Charisma

by Orania Papazoglou

  “It’s too damn bad you’re so damn into tea,” he said. “I thought for a while there that with you home I’d be spared the taste of brother Andy’s coffee.”

  Susan picked up her cigarette, took a drag, put it down in the ashtray again. She had lit it just a few moments before Dan had come into the kitchen, so it was still long and almost ashless. She blew smoke into the air and watched Dan through it, putting down a cup and saucer, putting water on to boil, measuring instant out of a green-labeled jar, hunting through the sugar bowls for the one that was actually full of sugar.

  “If anybody calls tonight, you’ve got to tell them I’m not in,” Dan said. “I brought a shit load of work home with me and I’ve got to get it done. That’s why I’m so early.”

  Susan was still watching his back. It looked narrower than she remembered it. Dan looked smaller.

  “I don’t know that I’m going to be home tonight,” she said.

  “What?” He turned around and raised an eyebrow at her, that old Murphy trick their father had once used so well. “Don’t tell me you have a date.”

  “No, I don’t have a date.”

  “The O’Maras then? We were invited. I’ve got too much work to go, but Andy’s going. Is Andy going to take you to the O’Maras?”

  “I always hated Denny O’Mara,” Susan said. “He was so damn full of himself he gave me a headache.”

  “He’s married to Margaret Mary Beshnik.”

  “She’s not somebody I know.”

  Dan picked up the sugar bowl and spooned sugar into his coffee. For Susan it would have been too much sugar. For the old Dan, it would have been a sacrilege. She didn’t know what the tastes of the new Dan were. She didn’t know anything about him at all.

  “Look,” he said, “I take it you’re pissed off at me for some reason or the other, and I take it I’m going to have to listen to the reason whether I want to or not. Why don’t you just get started?”

  “Why don’t you take off your coat and sit down?”

  “All right, I will.”

  Dan brought his coffee to the kitchen table and put it down. He took off his coat, one sleeve at a time, elaborately careful, and laid it over the seat of a chair. He pulled out the chair directly under his coffee cup and sat down in it.

  “All right,” he said again. “I have taken off my coat. I am sitting down. Now what?”

  Susan crossed her arms and rested her elbows on the table. Dan was tight, very tight, and she didn’t blame him. In his place, she would have been very tight herself. What she hadn’t expected were lines around his eyes and the tightness under his jaw—the face he wore when he went to battle against his enemies. She hadn’t made up her mind about him, not entirely, but he had made up his mind about her. It felt like the death of something.

  “What I want,” she said slowly, “are the answers to a few questions. Will you give them to me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Just yes? Just like that?”

  “I don’t see why not. If I don’t, you’ll probably hound me into the nuthouse.”

  “I never hound, Dan, and you know it. Do you know where I slept last night?”

  “Of course I do. Damien House.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Dan shrugged. “Christ, Susan, if you want to run off and play Mother Teresa, it’s your own damn business. I don’t have anything against Damien House. It was my idea Andy go there in the first place.”

  “I know it was. Now you’re prosecuting Tom Burne.”

  “I’m prosecuting Tom Burne because I have a case.”

  “Dan, that’s bull manure, and you know it. I was down on Sedger Street today. They do everything but post pictures of those children in their plate-glass windows with the prices underneath. You have a case.”

  “I only have a case if the cops bring me one.”

  “Is that what you want me to think? The cops don’t bust those bastards on Sedger Street?”

  “They don’t.”

  “They don’t dare,” Susan said. “While I was sitting around at Damien House this morning I had a few talks with a few people. Cops. People who work at Damien House. Kids—”

  “There was another murder down there this morning,” Dan said abruptly, “another murder of an ex-nun. I wish to Christ you’d realize, Susan—”

  “That I’m an ex-nun? Oh, I realize it, Dan. I realize there was a murder, too. I ought to. I found the damned body. I’m not interested in that right now.”

  “You ought to be.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me what I ought to be. According to one of the cops I talked to, they don’t bust those places on Sedger Street because it’s too good a way of putting their careers in a sling.”

  “You’d have to talk to their sergeants about that.”

  “Not according to this cop. According to this cop, I’d have to talk to you.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  Her cigarette had managed to burn halfway to the butt in peace. It was lying in the ashtray looking like a worm turned to cinders. She spun it to get the ash off, picked it up, and took another drag. This time, when she blew the smoke out, she blew it directly into Dan’s face.

  “Do you remember a case about two years ago, guy picked up down on Sedger for running a strip show with eight-year-old girls? He had a bar called Eden Rising.”

  “Yes, I remember it.”

  “According to the cop I talked to, the police department closed the Eden Rising down and handed the kids over to social services. Three weeks later, the kids had vanished into thin air—”

  “That happens all the time,” Dan said quickly. “Why the hell would you think I had anything to do with that? Do you know what the foster parent system is like?”

  “I’m beginning to get a fair idea, Dan, yes. And I’ve had chapter and verse from Francesca about how pimps come and steal their stables back when social services actually manages to get anything done. But this time the pimp was in jail.”

