Eveningland

by Michael Knight

  Hadley was invited to a party on Fat Tuesday, king cake and champagne in a downtown loft, the final parade of Mardi Gras fizzing past below the balcony. The party was hosted by Marlowe Boggs, a lesbian, somewhere in her fifties, with a shock of dyed black hair and a lover half her age. Marlowe owned a gallery on Bienville Square. She’d sold a few pieces for Hadley: a lighthouse at sunset, an antebellum manse. Tourists liked that sort of thing. Weeks before, Hadley had asked Davis to come along but his presence at the party left her ill at ease. He roamed the loft like a country politician, shaking hands, admiring the exposed brick and the paintings on the walls, trying too hard. “He’s like a golden retriever,” Marlowe said.

  When the parade cornered onto Royal, Davis grabbed Hadley’s hand and hustled her out onto the balcony. Down below, the sidewalk on both sides of the street was five, six deep with unruly humans, their shouts and catcalls misting in the chill. On the emblem float, a jester chased a skeleton around a broken pillar, Folly chasing Death.

  They were the first to leave the party. Hadley claimed that she was tired. In Davis’s bed, she pinned his wrists and rolled her hips and shut her eyes. Afterward, she dreamed of Sister Benedicta holding a red umbrella in the rain.

  In the morning, according to plan, Hadley met her mother for brunch at a restaurant famous for crabmeat omelettes. Her mother was wearing church clothes, pearls, her forehead crossed with ash.

  “You didn’t go to Mass?” she said.

  “I forgot.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I didn’t think about it.”

  Her mother’s eyelids drooped in disbelief but Hadley was being honest. She’d scribbled a note while Davis was still asleep, hopped the bus to her apartment to feed the cat, shower, brace herself for these hours with her mother, never once considering the obligation of Ash Wednesday. Before leaving, she’d picked Jezebel up, kissed her between the eyes and set her on the mat outside the door. Jezebel did a mewling whine. The complex was gated and walled. Lots of pets from the apartments prowled the grounds during the day, but Jezebel preferred the climate-controlled interior, preferred her perch on the back of the couch. “Think of it this way,” Hadley had said, “at least you’re not having brunch with my mother.” Now here she was, at a two-top by the window, trying not to wither under the chilly skepticism of her mother’s gaze.

  “There’s a two o’clock at Saint Ignatius,” her mother said.

  “Do we have to do this, Mona?”

  Since his remarriage, Hadley’s father had insisted that she address him by his first name—he didn’t want to be Dad and Pam; he wanted Hadley to put him on the same footing as his new wife—and this usage had bled over into her relationship with her mother. It had the added advantage of driving her mother crazy. She glared at Hadley over her iced tea, a lemon wedge bobbing near her lips, the ash smudged and dirty-looking on her brow.

  “You can call your father and that woman whatever you like but I’m your mother and I am not on a first-name basis with my child.”

  The waiter arrived and listed the specials but Hadley didn’t hear. She was thinking about the ring box. She’d fished it out the night before while Davis was brushing his teeth but she couldn’t bring herself to look inside.

  “Take that hair out of your mouth,” her mother said, when the waiter was out of earshot. “I thought we’d broken you of that a hundred years ago.”

  Hadley hadn’t noticed what she was doing. She tongued the ends of her ponytail before slipping it from her mouth. It tasted like stale bread.

  “Have you seen him?” her mother said.

  “Louis? We had dinner last weekend.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And how is he? Is he happy?”

  After brunch, Hadley drove to the Jesuit college up the road, sketchbook on the passenger seat. She didn’t go to Mass but she wanted to make some pencil drawings of the chapel. Perhaps she would paint it tomorrow, a kind of penance for the way she’d treated her mother. It was warm for February, hushed, pleasant beneath the pines.

  She sketched through one Mass and into the next, the first crowd pouring out onto the steps, the parking lot emptying and filling up again, another crowd, nearly identical to the first, entering the chapel. She worked quickly, as she always did with preliminary sketches, trying different angles, now focusing on the steeple, now on the gothic accents around the double doors, but the steeple looked like a steeple, the doors like double doors, nothing revealed beyond their simplest incarnations. She was just closing her sketchbook, dissatisfied with her efforts, when Mass let out and she spotted Sister Benedicta in the crowd. At school, the nun wore an unflattering calf-length black skirt and short-sleeved blouse with her wimple, but today she was outfitted in full habit. She stood at the top of the steps, blinking in the sun. It would have been easy enough for Hadley to slip off to her car and drive away unseen but even as she was trying to make up her mind, Sister Benedicta saw her. She hiked her skirt, revealing white athletic socks, and headed in Hadley’s direction over the lawn, her eyes brushing Hadley’s unmarked brow, pinning her in place.

