Requiem, Mass. Page 3

  Whom I wanted to write about here was the merciful and gracious God of great kindness that Father Dolan had talked about in his Sunday sermon, a God who would have laughed at Father McGuire’s absurd declaration, the long-suffering One, abundant in goodness, plenteous in mercy, slow to anger, an unrivaled God, too secure in his perfection and majesty to forsake and damn his bewildered children, a God worth attending to, in other words, like the cryptic trickster, the moving finger who wrote on Belshazzar’s wall, Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, “It has been counted and counted, weighed and divided.” But I knew this would result in another conference with Monsignor Reilly, who creeped me out big time. Monsignor’s lips glistened when he spoke, and he tended to spit when pronouncing his plosive consonants. When he talked about sin, his blue eyes rolled back in his meaty head. The last time we’d chatted in the living room of the rectory, he asked me in a strained whisper if I’d ever touched myself down there, and I said indeed I had—isn’t it cool? He began to tremble and turn red. He called me a cur, a viper, a scoundrel, the scum of the earth, and he took me by the shoulders and shook me, told me to kneel and beg the Lord for forgiveness. Better I should sever my offending hand than suffer the fires of hell.

  When I think about those school days now, I’m amazed I survived with my faculties somewhat intact. One afternoon in fifth grade, I was blindsided by Sister Sylvanus while kneeling on my chair reciting the Apostles’ Creed with the class. She caught me on the side of the head and knocked me to the floor, where she proceeded to kick me in the back and pound on my arms, which covered my head. She lifted me off the floor and shoved me in my seat. My crime was that I’d decided not to spend my lunch hour in the church hall watching a movie about Father Damien and the lepers. I played basketball alone in the schoolyard. I reminded Sister that she’d told us we had a choice. She told me I’d made the wrong choice and slammed my head into my desk. When I got home that afternoon, Blackie Morrissey was sitting on the front steps reading Rolling Stone. He asked me who tore my shirt and bruised my cheek. I told him the story. He said he’d have Sister killed if I wanted. Make it look like an accident. “I’ll just call Dave Brin—he’s itching to whack a nun.” I told him that was crazy. She’s like a hundred anyway. How long can she last? He said he’d cover the cost. He said, “This is a church with a lot of explaining to do.”

  I looked up from my catechism and followed Sister Casilda’s gaze out the window. I saw Spastic Jack Kazmierczak going through his facial contortions outside Tony’s Spa, saw Bev’s Unisex Salon, the paved schoolyard, and beyond the schoolyard, the Cat Dragged Inn and the triple-deckers of O’Connell Street. Sister toyed with the crucifix below her guimpe. She was, I knew, looking beyond what I could see, looking at what might have been or might still be. I wondered what she saw. Whatever it was, it was far from Requiem. Without turning her head, Sister said, “I don’t want to hear any whispering, Mr. Ludy.” Billy Ludy made a goofy face and flipped Sister the bird. I thought Candace Kane was going to cry. She closed her eyes and moved her lips in prayer. During lunch, which we ate at our desks, Smooch Penney didn’t touch his salami and cheese sandwich. He seemed lost in sadness. He just stared out the window. He shook his head. I said, Smooch, are you okay? He said, Sometimes I just want to stick my dick out the window and fuck the world.

  After lunch, I volunteered to sweep up the classroom while the others took recess in the schoolyard. Sister was cleaning her desk, dusting the statue of the Virgin, polishing the reception bell she tapped to summon our wandering attentions or to still our commotion. I asked her what her real name was. Before she was a nun. She smiled. I asked her where she grew up. She didn’t talk like she was from Requiem. She told me that her life before taking her vows was insignificant. I asked about life in the convent. Do you get to watch TV? Do you guys sleep in your pajamas? Eat Oreos in bed? Do you and the sisters play games? She told me that was all none of my business, told me I’d missed a pile of dirt under Thomas Simone’s desk. I asked her what color her hair was under the veil, the wimple, and the linen headband. She told me my question was impertinent.

