Waking the Dead (27 page)

Next to the church was a playground and here Mileski coached basketball, touch football, and soccer, which he learned in his year abroad in Cracow. He was resonant of voice and so self-confident it took your breath away: he was like a lunatic in a play, thumping his chest and proclaiming Nothing bad can ever happen to
me.
To recruit a center for the St. Christopher’s basketball team, Mileski played one-on-one with a tall Appalachian boy named Reuben Martin and after a fierce game to forty, after which Mileski was drenched with sweat and unable to speak through his huge rapid phlegmy gasps, not only was the vanquished Reuben Martin willing to join the team but he’d also, as part of the wager, agreed to take instruction in Catholicism.

And next to the playground was Resurrection House. It was a little blue and white frame house; it had once been the rectory for whoever was St. Christopher’s priest, and no matter how many beanbag chairs and funky posters they put in that house it retained its monastic air. Resurrection House was Mileski’s invention: he wanted a place where the homeless, the afraid, where all souls on the loose might gather. There was always an extra bed, always something to eat, always someone to talk to. Mileski ran it with the help of a boy named Hector Guzman, who was then drafted and finally killed in Da Nang. Now Sarah was there, working with Mileski when he was available, working on her own when he was not. It was social work in the old Church tradition. For years, the neighborhood had operated as a kind of way station for newcomers to Chicago, taking them in, letting them get started, and then letting them disperse to somewhat better circumstances as the next wave arrived. But all that had changed. The better circumstances—the jobs, the public housing—no longer existed; the neighborhood became angrier, denser, terminal. “We’ve really got our work cut out for us” was how Mileski put it, and Sarah, as far as I could tell, concurred. You had to be mad to think that a church could alleviate the suffering of that neighborhood. But like two brave souls trying to bail out a sinking ship with teacups, Sarah and Mileski kept the doors of Resurrection House open for anyone who needed shelter— for the night, the week, for all of eternity.

It was there that Sarah learned a domesticity I never thought she was interested in or capable of, and which I, perhaps out of jealousy, found wildly incongruous with what I thought were her best qualities. She was forever pushing around an old Electrolux, stripping beds, bleaching sheets, and that pop bottle filled with wild flowers which our own gloomy quarters could easily have used was placed instead on the Formica table of Resurrection House’s always crowded, always redolent kitchen.

I asked Sarah why she was doing nun’s work, but to her it seemed the best of both worlds—or perhaps she was only humoring me. “By day, I can do good works and by night I can sip Calvados and fuck my brains out.” But there are truths so partial they become lies and I’m afraid that was one of them. The fact was that more and more she came home unable to talk about anything outside the galaxy of human misery in which she orbited by day. “It’s so sick,” she said to me, “so unbelievably distorted. The Church thinks Mayor Daley is closer to God than the people Steven and I are serving. And if Christ walks among us today, the Church thinks He probably has a butler and a Mercedes.” Can we talk about something else? I asked. “OK,” she said. Another pause. And then: “How’s school?”

T
HANKSGIVING,
1974. S
ARAH’S
sister Tammy came up to stay with us. She was still not divorced from Derek—Derek of the silk pajamas, the poodle named Cynthia, and the shaved chest—but she had lost a great deal of weight. “I swear, that little sonofabitch ain’t going to leave
me.
I’m going to get good and foxy and then I’m going to leave
him.
” She was in Chicago, she said, to have a real Yankee Thanksgiving and, in fact, the day she arrived we had the winter’s first snow. The only window we had that looked out onto the street was in the bathroom and Tammy sat for hours on the edge of the tub, watching the snow fall. “She’s cracking up,” Sarah whispered to me. “It’s kind of scary.”

“I keep telling myself, she’s your sister,” I said, shaking my head.

“She’s not this southern at home,” Sarah said.

“I mean, really, watching the snow?”

“I know, I know, it’s not as if she hasn’t seen it before. Daddy gave her and Derek a trip to Aspen for their wedding present. Maybe that’s what she’s doing in there. Remembering it.”

“Derek,” I said.

