Charisma (2 page)

He got one hand around her jaw and the other on her shoulder. He dragged her to him and spun her around. She got a hand inside his jacket and pulled.

He tore her neck just as she tore his jacket. The sounds were strangely similar.

A moment later, she was on the floor, dead.

The blood drained from his head and his eyes cleared. She had a piece of his jacket lining in her hand. He took his jacket off and left it folded over the back of a chair. He was wearing two sweaters over a shirt and undershirt. He’d survived like that before in the cold. Besides, it had never really been his jacket anyway.

Somewhere outside, the church bell rang again, a single solemn gong marking the half hour. It had taken no time at all. He hadn’t been too weak for it. He had only to worry about finishing up, and about the weather. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the sky had opened. There was snow coming down as thick and fast as summer rain. Through the crack in the curtains he could see it piling up on the dead branches of the yard’s one tree.

He picked up her nun things and put them back in the drawer where she’d kept them, the third one from the top in her bedroom bureau. He went back into the living room and rescued the knife from his discarded jacket. The rosary he had sent her was still on the coffee table. It had been jogged out of place. It looked as if she’d been saying it and then put it down, carelessly; on her way to do something else.

The cold was still slipping through the window he had broken, dropping the temperature lower and lower, making everything frigid.

She was lying on the floor with her head tilted too far around, with her legs spread apart as if someone had tried to rape her. But he hadn’t tried to rape her. He didn’t want to rape her. She was an old woman. Sex had never held much interest for him anyway.

What he really wanted to do was cut.

S
OMETIMES, SUSAN MURPHY THOUGHT
her life would have been easier if she had been able to look at it as a series of grievances. God only knew, her history entitled her to one or two. Standing in this stone-floored foyer, looking out at a landscape she had once known more intimately than she had ever wanted to know anything, she could count out the things that would have turned any of the women she knew into raging shrews. Her father, her mother, her order, her Church: Dena, who had been a Franciscan before the ravages of Vatican II, would have taken any one of these things and run with it. In fact, she had. The last Susan had heard, Dena was down in South America somewhere, trying to bring contraception to women who only wanted to know how to have more babies, and communism to farmers who had their minds on jungles and rainfall.

One wall of the foyer was a great glass window, leaded and paned. Susan looked out of it at trees and rocks and curving stone walls. It was a beautiful place, Saint Michael’s. Its fidelity to the spirit of the medieval Church was absolute. So was its fidelity to the spirit of nineteenth-century capitalism. What it reminded her of, more than anything, was home the way home had been before the real trouble started: that massive house on Edge Hill Road; that endless dining room with its forty-chair table set with silver; her mother in pale pink taffeta and too many pearls. One of the reasons she was leaving the convent was that too much had started to remind her of home as home used to be. Sometimes, waking up in the morning and not quite rid of sleep, she thought of herself not as Sister Mary Bede, but as the woman her mother had once told her she would be. What scared her was the possibility that that woman was what, in spite of everything, she really was.

Silly ass,
she thought. She heard sounds above her head, heavy shoes on wrought-iron spiral stairs. She looked up to see Reverend Mother coming down to her, moving painfully, stopping on every riser to catch her breath. The black folds of an only-slightly-modified habit shifted and swirled in the air around her, making her look like a moving cloud.

“Are you all right?” Susan said.

“I’m fine.” Reverend Mother came down two more steps, stopped, and sighed. “If you wouldn’t wear a jacket, you could at least have let yourself into the office. There’s no heat in that foyer.”

“I’m not cold, Reverend Mother.”

“Of course you’re cold. Everyone’s cold.”

Susan started to fold her arms under the short cape of her habit, realized it wasn’t there, and stuck her hands into the pockets of her jeans instead. The jeans were new, and stiff. They scraped against the skin of her legs and made her wonder if she was bleeding.

It was seven o’clock on the morning of the Monday after the first Sunday in Advent, December 2. She had just spent half an hour in this foyer, trying to be angry. There had been days lately when that was all she ever did.

