Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  He pushed through the revolving glass doors into the lobby and headed for the elevators. There was a woman waiting there, a tall woman in a black wool coat and boots with very high heels, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. There were doctors and lawyers in this building as well as Diocesan offices. Their clients always seemed to be wandering in and out, looking lost.

  He pressed the up button and thought about Dan Murphy, who would now be forever connected in his mind with Victor. They were of a piece, too, although not in so obvious a way as Victor and Quinn.

  The elevator was taking forever to come. He unfolded Rodez’s newspaper from under his arm and started to read it. He had just gotten to the part about the crazed killer stalking the streets of the city when he felt a hand on his arm.

  He looked up, and the woman in the black coat was watching him. She was very pretty but getting old. There was gray at the roots of her hair and a nest of crow’s feet at the side of each eye.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Bishop John Kelly?”

  “That’s right,” Kelly said. “I am.”

  She took her hand off his arm and looked away and said, “I’m Catherine Sargent. I need you to listen to something I have to say.”

  Chapter Two

  1

  AT FIRST, JOHN KELLY thought the woman had come to ask him to help her find a job. Finding jobs for people was a surprisingly large part of his work, a part he’d never considered before coming up here. Down in the diocesan office in Bridgeport, he’d been protected from all that. He’d been assigned to the bishop for “theological investigations.” He’d spent his time wading through encyclicals and dispatches from Rome, trying to figure out how to fit them into an American context. He’d come to the decision that, for Rome, there was no American context. The Italians understood as much about the United States as he did about electromagnetism, meaning nothing; Ratzinger was better. The Polish Pope was worse. Sometimes he’d lain awake nights wondering what it would be like to set an Italian cardinal down in Bridgeport for a year, anonymously, and make him live like everyone else. He kept getting visions of nervous breakdowns in working-class bars and psychic breaks over the morning newspaper.

  By the time the elevator reached his floor, he had changed his mind. He’d seen a thousand job-seekers, and she didn’t have the look—not even the look of someone come to ask for someone else. She stood in the very middle of the car with her high stacked heels close together and her arms hanging motionless at her sides. Her blond hair had been cut to look as if it had been curled into a pageboy. Her black gloves were lined with cashmere. His assessment was reflexive: money but not serious money; a woman who had married a man in law or medicine.

  The elevator doors opened onto a wide hall that opened onto the diocesan offices’ reception area, and they both stepped out. Through the archway, Kelly could see Marie at her desk, sullen and bleary-eyed, looking off into space with all the mental alertness of a catatonic on Thorazine. Marie was the daughter of one of those Important Catholic Laymen Kelly could never get himself to like. He was stuck with her until she decided to elope again. The last time, she’d eloped with the ex-mental patient who served as the lead singer in her favorite local punk rock band.

  Kelly turned to Catherine Sargent. “My office is through there,” he said. “I’ll have to talk to my secretary—”

  “I’m not going to be put off,” Catherine Sargent said. “I’ll sit in your lobby all morning, but I’m not going to be put off.”

  “I don’t want to put you off,” John Kelly said. And it was true. Too many of the people who came looking for jobs had histories that sounded like his own. He could sympathize, but he could never make himself feel comfortable with them. They scared him. Worse, listening to them was like listening to his mother’s soul, an ectoplasmic stream of suffering and complaint. Catherine Sargent was something different, if not exactly something friendly.

  She was also looking at him as if she didn’t believe a word he said. He gave her a little smile and led the way into reception. Marie had straightened up at her desk—she must have heard them in the hall—and was doing her best to look competent and awake. She looked ferocious instead. John Kelly never ceased to be surprised that she had married as many times as she had, three or four at last count. She was as ugly and intractable as a wart.

  He took off his coat and hung it on the rack in the corner, one of those homey touches the diocese was convinced would make the Faithful more relaxed. Whether it did or not, Kelly had never been able to tell.

  He turned back to find Marie looking suspiciously at Catherine Sargent. Marie hated pretty women, in any shape or form.

  “You’ve got to answer a lot of calls,” Marie said. “The bishop even called. Himself.”

