Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  Now he looked out over the rubble and the dying grass of the vacant lot that lay between the ruined building where he sat and the backyard at Damien House, watching the police and the medical people and all the rest of them digging Marietta out of the woodpile. They had been there for hours and so had he. They had done a hundred things over there that he didn’t understand, and only now were getting around to what he had expected from the beginning. He was relieved to see it. He was sitting up on a third floor that was only half a third floor. What was left of the attic above his head was even less than that. The whole building listed to one side and swayed in every strong wind. Once it had been a triple decker, three floor-through apartments one on top of the other, home to good Catholic families with mothers at home and fathers with jobs at Sikorsky and Rumbold. Now it was just one more pile of pick-up sticks threatening to fall down. More than once today, he had been sure it was going to fall down on him.

  Over at Damien House, two broad men wearing jackets with sheepskin collars were climbing over the wall from the place where Marietta was. They stopped just on the Damien House side of the wall and leaned back over to help two other men get Marietta’s feet in the air. He could hear them grunting and groaning, cursing and laughing, as they got the feet over the wall and made the body follow after it. He leaned forward and tried to see Marietta’s face, with the carving on her forehead and the dead eyes open and staring at the sky. He didn’t feel sorry about Marietta. She had left her order, changed sides, come over to them. It didn’t matter that she had still been at Damien House, pretending to be one of us. He felt himself leaning too far out—there was no glass in this window, no glass anywhere on Amora Street anymore except at Damien House and in shards on the ground—and pulled himself back in, thinking that they would have closed her eyes anyway. It was something he believed the police always did.

  Every once in a while, he turned his attention to the windows at Damien House, lit up and warm in the bad-weather darkness, and remembered other lit windows in another house in another place he’d thought he’d forgotten about. That other place had been bubbling to the surface of him for days. Now it seemed to have surfaced permanently, to be sitting in the middle of his brain like one of those bullets They had visited on Billy Hare. This place was a small brick ranch house in the middle of a small square of lawn in a town called Oxford, Connecticut. It had a heavy painted-black door right in the middle in front. If you went through that door and on back down the hall, past the living room, through the dining room, you would come to a kitchen with a big smooth table in the middle of it. Sitting at that table, in a chair covered with something shiny and green, there would be a woman in a yellow dress with her hair pinned up on top of her head, drinking coffee from a white ceramic mug.

  His mother.

  He leaned out the window again, looked out over the yard at Damien House again, pulled himself back in again. The men had Marietta in the yard. They had the ambulance wedged into the alley with the doors open, waiting for her, an ambulance even though she was dead. He wondered what they had done for Billy Hare and the rest of them, what they were doing now for the one who had lived, the one who had been just like him. They—the They with a capital T, not the they that was the police officers and doctors and medical technicians—They always said your mother wouldn’t want you anymore, once she knew what you had been doing. It was one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, part of his charism, that he now knew that wasn’t true.

  The wind was rising all around him and whatever had been falling from the sky all morning had finally solidified into snow. His jacket wasn’t warm enough and he hadn’t had anything to eat since the night before, when that Spanish girl had taken him to the basement of her church and filled him full of strange spicy things wrapped up in tortillas. That was before she had told him what he needed to know and he had gone off to do the last thing he had to do before he finished this project completely. The next to the last thing. He was supposed to finish with Marietta first, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

  Back home, in parochial school at Saint Bridget’s, Sister Mathilde was always saying you had to do the will of God the way God wanted you to do it, or you weren’t doing the will of God at all. That problem was in figuring out what the will of God really was. Back in parochial school at Saint Bridget’s, Sister Mathilde had told him she thought he had a vocation to be a priest.

  He left the room by pushing himself backward on his ass. He didn’t stand up until he got to the staircase, out in the hall, because he wasn’t really sure the building was strong enough to handle it. In the stairwell, he could hear the junkies snoring in the basement, moaning in their sleep sometimes, as if they were in pain. He didn’t know what junkies felt and he didn’t want to. He was hungry and tired and cold, and before he went up to The Apartment he wanted to go to Church.

  2

  This is what had happened to him, what he could remember now that he had been out on his own long enough so that his mind was clear:

  It had been a cold day in late October, and he had been in the third grade at Saint Bridget’s School. It was a Tuesday, the day Father Moore came to teach religion, replacing Sister Mathilde. The lesson had been about the Holy Spirit. In the morning, Sister Mathilde had asked them all to draw doves. When they were finished she had put the doves in a line on the wall opposite the windows, where there was a thin strip of cork especially for tacking things up. After lunch, Father Moore had come down and told them all about how the Holy Spirit came to each and every person and told them what God wanted them to do with their lives. He had said that this call from God was what was meant by a vocation and that there were many kinds. “Most of you,” he had said, “will be called to be mothers and fathers.” “Some of you,” he had said, “will be called to be priests, sisters and brothers, religious in the world for Christ. All of you,” he had said, “should start thinking about your vocation now, and listening to the voice of God, and trying to figure out what He wants you to do.”