She crossed the foyer and opened the door to Reverend Mother’s office, mostly to give herself something to do. Then she let herself slip into her favorite fantasy.

She was driving along the road somewhere, sliding through small towns full of small stores and twenty-five-dollar-a-night hotels. The snow was thick and absolutely white, just fallen. The thin branches of the trees were encased in ice, so that the trees looked decorated. The sun was shining.

Up ahead, just coming into view, was a wide open Dunkin’ Donuts.

The meeting in Reverend Mother’s office was a ritual, like Mass. Every nun who left this order had to have one, even if she left before Profession. Susan had never understood what for. In her case, at least, there was nothing unexpected or inexplicable. She and Reverend Mother had been talking it over for months.

Of course, it was hard to pin down what they’d said to each other, or what they’d understood. Susan decided she was here because she was supposed to be here. To have left any other way would have been rude. Neither Sister Mary Bede nor the Susan Katherine Murphy of Susan’s mother’s fantasies would ever be rude.

She sat down facing the oversize crucifix at Reverend Mother’s back and stretched out her legs. She had to, because she found it hard to bend them. Her brother Dan had sent her the jeans. She had sent him her measurements. He liked clothes tighter than she did.

Reverend Mother poured two cups of coffee from the pot on the tray Sister Martina had brought in and handed her one.

“Did you get it all straightened out about the car?” she said. “I heard you on the phone last night. What makes them think nuns have credit cards?”

“They don’t think nuns have credit cards, Reverend Mother. They just don’t rent cars to people who don’t.”

“There probably are nuns who have credit cards,” Reverend Mother said. “Out there, somewhere.”

“Out there, somewhere” was Reverend Mother’s code for what other people called “the spirit of Vatican II.” It took in a lot of territory. Susan drank coffee and put her cup down on the edge of Reverend Mother’s desk.

“My brother Dan straightened it out,” she said. “He called and rented it himself. I think he used a little pull.”

“Pull.”

“He’s the district attorney for the city of New Haven, Reverend Mother. And it is a local rental company. Local to New Haven County at any rate.”

“You should have joined an order with a Motherhouse farther away,” Reverend Mother said. “Maybe that was the problem. Usually, I think it’s better for women to be close to home, but in your case—”

A look passed between them, something that said they both knew everything there was to know about “this case.” And would rather not talk about it. Susan had a sudden, vivid memory of the day she had told Reverend Mother what had happened in her life. She had sat in this chair in her novice’s habit and talked for six hours.

Reverend Mother poured more coffee, which Susan knew she wouldn’t drink. Reverend Mother never drank more than one cup a day.

“Do you know what you’re going to do with yourself?” she said. “I can’t imagine you want to work for the district attorney’s office. I can’t see you as one of those new women lawyers with their suits and their athletic walking shoes.”

“I’d have to go to law school for that, Reverend Mother. And I don’t think Dan could hire me even if I wanted him to. They have rules about nepotism, you know.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-five.”

Reverend Mother nodded. “I think I’ve heard of your brother. There was a case, about two years ago. It was in all the papers. About child abuse in a daycare center.”

“That was Dan,” Susan said. “And it was certainly in all the papers.”

Reverend Mother shot her a strange look. “What’s the matter, Sister? Don’t you get along with your brother? The papers at the time made him sound like—well, like a crusading knight.”

“I like my brother just fine, Reverend Mother. I suppose I don’t know him all that well. He’s ten years older than I am. He’s never even been to visit me up here. I’m closer to the younger one.”

“Younger than you are?”

“A little.”

“And?”

Susan shrugged. “His name’s Andy. You may have seen him once or twice. He’s been up here on visiting days.”

“What does
he
do?”

Susan smiled. “Reverend Mother, the three of us were brought up with a lot of money. Sometimes, with people who have been brought up like that, it’s better not to ask what they do.”

“Meaning he doesn’t do anything,” Reverend Mother said.

“Meaning he thinks he’s an artist,” Susan said.

