Downtown (7 page)

“So many of our girls have a heavy Sunday meal with their families. I thought you would have seen that we do not serve, in the pamphlet. In any case, I supposed you would have a meal somewhere with Rachel. She is usually out on Sunday evenings.”

“I’m not really hungry,” I said.

“Did you enjoy Mass?” she said. “I believe Father Diehl takes the eleven o’clock.”

“It was very interesting,” I said. “Well, I think I’ll go and write a few letters, and meet some of the others—”

“I believe most of them have retired for the night,” Sister Mary James said. “I was up a few minutes ago and all of their doors were closed. You’ll be without a roommate for one more night; Ansonia’s mother called to say that Ansonia has another of her sinus infections, and will not be coming back until tomorrow or the next day. Poor child, she suffers terribly in weather like this.

47 / DOWNTOWN

Remember breakfast is at six, in case you want to go to early Mass. You’ll hear the bell.”

“Thank you, sister. Goodnight,” I said, and went up the stairs and down the silent hall to my room. Sister Mary James was right. None of the doors was open.

Much later, after I had set out my clothes for the next day and written a brief, determinedly cheerful postcard home, and taken a quick, uneasy bath in the chilly, too-big bathroom, I turned out my light and crawled into bed. This time I did not lift the shade that Sister Mary James had let down over the window. I lay in the thick, airless darkness and listened to the thumping, pinging radiator and thought, Well, I can call them in the morning and tell them it was a mistake and I want to come home. It’s not a disgrace. At least I would know my way, know how to live there. It may be all I do know, but I know it well. I could be somebody there, a big fish, a kind of queen….

No, I can’t, I thought then. Whatever happens to me here, that is not an option. This may turn out to be the worst mistake I ever made, but going back is not an option.

For the first time I could remember I had not said my prayers, and I started to get out of bed and kneel on the floor beside it, but then I did not. The thought came, ridiculous but powerful, that I would simply be too exposed there. I closed my eyes and said, rapidly, “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”

The words crashed into the ceiling and scattered back down over me. I tried again: “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”

It was no use. Apparently the Blessed Virgin had turned her head as inexorably away from me as her handmaiden downstairs. I did not try again.

Far down the hall I heard someone begin to cry. The sound was muffled behind the thickness of old oak and ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 48

perhaps thin layers of old percale, but it was unmistakable.

In my house in Corkie I had heard that and all the other sounds of living through the paper-thin walls. I knew tears when I heard them. I lay still listening to the crying, wondering if I should get up and make my way down the dark hall, listening at each door in turn, until I found it. But then I heard heavy footsteps ascending the stairs and moving down the hall, and stopping, and the sound of a door opening and closing, and soon the weeping stopped, and at last I slept.

3

I
DREAMED OF HOME AND EARLY MORNING AND BREAKFAST, and when I smelled coffee and the hot steam of pancakes I tried at first, in the manner of dreamers waking, to work it into my dream.

Then I felt and saw light spilling over me, and heard a voice on the edge of laughter say, “Good morning, sleepy head. Don’t you have a date downtown?”

I raised my head groggily and saw a young nun setting a covered tray down on the desk. In the dazzle of light from the window her face seemed to gleam with a kind of translucence. She sat down on the edge of my bed and held out a cup of coffee.

“Drink up,” she said, and her voice was crisp and light, like the first bite from an apple. It was neither Southern nor Irish. “Sister Mary James told me you missed your dinner last night, and I know it’s your first day at your new job, so I thought a little head start on it might come in handy. Don’t go thinking breakfast in bed is part of the service, though.”

“Thank you, Sister,” I said automatically, blinking in the brightness of the diamond light through the window, 49

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 50

and the music of her voice. The whole room, the whole world, seemed transmuted by light. After two days in murk-iness I could scarcely take it in.

“Are you Sister Clementia?” I said, not believing it. She simply could not move in tandem with the dark Sister Mary James.

The young nun laughed. “Sister would not thank you for that,” she said. “No, I’m Sister Joan. I’m one of the two weekday sisters. Sister Clementia and Sister Mary James take weekends. I saw them when we changed shifts, though, and they said that you’d spent your first day out with Rachel and come in too late for supper, and I knew then that neither of them would have offered you anything on the side. I’m afraid they’re both convinced that Rachel is their cross to bear on this earth. And I knew you’d be in a hurry to get to your job.

