Nolan Trilogy

by Selena Kitt

  Leah’s mother nodded, looking at the carpet. “She was younger then, just starting out.”

  “Does she know?” Leah wondered out loud. “Does she know about the Mary Magdalenes?”

  “Of course she knows,” Leah’s mother replied, staring at her daughter with a look both patronizing and incredulous at the same time. “They all know. The doctors, the nurses, the nuns, the priests. Even with the incentive bonuses the Magdalenes get for giving up their babies, the church more than doubles that in adoption donations. And the agency Goulden works for gets a cut, of course. I think the social workers even get adoption bonuses for every successful adoption they facilitate.”

  That fact horrified Leah so much she had a hard time forming words. “Did you know… did you know she was going to trick me? Did you and… Joan...”

  It was hard to say her name, hard not to think of her as anything but “the ghoul,” hard to imagine she was a human being with feelings. The lawyer had said he believed the social workers were doing good. No, he said he believed they believed it. There was a difference. The social workers truly believed they were doing the right thing. Joan Goulden was a person, a woman who probably had a family of her own. How had she spent the adoption bonus she’d received for Grace? Leah wondered. A new pair of earrings? A summer vacation?

  “Did you and Joan plan to take Grace away from me?” Leah whispered her worst fear, saying it out loud to her mother for the first time.

  “No!” Patty Wendt looked truly horrified. “Leah, no! Never! I just didn’t want you to go through what I went through, that’s all. We always want to protect our children from the hard things, and being a mother on your own isn’t easy. Besides, remember, I really believed that Rob was your father...”

  “You knew he might not have been.”

  “I just didn’t...” Her mother closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to think about that. I think I convinced myself, over the years, he was your father. We were all such good friends, and the Nolans were always so generous. Before Susan died, I thought it might be because she was afraid I would tell him… but I never did. I never would’ve. And when she finally told him, she was dying...”

  “So he didn’t know?” Leah had wondered if Rob knew about the Mary Magdalenes all along. How in the world had he gotten involved? She couldn’t imagine Rob agreeing to Erica’s participation in the Mary Magdalenes, not in a million years. But she also never would have imagined he had a secret room under his loft bed that contained what amounted to a mountain of obscene, illegal images—both still and moving—either.

  “No!” Patty snorted. “He didn’t know anything until Susan got cancer. That’s when she told him everything.”

  “She told him about Father Patrick?” Leah wondered aloud. “About being in love with him?”

  Her mother smiled thinly. “There are some secrets a woman keeps for a lifetime.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Leah got up, pacing back and forth in front of the dresses, wheels turning.

  “The Mary Magdalenes? I honestly don’t know,” her mother admitted. “A long time.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone?” Leah flipped through the dresses, one by one. “Why didn’t you expose them? Stop it?”

  “Oh, Leah, I wish it was that simple.” Patty joined her daughter by the rack of dresses, her voice low. “The church… it’s so powerful. You have no idea. Father Patrick has the ear of every bishop and cardinal in the state. He’s had an audience with the Pope!”

  “But he’s still doing it.” Leah grabbed one of the dresses off the rack, shaking it at her mother, brandishing it like a weapon. “And you knew it.”

  Patty shrank away, blinking back tears. “What else could I do? I was a woman, alone! I was just glad to get out. And I got to keep you, didn’t I?”

  Leah looked down at the dress in her hands. “I don’t know if that’s much consolation...”

  “Oh, Leah, no.” Her mother grabbed hold of her daughter’s hands, still gripping the hanger.“Think of little Grace, how much you love her, how much you want to give her. Think of how much you would sacrifice for her.”

  Leah lowered her head, feeling the tears she’d been holding back start to fall. Thinking about Grace inevitably brought them to the surface. “I’d do anything.”

  “I know,” her mother whispered, cupping Leah’s face in her hands. She hadn’t done that since she was a little girl. Leah lifted her eyes, meeting her mother’s gaze. “I know because I love you the same way, Leah. Please believe me. I didn’t do it for me. I did it for you.”

  “Oh Leah, you have to try that on!” Erica interrupted them both before Leah could respond, coming around the corner and seeing Leah still holding a dress in her hands, knuckles white, fingers tight around the hanger.

  “That’s one of our lovelier gowns,” Irene agreed, peeking around the corner and joining them when it looked as if the coast was clear. “It was modeled after Grace Kelly’s—twenty-five yards of peau de soie, twenty-five yards of silk taffeta, three-hundred yards of Valenciennes lace and countless seed pearls.”

  “It suits you perfectly,” Leah’s mother said, touching her daughter’s cheek. Leah glanced down at the dress. She had hardly even looked at it. “Innocent and beautiful, just like you.”

  “Well go try it on!” Erica urged.

