Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “Right now I’m not a priest, I’m a golfer,” the note says. “And as a golfer, I resent the intrusion on my game. You can talk to the priest following the tournament this afternoon on the terrace of the clubhouse.”

  After this he seems nervous but, moments later, sinks the impossible putt in a single dazzling stroke.

  10

  THE TERRACE of the clubhouse is kidney-shaped and half an acre wide, paved in polished fieldstone of alternating grays. The clubhouse itself, a massive bungalow of timber, stone, and glass, recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. There is the smell of night in the air, of cut grass and the loamy dark beneath the bushes. The tables are packed with golfers and entourage, relaxing over drinks in the first calm light of dusk. For some reason, mariachi music filters through the loudspeaker as if one of the Mexican busboys has commandeered the sound system. The rattle of the tinny horns and accordion mixed with the sound of male laughter and the clink of glasses makes me think of a cantina in a border town and the raw stink of tequila.

  When I find Father Rose, he is slumped alone over a Bloody Mary at a small table in the far corner. Lithe girls in aprons move back and forth, silent as elves with their trays full of glasses. A cold wind blows from the sea. He motions for me to sit down. He stirs his Bloody Mary with a celery stick and will not meet my eyes. I wait for him to speak.

  “It’s been a rough day,” he says after a while. “I’ve got to face it. I’m not much of a golfer anymore.”

  He finished 108th, improving his standing somewhat in the latter part of the afternoon.

  “Come on, Father,” I say. “There were a couple of good shots there. I saw one excellent putt.”

  He waves me off. “Sometimes I think golf is a worse vice for a priest than having a mistress from his congregation or sleeping with the altar boys,” he says. “Wanting to win as much as I do, it’s a sin. I tell myself the obsession won’t matter if I pledge my winnings to the church. No, that’s not true. What I really think is that if I pledge my winnings to the church, a miracle might happen and I might make the top five.”

  “A miracle did happen, Father,” I say, smiling.

  He raises his eyes wearily. “All right, what have you got for me?”

  I pause dramatically, then take Sister Januarius’s Bible out of the book bag and set it on the table, where it sits heavy and dark as a slab of beef.

  Father Rose recognizes the book instantly and is aghast. “You didn’t”—he can hardly find the words—“desecrate the resting place of—”

  “Please, Father, hear me out.” I tell him about the miracles in the hospital, and I tell him about the ghost, about Madeleine de Prasères de la Roca, and about Albane d’Aurevilley, how one became a prostitute and the other a nun who took the name of the martyr Januarius. The light fades in the west over the dark hills. The night comes on. The lithe girls bring out heat lamps and place them here and there on the patio to take the chill off the ocean breeze.

  “Mr. Conti,” Father Rose says at last, “I’ve got to tell you that I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “How can you believe in saints and miracles and not believe in ghosts?”

  “Let me put it a different way. The Congregation of Rites in Rome, they don’t believe in ghosts. They’re a pretty hard-nosed bunch. Lawyers in red hats. ‘You heard all of this from someone who heard it from a ghost?’ they’re going to say to me. ‘What kind of proof is that?’ I’ll be laughed right out of the Vatican.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s all down here, the whole thing,” I say, tapping the Bible. “In nineteenth-century ink, in a nineteenth-century hand on eighteenth-century paper, authentic, verifiable. A saint’s own story, a valuable historical document. She turned stones into cheese, made the blind see, the lame walk. She started out a weird little girl in the possession of unfocused spiritual powers and hoed a long row to God. God came to her in little bits, in flashes, like artistic inspiration. She groped her way toward Him; she made many mistakes. But there was one big, unforgivable mistake when she already knew better, right at the beginning of her saintly career in Brooklyn. And because of it, she kept a soul imprisoned between the four walls of my apartment for a hundred and forty-odd years.”

  The priest drains off his third Bloody Mary and munches noisily on his celery stick as I open the Bible to the relevant passages and summarize.

  Remorseful over her part in the murder of the quadroon Esteban de Vasconcellos, Albane d’Aurevilley took the veil in New Orleans in 1842 and became Sister Januarius of the Nursing Sisters of the Cross.