  We were studying the Battle of Tours in history class when I got distracted by the name Charles “The Hammer” Martel, so I missed the discussion of how the Frankish warrior stopped the invading Moslem horde dead in their heathen tracks. Instead I was imagining a three-fall North American heavyweight title match at Mechanics Hall between Gorgeous George and Charles “The Hammer” Martel. There I was, ringside with my dad, peanuts and Moxie in my hands, cheering on The Hammer, when I somehow heard Candace Kane declare that God knew all along, of course, that Martel would crush the Islamic army of aggression. God knows everything, doesn’t he, Sister?

  Sister said, “He certainly does, Candace. He has what’s called ‘infallible prescience,’” and she spelled it out and had us write it in our notebooks. I wrote it on my hand and then raised that hand and suggested that if God knew the future, then there could be no such thing as free will, which you yourself, Sister, said last week that we did have, said that Judas chose to betray his Savior. If God knows what I’ll choose, it’s not a choice. I don’t get it. How can you have both free will and—I read my hand—infallible prescience? Sister said I wasn’t supposed to get it. It was a sublime mystery, she said. The judgments of God are inscrutable.

  I said, “If God created me knowing I would sin, then isn’t he responsible for my sins?”

  Sister hooked her thumbs into her cincture. “What did you just say?” That’s when Sister Superior chimed in on the intercom and told Sister to send me to fourth grade immediately. Audrey was in fourth grade. This wouldn’t be good.

  “May I, Sister?”

  She pointed to the door. “Don’t speak to me.”

  I stopped by the stairwell beneath the rows of class pictures. There she was, my mom, Frances Packard, class of 1951, in a white angora sweater, a pearl necklace, and short upswept blond hairdo. Her eyes were clear and dark. She was smiling. I wished I’d known her then, before she came unhinged. I thought what I should have said back in class was if I have free will, then I choose not to believe in God, and all this doctrinal prattle means nothing to me. Prattle was the Word-a-Day in the paper that morning. Use it ten times in a sentence and it’s yours. What’s this mindless prattle on the radio? It’s all just children’s prattle. Seven more.

  When I got to the fourth-grade class, Sister Mary Geronimo was pounding on the closet door, demanding that Audrey open it and come out. I told Sister that wouldn’t work. “Audrey can’t be forced, Sister.” The last time I’d been in this classroom I had had a wad of Juicy Fruit gum on my nose and an I’M STUPID sign pinned to my shirt. Punishment for chewing gum in school.

  Sister said, “She keeps saying she isn’t here.”

  “Maybe she wishes she weren’t.”

  “I called your mother.”

  Audrey said, “Is that you, Johnny Boy?”

  “The woman who answered didn’t know who you two were.” Sister heard laughter and turned. She clenched her fists and stepped toward the class. She pointed to a boy in the back row wearing a red flannel shirt and a thin blue necktie. One of the O’Briens. She said, “If I have to go back there, I’ll gouge your eyes out, boy.” She told the class to fold their arms on their desks, lay their empty heads in their arms, and close their eyes. If she heard a peep from anyone, she’d beat them all to within an inch of their odious lives. She agreed, reluctantly, to stand at the back of the room while Audrey let me into the closet.

  I said, “Man, it’s dark in here.”

  “If you’re in the dark long enough, you can see,” Audrey said. We sat on the floor. “How does that work?

  “Your eyes adjust.”

  “How?”

  “Audrey, why are you in the closet?”

  “Sister left the key on her desk.”

  The fact was that Audrey liked being in small, dark spaces. She usually did her homework under her bed. As a toddler, she sat behind the curtains. All you’d
see were her legs extending into the room. She’d turned her bedroom closet into a clubhouse. She had a lamp in there, pillows, books, a transistor radio. Mostly she sat in there and talked to herself.

  She said, “Where’s thence?”

  “What?”

  “Jesus will come from thence to judge us.”

  “He’ll come from the future.”

  Audrey thought about that. “If we went back to last week, we’d be coming from the future.”

  “I think so.”

  Audrey stood, dusted off her maroon uniform skirt, wiped the toes of her cowgirl boots on the backs of her legs. “Are we going to sit here all day, Johnny Boy?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Bondurant Number Twenty-five: Overcome your fears.”

