Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  Meanwhile, Father Rose has become something of a celebrity. He has appeared on Good Morning America and on the Regis Philbin show. His picture, along with a scandalous close-up of the shrunken, mummified head of Sister Januarius, was featured on the front page of the New York Post. The headline read A SAINT GROWS IN BROOKLYN? Perhaps it wasn’t success in golf he had wanted all along, Father Rose confided to me as a guilty aside, but a little bit of fame.

  Work on the house on Esplanade moves forward at a good pace. Antoinette hired an army of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers to do the specialty work, and last week we moved into the big bedroom on the second floor, which is still a little like camping out. I am having a hard time getting used to the idea that we are rich and still plan to finish my thesis one of these days and apply for a position teaching history at one of the local colleges. After so many years of hardscrabble living, Antoinette’s money is impossible to imagine. I find myself making the most absurd economies, though I am told that after taxes our share of Papa’s assets comes to something around seventeen million dollars. I say our share because Antoinette has refused to draw up a prenuptial agreement, cutting me out of a share in the loot in the case of divorce or abandonment.

  “If we sink, we sink together,” she says. “Anyway, what’s a million or two more or less to me now?” I have to agree with this assessment, but in my case it is God’s truth that I would take her barefoot and destitute without a rag to call her own, and all this newfound wealth embarrasses me just a little. After the child is born, we’re going to give some of the money to the poor, I tell her, and she folds her hands across her belly and gives a smile worthy of the Madonna herself.

  Still, like Henry Murger, after the success of Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, I am lifted from a life of bohemian penury and suffering in a single brilliant stroke.

  One of my economies has taken the odd form of landscape gardening. I am redoing the courtyard behind the house on Esplanade, drawing on experience garnered as a summer landscaper during high school. It is miserable, backbreaking work, but it eases my conscience a little. I’ve got a pile of old bricks from a demolition yard, and today I am rebuilding the planter walls around the live oak when I hear the crunching tire sound of a heavy vehicle pulling into the porte cochere.

  It is a vintage fifties era Bentley Continental, with a two-tone paint job of glossy black and deep burgundy and lots of polished chrome. When the chauffeur comes around to open the passenger door, I see the cross keys and miter insignia on the door and begin to brush the dirt off my knees. An older man steps out, wearing the red-trimmed skirts and cape and red skullcap that is the insignia of a cardinal of the Catholic Church. I am dumbfounded as the man approaches. His heavy gold crucifix gleams in the sun of three o’clock. His shoes are patent leather, Italian, handmade. He is short and plump, with odd square sideburns and a mole like a beauty mark on his left cheek. He smiles pleasantly when he steps up, but his eyes are grave and serious and conceal unknown depths.

  “Excuse me, I am looking for a Mr. Edward Conti,” he says in a measured English that shows its Italian accent through the pronouncement of my last name.

  “Yes?”

  “I am Monsignor Antonio Ruccia, attached to the Congregation of Rites at the Vatican. Can you spare a moment?”

  We sit at the cast-iron table beneath the live oak. Cardinal Ruccia carefully dusts the seat with an embroidered handkerchief, and when he sits, his skirts spread delicately over his knees, but there is nothing frivolous about the man. He has the assured gestures of someone who is used to the exercise of unquestioned authority. He brings out a small cassette player from a fold in his cassock, places it carefully on the table between us, and begins to ask questions about Sister Januarius, about the apparition in the hospital, about the long and arduous progress of my research over the course of last summer.

  When I am finished telling him what I know, he clicks off the tape recorder and leans close. His aftershave smells slightly of gardenias, but something about his eyes make me sweat.

  “I ask you, Mr. Conti, to swear upon the fate of your immortal soul and on your love for the church, that the things you have told me are true and do not represent fabrications or elaborations on your part.”

  I am flustered and for a moment think of Galileo standing before the Inquisition. “Word of honor,” I whisper, “it’s all true.”

  His eyes narrow for a moment. Then he nods and seems satisfied, and the tension lifts off into the afternoon like smoke.

  “You must forgive me if I am too serious in my work,” he says. “But the creation of a new saint is a very serious matter. We must be sure you are telling the truth.”

  I blink an agreement, and the cardinal is quiet for a moment. He looks around the courtyard, scratches his chin, smiles.

  “This will be a beautiful house when you are finished with it,” he says. “I like the style of architecture here. It’s open yet private. European but not quite.”

  “Creole,” I say. “French, Spanish. With a little solid American Federal style thrown in.”

  “A felicitous mix,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. The guy makes me nervous. At that moment Antoinette emerges from the kitchen with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses in hand. She is barefoot, and her skirt is pulled up and tied around her thighs. She’s been wallpapering the room adjoining our own that will be the nursery. Her arms are speckled with paste. When she sees the cardinal, she nearly drops the pitcher of lemonade.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize,” she says weakly. “You’ve got company.”

  The cardinal stands and gives a slight bow. “Signora,” he says, “I was just on my way. I do not wish to intrude upon your afternoon.”

  But Antoinette and I prevail upon him to stay. We finish the lemonade, and as the first blush of evening comes to the sky over the river, the cardinal expresses a desire to try one of our local alcoholic concoctions.

  “I have heard much of the mint julep,” he says. “I saw Gone With the Wind in Italy when I was a child, and this always sounded like a delicious drink to me. I couldn’t of course be seen going into a saloon, but if you have the ingredients on hand?” He raises an Italian eyebrow.

  Antoinette has a wicked gleam in her eye. “Mint juleps aren’t exactly a New Orleans tradition; they’re more of a plantation drink. But I’ll go you one better, Father,” she says, and disappears into the house. Ten minutes later she emerges with two Sazeracs in highball glasses.

  The cardinal sips carefully and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “Very good.”

  “It’s a Sazerac,” Antoinette says. “Homemade. None of this store-bought stuff. From scratch. Here, let me take a sip …”

  “Antoinette …” I say.

  “I said a taste. Don’t be paranoid, Ned. It’s not going to hurt anything.” She takes a demure sip out of my glass and hands it back to me. “Not bad,” she says. “Needs something, though …”

  “No,” the cardinal says enthusiastically, “this is excellent!” and to prove the point, he downs two more.

  When he rises to go at last, he is a little tipsy, his cheeks shining red in the twilight. The chauffeur is asleep in the car.

  “Thank you both for a very pleasant afternoon,” he says. He shakes my hand and kisses Antoinette on the forehead, but as he turns to go, she whispers something in his ear.

  “Yes, of course,” he says with the air of a man who has been reminded of something important.

  Antoinette comes over and takes my arm, and we both kneel together on the flagstones and the fallen leaves of the courtyard. The cardinal raises his hand, makes the sign of the cross over us, and intones a brief blessing.

  “The hardest thing is to find happiness in this world,” he says. “But the recipe is simple. We tend to our goats, so to speak; we take our children by the hand. And as the Scripture says, we walk humbly with our God. Be happy, my children.”

  Then, with a flourish of cloak,
he is gone into the dusk.

  Later Antoinette and I lie drowsing together in the big bed, talking quietly of the future. My hand is pressed to her belly, but the baby will not kick for us tonight.

  “So what did you think of the cardinal’s recipe for happiness?” she says to me.

  “Everybody’s got their own version,” I say. “A ghost once told me that happiness consists of finding out where you belong and going there.”

  “Hmm. And where do you belong?”

  But I don’t answer. And soon we are asleep in each other’s arms.