Nora Jane (46 page)

Lydia was driving the car. “I don’t know what this means,” she said, after they had gone twenty blocks and were stopped at
a stop sign. “Is Daddy going to live?”

“It means the transplant was successful and the leukemia won’t have a place to be. Yes, it does mean he is going to live.”
Nora Jane realized as she was talking that she didn’t understand what was going on any better than Lydia did.

“Forever? He’s going to live forever?”

“No one does,” Tammili answered. “He’ll live as long as normal, I guess.”

“The next few weeks will be scary,” Nora Jane said. “But we have to have faith in the doctors and what they are doing. These
are miracles that are occurring. We are the beneficiaries of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years.”

“Yeah, science,” Tammili added. “We live in a world made out of other people’s dreams. That’s what Mrs. Harley told us in
chemistry lab. That’s why we have to study it even if it’s hard to do.”

“Yeah,” Lydia added, choosing to ignore her abysmal grades in science. “I may take some science courses in summer school this
summer.”

“That would be wonderful, Lydia,” Nora Jane said. “That is a very mature decision.”

“I didn’t say I’d do it. I said I might do it.”

“Oh, right,” Tammili couldn’t keep herself from adding. “I’m waiting for that day to come.”

Lydia reached across the seat and pinched her sister on the leg. Not much of a pinch. Such a small pinch it would have been
difficult to prove it wasn’t a pat or touch.

“I saw that,” Nora Jane said. “Go over to Stella’s and get Little Freddy. And please don’t fight today. Please. Just for me
and just for the sake of goodness, mercy, and love.”

“Don’t start crying again, Mother. Please don’t cry when we should be happy.”

“We won’t fight,” they both said, and Nora Jane decided to believe it.

* * *

It was two days later when Nora Jane was allowed to enter Freddy’s room. Gowned and masked, she was allowed to talk to him
for five minutes. “That’s over,” he said, when she took his hand. “Would you tell Danen I’m ready to go home? And what happened
to the twins’ birthday? We didn’t even have a party? Have you registered Lydia for the Kaplan course?”

“I thought you wanted her to do Princeton Review?”

“She might need both. Tammili still doesn’t want to do it?”

“She doesn’t need to do it. Are you all right? Do you feel all right?”

“I feel like a different man. I think I have taken on some of Larry’s characteristics. I’m serious, N.J. Yesterday I found
myself being profoundly, even mysteriously, patient.” “That would be interesting.”

“Is Mother out there?”

“No, she’s coming this afternoon at five. It’s Christmas, Freddy. Do you know that?”

“Of course I know it. Good that Mother’s coming.”

“All right. I have to leave.” She stood up beside the bed. “Did I tell you Little Freddy was picked to sing ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’ when school starts in January? So we have to practice. If you can’t make it I’ll videotape it for you.”

“I’ll be there. Are you kidding? This is over now, N.J…. I am done with this mess.”

She stopped at the door. “I think you are. You know what, Freddy? We’re lucky. I have this huge feeling of being grateful
and feeling lucky.”

“You bet we are,” he said. “You bet I know that.”

M
ITZI OZBURT MAY HAVE SWORN OFF
lusting after Father Donovan, but that didn’t mean Father Donovan wasn’t still getting a hard-on every time she showed up
to work at the Crisis Center in her little matching pants and shoes, with her low-cut blouses and her long arms sticking out
all the way down to her pale pink fingernails with a star on top of one of the index fingers so that all he could think about
in the long January nights was what would happen if those fingers slid along the curve of his ribs and down onto the rest
of him.

“To hell with it,” he said. He got out the vacuum sweeper and hooked the hose onto the rod and began to vacuum the floor of
the room where the volunteers met once a month to workshop their cases and, sometimes, as tonight, be lectured to by various
professionals in the field.

