Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (2 page)

The shape came back again tonight and my hand is shaking. It’s the middle of the night. I can’t write.

Now I know. I know it was Tom. My own half-brother is the shape I have been seeing in my nightmares, in my dreams. His kiss at Father’s funeral and his awful scrub-brush beard and the smell of something slick he always wore in his hair are enough to make me remember everything. Now I know when it happened. And I know
what
happened, even if I don’t know why. Tom said he wanted me to come along to Bimini to watch the government test the atomic bomb, for the sake of my education. He said I needed to know how the world works. When the bomb was about to go off he said it would be too awful and too upsetting for me and that he would stay below to comfort me. Everyone was outside above us on deck looking out across the Pacific. I wasn’t afraid of the bomb at all, but he wouldn’t let me watch. When the bomb started to explode outside, Tom pushed my skirt up and pushed me down on the bed and took my legs up into the air like I was a rattle, the back of my knees on his shoulders so that he could grunt out the small round window above and behind me. I bent my back back and I could see the bomb out the round window, I could hear that smash/crash sound before  the mushroom cloud came upside down behind me as Tom dribbled the word “fallout” into my ear.

December 10, 1955

I sleep all the time now that I know whom to hate.

How could I let it happen? I should
never
have gone on that boat to begin with. And I should
never
have let him take me back down below deck. He must have thought he was doing what I wanted. It has to be
my
fault.

Christmas Eve at the Convent. Big flakes of snow. After Mass I come back here by the fire to pray for help, to pray for hope. I feel so dead inside, like the
me
down there is dead and buried.

What did everyone used to say? That they didn’t see how we could be related? Maybe we’re not. Maybe
that’s
what I’m feeling. He is only my
half
-brother, after all. We are nothing like each other. He ignored me, left me alone. I have no real relationship with Tom. He was older than me, angrier, in a rush to get through the people who got in his way. The most I ever got from him was politeness, a birthday card, and a present Christmas morning. I’m only just starting to hate him. I can’t wait to hate him more.

I won’t go on boats now because I start retching, because of what he did to me. But I’m sleeping now. I’m crazy and mad but I’m sleeping. Tom comes back sometimes in my dreams but at least I know it’s him, I know what happened and what’s going to happen and so I’m not scared by not knowing the way I was before. Before bed every night I fall right onto my knees,  I pray to understand why this has happened to me. I try to remember my sins, I tick them off one by one on my fingers and I always come back to my terrible pride. First as the first daughter of Thomas O’Kell, always acting as if that made me better than anyone else. I was so rich and so spoiled and I had anything any girl could want. And then coming to the Convent, the right path, but even here I have been drunk with pride. What a fool I’ve been! Thinking that I was serving the Lord when all the while I was just serving my own purposes. I hate myself for letting it happen. But at least I know who I am, what I am, why I am the way I am.

February 12, 1956

I’ve never seen Becca so worried, so jumpy. Joe’s just getting worse.
Much
worse, she says. He hasn’t had any work at all since the blacklist and Becca says she practically has to dress him every morning. She says the only thing he’ll do all day long is watch NBC with the shades drawn and the windows down, talking to himself or to the game show hosts on television. Becca finally got him to a doctor who said it was “melancholia” and gave him pills. But Becca says the pills make it so that Joe can barely move. She was practically screaming about Tom to me, blaming everything on him, how it was Tom who never liked Joe, Tom who was after Oppenheimer, that Joe was Tom’s way to get at Oppenheimer. I’m not ready yet to tell Becca about Tom and me on the boat, but I think about it all the time.  Before I couldn’t sleep at all. Now sleep is my only escape.

I ask Mother Superior to move me away from here and she says that won’t do for the new chief financial officer of the Sisters of Mercy. The Order needs me strong but inside I am dying. There is no escape from my pride, not even at the Convent.

I jump every time a car backfires, and our old cars at the Convent backfire all the time. The bomb lives.

I convince the Order to let me take over my own blind trust. The idea of letting Tom control my money as the trustee is just too much to live with. Better to watch my own money than to watch him watching mine. I should also admit the chief financial officer of the S
isters of Mercy likes to follow the market. Must be the O’Kell in me.

August 10, 1956

I know what it’s like to have a man inside of me. I need to tell someone, to ask for help. I’ve never needed help so badly in my life.

Mother St. Joseph comes when I call, bless her. I arrange it so we can come together at the Order’s private lodge in the White Mountains. Just the two of us. The sky is so blue up here against the green of the trees before the weather blows in. We put blankets beneath the floor jamb and then jam together in front of the fireplace to keep warm, our hands cupped around cups of hot cocoa. We sleep here, in the lodge, leaning one into the other like two branches of the same tree. Mother St. Joseph wakes up first and the smell of bacon and coffee pulls me right up out of my sleep. We talk and talk. I tell her
everything
. No nightmares here for me. Just the joy of being with another woman, of being as close as two Sisters who aren’t sisters can be.

A new group arrives today and they ask me to tell everyone about the business of the Order, all the hospitals and the missions and the schools, and how each one of us fits into God’s plan. Funny to be talking about the world to a gaggle of girls who have given up their lives for God, every one of them scrubbed clean with faith. There’s not a wrinkle or a sag on their young bodies, and they all flutter with the joy of souls who have given up everything for God. I love to see their devotion so close at hand.

