Blood Rubies

by McDowell, Michael

  Katherine had stopped fighting him. She yanked her face to the side, and for one long flashing moment she envisioned Mark Robbins atop her. It was his mouth that burrowed into her neck, his arms that pinned her to the blanket, his muscular legs that slapped against the flesh of her thighs. And when her father was nearing orgasm, she moaned with such pleasure that James Dolan pulled back, staring at her with an expression of revulsion. His hot seed spattered over her heaving belly.

  Katherine opened her eyes and parted her lips in a grotesque smile. It was her father that leaned above her on outstretched arms, but it was Mark Robbins she saw. James Dolan weakly climbed off the bed and pulled his pants up, unable to take his eyes from her altered face. Finally he turned away, unlocked the door, and stepped unsteadily into the hall.

  Katherine’s smile turned into a scream that she blocked with her fist. She writhed on the bed until she had struggled out of all her clothes. Dazed, she staggered naked into the bathroom—ignoring her father standing perplexed and guilty in the doorway of his bedroom—and vomited on the tile floor.

  One night the following week, at the dinner table, with her knife in one hand and her fork in the other, Katherine told her adoptive parents in a flat and emotionless voice that she intended to become a Slave of the Immaculate Conception. Nothing they could say or do would shake her out of that resolve or prevent her from assuming the beloved black robes of the missionary order.

  5

  “You were the lucky one! You had a sister, a twin sister, and she burned to ashes in that fire in the North End! Burned to death with half a dozen bums and half a dozen whores! One of the bums was your father, and one of the whores was your mother! You think a woman like that would have been a mother to you like I have? You were the lucky one! You didn’t die, you didn’t have a prostitute for a mother, you didn’t grow up in a slum! You’re our only child, we’ve treated you better than if you were our very own! And what do you do for appreciation, tell me, what?”

  Katherine didn’t reply.

  “You decide to become a nun!”

  Anne Dolan turned away in her bitterness. The more she thought about it, the more she was aggrieved that her daughter had determined to take the veil. Anne Dolan conceived that Katherine was taking this step merely to flee from the house on Medford Street.

  “Well,” argued Anne Dolan in her cooler moments, “I don’t know why you have to become a nun, why don’t you become a secretary instead? Who knows—your father could have an accident in the candy factory tomorrow, and then where would we be? People die in the candy factory all the time.”

  “I don’t think anybody dies in the candy factory, Ma. I don’t think they have that kind of machinery.”

  “They do!” snapped Anne Dolan. “If you were a secretary, you could live here at home and put all your money in the bank, and then we’d have something to live on besides Social Security. What good will you be to us locked up in a convent? You know the old saying: a daughter in the convent is a daughter in the grave.”

  “I never heard that,” protested Katherine mildly.

  “I hear it all the time! So does Jim!”

  “Ma,” said Katherine patiently, “it’s not something I decided for myself. It’s—”

  “Of course not! The nuns decided. That’s who decided. I’m surprised they didn’t just throw a hood over your head and drag you away.”

  “God decided,” said Katherine. “It was God’s voice in my heart. I hear God’s voice in my heart every minute of the day. I’d never be happy anywhere else. I’d never be happy leading any other kind of life. God wouldn’t let me be happy.”

  “What about us! God is making us miserable by taking you away. Does God want us to be miserable? We’re good Catholics. What’s God got against us?”

  “Nothing. He loves you just as much as he loves me. But the fingers of Christ have wrapped themselves around my heart, and they’re squeezing it till I can hardly breathe. That’s what it feels like, Ma.”

  Anne Dolan observed her daughter with disdain, a tight smile creeping across her carmine lips. “I’m sorry to hear that, Kathy, ’cause Jim and I are going to see to it that you don’t get into that place.”

  The calm words came like a frigid slap across Katherine’s face. “What’re you going to do, Ma?”

  “Your daddy’s taking a day off from the factory next week and I’m calling the mother superior and set up an appointment. We’re going up there together and tell her all the reasons why you can’t go into the convent.”

  “Ma . . .” There was real fear in Katherine’s voice.

  “I won’t let you do this, Kathy! If I have to use my last single dying breath to keep you out of there, I’ll use it!” Anne Dolan’s face was hard with determination; then, suddenly, her brow smoothed and she sauntered triumphantly from the room.

  A few nights later, while Anne Dolan was taking a bath, James Dolan knocked softly at the door of his daughter’s room. It was inched open, and Katherine’s nervous eye appeared in the crack.

  “Come on here in the living room,” whispered James Dolan. “I want to talk to you about something real important . . .”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” said Katherine, and the door was pushed shut.

  A few moments later she came into the living room and stood just at arm’s length from her father.

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  James Dolan sat on the edge of the chair before the blank television screen, with his hands clasped tightly before him. Katherine realized with a sinking heart, when she smelled the stench of stale beer and the cigarette smoke on his shirt, that he had just come in from the Paradise Cafe.

  “I haven’t said nothing to you about . . . about what you want to do, Kathy, have I? I haven’t said nothing about it.”

  “No, you haven’t,” said Katherine.

