Death of the Black-Haired Girl (5 page)

Jo brought the parties together. The fragile bark of human design being what it was, within a year things fell apart. Voyages of self-discovery found strange destinations; gathering storms broke. After something like a conversion experience—to what was unclear—it seemed the young birth mother wanted some relationship with her baby. Then she changed her mind. Discontents found their way up the college’s chain of command and even Dean Spofford, the smoothest operator ever to package a denial of college liability in a letter of condolence, found the outcomes trying. However, the experience taught Jo to be extra-scrupulous regarding matters sectarian, and she kept her job.

In the course of resolving that incident, Jo had gotten to know some of the people at the Newman Club and a look-in at what had been a subculture within the Catholic Church. Jo Carr, who would long keep her sentimental regard for religion, had found it hard to dislike the Newman people. In the days before the Catholics got so aggressive in their anti-abortion politics, before the sexual abuse scandal among parish priests, the Newman clubbers were quite lovable, with their Masses said by young priests from Kerala or Swaziland. Some Catholic kids went to the Newman Center in their freshman year and soon drifted away. At Whelan Hospital Jo had seen one she remembered, a pious post–parochial schoolgirl named Maud Stack, who had produced the club’s newsletter. Now Maud was a campus star, a
Gazette
editor whose idea of a club had nothing to do with dead cardinals. According to rumor, Maud had a romance going with one of her professors. Jo was not sure who the man was but suspected Steven Brookman, a witty man she knew slightly.

Whatever difficulties might presently befall the college or its students were unlikely to shock Jo Carr. In South America, at close quarters, she had seen a struggle toward mutual extermination so savage, fueled by such violent hatred between races and classes, that the very phrase “civil war” seemed an ironic euphemism. At the college she did what she could. A mind, as some brain-dead politician had once misquoted a fundraising slogan, was a terrible thing to lose.

Almost every year a kid was referred to the counseling office in whom Jo could detect the first signs of adolescent-onset schizophrenia. She was not qualified to work with its victims—there was a clinical psychologist at the center—but she knew the signs well enough. The too-wide smile, undercut by fear and wonder in the eyes, the futile attempted escapes into non sequitur, all the small signs of demeanor that signaled the beginning of the adventure. The descent of the innocent into half light, half life.

Far better, and one hoped less futile, was to talk to the merely troubled, beset by circumstance. Jo Carr’s clients were mostly young women. Often their problem was some degree of culture shock or homesickness, things that could be dealt with by providing someone to talk to. Other kids had drinking problems, and a surprising number—surprising to Jo, and increasing as far as she could tell—had drug addictions. At times, and in the cases of students who placed a lot of trust in the college as an institution, the problem was pregnancy. The questions these girls had were almost always similar, and Jo’s answers were too. There was no way around it, she thought. She hoped her answers were useful.

A sample question: “Should I tell my parents?”

Jo’s answer would be: “You’ll eventually feel you have to. That usually works out best in the end. If you’re not a minor, you’re not legally bound to get their permission to terminate in a state where abortion itself is legal. Get medical advice from someone you feel you can trust in a state where it’s legal. It’s legal here, for example.”

There was more to it, which she generally omitted from the record. The unrecorded section, in substance, went like this: “Young students at this college are unlikely to be bounced off the household walls for getting pregnant—though life is full of surprises. Tell your mother first, let her break it to Dad. Dad, even if he’s some foursquare right-to-lifing politician, is very likely to help pluck the mote from the apple of his eye. If your parents live separately, if you feel deeply apart from them, if they really aren’t rational people, use your judgment. Consider that if you are not ready and have no resources, the result of bringing a pregnancy to term can bring down on you and on your child more suffering, poverty and unhappiness than you can imagine. If you terminate your pregnancy, you may also feel very guilty and deprived.”

