Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I looked at the phone and then at my father, sitting as he always sat, in front of the television set, drinking John Jameson. The set that year was an RCA. He looked up at me when I did not speak, and I simply walked across the room and handed the phone to him, the cord stretched tight. And I sat down to wait.

  It was not a very long conversation. Mostly my father said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. Uh-huh. I see.”

  Finally he said, “Well, she’ll be calling you back, Mr. Comfort…Matt, then…in the morning. You, too. Good-bye, now.” And he hung up the phone and studied me in silence. My mother had come in from the kitchen, and we stood looking back at my father.

  “Fellow Comfort thinks highly of your work, Smoky,” my father said, as if it had only just occurred to him that I might have any sort of proficiency. “Starting a new magazine up there for the chamber of commerce, he is, says it’s going to be the best one of its kind in the world. Says it’s already more than halfway there.”

  I nodded. My father looked at my mother.

  “Wants Smoky to come up there and work for him. That Cantwell fellow that Smoky had here once, the one with the glasses and the fat behind, you remember, he showed this fellow Comfort some of the work our girl did while she was at college, and this Comfort told him to get her right on the phone. What do you think of that? Mama?”

  My mother started to shake her head, and my father lifted a hand. She subsided.

  “Fellow says he knows how we must feel about letting her go all the way up there by herself, but says he’s a Catholic, too, and he’s on the…the board or something of the Church’s home for working girls or something like that, right near this magazine office, and he’ll see she gets a nice room there, and makes friends with some other Catholic girls—he’s got two working for him—and he’ll look after her himself, and even take her to Mass with him until she’s found her way. Goes to a big church called Saint Matthew’s. Says he can’t pay Smoky much, but he can see that she comes to no harm, and he says she’s got that kind of talent ought to be given a chance—”

  “Is he married? Does he have a family?” my mother said.

  “Well, of course he does. I mean, he didn’t say, but no chamber of commerce is going to be giving a grand new magazine to some young, unmarried upstart, now are they?”

  My mother said nothing.

  “Well, Smoky girl?”

  “Oh, Daddy, oh my God—” I breathed.

  “Don’t blaspheme,” my mother said automatically.

  And so I was on my way at last.

  It was the first of the many miracles I personally witnessed Matt Comfort perform, that toppling of my father’s towers without a shot being fired. It gave me a great and giddy sense of possibilities, the sense that, in that city to my north, on fire and on the make, assorted minor miracles might truly be within beck and call, at least that of Matt Comfort.

  Then send me one right now, I thought desperately from the passenger seat of the Vista Cruiser stalled in Tight Squeeze, watching from the corner of my eye my father’s face harden into the resolve to take me home to Corkie. God or Our Lady or Matt Comfort or somebody, send me a miracle or this whole thing is surely going to end right here in this car.

  And it being the night for them, miracles as well as epiphanies, my deliverance presented itself at that instant, standing on a street corner under a streetlight on the corner of Tenth and Peachtree Streets.

  “Look, Daddy,” I said, incredulous laughter bubbling up like ginger ale in my chest, tickling giddily behind my eyes. “Look over there.”

  He followed my pointing finger and saw them, too. Three young nuns in full habit and a young priest in jeans and a crewneck sweater over his dog collar, standing in the middle of a throng of the tatterdemalion, half-naked young, strumming guitars and singing and laughing as if the whole scene were a Sunday School picnic. Over my father’s silence I could hear, faintly, the sound of the chords, and their singing: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind….”

  My father did not speak again until we had cleared the lights of Tight Squeeze and were at the corner of Fourteenth Street, where we were to turn left for the Church’s Home.

  “I’m leaving you here against my better judgement, Maureen Aisling,” he said. “And I’ll be in touch with this Matt Comfort at least once a week, and if he notices the slightest thing amiss with you, the slightest wee thing, I’ll be up here for you before he hangs up the phone. Don’t you forget that.”

  “I won’t, Daddy,” I said meekly.

