The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  I had been so absorbed in our conversation that I hadn’t noticed a car make the turn from Dartmouth Street into the alley. But from my low and fairly sheltered perch, I could now recognize the driver: Tad Winslow. He was driving toward us and the house. If I didn’t duck away quickly, I was going to have to explain what I was doing in the alley behind his family home, pawing through boxes of his rejects.

  I stood up quickly and walked in the direction of Clarendon Street.

  “Come with me,” I said aloud. It couldn’t hurt to keep talking to a ghost only I could see. No one, including Tad, was likely to want to tangle with a person who seemed to be hearing voices and was carrying on a lively conversation with them. Then again, these days you see a lot of people walking down the street, apparently talking to themselves. They’re wearing Bluetooth headsets for their cell phones.

  Mr. Grady floated along beside me.

  “Please, don’t go,” he pleaded. “I must find that deed.”

  “I know.” I was walking briskly. Though I’d been stung, the other day, by Tad’s utter disinterest in me, I was now counting my lucky stars that I hadn’t registered on his radar.

  “Was that the last of the books?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Where are the rest?”

  “Upstairs in the hall. They’re being sent to the Bryn Mawr Book Store. Josie went to Bryn Mawr.”

  I knew the store. It was a warm and inviting little haven for book lovers, in a Cambridge neighborhood known for its tantalizing food boutiques and astronomical house prices. Proceeds from the sale of secondhand books went to fund scholarships at Bryn Mawr College.

  “Is someone picking them up?” I asked.

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “When?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  I paused when we reached Clarendon Street. “Is there any way I can get into the house? Is there any time when no one’s around?”

  “Mrs. Martin goes home at six,” he said.

  “But I’m sure she locks everything up tight. Doesn’t she?”

  He paused to think. Hollywood’s got it all wrong when it comes to the amount of power ghosts actually have. They can’t open windows. They can’t turn keys in locks and let you in. They can interfere with electronic alarm systems, though, just by standing next to them. I was about to ask whether the Winslows had one when he said, “One of the windows was broken last week. They were taking apart the brass bed in Josie’s old room and one of side rails slipped and went right through the glass. It was old glass, rounded, with a lavender tint. They’ll not be able to replace it, really, but they’ve something on order from out of state.”

  “Is the window accessible?”

  “By the back fire escape, yes. It’s on the fourth floor.”

  “And they didn’t … board it up or anything?” (asked the person who was relieved of her mother’s engagement ring because she couldn’t be bothered to install a reliable lock).

  “Oh, they’ve got a piece of plywood across it,” he answered, “but it isn’t a bang-up job. And who would dare to climb that old fire escape?”

  He glanced at me sort of sideways, then looked away.

  Would I? Could I? And if so, when? I was on my way to Nat’s family for dinner, which never took less than five hours. And Henry was due home at seven.

  Oh, yeah. Henry.

  No, I was not going to climb four stories in the dark on what had appeared to be a hundred-year-old fire escape. There was a time when I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, and there might yet be a time when I wouldn’t hesitate to take on the challenge, but it certainly wasn’t now. Besides not wanting to end up flat in the alley being sniffed at, or worse, by the rat and all his cousins, there was that inconvenient little law against breaking and entering.

  Mr. Grady could tell what I was thinking. Not because ghosts can read minds—they can’t—but because I have never been very good at hiding what I’m feeling.”I’ll think of something,” I said. “I promise.”

  He smiled a little sadly, bowed, and was gone.

  Chapter Ten

  AS I ACCEPTED a slice of lemon-ricotta pie, dessert I was far too full for but would probably eat anyway, I tried to trace what had brought us onto the unlikely subject of the Great Molasses Flood. I think it grew out of Pasquina’s simmering displeasure at seeing cans of Diet Coke on her Sunday dinner table, contraband brought upstairs from the second-floor apartment of Nat’s aunt Marcella.

