“Officially, after about six months. But I’ve never really stopped. Rowan’s mother forwards me emails that come in through Rowan’s website. There aren’t many, but sometimes there’ll be something that sounds like a tip. I’ve followed up on things over the years,” Kit said.
“Like what?” Ciaran asked.
Kit picked up her coffee mug and held it.
“Possible sightings. There haven’t been many. I check on Jane Does that match Rowan’s description. With most, it’s been obvious right away it wasn’t her, but twice I’ve passed the information on to the detective handling her case.”
“They followed up?” Ciaran asked.
Kit was silent for a moment. “I hope so.”
Ciaran turned to me. “What do you think?”
I didn’t know if he wanted me to assess how helpful Kit’s investigation had been or acknowledge how hard she’d worked.
“About—?” I asked.
“What your uncle said.”
Listening to Kit, it had been easy to distance myself from the story, pretend it wasn’t about me.
“They don’t call it full-blown AIDS anymore,” I said. “You’re either asymptomatic or symptomatic.”
Ciaran frowned, but Kit said, “I’m very glad that you’re doing well.”
I nearly asked if she would have sent flowers to my funeral. Janus would have laughed. Leo would have laughed.
“Those questions the police asked, I thought that’s what they asked everybody.” After a brief silence, I added, “My mother was sick forever before she started . . . forgetting. I knew that. Michan should have let me talk to you.”
“He was trying to protect you,” Kit said. “Can’t blame him for that.”
“He should have let me decide,” I said.
Outwardly I was calm, but I was angry at how illness had turned me into a bundle of rioting cells that had to be placated.
Ciaran cleared his throat. “What would you have asked Adair?”
“A lot of the same questions the police did. Michan was right about that.”
“What else?” Ciaran asked.
Kit looked at me. “What were you looking for in the history section?”
It was like being addressed directly on the subway. After only a few weeks in Brooklyn, I’d learned to draw an invisible curtain around myself. When someone yanked it aside, a tourist asking for directions, a panhandler asking for change, I got a shock.
I turned to Ciaran. “The anthology of Moye House stories that your father was in. Rowan asked Charley if he had a copy of it. And he said yes, but damned if he knew where. Charley didn’t pay much attention to shelving. I didn’t believe him, or at least I thought he couldn’t possibly know for sure. But I helped Rowan look. We’d spent most of the summer hunting for it,” I said.
Ciaran looked pained. “You never found it?”
“No. By the time school started, Rowan had given up,” I said. “One day we were in there, checking the books that were stacked on the floor, and Rowan jumps up and says maybe Charley shoved it in with the children’s books. But she didn’t find it, and she was crushed.”
“Crushed,” Ciaran repeated quietly.
“We’d never looked in History either. That day, I was skimming titles, hoping to see it,” I said. Because I looked for the book out of habit by then, the way I look for Rowan’s face among the living now. “I thought how cool it would be if I found it and surprised her on her birthday.”
But now that I’ve read it, I’m glad it stayed lost—I kept that thought to myself. This wasn’t the time.
“What made you believe Evelyn?” Ciaran said abruptly, as if Rowan’s being crushed were too much for him.
Kit drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “For the most part, I think a parent who accidentally causes their child’s death, their instinct is going to be to lie about what the fuck happened. And by this I mean they caused the death directly, out of rage. First reaction is probably not going to be to get rid of the body and stage a kidnapping. I say this to a cop, I’m going to hear the exceptions,” Kit said ruefully. “But in those cases, most of the time the story falls apart fast.”
“What if Evelyn’s story never fell apart,” Ciaran said, “because Leo helped her? All he had to do was take Rowan into the woods and leave her somewhere hikers never went near. He’d have known where to go.”
At the mention of his name, both of them might well have cast Leo as a nineteen-year-old enthralled with an older woman, willing to do whatever she asked. Whether or not they believed it had actually happened that way, they’d let the scenario play out in their minds, weighing it.
But I remembered him, Leo, shaking my hand, proving by his grip that he was not afraid of me.
Kit nodded slowly. “Maybe. But if he was involved, being told he’s going to prison for ten years but maybe not, if he cooperates? Facing jail time does a very, very good job of persuading someone to act in their own best interest. That said, it’s possible his lawyer got him to stop talking in time. It’s possible he is that cold-blooded.”
“He isn’t cold-blooded. He was ordinary. An ordinary guy,” I said.
“You were a child then yourself,” Ciaran answered. “How could you know?”
Leo, who would only talk about prison in the dark, lying beside me, saying he understood why people confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. All you want in the world is to get away from the police, and they’re telling you all you have to do is say that you did it. The words the police want to hear start to feel like the opposite of a lie. Instead, they’re magic words, what will set you free.
But it wouldn’t have worked, I’d said to Leo, because you couldn’t say where Rowan was—they’d realize you were lying to get away from them. And Leo had answered, very tiredly, They wouldn’t have thought I was innocent, they’d have thought I was fucking with them. I looked away.