  YOU CAN get three hundred days off your sentence in purgatory just for saying, “My Jesus mercy.” The reduction is called a partial indulgence. So in one minute, you can reduce your suffering and torment by six years. You get five hundred days’ partial indulgence for this prayer: “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.” What this all adds up to isn’t clear, eternity being such a slippery concept and all. Eternity minus three hundred days is an awful lot like eternity. Three hundred days fewer than always. But let’s say you are particularly devout, that you’re Joan Noonan and you go to seven o’clock Mass seven days a week, and so you only get a hundred years’ punishment for your meager venial sins (you once uttered an oath under your breath when you slammed your finger in the car door, and you lied to your mother about liking her unnerving beehive hairdo); well, then you can erase that century of flames right there in your living room while you eat lunch and watch Arnold Stang devour a Chunky bar, and you can be in heaven before the commercial’s over. If you happen to die just then.

  Sister Casilda hadn’t spoken to me for a week, not since the free-will episode. Hadn’t called on me, not even when I was the only one with my hand raised, the only one who knew that the largest lake in Europe is Lake Ladoga. Hadn’t made eye contact. So to get back into her good graces, I figured I’d tell her why the boys smirked and giggled every time she told us to recite one of those brief, pious utterances. In that way I would eliminate her confusion, settle her agitation, and protect her from further humiliation. So I stayed after class, walked to her desk, and told her not to call the prayer an ejaculation. Ejaculation has another meaning, Sister. She looked at me and blushed, fumed, seemed to rise in her seat, and then she hit me on the side of the face with her Little Town of Bethlehem snow globe. I couldn’t hear out of my left ear for days.

  Once Upon a Time

  WHEN I WAS nine years old and Mom was at Four Crowned Martyrs Hospital having trouble having Arthur, the baby she lost, and Audrey was staying with my aunt Pepper in Taunton, and Dad was either with Mom or he was down at the Cat Dragged Inn “decompressing,” as he put it, I had a fourteen-year-old babysitter who ate my food, stole Mom’s costume jewelry, snooped through Dad’s dresser hoping to find a smutty novel, and locked me in my room while she smooched and smoked pot on the couch with her boyfriend, Thing 1. I kept Fig Newtons in my sock drawer, so I didn’t go hungry, but I was nonetheless disappointed because I had hoped for something more intimate in our relationship. Her name was Garnet Morrissey, and she lived downstairs. (She would not be around for our troubles, but she was the person who opened the door for me and let the future rush in. And this book is for her.) I suppose I had a crush on her. Garnet had long, wavy black hair and dense brown eyes. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and black leotards. She had two smiles. One reflected amusement with just a slight lift of the right side of her mouth, which engaged a dimple. The other, more luminous smile involved her eyes and eyebrows, nostrils and cheeks, and could express either hilarity or rage. I dreamed of her singing me to sleep, massaging my brow with her delicate and soothing fingers. I was certain that if I whimpered, if I bravely confessed to how frightened I was, how terribly lonely I was, Garnet would climb into bed with me, and we’d snuggle, and I’d watch her while she slept.

  When Thing 1 wasn’t around, Garnet would tell me all about his ass and his lips and his rock band Gloria’s Sunset (which actually had a racy regional underground hit at the time called “A Glans in Your Direction”). She told me she was mad to live, couldn’t wait to grow up, but dreaded growing old. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I understood children and adults to be different species. One could not become the other. Garnet said she couldn’t imagine living beyond thirty. What would be the point? “Leave a beautiful corpse,” she said. And she laughed. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” she said. In fact, Garnet lived to be fifty-two.

  After Sister Syncletica slammed Garnet’s head against the chalkboard for alleged insubordination, Garnet borrowed a switchblade from Chopper DeProspero in the ungraded class, and she held the knife at Sister’s doughy throat, cut through the linen coif, in fact, while Sister wept and apologized to Garnet in front of the tenth-grade class. Garnet got expelled, of course, and she was surely headed for hell, but first she headed to Bob Cousy High School, which she attended sporadically. When she was sixteen and she could, Garnet quit school altogether and moved in with Thing 1, and they had a baby girl, Sophie Anne. But then Garnet started bringing men home for sleepovers, and that put a strain on the relationship. After a while, the long-suffering Thing 1 got tired of sleeping in his daughter’s room, tired of cooking breakfast for unwanted guests, and tired of writing songs about betrayal and about coke-snorting, late-sleeping reprobates and poseurs, and he moved out with Sophie Anne.