  Kelly doubted this. It would have been one of the bishop’s aides who called, Father Blank or Father Dolan, even if the bishop meant to get on later and do the talking. Bridgeport wasn’t much of a diocese, but the bishop was meticulous about protocol.

  “Dan Murphy called, too,” Marie said. “And that man who calls all the time now. Vincent Carlucci.”

  “Victor Coletti,” Kelly said automatically.

  “Him.”

  Kelly kept himself from sighing out loud by force of will. It only made things worse, he knew that from experience. Marie could go from passively to actively hostile in no time at all. He turned to Catherine Sargent, standing in the middle of reception with her coat still on, and said, “This is Mrs.—Ms.—Sargent. She’s going to come into my office for a little while. When we’re finished, I’ll answer the bishop’s call.”

  Marie stared at him for a moment, then stared at Catherine Sargent, then stared at Catherine Sargent’s shoes. “The bishop said you were supposed to call him right back. As soon as you got in.”

  “The bishop has no way of knowing when I get in.”

  “She doesn’t even have an appointment. You’ve got a page of people set to see you. Your day’s all booked up.”

  “Obviously it’s not booked up now, Marie. There’s nobody here.”

  “I think you ought to call the bishop back right away. He said somebody had been murdered.”

  Catherine Sargent’s eyebrows rose practically to her hairline. John Kelly blushed. The bishop must have been paying more attention to the news than he had, and taking it more seriously. Rodez’s paper was still in his hands, unread. But none of this was really important. It couldn’t be, unless a priest or nun was suspected of being the killer. If that had been the case, Rodez would have said something about it. All this was was a blip on the radar screen, a problem with an almost untraceable connection, an incident that would require a press release. He turned his back to Marie and smiled at Catherine Sargent.

  “I don’t know if you saw the papers this morning, but there seems to be a serial killer in New Haven.”

  “I saw the papers.”

  “He’s had two victims, and they both were ex-nuns.”

  “I’m glad I’m not an ex-nun.”

  “Yes,” John Kelly said, nonplussed. “Yes. I’m glad I’m not one either.” He turned back to Marie. “I’m going into my office and have a talk with Ms. Sargent. I don’t want to be interrupted by any calls. Not even calls from the bishop.”

  “I can’t lie to the bishop,” Marie said.

  “You don’t have to lie to him. You can tell him the truth.”

  “He’ll be insulted.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  “I’ll bet she isn’t even Catholic,” Marie said. “She doesn’t look Catholic.”

  Kelly wanted to ask her what Catholic looked like, considering the fact that the Church had nearly seven hundred million members spread without exception across the surface of the earth. Instead, he walked past her desk into the short hall that led to his office, motioning Catherine Sargent to follow.

  2

  In his office, Catherine Sargent finally took off her coat. She draped it over the back of one of his two visitors’ c
hairs and walked around a little, reading the titles of the books in his bookcase and the caption under the woodcut that hung on his east wall. She was wearing a dress as black as her coat, but with a white collar and cuffs that made her look as if she’d just escaped from a Swiss boarding school. When she reached the statue of Mary she reached out and tapped it lightly. It made Kelly wonder if she was checking to see if it was solid.

  She came back to his desk, sat down in the chair she hadn’t thrown the coat on, and folded her hands in her lap. “As I told you downstairs,” she said, “my name is Catherine Sargent. I take it the ‘Sargent’ isn’t familiar to you.”

  “No,” Kelly said. “It isn’t.”

  “The girl at the desk was right, you know. I’m not Catholic and I never have been. I’m not anything. Religious.”

  “Most people aren’t, these days.”

  “I suppose you’re right. In this country, at least. My husband is the same way. I think he was raised Presbyterian, but I’ve never known him to go to church. We were married in my parents’ house by a justice of the peace.”

  “All right.” What was this about?

  Catherine Sargent shifted, just slightly, in her seat. “Three years after we were married, we had a child. A son we named Robert. He was the only child we had. I don’t want to get personal here, but I wasn’t capable of having any more. The way things turned out, I think I’m just as glad. Robert turned sixteen at the beginning of last October.”

