Charisma

  Hearing her feet slap the floor that morning, she pulled them back under her, ran her palms over her face, and shook her head. It was still dark out, probably before six in the morning. That was a habit that had lasted all her seventeen years inside, and that she thought she would never break. She played her fingers through her hair until her scalp hurt and then stood up.

  The only light in the room was coming from one of the security arcs outside. She went to the window and pulled the curtains shut, realizing as she did that she had left the window open the night before, in spite of the fact that it was freezing. That was more nun stuff, as she was beginning to think of it. Back in canonical year, her novice mistress, old Sister Marie Bonaventure, had believed in fresh air the way the Nazis had believed in the Blitzkrieg.

  Susan put on her robe, stopped herself from fastening it too tightly around her waist, the way she had been taught to do, and let herself into the hall. With no lights burning, the hall was pitch dark and eerie, full of imaginary cobwebs. Full of imaginary skeletons, too, Susan thought, and let herself into the bathroom. Like a lot of other things in the house, it had been renovated. There was ceramic tile on the walls and floor and ceiling and a big oval tub Dan had told her proudly was a “Jacuzzi for four.” Every time she saw it, Susan wondered: four what? She didn’t like to imagine Dan with all those women at once.

  She got her toothpaste and her Camay soap out of the little green bag she had brought to put them in—more nun stuff—looked at herself in the mirror, and sighed.

  It didn’t matter how hard she tried to block it, to fill her head with memories and excuses. It didn’t matter how hard she tried to tell herself she was afraid. Theresa Cavello, the Congo, the faces of children drifting in the street—going back wasn’t sensible, but it was what she kept feeling she had to do. God only knew she was sick and tired of hanging around this place, brooding about herself, brooding about Dan. Brooding wasn’t getting anybody anyplace and it wasn’t making her less bored.

  Or less anxious.

  She turned on the tap, threw water on herself, and scrubbed.

  2

  She was in the hall half an hour later, putting on her boots and fretting about her coat, when she heard a sound on the stairs and, looking up, saw Andy coming toward her. He looked as much of a mess as always, but less alert and less intelligent. She turned her face away from him and thrust her arm into the sleeve of a parka she had bought for herself when she was sixteen years old.

  “Where are you going?” he asked her.

  “For a walk.”

  “It’s quarter to six in the goddamned morning,” he told her.

  Susan shrugged and stuffed the other arm into the other sleeve. She was used to getting up at four and getting to work by five—and besides, what did the time have to do with it? The kitchen was behind her and it was a pit of vipers, her private arena for her private disintegration. She went to the front door and pulled it open, letting in the dark.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she repeated. “I’m feeling antsy.”

  “I didn’t think antsy was the kind of word a nun used,” Andy said.

  “I’m not a nun.”

  She stepped out onto the porch and looked down Edge Hill Road, at the street lamps, at the dark. Then, thinking she knew what Andy was worried about, she turned back and said, “I’ll be home for lunch. You can promise Dan.”

  Chapter Four

  1

  HE WAS WAITING FOR HER when she came out of the house, sitting in the front bushes instead of the trees at the back, knowing she would bolt. That was one of the things he was good at, knowing when people would bolt, what the limits were to their self-control. He had been watching her for a while now and he had her all figured out.

  She came down the porch steps and started across the front walk, keeping carefully in the center of it, as if she were willing herself to walk in the center of it. She let herself out the front gate onto the street.

  If she went down the hill, she would pass directly in front of him. If she went up, she would move away. He closed his eyes and prayed, hard, until he heard the sound of her feet on the rock salt just a few inches from his ear. He thought he knew where she was going—he had been watching her for so long—but he could never be sure.

  When he opened his eyes again, she was already halfway down the hill. She moved quickly and with purpose, as if she knew where she were going.

  He swiveled his head around just in time to see a man turn off the light in the house’s foyer and head up the stairs. Then he looked back at Susan, in her jeans and old sweater and worn coat. She had to be going where he thought she was going. There was no other reason for her to be dressed that way.

  He waited a few moments, just to be sure, and then he swung out on the street himself, following her.

  2

  Sometimes, thinking about his charism, he was afraid. Sometimes it all seemed so nebulous and diffuse, like the nightmares of the junkies who slept in the boxes in the vacant lots that took up so much of the Congo. It was wrong to call it the Congo now, really, even for the worst kind of racist fool. It had sunk now beneath even the tenuous respectability of a ghetto, and most of the people who slept there were white.

  He stepped into the street and began walking downhill that way, watching her slipping and sliding down the sidewalk ahead of him. The rock salt hadn’t been spread as thickly at the bottom of Edge Hill as at the top. Below a certain economic level, the city of New Haven stopped worrying about your chances of breaking your neck on the ice.