  “I know where he was, Susan. I ought to. I put him there.”

  “You also let him out. According to this cop—”

  “Oh, crap,” Dan said. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, anyway? Some cop hands you a cop legend and you swallow it whole. One walk down Sedger Street and you’re out to save the universe. One case gone sour and suddenly I’m the devil himself in horns and a tail—”

  “The cop who busted the man who owned the Eden Rising ended up getting busted off the force three months later—”

  “—For stealing two pounds of cocaine from the evidence room,” Dan exploded. “My God, Susan, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you even listening to yourself? You even sound like a cop. You sound like one of those fool women on television shows with the badges and the bad language and the—what the hell did you do in that damn convent of yours, anyway, read detective stories and fantasize about being on foot patrol?”

  “The cop I talked to said you set that other cop up.”

  “The cop you talked to had his reasons. A commitment to veracity wasn’t one of them.”

  “The cop I talked to said it was common knowledge in the police department that you’ve been taking bribes from those people on Sedger Street—”

  “Oh Jesus,” Dan said, “bribes. Bribes. Susan, what in the name of shit fuck would I want to take bribes for? Have you got the faintest idea how much money Daddy left me?”

  “After you killed him?”

  Dan reared back in his chair, white and stiff and wired as an electrified corpse. “Oh, that’s fine, Susan,” he said, “that’s wonderful. First I’m a pimp for the pimps of children and now I’m a goddamned murderer.”

  “I always thought of it as a kind of euthanasia,” Susan said softly, “an act of corporal charity for the sake of Andy and me.”

  “It might have been an act of corporal charity, Susan, but if it was, it wasn’t one committed by me.”

  The Benedictine was
making swirls like oil slick in her tea. Susan tilted the cup first one way and then the other. Then she drank what was left of it down and stood up. The sink was too far away, across the room, impossible to get to. She headed for it anyway, moving slowly, feeling drunk.

  “Dan,” she said, once she was far enough past him so that she could no longer see his face, “I’m not Pat Mallory. I’m not a cop or a newspaper reporter or one of those people from the mayor’s office you have meetings with at seven o’clock in the morning. I’m your sister and I can tell when something is not quite real with you. Now you know and I know that Father Tom Burne is the only person down in the Congo making any headway at all against those people on Sedger Street. And you know and I know that Father Tom Burne has not molested any of the children at Damien House—”

  “—Bruce Ritter—”

  “No matter what Father Bruce Ritter may or may not have done,” Susan said. “We’re not talking about Bruce Ritter here. We’re talking about Tom Burne. You have built your reputation in this state on fighting cases of child abuse. Now you’re doing your best to knock out of commission the greatest force against child pornography and child prostitution this state has ever seen. You’ve started an investigation on the unsubstantiated word of a boy who is, from all reports, both an habitual liar and a borderline psychopath. You had the fact of that investigation leaked to the press and you were very proud of yourself for doing it—and don’t lie about that, Dan, because I was here to see it. No matter what you believe, I am not a naive little nun who believes anything anybody tells her. I am perfectly willing to believe that that cop I talked to this morning had it all wrong. But, Dan, I’m going to find it very hard not to believe that cop if you won’t tell me why you’ve started this insane holy war against Father Tom Burne.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Dan said. “Jesus fucking Christ, Susan, I have told you and I have told you and I will tell you again. I am investigating Tom Burne because I have to.”

  “Right.”

  Susan dropped her cup into the sink. It landed with a thud, but didn’t break. She turned away from it and headed for the kitchen door.

  “Where are you going?” Dan asked her.

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That was a lie. Susan hadn’t thought she would care, but she did. She cared more that Dan not know where she was going.

  Out in the foyer again, she looked up the stairs, expecting to see Andy sitting on them, and got blackness and absence instead. She wondered vaguely where he was and then went into the closet for her things.

  It was a long trek out to the Yale-New Haven Hospital, and she was already very tired.

  Chapter Two

  1

  THE OFFICES AND STUDIOS of WNHY-TV were on Orange Street at the very edge of the commercial district, on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of a six-story building with a dry cleaner and a sex aids shop on the street level. Walking up to the building, Father John Kelly found himself resenting his life—his real life—for the first time. It was strange. Even if he hadn’t had a vocation—and he had, you had to to accept celibacy with any kind of equanimity; it was just that with everything else that was going on, with his head full of fears and confusions left over from a childhood horror story, it was hard to remember it—even if he hadn’t had a vocation, he might still have wanted to be a priest. There were so many advantages to it. In fact, unless you were some kind of sex fiend, there were nothing but advantages. The Jesuits had given him an education the like of which could not be had anywhere in the world outside the Church. They had sent him to London and Paris and Rome and taken care to see that he read half a dozen languages, ancient and modern, just in case he needed them. He knew more about the economy of Central America than the radical nuns who lived in the base communities of Nicaragua. He knew more about the theology of the patristic Church than the schismatic traditionalists who surrounded Marcel Lefebvre. He knew more about English literature than most Oxford dons who taught the subject and more about French philosophy than most of the existentialists who had preached Sartre at the Sorbonne—and it was all side knowledge, what the Jesuits considered necessary background for his serious education. That had been in theology, and as far as he could figure out, he knew more about that than the Pope and almost as much as Cardinal Ratzinger.

