After Vespers and collation, NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies or ABC’s Movie of the Week plays on the wide color console in the priests’ lounge. Officially the children aren’t allowed in the priests’ quarters except on Movie Night, which is usually on Thursday when there are no Holy Days of Obligation, but Julie, Billy, and Duncan often find a way to sneak behind the large settee that crowds the room before the priests have made their way from chapel or the dining hall, and this is where they’ll be when Saturday Night at the Movies begins playing.
But this night is different. Instead of a recent release, the television is playing a special on the Apollo lunar landing. They peer from behind the feather-down pillows thick with cat hair at the edge of the settee, and Duncan is struck by the sharp, melancholy black-and-white images on the screen. There is the young President Kennedy before a crowd of students at Rice University, his mouth working without sound. Brother Wilhelm fiddles with the cantankerous, loose knob, and Duncan hears John F. Kennedy’s voice:
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …
Billy nudges Duncan. What is he saying?
Shhhhh. I’m trying to hear.
We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced …
Duncan, Billy says, tugging at his sleeve.
It’s the moon, Billy. They’re sending a man to the moon.
… on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body.
I know, Duncan, Billy says, exasperated. They did this before we were born.
He doesn’t remember, Billy, Julie says. He doesn’t remember any of this.
But Duncan, they didn’t—
Hush, Billy, Julie hisses, and shakes her head at him.
And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
The program cuts to footage of the Apollo 11 moon voyage and the launch from Cape Canaveral. Duncan watches transfixed as the Saturn Vignites and flame surrounds the base of the rocket’s hull. For long moments the rocket seems to hover there, trembling slightly, ponderously upon its pillar of flame, as if it might simply keel over and hurtle, cartwheeling, into the earth, but then slowly, slowly the great rocket begins to move upward, vibrating with the effort of defying gravity, its plating shimmering with shattering ice cascading down the length of its super-cooled hull.
Duncan can feel the thundering vibrations of the rocket’s blast as it presses its way against gravity toward the moon. And, at the top of that colossal rocket, the Apollo command module, Columbia, with its three astronauts sitting as if upon the head of a combustible needle. Farther and farther the rocket presses, an eight-hundred-foot blazing orange tail arcing northeast across the late autumn sky above the Florida Keys.
And then, the first blurry images from Buzz Aldrin’s camera of the lunar surface: desolate, cratured plains strewn with rocks and glinting regolith and the black foreshortened horizon beyond and, farther, the curving plane of the planet suggesting only a greater, absolute darkness. Duncan imagines the moon’s coldness and the silence and the absence of color or sound.
Magnificent desolation, Aldrin says, and Duncan murmurs in agreement as his words hang in the vacuum between sensation and thought and as the moon’s panorama curves out into blackness. Magnificent desolation.
Duncan, Billy begins again, whispering conspiratorially. They never made it. They never made it off the moon. The moon jumper failed to blast off and they were left stuck there. The other astronaut just kept going around the moon waiting for them.
Billy makes a looping motion with his finger and says, Around and around until he died. They all died. What they showed on TV after that, it was all a lie. They’d filmed it before they left.
Hush, Julie hisses. Duncan, don’t listen to a word he says. He’s making it all up. He’s just being silly and spiteful.
The astronauts’ ghostly images flit and tremble on the screen as they move back and forth in surreal motion, bounding across the gray, pockmarked surface and stirring silver star dust, which no wind ever moves, imprinting their footsteps forever upon a surface last touched by God.
Brother Wilhelm reaches a palsied and withered hand forward and turns the knob to the left, and with an audible click and hum of transponders cooling, the image of the astronauts and the moon fades slowly from the four corners of the television screen to one single, glowing dot at its center, and then It is gone entirely as if it had never been, and only the shimmering white spark that momentarily impresses itself upon Duncan’s sensitive iris, and remains shaking on the inside of his eyelids long after he closes his eyes, convinces him it was real.
