Madeleine's Ghost (45 page)

“Yeah?”

“I don't mean the crazy stuff about the nun. I mean what you've been saying about getting out, leaving New York.”

I wait for him to continue, but I can already see it through the windshield of the truck, prairie storms blowing against green buttes in the spring, red-gold mesas, long, unbroken rows of fence posts, a big dome sky overhead, and the land rolling off to the horizon through air fresh and pure as the breath of a child.

“Thing is, I got a letter from Wyoming the other day. My kid brother just got tossed into jail. They gave him twenty-five years. Supposedly he's out in five with good behavior, but who knows?”

“Jesus,” I say. “What happened?”

“Bastard got himself a gutful of whiskey, went into Cheyenne, and shot an Indian in a bar.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“Yeah, well, I tell you what. My younger brother—Mitch—is an asshole. He's a hell raiser and one ornery drunk. And when he's sober, he's worse. Turns into a smooth-talking, oily son of a bitch. Been married six times now.”

The story comes out in bits and pieces. It seems Rust and his brother had a falling-out years ago over the most beautiful girl in Wyoming, Ella Slater, who was elected Miss Wyoming in a contest in Cheyenne in 1967. There was a rivalry that ended in a drunken fight during which Mitch got a gun and shot Rust in the ankle. Rust lifts his foot off the gas for a beat to show me the patched hole in his boot. We slow; a white limousine behind us honks, swerving wildly into the next lane.

“Got a metal pin in my ankle now,” he says. “Damn near blew my foot off. But Ella, she still went ahead and married the bastard. I was wearing these same boots at the time. Keep them around just to remind me. Been resoled a hundred times, and every time I put them on, I think about that woman. Mitch and her barely lasted out the year. He beat up on her or some such shit, and Ella wasn't the kind of woman to take it. She went off to Texas and married an oilman. Thing about Mitch, he could always make the ladies laugh. Always telling a joke, pulling some
stunt. I'm honest, you know, but I'm a glum son of a bitch. The ladies will take laughter over character any day.”

“So you were in love?” I say. The sentiment appears to be universal.

He shrugs. “I was young. She had this blond hair. Wore it in a thick rope down the middle of her back like an Indian girl. In any case I left Wyoming and I stayed away. Because in the end I would have killed the bastard. But now …”

“You're going back.”

“We've still got fifty-seven hundred acres along the North Platte, west of Douglas, in Converse County. Barley and sugar beets. Belongs to both of us equally, but I left the whole damn spread to him when I took off. It's going into receivership if I don't go back and take care of things. Thought I might try my hand at farming again.”

“How long has it been?”

“Shit. Twenty-five years, more.”

“Sounds risky.”

“Life is risky, pardner. The day you're born, they start figuring the odds.”

“Might be right.”

“Hell, like you said, how long can you hang out in the same damn bars on the East Side, listening to the same damn songs on the jukebox, watching the same damn cockroach crawl across the same damn table-top? This city gets dirtier and more dangerous, I get older, and soon I'm one of the lost souls. It's no country for old men, Ned. Look around, and you'll see them by the thousands. Lonely old men riding the subway, sitting on the stool at the end of the bar, nursing the same fifty-year-old beer, same delusions of grandeur running around their head. I've been here fifteen years now. Written four unpublished books. Always told myself that fame and fortune were just around the next corner. Shit. Time to give up. Time to go home.”

“You're lucky,” I say quietly. “You've got a home to go home to.”

He grunts; then he is silent.

W
E PULL
down the ramp off the BQE as the last light fades. It's just September, but the evening comes quickly, and the violet heat in the sky at dusk is gone, replaced by a mellower, permanent blue, and the city is like an oven cooling. In this part of the country, extremely hot summers are often followed by the deep freeze. Long winters of ice and snow, record colds. September gives New Yorkers time to meditate upon disasters to come.

When we get to Portsmouth Street, I climb up the stairs slowly and open the door to the apartment and stand on the landing for a second, feeling the atmosphere. The place is a wreck, furniture knocked over, sleeping bag still spread out in the middle of the floor, vomit stains on the pink bathroom rug. And only now, home again in the quiet dust in the first gloom of evening, do I think about the ghost, Madeleine. Her story is vague now, like the details of a nightmare, but I don't need the details to know the truth, which is in my bones. She died in this place the year Sister Januarius came to Brooklyn from New Orleans. She died here horribly and unavenged.

