When she had finished, she turned back the pages, kissed the image of Christ, and closed the book. She snapped the tiny lock shut and slipped the volume into the table drawer.
The overhead light went off automatically, and Katherine moved to sit on the edge of the cot. Beyond the dark window the winter sky was clear and starlit. The moon shone brilliantly on the deep lawn that sloped gently down to the marshes and the rickety pier there. Tall, bulbous-topped cattails swayed gently and with a melancholy swishing at the edge of the marsh.
Stark, dusty Somerville was a world away, and that her mother languished in a prison ten floors above East Cambridge caused Katherine no more discomfort than the remembrance of pain in a wound now healed.
11
“The robes look real good on you, Kathy, I didn’t think they would, but they do.” Anne Dolan sat in an armless chair, with her back to the sleet-streaked window in the small visiting room of the county jail. A matron, thin and wizened, stood in uniform near the mesh door in the far corner. Katherine sat opposite her mother, in a more commodious chair; the sleeves of her habit draped over the arms.
We’ve changed places, thought Katherine. Now I’m the one in power. It wasn’t power, really, it was simply a vast superiority of circumstance: Katherine was honored, satisfied, calm, and—above all—free. Anne Dolan was disgraced, unhappy, nervous, and—above all—incarcerated. Katherine knew that she ought to be patient with her mother, whose situation, after all, was extreme and dire, but patience was hard got for the young nun.
Anne Dolan’s eyes were moist and red-rimmed. She glanced shyly up at Katherine and shifted her eyes to her lap.
These robes protect me, thought Katherine, even from her.
There was a long silence. Katherine glanced meaningfully at the matron, who nodded deferentially and slipped out of the room. She stood within sight on the other side of the mesh door, but she no longer could hear the conversation of the mother and daughter.
“I’m so glad you came, Kathy, I wasn’t sure that they’d let you out of there. I asked another woman here, and she said they never let nuns out, not even for their parents’ funerals.”
“Reverend Mother Celestine told me that I ought to visit you,” said Katherine stiffly, unwilling even that her mother should believe that she had come entirely of her own choice and desire. “Sister Henrica drove me up here, she’s waiting outside.”
“Are you happy?” said Anne Dolan. “I hope you’re happy, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted in this world is for you to be happy, you know that, don’t you, Kathy?”
“I’m as happy as I could possibly be,” said Katherine grimly.
“It starts tomorrow,” Anne Dolan whispered. “Are you going to be there, Kathy?”
“I’m being called as a witness,” said Katherine, “I have to be there.”
Anne Dolan looked up: “You’re going to tell them how much we loved you, aren’t you?” she cried eagerly. “How we did so much for you, Jim and I, we did so much for you, you were adopted, Kathy, and we loved you like you were our own little girl, that’s why I can’t understand why people could think that I . . . But I didn’t. You know I didn’t. Nobody thinks I did it. You don’t think so, the neighbors don’t think so. Mrs. Shea came to see me the other day, and she doesn’t think so, and the nuns at St. Agnes, they know you, and I’m sure that they don’t think so. It was just the police, and the people in the court, and the judge, people who didn’t know Jim, and people who don’t know me, they think I did it, but you’re going to tell everybody that I couldn’t possibly have done it, you’re going to tell everybody that it couldn’t possibly have been me that killed Jim, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to testify about what happened that day, I’m going to talk about whatever they ask me, Ma.”
“Good,” said Anne Dolan, relieved in her assumption that Katherine would speak only well of her.
Katherine sat silent.
Anne Dolan looked around her distractedly and repeated, “You look so good in those robes, Kathy, and you’ve got more color now.” She plucked absently at her blouse. “Did that lawyer tell you what to say when you’re on the stand?”
“Which lawyer, Ma?”
“My lawyer, Mr. Giovinco. Who else?”
“Ma,” said Katherine slowly, “I’m testifying for the prosecution.”
Anne Dolan looked up startled. “Against me? You’re testifying against your own mother!”
“No,” said Katherine, “of course not. I’m just testifying. It was just the prosecution that subpoenaed me first; if they hadn’t, Mr. Giovinco would have. I’m surprised he didn’t mention it.”
“But what will you say, what will you say against me, Kathy?”
“Nothing, Ma, they just want me to talk about—about coming downstairs, that’s all.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say anything about that, Kathy,” whispered her mother, “we were both so upset that afternoon, so upset, you know we were—somebody coming in and killing Jim, and we both found his body—oh, Kathy, it was so awful!”
“Yes,” agreed Katherine, “it was awful.”
Anne Dolan leaned forward earnestly. “What if things don’t go right, Kathy?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if they don’t believe us? They’ll send me to Framingham. I hear stories about Framingham here—it’s awful there. I’ve ridden through Framingham, and I didn’t like it . . .”