Kit’s eyes flicked to the clock on the wall, a reminder that her investigation of Rowan’s disappearance may have been painful for her, but it was still her work, not her life. Each time she checked in, spent an afternoon, or more likely a night, I thought, looking at pictures of Jane Does, she could get up from her chair, shut down the computer and close the office door.
Ciaran and I got back to Moye House during dinnertime. We paused in the hallway and listened to the conversation, which was lively, a blend of voices.
“Are you going in?” I asked.
“I suppose I should,” he said. “I’m going to check my mail first. I made my mother promise to send a postcard, so I’d get something.”
Residents’ mail was set out on a side table in the library. Long ago, it had been a pre-dinner ritual. Writers forwarded their mail from home or had family send anything important. Each evening at the end of quiet hours, they’d go in to see if they’d gotten any acceptances or rejections, or postcards from the outside world. One writer learned she had sold her first story here. Another got a Dear John letter from his wife and later used it to begin his novel, without even changing the names. Some writers, aware of the stories, had their mail forwarded for the sake of tradition.
I followed Ciaran. There were two envelopes on the table.
“Nothing for me,” he said. “I’d better get in there. I’m going to be here all day tomorrow, on lockdown.”
He sounded almost apologetic, and it was embarrassing, as if he thought I’d expected to spend the day with him.
“An old friend of mine is coming to visit tomorrow,” I said.
“From college?” Ciaran asked.
He had no context for me outside of tragedies, my parents, his sister, and though I understood this, it bothered me.
“No.” I smiled. “He’s literally my old friend. He’s a little past my parents’ age. The age they would be.”
“You mean he knew them?”
“Them and hundreds of others,” I said.
“Hundreds of others?”
“With AIDS,” I said, though maybe it wa
s thousands. Could it have been? Janus called himself a museum of the dead.
“His name is Janus. J-a-n-u-s.”
“Looking to both the past and the future,” Ciaran said. “Was he a doctor? Is that why—?”
“He’s a doctor now. A therapist,” I said. “He used to be a priest.”
18
Janus
The boy was raised on Long Island, post–World War II, those years that are remembered now as the upbeat chorus of a song. He was the son of a veteran and a housewife. Of their six children, he was the third. He played baseball (not well) and had a paper route that took him all over the neighborhood on his bike. He liked the solitude of being up at dawn.
Even in his earliest memories, the years when his parents were still bringing home new babies, he had a sense of being different. Everyone around him believed the sky was blue, and he agreed with them, despite knowing it wasn’t. He wanted, just once, to stop and point and say to someone, anyone, Don’t you see?
When he was fourteen years old, he confessed to the older of the two parish priests, deliberately choosing him over the younger one. Years later, he’d question this decision. He’d wonder if it was his fear that the younger priest would be compassionate and help him understand that some boys dream of other boys.
This was a fantasy. Nothing the younger priest said or did during his time at the parish suggested a renegade spirit. Nothing suggested compassion.
The boy knelt in the confessional, the old upright coffin, and he buried himself alive. The old priest listened, his breath rattling, a distant train in his throat.
As an adult, Janus framed it as comedy. He imitated the priest’s phlegmy voice, his wet words and his own relief at being told he was not a faggot. The priest didn’t use that word. Janus did.
But the priest explained that his dreams were not erotic but apostolic. He, Peter, had been called by God, like the first Peter. The boy chose to believe it. His confusion would end in the simplest way, a life of celibacy. He would touch no one. At sixteen years old, he told his parents that he had a vocation to the priesthood, and they were proud, as parents were in those days. And he would be spared Vietnam.
One afternoon, his third term at the seminary, he was in church by himself, praying the rosary. He had climbed up into the choir loft, the better to look down on the sanctuary, which was decorated for Christmas. The smells of pine and incense filled the gabled roof. The crèche sat beside the altar. Mary and Joseph and the shepherds knelt before an empty manger.
He was dizzy with it. He bowed his head lower.
The Joyful Mysteries.
He didn’t turn when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, or when they approached him. There is voice in the breaths we take, from the first to the last. He knew it was Benno.
Benno, fellow seminarian, whose piety he claimed to envy—though it was really Benno’s sense of humor and the easy charm with which he talked to everyone, from the senior priests who taught them to the housekeeper who did their laundry.
He didn’t call him Ben, as the others did. Always Benno.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
Benno leaned over and kissed him between his shoulder blades, where his wings would be, were he an angel. Peter the seminarian didn’t move, didn’t respond. He continued with his prayers. After a moment, Benno went away.
Glory be to the Father,
the Son
and the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning,
Is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen.
They never spoke of the choir loft, but simply continued on in their studies, friends through ordination, after which their lives diverged.
Father Benno went to Vietnam as a chaplain.
Father Peter was assigned a comfortable parish on Long Island, near his childhood home. His parents drove to his church to hear him say Mass, as did his two married sisters.
Father Peter became a favorite of his parishioners. He did his best to memorize the names of the children, but devised a trick for when he was stuck.
“And you are Bert, or are you Ernie?” he’d say to the boys.