  He had been listening very hard for the voice of God that afternoon when he left school, carrying his dove picture in one hand, bundled up against the cold in a blue down parka his mother had saved from her grocery money to buy him. The schoolyard had been full of children in lines, and nuns. Yellow school buses had been lined up just outside the gates with their red stop signs popped out to let the cars behind them know it was not all right for them to pass. He had stood for a while next to a friend of his in one of the lines, talking about Sister Mathilde and whether or not they would ask to join the altar boys. Then his friend’s bus had started loading and his friend had gone away, and he had been left alone among a lot of strange older children. He lived only two or three hundred yards from the school and no bus would take him so short a way. He usually walked home with a little girl named Donna Bannagan who lived next door to him, but she was out sick. Nobody else lived out his way. When he had realized there was nobody left in the yard who knew him except the nuns—nobody at all except a line of bigger kids going out to one of the older subdivisions on the Seymour line—he had turned toward the back of the yard and headed for the hole in the fence that was his shortcut home. That was all he had really wanted that day: to be home.

  The road he had had to walk was lined with trees, but not much else. The first building on it, after the school, was his own house. Through the thick red leaves he was not able to see it, and that had made him uneasy. It always did, even when he had Donna for company. Alone, it was almost as bad as being by himself in the dark. He had been afraid of cars, then, so he had stayed well onto the grass, as far from the road as he dared to get—but he had been afraid of trees, too, so that hadn’t been too far. All the trees on that stretch of road were big and old and gnarled. They had faces in their trunks, like the faces in the trunks of trees in The Wizard of Oz. Above them, a strong sun had tried to force its way through to the road, and succeeded only in creating shadows.

  He had gone half the distance to his house when he he
ard the sound of a car on the road behind him. He had drawn back instinctively, because he had heard a hundred stories about children being hit, and crushed, and dying in hospital rooms. He was at a stage when the mere sound of a car engine made him imagine his bones were breaking. The car passed him at a fair clip, safely, and he started to mutter a prayer Sister Mathilde had taught him, thanking both God and his guardian angel. In the middle of it, the car had come to a quick and rather noisy stop. It idled for a while and then began to back up.

  Later he would know that it had not been an accident. They didn’t go wandering around in cars, looking for stray boys on the road. They picked a boy and watched him for weeks, sometimes for months, working out his schedule and getting their timing right. At the time he had just been confused. The car had backed all the way up to him and stopped. The woman in the front passenger seat had rolled down her window and stuck her head out and smiled at him. He had known immediately that he did not like her at all.

  “Hello,” she had said, showing her teeth, with the line of red lipstick across them and the yellowness in back. Her voice was funny, not like a woman’s voice at all, too low and too rough. Her face—too close now, she was leaning so far out of the car—was a mess. It was pocked and picked at and seemed to be growing a beard, even though he knew that was impossible. He wasn’t too clear then on the differences between boys and girls, men and women, but he did know this: women did not grow beards.

  “Hello,” the woman had said again, and that was when he felt it, one of the only two things he remembered feeling all the rest of that day. The driver must have gotten out of the car when he wasn’t paying attention. The air was suddenly full of the smell of mothballs and his mouth was suddenly full of cloth, wet cloth. It covered not only his mouth but his nose, his cheeks, his chin, everything but his eyes. He dropped his picture of the dove that was the Holy Spirit. He jerked his head back, trying to get away, and managed only to see the trees above his head and a crow sitting in one of them, pecking away at nothing, making no noise. There was no noise anywhere and he couldn’t make any. He was choking. He was heaving. He was kicking out at air. The passenger door had popped open and the woman had gotten out, all done up in very high heels and a tight skirt of shiny red like a woman on television. “Jesus Christ,” she had said, “what are you doing with him? How much of that stuff did you use?”

  Then there was nothing at all, because he had fainted.

  Sometime later, he was in the back of the car and the woman was there with him. His hands had been tied behind his back and his legs had been fastened to two ends of a long piece of wood, forced apart. He didn’t know what had happened to his pants. There were curtains on the windows in the back of the car. Maybe they had been there all along. He was scared to death and he was crying.

  “Come to finally,” the woman had said, except that he could see up her skirt now and he didn’t know what to think. She had nothing on under there and she had a boy thing, a huge boy thing swollen up and red, jabbing against the inside of her skirt.

  “Make him tractable,” the man in the driver’s seat had said, “make him tractable fast, for God’s sake. We need him to be all right for tonight.”

  “That’s your own damn bad planning,” the woman had said.