Katherine did not bother to point out to her mother that were she sent to the women’s prison there, she wouldn’t be spending much time in the town.
“They have capital punishment here now,” whispered Anne Dolan. “I remember when the governor signed the bill, I thought, That’s a terrible thing to do, what if somebody’s innocent and gets sent to the electric chair? And now it could be me, Kathy, they might end up putting me in the electric chair, have you ever thought about that? I’m scared,” she whimpered.
“They don’t have the electric chair any more, Ma. It’s poison gas.”
“I don’t know why I’m worried,” giggled Anne Dolan, “they’d never convict a woman whose daughter was a nun. I know that’s why as soon as all this happened you went in the convent, wasn’t it? I was surprised when you told me that was what you were going to do—I thought you had given that idea up. But then I realized that you were doing it all for me. Everything’ll be all right when they find out that you’re a nun. You knew the jury would never convict a woman whose daughter was a nun.”
Katherine didn’t reply.
“And then when this is all over, you can come back to me—I’ll need somebody to take care of me.”
“I’m going to take my final vows, Ma—no matter what happens at the trial.”
“Oh of course, Kathy, I know that!” her mother cried, and reached out and grasped her daughter’s knee through the black cotton robe: “But you’ll put it off for a while, won’t you, I know you will, the mother superior will give you some sort of dispensation because I’ve been through so much, and I’m so sick, they’ll let you spend a few years with me, you could get a job, and we’d get along just fine. We’ll have to find a new place to live, though, I don’t want to go back to Medford Street, you and I won’t need much, Kathy, we can get along on very little. When I get out of here, everything will be the same again . . .” She gazed hopefully into her daughter’s face.
“I’ll pray for you, Ma,” said Katherine. “All the sisters at St. Luke’s and St. Agnes’s are praying for you too. I have to go now.”
“All right,” said Anne Dolan meekly. “But just stand up and let me look at you once more.” Obediently, Katherine stood, her arms stiff at her sides. “Step back, so I can see you better.” Katherine did so. “Oh, you’re such a pretty girl,” exclaimed her mother, “if only Jim could see you!”
When she left her mother at the Middlesex County Jail, Katherine rode with Sister Henrica to the campus of Boston College for their evening class, Special Education for the Mentally Impaired. It was an advanced course, added to her normal undergraduate load, and her favorite. Several long conversations with Reverend Mother Celestine had helped Katherine decide that she would be a teacher of children with special needs.
Following the ideas of a certain Jesuit professor at Boston College, who had taken a particular interest in the elementary school attached to the Convent of St. Luke, Mother Celestine had done away with the “Special Class,” in which the certifiably slow and retarded children were kept apart from those with normal abilities. This segregation, even to the children’s often dim consciousnesses, was apparent, and their alienation from the other students was thought to hamper their already difficult advancement. In public schools it was often not practical to incorporate these disadvantaged youngsters into the regular classes, where they must inevitably fall behind because their teachers could not provide them with the painstaking instruction they required, but at St. Luke’s there was a superfluity of young nuns who were willing to assist in the slow and monotonous care of these children. Katherine was one.
On three days out of the week she assisted Sister Thomasina in her first-grade class, patiently listening to the children—Katherine could hardly believe that she had herself been once so small and tender—inch through their lessons in reading and numbers. She was infinitely patient and formed special affections for those who were slowest and performed with the most difficulty, for in them she glimpsed the Katherine Dolan that was.
She would sit with them for three quarters of an hour and, using crayons and marbles, patiently illustrate over and over the principles of addition and subtraction. She would gently hold their meek little hands and guide their thick pencils in the formation of the letter A twenty-five times—and not be disappointed that the children could not then do it alone on the twenty-sixth attempt. She would take a group of six round the school yard and talk to them of everything that could be seen from that limited vantage: clouds, rocks, marsh, and vegetation. And sometimes, in her free time, she would accompany a small group of them for a brief outing to Nantasket, only fifteen minutes away, to walk and gather shells from the winter beach while she talked of waves, currents, and tides to these children who didn’t yet understand the difference between fresh water and salt.
For the older classes she sometimes graded papers—just as she had so often imagined helping the nuns at ImCon—or monitored recess periods, occasionally joining in a game of kickball or teaching the smallest children the strange games she had learned in her childhood and forgot all about until now—Spider, Giant, and Crooked Mile. Katherine had never felt so happy or so useful, and her journal was nightly filled with small episodes of the day’s work in the grammar school: a child who had suddenly learned to write his own name, a girl who had embraced her in unrestrainable affection, a boy who had said that she reminded him of his dead mother. Katherine looked forward eagerly to the time in which she would have a class of her own; but she knew too that she would miss the opportunity she enjoyed now, of coming into contact with almost every child that was enrolled in St. Luke’s.
