Father Benno started a support group for men with AIDS that met in the living room, something he had long been trying to do. But he’d not wanted it to be held in a hospital conference room or some other such sterile space.
Father Benno asked Father Peter to take it over when he couldn’t any longer, which would be soon. He didn’t have to be a licensed counselor. He didn’t have to have AIDS. All he had to do was find men who wanted to talk and invite them in. Answer the doorbell. Still, afraid of the responsibility, Father Peter suggested that one of the men already in the group take over.
“We need someone who isn’t going to die,” Father Benno said simply. Then he smiled. “Be careful crossing streets, Pietro.”
Father Benno died on December 31, 1986, the date he’d been hoping for when it was clear he was at the end.
“If I live past midnight,” he’d said that morning in the scrap of voice he had left, “I’ll be trapped another year.”
Father Peter spoke at the funeral, in Benno’s church. He did what Benno had asked. He told the people what killed Benno, both ending his own life as a priest and winning him the respect of Benno’s group. Brave, funny, bitter, angry men, all of them grieving, so it was almost possible to believe that what was killing them was grief.
The funeral Mass was the last time he wore the Roman collar.
Sometime during that first blurred year, Peter changed his name, because he was no longer the rock but fluid, a protean man. He understood where he had been and where he had to go.
Janus did as Benno had asked, aware that he would probably be in the same place as these men had he not allowed himself to be led into the priesthood, sick with the fiercest denial possible. Yet his refusal to accept who he was had saved his life.
Lissa McCrohan was the first woman with HIV that Janus met who had not contracted the disease through needles or sex work. There are no groups for women, Lissa said. And she needed to talk.
Some of the men were angrily opposed to her. Lissa was an “innocent” victim, as was her hemophiliac husband, whom society would not blame but pity. To many, she was a victim of the homosexual community. Her life, her husband’s and her child’s would be a loss; the men’s were not.
Others agreed that this was true, but hardly her fault. If she wanted to become an activist, then she should. If it took a dying young family to get the government to act, then so be it.
A few men did leave the group. Others gradually took their place. Lissa began bringing her daughter and her camera to meetings.
No one ever resented Adair. These men, cut off from their own children, nieces and nephews, either for being gay or having AIDS or both, reveled in a child they were allowed to be near. They braided her hair and bought her clothes.
“I am going to spend my last dime before I die,” one man said.
Another taught Adair some phrases in French. Another had her sit with him at the piano. He put her small hand on the keys. Like this, he said. Like this.
The attention could be too much. Sometimes Adair hid under Janus’s bed. Janus had moved into the brownstone not long after Benno’s funeral. The rectory had been his home. He had no place else to go.
Janus would watch Adair as her mother talked and wept and took photographs in the next room and spoke about the book she was going to write.
For Adair’s sake, Janus found more children, which was a sadly easy task. Foster care was filling with HIV-positive children, many of whom had already been orphaned by AIDS and abandoned by what family they had left.
There was one four-year-old boy Janus had first seen on the news. At his aunt’s apartment in the Bronx, he’d fallen three stories from a window that had had no safety guard. Because he’d broken his collarbone and not his skull, the nurses nicknamed him Lucky. It stuck, even after blood work revealed he had HIV. Both his parents had already taken off. They may well have been dead of AIDS by the time the boy went into the system. Janus sought out his foster mother, and she brought Lucky to some of the meetings.
There was one child, a six-year-old named Hayley, whose mother brought her out of desperation, hoping she might find some answers. Doctors had no idea how the little girl, who was eight, had contracted HIV. Her mother and father, who were her birth parents, were negative. Hayley had never had a blood transfusion. There was no known history of sexual abuse, and she’d never displayed any signs of it in her behavior. But her father raged. He wanted to compel the men in their family to be tested, also the fathers of his daughter’s friends, men who worked at her school, even neighbors. Some uncles and cousins had, but no one outside the family would comply. Nor should they, his wife said. She worried that a positive test would turn up and that her husband would murder the man with no other proof.
She put her own faith in some long-forgotten accident on a beach or in a park. Could her toddler have stepped on a needle? Or were the doctors wrong about how AIDS was transmitted? She feared Hayley might be a terrible harbinger of the future, a doomsday child, her name a curse.
Janus suggested something had happened in the hospital when Hayley was born. Had she been brought to the wrong mother and breastfed, the mistake discreetly corrected to avoid a lawsuit?
Her mother had seized on this, and Janus was glad to have brought her some relief, though he thought her husband’s nightmare was more likely.
When the widowed Lissa got too sick to travel to Manhattan, Janus went to see her, and so did some of the men she was closest to. Many more stayed away, unable to bear it.
Janus had spoken to Lissa about Adair. He had suggested not leaving her with family at all. Not her own mother or sister or father-in-law, who would probably drink himself to death before long. Not her brother-in-law, who Janus suspected was lying about his status to spare his family a modicum of pain.
Give her to a foster family, he’d said. One that’s taken kids with HIV before. But Lissa trusted the uncle. At Lissa’s funeral, Janus told Michan to stay in touch. Bring her by to see us. Even as he said it, he thought the young man would not follow through.
