Madeleine's Ghost (32 page)

It is a little strange making love to her now. Sex in our youth had innocence, but it was also clumsy. Now the innocence has been wiped away by too much experience. Her body moves knowingly beneath my fingers; she adjusts herself to the right angle; she bids me wait for the moment. Perhaps what was lost in sweetness is made up in pleasure. Is this worse, better? I can't say. We are no longer the same people. As a youth, despite what I once thought, it was not possible to fuck. It would have broken our young hearts. Now it is difficult not to.

Antoinette doesn't talk at first because it is hard for her to talk, there is so much locked up inside her, and because her mouth is busy elsewhere, and then busy smoking, cigarette after cigarette, ashtray balanced on the slight round hummock of her belly. But at last after two days, desire is exhausted, and she runs out of cigarettes, and it is dusk, the sky ablush beyond the crescent curve of the city, and she is compelled to speak. This is the first thing she says to my questions, hair in a black and fragrant tangle on the pillow, last cigarette stubbed out: “I don't really want to talk right now, O.K., honey? Why don't we just leave it alone for a while? Not think. Just be with each other for a while.”

I frown, twist in the sheet, drum my fingers against the mattress. Then I say it is O.K., we don't have to talk now, and I settle against her, but she sighs and says: “All right. What do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Everything.”

She wags her foot nervously. “I need a cigarette,” she says.

“Send down for room service.”

She considers this, then ends up eating one of the yellow pills, the first today, and it is almost seven in the evening. “I'm getting better,” she says as her body absorbs the pill and a sly purplish look, now familiar, comes into her eyes.

“Even one pill is one too many,” I say.

“I tell you what let's do,” she says, ignoring me.

“What?”

“Let's order up a drink.”

“No.”

“Just a little drink.”

“No.”

Her lip curls out in a pout; then she brightens.

“All right, let's fuck.”

I'm not sure if there's anything left in me, but she is insistent, and I put my hand on her breast and feel the nipple harden and there is the corresponding reaction, and a half hour later, we come out of it, stuck to each other again. “Ouch,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“This is a good way to catch a urethral infection,” I say.

“I know. Honeymoon cystitis, they call it. From overindulgence. That's why you have to pee afterward. Clears out the pipes. Go, pee.” She pushes me off her, and I go to the bathroom. She follows, and then we are back in bed, spoon fashion, my arm around her stomach.

“It's nice to be here with you,” she says, covering my hand with hers. “Hell, it's nice to be with anyone after eight months.”

“Great.”

“I'm sorry. That's not what I meant.” She is silent for a while. There is the barest flush in the sky now, as the day drowns itself in the river like a suicide jumping off the Huey Long Bridge.

“Since you want to know, things have been bad with me for a very
long time,” she says quietly when there is nothing left out the window but the green dark of the city.

“What do you mean?” I can't see her eyes.

She shrugs. “I loved Dothan, I guess, although that seems so far away now. I was so young, too young. And I was crazy about you. You were only the second person I slept with. You may not believe it, but I actually cried my eyes out when you left.”

“I believe it.”

“Yeah, you up and walked off through Jackson Square, all beat-up and mad as hell. Didn't even look back.”

“Unh-huh.” I cringe, remembering.

“So after you left, there was Dothan again. Then I got rid of him finally, and there was everyone else. I can't remember half their names. Just sex. Nothing more than that.”

“O.K.”

“So, a while back, I met this guy, Victor. He was born in Caracas or some such place. Tossed money around like it was water. Sold coke, among other things. He had a big villa out on the lakeshore, a yacht, and a lot of sleazy friends. I don't know how I got hooked into that crowd.”

“Probably the drugs.”

“Maybe … So it got bad. I was snorting all the time, taking money from the till at work. Then, last September, Victor threw this wild party at his house. It was like something out of the seventies, with little silver bowls of coke on the tables and people having sex all over the place, right in front of everybody. I was too stoned and coked up to care. Like, here was this couple fucking on the couch not two feet from me, and I was just—I don't know—absent.”

“Unh-huh.”