  When she was thirty, Garnet got her first real job as an LPN and visiting nurse, which was how she met Karl, a Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress disorder. While Karl was still under house arrest, Garnet arrived each afternoon with his serotonin reuptake inhibitors, his trazodone and clonidine. Karl had done some nasty things while he was afflicted, like pimping his girlfriend, punching her unconscious, putting a passed-out drunk’s open mouth on the edge of a curb and stomping the back of his head, but now Karl was turning his life around with the help of pharmaceuticals and herbs, which mellowed him out. These days he wrote letters to the editor of the Requiem Standard-American, attended city council meetings religiously in order to badger the pro-development city manager and to advance his own libertarian agenda, and he planned to run for public office so that he could help this great nation return to its roots. Who doesn’t want a second chance? Who doesn’t love a story of redemption? Garnet couldn’t resist. Karl had memorized the Bill of Rights. He swept Garnet off her feet.

  When she was forty, Garnet began losing her balance, tripping over her feet. She felt a tingling in her fingers and seemed clumsier than usual. She and Karl were doing a lot of heroin in those days, and she chalked the symptoms up to euphoria. Around this time my own marriage collapsed, and I briefly dated Sophie Anne. She told me her father Brad, no longer known as Thing 1, had moved to Austin, Texas. She didn’t see much of her mom anymore. She told me about her minister, Billy Bartlett, and about her job at the Department of Public Works. She liked them both. She let me kiss her on the cheek.

  At forty-five, Garnet had to quit her job when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease advanced rapidly, and soon she was in a wheelchair. She became a burden to Karl, who told her, Baby, I didn’t sign on for this detail. He didn’t leave for good, but he did leave every night after supper and went down the block to the Olde Towne Tavern. Garnet didn’t see why he couldn’t take her along. He laughed at that idea. He could give her ten reasons why. She didn’t think she should have to beg for sex. She was trapped in their second-floor apartment. Unless Karl carried her down the stairs, she was imprisoned. She wanted to move to a wheelchair-accessible house. She wanted to move to Florida to where Sophie Anne had moved. In Florida she could be independent. Then when Karl went out for a drink or wherever, she could call Sophie Anne. They could chat, go shopping. She told all this to her brother Blackie, who told her that when she was ready to leave that as
shole Karl, he’d be by in a cab to pick her up, bring her home. She said, This is my home.

  On Christmas Eve, Garnet asked Karl to please stay in for once. She had bought him a gift, a hash pipe and an ounce of Nepalese black hash. They smoked a bit, watched It’s a Wonderful Life, ordered pizza. Eventually, Karl said he needed some air. Garnet said, Open the window. When he put on his toque, she cried. That’s right, he said, I’m going to the bar. Bingo! Garnet followed him to the back hall and grabbed his jacket. He slapped her hand away, and took the stairs two at a time. She screamed. He told her to shut the fuck up. She tried to stand and lost her balance, tumbled down the stairs, the wheelchair bouncing off her back. Karl called her a cunt, told her she could just lie like that until he got home. And he went to the bar.

  I couldn’t know the part I just told you about, of course, but from what I’ve learned about Karl, I’d be willing to bet that I’m right in essence if not in detail. When she woke up in the hospital, Garnet didn’t remember a thing. Karl told her that he found her on the landing when he got home, and he called the ambulance immediately. If only the landlady had been home, he said, and lowered his head. Garnet suffered spinal damage and lost the use of her arms.

  Bad got worse. Garnet couldn’t eat or take meds without help. She couldn’t get high if Karl didn’t want her to. Her only connection to the world was a headset and voice-activated telephone which dialed the numbers she recited. Karl meanwhile met a woman named Diane at the tavern. Diane had some miles on her, but Karl was wise enough to realize that he was going to seed himself. Diane also had a husband back at their flat upstairs over a Jewish bakery. He was a rummy and mostly oblivious, but she and Karl couldn’t very well fuck with the husband in the bed with them, now, could they? Karl’s bright idea was to move Diane into his and Garnet’s apartment under the pretense that Diane could help out with Garnet’s care. Diane’s bright idea was that they should steal Garnet’s Cylert and Wellbutrin and sell them on the street. Garnet lay in bed at night listening to them carrying on, laughing, whooping, falling down.