Anne Dolan shifted uneasily in her chair. “Are you sure you’ve got that right, Kathy? ’Cause you remember Mrs. Lomax at Saint Agnes every week, in the kitchen, when the nuns were too busy at the school.”
Sister Katherine stood and moved to the window. She undid the latch and slid it up a few inches, allowing cool air into the room. She pressed her hands against the top of the radiator until she could stand the burning no longer. She turned back to her mother. “I talked to the director downstairs, and she said that there shouldn’t be any trouble finding you a job. Most businesses would rather employ a murderer than a thief. We’ll find you a place to live—”
“It’s got to be nicer than this!”
“Apartments in Boston are expensive, Ma,” said Katherine evenly. “Maybe you should try to find something out from the city a little—in Lowell or Springfield, maybe. Why don’t—”
“But that would be so far away from you! Maybe if I called the Mother Superior down there and explained things to her, she’d—”
“No!” cried Sister Katherine. “Don’t you ever call the convent again! I told you not to, but you went on and did it! There’s no work there, and I don’t want you annoying Mother Celestine! I’ll help you all I can, I’ll do everything I can, but don’t you dare pick up that phone!”
Anne Dolan began to weep. “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, Kathy.”
Katherine picked up her cape from the bed and tied it round her shoulders. “Good-bye, Ma, I’ll—” She stopped, fished inside the pocket of the cape and extracted a rosary of red beads with a heavy silver-plated crucifix. She moved back to the table and took her mother’s thin hand. The fingers fell open, and Sister Katherine laid the chain of beads across the calloused palm.
“It’s been blessed. I had it blessed this morning.”
Anne nodded dumbly and closed her hand over the rosary.
“I’ll call you later this week.”
Anne Dolan couldn’t speak for her tears.
“Mother Superior Celestine told me to say that the whole convent was praying for you.” Katherine stepped into the dimly lighted hallway and closed the door softly behind her.
32
Within a month of her release from Framingham, Anne Dolan secured employment as a part-time sales clerk in a large variety store in Central Square, Cambridge. She had wept to think she would be so near Somerville, in a place where she knew former friends to shop, but nothing else had presented itself, and she did not venture to object. She received $75 a week, and her weekly rent was $31.50.
She occupied a single room in an East Cambridge house populated mostly by unmarried male factory workers. It had a high ceiling and three windows that looked out over a playground noisy with children in the day and teenagers at night. A sink had been thrust into one corner, and she had a hot plate that had been given her by her employer because only one burner worked. She shared a bathroom down the hall with the three men who also lived on the third floor of the house.
The first time that Katherine visited her mother in this place, Anne Dolan had been ashamed of her circumstances. She felt old and wasted and helpless. In the course of the hour-long visit, she begged her daughter to pray for her, she demanded that she quit the convent, she asked that she pay for a television set. Anne Dolan wanted consolation, she wanted a dye-job and permanent, she wanted to die. Katherine had left with the vow that she would never return. But Anne Dolan yelled out the window after the retreating nun: “Kathy, if you’re not back here next Saturday afternoon, I’ll call the Mother Superior and tell her you hit me!”
Katherine’s dreams and expectations of life were soured by her mother’s reappearance. Daily Katherine vowed to strike Anne Dolan’s image from her mind, and daily it loomed larger before her. Sister Katherine couldn’t hear the telephone ring in the convent house without dreading it to be a call from her mother. Each day, although she fought desperately against the sin, hate for her mother’s very existence grew within her. Most nights, despite the inclement weather, Katherine would steal down from her chamber, cross silent Mystic Avenue, and in the church pray for God to forgive her evil and destructive emotions. She returned to her room with trembling hands, lips still moving automatically in supplication and a sheen of perspiration glowing on her pale brow. In the morning, however, she felt no better for her effort and could do nothing but vow to pray still harder.
It was just at this difficult time that another issue began to tug at Katherine’s already burdened mind. One winter afternoon, after she had taken her last examination in the morning, Katherine sat at the back of the chapel and prayed her gratitude for the test’s having gone easily. She was alone except for the organist practicing Bach fugues. After a while Sister Henrica entered, genuflected before the altar, and slipped into the pew with Sister Katherine. Sister Henrica wet her lips as if hesitant to speak, and then slipped closer to Sister Katherine.
“I was in Boston yesterday,” she whispered, and then looked at Sister Katherine with significance.
“Yes?” asked Sister Katherine, also with significance—for she could not approve of the chapel being used for casual conversation.
“I was downtown. At Park Street. At one o ’clock.”
Sister Katherine’s eyes grew wide. “Yes?” she asked again.
“I saw you,” hissed Sister Henrica, and sat back suddenly, as if with relief at a great confession.
Sister Katherine was confused. “I wasn’t—”
“Shhh! Please don’t try to deny it, Sister. I’m not jumping on you, I’m just warning you! What if it had been Mother Celestine or Sister Winifred instead of me?”
“What are you talking about?”