  When we had reached the forbidding dark-brick pile of Our Lady, my father decided that he would not come in with me. His innate sense of otherness from all but Corkie had gotten hold of him, I knew; I had seen it happen before. His plan had been to deposit me safely in the arms of the Church, to find himself a cheap motel room nearby, and drive back early the next morning, but I knew that he would get back into the Vista Cruiser and start for home when he left me off, fleeing for safety in the cradling arms of the huge car. He would play the radio all the way, the sentimental stations he favored fading out as he left the city behind and the raw all-night gospel stations of the wiregrass and the coast coming in, singing along with them, emerging whole and vigorous once more as he neared Savannah and Corkie, like a photograph in developing solution.

  He carried my bags to the sagging front porch and set them down and rang the bell, and when he heard a ponderous tread coming toward us, he hugged me stiffly, ruffling my careful new Sassoon cut, and kissed me on the cheek.

  From the bottom step he called after me, “Whose daughter are you now?”

  “I’m Liam O’Donnell’s daughter!” I called back obediently.

  “And don’t you be forgettin’ it!”

  “I won’t.”

  But I began to forget in that instant.

  “Look out, Atlanta,” I whispered as the lock on the forbidding front door to Our Lady began to turn. “Look out, Downtown magazine. Look out, Matt Comfort. Here comes Maureen Aisling O’Donnell. And don’t you be forgetting it.”

  2

  I HAD NEVER BEEN TO NEW YORK, BUT CAROLYN RENFROW in my class at Saint Zita’s had, to visit her older sister Deirdre. Deirdre married a Corkie boy who simply never came home after he disembarked from his Korean-war troopship, but stayed and went to work for a taxi company. By the time he sent for Deirdre he had his own cab, and they married and lived in Levittown, and Deirdre worked for the city in the Tax Records Division until her children began to come. But before she married Jerry Sullivan she lived briefly in the Barbizon Hotel for Women, and it was there that Carolyn visited her. I thought Carolyn’s account of Deirdre’s life there was the most magical thing I had ever heard.

  I thought Our Lady would be like that. I can’t remember why, but I did.

  In my mind I knew every inch, facet, and nuance of it before my father and I even set out for Atlanta. There would be laughing, wisecracking young women streaming out to their jobs downtown in the mornings and back in the evenings. They would be sleek and modish, dressed in Mary Quant, their shining blunt-cut Sassoons swinging, their long legs flashing in patterned tights of white fishnet. They would be self-assured and up-to-the-minute on where to shop, dine, be seen in Atlanta, but of course they would be out-of-towners like me, too, so there would be just a touch of endearing unsureness about them; I would not stand out in their ranks in my Corkie greenness. They would welcome me as a sister; we would sit on our beds in our shortie pajamas and curlers at night, smoking and drinking Coca-Colas and trading the secrets of our hearts; we would do each other’s hair and lend each other clothes, maybe we would experiment with body paint. We would introduce each other to our boyfriends’ urbane friends, and we would go in crowds of youth and laughter and kickiness to movies and discos and restaurants and concerts. There would be a housemother, of course, a wise, eccentric older woman who saw in us her own youthful dreams and foibles, and she would shake her head, smiling, when we came in late or violated some minor house rule, a
nd comfort us when we fetched up—briefly—between boyfriends. We would call her Muggsy or Gertie or something, and she would call us all “Kid.” At Christmas we would pool our resources and buy her a satin negligee, and she would crack bad jokes about it, and her eyes would shine with tears.

  One evening, across the warm, disorderly, Miss Dior-smelling parlor, our eyes would meet those of a handsome stranger come to call on someone, and would lock….

  In truth, my vision probably owed more to a recent rerun of Stage Door at the Bijou in Corkie than to Deirdre Renfrow’s tenure at the Barbizon Hotel for Women at Madison and Sixty-fourth in Manhattan. Neither one had anything at all to do with Our Lady’s Home for Catholic Girls on Fourteenth Street in Atlanta. Our Lady was inexorably moored in the early, Vatican-blessed fifties, and though I could not have seen it, so was I. It is incredible to me, looking back, that the woman whose fantasies that night included Stage Door and body paint was twenty-six years old. But such was the power of Corkie and the Church. The distance from Atlanta and the dock neighborhoods of Savannah was measured in far more than miles.