Katherine’s only worry, her only impatience, was for her mother’s trial and its outcome. Hingham was years and leagues away from Somerville, from Medford Street, from the Middlesex County Jail, and she had no great fear that she would ever be forced permanently to reenter that world. Her mother could talk for as long as she wanted about Katherine’s coming to live with her again when she was acquitted, she could make all the plans she wanted for Katherine’s getting a job to support her, she could build the biggest castles that ever existed in an imaginary sky—but Katherine knew that nothing would prevent her from taking her final vows in a year’s time.
But the nuisance was that the trial hung over Katherine as well as her mother. Mr. Giovinco, a greasy sort of man, had held several conferences with Katherine, suggesting that she keep her evidence toned down for her mother’s sake. “Of course she didn’t do it, we know that, she loved your father very much, she tells me so every time I see her, and I know it must be true, but we ought not let the jury know—there’ll be a jury, of course—that there was any trouble between them. And are you really sure that you saw her holding the knife? You just saw the knife, and it was on the table near her, but she wasn’t actually holding the knife, was she, Sister Katherine?”
12
“Sister Katherine,” said the district attorney, “you are certain that you heard no noise from your own apartment prior to the time that your mother returned from her bingo game?”
He stood a discreet distance from her, out of deference to her robes, but also that he might face the jury. He was middle-aged, with dull ginger-colored hair and pale gray eyes that bore into Katherine.
“I heard the television on the back porch. In the summer Daddy sat out there and watched television. There was a baseball game on all afternoon.”
The man nodded and bit his lip thoughtfully. “But you testified that you had the television on all afternoon in the Sheas’ apartment. How could you also have heard your father’s television?”
“I watched television all afternoon with John Shea,” said Katherine. “He fell asleep in my lap, and I used the remote control to turn it down very low so that he could sleep. I could hear the ball game from down below.”
“And you were also able to hear when your mother came back into the house. You heard her open and close the front door and go up the stairs, and then into your apartment. Is that right?”
Katherine held her hands together in her lap and beneath her scapular. Her palms were sticky with perspiration, and she furtively clawed the material with her nails. Her temples throbbed beneath her wimple, and she fought the desire to thrust her fingers beneath it and massage them. The air in the courtroom was stale and heavy, and the large windows were closed against the frigid winter rain. The radiators rattled and hissed; occasionally they were filled with knocks so loud they covered her halting testimony so that she had to repeat it.
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I heard Ma—” She stopped again. It embarrassed Katherine to speak of her parents in such familiar terms before so many strangers. Also, they were so distant from her now—her father dead and, now that the grave diggers’ strike was over, at last decently buried; her mother, pale, thin, and subdued, on trial for murder in the first degree. She was a nun, and what were they? “I heard my mother come in,” she said.
“How could you be certain that it was your mother?”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps the only reason,” said the district attorney, “that you thought it was your mother was that you saw later that she had come in. Couldn’t it have been someone else—Mrs. Shea, for instance?”
“I lived in that house for eighteen years,” said Katherine simply. “I got to know what it sounded like when it was my mother who was coming in the front door.”
“Thank you,” said the district attorney, “that’s exactly what I meant.”
“I could even tell if she was in a good mood or a bad—”
“Objection,” cried Mr. Giovinco.
“Please, Sister Katherine,” said the judge kindly, “just answer the questions that are put to you.”
Katherine nodded. “I knew it was my mother by the sound,” said Katherine.
“Well,” said the district attorney, “was she in a good mood or a bad mood?”
“Objection!”
“Sustained.”
Katherine glanced at the clock that was placed between the windows. She had been on the stand for ten minutes, and already felt herself exhausted. She looked down at her lap. Beneath her scapular she felt among the folds of her robe and closed her wet fist over the rosary in her pocket. She was frightened to look
out at the spectators, frightened to look at her mother.
“If anyone had come into the house before your mother, you would have heard, is that correct?”
“Yes,” said Katherine. “I had left the door into the hallway open for the breeze. I would have heard. Nobody came in.”
“And if someone had come in, you would have known who it was, or you would have known it was a stranger, is that correct?”
“Yes,” said Katherine, wondering how many questions the man would drag out of this single point.
“And if your father had raised his voice for help—”
“Objection!”
The judge was about to speak, but the district attorney rephrased his question: “If your father had called out to you, you would have heard, would you not?”
“Objection! Leading the witness!”
“Sustained.”
“Did you hear your father call to you, Sister Katherine?”
“No,” said Katherine. “The back door was open too, for the cross-ventilation. I think I would have heard him if he had called. I could hear him when he got up to go to the bathroom, or when he went to get something to drink—he always let the screen door slam—but I didn’t hear him call out.”
“So, Sister Katherine,” said the district attorney, “although both front and back doors were opened of the apartment on the third floor, and although the television was set on low volume, you heard no one enter the house and move up either the front stairs or the back stairs all afternoon long, is that correct?”
Blood Rubies Page 9