“I cannot keep on if I don’t believe it’s right,” he said out loud, turning on the vacuum and beginning to push the brush
into the corners. “Everything is sexual, everything is blossom and seed and pod. In every niche in nature only one thing is
going on. For all we know the stars are fucking. The church is wrong to ask this of us. It is wrong and it is evil and it
creates evil. When women died in childbirth, chastity was an act of mercy. When priests had to minister to starving people,
there was no time for them to become husbands, fathers, lovers. If I were in Africa it would be different, but I am in San
Francisco, California. I am a good man. I am a priest, but I love this woman, I covet her, I lust for her, I want to live
with her in a house with a real kitchen and see her grow big with child. I want a little boy like Little Freddy to hold my
hand and tell me things.” He stopped talking and began to pray. He prayed as he vacuumed the room and continued to pray as
he pushed the tables back into place and set out the coffeepot and platters for cookies and put away the vacuum. He left the
recreation hall and walked across the playground to the church and went into his office and called his cousin, Nora Jane.

“I’m having a crisis,” he said when she answered. “But first, how is Freddy? Is it still going well?”

“He says he likes the way he feels. He says he is a quieter and more patient person now that he has Larry Binghamton’s DNA.
He says he is becoming wise and solemn. We hope he can go home soon. What’s going on with you?”

“I want to leave the church. I want to do the work but I can’t do the rest anymore. I want to be a normal man, Nora Jane.
I’m lonely here. If it wasn’t for you… I shouldn’t tell you this but you’re the only person who knows who I was before this.
Sometimes I can barely remember myself. Will you have lunch with me tomorrow? Anywhere. We could meet at the hospital if that’s
where you’ll be.”

“Okay. Meet me at the front entrance at noon. There’s a little French place in the neighborhood that Nieman discovered. I
wondered when we’d have this conversation, Donny. I’ve been waiting for it.”

Father Donovan put down the phone and changed into his running shoes and told the secretary he was going for a run. “In those
clothes?” she asked.

“The volunteers will be here in an hour and a half. I won’t have time to change.” “Okay.” She looked worried, so Father Donovan
went back into his office and took off his coat and collar and put on a sweatshirt and sweatpants and his running shoes and
left by the back door and began to run. He ran all the way to the children’s park and began to circumnavigate it. His heart
was heavy. He could not concentrate. He could not pray. I am a man, he kept thinking whether he wanted to think it or not.
I was a man for twenty-three years before I went to Texas and signed those papers and drove to Saint Louis and entered the
seminary and began this long, long lie.

He lost track of time. When he remembered, he turned and ran back to the church as fast as he could and hurried into the recreation
hall. Most of the volunteers were already there, filling cups with coffee, eating sweet rolls and cookies, waiting for him.
The speaker, Sally Monroe from Los Angeles, was moving among the volunteers talking to them.

“Please forgive me,” he told the ladies. “I forgot the time. I am so sorry. I’ll change and be right back. Never mind, I’ll
introduce Miss Monroe and let her begin her talk. I don’t know what happened to me…” Then Mitzi was there, wearing something
made of silk. It was yellow or gold or the color of marigolds or sunlight and it fell around her arms and the sleeves went
down to those fingers and that star, but he couldn’t look at it. He looked at her face, which was quiet and still. The light
was missing from Mitzi’s face tonight. She was solemn, as Nora Jane said Freddy Harwood had become. Maybe the world has grown
solemn the last few years, Father Donovan decided.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she answered. “I’m glad you were running.” He was sweating and the old sweatshirt from Tulane University was sticking
to his chest. He wanted to touch her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, even God, even salvation, even hope.

“I better get this started,” he said. He reached out and touched her arm through the silk and walked to the podium to thank
the volunteers for coming. He said a prayer for the whole state of Christ’s church and then he turned the meeting over to
Sally Monroe and left the room. He ran to his office and put on his pants and shirt and collar and coat and leather shoes
and ran back to the recreation building and stood at the back of the room, looking at Mitzi’s soft golden hair and thinking
of the night he drove her to Nora Jane’s house and she had cut his hair. Her fingers had brushed against his forehead and
God had drained out of his brain into her hands and it was over now.