  Even though it was just past nine when my father dropped me off, Our Lady was largely dark. Standing on the porch waiting for the door to open to my ring I saw a dim, grayish light from a foyer lamp through the grimy stained glass panels on either side of the door, and one or two slits of light on the second floor that looked as if they might be escaping from beneath lowered shades. Otherwise the ungainly old house and those around it were steeped in darkness like thick tea. I had little sense of the neighborhood, except that it gave off a stink of semicommercialism. I knew without even thinking about it that all of the darkened houses around me had once been single family residences, and substantial ones at that, but that now they were rooming houses or businesses of some sort: AAA Personnel Service; Peach City Temporaries; Dr. A. E. Moorvakian, Chiropractor; Madame Rhonda, Psychic; T. Plasters, DDS. Except for the sharp, cold night mist on my face and the distant river-roar of traffic over on Peachtree Street, I might have been back home in Corkie. There was the same slight, sour effluvia of defeat, slackness, decay. I would have known it on the other side of the universe.

  The door opened. I could not see the face of the woman who stood there, but I could see the white of her wimple and the dark skirts to the floor, and my heart sank. Why had I not expected a nun? Who better, after all, to guard the daughters of the Church in a strange city? But I had not. My vision of Muggsy in sentimental tears over her satin negligee vanished.

  “Maureen O’Donnell?” the sister said in a voice that seemed a piece of the night, harsh and affectless, overlaid with the singsong of the brogue I had thought I had left behind me.

  “Yes. Ah…at least, it’s Maureen Aisling, but everybody calls me Smoky,” I said into the darkness. I wished she would step back into the light. I felt as if I were talking to a statue.

  “I will call you Maureen. That’s what Mr. Comfort’s letter said, and that’s how you’re registered with us. I am Sister Mary James,” she said, and turned and went back into the house. I picked up my bags and followed her. Inside the light was the color of pale urine, and scarcely brighter than it had been outside. I could see only that she was heavy, wore flesh-colored plastic-rimmed glasses, had tight-stretched shiny skin, and might have been any age at all over thirty. All the doors off the foyer were dark fumed oak and closed, and the walls were painted the self-same green of those at Saint Zita’s. I thought perhaps there was a company somewhere that made green paint specifically for Catholic institutions.

  Sister Mary James moved ponderously and silently up a dark oak staircase. A runner of sour taupe carpet muffled my footsteps as I followed behind her. At the top of the stairs a crucifix hung over a scarred oak table holding twelve or so Thom McAn shoeboxes, each with a slit in its lid and a name crayoned under the slit.

  “For your mail,” Sister Mary James said, not pausing. “We sort it and put it out once a day in the mid-afternoons.” She turned left and padded on down the hall. On either side, doors were shut. Squares of cardboard taped on them had names, but I could not read any of them in the murk. The only light here came from a night-light attached to the baseboard about halfway down the hall and from a pink and green neon sign that flashed through the high window over the mail table: “Life of Georgia,” it winked. “Life of Georgia.”

  The thought came, unbidden and suddenly threatening to swamp me with choking laughter, that the night-light, when I passed it, would prove to be a plastic one of Jesus. But it was, after all, only a tiny bulb in a seashell. That, though, was plastic.

  At the end of the hall Sister Mary James opened a door using a key that hung from a chain around her neck and entered. She motioned me to follow her. As I passed I could see that the sign on the oak door read “Callahan, A.” and “O’Donnell, M.” I stopped still, suddenly shy. My daydreams had all had a roommate in them, but now that I was here, I felt bumbling and insensitive, and annoyed at Sister Mary James, simply unlocking the door and crashing in upon the sleeping Callahan, A.

  But the room was empty. A bare overhead light fixture showed two single beds, each tightly covered by a military-cornered chenille spread and a folded gray blanket. I knew those blankets: the few rooms at Saint Zita’s kept for boarders had them, and the infirmary. Perhaps as well as paint, there was a central emporium for blankets. Or, more likely, an enormous central Catholic commissary.