What a grand one, too. An editor, now. Do you know that
Downtown
just won some kind of fancy award for best city magazine, or something? Everyone is talking about it, and Mr. Comfort, too. I think it’s fully as good as any national magazine I see.”

“You read
Downtown
?” I could not help staring. She laughed again. Her eyes were warm and brown, and there was a scattering of freckles on her nose. I thought she could not be much older than I.

“I graduated from the Chicago Art Institute,” she said. “I know good graphics when I see them. You must be very good. Mr. Comfort said you’re coming in as senior editor.”

“You know Mr. Comfort?” I knew that I must sound like a parrot.

“We all know him here. He’s on the board. And I serve on a kind of unofficial commission he and some other city leaders have started, an ecumenical council on race. There are representatives from all the churches, 51 / DOWNTOWN

black and white. Rabbi Jacob Rothschild is on it, and our Archbishop Hallinan. It’s going to do great good, I think.

Anyway, Mr. Comfort said to look out for you. And,” her eyes crinkled, “not to let the weekend sisters get you down.

They’re some of the most devout we have, but they’re having a hard time with the twentieth century, and Vatican Two was a great shock to them. This is not a good town for the old-liners.”

Something clicked behind my eyes. “Sister Joan, were you…could you have been playing a guitar and singing in Tight Squeeze Saturday night? My father and I were passing through, and—”

“And saw two renegade nuns and a priest singing to the hippies and ran your poor father’s blood pressure sky high?

I confess. That was me, and Sister Catherine and Father Mark from Saint Stephen’s. We call it a street ministry, but we all enjoy it as much as the kids. I hope your father wasn’t too upset. I realize we do things here that some of our older church members have a hard time with. But we think—the archbishop thinks—that there’s a great need for them. Atlanta is a town for the young.”

“No, Daddy was all ready to take me home, and seeing you all did the trick,” I said, feeling a rush of love for her, a surge of something near sisterly, in the filial sense, sitting on the edge of my bed with her freckled face screwed up in laughter. I had never felt anything like it for a nun before.

“Good. Well, I’ll get on downstairs and let you get dressed.

I just wanted to say hello, and welcome. Oh, and to see if you knew where Rachel might have gotten to? She wasn’t at breakfast, and her bed hasn’t been slept in. We’re all a little worried.”

Cold fingers brushed my spine. “She was going on to a party with some boys we met,” I said. “It was at some ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 52

apartments that she said were popular, but I don’t remember their name. The boys seemed okay—”

“And were, no doubt,” Sister Joan said. “Don’t you go worrying about her. She’s stayed out before. I just thought I’d ask. The other sisters are upset—”

“I hope she won’t…you know, lose her room or anything,”

I said, wishing I had not informed on Rachel.

“We’re not her keepers,” Sister Joan said. “The only way she can lose her room is to not pay her rent, or do something much worse than the hours she keeps. I think about her a lot, though. Sometimes, God help me, I think she may simply be one of the lost ones.”

I blinked at her in surprise. This was a woman-to-woman conversation, not nun to parishioner, or teacher to pupil. I thought of the little cardboard wheel of pills in Rachel’s purse. I would have bet anything, in that moment, that Sister Joan knew about them.

“Thank you for breakfast and everything, Sister,” I said.

“You’re very welcome. I’ll be waiting to hear about your first day. Do they call you Maureen, by the way?”

“Some people call me Aisling,” I said, thinking to try again to circumvent Smoky.

“Ashley.” She misunderstood me. “Ashley O’Donnell. How very pretty. It sounds like a byline, doesn’t it? Very smart and now. Well. Happy landings, Ashley O’Donnell.”

And she was gone in a swirl of skirts.

I stood looking after her. Ashley O’Donnell. Ashley O’Donnell…I liked it. It did not sound Irish, or Catholic, or anything except young and smart and rather glamorous. That was it, then. From here on out, I would be Ashley O’Donnell, senior editor of
Downtown
magazine, Atlanta, Georgia.

