The Halo Effect: A Novel

by Anne D. LeClaire

  Of course, I had misheard the priest. But what could he have said? I played with the phrase, came up with another possibility. Doughnuts in air. That made no sense either, but I saw them rise up out of the case, floating past until the ether was dense with them, dancing and twirling and tumbling, each pair linked by stick cartoon arms. A scene from Fantasia. Lucy’s favorite movie. Land mine. Land mine. My head buzzed with memory. On the second-floor landing, a thought ambushed me and stilled my step. Maybe it wasn’t that I was going deaf but that I was going crazy. Losing my mind, not my hearing. Going round the bend. Loony tunes. Daft. Nuts. Bonkers. A finger of fear shot through my chest, and I considered the idea that my hearing loss was psychosomatic, some kind of PTSD symptom. I wondered if Sophie was right, if I should talk to someone, but instantly a cone of self-protection snapped in place. I thought of how she would drag me around from doctor to doctor with that determined, take-charge look on her face. Let’s get some answers, see what we’re dealing with here. Physicians and psychiatrists. Otologists and audiologists and neurologists. Hell, maybe even proctologists. She would cover all her bases. Corporal and emotional. Spiritual. I saw her kneeling in a pew, lighting candles, praying. To whom? Was there a patron saint of loose screws? I wouldn’t have bet against it.

  Early on, when we’d been at that mad and ardent state of courtship that trembled near a welcome madness, when everything she’d said struck me as either endearing or terribly clever, when if she had suggested I crush a goblet and eat the shards I would have happily agreed, when any weakness or flaw was not so much forgiven as unseen, when I could barely trust—let alone test—the miracle of her love for me, she’d told me that for every condition there was a saint who could intercede on one’s behalf. We’d gone out for beer and pizza. Hawaiian, I remembered. Pineapple and ham. Her choice. She’d cut her slice neatly using a knife and fork, the first time I’d seen anyone eat pizza with such precision, and I had thought that this was a person who could be relied on to organize one’s life. I trusted, too, the way she spoke with such certainty. Lately it seemed to me that women had begun to talk like children, their declarative sentences rising at the end as if in question. I bought a new pair of boots today? Didn’t they know if they purchased shoes? That new restaurant just got a rave review in the Globe? Did they think this verbal tic in some way charming? Or did they believe it made them appear less threatening, the way an animal would roll over in submission to reveal a soft underside? It unnerved me. I liked people to be straightforward.

  Saints, Sophie had told me in her confident tone, could be invoked for most afflictions or important life situations. I’d laughed, of course, unable to believe she wasn’t joking, that a bright and educated woman who seemed savvy about people in ways I wasn’t would seriously buy into such shite. (Shite. Now there is a word. Proof positive that a semester in London could upgrade one’s vocabulary.) Useless superstition, I’d teased and slid another piece of pizza on her plate, refilled her glass from the pitcher. Is not, she’d insisted with an earnestness I had found enchanting and a certainty I could almost envy. Saints for every vocation, she’d said, sipping her beer. And every country. Saints to protect the innocent and the criminal.

  Which am I?

  She had taken a sip of beer and gazed at me, considering. You’re an artist, she’d said. Patron saint: Luke. How had she known this? Had she had to memorize a roster of them along the way? Some kind of catechism of the saints required of Catholics? Or had she looked it up before our date the way another girl might check a man’s astrological sign? There are saints for arthritis and gout, Sophie had continued. Headaches and earaches. Heartaches? I’d said. A premonition? She’d laughed. Even the plague. Everything is covered. Dandruff? I’d teased. Acne? Hangnails? Hangovers? Knock-knees and nose hair? Lost pets, she’d countered. And lost causes.

  Well, I thought that morning as I stood on the landing, now we know better.