“Are you Gertrude or Bertha?” he’d say to the girls.
The children believed he was only teasing. Their priest knew exactly who they were, but they still chimed out their names to him, in on the joke.
Jack! Jimmy! Joseph! Katie! Colleen! Kerry!
Father Peter loved them. He loved the high schoolers too, passionate and angry, brilliant and dumb. He cheered them on in basketball and baseball and softball and soccer. Some boys may have guessed. Father Peter was never slurred on bathroom walls, and he took it as a compliment, a sign of respect, though probably the ones astute enough to understand were the kind to write only in journals. Besides, there were no actual rumors to go on, nothing but instinct, since Father Peter did keep his vows, kindly turning aside the few subtle passes from married men of the parish he’d received over the years.
Father Peter knew all the words for what he was, though he never spoke them. He did not know if remaining celibate made him some lower order of saint or high order of hypocrite. His father had died and his mother was frail, and of all her children, she was proudest of him.
Father Peter decided he would wait until she had passed away before leaving the priesthood. This he would always count as his greatest sin, because it left him wondering daily, When? How much longer? He continued ministering to his parish of middle-class families, tending to their troubles, which were not inconsequential, for all their invisibility outside the home. Alcoholism, spousal abuse, drug use, teenage pregnancy.
He watched the news stories on AIDS with increasing alarm, as it became clearer and clearer the disease was no fluke afflicting a small number of men. He prayed for those who were suffering and thought once or twice about giving a homily about it, suggesting compassion and prayers for the dying, though it would certainly offend his older parishioners and not a few of the younger ones.
August 1985.
On a broiling summer afternoon, Father Peter had a rare few hours free, so he sat in the kitchen of the rectory reading a novel at the table. He had liked to do this as a child. The kitchen was where his mother was, cooking or ironing. Only the bedrooms of the rectory were air-conditioned. That’s where his fellow priest was, taking a nap. In the kitchen, the fan was adequate, the whirring a comfort, like voices of a family from another room.
The doorbell rang and Father Peter closed his eyes, saying a brief prayer to Jude, patron saint of the impossible, that it would be a delivery or something else the housekeeper could handle.
When the dark-haired priest came into the room, in clericals, collar in place in spite of the heat, Father Peter knew two things at once: who he was, and that he had AIDS.
He had learned from pictures in the newspapers and on the news to recognize the razored cheekbones and, even more, a look in the eye. Wary and hunted.
“Benno,” Father Peter said, getting to his feet. “Benno.”
He hugged him, and it was a long embrace. Father Peter looked into the brown eyes of his old friend and then at his bare arms. The short sleeves spoke not of the weather but that Benno didn’t care who saw the marks, the Kaposi lesions.
Father Benno said, “Will you help us?”
“Yes,” Father Peter said.
Father Benno had laughed then, in relief, he later said, because he had not been at all sure. He laughed, touched Peter’s cheek and said, “You are the rock upon which I build my church.”
Almost from the beginning, the Catholic Church had mounted a response to the crisis through Catholic Charities and hospitals, like St. Vincent’s in the Village, where the sick and dying were cared for. A paradox, Benno said, that the Church should minister to the gay men who were victims of the disease while proclaiming them “disordered,” a
nd while the pope stands up and says condoms are a mortal sin.
Don’t protect your bodies. Pay for your pleasure, your comfort, the particular expression of love that is sex. Pay for it with your lives. Your lives are worth nothing.
Father Peter worked with Father Benno, as long as Father Benno was still able, making sick calls to the hospital to hear the confessions of men long estranged from the Church. He didn’t quite understand why they wanted the comfort of an institution that turned them away, but Benno said it had to do with their past, not their future. They had no future. The two priests called mothers and fathers in faraway midwestern towns to tell them their sons were dying in New York.
He wants to see you. Will you come?
Quaking, elderly couples found their way to the bedside, as frightened of the subway system as they were of the disease killing their sons. Others said in cold voices, “He is already dead.” More mothers than fathers came alone. About an equal number, from what Father Peter could see, of brothers and sisters. The grown children of men arrived as well, to say hello and goodbye, sometimes in a single breath.
Father Peter and Father Benno, and a cobbled-together network of volunteers that included men and women, family members of the dead, nuns, nurses and doctors, worked both within the confines of Church-led organizations and outside of them.
Priests were sick.
Father Benno, removed from his own parish against his wishes—for “health reasons,” his flock was cryptically informed—told Father Peter about one priest, in the suburb of a city he would not name, who had infected at least five other priests.
Father Peter and Father Benno ministered to priests in hospice, many of whom had come from other states to die in hiding. Some said they had sinned only once. Some claimed they had caught the virus (somehow) from a drug user or prison inmate they had prayed with. Their death certificates listed the cause of death as pneumonia, brain tumor, emphysema, heart failure.
A friend of Father Benno’s died and left Father Benno his brownstone in the Village. Father Peter assumed they had been lovers, but he did not ask.
Ghosts of the Missing Page 20