When I left Our Lady and ran out into the cold, dazzling morning, I had rolled the waistband of my blue 53 / DOWNTOWN

skirt until the hem brushed the tops of my knees, and brushed and shaken my hair until it sprang from its accustomed careful flip and fell over my forehead and one eye in a tousle of curls. I rubbed my cheeks and bit my lips for good measure. Aisling O’Donnell of Corkie might not wear miniskirts and Sassoon hair, but Ashley O’Donnell of Atlanta most certainly would.

The city pulsed with light and morning; the sidewalks danced with them. The streets were crowded with people on their way downtown, and they looked wonderful to me, vi-brant and smart and eager to be on their way. The 23 Oglethorpe bus rocked along between shops and office buildings glinting in the morning light, and everyone on it seemed to be young. The drivers of the bright cars caught in traffic beside the bus looked young, too, sleek and well-groomed. I felt ginger ale bubbles of glee rising in my chest, and bit my lips to keep from laughing aloud with joy and anticipation.

Wherever they were going, these chic young men and women alongside me, only I was going into the heart of the city to begin being the new senior editor at Matthew Comfort’s remarkable
Downtown
magazine. Only I. Ahead of us the city came wheeling up in the dazzling sun. Bronze and silver and blue towers rose up around me.

“Oh, yes,” I whispered. “Now.”

Looking back, I can see—though I could not then, caught in its midst as I was—what a strange, exhilarating, and contradictory time that was in the country. It was a cups moment in our national life, the year before the love turned to anger, the peace to militancy. Everything that had gone before us hung shimmering in the air, along with the unseen bulk of everything yet to come. At a Human Be-In in California, heads and freaks had announced happily that the number of live people equaled, for the first time in history, the number of the

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 54

dead. From that
outré
coast the sound of mantras and chanting from yogis and the wailing of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix drifted East; the Beatles reigned supreme everywhere; the hippies and yippies met in their trajectories. Gidget and go-go dancers and Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters competed for the national consciousness, along with Hugh Hefner and the Bunny Hutch. Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver were moving toward their time in the sun as Martin Luther King Jr. and his doctrine of nonviolent change moved out of it. The war in Vietnam was not yet called a war, and the great protests still lay ahead, as did the militancy of the Black Panthers, the body of the sexual revolution, and the sisterhood of the women’s movement. In late 1966 the young said “fuck” as often as possible but the pill was still an innovation, and no one had yet bombed a chemistry building. In that year, women were still called “chicks,” even in the most radical circles, and Bunnyhood was as desirable a thing as sisterhood. NOW

was in its infancy and both Twiggy and Doris Day were at their apogee. The ferocious, militant love of Woodstock Nation—the Hippies’ Last Hurrah—was more than two years away. The first terrible death, that of JFK in Dallas, was three years past.

In the year I came to Atlanta, it was still possible to regard that assassination as an aberration, a terrible accident. I rode a crowded bus along a literal fault line, one that would soon cleave America apart, and I had no thought of anything except that the sun was shining and I was careening toward the rest of my life.

When I got off the bus at the Five Points turnaround, I took a deep breath of cold, electric city air and looked up and saw the dancer’s cage, empty now, and above it, on the fourth floor of the gray stone building, a small sign in a window that said “Museum of the Deep South.

55 / DOWNTOWN

Exhibits and Artifacts. Open by Appointment.” Below that a smaller sign said “See Big Snake.”

I began to laugh. My poor father. His Good Catholic Girl had been delivered into the very jaws of the enemy by the 23 Oglethorpe bus. When I got off the packed elevator on the eleventh story of the Commerce Building, in a crowd smelling of youngness and cold wool and Miss Dior and cigarette smoke, I was still smiling.

I stopped before a red-lacquered door that said DOWNTOWN in bold black capital letters, smoothed my hair, bit my lips, and took a deep breath. I could feel the smile still on my lips, stiff and frozen. I could not seem to make it go away. I closed my eyes, and then opened them and turned the knob and went in. Still smiling, I stood in the small lobby and looked around for the people who would soon shape my world, hearing my heart in my ears and feeling it in my throat.