  Pasquina despised the consumption of soda, and diet soda, especially at Sunday dinner, was beneath her contempt. Having grown up on a grape farm in the Mazara valley, just outside of Palermo, she believed that the human body had not been designed to consume anything that hadn’t once walked the earth, grown in soil, swum the seas, or hung from a branch. Somehow, a conversation about artificial sweeteners had led us onto the subjects of sugar, then honey, then molasses.

  I’m ashamed to admit it, now that I understand what a tragedy it really was, but the whole idea of a molasses tank exploding and flooding the street just below us waist-high with bubbling brown goo had always struck me as sort of … comical, like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon. Not to mention implausible. I mean, really—how could that have happened?

  “Lifted a train right off the tracks,” insisted Nat’s brother, Franco. “Buildings flattened, people and horses smothered. It was like … lava coming down a mountain.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “Winter, 1919,” Pasquina piped up. Think what you want about her dietary theories; at eighty-one, the woman has the energy of a jackrabbit and a better memory than anyone else at the table.

  “You weren’t even here then, Nana!” Nat said.

  “No, no, but Papa talked about it.”

  Papa, Pasquina’s late father-in-law, had run a barbershop, Alonso’s, on Salem Street for decades. Like his son, Pasquina’s late husband, he’d paid the ultimate price for his love of a good smoke. Or forty.

  “All the old-timers talk about it,” Pasquina went on, shaking her head. “It took months and months to clean it all up. The water in the harbor all that summer: still brown.”

  I glanced down the table at Nat’s new “friend,” Rocco, who was wedged in between Marcella and Nat’s mom. Rocco was a bartender Nat had met recently at one of the clubs she was always trying to drag me to. In the dim, crowded dining room, he looked a little too …good, especially for someone who had probably worked until two or three this morning.

  What was it? Man makeup? Multiple hair products? He caught my glance and sent a smirky little nod in my direction, one I couldn’t help but interpret as meaning, Yeah, I know. I don’t blame you for staring. Everybody does.

  Marcella was one of the more successful Realtors working in the area of the North End and the Waterfront. She was wearing a low-cut blouse with red lace peeking out. Though she had to be nearing sixty, she walked five miles a day and was rigorous about her diet and salon procedures, enabling her to dress like a woman half her age. This was not lost on Rocco. Faced with the choice of spending the afternoon chatting up the steamy, perfumed Marcella or Nat’s mom, Regina, a kindly nurse-practitioner at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Rocco had thrown his lot in with the City Mouse.

  In doing so, though, he had probably sealed his fate with Franco. Franco didn’t like the fact that the unctuous Rocco had spent his entire meal showering attention on the sexy Marcella, barely giving their mother the time of day. Rocco was no sooner out the door, Marcella’s business card in his pocket, than Franco rose to Regina’s defense.

  “I don’t know what you see in that guy,” he said to Nat, shaking his head.

  Nat was clearing the table. Pasquina had gone to have a little lie-down, and the men had stretched out in the living room with cigars and Italian soccer on Digital TV.

  Nat glanced up quickly. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a bonehead,” Franco observed delicately.

  “Franco!” Regina said
softly.

  Marcella stood up and brushed crumbs off her short, chestnut skirt. “He’s very successful, Franco. He wants to buy a building with a couple of his friends.”

  “And do what with it?” Franco sneered.

  “Open his own club. You could learn a few things, you know, if you put down your fork every once in a while and participated in the conversation at the table.”

  “Ow!” said Nat’s cousin Gennaro, grinning.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Franco sat up, perhaps to minimize the slouch that might have led his aunt to draw the wrong conclusion: that he was packing on some pounds.

  Marcella pursed her lips and glanced at her sister, who shook her head slightly. Marcella reached for the remains of the pie and filled a glass with dirty cutlery. She headed into the kitchen.

  “Well I think he’s very nice,” Regina said to Nat. “He was very polite. It’s an awful lot of people to meet at one time.”