  Unlike Sophie, who continued to believe, believed even after all we had lost, I didn’t believe in saints or in their power to intercede or comfort, and I certainly didn’t need them at that instant. What I needed was a drink. I was overtaken with a desire that shot through thirst and went directly to craving. I could almost feel the heft of the bottle, almost see the pleasure of amber liquor in a tumbler, nearly taste the raw jolt of the first swallow, followed by a curling heat that could warm places nothing else could touch. Booze. I craved booze. I checked my watch. Eleven o’clock. Not even noon. Noon I might justify. Mac, my college housemate, had rationalized an early drink by saying, “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” grinning as if he had invented the phrase. I pushed the desire down, not from self-control but fear. I’d been down that slope earlier in the winter and had fought my way up. Best not to ski that trail again. Who was to say if this time I would find my way back? Plus, I’d promised Sophie. There would be hell to pay if she stopped by and found me drinking this early in the day. I started up the next flight of stairs, each step a victory over temptation.

  On the top landing I inhaled the scent of oil paints and turpentine sinking down from the studio, and I was taken briefly by the familiarity of it and was comforted. For a moment I understood why Sophie had fallen for the science—the pseudoscience—of aromatherapy, why she had selected hand soap scented with eucalyptus, furniture polish imbued with the oil of lemons or oranges, and why, at night, she’d sprayed our pillows with a mist of lavender—ordered online and shipped from France—that was supposed to induce deep sleep. Used to spray, I thought and wondered if, when she’d moved to the rented condo three weeks before, she’d packed the blue aerosol bottle along with her bath salts and body lotions. It was all I could do not to go down to the room we’d once shared and check, afraid that if the spray was gone it would hold a significance I was not ready to face.

  I switched the fan back on and returned to the worktable where I took up my brush, unwrapped it from the foil, and approached the easel. In the past, I had received a certain level of renown for my portraits—features in the arts sections of the New York Times and Washington Post, a four-page spread in Arts in America; exhibits in Germany and China; commissions from corporations, politicians, actors—and I gathered it was this attention that had led to Cardinal Kneeland’s offering the commission. No doubt I would have refused anyway—even before September I would have avoided getting involved with the church—but since Lucy was murdered I had no interest in portraits and the necessary intimacy they involved. When I’d finally begun to paint again, I had turned to still life, finding in it a distance that allowed me to breathe, as if it were a door opening to another world. There remained a narrative in the work, but no people. I had never been very social, but after Lucy was killed I had given up on people. And who, knowing my story, could have blamed me? In still life I found something remotely identifiable as, if not truth, at least escape. I have never understood people who mistook still life for static. There is so much there in the line and light and composition that contains the power to stir me and draw me in and allows me—momentarily—to almost forget. And even if it was only an hour or two of reprieve, I would take it. As I stood there, I wondered again if Sophie knew about the commission. Had Father Gervase told her he was coming? I remembered another of our recent arguments. “Maybe you’re content to spend every waking hour just going through the motions, mad at the world,” she’d said. She turned to me then, and I’d seen the gleam of tears in her eyes. “I’m really sorry, Will. Really, I am. The thing is, maybe you can live that way, but I don’t think I can.”

  Of course she couldn’t. Not Sophie. I knew she was frightened by my anger, fury that at times shook even me, a force field that repulsed others and isolated me. Nights I would wake from the nightmares I’d had ever since the fall, when the police had given us the news, when I had gone to formally identify our daughter’s ruined body, I had lain in the dark and—fueled by this rage—held on to the grim hope, the weak consolation, that someday I’d be able to find and kill the unknown
person who murdered our daughter. Almost from the first I began to devise elaborate plots of torture, graphic plans involving things I wouldn’t have believed my mind was capable of inventing. I hadn’t yet learned the deeds we are capable of. That knowledge would come later, in the summer. Those fantasies and my newborn capacity for violence, my need for retribution, I kept to myself. Once—in the early-morning dimness and tired of being alone with these thoughts—I’d woken Sophie. Soph, I’d said, if you found out who murdered Lucy and you absolutely knew you wouldn’t get caught, do you think you could kill that person? She had turned to me, not even trying to conceal her horror. No, of course not, she said, and then added with a conviction I did not share, Nor could you, Will. Violence is never the answer to violence. Well, the truth is we have no earthly idea how we will act when faced with the unimaginable. So I continued to exist in a deep and private grief from which I was cut off from everyone—even Sophie, especially her—and left to my own sorrow. I had lost my daughter, and I had lost my way, and it wasn’t getting better.

