Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (5 page)

I visit Will in Westchester. I wonder whatever happened to God.

I don’t want to but I call Tom again. Will is a vegetable, I tell him. “It’s only temporary, I tell you,” Tom says. “The doctors say they need to stabilize him first before there can be any real progress.” There’s a difference between stabilizing someone and
electrocution
, I say. “Don’t be hysterical,” Tom says. “It’s up to the doctors now. It’s out of our hands.”
Your
doctors, I say.

Will calls from Westchester and he sounds awful. I want to rush up there and hold him, but I know the doctors won’t let me in. If they keep shocking him silly, I’m afraid
our
Will will be lost forever. I absolutely must get him out of there.

My lawyer says the problem is that Will signed all the papers that put Tom in control of his treatment. But he was
drugged
, I say. “We have to prove that,” my lawyer says, “and it won’t be easy. You and your sisters have to fight this together. Without your sisters you’ve got no chance.”

Rebecca is willing to help, but Diana wants nothing to do with it. “I have a baby,” Diana says, as if that explains anything. “And Will is where he belongs. If you let
him out he might hurt himself—or worse.” Tom got to her first. I don’t know what to do.

Becca comes back from Westchester with pictures of Will that break my heart. In the close-ups, he looks like he’s ready to cry, and in the longer shots he looks stooped, defeated. Will is still so young, but in the pictures you can see him as an old man, his heart broken.

Will is gone and no one knows where he could be. I knew this would happen because I believe in my gut that Tom wanted it to happen. First he stole Will’s manuscript and his notes. Then he wiped out Will’s memory with the shock treatment. The only thing left now for Tom is to kill him—or to let Will kill himself.

I have been driving from bar to bar in Westchester with Will’s picture. But he is nowhere to be seen.

A false sighting in a bar in Armonk by a drunk too drunk to be believed. I could have shown him a picture of the Pope or the President and he would have said the same thing. Another dead end. Where else is there to look for a lost soul?

Nancy says the only thing left to do is to pray.

Will is dead and I want to die. They found him face-down in a gorge downstream from the mouth of a river. He broke his neck in a fall, so they say, but I know better. Tom might as well have killed him in cold blood.

Will’s funeral is in the chapel Father built for Becca’s wedding near
The Big House in Southampton. Everything is so ghostly, so ghastly, especially Tom’s bowed head, his grotesque reverence in the front row. The chapel is packed with those who would give homage to the O’Kells, to Tom, but you can count Will’s friends on one hand. Will knew too much for Tom to bear, and I can’t bear to be without my baby brother.

October 2, 1964

I am thinking of Will as I walk along the water, of how much he loved it here by
The Big House. I would give anything to have him back upstairs writing on those long yellow pads, to find a place for his craziness in this crazy world. I wonder what Will could have done with his life if Tom had not been ready to destroy him. Will had a wonderful, crazy way with words, and the “Sins” he wrote about were not of this earth. Is it fair when a younger brother dies and you are still living? I mourn him now, and I will miss him forever.

Nancy comes to be with me here in
The Big House because she didn’t like the way I sounded over the phone. “Like a ghost,” she said. She waits now before saying anything, so that I know I will never be alone. God, how I love her!

October 5, 1964

Will is gone and God is dead.

November 17, 1964

I tell Mother Superior that I want to run the Order.

I am now in charge of everything in the Order except religious instruction. “Things of the flesh,” Mother Superior tells me. “No one understands them better than you.” What do you mean? I say. “You’re an O’Kell,” she explains.

Christmas in the city with Becca and Diana and Luigi and tiny Gino. More wedded bliss and more presents for the baby than I can count. I get the baby a comforter with a hood to keep him warm in winter. Becca gives them a beautiful photograph from the day they all went to pick apples in the fall in Yorktown Heights with little Luigi, now known to one and all as “G.” No one says a word about Will.

I still dream of Will. He was too alive to ever live in peace.

Will is dead and buried. Bucky, Tom, and Luigi are the men in my life. No wonder I get the taste of vomit when I think of them, when I think of all men and what all of them want to do to a woman. With Bucky it was the money, with Tom it was brute force. Luigi was just an animal. There was not a single moment of pleasure with any of them. I have never had a moment of true pleasure with a man in my life.

New Year’s Eve and Nancy and I are alone again the way we like it. We watch the ball drop in Times Square on television and Nancy gives me a New Year’s kiss on the lips.

Had a revelation today that had to be divine. Nancy was next to me, reading Virginia Woolf, and I realized how beautiful she is, not in the storybook, fairy-princess way, but in the real way that a woman can be beautiful. I know that I love her and that I always will.

“Well,” Mother Superior says. “We really are coming into the modern age.” She is talking about all that I have done to modernize the Order, my insistence on organization and planning and modern marketing techniques. That’s the easy part, I tell her. “What’s the hard part?” she wants to know. The soul, I say.