  Then there were the living conditions. Over a period of years, he had lived in every possible kind of place, from a palazzo in Venice to a hut in the Mojave desert, but most of the time he lived in ordinary Jesuit rectories. Ordinary Jesuit rectories were not luxurious, at least not most of the time, but they were comfortable. They were certainly much more comfortable than any of the places he had been allowed to occupy as a child. They offered good food and good books and good conversation. They offered refuge from the craziness of the rest of the world. They offered a kind of automatic acceptance of the intellectual life that left him free to work and to think without being under pressure to also be “normal.”

  Most of all—and John Kelly knew this—the Church had given him a community of merit, a world working overtime to ensure that oldest and most startling of Western ideals, the absolute equality of every soul under God. When he told people that they argued with him. They brought up dozens of things that had nothing to do with anything. Weren’t women barred from the priesthood? Wasn’t the Church a hierarchy? It was all true and all beside the point, only credible to people who had spent four years of college hearing that all that mattered was gender, race, and class. In the world John Kelly had entered on the day of his ordination, gender, race, and class were not supposed to matter at all. Every man and woman was a descendant of Adam and Eve. They were brothers in blood as well as in metaphor. Every man and woman, rich and poor, black and white and red, was stained with the same Original Sin and charged with the same mission: to work out his own salvation and give glory to God. What the Church was trying to be was what the rest of the Western world had always considered itself to be, inaccurately and unreflectively: a world where advancement was won by merit only and sanctity was a gift that could not be boasted of because it could never be deserved.

  Just why he was standing on Orange Street thinking about these things, he was not sure. It was passive thinking anyway. What little active thinking he was doing was all about nonsense. Dan Murphy, Victor Coletti, Tom Burne: the fact was, he was afraid to go inside, and he didn’t want to be. He was a little embarrassed by the homily he’d written, too, but that was something else. He looked up Orange Street and found it empty. There was a girls’ school up there, run by the same nuns who ran Albertus Magnus College, a good one. The order was a good one, too, or had been before Vatican II.

  He checked out the curious display in the plate-glass window of the sex aids shop—it was called A Marriage Made in Heaven, and all it had for decoration was a lot of Valentine hearts edged in paper lace; if it hadn’t been for the discreet sign on the door, PRACTICAL HELP FOR THE HO-HUM RELATIONSHIP, he wouldn’t have known what was going on in there—and then forced his way through the glass doors. The small lobby inside was empty and cold and floored in stale linoleum.

  What he should have done with his homily was to make it the first in a series, the start of a course in the Catholic religion, the kind of course no one ever taught anymore in America but that he had been trained to put together when he was in the seminary. Either that, or he should have prepared a statement on the plight of Father Tom Burne. Anything would have been better than what he had done, which was to put together half an hour of platitudes and abstractions on the Trinity.

  He let himself into the elevator, pressed the button for the second floor, and sighed.

  2

  “The recording studios are up on three,” the receptionist said, when he had presented himself at her desk. “That’s where we’ll be going, Father. If you want to smoke, you have to wait in the green room. Fire regulations don’t permit smoking in the studios and common sense do
esn’t permit it in the technical rooms—I don’t know if you realize, but the lens on a single one of our cameras, just the lens, costs over fifteen thousand dollars.”

  The receptionist was a tall woman in middle age, very thin and very well put together, wearing a gold crucifix on a chain around her neck. John Kelly had tagged her immediately as being the kind of cradle Catholic who prided herself on having “her own opinions.” There were more and more of those running around every day, and the opinions they prided themselves on having were usually heretical. It made him a little nuts. A Catholic who did not believe that the Consecration changed the bread and wine into the true Body and true Blood of Christ Jesus was a Protestant, and so was a Catholic who thought Rome had too much to say in the affairs of the American Church. The receptionist had gone back to the elevator and pressed the call button, and John found himself holding back, reluctant to follow her.

  The elevator came to a stop in front of them and the doors popped open. The receptionist held one of them open with her hand and shooed him in.

  “Dan Murphy has told us all about you,” she said as she followed him. “We’ve been very excited. Most men don’t have the kind of commitment to his faith community that Dan does, don’t you think?”

  “Mmm,” John Kelly said. He was biting his lip, trying not to wince. “Faith community.” Dear God in Heaven.

  The receptionist punched the button for three. “I know everybody talks a lot about community these days,” she said, “but they don’t really do anything about it. You work in the bishop’s office, not in a parish, don’t you?”

  “That’s right. Actually I’m not at the chancery at the moment, I have my own—”

  “You really wouldn’t believe what it’s like in the parishes. You wouldn’t. We held a sleep-in for the homeless in my parish only last week—”