  At first Sister Januarius’s faith was weak, and she thought only of Esteban, her lost love: how he betrayed her with Cousin Madeleine and how he was brutally killed because of her own vindictive jealousy. But during the rigorous novitiate she changed. Gradually Sister Januarius’s heart emptied of despair and self-interest and filled with selflessness and religious ardor. Then, one night in the spring of her second year as a novice, she was visited in her dreams by the Virgin Mary and told that St. Benedict and St. Teresa of Avila would be her patrons and that it was required of her to use her special abilities for the glory of God. So she prayed and fasted and was granted the power to heal and work wonders.

  Meanwhile, Madeleine de Prasères de la Roca’s unexplained absence from society was the talk of New Orleans. Her husband, Don André, let it be known that his wife had gone to a spa in Europe for the treatment of a nervous condition. But there were still many rumors, and Don André killed two young men beneath the Dueling Oaks for idle speculation on the matter.

  The night before Sister Januarius’s final vows, St. Benedict and St. Teresa of Avila visited her in the shape of hummingbirds and revealed to her the whereabouts of her cousin. Madeleine languished in a place far from God called Brooklyn, they said. Go to her and help her to know that God is merciful.

  A year later Sister Januarius received permission from the bishop to serve as an uncloistered nun at St. Basil’s, then an impoverished new parish with a congregation of Irish immigrants. Guided by the voices of her saints, she traveled north and eventually found Madeleine in squalid rooms in a prostitutes’ quarter near the Molasses Hill docks. But poor Madeleine was in awful shape, already half eaten away with a suitably biblical disease—leprosy.

  “What’s the point of this gruesome tale?” Father Rose interrupts. He waves to the waitress for another Bloody Mary.

  “You’ll see, Father,” I say, and bend my head to the crabbed handwriting in the dull light of the terrace and begin to read.

  11

  1847–6 Aug.—I have done my best to alleviate my poor cousin’s suffering, a task set before me by the Almighty to strengthen my soul for the work which is ahead. The doctors will not come any longer & have ceased sending their medicines because there is no money left & I must wrap and bathe her lesions myself. The stench is terrible. Poor Madeleine’s limbs are rotting on the bone; her hair is falling out. She clings to her hatred of her husband like a drowning man to a bit of wreckage & she no longer believes in God or Salvation. I tell her that suffering should not deter her faith, that even suffering is a gift from an Almighty & Merciful God, so that in the next life we may appreciate Paradise more thoroughly. She laughs at me, and the sound of her laughter is terrible, the sound of the Prince of Deceivers laughing in the Wilderness of Hell. She also uses profane language and abuses me in the most licentious manner possible—blasphemies learned in her life as a whore.

  Try as I might, I cannot feel Christian Love or Sympathy for her & I know that this is a grave & perhaps a mortal sin; we are abjured to love those who have wronged us, as is written in the Scripture. I have not turned my mind to my dear lover Esteban in a long while, but now I think of him again daily, and I think of the seven times we had carnal union—twice in the garden, once in his room on the upper gallery, once in my dressing room on the lower, twice on a couch in the library, once in Papa Prasères’s tilbury the afternoon we took a drive through the countryside—all before Cousin
Madeleine seduced him away and took him from me. Yes, I know I endangered my soul with these acts of physical love—indeed, of adultery—and I have repented of them, yet I can’t help it. I still despise Madeleine for her treachery.

  Yesterday I walked with glass in my shoes until my feet were bloody to repent for my failure to forgive her.

  8 Aug.—In the few lucid hours she still possesses, Cousin Madeleine is engaged in a bizarre and copious correspondence with Mr. Bleekman, a lawyer who keeps offices on Manhattan Island across the river. She lost the use of two fingers yesterday and now asks me to tie the pen to her hand. This correspondence—which she will not let me set eyes upon—she lowers out the window in a basket to a slatternly Negress who conveys it to Manhattan on the ferry that docks at the base of Fulton Street. The gentleman’s replies are delivered by a young clerk who refuses to come any closer than the foot of the stairwell.