I miss Will at times like these at The Big House, when the night comes down around us, when I half-expect him to come skipping down the stairs, yellow pad in hand, talking too fast about what he has just written or is about to write. He had the soul of a boy. I can
never
forgive Tom for what he did.

So much guilt about Will. Someone had to stop Tom from killing him, and it had to be me. I could have been a better sister. I could have done more to help him. I could have done
something
. But I was too slow, too late. Now he’s dead even though I know I could have saved him.

Tom tells Diana we are much richer than ever. “How can you tell?” Diana says.

If Wall Street loved us any more it would be obscene. I take Nancy with me to meet our investment bankers and they are more bullish than ever about the business of God, especially the unusually sober and unusually quiet Charles Evans. Since I took over the finances of the Order, we’ve grown from a dozen hospitals to more than forty. “Why not 400?” I say. “You boys have the money, and we have God.”

Memorial Day weekend and I stay with Diana and Luigi at the home they have just built next to
The Big House. They have horses and a lawn that looks like it was cut with a razor. Luigi spends today on the beach in his tennis whites, fighting the naked homosexuals who sunbathe north of The Big House. He shakes his racket and screams at them in Italian, as if his mother tongue might drive them back to their mothers. Not even Diana can calm him down. Baby G screams gibberish just like his father.

We all go to the beach together again, Diana and G and me, Luigi with his racket ready to do battle. “Luigi can’t talk now,” Luigi says. He walks down the beach to where the homosexuals wait for him without a stitch of clothes. “Luigi can scream all he wants,” Diana says to me. “The beaches in Southampton are public beaches. There’s nothing he can do.”

June 2, 1965

Luigi puffs out his chest in victory on the way to the beach this morning, but once we come over the dunes we see his campaign of extermination has backfired. To the north it looks as if the entire homosexual population of Southampton has shown up naked just to teach him a lesson. Luigi retreats from the beach without another word.

June 3, 1965

Luigi gives a haircut to every hedge on their property.

June 6, 1965

“We have more Sisters coming in than ever before,” Mother Superior tells me. “I am so pleased. And the expansion?” Two each month starting in September, I tell her, eight new hospitals by the end of the year, all of them in the big Southern cities. “I do love it so when things go South,” Mother Superior says.

“He won’t touch me,” Diana says. She has no idea what’s wrong with Luigi, but in the last two months he has wanted nothing to do with her. Diana says
it must be because she just went back to work at
Imagine
and Luigi has nowhere to go.

Charles Evans finally calls me to apologize, apologizing first for the fact that he may have already apologized. “I’m a horse’s ass when I drink,” he says. I see no reason to contradict him.

August 3, 1965

Luigi goes down to the beach every day now, Diana tells me, sometimes all day. “He won’t touch me any more,” Diana says. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” I think I do.

Luigi asks to meet me, alone, at the Stork Club. “There is something Luigi needs to ask you,” he says. “For a man to love a man is a sin, yes?” I ask him why he’s asking me. “You are a woman of God,” he says. “You know what it is to live with only women, without man.” What does that have to do with it? I say. “Luigi needs to know if it is a sin for a man to love a man.” You mean to love him the way a man loves a women? Of course it’s a sin, I tell him. “Of course,” Luigi says.

Diana has baby G in the most adorable plaid shorts and a darling blue shirt. It’s enough to make a nun want to have children.

Diana can’t get Luigi to come out of the stable for dinner.

The new girls arrive in force and for the first time in my life I think I must be getting old. They look like children to me now, not just their baby faces, but in the innocence they bring to their worship, to the world. I give my speech about the work of God being very hard work. I tell them to guard the quiet place in their hearts where God begins. I love the sound of that without quite knowing what it means.

September 12, 1965

I lose myself in the latest batch of recruits. Today I tell them about sin and temptation, two subjects I know something about. “Is it a sin to just think
about sinning?” a recruit called Sister Jane asks me. Of course, I tell her, but it’s far worse to commit the sin itself. “What’s the worst sin you ever committed?” she asks me. I don’t even want to think about it, I say.

Jane is sobbing in her room over sins unspoken. I comfort her, rubbing her back, then I move my hands down along her hips all the way to her toes, moving back up again to the outside of her thighs on both sides and to the small of her small back. She sighs and rolls over onto her side and puts her hands between her legs to comfort herself. She sounds like she is in pain until I touch her, and then, like a child, she slowly falls off to sleep. I decide to keep her at the Convent, working with Nancy, to make sure she makes it through.

Mother Superior and I fly south from LaGuardia for the hospital opening. There are balloons and clean sheets and chrome and carts on wheels and nurses with their skirts ironed to a crisp. Mother Superior cuts the ribbon, and we are both treated like foreign dignitaries, which I suppose we are. All we need now are sick people and penicillin.