  The painting I was working on that morning depicted an Anjou pear, a wedge of cheese, and an ornate silver fruit knife, all on a blue-rimmed plate I’d selected from the collection of goblets and platters and teapots we’d picked up over the years. I put brush to paint, and as I looked at the order and simplicity of the arrangement on the canvas in front of me, I experienced a mix of relief and guilt to know that while I labored to capture the sharpness of a fold in the cloth that draped the table, the precise shade and texture of the fruit’s flesh, I would be able to escape not only the past but the reality of life outside this room, as if I had entered a great tunnel leading to a parallel world.

  I looked at the fruit on the blue dish and then thought: Pears. Not pairs. Pears. Perhaps that was what the priest had said. Doughnuts and pears.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Do not despair.”

  As he pulled out of the driveway, Father Gervase heard the echo of his parting words to Will Light and recalled Will as he’d stood in the foyer, his face molded by the strange beauty of sorrow, a grief so personal and manifest he wore it like second skin. He remembered, too, the man’s posture, his closed-up body that spoke loudly of his rage, and he knew how facile, how empty, those words must have seemed and felt the insufficiency of them, knew full well his own inadequacy. Surely there was something he might have said that would have comforted or consoled, or even indicated by holding silent that he had seen Will’s pain, a witnessing that in itself could comfort. He hesitated for an instant, considered going back, but didn’t. Will—his anger and grief—had unsettled him. Still, this did not acquit him. He was aware of his cowardice and was ashamed.

  He wrenched the steering wheel, took the corner too widely, veered into the oncoming lane, saw, at the last minute, the motorcycle, and swerved. The bike skidded sideways and then straightened, avoiding a collision by a matter of feet. Maybe inches. As the biker roared off, and even knowing he couldn’t possibly be heard, Father Gervase murmured, “Sorry. Sorry.” He felt slightly light-headed. The noise and color outside the car seemed to intensify and press against him, flustering him, and for a moment everything was unfamiliar, as if he had taken a wrong turn. He lowered the window for some air and sighed. A dry and shaky exhalation. Like someone’s grandmother. Like his own Nana Gervase.

  He was weighed down by the world, and more immediately, in this very moment, he was encumbered by the burden of failure. Double failures. He had failed the archbishop, and all too well he understood he had failed Will Light. This was, in his mind, the greater of the two failures. His foot eased on the accelerator, slowing his return to the rectory.

  He needed time to quiet his heart. It all had been so unexpected. Although Sophia Light had spoken to him about her concerns for her husband, he’d been unprepared for not only the man and his grief and rage, but for the house itself and the flood of childhood memories the foyer had awakened, the echo of the past that had washed in. For a moment, hijacked by a vivid memory, he saw his sister, Cecelia, at ten, kneeling on the parquet floor in her Ursuline Academy uniform, pleated green jumper, the white sleeves of her blouse pushed up to her elbows, ribbon-tipped braids swinging forward, intent on a game of jacks. He experienced the old sorrow anew, anguish he had believed long ago metastasized into dead and shiny tissue. What was it Faulkner wrote about the past? It wasn’t dead? It wasn’t even past? The burden and bitter truth of this haunted.

