Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

“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.

  14

  THE 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!”

  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 th
at 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:

  I have chosen the name of Januarius for my life with the good sisters here, after the Martyr of Benevento whose congealed blood they say liquefies eighteen times during the year in the cathedral at Naples. According to the Lives of the Saints, this poor soul was thrown to the bears in the amphitheater of Pozzuoli and then beheaded. The sheer violence of this fate attracts me. I long for such an end, though God reserved a similar death for the man I loved and lost.

  The sisters here have asked me to write down in this book the reason I wish to take the veil with their order. And they have asked me to write nothing but the truth. Very well. I bury myself in this terrible way not because I love God but because I cannot stand to look at my face in the mirror after the part I played in certain tragic events. I acted out of weakness and wounded pride and jealousy. The man I loved is dead now, and in the end he loved another. Perhaps I shall come to love God in the way the kind sisters love Him. I do not know. I tried to join the Ursulines, but they would not have me, also the Carmelites. The sisters here take me as a novice only because too many of their numbers drop dead every year with the fever of the black vomit and they cannot afford to be choosy.

  Let me say now that I was not without dowry or offers of marriage, and I have been told I am pretty. I am the daughter of a proud family, and like my beautiful, sad cousin, I cherished my pride as I cherished my spite. But all of it will be forgotten in time. Now it is merely for me to obey the rules of the order and to make myself suffer as the others suffer. These things I can do. It is easy to follow rules, to live on bread and water. I do not fear death. Life is the troublesome thing. Good-bye.

  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.

  15

  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 wi
ll 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.