Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “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.

  7

  THE 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.

  “Can’t see a thing in here without those on,” she says, indicating the fluorescent tubes concealed in an alcove, “but you know Father Rose, he likes the mood lighting. Helps him imagine he’s got something here besides a mess of old bones.” Then she walks over to the coffin, runs her fingers along the top, and comes up with a thick coating of dust. “Where does the stuff come from, ever ask yourself that? I use Endust and Formula 409, we’ve always got the door bolted, there are no windows, but …” She wiggles her finger in my face.

  “Entropy,” I say. “Tiny particles of everything. Dust is the visual evidence of the world itself falling apart.”

  For a moment her eyes go blank on the other side of the spectacles. Then she shakes her head. “You’re just as crazy as the priest,” she
says.

  The lid of the coffin is secured to the sides by eight elaborate bronze brackets held together with alan screws in the leafy engraving. Mrs. Schnadenlaube produces an alan wrench from the band of her orthopedic socks and bends over the first bracket. Then she catches sight of the spiderweb strung between the nun’s clumpy black shoes and knocks an angry knuckle on the glass. The spider hangs placidly in his web, unaware of the holocaust to come.

  “I vacuum in there once every two months,” Mrs. Schnadenlaube says, more to the spider than to me. “And still there are bugs. How do they get in there? I’ll tell you how! Dead bodies attract all kinds of vermin. The sooner the dead are in the ground, the better!”

  I have managed to convince Mrs. Schnadenlaube that as a result of my investigations, Sister Januarius’s body will soon be laid in a grave in the churchyard. This suits the woman just fine. We all have our petty annoyances, the irritating details that, added one to the other, somehow conspire to make our life miserable. The removal of even one of them can make it seem like the world is becoming a better place. As Mrs. Schnadenlaube looks at the situation, Sister Januarius’s mummy is her responsibility, and she will not let me near the sarcophagus as she works on the screws with her wrench. She bids me lean against the far wall beneath the Christmas lights. It is fifteen minutes before she calls me over to help with the heavy glass lid.

  With some effort, we slide it half off one side to the teeth-gritting scrape of glass against glass and surprisingly, the scent of wildflowers.

  “I put in one of those stick-um things,” Mrs. Schnadenlaube explains. “You should have smelled the old girl before.”

  “Where did you put it?” I say.

  “Don’t ask. Now, what is it you want out of here?”

  I try not to see the shriveled brown skin, the skeletal teeth. “The old Bible,” I say, dry-lipped. “There …”

  Mrs. Schnadenlaube nods and reaches in to knock out the spiderweb and retrieve the book. We push the lid back into place, and as she once again busies herself with the alan wrench, I step back to examine my treasure.

  It is a heavy Douay-Reims translation of the New Testament, printed in Paris toward the last half of the eighteenth century, bound in black morocco and trimmed with cracking gilt. The inside covers are marbleized; the sacred text is three-columned and close printed to save space. And as I suspected, it is a study Bible, printed on heavy vellum, with more than half the pages set aside for private notation and commentary. A cursory look shows these pages are covered from top to bottom with a minuscule feminine hand—large chunks of writing broken only at odd intervals by the interpolation of a few blank spaces and a date. There are many such dates from beginning to end, covering a period of some forty years. Not a day-to-day chronology, exactly, but a diary just the same. The diary of a saint.

  I feel the weight and density of this book in my hand. I carefully blow a faint layer of dust off the textured cover and smile.

  8

  SATURDAY.

  The day is bright and clear and beautiful. September, with its luminous days fading into the amber twilight of last barbecues. The air in the morning is a bit chilly, just enough for a light jacket. The jetstream trails high impassive clouds. The cars of the Long Island Railroad train smell dusty and old.

  I get on at Flatbush and get off at Jamaica, Queens, to wait for the transfer on the platform with the rest: mothers and children with umbrellas and picnic lunches; retirees in golf caps; young, attractive Jewish girls, their hair a tangle of curls, hiding behind sunglasses and books; yuppies fresh from the office bringing briefcases full of legal documents, squash racquets under their arms. Now, sitting on the concrete steps in the shade, I have a vague and comforting sense of déjà vu. This is one of those great repetitions of bourgeois life. Getting out of the city for the day to the countryside, the train pulling into the last station, the dunes near and achingly white, scooped out of light.

  I look around and watch the faces. New York faces, hard and yellow and worn by life in the city. They haven’t had much time to get away this summer, to breathe some fresh air. The rat race has kept them pent up in the offices, in the stores, on the subway. They seem like characters out of Maupassant, tragic and ironic at the same time. Once I was one of them. Just yesterday. But now I am different, and I fancy that difference burns like a star. In my shoulder bag, padded between a new paperback history of the Mississippi Bubble scandal of 1720 and a two-month-old copy of the Voice—the key to my life. The diary of a saint. I want to embrace strangers, shout my discovery from the top of the train. I can hardly suppress my glee.