  3

  She reached the bottom of the hill, turned the corner, and went on walking. He speeded up and kept following, keeping his distance and varying his pace. He had been thinking about not coming out this morning, thinking how tired he was and how it wouldn’t matter if he missed a single day. Now he was glad he had listened to that insistent voice of God in his head and come in spite of himself.

  Right now, his charism didn’t seem nebulous and diffuse. He was omniscient and invulnerable, guided by the light. He was on the cusp of a prophecy.

  Two blocks ahead of him, she turned another corner. When he came around that corner himself he found her stopped under a bus sign, her hands in her pockets and her teeth biting against her lips to keep them from hardening in the cold. He had forgotten that the buses to where she wanted to go started running at six.

  He gave her a shy little smile, and stepped back.

  She paid no attention to him at all.

  4

  He had to remember: she was the start of it all, the bad seed of faith who had begun the betrayal and caused the rest of it. She was not like Margaret Mary McVann or any of the others. She had to be handled carefully. Everything that happened to her had to be planned.

  Then, too, it was harder to kill a general than a soldier. It took practice. It took rehearsal.

  He thought she had to be a general because she was his sister. She had to be the explanation of him.

  It was getting fuzzy in his head again, but he knew what he meant.

  This was his charism: to find the soldiers of Judas Iscariot and lay them down.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  1

  CATCHING THE BUS AT the Green, even making the change at the very last minute in a blackened landscape that looked less and less familiar by the minute, Susan had thought it was going to be easy. Certainly she knew how to get where she was going, even after she reached the point where the buses stopped running and she would have to walk. The memory of her trip with Andy was burned indelibly into her brain, like the memory of where she had been when she heard that JFK had been assassinated. Certainly she knew New Haven. She had been born and brought up there. What she hadn’t counted on was the peculiar ebb and flow of city life. The city changed from hour to hour, especially in places like Congress Avenue, becoming unrecognizable to itself in transformations that took split seconds and altered everything. When she got off the bus at Congress Avenue it was not
hing like she remembered it. The small novelty stores seemed to have disappeared into the dirt and concrete. The people who crowded the street seemed to have come from some Hollywood censor’s fantasy of the evils of prostitution. The light was glaring, neon and jerky and never white. An enormous sign that said GIRLS! GIRLS! 25¢! 25¢! 25¢! seemed to take up an entire block. In the Congo it was still night.

  She knew she only had to keep walking along the avenue until she found Amora Street, and so she did, pushing against girls in halter tops and thigh-high sarongs who looked younger than her eighth-grade students back at Saint Mary of the Rosary Parish School. Their makeup was inexpert and halfhearted, but the men who stood behind them were intense. Susan was startled to realize how many of those men there were. Somehow, she had always thought of prostitutes as free agents on the street—with their pimps hidden off somewhere, where the customers couldn’t see them.

  Still, the prostitutes gave her heart. They looked her up and down in disbelief, checking out her jeans and her parka and her clunky L. L. Bean hunting shoes—baggy jeans now, because the one piece of shopping she had done since she got back to New Haven was to replace the tight ones Dan had bought for her. When she was a third of the way up Congress Avenue, one of the girls came up to her and said, “You ought to get out of here. You ought to get out of here now,” and Susan wanted to say something just as pertinent, to find a way through the cosmetic shell. It was more nun stuff, and she knew it, but it was nun stuff that seemed necessary. Surely this girl, with her small undeveloped breasts and her skin as smooth and unmarked as an infant’s, didn’t want to be standing out here in the subzero cold in less clothing than most people wore to lunch at a beach resort, waiting for men. Then the moment passed and was gone. The girl stepped back into the line and functionally disappeared. A moment after she’d stepped away, Susan could no longer have picked her out of the lineup.

  Her guilt at that didn’t last very long. It was taken over by fear, and then by confusion. She almost missed Amora Street, because in her mind it was a turn off a dead stretch of Congress Avenue. Two hours from now, there might even be a dead stretch of Congress Avenue. Half an hour might be enough to leach the life out of the place. At quarter after six, it was still spurting blood.

  Susan never noticed the beginning of the burned-out buildings, because they were hidden behind a road show. A pimp had set his girls out on the sidewalk like the Rockette line at Rockefeller Center. They were kicking and laughing and blowing white breath into the cold, while he sat on the curb picking his teeth with the edge of a matchbook and flexing the tattoo on his arm. In the weird light, Susan couldn’t see what the tattoo was of, but the pimp could see her. He spit into the sides of her boots as she passed and said, “Too fucking old.”

  The turn for Amora Street was right there, and she missed it. She walked into a ring of men huddled around a fire they had built in a garbage can. God only knew where the garbage can had come from—Congress Avenue didn’t seem to have any—and God only knew what had been in it. The fire, smelled funny. The men had all shot up, or smoked something. Susan didn’t know enough about drugs to tell. She just knew they were all falling asleep in spite of their thin clothes, and some of them were giggling.