September 23, 1956

I comfort the young Sisters with my words, with my prayers, with my touch. I ask them where they want to go in the Order, I tell them I can get them there if they’ll just let me help, because I know every Sister who has passed through the Convent. Sometimes the slightest touch is all it takes for them to know they are not alone.

Eisenhower appoints Tom to the Nuclear Energy Commission, so now I get to see his face in every paper I see. It’s all about money, of course, and O’Kell money was enough to get Tom what he wanted, though I have no idea what he sees in nuclear power. Maybe Tom needs power of his own, a new kind of power to replace Father and his electricity. “Did you see? Did you see?” the Sisters in the Convent ask me. Oh yes, I say. I see it all. They congratulate me for having such an important brother. The tabloids call him “Atomic Tom.”

October 12, 1957

Diana and Luigi elope to Venice, then they drive to Rome so that Luigi can  win the Italian Open, as a wedding present I suppose. Diana O’Kell is now Countessa Diana Campobello (
coun
-TESS-
ahh
/ DEE-
ahh
-
naah
/
camp
-
o
-BELL-
o
) because Luigi is some kind of count or something in Italy. Diana tells us Luigi says marriage has been great for his forehand. That’s as deep as he gets. It’s so obvious what Diana is doing, and so obvious it’s not going to work. Luigi is the anti-Ford. He may have some kind of Italian title, but he has absolutely no breeding, no class, no manners, and no money. Diana thinks she will show Henry Ford that she doesn’t need him. All she has done so far is to show how badly she misses him.

Don’t call us the Sisters of Mercy, I tell Wall Street. Call us the Sisters of
Currency
. And that’s what they’re starting to do. If the Order is going to be strong then we are going to have to run it like a business. They are all starting to buy in on the Street, in part because the Catholics on Wall Street  get such a kick when they see a nun traipsing down the halls. They treat me like royalty, like I’m Bishop Fulton Sheen’s personal messenger. I tell them the financing is all about trust and love and God-knows-what. They crack up, cackling by their second martinis. I’m like a good-luck charm who isn’t afraid to take a drink, and they all dearly love to let me walk through the door first, to make sure everyone sees the profane having their brush with the sacred.

Will. He will always be the youngest of us, not just in years, but in innocence, which is what counts. He came to the Convent today to tell me
all about his plans for his life, for the world. I think Will would try to save the world and everyone in it if he ever had a chance. Instead he says he just wants to write. About what, I ask. About
us
, Will says, about the family. Why would anyone care? I ask. Will said no one has to care, as long as
he
cares. He says the O’Kells are different than everyone else, richer, darker.

Joe killed himself last night after Becca went to sleep. He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge from the very top and then he washed up this morning down by the ferry at the tip of Wall Street. Becca is incoherent now in the next room, shot full of drugs that make her so numb she could not tell you her name. I don’t think Joe ever quite understood what it meant to be an O’Kell. I know he was on the blacklist. But did that have to be the end of the world?

Becca is better today, but not much. She is bitter, screaming about Tom and the Communists, saying he might as well have pushed Joe right off the bridge. She says Tom did the same thing with Oppenheimer, pushed him right out of the government. She blames Tom for everything, but I can’t tell her yet what I blame Tom for. It’s still too soon for me. I’m still too raw.

I take Becca to
The Big House after the funeral and we take long walks up and down the empty beach, walking east until we can’t see The Big House any more, then doubling back until who knows where we’ve been. The sun is enough to keep the cold at a distance. Becca likes to talk about everything but what she needs to talk about now, and at night she takes so many pills that she sounds like a record player slowed down to the wrong speed, telling me all about Joe
very
slowly, in a dead voice, about how alive he was, how alive they were together, the way they used to go to the restaurants no one went to until they became too popular, about how funny Sid and Carl and Imogene could be. Becca is crying instead of laughing, and there’s nothing I can do.

Becca and I are walking on Job’s Lane in town and the only store open is the drug store. She buys a cheap camera with a roll of film and by the end of the street she has taken so many pictures we backtrack back to the store for a
dozen rolls. Becca wants me to pose, and I do the best I can in my habit. She takes pictures of everything, and we go back later in the day for more film and to get the other pictures developed. It’s like the camera is the only way she can look outside of herself. Maybe it means her life can go on.

Diana and I meet in the city while Luigi is away playing on clay. I was wrong about Diana and Luigi. Diana says she’s never been happier, that Luigi loves her better and more than
Henry The Second ever could. She is glowing, telling me all about Luigi’s tournaments, and the walks they take, and even their lovemaking, the way Luigi never wants to stop. Diana is even starting to talk with the tiniest accent, like she really is
Countessa Campobello
.

Mother is asking Tom questions about O’Kell Consolidated and our money and his plans for our money in the future. I’m all for it, and I do what I can to help Mother understand where our money comes from and where it’s going. Tom has all the power in the world when it comes to our family fortune, and the idea of him controlling our destiny makes me retch, even if he is so good at it. It’s not about money. It’s about control, and he controls me in ways that scare me. I haven’t told anyone except Mother St. Joseph about what happened between us.