  “But I got to. Honey, I got to know why you want to lock yourself up with all those nuns. I mean it’s not . . .” His chest heaved in a belch, and, almost tearfully, he broke off.

  “Not what?” said Katherine tonelessly.

  He looked up pathetically. “Not natural, that’s what. It’s not natural. Young girl like you, pretty girl like you. You could have a boyfriend for the asking and get married, and you know how much your mother would like a big wedding, and I would too, and there’d be kids, kids’ll make any woman happy, and that’s what you are now, you’re a woman, and that’s what I don’t understand, why a woman would want to lock herself up, you could be happy with a husband and kids, and we’d always have you. You wouldn’t be lost, and that’s just what you’re going to be if you go in that place. They’ll take you away, they’ll transfer you somewhere where we won’t ever see you again, they’ll take you to Minnesota or some place like that, and then they’ll never tell us where you are . . .”

  “If I thought I wouldn’t be staying right here in Somerville, I’d never even think of joining the convent.”

  “It don’t matter,” said James Dolan. “We still won’t see you. They won’t let us see you.”

  “It’s still what I have to do.”

  “Don’t you care what people think? You know what people think when somebody like you goes off to a convent? They think it’s not natural, they think there’s something wrong with you. You know what I mean, they think there’s something wrong—down there. Maybe you’re afraid of boys, maybe something happened to you—you know what I mean.”

  Katherine backed away. “I don’t care what people think about me. I’d be doing this for God. I wouldn’t be doing it for anybody else. I know this is what I have to do!”

  “You’re too young to know that!” He reached out and snatched her arm. “I been good to you,” he whispered hotly. “I work for you, you don’t think I go down to that goddamn candy factory every day just because I like the work. You don’t think
it’s because of her!” He jerked his head toward the bathroom.

  “Daddy,” pleaded Katherine, trying to pry his tobacco-stained fingers from her wrist.

  “You’re the only thing I care about, and it’s going to kill me to lose you to a pack of wrinkled old women, every damn one of ’em still got their goddamn cherries—”

  “Daddy!”

  “Every damn one of ’em,” he hissed, “ought to get their cherries busted, and that’s why your ma and I are going to stop all this. We’re not going to let you go in that place—they’ll never get you away from me—”

  In a fever, Katherine pried herself loose and ran back into her room. She slammed the door and shoved the chest of drawers against it.

  It was perhaps when she was most patient with her parents that Katherine played her most deceptive part. If she over and again described what it was to feel in her heart God’s call, if for the tenth or twentieth time she recited her irreproachable motives for joining the convent, it was not because she wanted her parents to understand, to be brought over to her side, to support her in this decision—it was only so that they might not interfere. But now she was frightened that her parents would find some way, working together, to prevent her from becoming a nun. Legally, it was beyond their power. Her eighteenth birthday, which had arbitrarily been celebrated on February fourteenth, Saint Valentine’s day, was some months past, and it was now possible for her to join the convent without her parents’ permission. With it, she might have gone in two years earlier, but Katherine did not like to think of this; the notion that she had squandered two years in the outside world made her tremble, and she consoled herself to the lost time by saying to herself that her adoptive mother and father would never have agreed to sign the papers. Her only concern now was to get into the convent. Katherine knew that, even though she was legally in the right, a visit by her parents to Mother Felicitas might prove disastrous to her cause. She hoped that she would be able to play her parents off one another, to make their rage impotent; Anne and James Dolan were natural antagonists anyway. Katherine remembered certain times past when her parents had gone at it with some ferocity, but not the most frightful of those memories matched what she heard from them now every night.

  James and Anne Dolan fought about their daughter’s decision, but they also fought about James’s drinking and James’s friends; they fought about Anne’s bingo and Anne’s cooking and Anne’s temper. Twenty years of constant friction, twenty years of smoldering anger, glowed nightly now like worms of red fire. Katherine, without realizing it, found herself waiting for the great explosion when both would be engulfed by the combustion of their implacable rage. And in that confusion of light and heat, she would make her way to the cool, dim safety of the convent.

  6

  On the day after her graduation from high school, Katherine Dolan sat in her room with the door closed and the curtains drawn against the early Saturday morning heat. In her diary she recorded her mingled feelings about the ceremony. Of course, for months before, she had at great length written of what her misery would be to leave the school, the convent, the church, and the nuns. But once she had made her decision to join the order of the Slaves of the Immaculate Conception, the school year became merely a barrier of time to be got across, and she regarded the end of it with nervous, yet happy anticipation.

  Just as she was turning the key in the lock of the diary, Katherine was startled by a knock at her door: not her father’s heavy hand, nor yet her mother’s peremptory rap. She thrust the diary into the drawer of her little desk, rose, and opened the door.

  Mrs. Shea stood there, and Katherine smiled and regarded her questioningly.

  “Oh Katherine,” cried Mrs. Shea, “I hate to bother you like this, but would it be possible for you to come up and keep the children? My sister—you’ve met her, she lives in Brockton—broke her arm this morning, I don’t know how she did it, she was hysterical over the phone, I’ve got to get over to Brockton this minute, and I was wondering could you please stay with the baby? Bill’s off with the Reserves this weekend. Oh, and congratulations, I wish I could have been there last night to see you graduate!”

