Charisma

  Not knowing what else to do, he turned right at the next intersection and kept going. He wanted to see if he could get himself lost.

  2

  Twenty minutes later, he was still walking, now on streets too well-kept to be abandoned but too dark to be inhabited. The people who lived in the houses around him were Catholic, but probably Hispanic Catholic. There were stained-glass window-hangings of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart in the windows, but there were also a lot of those rainbow-colored roosters. He didn’t know what the roosters were supposed to represent, but he did know they had something to do with being Catholic, at least for people from Latin America. Someone—maybe Theresa Cavello—had tried to explain it to him once.

  When he got to the next intersection, he stopped. In heavily Catholic neighborhoods there were heavily Catholic churches, often churches that were open all night. If he could find the one that belonged to these people, he could go in there and think. He had a lot to think about. All day the street had been full of stories about Stevie Marks. His first name hadn’t really been Stevie and his last name hadn’t really been Marks, but it didn’t matter much.

  He’d heard first about Stevie Marks while he was standing on the corner of Congress and Strove, long after he’d followed her down from Edge Hill Road and realized she was going to disappear into Damien House for hours. He’d gone back to Congress Avenue to decide what to do, and one of the girls had come up to him and told him. Like most of the girls, she got paid in money, but she doped to take her mind off her life. She was supposed to stay clean on the street, but she hadn’t. When she came up to him her eyes were small and hard and bright.

  “It was dumb,” she’d said, after she’d told him the story. “It’s the stupidest thing in the world, coming back from the dead.”

  He had wanted to tell her about resurrection, but he hadn’t. She wouldn’t have understood and it wouldn’t have done him good. His charism was like the fine soft skin on a fashion model, a gift of God that had to be carefully taken care of, a grace that could too easily be lost.

  Now he walked another block and looked down another intersection, into blackness, into nothing, and wondered how long it would take for him before he found what he was looking for.

  A church.

  And a chance.

  3

  It was called Saint Mary of the Pines, and its name was written, in Spanish as well as English, on a square little painted sign on the street-end of the lawn out front. He read the Spanish words in the light streaming out of the church’s open front door—Santa María de los Pinos—and decided that, Hispanic or not, this was a better neighborhood than Margaret Mary McVann’s. In Margaret Mary McVann’s, no one would have considered leaving the church doors open at night.

  He walked to the bottom of the steps, looked in through the door, and saw nothing. Then he walked up the steps and looked in from the porch. Not only the front doors, but the vestibule doors were open. He could see straight up the center aisle to the altar. The altar had been covered with a cloth, and there was a monstrance on it with the host exposed in a circle of gold. There was one old woman leaning just inside the aisle rail of the left front pew. He dipped his fingers in the holy water and blessed himself and went inside, genuflecting automatically. The consecrated Host was the real body and blood of Jesus Christ, made present, and he knew he ought to be in awe of it. In fact, he had never been able to make himself take it seriously at all. The knife, in the right pocket of his jacket again, just the way it had been the day he went to Margaret Mary McVann, felt more real.

  He backed all the way out into the vestibule again, and there she was, a small dark girl in a long blue skirt and a white blouse. She was wearing a Miraculous Medal around her neck. It was one of the ones with a blue glass covering that was supposed to look like sapphire.

  “You,” she said, and then went off in a stream of Spanish, incomprehensible but musical, an alto chant.

  He shook his head.

  She looked disgusted. “Of course not,” she said. “You’re not here for the Forty Hours Devotion.”

  “Is that what that is?”

  “Twice a year. What are you here for?”

  “I was walking around.”

  “In the cold?”

  He shrugged.

  She went up to the vestibule door, looked inside, and shook her head. “I’ve got a list here, all these old ladies. That’s all who ever volunteers. Sister Annacita says it’s a scandal.”

  “Who’s Sister Annacita?”

  “She’s my history nun. She’s a hag, really, a woman without blood. That’s what my mother says. She’s not really Annacita.”

  “What is she?”

  The girl made a face. “Anne. An Anglo. They come down here and they’re so proud of themselves, lifting us up from poverty. We lift ourselves up from poverty as long as we stay away from them. You’re an Anglo. You don’t look proud of yourself.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “I’m tired, too, but I have to be here all night. I have to do the baking. Then when the old ladies come in I have to check them off on a list, and if they don’t come in I have to call up and find out what’s happened to them. Not that that’s going to do any good. Most of them don’t have phones. If somebody doesn’t come in I’ll just go next door to the convent and get one of the nuns. They ought to be here. Letting old ladies ruin their health in this cold kneeling all night in front of the Blessed Sacrament.”

  “You don’t like nuns,” he said.

  The girl shrugged. “Nuns are nuns. None of them has any blood and none of them makes any sense.”

  She turned away from him and looked off toward the right, where there was a door he hadn’t noticed before. The door was open and a faint shaft of light was spilling out of it.

  “I’ve got to go down there,” she told him. “I’ve got to take calls and I’ve got to pretend I’m being alert. You can come with me if you want.”