  “And?”

  She shifted in her seat again, then looked away. Her pocketbook, a black shoulder-strap just large enough to hold a wallet and a set of keys, sat at her feet. She stared at that.

  “Excuse me,” she said finally. “Would you mind if I smoked?”

  “Of course not.” Kelly was surprised. Women like this didn’t usually smoke these days. Smokelessness had become a badge of their class.

  She leaned over, got her pocketbook off the floor, got her cigarettes out. Kelly got the ashtray out of the top drawer of his desk and pushed it across to her.

  “My husband,” Catherine Sargent said, “would tell you Robert has changed. I don’t think that’s true. When he was small, I used to wonder if he was mildly autistic. He didn’t do that rocking thing autistic children are supposed to do, but he—lacked affect. He’d cry when he was physically hurt. Beyond that, if he had any emotions at all, I never saw them.”

  “That doesn’t sound like autism,” Kelly said. “With the autistic, there’s supposed to be a lot of anger.”

  Catherine Sargent nodded. “I know. That’s what the doctors told me when I took him, and that’s what my husband says when I bring this up. My husband thinks Robbie was just—shy.”

  “What did the doctors think?”

  “They thought I was imagining things. Sometimes they thought worse. One of them suggested I go into therapy myself.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.” Her cigarette had grown a long column of ash. She tapped it into the ashtray and took another deep drag. Then she looked at it as if she couldn’t imagine where it had come from.

  “I quit smoking these things nearly ten years ago,” she said. “I started up again last month. I was back on two packs a day in under a week.” She took another deep drag and shook her head. “When my husband came home and found the living room full of smoke, he thought somebody had died. He thought Robbie had died. He almost had a heart attack right there.”

  “I take it Robbie hasn’t died.”

  “No. I almost wish he had.”

  “Because he—lacks affect?”

  Catherine Sargent laughed. “Oh, dear,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to lack affect anymore. He’s got more emotions than I knew existed. It’s just that none of them make any sense. Do you know a priest named Father Thomas Burne?”

  “Yes, of course.” Kelly was surprised again. Burne was a saint to street kids and the police department, a demon to the county social workers, an enigma to the Church, but he was not a casually famous man. Where would Catherine Sargent have heard of him? If she’d been Catholic, he could have put it down to the diocesan newsletter or the Catholic Charities mailing list, but she wasn’t. In fact, it was hard to tell what she was. It was impossible to tell what she felt.

  He watched her stub her cigarette out, get another, and light up again. Her lighter was one of the gunmetal gray Zippos women used when they’d been to private school. In the glare of the flame, her skin looked as thin as paper.

  “When Robbie was fourteen,” she said, “he started to get very aggressive. If it had been heavy metal rock or punk clothes, I could have understood it. Half my friends have children who look like they’ve been sleeping on park benches. Robbie went the other way. We had him at the Thorne School. We were talking about sending him to Deerfield. He’d always been bright even if he’d always been—strange. One day we noticed he’d started coming home with—things. Clothes, mostly.”

  “Clothes,” John Kelly repeated. He was doing his best to sound very wise, but he was thoroughly bewildered. He had no idea what this was leading up to.

  Catherine Sargent blew a stream of smoke into the air. “My husband and I are well off, but we’re not rich. He’s an accountant in private practice. We can do what’s important to us if we set priorities. We had enough to send Robbie to Deerfield and maybe to the Ivy League if we didn’t waste the money on other things. We gave Robbie a reasonable but not generous allowance. When Robbie started coming home with the clothes, designer clothes, expensive clothes, we thought he was stealing them.”

  “You’ve changed your mind?”

  “I don’t know. We found cash. If he was stealing the clothes, he had to have been stealing cash, too, and I don’t know where he’d have done that. We don’t keep a lot of cash in the house. It couldn’t have come from us. And we kept a pretty tight leash on Robbie. He was only fourteen. He wasn’t wandering around in the middle of the night sticking up gas stations.”

  “How much money was involved?”

