Blood Rubies

by McDowell, Michael

  Somerville, Massachusetts, a suburb only a mile or so north of Boston, has an area of only six square miles, but a population of over one hundred thousand, making it one of the most crowded municipalities on earth. It has no industry whatever, and its shopping areas are of only the most desultory nature. Its parks are small and woebegone, and its single distinctive feature is the thousands and thousands of triple-deckers, built in the decades around the turn of the century, that are terraced round its gentle hills.

  Religion plays a large role in the lives of Somervillians. It is still the rule, even in the poorer families, that the wife remains at home and the husband’s meager paycheck is stretched unaided across the family’s entire expenses. In consolation for their straitened lives, women often remain in the fervid embrace of their religion. Certainly there are Unitarian and Methodist and Congregational and Baptist churches to be found within the city’s limits, but they are scarcely to be compared in number, size, grandeur, or social importance to the Catholic churches, which seem to rise at the end of every third block. These churches are well-off, for women skimp and pare in order to present a larger contribution to Sunday’s collection plates than their near neighbors. The lawns of the churches are manicured, and the statues of the Virgin Mary are never defaced. Some scheme of building or remodeling or adding on seems always to be contemplated or in the works or just completed.

  In Somerville, enrollment in Catholic schools exceeds that of the public schools. Of the three principal parochial schools, the strictest, best endowed, and most highly regarded is run by a chapter of the Slaves of the Immaculate Conception, a sorority of missionary nuns. In the great sprawling buildings of the School of the Immaculate Conception, girls could be educated from the nursery through the senior year of high school. The convent and school are located on Lowell Street, within half a dozen blocks of the Dolan home. The church attached to this complex is dedicated to St. Agnes.

  It was there that Katherine Dolan had been enrolled since kindergarten, and the walk from her home to the convent-school was more familiar to her than the lineaments of her own face in the mirror.

  In the autumn of 1968 Katherine Dolan was eight years old and in her third year of the elementary level of ImCon, the students’ irreverent designation for the school. On the day before Thanksgiving, as she hurried down Medford Street toward her home, she held her reader close to her breast and burrowed her face into the turned-up fake-fur collar of her brown wool coat. The wind blew hard down the grimy street, stinging her bare, chafed knees above the green plaid socks and freezing her toes inside her scuffed oxfords. Tufts of her straight, light-blond hair whipped at her thin face from beneath her green knit hat, and her intense green eyes began to water. She stopped at the end of the sidewalk and glanced up at the windows of the second-floor apartment. Behind the lace curtains she could barely discern the gray flickering of the television. She saw her mother stand, lean forward to adjust the set, and then drop back out of sight.

  A sharp tapping at glass drew her eyes a story upward, where Mrs. Shea was waving down at Katherine; Mrs. Shea had recently married a Marine Corps sergeant who had been sent to Vietnam on the day after their honeymoon. Although Mrs. Shea was not Catholic, Katherine thought her very nice and sometimes visited her upstairs.

  The warmth of the narrow stairwell that led up to the second and third floors made Katherine’s face ache. She rubbed the back of her hand against her cheeks as she slowly mounted the stairs. She opened the door of the apartment slowly, as if trying to slip inside without attracting her mother’s attention, and placed her book on a little rickety table next to the clothes tree.

  “Katherine!” called her mother. “Don’t sneak around like that!”

  Anne Dolan sat in a formidable armchair placed no more than four feet from the screen of the portable television. Her back was to Katherine, and she didn’t look round to see her daughter. A large lace tablecloth was spread across Anne Dolan’s lap, and she was mending a tear in a big rose design as she watched Candlepins for Cash.

  “You were so late,” said Anne Dolan, “I almost thought it was your father. Now he’s late too.”

  Katherine seated herself on the frayed arm of the chair next to her mother’s, folded her hands over one another in her lap, and said softly, “Ma, I told you I was going to help the sisters.”

  Katherine glanced into the dining room. The Dolans’ good china was set out on one end of the table and covered with a large sheet of plastic that after Thanksgiving would be nailed over the kitchen window as stormproofing. Now that she began to adjust to the warmth of the room, Katherine could detect the too familiar odor of stringy beef that had been stewing for hours on top of the stove.

  “They ought to pay you,” said Anne Dolan. “The nuns are good, nuns are at the heart of the church, but they’re running you into the ground over there, because you let ’em. It’s a sin to take advantage of a child the way they take advantage of you. And it’s a sin in you to let ’em do it.”

  “I love to help, Ma. I like to do everything I can.”

  “I know you do,” snapped Anne. “I just wish you spent half the time helping me that you do over at the convent.”

  Katherine slid off the arm of the chair into the seat. She fisted both hands and dropped her chin upon them, as she stared at the television.

  It was only in the convent of the Immaculate Conception that Katherine Dolan was happy. For any number of reasons, she didn’t particularly like school, but it was a distinct pleasure to her to think that so close to the noisy classroom, with the jarring bells and the constant giggling and whispering, there lay the quiet, empty halls, the spare chambers, and the peace and serenity of the Convent of the Slaves of the Immaculate Conception. There, at all hours of the day and night, there walked, in smiling contentment, the three dozen nuns who were daughters of the church.