Brother Wilhelm is asleep in his armchair, and before they leave, Duncan tenderly touches his hand, which lies trembling upon the armrest. For a moment Duncan stands and listens to Brother Wilhelm’s apnea and the long seconds of silence between his shunting and staggered breaths.
When he takes the stairs to bed, one of the boys has already dimmed the lamps. With Brother Wilhelm sleeping, they know they will have an extra hour or two of heat; the hallway is warm with the sound of water bubbling in the radiators and of boys’ snoring contently in their sleep. Dressed in his pajamas and wrapped in a blanket, with Brother Canice’s radio glowing from his bedside table and crackling and hissing with static, Duncan sits on his bed and stares out at the night sky. High over the prairie shines a full moon encircled by a ring of bluish-white phosphorescence. The ghostly haze of ice and moisture casts its shape in magnified projection: its great maria, those shadowy plains known as seas, and its cratured scars—the illusion of cheek, nose bridge, and brow—creating the sense of some benevolent, slightly curious or confused face, peering down upon and illuminating the snow-covered plains of Thule. From the radio comes a sudden high peak of static and then the disembodied and fractured sound of voices carried by radio waves across the vast distance of space over a decade before:
102:44:45 ALDRIN: 100 feet, 3½ down, 9 forward. Five percent. Quantity light.
102:44:54 ALDRIN: Okay. 75 feet. And it’s looking good. Down a half, 6 forward.
102:45:02 DUKE: 60 seconds.
102:45:04 ALDRIN: Light’s on.
102:45:08 ALDRIN: 60 feet, down 2½. [Pause] 2 forward. 2 forward. That’s good.
102:45:17 ALDRIN: 40 feet, down 2½. Picking up some dust.
102:45:21 ALDRIN: 30 feet, 2½ down. [Garbled] shadow.
102:45:25 ALDRIN: 4 forward. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. 20 feet, down a half.
102:45:31 DUKE: 30 seconds.
102:45:32 ALDRIN: Drifting forward just a little bit; that’s good. [Garbled] [Pause]
102:45:40 ALDRIN: Contact Light.
102:45:43 ARMSTRONG: Shutdown
102:45:44 ALDRIN: Okay. Engine Stop.
102:45:45 ALDRIN: ACA out of Detent.
102:45:46 ARMSTRONG: Out of Detent. Auto.
102:45:47 ALDRIN: Mode Control, both Auto. Descent Engine Command Override, Off. Engine Arm, Off. 413 is in.
102:45:57 DUKE: We copy you down, Eagle.
102:45:58 ARMSTRONG: Engine arm is off. [Pause] Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
102:46:06 DUKE: Roger, Twan … Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.
102:46:16 ALDRIN: Thank you.
And when Duncan whispers JFK’s words, he might have been praying: Dear Lord, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and
greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. Amen.
He hears Billy’s words clamoring in his head again: They never made it. They never made it off the moon. The moon jumper failed to blast off and they were left stuck there. They all died. He cannot possibly believe it is true even as he stares up into the night sky and imagines that he sees the small dark shapes of the two men splayed and bent aslant the surface of the moon. But they came home, didn’t they? They must have. Mustn’t they?
Chapter 11
July 1981
A haunting music reverberates off the stone and echoes in the stairwells as Duncan enters the center hall from the chapel, and with its shifting, fractured quality, it takes him a moment to recognize the voice of Elvis. Rising and then falling, the song materializes fully and then is gone. Duncan walks the halls, moving from room to room, searching for its source.
From Father Toibin’s room comes the faint sound of music, and when Duncan passes and finds the door partly ajar, he pauses. A thin slant of light spills across the hallway. A familiar crooning music plays upon a mahogany upright turntable that stands varnished and gleaming in the corner of the room. There is the scent of tobacco and of age—a comforting, spicy, pleasant smell of polished wood floors, ancient carpets, beeswax, and tallow.