“But Victor, he got all worked up and took me upstairs and we're going at it on the bed when the door kicks open, and it's three cops in flak jackets and combat gear, with guns. I mean, Victor is literally, well, in mid-stroke. It was like a scene from a bad action movie. They pulled him off me and hit him a bunch of times till he was bloody and handcuffed him naked and threw him on the floor. And they wouldn't let me get off the
bed or even pull up the sheets. They walked all around, making these crude comments, and I'm laying there, trying to cover myself with my hands. It was horrible. Finally they start asking me if I'm a prostitute, because it turned out most of the women downstairs were known prostitutes. I kept saying no, no; then I started to cry, and they allowed me to wrap the sheet around myself; then they arrested me and took me downtown. So there I was sitting in this wire cage in the Third Ward Precinct house, wearing a sheet, surrounded by hookers and junkies, and the cops wouldn't let me go because they're trying to book me with prostitution and possession and I don't know what.”

Antoinette is silent for a while. Ear pressed to her back, I hear her heart beating faintly through the thickness of flesh. I try to turn her toward me, but she won't turn, and at last I must urge her to go on. Her voice is different when she does, descended to a low, sad register.

“I was in there for twenty-seven hours. They wouldn't let me call a lawyer till they finished processing my paperwork. But that was O.K., because I didn't want Papa to know—he's so sick now—and all my lawyers are Papa's lawyers. I just sat in there with these women, the absolute dregs, and did nothing but think. Finally one of Victor's mob lawyers got me out, and there was a limousine waiting and flowers and a bottle of expensive champagne on ice, and Victor kept apologizing, but that was enough for me. I went home and scrubbed myself three times. Then I dug my aunt Tatie's mantilla out of a chest, and I covered my head with it and took my rosary, the one I got at my first communion, and I went down to the St. Roch shrine. I got on my knees and begged the saint to ask God to forgive me, because I wasn't good enough, clean enough, to ask God myself, because I felt, I really felt just then, that he had turned His face away in disgust, and I was so ashamed of the things I had done. Then I made a pledge to the saint in the dark of the chapel. First, I swore I would stop using cocaine, and I was pretty far into the stuff then, which is why I'm using the yellow pills now. Second, I swore I would stop having sex like that, as if it didn't matter who I had sex with. I promised I wouldn't have sex again until I had it with someone I cared about.”

She stops talking abruptly and lies in my arms stiff and nervous. I wait for her to go on, but she does not.

“So what about this?” I say after a beat.

“What do you think?” she says gruffly. “I care about you. I've always cared about you. We're good friends, right?”

Then she gets up without looking at me and steps into the bathroom cubicle. Soon I hear the bathwater running, then in a half hour, the tub draining. Ten minutes after this she comes out smelling of soap and talcum powder, naked except for a towel wrapped around her head, and she leans over and kisses me and turns off the lights and gets into bed. In five minutes she is asleep, her damp turban on the pillow. Leaving me to ruminate in the half-dark hotel room, the ceiling lit now by reflection from the Quarter, like sun striking water at an oblique angle through an opening in a cave.

T
HE NEXT
morning we check out of the hotel and separate for the day. Antoinette goes home to the Faubourg Marigny and thence to her store on Treme, and I dedicate myself to the afternoon of research that will make this trip a deduction on my taxes.

The Convent of the Nursing Sisters of the Cross occupies an ancient town house on Chartres Street, a half block up from the old Ursuline School. The Nursing Sisters are a strict order, requiring severe discipline and mortifications of the flesh. They are not allowed to eat meat, they are not allowed to enter the streets unless in the service of the sick or dying. They are not allowed to speak for the first two years of their novitiates and must subsist entirely on water ten days out of every month. They must divest themselves of all property and renounce all friends and family. When this is done, the order pays for an education at the best nursing school in the country, and many of the sisters go on to become medical doctors.