  Irene took Leah into one of the fitting rooms, leaving her alone with the gown but telling her to call for her when she got it mostly on, as there were dozens of buttons to be done up the back. Leah undressed slowly, hands shaking slightly, still trying to absorb what her mother had revealed. She had asked for honesty, had demanded it in fact, but the news she’d received had been more shocking than anything she could have imagined. It was true after all—you should be careful what you wished for.

  Leah left her clothes on the padded bench, standing in front of the full-length mirror in her bra, panties, garters and stockings, still wearing her heels. The wedding dress was voluminous, the layers of fabric shockingly heavy as she slipped her arms through the long, full-length lace sleeves, white satin falling all around her hips. The neck was high as her mother had suggested, but it was sheer lace, showing the pale cream of Leah’s throat and the upper part of her chest.

  “You can come in now,” Leah called and Irene opened the door, smiling as she stepped into the dressing room.

  “Oh, lovely,” Irene murmured, looking at Leah’s reflection in the mirror. Irene produced a tool to do up the buttons in back and they were fastened in no time.

  Leah stared at herself in the mirror, her long, dark hair falling in carefully set waves over her shoulders, down the back of the dress. She would probably have it put up for the wedding, depending on the type of veil she chose.

  “Do you have a veil for this dress?” she asked, smoothing the fabric over her middle. She was two sizes larger than she’d been before Grace, and her body was still resuming its original shape, although she was beginning to wonder if it would make it all the way back. She needed to start dancing again.

  “It’s divine. Stay here.” Irene disappeared again and Leah touched the lace at her throat, marveling at the gorgeous handiwork. What would Rob be thinking when I walked down the aisle in this dress? she wondered. Probably how long it would be before he could get me out of it. She giggled at the thought, cheeks flushing. She’d thought a great deal about her wedding when she was young, but never her honeymoon. Now she was looking forward to both.

  “Here we are!” The veil was a delicate, Juliet cap affair Irene clipped into place, fluffing the veil over Leah’s face, arranging. “Oh my goodness, what a beautiful bride you make!”

  Leah blushed at the compliment, following Irene out of the dressing room and down the hallway. She heard Erica’s gasp before she saw her wide eyes and the bemused smile starting on her face. When Leah looked over at her mother, she saw with wonder and a little bit of awe, she had tears in her eyes.

  She stepped toward the three-
way mirror, the train of material following her, looking at herself in amazement. She’d been transformed from an ordinary girl to a goddess with one simple costume change. Irene urged her up on the pedestal so she could arrange the train and veil behind her. Erica crowded next to Leah, looking at their reflection side by side in the mirror, her eyes damp too.

  “I feel like a fairy princess,” Leah whispered, taking Erica’s hand in hers and squeezing.

  “You look like one,” her mother assured her, stepping into view on Leah’s other side, going up on tiptoe to brush her daughter’s cheek with a soft kiss. Leah couldn’t remember the last time her mother had kissed her.

  Leah met her mother’s eyes in the mirror, not as a daughter looking at her mother, but as a woman meeting the eyes of another woman. They had far more common ground than Leah ever had wanted to admit as a teenager, but she saw it and understood it now in one glance. Patty Wendt was a woman and a mother. How could Leah fault her for hardening her heart in a world that treated her like a piece of property, had used and defiled her, had abused and demeaned her at every turn?

  Leah lived in that world too. Nothing had changed. But her mother had loved her and had tried to protect her from it all along, just like Leah loved Grace and she knew she would do everything in her power to protect her daughter from the same mistakes she’d made. Funny how the universe repeated patterns ad infinitum, generation after generation, until someone finally turned around and started walking in the other direction.

  She felt her mother’s hand slip into hers and Leah squeezed it, smiling. She would never know who her real father was. She didn’t have a father to walk her down the aisle and give her away. But she had her mother, and she knew, finally, her mother really did love her.

  “Mom, Erica’s going to be my maid of honor.” Leah smiled at her friend, feeling tears pricking her eyes. “But I was wondering if you would walk me down the aisle and give me away?”

  “Oh, Leah...” Patty Wendt’s face crumbled, tears slipping down her cheeks. “I never wanted to give you away.”

  Leah smiled. “Is that a no?”

  “No, sweetheart.” Leah’s mother opened her pocketbook, looking for a tissue. “Of course I will. It’s just… you’ll always be my little girl.”

  “What church are you getting married at?” Irene asked, smiling and fluffing up her veil.

  Leah sighed, shaking her head.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Leah’s mother said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “To hell with Father Patrick.”

  Erica and Leah looked at each other in the mirror, eyes wide and mouths open. Then they both burst out laughing, and Patty looked between them, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth. That turned into a snicker, and then laughter. The three of them couldn’t stop, even though the other bride and her party were staring at them and whispering. It just made them laugh harder, forcing Patty Wendt to dab at her eyes again, using the tissue to wipe away tears of laughter from her eyes this time.

