She pulled him toward her, kissed him lightly, tried not to be affected by his evident sense of relief that she was not going to involve him in anything.
“You’re a terrific girl, Megan.”
“You know me, stand-up Megan.”
“I mean it.” His large greenish eyes filled with tears and he tightened his grasp on her shoulders, shaking her slightly. “I wish … I just wish that …”
“Wish us both luck with our careers, Tim. It’ll be okay.” Then, as a parting gift, she told him, “You’re a very nice guy, Timmy. Have a good life, okay?”
She telephoned Aunt Catherine, who agreed to see her immediately.
Catherine met her in the small private hallway that was shared by only one other tenant. Megan went from the elevator directly into her aunt’s arms.
The old man was at his Providence, Rhode Island, mansion. His children were spending their mandatory few days with him, and Catherine had time to herself in the vastness of the Riverside Drive apartment.
Catherine led her through the servants’ quarters and they settled over a pot of tea in the kitchen.
“Drink some tea first. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
Avoiding Catherine’s eyes, she blew steam from the cup, sipped, burned her mouth, put the cup down.
“Look up at me, Megan.”
Catherine reached across the table and touched her cheek lightly.
“How far gone?” she asked.
It was one of the qualities Megan loved beyond all others. A practicality untouched by judgmental comment. Right to the heart of it. Here and now: let’s know the problem and figure out how to deal with it.
Within two days, late on a Saturday night, the abortion took place in one of the small bedrooms of the apartment.
The room had been arranged according to directions that were given during a quick phone call. A good light overhead and beside the bed; a twisted bedsheet; rubber sheeting; a pail. Soap; clean towels. Sanitary napkins.
There were two of them, and before Megan saw them, they had put out hands for money, which each in turn counted. Catherine never told her how much they charged.
They entered the bedroom without glancing at Megan, who sat, tensed, at the edge of the bed. They took off their dark, heavy suit jackets, glanced at her, and told her to stop looking at them.
They arranged her on the bed, her ankles separated and secured by the sheets and tied tightly and attached to the bedposts. Her knees were bent and wide apart. One of them jerked the rubber sheeting abruptly under her; he wanted it centered. One of them handed her a rolled-up towel and told her to use it to stifle any noise. He reached out and turned her head to one side.
“I told you not to look at us. Now if you make so much as one sound,” he told her in a harsh, foreign voice, some unknown accent, more threatening by the mispronunciation of words, “even one sound, we will leave you. Immediately. In whatever stage of the procedure. Do you understand?”
Yes.
They gave her a shot of something that made her dizzy but did not blunt the pain of the long cold steel instrument that entered her body. She gasped, chewed on the towel, heard one of them say, “Not a sound! It’s hard enough with the damn deformed leg.” And then, to the other: “Pull it to the side, it’s collapsing like a wet noodle, get it out of the way.”
She felt the ripping, tearing, wrenching pain. It seemed to last forever, but it was probably over within minutes.
“There,” one said. “Where’s the pail?”
She heard a plopping sound; something being dropped into a pail half filled with water. “Where’s the toilet?”
She heard her aunt speak quietly as she left the room, and then she felt the warmth of the sweaty face close to her. It was the one holding the pail.
“You’re a medical student, huh? You wanna see the fetus?” He gave a deep hard laugh. “You wanna see, as part of your medical education? A lovely red-headed little girl.”
She heard Catherine’s voice, furious, threatening. For a moment she blacked out, then came to, dizzy and weak. She felt the blood surging from her body, felt a towel jammed between her legs. They gave her abrupt directions. Gave her some pills. Told her to go to sleep. It was all over.
In the far distance, in some dream time, she heard the flushing, endless flushing, swirling and sucking, flushing.
When they were gone, Catherine came to her side, pressed a cool cloth against her face, lightly swabbed at her dry lips, stroked her hair. She opened her eyes.