  Then she had turned to him, smiling through those teeth, and flicked up the end of her skirt. Her boy thing was in the air and pulsing, pulsing right into his face. That was when he’d first realized he still had something over his mouth, something tight and thick, because what he wanted to do was bite that thing she was pushing at him right off, but he couldn’t. She grabbed him, turned him over and threw him back on the seat, face down. With the way he was tied, his bottom shot into the air and the joints in his legs began to ache, to scream really, and he had begun to cry again.

  “Listen,” she’d said to him, just before she started something that would be the worst pain he had ever felt, the worst pain he would ever feel, not even that time later after he had run away and They had cut him, “listen. This is going to be better than a spanking.”

  3

  Now it was noon and years later, years and years, and he was free. Marietta was behind him. He had left her and the people who were attending to her back on Amora Street. The Spanish woman who had once been a nun was behind him, too, although nobody had found her yet as far as he knew. He had gotten to her in her own apartment after the Spanish girl at the church had told him what he needed to know. He was free and out on the street and even a little safe, because they would never expect to find him where he was about to go.

  Coming up Church Street he brushed by an older man in a suit with his topcoat open. He lifted the man’s wallet—it was easiest with the ones who wanted to think they were too tough to really need a coat—and trusted that to give him the money he needed for lunch. Then he started walking up the steep hills that led to Prospect Avenue and Edge Hill Road.

  If there was one thing he had figured out, after all the time he had spent in The Apartment, it was that to do what had been done to him you had to be not only bad, but rich.

  Part Five

  Chapter One

  1

  FOR SUSAN MURPHY, COMING back to Edge Hill Road was disorienting. It reminded her of the first time she had come back to the Motherhouse after three years on mission, teaching in a parish school in the very worst part of the city of Detroit. She had been in Detroit for so long without a break, she had begun to think of her life there as normal. Small rooms, bad plumbing, mostly inoperative heating systems were the most she could expect. The Motherhouse, with its stone and stained glass and marble, had felt at first like a fairy tale and then like a prison. She could not make it make sense or make herself relax there. Walking up Edge Hill from the bus stop after two days of Damien House felt the same way. The houses all looked thyroidal. The fairy lanterns and colored tinsel that lined the walk to the O’Mara place—decorations for the open house they were holding that night, coy signposts to show the way to a party everybody knew their way to anyway—looked insane. She stopped for a moment at the O’Maras’ walk and fingered the soft metallic wings of an angel that had been taped to the lamppost there. Nobody took the injunction against decorations in Advent seriously anymore, she knew that, but the angel offended her anyway. There was something so damned blatant about it. Like coming back to Edge Hill Road had reminded her of coming back to the Motherhouse, the angel reminded her of the signs on the side streets off Congress Avenue, TENDER LOVE, YOUNG LOVE, INNOCENCE. They might as well have put up a blazing board of neon and said it straight out: CHILDREN FOR SALE.

  She walked slowly up the rest of the way to her own walk, then down her walk to her door, and let herself inside. The foyer was empty. The house was quiet. She kicked her shoes into the foyer closet, took off her coat and threw it on the stair rail. She didn’t feel like caring if the house looked a mess. Someone had turned the heat up and left it up. The foyer was close to steaming. Susan pushed up the sleeves of her sweater and her turtleneck both. Then she stood still and listened hard, for the sound of someone or something in the house. She got nothing.

  She had a new pack of cigarettes, bought on Congress Avenue after she had left Damien House. She took it out, opened it up, and dropped the torn cellophane on the floor. Then she got a cigarette out, lit up with a match from the matchbook she had picked up at the diner where she had tried to have lunch, and dropped the spent match on the floor. Then she gave up, because nothing she could do, short of going to work with an ax, could make the foyer really look ragged. It was too big and too solidly built. Instead of trying, she headed for the back, where the kitchen was, and where she could be reasonably sure of finding some whiskey to put into her tea. She needed a drink and she needed a smoke and she needed somebody to scream at, preferably Dan. She thought two out of three might not be all that bad.

  On her way to the kitchen, she passed the portrait of her grandmother her mother had always hated, hanging now in the back hall. Her grandmoth
er had been a great enthusiast of social causes and a great advocate of political reform, as political reform had been defined in the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Susan remembered her as a nasty old lady with an even nastier temper, always talking about the deserving and the undeserving poor. She had used her own peculiar vision of Science as a weapon. It had been a weapon that cut.

  Susan stopped in front of the portrait, ran her fingers through the dust that had collected on the top of the frame, and then turned the damn thing to the wall.

  2

  She had been alone in the kitchen for half an hour, drinking cups of tea half full of Benedictine, by the time Dan came in—the same Dan whom she had thought, only a few hours before, she was ready to kill on sight. The Benedictine had mellowed her. She had lost the energy she needed to do much of anything, and most of the urgency she needed to do it with conviction. She was still angry, but not on the warpath. Dan must have been coming in from work. He had his overcoat on and his shoes were wet. He smiled when he saw her sitting at the table and headed for the cupboards near the sink, where the coffee things were.