  One of the beds had a stuffed monkey and a ruffled pink pillow on it. The other was bare except for one thin pillow, hardly making a rise in the chenille. Between the beds was a metal desk with a green goosenecked lamp on it, and over each bed was a plain metal cross. Two enormous oak-stained wardrobes stood on either side of the door, and a round hooked rug, faded and obviously homemade but somehow warm and softening, lay in the middle of the linoleum floor. In the corner a radiator hissed and rattled.

  It was so Spartan a room as to seem a nun’s cell, and my heart, already poised to dive into the pit of my stomach, would have made the final great leap with no further delay except for the window. It was much larger than the other few I had seen in Our Lady, and it lay over the desk uncurtained and shining like the door into heaven.

  I drew a soft little breath. By some twist of geography I could not yet figure, the window in my room looked straight out over the treetops of Fourteenth Street and those on the streets beyond it, into the river of light that was Tight Squeeze. I could see the shoals of drifting, wildly dressed hippies that had so outraged my father, and the flowing-lava lights of the traffic crawling along Peachtree Street, and the towers of downtown rising beyond it all, gleaming in the mist.

  “Oh,” I said softly. I did not realize that I had spoken it aloud until Sister Mary James nodded in quick annoyance and strode to the window and pulled the shade down firmly.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a terrible annoyance. Shameless young heathens. But it’s the only vacancy we had, and Mr. Comfort didn’t give us much time. I’m afraid you’ll just have to ignore it. We’ve petitioned and petitioned for someone from the diocese to come and do something about it—shutters on the outside, or something—but of course no one has. Ansonia keeps the shade down all the time, but there’s still the glow, and in the summer the infernal noise—”

  “It will be just fine,” I said, itching for her to leave so that I could raise the tattered shade. Ansonia, whoever she was, would just have to make other sleeping arrangements. Perhaps I could get her one of those chic black satin sleep masks you saw in movies. Audrey Hepburn had worn one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  “Well, then, here you are,” Sister Mary James said. “I hope Mr. Comfort will be pleased with your room. I must say we don’t usually take girls on such short notice and without written references from their parish priest, but he said your Father Terrence Moore would be writing us in a day or two, and it was Mr. Comfort who got us our bus, so of course we did what we could. I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here and will try to do him proud. We d
on’t have many rules; you’re all young working women and too old to be treated like children, but the rules we do have are quite firm. You’ll find them in the little pamphlet in your mailbox. Any other questions you can ask me or Sister Clementia in the morning. Breakfast is at eight, so you can have it after early Mass or before the nine o’clock. Saint Joseph’s is one street over and two down. Almost everyone has gone home for Thanksgiving, but they’ll be coming in tomorrow. I believe Ansonia said she would be back about four. She’s visiting her parents in South Carolina. Rachel Vaughn down the hall is here and will no doubt be happy to take you to Mass with her. She goes to the eleven o’clock when she goes. And you may have company in the parlor tomorrow from one p.m. until nine in the evening, if you have friends here.”

  She paused and looked at me. The eyes behind the flesh-colored plastic glasses clearly did not believe that I had any friends in Atlanta.

  “No, I thought I would just…walk around and get to know the city a little bit,” I said lamely.

  “You’ll find it very quiet on a holiday Sunday,” she said and made as if to leave, and then turned back. “We had thought to meet your father,” she said. “Sister Clementia made a cake, and has waited up, I believe. But I see that he has gone on—”

  “He had to get back,” I said, the lie sliding out smoothly on a little rush of annoyance. “My mother isn’t well.”

  “I am sorry. I will remember her in my prayers,” Sister Mary James said, nodded at me, and closed the door. I could not hear her footsteps going away, and somehow had the fancy that she was standing just outside the door, listening. But for what? It was an absurd notion.

  All the same, I did not move from the edge of my bed for a long time, and it was even longer until I reached over the desk and raised the shade and let the blaze of city lights stream back into the room. They set me free, and I moved about the room in my stocking feet putting away my clothes in the unlocked armoire, my eyes drawn over and over again to the blaze of light and life outside.