  He was going to tell her he didn’t want, but she didn’t give him time. She went for the door in a run, pulled it open, and rushed through. She reminded him of the street girls just after they’d taken a hit of speed, except that she hadn’t taken anything.

  When she was gone, he put his hand in his pocket and felt along the blade of the knife. It was nicking him the way it had the last three times he’d brought it with him, the sharp tip stabbing into his flesh over and over again like an angry wasp. He pulled it halfway out and wrapped his hand around it, squeezing it until the blade cut into the flesh under his knuckles. When he felt blood he began to feel dizzy.

  He also began to change his mind.

  4

  The Holy Spirit was a bird, a dove, and birds sang. The Holy Spirit sang out His charisms and poured His music out over the men and women who listened to the Word of God. The Holy Spirit gave the gift and gave the power and you could hear about it any night you wanted to on television. Somewhere in this place filled with Hispanic people and Anglo nuns there was someone he was looking for and all he had to do was listen to the music, listen to the music, feel himself fill up with the Holy Spirit and then start to fly.

  5

  When he looked down the front of his jeans were soaked with blood. His hand was a mess and his knuckles ached. Everything hurt and all he could think of was crucifixion. He’d been nailed to a cross once, but the cross was upside down and that had been another life.

  Besides, this was a charism, too.

  When she saw him bleeding she would take care of him.

  Taking care of him, she would tell him what he had to know.

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  1

  THIRTY YEARS AGO, FATHER John Kelly’s job would have been very straightforward: take care of the Knights of Columbus, and make sure none of them, in the local chapters or the national office, got upset. Thirty years ago, New Haven was not only the world headquarters of the Knights, but the most fiercely loyal Catholic city in the world. Unlike the C
atholic cities of Europe, like Dublin and Paris and Rome, it had never developed a hard strain of anticlericalism, a visceral suspicion of priests. Unlike the Catholic pockets of New York and Chicago and Boston, it had never had its feelings hurt by the Vatican. Even that old fart of a papal legate who had served under Pius XII, whose personality had acted like sandpaper on a raw wound on every other collection of prelates and laymen in America, had managed to be charming here. John could remember the building of the world headquarters in the late sixties, how impressed and shocked everyone had been. The Church was falling down around their ears. Nuns and priests were defecting en masse. Every product of a parochial school over the age of twenty-one was writing a book on how terrible it had been to be raised Catholic in the days before birth control was a sacrament—and the Knights had calmly collected a few million dollars, put up a building the size of a New York City flagship hotel, and dedicated the project to the Mother of God. Maybe, Father John Kelly thought, that was why his job hadn’t existed thirty years ago.

  At the moment, it existed with a job description that did not match its duties, because no one—least of all the bishop—wanted to admit in public that the Catholic church in New Haven now needed a referee. What Father John Kelly was supposed to do was simple: keep the liberals on one side of the fence and the conservatives on the other, and make sure they didn’t beat each other to death in front of a dozen television cameras. It wasn’t easy. As an order priest, locked away for the most part on college campuses where “dissent” meant desperately sincere, studiously intense discussions of the possible connections between the theology of the Trinity and sexism, he had had no idea how bad it had gotten. On his desk at this moment, at eight o’clock in the morning, there was a pile of message slips an inch and a half thick. Twenty or thirty of them would be from Saint Michael’s Parish out on the Milford border, where the bishop had made the mistake of assigning a sweet old priest, close to retirement, to what John Kelly considered a nest of sharks. Every time the old man gave a homily that so much as mentioned the word sin, the whole parish council called in, demanding to be assigned a priest who wasn’t so “negative.” Father John Kelly thought the parish council at Saint Michael’s could have found negativity in the Resurrection if they’d really tried—and if they’d had it preached to them by a priest who insisted on upholding Rome’s ban on altar girls. Then there would be the calls from Saint Rita’s, which was close to being an inner-city parish, but not quite. The “not quite” meant that the place was full of charismatic Hispanics threatening schism, and being badly served by a nice young man from the local seminary who thought speaking in tongues was the province of Protestant holy rollers. Parishioners at Saint Rita’s got up in the middle of Mass and went into religious ecstasies. Their priest, forbidden by the bishop to throw them out, was near to a nervous breakdown. Somehow or the other, John was supposed to calm them all down and make sure none of them, or few of them, left the Church. He was beginning to wonder why the bishop wanted him to bother. In these days of democratic governments and religious pluralism, the Catholic Church was a voluntary organization. If you didn’t want to belong to Her, you ought to be allowed to leave in peace.

  He picked up the stack of message slips, turned it over, and put it down again. He listened for sounds in the outer office and heard nothing at all. Marie wasn’t due in until nine and wouldn’t arrive until half past. Most of the rest of the world wouldn’t think it was polite to bother him until after ten. He had never told anyone how early he sometimes came to work, not even the bishop. His office was his refuge from the other Jesuits in his house and the problems of his job. The woman at the switchboard—the one who had taken the messages—knew enough not to put any calls through unless they were from the bishop himself.