“I know. I
know.
We all take after our mother in our horrible taste in men.” Sarah slipped her arm around me and leaned against my side. We were in the kitchen making Thanksgiving dinner, a turkey jambalaya. A thousand times we’d begun to sing, “Oh jambalaya/crayfish pie filé gumbo,” but never took it any further. There was a jug of Inglenook on the table, a store-bought pumpkin pie near the sink. Our domestic life struck me as purely conceptual. Perhaps it was the light in that apartment, that soiled, overcast, dull glare. The rituals of cooking and sweeping and plumping up the pillows on the old flowered Minnie Mouse sofa and chairs was to real housekeeping as a little string fence around a garden in the wilderness is to real farming.

Our guests for dinner were Father Mileski, Father Stanton, a poet who was a friend of Stanton’s named Madeline Conners, and a teacher named Bernardo Gutierrez, who had recently been smuggled out of Chile and was now living in hiding in Chicago. Gutierrez was a surprise; he arrived with Madeline Conners.

Madeline Conners was a small, stocky woman; her hair was pale brown and her watchful face with its worry lines and sharp blue eyes was cast into innocence by an extravagant mask of pale freckles. She was nearly forty, had traveled the entire world, and worked grinding lenses occasionally to raise money to self-publish a book of her poems. She smoked her Camels like a convict; the ember came so close to her full, cracked lips that you couldn’t help staring at her. Madeline had been living in an apartment not far away, taking care of it while its owners were in Taiwan buying toy prototypes. Now they were coming back and she was getting ready to move again—this time out to Silver Spring, Maryland, where her brother lived and where she could put in a couple of months’ work at an optics factory and ready her new book for the printer. Bernardo had been living with her in what I sensed was a roommate relationship but he was reluctant to move out to Maryland with her.

Gutierrez was a large, melancholy-looking man. He was in his forties, an exile. While President Allende was in power in Chile, Bernardo had quit his post at the university and gone to work for the new government—writing press releases, trying his hand on speeches. He was an economist, suspicious of rhetoric, constitutionally averse to sudden excitement. But he was capable of clarity and could simplify complicated economic issues; he was given a lot to do. After the Chilean generals disposed of Allende and his regime, Gutierrez went into hiding. One by one, and, finally, dozen by dozen, everyone he knew was under arrest, missing, dead—often found in rivers with their eyes burned out, their genitals sewn into their mouth. Bernardo hid in a church outside of Valparaiso, where his sister was a nun. Eventually, he was sneaked out of the country.

“Why did you come here?” I asked him. “I’d think you’d be angry at the United States.”

Gutierrez pursed his lips when he listened and nodded his head. He folded his surprisingly delicate hands over his taut round belly.

“Perhaps I’ll go to Cuba,” he finally answered, with a sigh.

I looked over at Sarah. His answer somehow gave the impression that I had asked him to leave my country.

“Maybe someday you’ll go back to Chile,” Sarah said to him, raising a glass. “When this nightmare ends.”

“I didn’t mean you
shouldn’t
come here,” I said, feeling awkward, irritated. “I just thought you wouldn’t want to, seeing how tough we made it for your president.”

Gutierrez stared at me. I had always flattered myself into believing there was virtually no one with whom I couldn’t easily communicate, but whatever sympathy and solace I was attempting to show the Chilean was somehow slipping into the fissure between Spanish and English, like a dog that falls into a stream and scrambles out looking like a weasel. I saw in his eyes that my saying “how tough we made it” meant that I considered myself a part of the forces that had engineered the coup: like so many deeply committed people, he took an opinion for a desire.

We served the jambalaya. Madeline carefully separated all of the turkey out and left it in a mound on the side of her blue willow plate. Tammy, who’d been uncomfortable at first when the church people arrived, feeling it meant she would have to be on her best behavior, and who then shifted to another sort of discomfort—the discomfort of a good citizen offended by the seditious disloyalty of her table-mates—seized on the opportunity of the jambalaya’s arrival to become still more southern. She was all my mys and ooo wees and she was shaking her fork at Sarah, saying, “You done yourself proud on this one, Sister.” Mileski ate heartily; it astonished me to see the Friar Tuckian heap he’d piled on his plate. He had asked us to join hands before the meal and we did: I held Madeline’s hard, dry hand and Tammy’s soft, nervous one. We closed our eyes and silently reflected on our good fortune. Tammy seemed to be giving my hand an extra squeeze; I had a demented apprehension she was flirting with me but then realized she was trying to make contact with an ally: she was appalled by the company and assumed I shared her feelings.

