Madeleine's Ghost (33 page)

The nun squints up at us for a disapproving second. Then she goes back to her cards, which she shuffles accordion fashion, like a dealer in an Atlantic City casino.

“I only borrow a cigarette from Sister Jerome so she'll smoke less,” Sister Gregory says when we are out of earshot. “Of course, you figure what can it hurt at one hundred and one?” But she lights up and blows a furtive cloud of smoke up the old facade before scraping it out in the gravel of the walk.

The North American archives of the Nursing Sisters of the Cross consist of twenty-five leather bound parchment ledgers dating back to 1817, the year they came from Italy to Baltimore. On each parchment page is entered the date of entry, holy name, date of birth, and birthplace of the novitiate, followed by a short statement in the novitiate's own hand. At the bottom, the date of death and a stock phrase in Latin. That is all. I flip through the first volume, its pages spotted with mold.

“I had hoped for more,” I say. “Letters, documents, that sort of thing.” Sister Gregory sits on the heavy library table, arms crossed beneath her breasts, swinging her leg like a sorority girl.

“That's all there is,” she says. “All documents of an administrative nature are routinely destroyed at the end of each year. Personal correspondence is not allowed. To join our order, you must dispense with the familiar, shun the world. I'm afraid we don't think much of history here, Mr. Conti. History is for the vain, since the hand of God will sweep it all away in the end. This single page is all that we are allowed. We are not even permitted to write our birth name, just the holy name we choose for our new life, which must be the name of a man. When we die, it is another
law of our order that we go to an unmarked grave in potter's field. No stone to mourn over. Just another one of the countless victims of the epidemic called life.” She smiles, but the effect is chilling. Such grim pronouncements out of such a sweet face.

When she leaves me alone with the ledger, it doesn't take long to find the page I am looking for, dated November 30, 1840: Novice born May 2, 1819, New Orleans, Louisiana, died Brooklyn, New York, October 11, 1919. The short inscription in a young, elegant hand is written in very correct French and rather easy to translate:

Not a promising beginning for a saint. I copy this odd statement in my notebook and flip through the rest of the volume, but there is nothing more of interest. Then I go to find Sister Gregory.

She is painting one of the nun's cells down the hall. The color scheme here is white and blue. Blue to the shoulder, white above. The white part is done.

“One of my older sisters passed away in the room last week,” she says as we head to the first floor down a set of freestanding spiral stairs as elegant as any in the Quarter. “The poor old girl, it was a terrible death. Sometimes you wonder why God allows such things. A hemorrhage, she threw up lots of blood. Couldn't get the stains out of the walls. That's why we're painting the place.”

I shudder at this and am silent till we reach the gate. Then I turn to her on impulse.

“Sister, I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?” She is wary suddenly, as if she thinks I am about to make a pass at her.

“What did you write on your page?”

She looks down and scrapes her paint-splattered Doc Martens along the gray brick. “You're asking why I became a nun?” she says at last.

“Yes.”

She looks back up at me, her eyes blue and fine and Irish, and I think I know the reason.

“It was
The Sound of Music,
” she says quietly.

“What?”

“You know, the musical with Julie Andrews. The Von Trapps. Maria, the nun; Rolfe, the Hitler Youth; the kids; the puppet show. Remember? ‘Climb Ev'ry Mountain.' ”

“Yes, of course.”

“For me the saddest part of that movie was when Maria left her nuns behind. They loved her without reservations; she belonged with them.
And then, when the Nazis were looking for the family in the graveyard, I always wanted to shout, ‘They're behind the tombstone!' so the captain and those odious kids would get shipped off to Treblinka or something and Maria would have to go back to the convent. Of course, this was a bad impulse, and I confessed and did penance for it. But at least I realized at a young age that I wanted to be a nun.”

I don't know what to say. Is she serious? This is just the sort of smart-ass answer the girl next door might give when you ask a question that is none of your business. But before I have a chance to ask another question, there is the hard little tennis player's hand again and the freckled smile.

“Good-bye, Mr. Conti,” she says, and the iron gate closes heavily behind me and I am cast out into the muzzy sunshine of the afternoon.

I
MEET ANTOINETTE
at four o'clock at ‘Tite Poulette's Oyster Bar as we had planned. We stand shoulder to shoulder at the zinc counter with tourists and locals, for Poulette's is something of a landmark and one of the few places frequented by both. I hear the broad upriver accents of farmers and fertilizer salesmen in town for a day on business, the flat vowels of midwestern conventioneers, the affirmative “eh” of a couple from Winnipeg, Canada. With these voices, I contrast Antoinette's—soft, almost shy in my ear. Hers is an accent without being an accent at all. It is the accent of Uptown New Orleans, sophisticated, citified, without the twang, but southern nonetheless.

“You can't leave without having a couple of sliders,” she is coaxing. “Come on, now.”

I have been drinking a Dixie, watching her polish off a half dozen of these big glossy Gulf oysters and dreading the moment. You have to be in the mood for oysters. I haven't been in the mood for over ten years.

“I'm naturally suspicious of food you're not supposed to chew,” I tell
her. She shakes her head, imperious. Not liking oysters in New Orleans is treason.

“Don't be such a Yankee,” Antoinette says, and flashes a smile at the shucker behind the zinc counter.
“Lagniappe,”
she says to him and winks in my direction. The man smiles back, recognizing one of his own. He shucks an oyster and places it before me.
Lagniappe
is a Creole word of uncertain etymology that means roughly “a little something for free.” I stare down at this gray quivery bit of
lagniappe
helplessly, as Antoinette stabs it with her three-pronged oyster fork, swirls it in the hot sauce and horseradish mix, and holds it up to me, one hand under my chin like a woman feeding pablum to a baby.