  In the school Katherine felt herself to have no part of the lives of her peers. She considered it her duty to report which of the boys or girls passed notes during religion class or secretly devoured candy during the mass they were compelled to attend on First Fridays. But she made her reports quietly, when none of the students were around, and was always disappointed that the offending child wasn’t sent home, deprived of recess, or otherwise punished by the nuns. Katherine was a diligent student, but no matter how she agonized over the reading assignments or the simple math problems, her attention was continually drawn away from what was taught, to the teacher herself—to the nun who stood at the front of every classroom.

  Katherine had heard the jokes of her classmates, in which nuns figured as penguins, but she found these crude witticisms blasphemous. To her the Slaves of the Immaculate Conception were beautiful and mysterious creatures. She knew the phrase enter the convent, of course, but the idea was still with her that these women were born to the robes, that they had been set apart and blessed to the order since birth. When, for whatever reason, she found herself standing near one of the nuns, Katherine would run her fingers lightly along the material of the voluminous black robes until she knew the feel of that coarse cotton as well as she knew her own skin.

  Each year the third grade put on a Thanksgiving pageant, solely for the entertainment of the nursery, kindergarten, and lowest elementary level, and this year’s show depicted highlights of the life of Mother Cabrini. Katherine pled with Sister Mary Claire, who had a flair for drama and directed all such affairs, that she be allowed to play the saint. So fervent was Katherine in this wish that she was given the part. Anne Dolan had refused to make the costume, but Mrs. Shea, upstairs, was an expert needlewoman and, going only by photographs, had produced a beautiful copy, in exquisite miniature, of a nun’s habit. Katherine kept it at home a full week—telling Sister Mary Claire that it wasn’t quite ready yet—and whenever her mother was out of the house, Katherine put the robes on. She locked the door, knelt by the side of her bed, and pra
yed, pretending that she was in a chapel, surrounded by her sisters.

  Katherine felt pressure on her foot and looked over at her mother. Anne Dolan, breaking the white thread with her teeth, had pushed the toe of one worn slipper against Katherine’s oxford.

  Katherine blinked. “What were you saying, Ma?”

  “Never mind now. What’s wrong with you? Always going into a trance: I’m surprised you haven’t been run down by a truck before this. It’s a wonder to me that you can get to and from the school every day.”

  Anne Dolan had rethreaded her needle and began working on a delicate stitch. She leaned close over the material.

  “What did you say, Ma?” said Katherine with resigned patience.

  “It’s not important. You don’t care what I say or you’d listen the first time.” Anne Dolan pushed back a black wave of dyed hair from her forehead and pursed her bright-red lips.

  Katherine sighed. “That’s not true.”

  “I asked you what you were doing at the convent so late.”

  “Sister Mary Claire asked me if I wanted to help them get the food for Thanksgiving, and—”

  “And of course you said you’d let them put you in chains if they wanted to. There’s probably sixty of ’em, don’t have a thing to do with themselves all day long but say half a dozen prayers, and they need your help, when I’m here all by myself, with five thousand things to do before tomorrow morning. I haven’t even started the dressing yet and—”

  “Grandma always says I get in the way when I try to help.”

  “Well Grandma’s not here now. I need that bread broken up in crumbs, and make sure they’re small. You never break it up small enough. And when you’re through with that, you can scrape out the pumpkin, and make sure you don’t get the seeds all over the floor. And this room needs to be dusted, and be sure you move all the furniture when you sweep.”

  Katherine went into the kitchen to begin the work that had been set out for her. Her obedience was not to Anne Dolan, but rather to the nuns, who had always stressed the importance of obeying one’s parents. Katherine was ashamed of her mother: ashamed that Anne Dolan dyed her hair black, that she used rouge on her pale cheeks, that she disguised the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes with pearl powder, that she wore pants that were too tight and dresses that were too short.

  For her part, Anne Dolan resented her daughter; had resented her from the first month after the adoption, when she had realized how much of a responsibility the child was. It had been her husband and her mother who had insisted upon the necessity of adopting a child, for seven years of marriage had proved that Anne was barren. The plan had been to adopt a number of children as Jim Dolan rose in importance and salary in the Necco Wafer factory in Cambridge; but James Dolan was not advancing, and Anne had used his failure to get any but cost-of-living raises year after year as an excuse never to trouble the adoption agency again. At least once a week, Anne Dolan told Katherine, “You’ve made me old before my time.” She had used the fact of Katherine’s adoption as a taunt and weapon against the child, since long before Katherine even knew what the word meant. “You’re adopted!” her mother screamed at her once, when she was two and had upset a plate of food: “Your real mother burned up in a low-down sleazy apartment house, and she threw you out the window! Your real mother burned to ashes, and then got washed away by the fire hoses!” Anne Dolan had got the confidential information on Katherine’s parentage from a worker at the adoption agency who was also a member of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart.