“Quite a bizarre holiday,” said Stanton, in his Rhodesian accent. “What we’re celebrating is a gang of rapacious Protestants who came here and stole a country.”

“What I would have loved to have been,” Mileski said through a mouthful of jambalaya, his thick mustache dripping wine, “was one of those priests who came over here about the middle of the nineteenth century.”

“Was that a good time?” Sarah asked. Her face was bright with pleasure—already.

“Well,” said Mileski, smiling, “you might say so.” He kept his napkin next to his plate and wiped his hand on it without lifting it. “You see, the Church came over with the flock, and the flock was in the cities.” He looked at me and winked. “Working their tails off.” Back to Sarah and then, with a wave of the fork, the table. “Things were more or less together. The Church administered to the Catholics at hand and pretty much tried to keep up the ways of the old country. And helping the immigrants fit into the whole American trip. But when the
west
started opening up—” Mileski grinned and shook his head. “That was a whole different story. Suddenly, you had Catholics in … Nevada, Oregon, you had Catholics picking grapes all the way out in California. And no one to look after them.”

“No one to keep them toeing the line, you mean,” said Sarah. Good-natured.

Mileski bowed toward her, gladly conceding the point. I half stood up, refilling all the glasses. I realized I was doing a lot of that. Stanton was already looking a little lopsided and Madeline Conners’ eyes were pale red, like the inside of hot-house tomatoes.

“There weren’t enough priests in America to send them out of the cities. So the bishops had to take emergency measures.” Mileski glanced at his plate but decided to continue with his story before taking another bite. He filled his fork and then laid it on the side of the plate. “They had to
import
priests from Europe and send them after the American Catholics. Not a bad solution, you might say. But the problem was that the only priests they could lure over here were priests who had fallen on hard times. We’re talking about priests who’d become total juicers, priests—” Mileski started to laugh. “Priests who were maybe a little strange in the head. Priests who’d gotten themselves caught in some pretty embarrassing situations. And when they came over here and they got themselves sent out into the wilderness—well, some pretty strange things went down. As far as the bishops were concerned it was terrifying.”

“And this is what you’re nostalgic for?” asked Sarah. She indicated to me it was time to pour a little more wine for Father Stanton.

“Those are my
roots,
” said Mileski. “That’s my pastoral tradition. You realize how sublimely crazy this Church has got to be to let a Polack like me put on a collar.”

We were all getting drunk, though I wondered if the alcoholic oblivion I was headed toward was anything similar to the expansive ease and relaxation the others seemed to be drinking their ways into. I drank as if to keep an appointment in Samara, first quickly and then slowly and then quickly again. Mileski seemed to drink in order to expand, whereas Sarah drank to quicken her responses, to play at spontaneity. Stanton drank to escape memory and Madeline Conners drank simply to relax. Tammy, as far as I could tell, drank to wash down her food. And the Chilean Bernardo Gutierrez, I saw, drank to make his fear bearable.

“When do you think you’ll be able to get those generals out of the presidential palace and give Chile back its democracy?” I asked him.

Bernardo moved his eyes in my direction. His gestures were slow, careful; he drove the engine of self as if it were falling to pieces. He dabbed his lips with the edge of his napkin and then took a sip of ice water. “I expect to return to my country very soon,” he said.

“The rest of South America has to rise up,” said Sarah. “Argentina, Peru.”

“Wait a minute,” said Tammy, quite unexpectedly. “Those places down there are
always
having revolutions. They have a new president every
week,
don’t they?”

There was a silence with a spine of disapproval. Madeline Conners finally said, “That’s what the press would have you believe. But that’s largely propaganda. No reason to fall for it, ah … ah … ”

“Tammy,” said Tammy.

“Tammy,” said Madeline, nodding.

“This guy you were working for,” Tammy said, pointing at Gutierrez. “How long did he have it?”

“Have it?” asked Bernardo.

“You know. Power. How long was he in?”

“A little under two years, unfortunately,” said Bernardo.