  “He’s a bonehead,” said Franco.

  Nat walked me to the train.

  “I liked him,” I lied. “I mean, I didn’t really get to talk to him much but he seemed pretty nice. Franco’s just—”

  Nat reached into her pocket and pulled out a box of Marlboro Lights.

  “He’s a fine one to talk,” Nat sniffed, cradling the flame of her lighter from a chill wind that had suddenly blown in from the water. It made me want to be home, right now, with Henry.

  “You remember that girl he brought to Ma’s sixtieth?” Nat went on, inhaling a chestful of smoke.

  I didn’t, but Franco’s girlfriends were always kind of the same: blond fans of tanning parlors, French pedicures, and fur.

  “She’s in jail! She embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars from the company where she worked.”

  “Wow,” I said, trying to call up a particular face. I couldn’t.

  “I mean, cut the guy some slack,” Nat continued. “He even brought flowers for Nana!”

  I put my arm around her shoulder. “Forget about Franco,” I said. “He’s just … overprotective.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of you; of your mom. I’m sure he didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  Nat stopped short and gave me a look. There weren’t too many ways to parse the meaning of Franco’s judgment.

  “Anyway,” I said, looping my arm through hers, “guess who has a new job, starting tomorrow?”

  I filled her in on the events that had transpired since her call to me a week ago this evening; in fact, this very hour. She was fascinated to hear about my encounter with the monks and horrified to learn that their precious manuscript had vanished from Sylvia’s apartment.

  I remembered another important matter just as we reached the end of Hanover Street. From there, I would continue on alone across the disappointingly slight swath of green space that had replaced the Central Artery when the “Big Dig” took cross-city traffic underground.

  For years, beleaguered commuters had endured traffic jams and weekly changes in the direction of one-way streets by dreaming of a regular Central Park reconnecting the North End with the rest of the city. When the towers supporting the Central Artery came down, though, the “Rose Kennedy Greenway” was revealed to be not much more than a string of little green parcels, bisected by traffic moving at highway speeds. Already, interest groups were lining up with proposals to erect commemorative monuments on the measly patches of green and build more structures to replace the ones that had just been dismantled.

  “Speaking of guys who are crazy about you,” I said.

  Nat frowned, puzzled.

  “The one I live with would really love a movie date.”

  “Awww” Nat said. “That’s sweet! I’ll take him anytime.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

  Nat nodded, dropped her cigarette onto the sidewalk and crushed it with the toe of a brown suede boot. We embraced, and then, taking my life into my hands, I headed into the traffic, toward Haymarket.

  Nona had called from Cleveland while I was out, so I picked up the phone while waiting for Henry and Dec.

  “Cucciola mia!” she said when she heard my voice. “Where were you?”

  “Pasquina’s.” Anticipating the next few questions, I answered them before she asked.

  “She served a great dinner: stuffed artichokes, pea soup with croutons, baked eggplant with capers and tomatoes, and rabbit.”

  “Cooked how?” Nona asked. A tone of suspicion had crept into her voice.

  “Braised, with red and yellow peppers.”

  “Red and yellow?” she said disapprovingly.

  Nona would never use two sweet peppers in a braise. Red and green, yellow and green, orange and green—all fine. But red and yellow? Much too similar, sweet and mild; the dish would lack depth. A variation like this was as unimaginable to my grandmother as my making lasagna “English” style, with béchamel sauce, an experiment I tried when I was fifteen. I guess I was rebelling. She still brings it up occasionally.

  “Was it tough?”

  “The rabbit? No.”

  “Gamy?” Another reason to lean on green peppers. “Not really, no.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, sounding a little disappointed. It probably felt unfair, her childhood friend’s being fortunate enough not only to turn out a flawless dinner, despite using the wrong peppers, but also to be spending Sunday afternoon surrounded by her entire extended family. Plus me. Whereas Nona probably went to eight o’clock Mass, then had dinner with someone else’s family or spent the day alone. Dad wasn’t far away, but she wasn’t his mother. He’d be there in a blink if she needed her screens mended or her driveway shoveled, but he wasn’t going to hang around her hot little house all afternoon.