“Listen to me, Megan. That was a filthy, vicious lie, my darling. It was just some bloody little glob. There was no baby, no little girl, nothing. Just a small piece of matter. I swear this to you.”
Megan knew Catherine was telling the truth. It had been no more than six weeks. She knew about fetal development.
But she also knew that she would be forever haunted by the picture of a tiny baby girl, in her own image, being ripped from her body and flushed down the toilet.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN HE WAS DISCHARGED FROM THE Navy, as a lieutenant commander, Dante took advantage of accelerated courses at Fordham University and finished his degree in one more year instead of two. Much to the chagrin of his Fordham professors, he chose Columbia Law School for his continuing education.
“I’ve been raised in the Catholic school system,” he told his mentor, Monsignor McNulty. “I learned so many things in the Navy that I wasn’t prepared for. It’s time for me to continue my education outside the Church.”
“And were you so ill prepared, Dante, by your Catholic education?”
He knew that no matter what he said, the slender, gray-haired, bright-eyed old Jesuit would find offense. He didn’t want to engage in debates. The priest could beat him at semantics any day. It was decided. Fini.
The priest, who knew Dante thoroughly, shrugged. “Well, I have a favor to ask.” He saw the wary frown and laughed softly. “Nothing life-changing, Dan. I’m asking one evening from your very busy life. We’ve received a request from Marymount to send a few of our very best graduates to attend their senior dance. Don’t make a face at me. Consider this the last imposition of your Catholic education.”
Of course, the women graduates were several years younger than the Fordham and St. John’s invitees. The girls were untouched by war years. The boys showed their experience not by the ruptured-duck lapel pin, but by their attitudes. Some were blank and expressionless, others were braggarts, still others were amused and delighted by the glowing innocence of the Catholic girl graduates.
Dante was immediately attracted to a tall, slender girl. Her name was Lucia-Bianca Santini. Twenty-one years old, she had majored in foreign languages, and was proficient in French, Italian, and Spanish. She had made Phi Beta Kappa, and had a job lined up as an interpreter at the UN.
She was the most interesting girl Dante had ever met, tall and slender, with a face more handsome than beautiful: high cheekbones, a slightly pointed chin, and a straight nose in good proportion to the rest of her face. Her lips were full and deep pink, her color fair, in startling contrast to her black hair and dark eyes, which held his gaze steadily as they spoke.
They danced together once, and then both turned down other partners. She spoke in a low, slightly husky voice with none of the simpering nervousness of other girls he had known. None of the hidden pleading to be liked, to be considered special. None of the phony hiding of herself until she discovered what he might want her to be.
They talked about their education and their future plans. She thought it was a good idea for Dante to go to Columbia. Fordham was so provincial. She was genuinely interested in his service years, his time spent in Washington, D.C., in naval intelligence, and on active duty in the Pacific. Although he was reluctant to talk about his heroics, he found himself telling her, matter-of-factly, about the torpedoing of his PT boat, the long swim to a hostile island, dragging two wounded shipmates. His despair at realizing he had been hauling one dead and one dying
man. His own injuries, his near capture, his time spent alone, in the Jap-occupied territory, living in a jungle, learning to survive. It was as though he were telling the experience of someone else. It had little to do with who he was, right now, in this hotel ballroom, with this incredible girl.
She neither gasped nor fluttered her eyes, or caught her breath. She studied him closely, and listened. They both felt that it was the foundation for their present and future.
Lucia-Bianca lived in a substantial eight-room house in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx with her widowed father, Aldo Santini, a wine dealer. She introduced the two men on the night of the graduation dance, when Dante brought her home in a taxicab. Her father was a tall man, thin to the point of emaciation, with a startlingly concave face, a long nose, tight lips, and a small mustache and beard. His daughter had inherited his large dark eyes; his had the same liquid look, but could freeze under a quick blink. His hair also was black, but with threads of gray at the temple. He wasn’t a handsome man—he was too thin—but there was a strange near-beauty about him. He was graceful in his movements; his hands were long and manicured; he glided when he walked; none of his gestures or movements were spontaneous. He was completely controlled, and if his daughter’s intelligence was charming, his was fierce.