Sister Henrica made a face at what she considered Sister Katherine’s wilful misunderstanding. “I saw you in street clothes. I saw you walking right by the subway, and you had on a short jacket and blue jeans. You came very near us—I can’t understand why you didn’t see us—and I got Sister Winifred to look the other way just in time, I—”
Sister Katherine blinked. “No,” she said. “That wasn’t me. That was somebody else. I wasn’t in Boston yesterday.”
“Yesterday. At one o’clock. I know it was you!”
“I had an exam yesterday at one o’clock. And in the morning too. I ate lunch at the cafeteria at BC with Father Dickerson, who teaches that course on problem adolescents. I was at Chestnut Hill the entire day, Sister.”
Sister Henrica looked bewildered.
“Then it was your twin! It must have been! You must have a twin sister!”
“No,” said Katherine. “I’m an only child.”
On the following Saturday morning, Katherine was given money to cover the expense of a round-trip bus ticket to Boston, subway fare to and from East Cambridge, and lunch for herself and her mother. But when it happened that Mother Superior Celestine had to drive to Worcester that morning, she offered Sister Katherine a ride into the city, which Katherine gratefully accepted. She was let off at an Orange Line subway station in the South End, near the halfway house that had sheltered her mother, but with nearly two hours to kill before Anne Dolan got off from her morning shift.
The South End was an area of accelerating change: a population of the ethnic poor—Spanish, black, Puerto Rican—being displaced by the relentless gentrification of young professional childless couples and gays. Strings of four or more four-story town houses were run-down, one more derelict than the next, with drunks and bag-ladies encamped on the steep carved stoops, while the next several had been recently sandblasted, fitted with new carved doors, leaded glass, painted shutters, and winter window boxes of clipped evergreens. It was all a strange mixture of sagging decay and explosive restoration; but despite the signs of rejuvenation, everywhere visible, Katherine felt ill-at-ease. All the streets themselves were dirty and, she was sure, dangero
us.
The idea came to her suddenly; she would not visit her mother at all. Nothing but misery waited for her in East Cambridge—nothing but pleas and recriminations and complaint. It would be unpleasant to wander the streets of Boston for the entire day, but that unpleasantness was nothing in comparison to what she would suffer in spending the afternoon with Anne Dolan. In fact, if she only went to the public library—which in the past three years had become a place well known and comfortable to her—she might pass the day in relative contentment.
It occurred to her, as she was walking past the great police station on Berkeley Street, that in her habit she might be recognized by one of the nuns also in town for the day, by a parishioner, by the parent of one of her students. This possibility made her distinctly uncomfortable, and she almost resolved to go to her mother after all. The thought of her deception becoming known to Reverend Mother Celestine was terrible.
Just before the bridge that crossed the railroad tracks, she stopped and stared at her reflection in the windows of the Morgan Memorial, determined to remain still until she had made some decision. Looking at herself, she began to wonder if the young woman that Sister Henrica had mistaken for her was actually identical in appearance. She glanced around as if in timid expectation of finding her duplicate standing near. Katherine thought for a few minutes more, not realizing that she was drawing some attention to herself by the intensity of her gaze and her motionlessness. Then, quite resolutely, Katherine entered Morgan Memorial. She moved past the shelves of housewares and the cases of paperback books, toward the racks of women’s clothing at the very back. She laid her book bag on a table, settled her cape far back on her shoulders, and one by one went through a long rack of dresses. At the last, she selected a burgundy flannel with high collar and long sleeves. She folded it and set it atop her book bag. From a table of scarves she pulled out one that was long, soft, and gray. A stiff blue vinyl coat with a rip hidden beneath the sleeve brought the total up to only a little more than eight dollars—and she had more than fifteen with her.
“It’s for a woman whose apartment building burned down last night,” whispered Katherine needlessly to the checkout girl.
“Great,” she replied.
Katherine looked up and saw that the girl had an eye heavily ringed with purple bruises.
At a sewing notions shop on Boylston Street, Katherine purchased a ring of safety pins and slipped these into her book bag.
She mounted the steps of the Boston Public Library, stared for a moment up at the names of the world’s philosophers, artists, writers, scientists, and enlightened rulers, and then entered through the swinging doors. Climbing unhesitatingly the vaulted marble stairway, she ignored the dark, dim murals that had so intrigued her in the past. She walked through an exhibition room, where she was happy to find no more than two men whispering before a large mounted poster. At the far end, beside the closed door that led to the library’s rare print section, was a ladies’ room. Katherine turned the handle with a perspiring hand.
As she knew, the rest room was intended for the use of only one person at the time. She locked the door behind her.
Avoiding her reflection in the mirror, Katherine made the sign of the Cross and then prayed for forgiveness as she untied her cape.
Five minutes later Katherine stood before the mirror and stared at herself in it. Her short blond hair was almost hidden beneath the gray scarf that she’d tied at the back. The burgundy flannel dress was a size too large, but the safety pins fixed to the inside of the waist gave the illusion of a comfortable fit. Beneath the skirt she had pinned up her long slip well above the hemline, and the black hose and simple black shoes had been left—they did not clash.