“O.K. now, son,” she says. “Open up.” The oyster shivers in the air before me. The Canadian couple, just to our right, finds my reticence amusing; the oyster shucker looks on with a twinkle in his eye. I have no choice but to open and swallow. The spicy taste of the horseradish cannot cover a certain green flavor as the thing goes down my throat like a lump of phlegm. And when it is gone, there is a residue of grit in my mouth. I reach for my beer and gulp a few mouthfuls to get rid of the rotten fish taste and to keep myself from retching.

“Your boy looking a little sicklylike,” the oyster shucker says to Antoinette, resting his big rubber glove on the metal of the counter. “Not used to our food down here.” In his speech,
our
and
here
have two syllables:
aw-huh
and
he-ah.

“Hell, what we need is another dozen,” Antoinette says. The shucker gives a gap-toothed grin and goes to select twelve good-sized oysters from the trough.

“I think that last one was bad,” I say when I recover my breath. “Gritty. Don't they say that gritty oysters—”

“Old wives' tale,” Antoinette says. “Wouldn't you be a little gritty on occasion if you spent your life buried in the mud?”

When the second dozen arrives, I eat two more, just enough to preserve my honor; then I stand back with my beer.

“Okay, this is my dinner,” she says as she lifts another viscous muscle to her lips. “You want to stop for something else?”

“I'm not really hungry,” I say, and I'm not. My stomach is filled with panic. The plane leaves in three short hours, there is nothing definite between us, and I do not have the courage to speak. It seems Molesworth's prediction will come true, and I will fly off for another ten years of exile and regret.

“Now let's talk about you, honey.” Antoinette seems to sense my agitation and pauses after five oysters. “I've been talking about myself all along. You always get me to talk about myself. I go for ten years without a word and you show up and it's one long blabfest. Now a little of your own medicine. What's been going on up there in New York?” It is perhaps only out of politeness that she asks. Not because she doesn't care but because she prefers to live in the immediate, in the touchable, in the particular moment of sunlight. The rest of it, the past, the future, lies vaguely delineated and half submerged like the roots of a mangrove beneath the black waters of the bayou.

I have been hoping for this moment, but now I don't have much to say. I suppose I am still waiting for my life to happen. This is a terrible thing to admit at thirty-two. So instead I tell her about the ghost.

She swallows the last oyster and listens in silence. Then she pays the tab—“Don't worry, it's on me, honey”—and she takes my arm and escorts me out into the street. I cannot tell what she thinks; her Italian shades are down like a curtain. When I finish my story, she is silent, and I am prodded to say, “Well?”

She tosses her head. “I don't know.”

“You don't believe in ghosts?”

“Not saying one way or the other. Never saw a ghost.”

“You think I'm crazy?”

“So let me get this straight, your life in New York, at least recently—we're talking suicide, muggings, and ghosts. Know what I think, honey? I think you ought to get the hell out of that city. That's what I think.”

“O.K. Where do I go?”

She hesitates. My heart is in my throat for a moment.

“Somewhere else,” is all she will say. “Come on.” Then she's got my
arm tight, and she's pulling me down Bourbon Street toward Esplanade, through the crowds.

We turn up Dumaine to avoid an old-fashioned spasm band of young black children banging on pots and pans and dancing on the street corner, go past the house of the cornstalk fence—beloved of architectural historians, though it never did much for me—make a right on Dauphine and make a left on Esplanade. In the middle of the block between Dauphine and Burgundy, there is a crumbling pinkish house of plastered brick standing alone on a narrow lot. It is inconspicuous here, surrounded by statelier homes that better suit this wide avenue, once the grand boulevard of the Creoles, but it would be a landmark in any other American city. The sagging balconies and wrought-iron work place it in the first half of the nineteenth century. A weedy porte cochere leads back into an overgrown courtyard shaded by a single large oak.

We stand for a moment arm in arm on the banquette, looking up. The windows are boarded up from behind. Broken panes of glass glint in the afternoon light. Antoinette has an odd, expectant look on her face. She searches the facade as if for a clue.

“What are we looking at?” I say.

“See the green shutters?” she says eagerly. “There was a time when green was the only color for shutters on Creole houses in the Vieux Carré. Everyone had green shutters. If you didn't, you were déclassé—or an American.”

We squeeze through the gate of the porte cochere, rusted half open over the weedy cobbles, and go around back into the courtyard. Here there are two blackened bronze urns depicting classical scenes, and a rusty fountain. A few steps lead up to a wide brick patio littered with broken appliances.

“It's sad how little time it takes for a house to fall apart if no one lives there,” Antoinette says. “Only been abandoned for a couple of years, but to look at it, you'd think centuries. What is a house, you know, without the people inside it? The people are the glue and the nails and the wood that keeps old places together.”

She leans a garden chair against the bricks at the French doors,
climbs up, and retrieves an age-blackened key from a nook above the lintel. At first the lock won't give, then a heavy chunk and the old machinery turns, and Antoinette hips open the door, which scrapes over the mottled flooring of hardwood. Inside there are high, empty rooms with cobwebbed plaster rosettes staring down from the ceiling like eyes. The fanlight over the front door illuminates a curving stairway that leads from the entrance hall into dim upper regions. Dust is piled in the corners. The air is hot and thick. I feel as if we have entered an Egyptian tomb. On the mantel in the front parlor, a stilled clock. Antoinette leads me by the hand in a silent inspection of the first floor. I have never seen her so serious. We cannot go upstairs because a few of the steps are rotted out, and we end up back in the parlor, slashes of yellow light coming through the cracks between the boards overlooking Esplanade.