  Once she got beyond them, she found she was in terra incognita. The landscape in front of her was not burned out but wild. If it had ever been part of the city of New Haven, only an urban archeologist could tell. She backed up, spun around, and headed toward where she had come. She even made herself stop paying attention to the people and start paying attention to the signs. She found Amora Street where the Rockettes started up again.

  Standing on the corner, looking into the dark, she found the burned-out buildings she had been looking for. They were out there, in the side streets, like gangrenous limbs on an otherwise living body.

  “Jesus Christ,” one of the Rockettes said, right into her ear, “if it isn’t Polly-wally-anna-all-the-day.”

  That was when she realized the Rockettes were men.

  2

  Ten minutes later, Susan was pushing the front doorbell at Damien House, looking back at Congress Avenue through the black around her and wondering what she thought she was doing. The place looked as dead as it had on the day she had come to see it with Andy, just when she thought it ought to be jumping, lit up and ready to take in all those children—like the girl who had spoken to her in kindness back on the Avenue—who were desperately looking for a way into a different life. Then she began to feel like the worst kind of fool—a do-gooder fool, with a head full of nun stuff and naive certainties about what the People want. Who was she to tell that girl how to live her life? Who was she to assume that girl didn’t already like her life? Who was she—

  She might have given up the whole thing, turned and run and fled back to Edge Hill Road, but she had been leaning against the buzzer the whole time. The dim light above her head was joined by two more, turned on by someone inside. Susan jumped at the little click the lights made and turned to see someone behind the door, a tall, spare, middle-aged woman she didn’t recognize, in a robe. Obviously she had gotten this poor woman out of bed and, just as obviously, that made it impossible for her to go. Instead, she stepped back and waited while the woman opened the door.

  “Excuse me,” Susan said. “I didn’t realize I’d be waking anyone up. I assumed—”

  The middle-aged woman was already waving this away. “I’m supposed to be woken up,” she said. “Come in and sit down if you’ve got a mind to.” Then she looked Susan up and down very carefully, nodded thoughtfully to herself, and added, “Sister.”

  3

  Her name was Marietta O’Brien, and the reason Susan hadn’t seen her on the day she came down with Andy was that Marietta had been out shopping. “That’s what I do,” Marietta said, moving around the kitchen, getting coffee for them both. “I shop. I clean. I go out to the mayor’s office and pick up forms, or the welfare office for that matter. What do you do, if you’re not a Sister, I mean?”

  Susan took a drag on her cigarette, put it in the ashtray Marietta had given her, and sighed. She had gone from fear and elation to comfort and confusion. She was no longer entirely sure what she was doing here. Her penance for this state of mental disorganization was Marietta O’Brien.

  “I don’t do anything at the moment,” she said. “I live with my brothers in the house where we grew up. I read a lot. I’ve started to smoke too much.”

  “Nobody smokes anymore,” Marietta O’Brien said. “What do you want? You gonna come down here and volunteer?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about volunteering. I don’t even know what volunteers do.”

  “Get themselves killed,” Marietta said, “or mugged anyway. I’ve been mugged half a dozen times since I got here. Once I got mugged on the back porch of this very house, by a boy who ought to have known better. He lived here three years, for the Lord’s sake, before he went back out into that.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  Marietta looked surprised. “I have to stay,” she said. “Everybody has to stay. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you know what I mean,” Marietta said. “I think that’s the only reason some ex-nun would wind up on our doorstep at six o’clock in the morning.”

  “Actually,” Susan started to say, “it was six-thirty—”

  She never got the words out. Marietta had made some coffee and poured Susan a mug of it. The mug was made of thick white ceramic and cracked. Marietta had gotten milk from the refrigerator and sugar from the cabinet, too, and put them down, with a bent spoon, at Susan’s elbow. Now, in the middle of Susan’s automatic explanation, she stopped in her tracks and stared at the ceiling above her head.

  “There,” she said, “that’s Father Tom. If Father Tom’s up, the rest of them will be too, in a minute.”

  Then she turned and marched out the kitchen door, into the bowels of the house, leaving Susan alone.
>
  Susan wondered if that was going to be the end of it—if she would drink her coffee in solitude, put the things she had used into the sink, and leave by the back door, never talking to anyone at Damien House who could give her any answers.

  4

  She was still wondering that, ten minutes later—and even deciding it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, since she didn’t know what questions she wanted to ask—when the kitchen door opened again. The man who came in was small and stiff and very Irish, and still looked as wrong to Susan as he had the first time she had seen him. Susan wanted Father Tom Burne to be charismatic, tall and strong and wide. Looking “straight out of the Baltimore Catechism,” as Andy had put it, like Barry Fitzgerald playing some immigrant Irish priest, didn’t quite do it.