  As a matter of fact, he was expecting the bishop to call and was a little surprised that he hadn’t. He had given the bishop all the information necessary for one of his patented rampages—all the news on Father Tom Burne, Dan Murphy, and the three women who had died with the Eucharistic symbol carved into their foreheads. Now that the third one had been found, the papers had stopped asking “Is there a Catholic connection?” and started screaming instead. The subhead on the second lead story in the Register John had picked up on his way in had used the term religious mania in a way that made him feel distinctly queasy. The lead story had been worse: FATHER BURNE, DAMIEN HOUSE, SUBJECT OF SEX ABUSE PROBE. It was like the sixties, only worse, because this time the enemy wasn’t made up of discontented parishioners itching to be part of the Playboy generation or long-haired radicals who didn’t really believe in God at all. This time the enemy was the City of New Haven.

  John Kelly got up, went to his door, and opened it carefully. Just in case Marie had come in early—an event as probable as a visit from little green men from Mars—he didn’t want to startle her. The outer office was empty. He went back to his desk and looked at his clock: 8:06. The digital underline said: December 17.

  Father Tom Burne was six minutes late.

  2

  In the end, Father Tom Burne was twenty minutes late. He came bounding through John Kelly’s door at 8:20:04 without apology or explanation—and without warning, either. It was the lack of warning that got John so upset. By then, he had half convinced himself that Tom Burne wasn’t going to show up, that he’d cut his throat and made a run for it, that the whole situation was going to turn out to be nothing more than another wearying scandal to be handled by his best efforts at damage control. His mind had swerved off on other things, like the fact that he was due in the studio to tape the first of his broadcasts at four thirty-five today. He kept trying to picture himself on television and failing. When he closed his eyes, the face he saw staring out at him from the screen always belonged to Fulton Sheen.

  He was trying to banish this ghost when Father Tom Burne came in and threw himself unceremoniously in a chair. He was carrying a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid on it in one hand, and it was steaming.

  “Too hot,” he said, putting it down on John Kelly’s desk. “Everything in my life these days is either too hot or too cold.”

  John Kelly was still all tangled up with Fulton Sheen. He cleared his throat, looked out the window, looked at his hands, looked at his feet. Finally, he looked at Tom Burne, but it didn’t help. “Yes,” he said. “Well.”

  Tom had taken the plastic top off the cup. He sniffed at the coffee and grimaced. “If you want to know why I wasn’t here when I was supposed to be, I was out looking for Marietta.”

  “Marietta?”

  “Marietta O’Brien. Older woman. She’s been working as our housekeeper for—I don’t know. Years.”

  “And she’s missing?” John Kelly looked down at his paper, folded on the corner of his desk. He had folded it carefully, so that he could see nothing of the stories that upset him, but he could feel them there.

  Tom Burne looked at the paper, too. “That’s what I was trying to get across. With—everything that’s going on, I don’t like not being able to find her. It’s not right.”

  “Did she—does she live at Damien House?”

  “Oh, yes. Up on the third floor with the girls.”

  “Ahh,” John Kelly said.

  Tom Burne stood up and began to pace—reminding John Kelly that he always paced, that he was one of those people who could never sit still.

  “The problem is, the whole thing’s so weird. She’s in her sixties, at least. She makes a big show of how well she gets around, but she doesn’t really. We’ve been talking about finding a different place in the house for her to stay, trying to figure out a way to keep her downstairs without getting her offended. She’d never just go wandering around in the middle of the night on her own, even in a better neighborhood.”

  “How do you know she went wandering around in the middle of the night?”

  “I saw her just before I went to bed. She came downstairs for hot milk. Actually, she came downstairs for a painkiller. She’s got wicked arthritis. H
er legs kill her.”

  John Kelly rubbed the side of his nose. “What are you going to do about it? What can you do?”

  “What I did do. I got Pat Mallory out of bed and asked him to go down to Damien House. Personally.”

  “Will he?”

  Tom Burne stopped pacing, caught John Kelly’s eye and held it. He wasn’t smiling, but John felt there was a smile there and it made him uneasy. It was as if emotion were a climate and the weather had changed.

  Tom Burne grabbed the chair he had been sitting in, pulled it back, and sat down in it again. Then he put his elbows on his knees and rested his head on his hands.

  “The police,” he said carefully, “as far as I can figure it, seem to believe that I am going to be crucified, in all my innocence, by the political ambitions of one Daniel Murphy.”

  3

  The problem with talking to Father Tom Burne, John Kelly decided as the morning went on, was that he wasn’t quite human. At least, he wasn’t quite human as priests were supposed to be human. His words never meant what you expected them to mean, and his emotions were—out of whack. John Kelly could have understood a Father Tom Burne who was afraid, or close to cracking under pressure, or overcome by remorse. He could even have understood a Father Tom Burne who was working very hard to keep his courage up. What he couldn’t understand was this—distance, this utter calm, as if nothing very surprising had happened at all. What was worse, it was the same distance, the same calm, that Tom Burne always wore. John Kelly amended his initial analysis. With Tom Burne, it wasn’t as if nothing surprising had happened, but as if nothing had happened. They went around it once or twice, but there was only one place to settle, only one real topic of conversation—unless Tom Burne could be made to think about damage control, which John Kelly didn’t think he could.