  This time, Catherine Sargent’s smile was thin. “Once I went through one of those new blazers of his and came up with a thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills.”

  John Kelly blinked. A thousand dollars. Where would a fourteen-year-old boy come up with a thousand dollars? He couldn’t have come up with a thousand dollars himself, in cash, if his life depended on it. He hazarded the only explanation he could think of, aware all the while that Catherine Sargent’s face had frozen into an expression of amusement that was somehow irredeemably horrible.

  “Was it dope?” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure not,” Catherine Sargent said.

  “What was it, then?”

  She had smoked another cigarette down to the butt. She lit up for a third time, then stood and walked to his window. She kept her back to him and one arm wrapped around her waist.

  “Two days after his fifteenth birthday,” she said, “Robbie disappeared. He didn’t tell us he was running away from home. He didn’t leave a note. Things had been tense for a long time—even his father was beginning to see something was seriously wrong—but we hadn’t had a fight recently and we hadn’t had a confrontation. He was just gone. We went to the police.”

  “Did they find him?”

  “Nobody found him. We didn’t hear anything of him for almost a year. I used to worry that he’d gone to New York City. I used to worry, period.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I should have been more worried than I was. What do I call a bishop, anyway? Your honor?”

  “I’m only an auxiliary bishop. You can call me ‘Father’ if you want to.”

  “Well, Father, about a month ago Robbie surfaced. According to what he told the district attorney’s office—and what the district attorney’s office told us; I’m getting this secondhand—he’d been living on the streets of New Haven all the time, eating out of garbage cans. He said his father was abusive and he was afraid to go home.”

  John Kelly felt h
is mood shift. You could never tell in abuse cases. Anybody could be lying and anybody could be telling the truth. With this on the table, Catherine Sargent looked a little shabbier to him. Then, suddenly, he was ashamed of himself. He didn’t know anything about this, or about her, and the mere suggestion of abuse had started a litany of accusations in his mind. He felt like an Inquisitor.

  “Did the district attorney’s office send Robbie to Father Burne?”

  “They did indeed,” Catherine said.

  “Did they file abuse charges against your husband?”

  Catherine Sargent turned her back to the window. The smoke from her cigarette rose in front of her face like the smoke from an incense stick and curled around her head. The prettiness was gone from her face. In its place was something both cruel and triumphant.

  “The district attorney’s office hasn’t filed charges yet,” she said. “Robbie got a lawyer and filed suit all by himself. But he isn’t suing us, Father Kelly. He’s suing Father Tom Burne. He’s saying Father Burne fucked him and Father Burne would only let him stay at Damien House as long as he went on being fucked.”

  Chapter Three

  1

  ON THE DAY DAN announced at breakfast that he would be home for lunch, Susan decided to go down to Damien House by herself. It was Monday, December 16, and she didn’t actually decide. That would have taken forethought, and there were times she thought she’d lost all capacity for forethought in the weeks since she’d left the convent. Sometimes she thought she’d even lost consciousness. In her first days of being out, the holdover habits of being in had been so slight, and surfaced so erratically, she’d thought they’d disappear in no time at all and with no effort on her part. Then, as morning followed morning, she’d begun to catch herself doing things that would have looked crazy to anyone who didn’t know her history. Swinging her feet out of bed so that they landed on the floor with a dull but violent slap; praying in Latin before she had her eyes open; walking against the wall on her way to the bathroom: what was coming out in her was something old enough to be ancient, the routine of convent life before the changes of Vatican II had made themselves felt. Her order had been laggard in that respect. While all the other nuns in the archdiocese of Hartford were already experimenting with lay dress and lunches at McDonald’s, Susan had still been wearing a wimple, five layers of underwear, and a veil that reached down her back to her knees. All that had lasted well into the 1970s, so that Susan had spent her first five years after tertiary profession looking—as a man who stopped her on the street had once put it—like a “real nun.” If there was anything she remembered from that period, rather than simply had fused into her bones, it was the older people who would stop her, their eyes pleading and desperate, anxious and afraid of hope. They all had the same question, which was not really the question they wanted to ask at all. They wanted to know if they would get their Church back.