by John Shannon
Too much remembrance flooded back at once, and too many emotions. His brain was a mood-light spinning madly through its colors. He remembered he’d been her first lover. Along the banks of the Sespe River. The power of that dewy innocence taking off her sweater for the first time for a man while well into her forties. How impossibly tight her portal had been after years in the convent. Then, later, he’d almost got her killed – that was the overriding memory – dumped into a storm drain by thugs during a rainstorm, and the jeopardy of his own life frightening her back into her convent of renunciation and silence.
‘Oh, Jack, it’s so good to see you,’ she said. His mind whirled into another reality.
So much for her silence, he thought. If only he had permission to speak, too. There was so much to say. He felt tears running down his cheeks.
Beside her, Chopper Tyrus stared curiously at Jack Liffey. ‘She seem to know your name.’
‘I met Gloria looking for you yesterday, Jack,’ Eleanor said. ‘And I knew you were around here. A white man with bright blue eyes, this friend of yours tells me this morning. Name of Jack.’
‘Ack-ack!’
‘Don’t, please. I know you’re in trouble. I offer both of you a healthy breakfast at our shelter, and then we’ll make your call and get Gloria over here.’
‘Whoa!’ Was that his voice? His elusive second sound was back.
‘Moms was a gentle woman,’ Paula said in the car that was awash in a hopeful morning light. ‘Of course, she was also a schizophrenic who couldn’t find it in her strength to take her meds regularly, so eventually I was taken away from her and put in a home. The less said. But I got to say.’
‘I was fostered out, too,’ Gloria said. ‘You know that. That’s probably how we recognized each other.’
Paula nodded as Gloria drove west toward The Nickel. She was not to be denied the rest of the story that she’d held back for years. They hadn’t had much sleep, but it was going to have to do. ‘My new home was a kind of school of violence, with the fosters turning their thumbs down like Caesars as they pitted the rough girls against theyselves. They didn’t know nothing but to put their anger out there. Sometimes it was yelling, sometimes a weird passive burn and yell thing, but mostly it was hitting and biting and scratching. Every Thursday was rope-a-dope night. Two of us was picked to fight it out.’
‘That’s awful!’ Gloria stopped at a light and watched an old man on a bicycle cross their path. His bicycle was adorned with a big plywood airplane tail and he hauled a wire trailer containing recyclables. The old man stood on the pedals to get his contraption going, eying the gutters and sidewalks for ready money. The light changed and Gloria waited for the whole rigamarole to inch past before starting up.
‘After I been beaten to a pulp enough, I learned what I had to.’ Paula wiggled her broad nose for a moment like a rabbit remembering a nose punch, then rubbed it with the back of her hand. ‘I learned to use my own anger. I learned to live with a bit of pain, and mostly I learned to take me some satisfaction from the pain that I could inflict. Moms and her schizo gentleness was long gone. She came to seem nothing but a dream of a lost world.’
Gloria was about to say something about her own mom – who’d tumbled into a fog of alcoholism – but decided it would be insensitive just then. ‘What lousy fosters you was dealt. Is your mom alive?’
‘No. She kept her meds in a secret place for weeks and then took them all at once. She’s in a happier place, if there is one.’
‘You believe in heaven?’
‘No. Six-foot pine box a happier place than Geneva was ever at.’
‘Aww.’ Gloria reached over and gripped her friend’s hand a moment. ‘Girl, don’t go thinking that way. Not never. You got good friends here on earth.’
‘I know it. Neither of us gonna copy our mommas, don’t you know. But I miss that gentle kingdom Moms lived in. I did once live in it, too. I don’t know why I picked to be a cop. I shoulda hid in the basement of a liberry, stamping numbers on books.’
‘You got a lot to give, girl,’ Gloria said. ‘Jack used to always say pain was a hell of a university, and struggle was a law of the world that taught you the best stuff – whether you like it or not.’
Paula nodded. ‘Struggle was highly regarded at Sixty-fourth Place.’ Abruptly Paula seemed to notice something outside the car. ‘There’s the spot we left off at.’
‘Yeah,’ Gloria said. ‘No more moms right now, girl.’
‘Fo’ shizzle. So we got to put off the good death till it permitted and come down the chute on its own.’