It was difficult for Dante to see her very often while he was at Columbia, but they did meet some evenings, when she finished working at the UN and he was finished at the law library. They went for walks, to movies, occasionally for an inexpensive meal. They talked to each other, not at each other; she was interesting and incisive and helpful to him at times when he needed to clarify the more obscure points of the law.
She was also unbelievably passionate. And a virgin.
They loved each other. They planned to be married. Her body against his, on the grass of a secluded section of a local park, was light and warm and yielding. They lost consciousness of themselves in the deep, incredible depths of their kisses. His hands roamed her slender but strong body—and then she would abruptly sit up, shake her head, adjust her clothing.
She would be a virgin bride. It was the way she was raised and educated. It was what she believed.
Dante suffered. He was not a teenager. He had been around. He had spent three years in the service. This was ridiculous; this was unhealthy.
He proposed and she accepted, and now, as courtesy and tradition demanded, he had to ask her father’s permission.
Everything about Aldo Santini that had seemed understated now seemed to be intensified. The expensive dark suit added to the elegant gracefulness of the tall, slender body. His gestures were fluid and expressive. Have a seat, Dante. Here, would this not be more comfortable?
Dante fully expected the older man to seat himself behind the magnificently carved, glass-topped mahogany desk, to take a position of authority, to set the distance between them. Santini surprised him. He chose one of the two easy chairs that flanked the leather couch against the book-filled wall, waited politely for Dante to settle, then slid into place, his spine not touching the comfortably upholstered chair. His hands, fingers long and white, caressed the velvet pleasurably.
It was the first time Dante had really taken a close look at the man who would, he hoped, become his father-in-law. He was astonished by the resemblance between Aldo and his daughter. What was fragility in the daughter’s pale, beautiful face was strength in the father’s. It was a serene face, yet the serenity was contradicted by the intensity of the black eyes. As he offered Dante wine, a cigarette, only the hands moved; the eyes stayed on Dante, studying, watching, piercing.
Dante leaned back in his chair, but kept his hands still in his lap. He wanted a cigarette, but felt that smoking would betray his tension, which was intensified by the demeanor of the man facing him. There was something strange, mysterious, such a power of concentration directed at him, that he had to draw on a deep resolve not to do anything stupid. Get up and leave, for instance.
Aldo made a tent of his long fingers, rested the tips of his forefingers against his thin lips for a moment, then brought his hands back to the arms of the chair. It was difficult to see the smile, but his teeth flashed white against the blackness of his neatly trimmed beard, and his voice was soft and low and melodic.
“I understand your situation, Dante,” he said quietly. “It is most difficult to be a young man, to talk to the father of the girl one wishes to marry.”
Dante smiled, shrugged, tried to take a deep, relaxing breath without appearing to, then laughed. “Yes, Don Santini. It is most difficult.”
He fell easily into the cadence of the man before him.
“Well, then, that is a given between us, so let us get on with this talk. My daughter tells me she loves you.” The slender shoulders rose and fell, commenting on the love feelings of a young girl. Inconsequential. What does it mean, this adolescent claim, I love him. “And you have told me you love her and wish to take her for your wife.”
“Yes. Oh, yes, sir. I love Lucia-Bianca. I want to marry her as soon as I graduate from Columbia in June. I have a job lined up at the Bronx DA’s office. I will take care of her for the rest of her life. Make a home with her and have children with her and …”
Santini held up his right hand and made a soft, sympathetic sound, which stopped Dante cold. He hadn’t realized how foolish, how childish, how boyish he sounded until the older man spoke, slowing him down the way one shushes an overeager child.
“Yes, yes, yes. All of those things. All of those things. Now there are some questions I would like to ask you, without your objection?” He smiled, “You see, I speak to you as one who will be an attorney.”