  Suddenly a clean wind blows from the direction of the sea. I fill my lungs with it. The train comes clattering around the curve and slows into the station. The passengers line up along the platform. I hesitate, then push my way toward the front. Do I imagine this, or do people move aside to make way? And the attractive young Jewish girl with the mop of gold-brown hair, does she lower her copy of Camus and flash me an approving glance above the dark half-moons of her sunglasses?

  9

  THE SMALL station at East Hampton is decorated with a large banner advertising the Rushwick Country Club-Long Island Pro-Am, with the dates in big green letters. Rushwick Country Club is a new facility, opened just two years ago on the grounds surrounding the turn-of-the-century mansion that once belonged to one of New York’s oldest families, the Van Rushwicks. The last heir died insane in the late 1980s. After a long court battle the grounds and house were sold to a golf enthusiast-real estate developer who carved eighteen holes out of the property and put up the most modern golfing facility in the state, full of superfluous conveniences like digital ball washers and electronic scorecards.

  I board the shuttle bus to the tournament with a small group of golf fanatics, older men and women wearing green-visored caps and exaggerated golfing attire. They seem quite excited and hold hands like teenagers. We roll for twenty minutes through the green and even countryside and approach the Van Rushwick estate through an alley of oaks that reminds me of plantations in Louisiana. There is a great iron gate between brick and mortar posterns, the glimpse of green lawns extending to the horizon, and somewhere the sound of cheering.

  When we disembark, it is like stepping off the bus into paradise. We advance in awe to the ticket booth and pay the thirty-five-dollar admission fee without blinking an eye. It seems a reasonable price on such a beautiful day, in such a green and precious park. Then I follow the crowds around the brick bulk of the old mansion, its dark sides laddered with scaffolding. “They’re turning the place into a fancy hotel for golfers,” I hear one of the old ladies say, “with close-circuit monitoring of the greens and underground parking, so as not to spoil the effect.” We pass through a second set of turnstiles, where a dour young man with a walkie-talkie and a Rushwick CC polo shirt checks my bag.

  “What are you looking for?” I say as he paws through my books, a scowl on his face.

  “Automatic weapons, explosives, alcoholic beverages. In that order,” he says.

  “Have you had problems out here?”

  “You never know, sir,” he says, eyeing me narrowly. “There are lunatics everywhere.” Then he pulls Sister Januarius’s Bible out into the air.

  “Be careful with that,” I say

  “What is it?” he says.

  “A Bible.”

  “You’re not one of these born-again Christian nuts, are you? They can be dangerous. We had one start witnessing last year from the gallery in the middle of the seventh hole, and the golfer missed his putt. That really sucked.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m a Catholic. We’re pretty quiet.” He scowls and flips through the Bible and hands it back. “A book like that, you could use as a weapon. Don’t they make smaller editions?” I shrug. He hesitates but lets me through.

  For the next two hours I wander the course, dazzled by the sumptuous landscape. Along the way I see several birdies, two eagles, and three bogies. On the greens the pros le
an over their putters as if in prayer, caddies bowed at a respectful distance. The sand traps loom like open mouths. It’s not so much the game itself, the primitive sexual dynamics of ball and hole and club, as the whole beautiful setting: gemlike greens in oceans of grass, trees swaying in the breeze, the warmth of the last sun, and the spectators hushed and respectful, like the crowds at a coronation.

  When I find Father Rose, he is stuck in the dogleg of the thirteenth hole, trying to hack his way out of the rough. He has abandoned his mock-Jesuit simplicity today. Indeed, there is nothing of the priest about him. He wears a fashionable 1920s-style golfing ensemble, with tweed knee pants, yellow argyle socks, two-tone brogues, an argyle sweater, and a tweed cap. He studies the lie for a few minutes, gestures to his caddie for a nine iron, and knocks the ball into a clump of willows seventy-five yards to the west. He swears, goes red in the face. I can almost imagine him breaking the club over one knee. On the big board he ranks 110th out of a field of 112.

  I wait till he’s up on the green, three shots later, and staring down a double bogie, his next putt a nearly impossible forty-footer. I tear a page out of my notebook and write, “Father Rose: It might help your game to know that Brooklyn has its saint, with a miracle or two thrown into the bargain—Ned C.,” and send it through a greensman.

  Meanwhile, the famous Armenian golfer Pulan Lazikian, who’s playing along with Father Rose, bends for his marker and replaces his ball for a twenty-foot putt. He squints at the hole for a moment, then putts with the calm assurance of a professional. The white ball inscribes a gentle arc on the grass, looks good up to the last foot or so, but jogs off to the left. The gallery lets out a disappointed murmur. Lazikian’s just lost himself a half million dollars and the tie for first. Father Rose pulls himself away from this drama to read my note. Then he scowls, takes a pencil out of his pocket, scribbles a response on the back, and sends it back to me.