‘Don’t be that way, honey. No, no. Them thoughts take you down the wrong track.’
‘Sure, hon. I happy with the House of Pain we be in now. We best find your Jack and Maeve real quick.’
Chopper wheeled the chair with difficulty along the obstacle course of The Nickel sidewalk toward the shelter, avoiding the mushy piles that were best not studied too closely. The little wheels made it a chore, but Chopper was strong and lifted him and the chair bodily over the worst obstacles. Jack Liffey could hear Eleanor’s voice, now and again, familiar, reassuring, but could not see her at all where she walked behind him, and it gave him time to prepare himself. The simple idea of her had stirred too much, and his awareness had developed a pristine intensity that worried him. He saw the day’s weather building in the sky above, and some of him wanted her to walk right back into his life.
On the fence that guarded the lawn there was a small plaque saying Catholic Liberation House beside an intercom, and she unlocked the gate with a key she kept on a chain around her neck.
‘Chopper, I’m sorry but men aren’t allowed inside the shelter. I’m going to make an exception for Jack in his condition, but I ask you to wait on one of those chairs on the lawn and I’ll have a nice breakfast sent out.’
‘Don’t trouble yourself, ma’am. I thank you kindly.’
‘You’re very welcome.’ She took over and pushed the chair up the zig and zag of a ramp that doubled back to the front porch. ‘I’ll get you some writing paper, Jack. I want to talk a little before I call Gloria.’
He nodded his concurrence. This woman’s body had once driven him mad with desire – an actual virgin in her late forties who had been so rattled by noticing her new sexual desires that she’d had one foot on the gas and the other on the brake at all times. With a pang he remembered her stripping off a dance top and saying something like, ‘Of all these fruits you may partake,’ which utterly bushwhacked an unexpected vein of innocence that he’d found buried deep inside himself, too. More prosaically, he remembered that it had been several worrying days before he could actually penetrate the object of desire, testing every non-toxic lubricant known to science.
‘Let’s go in my private office. I’ll have some food and coffee sent in. Black and strong, as I remember. Jack, I do remember a lot.’
He nodded and made a desperate writing gesture in the air, glad she couldn’t see his face. He felt fiery tears welling up and would have to brush them away discreetly when she wasn’t looking.
‘Yes, paper and pen. Sorry.’
He heard a phone being picked up. ‘Jenny, would you send Kenisha Duncan out front with a really big breakfast for a friend of the house. His name is Chopper. And send about half that much to my office with two black coffees.’
The phone hung up. ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m sorry.’ She’d parked him facing a wall, only inches away, in fact facing a classy Cuban poster for a play called Madre that had plucked out of the Guernica mural Picasso’s image of the screaming head-thrown-back woman with a dead infant in her arms. Isolated, it was a stunning image, but it seemed pretty much out of place around here. She turned his chair around and he tried to keep his eyes away from the unbearable radiance of her face. It was a tiny office, full of filing cabinets and a few of her paintings, plus a small battered desk. The paintings weren’t any of the old ones he remembered, but he did remember her bold heavy-outline style. She handed him a yello
w pad and a pencil.
‘I’ll bet there are things you need to tell me, or want to,’ she said. ‘Curse me if you want for absconding and hiding away. Take your time. It’s good for me to just look at you a little. Pretend I didn’t say that.’
I HAVE NO CURSES. SO THEY SPRUNG YOU. TOO GOOD A WORKER ON THE OUTSIDE TO WASTE.
‘It doesn’t work that way, Jack, but that’s not important. How have you and Maeve been?’
SHES SUPER. SHE HAD SOME BOY PROBLEMS BUT ITS OK NOW. He didn’t mention the gangbanger or the pregnancy or the girl problems. It was all too complicated for notes on a yellow pad. WE LIVE IN BOYLE HEIGHTS WITH GLORIA. Part of him wanted to write that it was a struggle keeping Gloria happy, but no. No hint of that.
‘I liked Gloria a lot,’ Sister Mary Rose said. ‘Obviously a strong woman. I gave her a copy I kept of that old painting of you. Remember?’
PLEASE DONT ASK ME TO REMEMBER. HOW DID YOU GET OUT OF THE CONVENT?