Reverend Mother sighed. “I think you should have taken that job with the archdiocese,” she said. “I know it was social work and you’re not trained for that, but you could have handled it. It would have made a good transitional phase. Halfway in and halfway out.”

“Except that sometimes it’s not so transitional, Reverend Mother. Sister Davida took a job with the archdiocese in 1972. She’s still there.”

“Nineteen seventy-two was a very different year.”

“An entirely different decade.”

“And Sister Davida was a very different kind of nun.”

“Reverend Mother, Sister Davida was a psychopath.”

Reverend Mother got out of her chair. She was a huge woman, tall and grotesquely fat, except that under the folds of a conservative habit nobody ever looked really fat. Just tented.

“Susan, Susan, Susan,” she said. “You’ve got to stop saying things like that. Seventeen years, and we didn’t even make you circumspect.”

“Maybe,” Susan said, “but I can recite the Litany of Loretto from memory. And I can recite the Miserere from memory in Latin.”

Reverend Mother turned away, opened the top drawer of her filing cabinet, and went rooting around for Susan’s papers.

In the seventeen years she had known this woman, Susan had never once seen her put anything in its place.

Fifteen minutes later, Susan climbed into the convent van next to Sister Mary Jerome, stuffing the things she was taking with her on the dashboard over the glove compartment. There wasn’t much. A dwarf manila envelope held her fifteen-decade rosary and the brown scapular she had worn under her habit. A larger manila envelope held a small packet of unopened mail. The Miraculous Medal she had worn around her neck was still there, under the shirt and sweater Dan had sent her. God only knew why.

Sister Mary Jerome sat in the driver’s seat, stiff and cold and disapproving. She was a young nun with an uncertain vocation and a sour face, a well of bitterness that could not be excavated because it had no bottom. Defections always threatened her.

She pointed to the manila envelopes and said, “If we go up a hill, that stuff is going to fall on the floor.”

Susan took the manila envelopes and put them in her lap. Sister Mary Jerome frowned at them.

“I can’t believe you aren’t going to open your mail,” she said. “I always open my mail. We only get it once a week.”

“And there’s never anything in it,” Susan pointed out.

“There’s a lot in yours.”

“It’s just circulars, Mary Jerome. Religious publishing houses wanting to sell me catechisms. Religious supply houses wanting to sell me First Communion gift sets. It’s because I was principal of a school.”

“You get mail every week,” Mary Jerome said. “I see it stacked up on the table in the living room. Sometimes I go months without seeing an envelope.”

“I’ll send you some,” Susan said. “I’ll even get my brothers to send you some. Don’t you think we ought to get moving?”

Mary Jerome turned the key and shifted into gear. “I can’t believe you’re not going to open your mail,” she said again. But she had pulled the van into the drive, and they were moving.

Through the windshield, Susan could see snow beginning to come down, white against the black bark of naked trees. Saint Michael’s had nearly two acres between it and the road. Standing on the porch at the front of the Motherhouse was like looking into primeval forest. The lawn could have been endless.

Today the drive itself was slicked with ice and looked dangerous. Mary Jerome was alternately humming the alleluia and muttering under her breath about “we.”

When they made the first turn of the three that led to the gate, Mary Jerome said, “Some people just don’t know how to
appreciate
that mail.”

Halfway to town, Susan finally opened her mail. She did it because she was nervous, and because Mary Jerome kept staring at it. Mary Jerome kept staring at her, too, but there was nothing Susan could do about that.

They were rolling along on ice and snow, going much too fast, skidding across streets that dipped and curved and plunged between white Protestant props. A Congregationalist church. A gambrel colonial built before the Revolution. Susan had never noticed before how deliberately picturesque this town was, as if a Norman Rockwell aesthetic had been imposed on it by legislation, from above.

“People just don’t understand,” Mary Jerome said. “About mail, I mean. I tell my family and I tell my family, but they just won’t listen. They think just because we’re not allowed to write more than four times a year, they shouldn’t write to us more than four times a year.”

“My family never wrote to me at all,” Susan said. “They certainly wouldn’t be writing now.”