  I feel awfully guilty about the two of them being alone. I wonder if Joe and Jay ever feel this way, and somehow I doubt it. Men are expected to go off into the world and make their way, but for a woman, it’s different. You feel … selfish. Disloyal. And Joe and Jay weren’t nearly as tied to Nona as I was, between the ghost business—my brothers did not inherit the gift—and my being the only girl.

  I had wanted, and needed, to get away on my own for a while after college. I just couldn’t bring myself to move back home and resume a version of the life I had led from the time I was a little girl until I went away to school. Dad was never all that crazy about my being involved in the world of the spirits. Nona, on the other hand, just loved the drama of the phone ringing, especially in the middle of the night, and of our being summoned—we usually went together—to a stranger’s house or a funeral home or the office of a private detective. She still answers the calls whenever they come, but now, she goes alone.

  “How’s my boy?” she asked.

  “He’s great. He’ll be home any minute.”

  “Oh. Where is he?”

  “He was at his dad’s for the weekend.”

  “Ah.” Her tone was a little smug. She knows Henry goes to Dec’s on the weekends, and I think she gets just a tiny bit of satisfaction from knowing that I, too, am often alone on Sundays. Chi la fa l’aspetti, she always used to say. What goes around comes around.

  Nona has never met Declan, but her tone turns chilly every time his name is mentioned. The irony is, she would love him. But it’s easier for her to blame him than me for the fact that I will probably never move back home. If he hadn’t gotten me pregnant, after all, I wouldn’t have to stay in Boston for the foreseeable future, if not for the rest of my life, so that Henry can be near his father. Then again, Nona wouldn’t have a great-grandson who sends her drawings for her refrigerator and tells her jokes over the phone and falls asleep in her lap on Christmas Day.

  I considered telling her that Nell and Delia were coming here next weekend, but I stopped myself. What was the point? No matter how hard I try to paint my situation as that of a regular mom with a regular family life—laundry, cooking, sleepovers, birthday parties—she is never going to accept it completely. I might do a perf
ectly commendable job in my unfortunate situation, but in her mind, the fact will always remain that I gave birth to a child out of wedlock.

  A word that doesn’t exactly fill me with a sense of hopeful abandon.

  Complicating matters, she really can’t disapprove of the choice Declan made to go back to Kelly. What she wishes will happen, she has often told me, is that I will meet a “nice young man” who will marry me and adopt Henry, so my son can have a “real father.” Easier said than done, I always think, and besides, he has a real father. A great one.

  What always reassures her that I am still “her girl,” though, are tales of the ghosts with whom I am presently communicating.

  “Monks?” she said. “How old?”

  “Oh, close to a thousand, I think.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Ireland.”

  “If they want a bishop,” she went on, “you call Monsignor Dolan. He knows everybody. And you helped him a lot.”

  I’d met the sprightly cleric in my late teens, when Nona was sidelined with a case of sciatica. A successful local contractor had died suddenly, just months after making a new will in which he left a valuable piece of lakeside property to the Diocese of Cleveland. But the will could not be found. The lawyer had skipped town, under a cloud of conflict-of-interest charges. And while the contractor’s wife remembered seeing an envelope that she believed contained the revised will, no one could find it in the days following the man’s death.

  That’s where I came in, and Monsignor Dolan was in the room when the spirit of the contractor told me where the document was filed. Or rather, misfiled. There’s a summer camp now on the edge of the lake, and in fall and spring, the buildings are used for conferences. It’s much in demand as a location for weddings, and that’s easy money for the diocese. Monsignor Dolan gives me all the credit for this, and having been in the room when the conversation happened, he no longer doubts the existence of ghosts. He’s always happy to help me when I call.