“The main thing you must do is be a coach,” Sally Monroe was saying. “You must always stay positive about the future. This
was a terrible and life-changing thing that happened to these women, but it was ONLY ONE THING. Yes, it will take them a long
time, for some of them years, to understand and lessen the fear. The fear is real for them now in a way none of us can understand,
unless it happened to us also.” She stopped and looked down a moment.

“Where am I? It is a process. You will be better with some victims than others. If you are feeling like you can’t help a woman,
call for help from Father Donovan or one of your team captains. Never keep trying to do it alone if your lady isn’t getting
better. You are only one person doing what you can. Don’t get frustrated. We need you. You are true angels to do this work.
We love you for it. I love you for it.

“I was a victim. I know what it means to have been raped. But more importantly, I know what it means to be helped.”

She bowed her head and folded her hands in prayer at her chest. The volunteers clapped and cheered.

Father Donovan went to the podium. “Let’s take a break for fifteen minutes. Then we’ll have questions for Miss Monroe and
I’ll read you some letters we received last week from women we have helped.”

Mitzi was not moving toward him. She was talking to another woman, but when he looked at her she turned and looked back at
him and it was a caress and they both knew it.

When the meeting was over, Father Donovan was busy taking care of Sally Monroe, thanking her for coming and attempting to
give her the small check that most of the speakers either refused or sent back as a contribution to the center. Mitzi was
glad he was busy. She left as quickly as she could after the final prayers were said. Pray for grace, she told herself. Pray
for something.

She went home and watched HBO for a while, then got in bed and tried to read a book of poems Freddy had lent her months before,
but they were all about love and that was the last thing she needed now.

I walk down the garden paths,

And all the daffodils

Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.

I walk down the patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

With my powdered hair and jeweled fan,

I too am a rare

Pattern. As I wander down

The garden paths…

But this poet lost her lover in a war, Mitzi decided. I lose mine to God. Or am I just a bad girl, and always love the wrong
people, like my cousin James in Baton Rouge. That was worse than this, I guess, because we just did it to be mean. We weren’t
in love. We were just young and mean.

Oh God, I ought to stop these patterns. They are killing me.

Mitzi got up and went into the kitchen and made some Sleepytime Tea with lots of Splenda and went back into her bedroom and
snuggled down into the blue comforter she had had in her bed in her mother’s house and thought about calling her mother, but
her mother was the last person on earth to talk to about this.

She turned on her meditation tape and began to pretend she was on a lake looking at the water and the lake birds and all the
stuff growing all around it like that lake they have near Las Vegas that is so beautiful—no, that was Reno, Nevada, when she
went there with Charles Cartwright before he left her for a sorority girl he knew at LSU.

In the morning, Father Donovan went to the record store on Telegraph Avenue to walk about among normal people and try to imagine
himself becoming one again. He bought an expensive double album by Bob Dylan, then went to a coffee shop down the street from
Freddy’s bookstore that Nora Jane and Freddy had taken him to one night when he first got to town. He ordered coffee and a
croissant and sat down at a table near the sidewalk. He found a newspaper on a chair and opened it to the sports pages, then
put it aside and sipped his coffee. He had not eaten since half a sweet roll at the meeting the night before.

He broke off a piece of the croissant and ate it slowly, trying to remember what it was like to hold a woman in his arms and
be a man. Then Mitzi was there, standing beside the table with a plate and a cup. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I’m
glad. I want to ask you about that talk last night, what she said about not getting worried.”

He stood up and took her cup and plate and put it on the table next to his. “Please sit down. Stay with me.” She sat down
across from him and he took her hand in his.

“There aren’t any accidents,” he said. “We don’t run into people we like by accident. No, look at me. Please look at me. I’m
falling in love with you, Mitzi, and you know it and you feel it too. I am going to leave the priesthood. It’s decided. I’m
going to call my spiritual adviser this afternoon and tell him that.”

“You would be sorry,” she answered. She was not amazed, not frightened, not surprised.