Father Toibin’s voice calls from the other side of the door, where Duncan cannot see him: Come in, Duncan, come in. The door is open and I’ve just made tea.
Duncan pushes against the door and it swings wide slowly. A cat blinks its green eyes at him lazily from its perch upon a red velvet chair covered with its white and black hairs. There is also a red velvet sofa badly in need of new upholstery and above this is a painting of the San Damiano Crucifix, from which, the Franciscans believe, God spoke to St. Francis of Assisi almost eight hundred years ago. From dark wooden tables small lamps with aged, stained yellow paper shades cast their soft glow into the corners of the room.
Duncan closes his eyes to the warmth and to the sound of Elvis’s voice and the Brothers’ footsteps in the distant stairwells—a rhythm like gently falling rain—reminding him of the first time he opened his eyes after his sleep. The record is spinning on the turntable. The stylus lifts, the tone arm swings out and back, and then the stylus drops once more into the groove and the record begins from its first track. The haunting notes of “Blue Moon” tremble from the aged speakers.
Blue Moon, he whispers and Father Toibin hears him as he emerges from the kitchen carrying a tea tray of clattering crockery.
You like it? This is one of the finest recordings of this song. Bill Black on bass and Scotty Moore on guitar. With the edge of the tray he pushes issues of National Geographic, Time magazine, and a dogeared copy of The Collected Works of Douglas Graham Purdy: Tales of Horror and the Macabre off a table and onto the floor, and then lays the tray down.
This is what I heard when I first woke up, Duncan says and points to the turntable. I heard this music in the sick room.
Father Toibin nods absently, gestures toward the sofa—Sit, Duncan, please sit—and takes a chair beside the cat. Oh, yes. Will you listen to that, such crooning would put a chanter to shame. He smiles, cocks his head to the side, and scratches idly at his bristles.
It’s quite truly a divinely inspired piece of music, he says. And I don’t think Elvis would have been afraid to admit that he was singing to God when he sang this.
On the far wall, The Sacred Heart with Christ baring his thorn-gouged heart imploringly, and beneath this, lining the baseboard, stacks of old, yellowed newspapers. Father Toibin follows Duncan’s eyes and laughs. There you will find every Minnesota Tribune and St. Paul Gazette for the last twenty years, which is almost as long as I have been here. I really must put them in the compost.
I have trouble letting anything go, he says. It is one of my failings as a Capuchin, I believe, one among many. I ask God’s forgiveness all the time, and—he raises a quizzical eyebrow—I think he understands.
From an ornate china teapot, Father Toibin pours steaming brown water into two large mugs and nods to himself. The Brothers that attend to the boys’ sleeping quarters tell me of how terribly difficult it has been for you at times, he says. Have you talked to Dr. Mathias? You know that is what he is there for.
There are some things I’d rather not tell him, Duncan says. Is that okay?
Of course, Duncan. Of course.
Can I ask you something?
Yes, yes, yes, Father Toibin says, waving him on as he works to clear the table and his chair of papers, and then sits.
It’s about the children who have died here. Do you suppose they all go to God when they die?
Father Toibin harrumphs, clutches at his teacup as brown water sloshes from its tilting rim. He takes a sip and grimaces, as if the liquid has burned his lips. From the campanile comes the sudden discordant ringing of bells and, frowning, Father Toibin glances at his watch. Brother Canice, he says softly, sighs and shakes his head, rubs violently at a point above his eyebrow as if it were causing him sudden and intense pain. For a moment he stares imploringly at Duncan, wide-eyed and helpless, shakes his head in disbelief, and Duncan tries not to smile. Tonight in the kitchen he will tell Brother Canice that Father Toibin is very much taken with his bell ringing.