  I have inquired many times as to the purpose of all this frantic note carrying, but my cousin will only smile in a most sinister manner and reply that she is making arrangements for her journey home to Louisiana. God deliver her from such painful delusions! She would never survive such an arduous trek. I fear she has gone mad. Then I see the fierce light in her eyes, and I think instead that she is plotting something terrible to take place upon the event of her death.

  12 Aug.—Madeleine is now in the grips of the most hideous pain, which I see as God’s judgment upon her. I offer an opium elixir to dull her sufferings, but she refuses & says she prefers to keep her intellect clear for her work, which is not yet done. Such incredible strength of purpose! Yet she refuses to accept God’s Mercy & confess her Sins. This obstinacy greatly troubles me, for by it she shall lose her Immortal Soul! I explain to her that she will be denied the Sacrament of Extreme Unction at the End & consequently suffer the torments of Hell, but she does not appear greatly moved by this warning. The stench grows worse here; the air full of the reek of rotting flesh and excrement. And I console myself with these words from the prophet Isaiah—“My decline draws near speedily, My Salvation has gone forth, Lift up mine eyes to the Heavens!”

  15 Aug.—Much to my shame, Cousin Madeleine still denies the Light of God’s Mercy. O Saints and Angels, give me strength to wrestle with the Prince of Deceivers, who holds sway over her weary soul! I have many conversations with her on the subject of her Salvation, all to no avail. She mocks me as I kneel at her bedside to pray for her & she often taunts me with descriptions of her lovemaking with Esteban—tho I do not believe she has any intelligence of my own activities in that realm & shall keep silent so as not to add to her suffering. St. Benedict and St. Teresa of Avila have not come to me in the guise of hummingbirds for some time. I think they have been driven away by the stink of my Cousin’s evil & unrepentant heart.

  17 Aug.—Today I discovered that Cousin Madeleine has added suicide to the long catalog of her sins, which include whoring & adultery, & as always, I tremble for her immortal soul. She has told me that she contracted the leprosy last year, by whoring with sailors on a clipper from China quarantined in the harbor; the sailors have all since died of the disease. Every night for weeks Madeleine spirited herself out to the ship & threw herself upon her back & whored & whored until she had carried off all the gold the poor wretches possessed. A month or so afterwards she began showing the first signs of putrefaction, which appears as hard red welts up the skin. Tears in my eyes, I begged her to reveal her motivations to me. Had she grown tired of life? “I did it for the money,” she said, & turned her face to the wall & would not hear anymore, tho I took out my New Testament and read from Matthew 8, in which Christ Our Lord heals the sinful and the sick—“Behold a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.”

  20 Aug.—My cousin grows daily weaker and less observant & I have at last intercepted a few pieces of her correspondence with the Hon. Mr. Bleekman Esq. of Manhattan & am beginning to apprehend the shape of her awful plot. My soul is frozen by this intelligence! It is too horrible! Madeleine has sacrificed her life on the altar of vengeance & intends to wreak a terrible punishment upon her husband for the death of my dear Esteban! The plot is diabolical, worthy of the Great Deceiver himself! She mentions a large sum put aside to assist her efforts, profits gained from her whoring over the course of these last black, sinful years. I believe it to be more than five thousand dollars in gold coin, which she keeps in a strongbox beneath the bed.

  As I understand them, the particulars are these: Madeleine has already purchased the construction of a peculiar funerary memorial, an obelisk of black marble inscribed only with her name and profession in no uncertain terms—WHORE&—;& she has entered into an agreement with this lawyer Bleekman to arrange all other salient details after her death. The obelisk will be shipped alongside her corpse back to New Orleans, where the newspapers are to be provided with a lurid account of her sinful life and putrid death. Once she is there, the agreement calls for the memorial to be raised with great pomp in the St. Louis Cemetery on Royal Street. Masses are to be said at the cathedral while her corpse, installed in a magnificent coffin, journeys downriver in a grand funerary flotilla to its final resting place in the crypt at Belle Azure.