  A horn sounded, startling him, and he realized he was creeping along, slowed to a pace just short of a dead stop. The driver in the car behind him was practically attached to his bumper. Father Gervase flicked on his right turn signal and edged over to the curb. As the driver pulled past, he recognized her as a member of the parish, yes, the mother of one of the former altar boys, and struggled to pull up the name. Beth LaBrea. He felt the victory of this recall, even remembered the name of her boy. Duane. That was it. This small success pleased him. A sweet, reclusive boy, he recalled. And there was a daughter too. A girl with an unusual name, but that he could not recall. As she passed him and sped off, Beth glared at him, off with one final dismissive look. Everyone was in such a hurry these days. Rush, rush, rush. And to get where? he wondered. The inevitable fate that awaited everyone? But this encounter shook him further. His hands trembled, and he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The car idled at the curb, its engine whispering of futilities. And of failures both ancient and new. What should he have said to Will? What could he have said to blunt the acuteness of his pain? That with time things would get better?

  He thought again of Cecelia. No, grief was not healed by time. Eventually, the edges crusted over and no longer ran scarlet, but the best one could hope for was the blessed way that memory faded at the edges, for the numbness of a scar in place of a wound or its fragile, webbed scab. Well, whether a memory grew clouded, a scab or scar, he knew fully how grief permanently changed one’s world, how it gave rise to doubt and despair, and even to questions about the nature of faith. Countless times over the years he had sat in the rectory study facing parishioners seeking consolation, desperate for answers because their world had been shattered and they were lost as to how to pick up the shards and start again. And it was an immutable fact that the loss of a child violently shifted the tectonic plates of one’s world. If he knew anything it was this. A current of unrest, ephemeral as the wake of a passing wasp, rippled through him, and he brushed it away. He reminded himself that faith was not faith if it had not been questioned and that even grief had a purpose. And hadn’t he delivered a homily on this very subject just weeks back? “Suffering points us to the good,” he’d quoted Pope John. “It creates the possibility of rebuilding goodness.” As he’d looked out at his parishioners, he’d felt the stony, near-hostile stare of Andrea Doucette, who had lost her husband three years before when the Alva Josephine went down off Georges Bank, and the hopeful, trusting gaze of twenty-seven-year-old Mary Silveria, whose husband had so recently been buried in the watery grave of the bank. His eyes had fallen next on Sophia Light, her face sober and purposeful. The grief of these women had disconcerted him—as if the Fates or the Weird Sisters had materialized in the wooden pews that morning—and before them he’d felt insubstantial. For a moment, he’d lost his place in the text. When he continued, he’d spoken of the link of suffering to love—a radical and resolute love in the passion of the cross—and had hoped that his words would reach them. “It is not our concern,” he’d said, “to erase or regret the scars of grief, but to find opportunity in the wounds that wrought them. Our faith,” he had told them, “must triumph over both our sorrows and our fears.”

  Now he thought of Sophia’s husband. He doubted Will would have sat through his homily. Certainly the man he’d seen earlier would reject any philosophical or theological discussion of the mystery and meaning of suffering. And again, at the thought of Will Light, he was swept by an anxiety so sharp it verged on apprehension, actually—impossibly—closer to premonition
than perturbation.

  He was brought back by the sound of a policeman tapping on the passenger window.

  “Father Gervase?”

  He rolled down the window, and Michael Callahan peered into the car. In spite of the uniform, Father Gervase could see the child the officer must have been—a skinny kid, an altar boy with a splash of freckles across his nose.

  “Is everything all right, Father?”

  “Fine, Michael. Fine. Thank you.”

  The policeman seemed uncertain.

  “I’m just thinking for a bit,” Father Gervase said. He repeated the words. “Just thinking.” As if it were his regular practice to plant his car and sit in meditation in what he now saw was a no-parking zone. At that moment, a convertible with the top down swept past, crammed with teenagers. He counted six in the backseat: three boys and, sitting on their laps, three girls, two of whom he recognized as members of the parish. They seemed to him as exotic as tropical birds. For the third time in minutes, he thought of Cecelia, remembered seeing her in their father’s old Nash, riding around town with her best friend, May, windows down, radio blasting, so filled with life and joy that even strangers smiled at the sight.

  Michael Callahan watched the car as it took the corner with wheels squealing.

  “Gotta go, Father,” he said.

  “I’ll see you on Sunday, then, Michael? At Mass?”

  “If I’m not on the duty roster, Father.”