  This “real mother,” to whom Anne Dolan still sometimes referred, had taken on mythic stature in Katherine’s mind: she saw her as a saint who had undergone the martyrdom of flame, like Catherine of Siena. But when the child asked questions concerning this woman, Anne Dolan would say that she knew nothing at all about her, that Katherine was got from an adoption agency, and that’s all there was to it. Anne Dolan knew that Katherine had been born out of wedlock and was reserving this information as ammunition for a time when Katherine understood fully the shame of bastardy.

  Katherine sat at the kitchen table scooping the seeds out of the pumpkin. As usual, she was thinking about the convent, where at this very moment the nuns were filing into the chilly gold-and-purple sanctuary of the Church of St. Agnes for vespers. She wished that she could be there with them. Sister Mary Claire, Katherine was virtually certain, had never even heard of Candlepins for Cash.

  So intent was she upon her homely task and the bright vision in her brain that she was startled when she looked up and saw her father in the doorway. James Dolan was thirty-three, just a year younger than his wife, but a man to whom the years had not been kind. He was noticeably overweight, he had lost much of his fine dark hair, and his face was blotched red; he had drunk too much liquor on too many days after work.

  James Dolan was not the man to miss so good an excuse as its being the first really frigid day of the year, or the eve of a paid holiday, to go out drinking after his eight-to-four shift.

  “Hi, Kathy.” He grinned. “I brought you something.” He waved a paper bag in front of him. Much wrinkled and torn about the top, it bore the logo of a women’s clothing store in Central Square, Cambridge.

  “Hi, Daddy,” said Katherine softly, and continued to spoon out her pumpkin seeds.

  “Aren’t you going to give Daddy a big hello hug?”

  Katherine put the spoon carefully down on the table and wiped her hands on a dish towel. She slid down from the chair and stood before her father. James Dolan lifted her in his arms and nearly squeezed the shallow breath out of her. “Daddy!” she protested. “Please put me down!”

  James Dolan’s large fleshy hand rested at the base of her spine. “You been a good girl, honey?” he whispered hotly in her ear, then pressed his own ear against her mouth, for her to whisper back.

  “Yes,” she answered, trembling. “I always try to be good.”

  Anne Dolan’s heels could be heard on the bare dining room floor. James Dolan lowered Katherine to the floor.

  “Jim,” said Anne Dolan, “go watch the news or something, ’cause I have to get dinner on the table and you’re in the way.”

  Katherine ran back to the spoon and pumpkin. James Dolan did not look at his wife as he passed her in the doorway. He switched channels on the television set and fell heavily into the large chair before it.

  As Katherine placed aside the last of the dinner dishes to dry, she reached through the hot, greasy water and pulled the rubber plug to drain the sink. From the living room she heard the taped laughter of a situation comedy on the television. Katherine hadn’t watched much television since she learned that there were no sets in the convent. When she went into the dining room to refill the salt shakers—this had been the last of her mother’s directions before she left for Wednesday night bingo at the Knights of Columbus—she glanced into the living room and started to find her father slumped in his chair and staring not at the television, but at her. The cold gray light, the only illumination in the room, played off his pale, fleshy face.

  She turned out the lights in the kitchen and dining room and crept softly through the living room. What she feared, happened: her father called her over to him.

  “Come and sit with Daddy, sweetheart. Come over here and watch television with me.”

  “I got to do reading tonight. In the third grade they give us homework.”

  “You can do that later, Kathy.”

  She nodded obediently, and was about to settle into her mother’s chair when James Dolan sprung at her and lifted her onto his lap. “There,” he said, “isn’t that more comfortable now?”

  “Yes . . .”

  James Dolan shifted, and Katherine suddenly felt a growing hardness against the inside of her thigh. She pressed the palms of her hands against the chair arms and tried to move away, but her fathe
r clasped her more firmly against his lap. He held her secure against him and pushed his chin against the top of her head so that she could scarcely move. Her head bobbed up and down whenever he laughed at something that happened on the television.

  “I like holding my little girl like this,” he said slowly. “And I bet you like it too, don’t you? I tell you something, Kathy, in about eight years you’re going to be the prettiest girl on Medford Street, and I know what I’m talking about, too! I’m going to look out the window and I’m going to see a line of boys a mile long following you around like you were the queen of this town—Kathy Dolan, the Queen of Somerville!”

  Katherine drew away from her father. “I have to do my homework now, Daddy. It’s getting late.”

  “Let me help you, why don’t you?”

  “I don’t need any help. We’re supposed to do this by ourselves.”

  “I won’t help you then, I promise,” he said, pressing hard with the flat of his hand against the bulge in his trousers. “But I’ll let you read to me, and you’ll show me how good you can do it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you read, Kathy. You’re growing up faster than I can keep track of.”

  “All right,” said Katherine reluctantly.

  He stood. “You go get that book and then come in the bedroom and you can read to me there. I got to lay down for a while.”