Adoption-wise, moreover: “Keep in mind that this is a college where students like you have been known to sell their fertilized eggs to eugenics-minded strivers. When it comes to facing an anxious, six-foot-one-inch, sculpted, preternaturally intelligent, Anglo angel of a basketball goddess, parents can be readily recruited for your love child. And often—not always—the young dad is an infant phenomenon himself. Keep it in mind.

“This may be the most important decision you ever, ever make,” she would tell them. “Try very hard to get it right.”

Every time, she was tempted to say, against her own good sense and reason, “Pray for guidance.” Of course she never did. She avoided, out of discretion and principle, any suggestion of religion, regardless of the kids’ backgrounds. Any French movie critic, she believed, could bring more influential historicist doctrine to bear on his specialty than she could on advice to troubled youths. Sometimes Jo cried over the kids and their problems. But it was in Texas she did most of her crying. For a while there Jo had subbed as a teacher in a ghetto high school and had got to know a few of the kids. Girls she had counseled there would sometimes fall in love with their books, their curricula, with the process of learning itself, only to have it end for them with pregnancy. Then they would find themselves approaching baby-mamahood unassisted.

At the college, she had learned how to avoid sectarian problems. She had come to despise both the Catholic Church and its archenemies. As for causes unto death, in the montaña she had seen all the passionate intensity she could possibly endure and stay sane.

The conferences usually ended the same way. “Please stay in touch,” Jo would say.

She was in her mid-fifties but looked younger. In dress she tended to fashionable dark suits, short- and tight-skirted in the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century style. Her salary was not so bad, better than that of some adjuncts.

There had been no appointments that miserable day, an icy gray morning that left windshields frosted and sidewalks treacherous. After her morning at the counseling center Jo worked the afternoon shift at Whelan Hospital. Whelan was the one connected with the college and performed abortions, prescribed birth control and often drew pro-life demonstrators.

As she started up the hill toward the hospital the sun broke through. In very little time students were on the college hill in T-shirts, tossing Frisbees. Then the sky turned misty and pale. A warm wind came up the valley. All at once the disorderly day prepared to present as spring. It was the kind of day salted with memories for Jo Carr. Maybe, she thought, for students too, because students arrived lately with recollections so much more complicated and brutal than the old ones.

Jo was just old enough to remember when places like the college played at being the world. Its students went out to rule their cloudy imperium and around the campus no one even locked a door. In days of old the college had presumed to send forth its light, a few homilies, to doomed praying Indians. In its own heart it never knew, and never learned, light or darkness—about either, or how to distinguish one from another. It sent out bookish young men, and eventually women, to save the world by generations. But the college had never really known darkness until they threw away the keys, and the shadows the place had pondered and reported and tried to witch away turned up at its doors.

As a volunteer at the hospital, Jo functioned as a counselor–social worker. Even there she sometimes felt uneasy, a necessity to keep her job, and her dialogue with patients was, by unspoken understanding, scrupulously secular. It was hard for Jo to be secular about pain, however. Might as well call it God’s will as anything else, a process that was futile to interrogate. It was so much less of a burden not to attempt a ministration. How should I know why you got that awful stuff? Offer up your sufferings to the Holy Spirit if that gets you through the night. God takes pride in his providence. People felt better. So all of it gave urgent evidence of something. But what?

An odd thing had happened to Jo only weeks before. She had gone to visit a seven-year-old girl with a fatal, painful cancer. Her mother and father were there. The man was a swamp Yankee kind of guy. He wore a black jacket that might have been provided by a township to go with a job at the dump. He was not young. The mother was narrow-faced, pointy-nosed, small and whipped. The girl you could hardly look at without breaking down, so pale and helpless that it gave resonance to the term “life support.” Suddenly the child’s mother took the notion that her dying daughter should be baptized. In her surprise and confusion Jo thought in a rather panic-stricken way about priests, ministers, any clergy who might be on duty. All at once she heard herself saying, “I can do that.”