  “Of course,” said Katherine. “You go on right now, and I’ll be up there in about two minutes. I just want to gather some things together. You take as long as you want. I’ll even spend the night, I just have to be out in time for mass in the morning, that’s all.”

  “Katherine,” cried Mrs. Shea vehemently, “you’re too good for this earth!”

  Katherine was glad of an excuse to be out of the apartment. Each Saturday afternoon Anne Dolan attended her second weekly bingo game with the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, and Katherine was left alone with her father. James Dolan had already taken his place on the screened porch and was dozing off in front of the Saturday morning cartoons. He refused to open a can of beer before noon, because he was convinced that only a man who drank before noon was alcoholic. And if he could not drink, then he must sleep. Katherine did not want to give her father the opportunity to repeat the scene of a few weeks past; and she knew he would never, no matter how much liquor he consumed in the course of an afternoon, mount the back stairs to the Shea apartment. She would be as safe there as within the confessional at the Church of St. Agnes.

  Upstairs, Katherine played for a while, with little John Shea on the floor before the television set. She prepared his food, held him close to her as she watched a Doris Day film on television, and later tucked him into his bed for a nap.

  Alone in the Sheas’ living room, Katherine drew the curtains against the hot afternoon sun. She hooked the back screen door in the kitchen, through which she could hear the sound of the baseball game drifting up from the screened porch just below, and settled in to watch Anthony Adverse. Her attention held not on the film, however, but on the crowding events and changes of the past two weeks. Her thoughts reeled darkly as she tried to find some way to prevent her parents from making the appointment with Mother Felicitas. Her head began to ache with the effort. With a fervor that obscured the sound of the television, that distorted her sense of passing time, that blocked out even her knowledge of where she was, Katherine Dolan prayed that nothing might interfere with her induction as a postulant into the order.

  She closed her eyes as she whispered one prayer after another. The blackness behind her lids was suddenly filled with a vision of dead Sister Bibiana, her robes streaked with lapping tongues of flame. The nun’s face was turned heavenward, eyes rolled back, as her lips formed the same prayers that Katherine huskily chanted. Sister Bibiana’s head began to loll in rhythm with their echoing chant, and then her voice suddenly intoned clearly in Katherine’s head: “You will wear my robes, Katherine. God’s eternal love will first sear and then consume your heart.”

  Katherine opened her eyes. Her hair clung damply to her forehead, and her back ached from the tortured posture she had held in the overstuffed armchair. She stood and walked, as if by a silent command, through the Shea apartment toward the entrance hall. She stole down the front stairs and through the unlocked door of her own apartment. She moved through the hot, shadowed rooms until she was standing in the kitchen. The baseball game blared loudly on the back porch, but when she peered through the screen, Katherine did not see her father. Her eyes drifted about the room, briefly examining things as if for the first time. As she turned back toward the dining room, she stopped. James Dolan stood grinning in the doorway.

  “Didn’t want me to hear you, did you?”

  Katherine’s tongue slid across her dry lips to moisten them; they had been seared by the vision of Sister Bibiana.

  “Do you love your daddy, Kathy?”

  He had evidently come back from the bathroom, and the fly of his baggy green pants was unzipped.

  “I love God, Daddy,” she murmured, but he did not hear her. She stepped to the counter beside the sink and rested her hand
s flat on the cool red Formica. Her eyes languidly skimmed over a small joint of cooked ham resting on a crumpled sheet of tinfoil, and the carving knife beside it.

  “You shouldn’t leave the ham out, Daddy, it’ll go bad.” Katherine wiped the blade of the knife with a sponge and then began methodically slicing the remaining meat.

  “Do you love me, Kathy? I’ll keep asking till you tell me, honey.”

  “Yes,” said Katherine.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes I love you.”

  James Dolan leaned heavily against the door frame. “You hurt me, Kathy. All the time. Every time I look at you, I hurt . . .”

  “I’m joining the convent, Daddy,” she said calmly as she continued to run the blade smoothly through the pink meat, cutting the slices thicker and thicker. “I’m joining the convent, and then you won’t have to think of me anymore.”

  “Don’t talk about that! Don’t talk about that—because it’s not going to happen. I’m not going to let it happen.”

  James Dolan stepped closer to his adopted daughter. He swayed badly, then grabbed at his crotch as if that would help to balance him. “But I worry about you all the time, honey,” he whispered. “All the time, honey, I worry about you all the time.”

  Katherine put the knife aside and pressed both hands onto the counter. “Then leave me alone,” she hissed, “just leave me alone.”

  “All I want’s a hug,” said James Dolan, coming up so close behind her that his alcoholic breath seemed to envelop her. “A hug to make me feel better. You don’t think I could ever let you go, do you? Even if you got in that place, I’d break in and drag you right back out again. And nobody would stop me.” His arms reached suddenly round her and his hands clapped over her breasts.