But Michan surprised him. He called when he had questions. He put Adair on the phone. He brought her into Manhattan at Christmastime. Lucky died, and so did his foster brothers, and so did Hayley, but Adair, she lived.
Though he hadn’t said so, I knew Janus would take the train to Culleton. He didn’t own a car and wouldn’t bother renting one.
I spent the morning in North Light, straightening the shelves, and by noon I’d settled on the balcony, where I idly sketched the trees that lined the drive, not as they looked in autumn but in winter, stripped, their branches stocked with snow.
I was listening for the sound of a cab coming up the drive, so when I saw the man with unkempt gray hair appear around the curve, I briefly saw a Civil War soldier coming slowly toward the house. I stood and blinked and he became Janus, the strap of a messenger bag across his chest. When he traveled, even on short trips, he always brought at least three books.
He waved and I waved back. My grip loosened and I was able to feel the pencil in my hand again.
Nearly twenty minutes passed before I heard a tap at the door, and I opened it to find Janus standing there with a coffee mug in each hand.
I’d seen pictures of him when he was Peter, the young priest, his dark hair short and perfectly parted, his somber blue eyes searching. I would not have known they were the same person.
After antiretrovirals became available, Janus returned to school to get a master’s in psychology. In his therapy practice, he had many patients who’d lived through the crisis years. He said they bore the same wounds as those who had survived a war. You, he once told me, are a baby born during the Blitz, but it made me uncomfortable. I had done nothing heroic.
“Can I hug you?” he asked.
“Please don’t,” I said. “Just the coffee.”
He handed me the mug. “For a dog person, you are awfully like a cat.”
Janus sat on the loveseat in the corner, and I perched on
the chair that I used at my easel.
“I’m starting a new support group,” he said.
“For the newly diagnosed?”
Janus smiled. “The opposite. Long-term survivors. Positive seniors. Another forty years and you can join.”
“Can’t wait,” I said.
“If you’re alive, that is,” he said.
“Did you come all this way to lecture me?”
But whatever Janus had in mind, I’d withstand it. He brought my mother with him. I caught her scent, a blend of tart perfume and darkroom chemicals. My father’s living person, I believed, had been his father, Darragh.
“I came all this way because you asked me to come visit. It’s my professional assumption that you want me to lecture you because Uncle Michan has not. Or not much. Probably because he spent a lifetime on medication himself, and he knows what it’s like to be told to take it.”
“Why isn’t it the opposite?” I asked, genuinely curious.
Janus leaned back, settling in. This was the kind of question he liked.
“When he was a child, he took factor VIII when he was bleeding, and it made the pain stop. You, on the other hand, are quite well but still have to take meds. Different mindset! But Michan has also been told his whole life that the medication is for his own good and that he might die without it. He knows what it’s like to want to be like everybody else. Striking any chords?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
“Why don’t you tell me.”
He laughed. “I’d love to hear your version first.”
But it was like trying to remember a movie I’d seen long ago.
“I moved,” I said. “When I had to refill, the pharmacy wasn’t close to my new apartment, and I kept meaning to get over there to pick up the prescription, but . . . it was never on the way home from wherever I was working.”
Janus nodded. “An extra couple of stops on the subway or having to switch trains. That’s worth risking your life for.” He sighed.
“I didn’t think of it as risking my life.”
“You wouldn’t jump off a bridge to see if you’d survive the fall, would you?”
I didn’t answer, and we sat in silence. He would wait for me to speak, I knew, for as long as it took. When I finally did, my question surprised him.
“Rowan,” I said. “Do you remember who she was?”
“Rowan . . .” I saw that he was going through the catalog in his mind, the names of the dead.
“The girl who was my friend.”
“My God, yes,” Janus said. He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me there are new developments?”
I shook my head and then explained who Ciaran Riordan was.
“He’s here now?” He glanced at the closed door as if he could see through it, down the hallway.
“He’s in his room, working.”
“He’s her brother? Sad business,” Janus said cautiously.
I had always changed the subject if he tried to mention Rowan to me, and he never pushed.
“Rowan wasn’t afraid of me,” I said. “And she never believed I would die.”
“Kids have a hard time understanding death.”
“She understood it perfectly,” I said, frustrated. “She knew what AIDS meant. But she didn’t think I’d die of it.” I nearly whispered the last part.
Janus didn’t try to tell me that in the fall of 1995. No twelve-year-old girl could have predicted 1996, the Lazarus year. He waited for me to go on, so I did.
“Sometimes I think she found a way to trade her life for mine.”
Janus didn’t laugh. For a moment I thought he might ask me how I thought she’d done it. But he chose a different question, a harder one.
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why would she have done that?” He sounded puzzled, and curious.
Because we were friends, I wanted to say, yet I knew he was right. It wasn’t quite enough. We had not been sisters, after all. We had not loved the same mother, the same father. Then, perhaps, she might have done such a thing, to spare them grief.
So I only stared down at the coffee, growing cold in the mug.
“Tell me about when Benno visited,” I said.