Someone tried the door of the room. Katherine saw a woman’s shadow through the frosted glass.
“Just a minute,” she called softly, in a voice that she could scarcely recognize as her own.
The shadow retreated.
Katherine folded the items of her habit and placed them neatly inside the wrinkled paper bag; she was especially careful of the wimple, rolling it about the scapular. She pulled on her jacket, adjusted a wisp of hair that had fallen across her forehead, and left the rest room. She nodded shyly to the librarian, who leaned against the wall tapping her foot impatiently.
Katherine went to the elevator and pressed the button. She threw the book bag over her shoulder and pressed the bag of clothing far up under one arm. She tried not to walk like a nun. The elevator door opened, and Katherine stepped into it alone.
For the next hour she wandered through the newer section of the library, picking books off the shelves and leafing through them. She sat at tables where serious students bent over their volumes and their notes, and avoided tables where the drunks slept and old women muttered to themselves as they worked crossword puzzles. In the theatre in the basement she sat among a couple of hundred children and watched a film called The Whales of the North Atlantic. She followed some of the children into the juvenile reading room and looked through the books there with a view to recommending them to her own students.
Without her habit she was almost at her ease. The guilt that had attended her deception had been folded up and put away with the wimple, scapular, and rosary. Even if someone from the convent saw her and word got back to Hingham that she had been seen in street clothes in the Boston Public Library, Sister Katherine would have Sister Henrica’s testimony that there was an exact physical duplicate to Katherine in the city. She was safe.
In the section on sociology, Katherine examined a large picture book on famous female criminals. There was a photograph of Winnie Ruth Judd, the trunk murderess, smiling as she entered the courtroom on the day of her sentencing. Reminded of Anne Dolan, she slammed the book shut and walked on. Why should I visit her at all? Sister Katherine thought. She’s not my real mother.
Passing from the new portion of the building back to the old, Katherine stumbled across the microfilm viewing room. She stopped suddenly, went in, and filled out a slip for a particular month of the Boston Globe. She took the spool of film to a machine in the far corner of the room and, after carefully reading the instructions on its operation, threaded the film and flicked on the light.
She didn’t have to go further than the first frame. The microfilm was for the month of January 1960, and on the front page of the January 1 edition was the story of the burning of the tenement building at the corner of Salem and Parmenter Streets in the North End.
Trembling as though cold, she read of her own rescue, thrown from a fourth-story window into the firemen’s net. In an interview with the midwife who had visited the building only an hour before it caught fire, she learned of her twin sister, whose tiny corpse had never been found. And she found out her mother’s real name: Mary Lodesco.
I’m Katherine Lodesco.
She twice advanced the frame. At the top of page three was a frightful photograph of a woman whose limp body was thrust through a broken window; flames were frozen into a flat pattern of shredded ribbon behind her. “Moments after hurling one of her hours-old twins to safety, Mary Lodesco died when her stomach was punctured with a large shard of broken glass remaining in the window frame.”
Katherine pressed the switch that killed the light on the machine.
Katherine sat alone at the back of the overheated bus to Hingham. There were not more than twenty other riders this Saturday afternoon, mostly women who had gone into town shopping and now napped fitfully or talked in low, gossiping voices to one another. Several had nodded friendlily to Katherine when she boarded at the last minute. Katherine had so much relished the anonymity of wearing her street clothes as she wandered the rooms and corridors of the library that she had lost all notion of passing time; when at last her consciousness had registered a clock above the information desk, she had returned to the single ladies’ room, changed back into her habit, and
hurried out of the library. The guard on duty had not, of course, bothered to check the packages of a habited nun.
Staring out the tinted window, she thought of her mother, Mary Lodesco, who had sacrificed her life so that Katherine might live. She had died in hot flames.
Once back in Hingham, Katherine hid her purchased clothing in her locker at the school. She had thought originally to secrete it beneath her mattress at the convent, but she could not be certain that the women assigned to clean the rooms would not find it there.
After dinner in the refectory, Katherine returned to her room, drew her diary from the desk drawer, and penned the following entry:
I rode into Boston with Reverend Mother Celestine. We talked about my classes and courses. She thinks I ought to attend the ceremony in February when I get my diploma. I never imagined that I would be a college graduate. When she let me off, I took the subway to Cambridge. I visited my mother for about four hours, from 11:30 until 3:30. We had lunch together at a small restaurant across from Lechmere. The food was very good. While we ate lunch, she told me all about my real mother, Mary Lodesco, who died trying to save me from a fire in her apartment building in the North End. That happened the same night I was born. My twin sister died, my mother couldn’t save her too. My twin sister will be waiting for me in heaven when I die, but will she still be a baby, and I’ll be an old woman? God will take care of things like that, I know. Of course I always knew I was adopted, but I never knew my real mother’s name and I never knew that she died trying to save my life, and I didn’t know I was one of twins, and I was the lucky one. I will ask Mother Celestine if there can be a mass said for my mother, Mary Lodesco, and my sister, who never even got to be named, who both died by fire on January 1, 1960. That is my real birthday.
Blood Rubies Page 24