Their sole mission is the care of the critically ill and the violently
insane. Contagious diseases are a specialty, particularly leprosy, a heritage from the Middle Ages. It was the yellow fever epidemics of the last century that led the order to New Orleans. Until the 1860s yellow fever raged in the town every few years, with death rates as high as seventy out of every thousand. The building housing the convent was left to the sisters by a wealthy exporter of cotton, cared for by them as life burned out of him during the terrible epidemic of 1825. Today the convent functions as a retirement residence for old nuns and the order's administrative headquarters in the United States. Its home base is Cigli, a tiny island off the Adriatic coast of Italy, once a notorious plague island, or lazaretto, where the victims of smallpox were shipped off to die. The sisters operate a hospice for terminal AIDS patients in San Francisco and five hospitals in equatorial Africa, a region famous for its virulent diseases. They seem happiest wherever human suffering is the worst. Assets in 1990 dollars were estimated at a hundred million, not bad for an organization with a membership of 3,020 celibate women.

Armed with this information out of Standard & Poor's
Index to Catholic Religious Orders
, 1990 edition—an indispensable reference volume consulted in the reading room of the Brooklyn Library—two mechanical pencils, extra lead, a notebook, and a letter of introduction to the mother superior from Father Rose, I call at the porte cochere of the convent at twelve noon, sharp.

As I press my nose against the bars, the bell rings somewhere in the cool interior. A lizard runs up the stucco. I make out shade trees and large urns full of flowers in the inner courtyard. This pleasant feature of Creole architecture was borrowed from the French. The old houses of the Vieux Carré do not show their best side to the street. Instead they open in on themselves in secret luxury. Rooms with eighteen-foot ceilings and ancient gilt mirrors shun the heat of the city and look out upon the fountains and quiet lawns, the garden patios of domestic life.

Presently, a woman in her late twenties turns the corner and comes toward me down the uneven brick passageway. Blue eyes, a pretty, open face, hair cut short as a boy's. She wears jeans and a ratty Wisconsin T-shirt, splattered with paint. I think of certain Irish Catholic girls I knew
in college at Loyola. Pert and saucy, cute as the girl next door, but achingly unavailable. They had boyfriends elsewhere and always kept a sisterly distance, but it didn't matter. Their natural sarcasm made any thought of sex impossible. In bed there is nothing worse for the mood than a well-timed wisecrack.

“Excuse the clothes. I've been painting,” the woman says, and bends to fumble with the heavy latch. When the gate swings open, she extends a hand. “You're Mr. Conti?”

“That's me.”

“Sister Gregory.”

“The mother superior?”

“I'm afraid so,” she says with a laugh.

I try to keep the surprise off my face. A nun. Of course. The boyfriend elsewhere was Christ Himself.

“I spoke with Father Rose this morning,” she says. “You're doing a parish history? Wonderful. But as I told him, we don't have much in the way of records here. It's a sort of tradition with our order. You could say we don't believe in history. But what we do have, you're welcome to take a look at.”

She waves me to follow with the quick elbow and wrist gesture of a tennis player, and we step down the porte cochere, our shoes making familiar hollow sounds against the stone.

In the courtyard a dozen or so ancient nuns are taking the sunlight. They wear the full black habits of a stricter time and those clunky black nun shoes much like the orthopedic footwear prescribed for flat-footed children. (Where do they get such ugly footwear! Are they mail-ordered from the Vatican?) A few of the nuns lie transparent as wax in lawn chairs. Mouths open, asleep, they snore or mutter. Three more pursue a slow game of croquet on the narrow lawn; I can almost hear their bones creak. At a round café table in the shade of the live oak, two others play a hand of stud poker with buttons for chips. One of them, her face shriveled as a carved-apple granny doll, smokes a cigarette in short, grunting breaths.

“I try to get the girls to wear more casual clothes,” Sister Gregory whispers to me. “They are retired now, and the rules of the order are
relaxed for them. But most have been wearing the wimple and skirts for more than sixty years. After that much time it is impossible to imagine wearing anything else.”

We pass the poker game, and Sister Gregory pauses to borrow a cigarette. They are French, Gauloise Bleu, from a pack stuck with tariff stamps.

“Sister Jerome is one hundred and one years old,” Sister Gregory says in exactly the same tone as you might say, “Junior is two!”