  Cousin Madeleine has calculated all this for the greatest possible public notoriety. She rightly supposes that our city will long talk of these events, for which good Creole would miss such an ostentatious funeral? And who will not read the account of it in L’Abeille and Le Courier de la Louisiane? In this way Madeleine’s fate will become generally known & her fantastic revenge achieved in a single stroke. Don André’s monstrous pride will be wounded beyond repair & his family honor destroyed. A descendant of the grandees of Spain married to a whore! The populace will talk of nothing else! He will be made a laughingstock, this proud and pompous Spaniard! His challenges will not be accepted— & that alone is a mortification worse than death to such an avid duelist as Don André; he will be ridiculed out of Society. Madeleine’s plot is indeed ingenious & will pierce that puffed-up, murderous man to the quick. But bought at such a terrible price! Bought with sin and with death! Bought with her body’s horrible sufferings & with the doom of her immortal Soul!

  I weep for her and meditate upon these words inscribed in Lamentations, 3:25—“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning. The LORD is my Portion, says my Soul. Therefore I will hope in Him—” Oh, St. Benedict & St. Teresa, come to me! Why have you been so silent? Give me the strength to make Madeleine see the error of her ways!

  25 Aug.—My cousin’s affliction has taken a sudden turn for the worse. She cannot lift her arms & her extremities are little more than Gangrenous stubs. A fever rages in her body & she lies in her own filth without moving. I swoon from the stench & must wear a cotton mask soaked in camphor to bear a moment at her bedside. The end is only a day or two away, & still she fights fiercely for life. Such resolve! Were it only put to good use! Did our Lord suffer as much upon the Cross? This thought is sheer Blasphemy, but it seems Madeleine’s suffering could redeem a thousand souls from Hell—though now it suffices to send one soul to its Eternal Perdition.

  St. Benedict & St. Teresa keep their Holy Silence. Is it because they know there is no real Love in my heart for my cousin Madeleine? I saw two hummingbirds yesterday hovering about one of the fig trees that spring up along the sidewalk in this poor neighborhood, and my heart leapt—I held out a hand as a perch, and the delicate, feathery creatures hovered above my palm there for a moment, so close I could feel the breeze stirred by the beating of their tiny wings, but they had nothing to say & were only poor feathered creatures of this world.

  26 Aug.—Today I see the terror in Madeleine’s eyes & I must confess to my shame that it gives me a satisfaction that blackens my soul. It is not the terror of death that has her by the throat. No, she is brave, far braver than I! Instead she is haunted by the fear that she will die before
her plans for Revenge come to full fruition & I say to her, Yea, the Almighty often intervenes in the best-laid works of men, and at these words, she trembles with fear. For the disease has now caught her with a singular necessity still undone—namely, this—She has yet to pay for any of her complicated arrangements! The lawyer Bleekman she maintained till now on a retainer, intending to transfer the bulk of her monies presently.But Death has no respect for schedules, no regard for carefully made plans & the five thousand dollars in gold coin rest as yet in the strongbox beneath her bed.

  Today she was too weak to compose any more of her letters, and begged me to send for Mr. Bleekman’s messenger or, failing this, to hand over the gold to him upon her demise. I refused her sinful request outright. I cannot allow her plot to go forward—Revenge is mine, saith the Lord! D.V. tomorrow I shall call in Father Collins from St. Basil’s to hear her confession. D.V. perhaps we may yet save her immortal soul.

  27 Aug.—My cousin lives, though she is out of her head with fever most of the time. In rare periods of lucidity she calls on me in a most piteous manner to pay the lawyer what is still owed. She pleads with me; then she turns face & abuses & berates me in the foulest manner imaginable; then she weeps like a child. She blames me for the wrongs of her life. She tells me that I stole the love of her dear papa from her the day I entered the house at Belle Azure, a poor and friendless orphan; she tells me I am responsible for the death of Esteban & that now I steal away her Rightful Vengeance. It is useless to protest against her, to tell her if I have wronged her, I have repented of it, to tell her not to doom her immortal Soul on my account, but her heart will not hear the words. She utters many blasphemies as I try to offer her comfort in her last hours, and I reply with a verse from Acts 8—“Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, & pray to the LORD that the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the Gall of Bitterness & in the Bond of Iniquity.”