“Anything, Don Santini, anything you ask me, I will answer.”
Don Santini’s eyes glinted. Of course you will answer me. What choice do you have? There was a contradiction between the softness of his voice and the hardness of his eyes.
The question was unexpected.
“Why did you go into the Navy instead of the Army? You would have achieved a commission in either service.”
Carefully, Dante replied, “I thought about what my service might be. There was the very real possibility—and it did turn out this way with some of my friends—that I might be sent to fight at some time in Italy. Since my father and uncles still have family in Sicily, I didn’t want to come face to face with cousins, to have to shoot at cousins.” He shrugged. “As a naval officer, I served in Washington, D.C., for part of my time, and then in the Pacific.”
Santini tapped his fingers against his lips and nodded. “And why did you decide against Fordham Law School and for Columbia Law School?”
And why do I have the feeling you know everything you are asking me?
“Because for all my life I have been educated in Catholic Schools. The Navy was the first time I’d ever been in a secular setting. I felt that my education, while good, was too protected, too limited, that it did not prepare me for a larger world.”
Again, the slight smile, the nod.
“And for what are you preparing—in the larger world? What area of law do you wish to practice?”
“I’m not sure. As you know,” he said, taking a chance on Santini’s knowledge, “I’m working part-time in the Bronx DA’s office. I’ve been promised a full-time position when I graduate. It will give me a year or two to decide where I might use my law degree.”
“But not in criminal law, as a prosecutor or as legal aid.” It was a statement rather than a question.
“Not as a career. But for experience for a year or two. Criminal law doesn’t appeal to me as a career.”
“Politics, perhaps?”
Dante stiffened. It was as though this man had probed into an area of his brain he had held closed off, even from himself. A secret, not faced fully, but tantalizing, darting elusively in and out of his consciousness.
“I thought it might be interesting to get involved in a political campaign, yes. To pick out a candidate and work for his election. On the loca
l level.”
“At first.”
Dante nodded. “At first.”
There was now a knowledge between them that Santini had brought out of Dante’s subconscious and with which Dante now felt familiar.
“It is the way to proceed,” Santini told him. “Carefully. Do the groundwork. See how things work. And build a network. You are a bright young man. And ambitious.” Dante shrugged; it had never occurred to him that he was ambitious. “Oh, yes,” Santini went on, “ambitious. It is a quality that only the successful have. Do not shrug it off. It is an essential ingredient. So. Now we come to some other matters.”
Dante tensed. “Don Santini, I cannot right now support your daughter, as I am in school and I do help my family, but—”
Santini held up his right hand, sloughing off Dante’s objection as unimportant, something that could be worked out. All of this with one casual gesture.
Dante watched the transition of the relaxed yet controlled man. Almost unobtrusively there was a stiffening, a drawing inward, the eyes narrowing, piercing, indicating a decision being measured and finally reached. The long hands locked across the dark fabric of the suit, clenched, then eased. Without actually leaning forward, Santini, by his voice, his body posture, his quiet air of intimacy, pulled Dante closer, riveted his attention.
“What I am going to do now, Dante, is to give you some information in deepest confidence. In total trust. You must understand first that I will expect two things from you.” He paused, then slowly gave his conditions. “First, that no matter what happens in the future, whether you marry my daughter or not, what I say to you here and now will remain between the two of us. Eternally.”
Dante’s heart pounded. His mind raced. What in God’s name was he to be told? Did he want some terrible secret from this intense man?
“Yes. Absolutely. You have my word.”
There was a slight nod. The answer was only what Santini expected. “And the second condition. Listen carefully, please, and think before you give me an answer. In exchange for the trust I will place in you, you will give me the same fidelity of trust. In every man’s life, even that of a young man, there is some fact, some deed, some event that he holds secret. You must confide that in me, as I confide in you.”
The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel Page 23