  Chapter Six

  Curiosity killed the cat. That’s what kept going through Erica’s mind as Clay drove down the back roads of the ironically named Paradise Alley, the black ghetto between the Detroit river in the south and Grand Boulevard to the north, at a crawling five miles an hour with the lights of his Sedan off, the passenger side window cranked all the way down, making Erica shiver in the frigid December air, what was left of a pile of rolled up newspapers between them at one in the morning.

  “Do you always deliver them like this?” Erica whispered as if the people sleeping in the houses and tenements could hear them.

  “Have to.” Clay slowed to a near stop, grabbing a paper and leaning across her, tossing it with the velocity and aim a major league baseball player would have been impressed by, hitting the front porch stoop square on. “They’re called ‘underground’ papers for a reason. I could be arrested for writing most of this stuff, let alone distributing them.”

  “Wouldn’t your parents just throw a fit?”

  “Oh, hell yes.”

  “Is it worth it?” Erica picked up one of the papers, sliding the rubber band off the end and opening it up. It was too dark to read much, but when she held it up in the dashboard light, she saw the headline read, Detroit Plans for ‘Negro Removal.’

  “Sit back.” Clay slowed again, grabbing a rolled paper and tossing it. This one missed the stoop and ended up in the bushes next to the porch.

  “You missed.”

  “You were distracting me in that blouse. Button it up, would you? At least until we’re done?”

  Erica grinned, looking down at the cleavage showing and reached for her buttons, slowly unbuttoning one more so that her bra was showing, looking straight at him the whole while. Clay groaned.

  “What’s this about ‘Negro Removal? ’”

  “Urban renewal project plans to tear down all of Black Bottom and Paradise Alley. They’ve already razed a bunch of housing near the river. They call it ‘eradicating blight.’ Yeah, they’re eradicating blight all right—they’re getting rid of the negros in one fell swoop.”

  Erica frowned, squinting at the article in the darkness. “But the news said it was a good thing. Something about increasing tax revenue, improving living conditions. You have to admit, some of these houses are pretty shabby. Aren’t they planning on building nice, new high-rises for them?”

  “For them?” Clay snorted. “Is that how you think of Solie? She’s one of them?”

  “Well… no… I...” Erica floundered, flustered, flushing red in the thankful dimness. Solie was like part of her family, had been for years. She was the closest thing she had to a mother since her own mother had died. But she was ashamed to think she didn’t know much about Solie’s life outside of the Nolans. Erica knew she had children, a husband who worked at a factory. But that was about it.

  “Can you be that naïve?” Clay grabbed another paper, leaning over her to toss it angrily out of the window. “They gave the people living down by the river thirty-days notice to vacate their homes. Then they tore them down to the ground. But they don’t have plans to build on the land at all! That empty area they call Cobo Field now? It’s just sitting there. ‘Urban development’ is just code for ‘Negro Removal.’ They’re trying to get rid of their ‘negro problem’ without creating any solution at all.”

  “Well… I don’t understand why the news isn’t covering this...”

  “They are.” Clay slowed again, tossed another paper. “They’re spinning it all into nice little bits and bites for the whites to swallow so they can feel better about driving down Hastings street after dark. They’re using federal urban renewal dollars to eliminate the only housing blacks are allowed to live in, and they’re doing nothing to build any more. In fact, they’re going to build a freeway instead.”

  “Where will everyone go?”

  “Good question. I wasn’t kidding when I said we’re not far from the race riots we saw back in forty-three.”

  “Clay, you were, like, fourteen...” Erica didn’t remember the incident very well. Her mother had been sick at the time and they’d been well insulated in their big house on the river. It had all started out on Belle Isle in a traffic jam, and rumors flew about a white woman being raped, and a black mother and child being thrown off the bridge, neither of which were true but which spurred the biggest race riots Detroit had seen.

  “I was at Belle Isle that day.” He threw the last paper, hitting not just the stoop this time, but the door beyond it. “We were in a traffic jam on the Belle Isle Bridge. It was hot and everyone was irritable. There was a little black kid in the car next to ours. He was just goofing around, you know, like kids do, making faces at the other cars.”

  Erica felt her heart drop to her middle when Clay whipped the car around the corner, pulling it to the curb and looking over at her in the darkness. He turned toward her, his breathing shallow and sharp as he told her his story.

  “Four guys got out of their car behind us. White
kids, probably just old enough to drive. They grabbed that little boy out of the car and beat him up right there in front of his mother.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “And no one did anything. His mother screamed and called for help and got a fat lip herself trying to get those boys to stop. And no one did anything.”

  “Oh, Clay...” Erica reached out, putting her hand over his. “I’m so sorry...”

  “I didn’t do anything either.” He swallowed, the clicking sound in his throat huge in the darkness. “I asked my dad—he was driving, and my mom was sitting in the passenger seat, we’d just gone to Belle Isle for the day because I’d begged them to take me—I asked him, ‘Shouldn’t we do something? Dad, shouldn’t we? ’”

  Clay’s voice cracked and Erica felt tears stinging her eyes, imagining it.