarty acted on faith. Sometimes the wheels of the church grind too slowly for the true believer. He knew Sister Januarius was a saint, had in fact witnessed miracles, and wished to act before the body disintegrated—”

“Excuse me, Father,” I interrupt. “You once mentioned a monograph written on this subject. I have spent many hours searching libraries for that monograph. Now I find out the whole thing's a big secret from the pope. My guess is the monograph does not exist, that I've been on a wild-goose chase all this time.”

Father Rose is silent at this accusation. He folds his hands and looks down at the polished surface of his desk. Sunlight gleams off the golf trophies in the cabinets and laps like the waters of a tropical lagoon against the flowered wallpaper. Outside a summer haze is settling over Brooklyn. At last he looks up.

“You're right,” he says, and swallows hard, a guilty glottal sound in
his throat. “There is no monograph. I'm sorry. A white lie. The story I told you concerning Sister Januarius was handed down from pastor to pastor in the oral tradition, you might say. When I took charge of this parish from old Father Carello, I was made to memorize every detail. I couldn't let you know this because of the secrecy involved. Each pastor selects his successor carefully on the basis of devotion to the cult of the saints. And each pastor must keep the secret in his own way until the day when all secrets can be revealed at last.”

“And when is that?”

Father Rose shrugs and goes to the window. “Anytime short of Judgment Day, that's up to you and your research,” he says. “For a long time the pastors here were content to keep all this to themselves, to keep Sister Januarius as a sort of private saint. But saints are for people, Mr. Conti. People who have need of their intercession. When I saw that letter in the archives years ago, I thought the possibility of building a case for the beatification of Sister Januarius before the Congregation in Rome just might exist. Where there was one letter, there were bound to be others.”

“So the letter was real?”

Father Rose turns to me now, a little indignant. “The letter is there in the archives somewhere. It's just a question of perseverance and faith.”

“Faith.”

“Yes.”

There follows an uncomfortable silence in which we hear the grunts of the handball players sweating on the blacktop of the park below.

Then I tell him that I am planning a short working vacation in New Orleans. I'm going down to visit an old friend, I say, and will consult the archives of the Nursing Sisters of the Cross, supposedly Sister Januarius's order. They still maintain a convent in that city, in the Vieux Carré.

Father Rose seems pleased with this plan and comes over to clap me on the shoulder with his callused golfer's hand. But when I rise from the love seat, I rise a skeptic.

“You went to college in New Orleans, am I right?” he says as he sees me to the door.

“Yes,” I say, “Loyola.”

“How long has it been since you've been back?”

“Ten years, Father.”

M
Y SUITCASE
is packed; everything is ready. A sliver of laconic moon rises over Manhattan, and a wind fragrant of salt and oil stirs from the river. It's the night before I leave for New Orleans, and I can't sleep. Never could sleep the night before a trip. Who can? The power plant is grinding out a merry tune, and every time I close my eyes, I see Antoinette's face framed against the darkness. Despairing of sleep, I rise at 3:00
A.M
. to clean the apartment. There is nothing worse than coming back to the same mess and squalor, and I haven't really touched the place since the séance.

I get on my hands and knees in pajamas and rubber gloves and scrub the kitchen floor, I wash all the dishes, I clean out the refrigerator. In the bathroom I scrape mold from the grouting in the shower stall with a screwdriver and have a go at the commode and sink with the kind of foaming action cleanser they advertise with animated bubbles on TV. The ghost seems to approve of my activities. The toilet brush, which has been missing for some time, mysteriously appears in its old place in the corner by the commode. Same with the two-pronged converter plug for the vacuum cleaner, which I find in the sugar bowl in the kitchen.

When I fall asleep at last on the sofa at dawn, I dream of the wax eyes of Sister Januarius's mummy staring up into the darkness in her locked tomb beneath the altar, and I dream of a brown river that might be the Mississippi, and I dream of Antoinette. I wake late at 7:00
A.M
. and must rush to catch the Carey bus to La Guardia. But on my way out the door, I stop, place the suitcase on the landing, and sit a minute in the morning light of the clean apartment. It is an old Russian custom, adopted from a Tolstoy novel: Before taking a trip, you pause a quiet
moment to consider where you are going and where you are leaving and what will be different on your return.

So I think of New Orleans—it seems impossible that I will see it again in a few short hours—and I think of Brooklyn and the mundane run of my life here, but I fail to imagine the future, which is imponderable as ever. Then I rise and exit, closing the door on the sunlight and the dust beneath the radiator that will never be vacuumed and the apartment full of silence that is the sound of the ghost at work in the walls like a termite.

N
EW ORLEANS
appears out of the gray afternoon as a patch of green on the horizon. Rain beads the thick goggle of window; the plane dips a wing toward Lake Pontchartrain, and we bank for the final descent. I see the gray-blue waters of the lake, touched with little whitecaps and the white dots of sailboats, and farther off, rising from the river, the flash of heat lightning. Then, I see the green oval of the infield at Jefferson Downs, and the streets of Kenner like lines on a map, and as we lower toward Moisant Field, silver water tanks in backyards, and the shallow blue of pools and cars moving like flecks of gold in an uncertain light on the Eastern Expressway, and here and there, the pale buttons of magnolia flowers.

At last there is the pressure in my ears, and the rough bump as the wheels hit the grease-burned tarmac, and the flaps-down shriek of brake. My heart is in my throat as we taxi alongside the Duncan Canal and approach the terminal, and for a moment I wonder what is wrong—I have flown before, many times—but then I look out the thick window past the drops of rain and see the familiar green-and-white profile, the scrub pines and jasmine, the shaggy tops of the palms nodding over the flat pastel neighborhoods, and even in the pressurized cabin it seems I can smell the thick, loamy richness of bayou and lake beyond the tangle of city, and it hits me—New Orleans. I am back after ten years.

A
NTOINETTE IS
waiting at the baggage terminal. She is wearing a nice tan and a red polka-dotted one-piece pants suit outfit from the forties, scooped down low at the back. Her black hair, curly because of the humidity, is twisted over one shoulder. She searches the crowds for me, stepping around a group of Japanese tourists, pausing to ask one of them a question I can't hear. She towers over the man; he stares up, wide-eyed. But he shakes his head, makes the international sign for no understand, and stoops to retrieve a plaid golf bag from the baggage carousel. I watch from an oblique angle, admiring her profile, as another Japanese man, judging her an excellent specimen of the local fauna, asks to take a photograph. When this is done, I come up quietly behind.

“Antoinette,” I say.

She spins around, and I see that she is carrying a bunch of pink roses wrapped in green tissue paper—what does the pink represent, I wonder, possibility?—but I don't have time to think. She lets out a small cry and in a moment has me in a healthy bear hug, crushing the roses between us. She kisses me full on the lips, then leans back, hand on her hip to get a good look at me. A pair of expensive Italian sunglasses is propped in her hair. She adjusts these with an expert gesture and gives me a long, gray-eyed look. From far above, the airport loudspeaker crackles unintelligible flight departures.

“Hmm, you're looking white as a fish, boy,” she says, and pushes a finger into the paste-colored skin of my arm. “We need to get you out in the sun, that's for sure.”

I shrug. She is right. I've spent the summer in a crypt with thirty boxes of decaying documents, not a stone's throw away from a mummified corpse with wax eyes. But she looks marvelous. Healthy and athletic yet elegant in that casual way she always had. Antique earrings of bloodstone and silver bump against the muscles of her throat.