Then, directly following this terrible intimation, I know what to do. I clean myself up as quickly as possible, go downstairs, borrow Rust's truck and drive over to the cathedral on Jay Street. The windows of the rectory are dark. I park on Concord and go around to ring the bell and keep ringing until the housekeeper, whose name is Mrs. Schnadenlaube, pulls back the little glass window peephole and stares out with her usual suspicion.

It appears that Father Rose is off on vacation playing golf until Sunday.

“He'll be back in time for mass,” the woman says. “If he's not back, the bishop will have his head.” I get the feeling that Mrs. Schnadenlaube does not approve of Father Rose's golfing, and I tell her so.

“What the good father does with his spare time is up to him,” she says. “But I've known him to cut services short on holy days so he can watch a tournament on TV. Someday it's going to catch up with the man.” She's about to shut the peephole when I tell her I need to get into the crypt.

“To finish my work,” I say. “I've been sick, you know, and the deadline for my research is September fifteenth.”

Mrs. Schnadenlaube eyes me suspiciously through her thick glasses. At last she wrinkles up her nose. “You're up to something,” she says.

I put on my best smile. “Just my work,” I say.

The crypt is dark and full of darker gradations of shadows. Out in the vault, the red glimmer of electric votive candles illuminated in honor of the dead by the quarters of the living. Mrs. Schnadenlaube unlocks the iron grate and steps in beside me. Three boxes of archives left unsorted sag in a row against the wall like the monkeys who see, hear, and speak no evil. The rest of the space is covered with piles of documents, labeled and arranged in chronological order.

“Twenty-eight boxes of moldy paperwork cataloged since June, not bad,” I say, half to myself.

“And not good either, if you haven't found what the father wanted you to find,” Mrs. Schnadenlaube replies tartly.

“Maybe it's not here,” I say.

“Maybe you haven't looked hard enough, young man,” she says. “Thank you, Mrs. Schnadenlaube. I'll call you to lock up when I'm done.”

“Don't make it too late. At my age, contrary to what they say, you need more sleep, not less.”

When she is gone, I drag the three unsorted boxes into the center of the room. Then I crouch down and concentrate. I imagine the sheets of paper buried in the darkness of the boxes, the old solemn phrases scrawled across them, the individual letters of the alphabet hooked together
in an archaic hand, all of it one vast cipher, a labyrinth of pen and ink and paper and words.

“Hey, St. Januarius of Brooklyn!” I say. “Thanks for saving me at the hospital. But I've also got one other request. I know there's something here. A scrap I've overlooked. Please show me where it is. Understand, this is for your benefit more than my own.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and wait. Nothing. Not a peep from the Other Side. Soon my foot begins to fall asleep, and along with the numbness, I feel rather foolish. Here's a grown man talking to a heap of moldering paper. But just as I am about to rise, defeated, I feel a slight wind on the back of my neck. I turn slowly on my haunches to see one of the neat stacks of correspondence—second pile from the end, front row on the left—begin to flutter and rustle in the cool air. In a moment the pages are blowing across the room, sheet after sheet turning over in a slow, steady breeze which comes from everywhere and nowhere. The other piles are motionless, undisturbed.

I have grown so used to ghostly happenings and miracles and such in the last six months of my life that I feel only the faintest chill at this marvel. Instead I rise and watch the sheets float through the air, hands in my pockets, and begin to understand why God put an end to the Age of Miracles. We mortals have a low tolerance for such things, loaves and fishes multiplying, the dead raised, rods turning into serpents. Life needs to be hard for us, or we will take the marvelous for granted. At last the wind dies down, and there is a dead calm in the crypt. At my feet a single manuscript page flutters, sepia against the dark stone. I bend down to pick it up.