‘Oh, it’s a long story, Jack. It took a bishop to decide I was better suited for service than adoration, and he had to overcome my deep-seated reticence.’
Reticence. He laughed, and a little sound came out. She had virtually fled full speed back to the convent after a taste of the violent world, his violent world. He remembered clearly the last words she had spoken to him, from her hospital bed after his job had got them both badly hurt, but he wasn’t about to remind her in his present state. I don’t think you’re going to make it, Jack. That was her way of dismissing him and his world in order to re-enter hers.
‘But tell me how you come to be mute and – you know – your legs.’
He wrote as briefly as he could about being buried alive in a massive landslide after a dynamite blast, and the fact that the experience had re-triggered his lifelong claustrophobia, something she would remember from their own ordeal down the storm drain. He didn’t think his condition was permanent, but it annoyed him when various shrinks said the same. He had no idea what would unlock his body.
‘That’s so sad. I’ll pray for you.’
WAVE A DEAD CHICKEN OVER MY HEAD TOO.
‘Don’t be mean, Jack.’
I WONT PRETEND TO BELIEVE IN GOD, EL. AND YOU WONT PRETEND TO LOVE THE STORMS OF FREEDOM.
‘Wow, that’s full of beans.’ Her idiom always had been dated. ‘Are you quoting?’
He nodded, but she didn’t push it, and he didn’t have to admit he couldn’t remember whom.
‘I know you’re not fond of religiosity – that was your word – but would you give me permission to pray over your affliction?’
NOT RIGHT NOW. TALK TO ME OF YOUR LIFE – THESE 10 LOST YEARS.
‘Not lost. I don’t know if the details matter so much. I was cloistered in Mount Grace Convent in St Louis. It’s not a vow of utter silence as you think of it; it’s a rule of silence. We speak when we have to for reasons of health or urgency. “You’re burning the vegetables.” But not very often. It is very quiet and peaceful. And we do leave the walls for some purposes. We wear gray robes outside instead of the rose ones that we wear within, in order to be less … showy. Here’s something for you to scorn if you wish, Jack. We have Adoration Periods before the image of Jesus. It’s crepuscular – I read that word about the activity period of domestic cats. Generally for about forty-five minutes early in the day and an hour in the evening. Maybe you’d like them better if I called them meditation periods. Contemplation is our only real outlet. I’ll demonstrate.’
She lowered herself to her knees beside the wheelchair, which made him extremely uncomfortable, but she closed her eyes, and there was no way to protest her prayer other than whacking her on the head.
‘Blessed Mother, our Lady of the most Blessed Sacrament, be with me at this time which I am spending in the presence of your divine Son and another good man. I ask you to be my companion and to help me and to help this man. Reveal your divine Son to me, O Mary. Make me love Him as you did and inspire me to live for Him and for others. And do what you can for Jack Liffey, please. Amen.’
‘Ack-ack.’
ENOUGH PRAYING PLEASE.
‘Almost. Blessed Mother, may this man regain his speech and the power of his legs so he may do God’s will in the world. I know God desires the return of missing children. This is a good man here, even if he does not believe. I know this for certain, as you do. Amen.’
ENOUGH ELEANOR! TELL ME NOW ABOUT YOUR ESCAPE.
‘You shock me twice. I haven’t been called Eleanor in ten years. Oh, once or twice. And that’s a cruel word – “escape!”’ She touched the word on his page as if to lessen its power in some way. ‘The Mother Superior decided I wasn’t happy at Mount Grace – well, not suited to the contemplative life, though I thought I was doing my best. She had the bishop speak to me at length, over many months. He decided it was either Catholic Worker or Catholic Liberation that would suit me better. Direct service to the poorest of the poor, and a little sense of social struggle thrown in. I think you can approve that. My old Liberation House down in Cahuenga had been closed down, so he sent me here. A shelter for battered women, if you haven’t divined it.’
OF COURSE. JUST REMEMBER, EL. THE MASSES OF POOR WEREN’T CREATED JUST FOR YOUR OWN SPIRITUAL ADVANCEMENT.
She puffed out a breath of shock. ‘Oh, you can be such a hard case still. But you’re so right, Jack.’ She stood up and squeezed his hand. ‘It’s why I loved you so. You made me think. I’m sorry. I know I mustn’t say love.’