Benno, I didn’t remember. Many others I did. Some of the men Janus mentioned from time to time. Others he never spoke of, and long ago I decided not to ask if they were still alive, assuming they were not. But I could talk about Benno, who to me was like a movie star from the silent film era.
Janus was quiet for a long time. I knew he was trying to decide if he should press me more about Rowan or let it go for now. Benno won.
It happened shortly after midnight, New Year’s Eve. Benno had been dead for one year. Apartments packed with partygoers had their windows open to let the guests breathe the cold night air. People were singing up on the rooftops. Janus opened his own window to let some of the noise in, so he would feel less alone, though solitude this night had been his choice. Out in the city, friends were toasting Benno and so many others.
Janus looked up from his book because the letters were running all over the page, the p’s, q’s and g’s turning into one another, m’s and n’s switching places. Because the words would not behave themselves, he could not read. Yet he kept the book open on his lap, the way he did on a train or a plane when he didn’t want to risk conversation with a seatmate.
When he looked up, he saw Benno standing on the fire escape, casually leaning against the railing, grinning. He was quite young, eighteen or so, and dressed in jeans and a tight white T-shirt. His hair was shaggy. It was the Benno of summer. The Benno before seminary. The sky was bright behind him.
“How do you know it wasn’t your imagination?” I asked. “Wishful thinking?”
Janus smiled. Because it was so brief. A respite. In the space of a blink, Benno vanished.
It was like drinking a glass of water when you are very thirsty. It heals. But then you are soon thirsty again.
“If he were visiting from my imagination, I would have had him stay much longer.”
Janus had a soothing voice, a gift that had served him well as an AIDS activist. He must have been a good priest, I’d often thought.
“Have you ever seen anyone who’s still alive?” I asked.
“No,” Janus said. “It’s a trick only the dead can perform.”
I set my mug down on the floor. It had grown heavy as an anchor.
“I think Rowan was in the bookstore that day.” I twisted my fingers together. “I’ve let everybody tell me I had the wrong day. I was mistaken. I mistook a dream for reality. But it doesn’t feel like a dream. It never has, and I can say it now.”
“Memory does play tricks,” Janus said gently. “Even when you’re not traumatized. I remember this beautiful day I spent at the beach. It wasn’t too hot. The sky was cloudless and the water was not too cold. It wasn’t crowded. Nobody else sitting too close. Some days I can see Benno beside me, though it was before the seminary. We hadn’t even met.”
“Isn’t that a daydream, then, and not a memory?” I asked. “If you sometimes think he was there but you know he couldn’t have been.”
Janus raised his gray eyebrows and nodded once. “Well argued.”
“My parents didn’t think I was going to be okay.”
“No, they certainly did not.”
“They tried to kill me,” I said.
I’d startled him, I could see, as practiced as he was in hiding his emotions, staying neutral.
“Adair, I don’t know. Good God.”
I got up and went into a small alcove that I had not shown Ciaran. Canvases. Sketchbooks. Stacks of photographs. Cameras. Paintbrushes. My parents’ work, their instruments. Their fingerprints on all of it.
My father wrote his name on the cover of all his sketchbooks, and I wondered if he’d thought of it as autographing them, picturing the day when they might be worth something. The pre-1984 books are full of my
mother. There are many nudes. I’ve tried to look at them critically, one artist studying another’s work, but I can’t for long. It isn’t her actual nudity that’s difficult for me to look at; it’s that I know how it ends for them, artist and subject.
The postdiagnosis ones are immeasurably darker. There is the self-portrait, my father’s face marked by Kaposi. There are the sketches of me, always serious. There are plenty of photos of me where I am happy, shots my mother took. But my father always drew me as if I’d understood from the very beginning. As if, perhaps, I knew before they did.
I opened the book to my favorite one, drawn when I was three years old. My father’s projection of what I would look like, grown.
“Have you ever seen this?” I asked.
Janus took it, shaking his head. He smiled. “My God, he got pretty close.”
Cathal didn’t always title his work, but this one he had. Adair, Never, he’d called it.
I took the book back and turned a few more pages until I came to a much less polished sketch. It was an aerial view of a garage, the roof gone. A parked car, also without a roof. A man and woman sit in the front seats. There is a child in the back. All you can see are the tops of the heads. The garage door is closed. Somehow it’s clear that this family isn’t going anywhere.
“This happened,” I said.
“What?” Janus asked.
We were still living in the small house they rented when I was a baby, in what would become known as The Year Before (diagnosis). It is Christmastime. The tree is up and colored lights surround the windows.
My father can still walk, but his vision is failing and he is so thin that his smile takes up his whole face. My mother looks fine, and at five years old, I do as well, though I have already had pneumonia twice, the second time so recently, the long hospital stay is still my primary nightmare. The slick touch of gloved hands. The strange eyes, kind or cold, peering down at me above the masks. I memorized the cuts of furrows. Only my parents showed their faces.
The family comes to us for Christmas—my grandparents Darragh and Cecilia, and Michan as well. I run to him. Uncle Michan, I say. Niece Adair, he answers, and I laugh. There is a big dinner on Christmas Eve. My father is not at the table.
Ghosts of the Missing Page 21