It is a page out of a missing volume of the parish record, written in faded blue ink sometime around the turn of the century. At a glance, in the dim light, I can see that it contains a straightforward account of the death of Sister Januarius, written by Father McCarty, who was the pastor of St. Basil's from 1890 to 1925. Of course, no mention is made of the secret interment or the fresh blossoming cultus. “Sister Januarius, an old and pious nun of long service to the Parish, died in her sleep on October 11, 1919,” Father McCarty wrote. “Knowing that death was nigh, in
accordance with the rules of her order, Sister Januarius instructed that she be buried in a simple pine box in an unmarked pauper's grave in her nun's habit, along with the Bible she had used for her devotions in life.…”

Nothing out of the ordinary here. Certainly nothing to advance Father Rose's case before the cardinals in Rome. Not a single clue or possibility. Not a whisper. Then I pause and read the sheet again.

In the crypt the silence drips like water.

T
HE NEXT
afternoon I find Mrs. Schnadenlaube watching
The Guiding Light
in the basement of the rectory. This is where they store the seasonal hangings, those bedspread-size appliqué banners which decorate either side of the altar during the mass. They dangle on curtain hooks all around the walls here like the tapestries of dogs playing cards you see hanging on clotheslines at country stores along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Mrs. Schnadenlaube is perched on the edge of the green tweed couch, one hand clutching the handle of a battered blue Hoover convertible, the other holding a cigarette, its ashes burning unnoticed toward her fingertips.

She's caught up in the florid action of the soap opera with the full devotion of her being. Right now, from what I can tell, there are two plot lines going. A fey young man with a drinking problem has wrecked his parents' Mercedes and is afraid to tell them. Meanwhile, a handsome older man with a beard and a beautiful young woman who apparently hate each other are stranded together on a desert island where, it seems, shenanigans will ensue. A copy of
Soap Opera Digest
is spread open across the coffee table with certain pertinent passages underlined in red ink.

When I try to speak, Mrs. Schnadenlaube doesn't even acknowledge my presence. But she turns toward me angrily during the commercial break. “This is my private time,” she says. “The priest himself
wouldn't bother me when I'm watching
The Guiding Light!
What the hell do you want?”

“Your help,” I say, as earnestly as possible.

She gives me an odd look, and is about to respond, when the soap comes back on the air, and it is as if I have vanished from the room. During the next commercial break I prey on her weakness and ask about the characters and plot. She knows I am patronizing her but, like any true fanatic, cannot resist attempting an explanation. The plot is baffling, as complicated as the sums in an advanced physics textbook. I understand nothing but feign interest. At last it is over, and Mrs. Schnadenlaube clicks off the set with the automatic channel clicker.

“Well?” she says.

I clear my throat and try to sound as official as possible. “I assume that you are responsible for cleaning the rectory and the church?”

“Me and a few others,” she says warily. “I've got a crew of Mexican girls comes in on Wednesdays. It's a big place, you know.”

“Of course. And what about the crypt? Do you clean the crypt?”

Mrs. Schnadenlaube hesitates. Then she says, “We sweep it out every other week. You'd be surprised the dust that collects down there. But if you're insinuating that somehow, one of us messed up your precious piles of papers—”

I shake my head. “The secret vault,” I almost whisper. “I've got to get in there. Do you have the key?”

It turns out that Mrs. Schnadenlaube, Helga, as she tells me to call her now, is a strict Lutheran who has little respect for Catholic superstitions. She attends a bare white Lutheran church in Park Slope, with hard pews and no decorations whatsoever on the walls.

“If you ask me, they should have buried that withered old thing eighty years ago, when she died,” she says as we step down into the flagstone corridor which leads to the vault. “It's indecent to keep a human corpse around like a stuffed bird. And those wax eyes. Ugh. They give me the creeps every time.”

We are before the door with the Chi-Rho, and she finds the key on her ring and swings it open. There's a protesting creak and that strong smell of must and old bones, but Mrs. Schnadenlaube seems unaffected. She flips on the wall switch, and the Christmas lights wink on around the ceiling, giving the room its cheap tinsel air. The mummified body of Sister Januarius lies still and shrunken in its glass coffin at the center of the room, wax eyes staring into space. Mrs. Schnadenlaube shakes her head at this ghastly relic and steps over to plug an extension cord into a socket in the corner. In a moment we are illuminated in a hard green glow.