I LOVED YOU TOO. WE MET EACH OTHER AT A NEEDY TIME FOR BOTH OF US. IT WAS AN AMOROUS COLLISION. THE HEAT MAY NEVER BE REPRODUCED. CALL IT AN EVIL FRUIT IF YOU LIKE.
‘Never. I never will, Jack. You opened me up in so many ways. Oh!’ She covered her mouth like a bashful Japanese girl, realizing the literal content of her words.
DONT BE EMBARRASSED. WERE ALL WILD BEASTS TOO. IM SURE EVEN MOTHER MARY KNOWS THAT. Sleeping with God must have been quite a trip, he thought.
‘Oh, I do miss being beside someone wise.’ She moved toward him, glacially, as if drawn by a great magnet through some immensely resistant medium.
Eleanor Ong reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘As smart as nuns can be, there’s something always a little spoiled and childish in our protected state. All that moral earnestness and caring for others without any real personal connection to them. That’s one reason I took myself back into the domain of silence.’
DIDNT YOU FIND YOURSELF SHRIVELING INSIDE?
‘I don’t really want to answer that. The bishop and I talked for so long. The official answer has to do with the abiding love of Jesus, the company of the saints, and the richness of the world of the spirit. But, honestly, I missed you terribly, Jack. For years and years. I missed your company and your skeptical goading and your jokes and your good heart. Did you miss me at all?’
It took him a while before he nodded, ever so slightly. He tried to write but his hand shook, and he pressed so hard on the pad to still his fingers that he snapped the pencil lead, and then he had to wipe tears against his shoulder. She’d taken her hand away, and soon he noticed she was locking the office door and he nearly panicked. No, please.
She touched him in many places, cheek, neck, shoulder, ear, mostly innocent, like a sculptor working the final shapes into a clay maquette, and then she was sitting in an impossible position over the chair arm, kissing him and shuddering and bawling with too many emotions flooding out at once, her hands grasping the back of his head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ He remembered: her feet pressing down hard on accelerator and brake at the same time.
His own arms went around her and he seemed to have lost control of them in a new way. This is what they used to call a swoon, he thought. And today they only call it lust. Their mouths found one another, and when his tongue wouldn’t probe her mouth in return, physically wouldn’t, despite his willing it, he became self-conscious of his disabilities. Move, legs, dammit. But they only tingled.
As gently as she could, s
he lowered him to a hooked rug that provided minimal padding, and her hands worked at his clothing. At some point she stopped what she was doing and stared into his eyes, resting on all fours above him, half undressed herself. ‘Nod if you want me to stop.’ She was gasping for air. ‘I’ve got to be fair.’
‘Ack-ack.’ It was no struggle now: he shook his head.
Several times there were knocks at the door, and they both stayed as silent as they could each time. He assumed her sense of guilt was tremendous – what she was doing locked away in her private office in a women’s shelter where men were not allowed at all, and certainly not male lovers, but a sense of release overwhelmed him. He hoped this wasn’t going to interfere with his feelings for Gloria, but he had no power to stop now. He noticed how he had swollen uncontrollably. Zen master of the penis. That mystic still worked.
‘Jack, oh!’ Over and over she cried out. He remembered the surprisingly sharp-voiced bark, and how he had once loved it and watched for it and triumphed in her surrender to passion. She was just about as tight and closed off as he remembered. Surprisingly his tongue began to work.
Later, covered with sweat, she rolled off him and lay beside him holding his hand, catching her breath softly.
‘I don’t care what I’ve done,’ she announced. ‘It’s wrong, but we’re not monsters. We’ll both survive this.’
He had no energy to write a note, but he nodded, hoping she saw it. Sexual heat inevitably creates such confusion, he thought. And such purpose. The body had taken over, with far too much to do to think about what the mind was getting itself up to. Sweat and other secretions – the whole world had been about nothing but moistness for a long while.
He did not look closely at the fleeting guilt-tinged thought that this event had been more powerful than it had ever been with Gloria or anyone else, even Eleanor herself, in the before. It was circumstances, that was all. But he remembered the ancient feeling that he and Eleanor were burning each other down to ashes with their combined fire. Deep inside, he had a sense that nobody believed they had a right to something like this.