This was true according to canon law when there was no time for delay. And maybe there was a defiance in it for her—the male authority and so on. So with water from the bright steel black-and-white thermos jug beside the bed and the medical machinery, she did it. She poured the ice water over her hand and tried to hold it a second, warm it just a little. Three cups of the hand invisibly sheeted with ice shards, a viaticum, Father, Son, Spirit. And then the girl’s mother wanted the same, and Jo did it. To the child’s father, Jo said, “Sir?”

It was absolutely not her business. It was a presuming intrusion, patronizing, diminishing. She thought he was feeling that as strongly as she was. He also knew, as did she, that he would not hold it together, that the sacrament would lay him down and out and break him in half. Which made it even more intrusive, and so she properly went away. Yet when she did, her heart was soaring. Any good at all, she thought. The hope of it even. Even the slim fancied appearance of an invisible notion was better than nothing, suggested some significance for naked pain. On the college shuttle bus back to her office she felt guilty and cried.

At the top of the hill, a block or two from the hospital, four young Andeans were playing bamboo flutes. Jo had been vaguely aware of them for a few days and was used to the stratospheric pitch and spectral tunes, and to hearing them played around the campus. Three boys and a girl were busking there. Two of the boys wore tweed caps like old-fashioned British shepherds. The girl and the third boy wore beat-up fedoras. At their feet was a woven basket of the sort that was used all over the Americas for carrying fruit. These youths were not in costume—they were the real thing—Indians of the montaña. Watching them, Jo could almost place their valley, tucked into some high borderland, alternating the tropical and the alpine, speaking a language that was almost exclusive to that valley. All at once Jo realized that she could recognize the song they were playing. It was called “Sora,” a song all children knew and could sing in several versions. She did not know the meaning of the words, only that the song somehow concerned the Milky Way, which in some of the mountain languages was known as the Sea of Fat.

Students had stopped to watch and listen, and a few took places among the Andean players. The music of the flutes was as hypnotic as it always had been. One flute, she noticed, was made of plastic instead of bamboo.

Jo could vividly remember an occasion from her days in the mountains, children on the edge of a village where she was staying, singing “Sora” with voices as innocent and clear as fresh rain sounding in the broadleaf palms along the dry-season forest trails. After the children’s song the villagers were addressed by two men, an elderly white professor from the nearest provincial college and a local schoolteacher who spoke in the villagers’ language.

What that experience had aroused in Jo Carr, then a young nun thousands of miles and so many years away, was fear and rage. Fear first, because she had mastered the local trails and her motorbike well enough to understand what was going on in the valley around her. The rage nourished itself afterward. In the montaña that evening she had assumed, as a listener, an expression of benign approval. People were watching her and she was very afraid. The people in the village crowd, she knew, were also afraid. It occurred to her now, standing on the manicured hillside of the college, that she was assuming the same complacent expression.

When the children had finished singing “Sora,” the speakers explained the situation, the big picture. The collectives the government had established on confiscated estancias were a cheat and a lie. The people must know this. When things had been explained to them, the judgment of the people was never wrong. No one could arrogantly pretend to be above or outside it. And only those whom history had summoned to leadership could interpret the people’s judgment. Why? Because only they understood history completely.

Nor could that judgment be appealed, based as it was on absolute mathematics and philosophy. The knowledge commanded by the leaders’ chief was the opposite of lies. It was like the lines across the stars. They had been known to the people who had built pyramids all over the world. The lines led from a point near the Sea of Fat into the deepest desert, measured to a degree more correct than anyone on earth could perceive. Liars pretended knowledge.

The night birds had begun their trills and flutings. Night came suddenly at that latitude. The week before in a nearby village a number of people, peasants and local grocers whom the leaders called “the rich,” had been boiled alive in rubbing alcohol after witnessing their children being eviscerated. They were accused of being spies for the auxiliary police, a charge that no one in the village really believed. After the killings, the army of the people had taken as much money as they could find and distributed it to the deserving poor.