Well, Duncan, he says, as if trying to think about things other than the bells, children have died here, he says. I wouldn’t tell you otherwise. And God has always taken them into his care. I remember how hard the year of that terrible blizzard was—many people died, not just children. And of course many children died aboard the Holiday Train. We weren’t even able to break ground to bury the dead. They all remained in the charnel house until spring. And it was late coming that year. I remember the pickaxes they had to use on the ground, and there simply wasn’t enough room. We buried them all together: mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons. The other children were all orphans. We buried them in the children’s graveyard.
The monastery’s record books say that an influenza epidemic took a dozen children in 1902, but still, the blizzard and the Holiday Train, well, it’s hard to imagine worse than that. I’d never experienced anything like it. He shakes his head slowly, still unbelieving, and Duncan wonders what he sees upon the plains beyond the monastery’s walls. Perhaps mechanized snowcats laden with the Holiday Train’s dead rumbling over the snow-covered hills, or the shrouded figures of gravediggers hunched against the wind over their spades and pickaxes, or, at the end of spring, the pallbearers from the chapel carrying the small coffins containing the children from the charnel house to the grave.
I held so many of them during baptism, he says. And so many families begging me to baptize their children, their infants who had died before they could receive the Sacrament of Baptism. All of them so small they weighed next to nothing. The curtains sweep back and Father Toibin is holding up his hands, empty hands cradling the air. Next to nothing, he says again, and then: We baptize dead children with our tears and it is with our tears that they enter heaven.
He comes forward and touches Duncan, not without kindness, on his arm. Enough of this morbidity, he says. That was a long time ago. He shakes his head. Children have died here, Duncan. Children will always die here. We hold them in God’s care and yet they die. This is why we have the children’s graveyard. This is why we offer up prayers at Mass. This is why we have faith in God and believe that they are all with him now.
I almost died too, didn’t I? Dr. Matthias thinks that’s why I can’t remember things. Or at least it’s a part of why.
You were very sick and we are blessed that you survived, that you are here now.
Duncan thinks of his mother in her coffin wrapped in white roots and her face turning toward him, the pupils of her eyes so large and blue he can see his own longing reflected in them.
Do you think my mother, he says, after she left me here, what do you think happened to her?
Father Toibin purses his lip and considers the question, as if he is weighing what to say, and at f
irst Duncan thinks he will say nothing at all. The children of the Home know that this is the question you do not ask—it is sacrosanct and unwritten but the priests and Brothers will not talk about the children’s parents.
Every so often, Father Toibin begins slowly, I used to get a letter from her. They stopped years ago, of course. He waves absently at the air, as if, Duncan thinks, all letters from parents eventually stop when they move on to their new lives and new families or when they simply die.
But she sent money when she could for your support. Even though she could not be a mother to you, Duncan, you were very much in her thoughts. I think, in leaving you here, she felt she was doing what was best.
Duncan looks at him. Instead of feeling pleasure and happiness at the unexpected news, he finds that he is suddenly numb; nausea rolls in his stomach and he fights to settle it.
Finally he says: Can I see her letters?
Father Toibin places his hand on the side of Duncan’s head. Let me think about that, okay? I want you to understand that your mother made a choice a long time ago. We don’t talk about those choices here and we don’t talk about your parents because we don’t want to instill the false hope that someday they may return. Sometimes we have to accept what is and then move on in life, otherwise we remain stuck and we fail to thrive. Everything we do here is with that in mind. If I do show you the letters, it will be under the condition that after reading them, you will be able to move on, yes?
Duncan feels the nausea in his stomach subsiding but places his hand there anyway. He wonders what the letters contain and whether or not he really wants to see them at all. Perhaps he should be content for his dreams, of her standing before the Festival of Lights Holiday Train in the snow, for the image of her resting peacefully in the ground.
The cat with the green eyes stretches upon the seat, shakes itself, and then jumps to the floor. Its uncut nails tap the floor as it makes its way out of the room.
It is time you were in bed, Duncan, Father Toibin says, and suddenly he seems very tired. His eyes are red-rimmed and his face pale. I’ve kept you here much too long.
This Magnificent Desolation Page 5