  “Miss Walsh.”

  “Hello, Sister. You don’t go to Mass at Our Lady?”

  “I generally do, yes, but this morning I was asked to pray with a sick parishioner. This Mass suited my schedule.”

  Hadley hugged the sketchbook against her chest.

  “I’ve been drawing the chapel.”

  “Inspiration for a new art project?”

  Shadows wavered on the grass.

  “Could I buy you a cup of coffee?” Hadley said.

  To her surprise, Sister Benedicta agreed. They took Hadley’s car. Hadley had to clear the floor on the passenger side of fast-food wrappers, unopened mail. Sister Benedicta looked out of place in the coffee shop but she would have looked out of place most anywhere in that habit. Hadley wasn’t sure what she’d hoped to accomplish by her invitation, perhaps only to prove to herself that she would not be cowed. She didn’t know what to say. They passed a few minutes with small talk. Yes, Hadley had grown up in Mobile. Yes, she’d enjoyed her time in Providence. Yes, she supposed she was glad to be home. She was tempted to tell Sister about her dream, the image of the nun holding a red umbrella in the rain. She wanted to say something outrageous, to put Sister Benedicta on her heels. She had an impulse to tell her about the ring box but tamped it down.

  “So, I’m sorry, I’m sure you get this all the time,” Hadley said, “but I can’t help wondering why you decided to become a nun.”

  Sister Benedicta said, “I was called.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “Well, then, how were you called? Did you hear God’s voice? Did you have a vision?”

  Sister Benedicta sipped her latte, holding the mug with both hands, leaving a smear of foam on her top lip. She set the mug on the table and looked at Hadley.

  “I was a girl, fourteen years old. There was a convent school in our town. The nuns were kind. They were like strange birds. One night, soldiers broke into our house looking for my father. They raped my sister first. As they were raping me, I prayed that if I survived and if He would have me, I would marry myself to the Lord. At that moment, He lifted me out of my body. I felt no more pain, just warmth, release.”

  Her gaze never left Hadley’s face, her voice never wavered. The man at the next table was staring around his newspaper.

  “Jesus,” Hadley said.

  “Indeed.”

  Davis phoned that night. He wanted to come over but Hadley told him she needed quiet time. If he was disappointed, he didn’t let on. She could hear the TV playing in the background.

  “What are you watching?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some movie.”

  Jezebel purred in her lap. She was inev
itably hungry for affection when Hadley let her in at night.

  “What channel?”

  He told her and Hadley turned the TV on and found the channel he was watching. She’d seen this movie before.

  “I meant to ask,” Davis said, “what did you give up for Lent?”

  “I’m still thinking about it,” she lied, and then she was telling him about her day, the story spilling out in a rush, how she’d run into Sister Benedicta by chance outside the chapel, the coffee shop, her stupid question, Sister Benedicta’s reply.

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s what I said. And I know it’s terrible, I know it is, I can’t even begin to imagine something like that, but I swear she took pleasure in telling me. It was creepy. Like it gave her power. I felt like she’d slapped my face. How wicked am I for thinking that?”

  “On a scale of one to ten? About an eight.”

  “What did you give up for Lent?”

  “Doritos,” Davis said.

  Jezebel sprang up suddenly from Hadley’s lap and darted into the kitchen, skittering under the table and out the other side, pursuing nothing.

  Back in high school, Hadley had applied to Brown, along with Duke and Yale and Stanford and Columbia, because those schools had first-rate art programs and she was an excellent student and her teachers had encouraged her and none of those schools were less than five hundred miles from Mobile. She wanted to meet new people, have an adventure, experience something all her own. She wasn’t thinking about her future, not really, and when she did, it took on the hazy contours of a half-remembered dream, a vision, she believed, that would come into focus eventually without much effort on her part. She’d gone to Brown because it was the only one of those places that had accepted her, a detail that hadn’t bothered her at the time. She’d chalked it up to fate. And Hadley had loved Providence in some ways—how the leaves came alive in their dying every fall and how the old brick dorms gave her dreams of upright New England ghosts—though it never felt like home. She hadn’t exactly fit in among her classmates with their ambitious piercings and aggressive tattoos. They were serious about their art, pretentious in the way that only undergraduates can be pretentious, even if they weren’t always very good. They seemed to know something about the world that still eluded Hadley. Hadley had never met so many actual homosexuals and one night, she let a girl named Tori Samples kiss her breasts before bursting into laughter at the thought of what she was doing. Tori was incensed. “You need to let go,” she’d said, glowering beneath a row of eyebrow rings, and Hadley had thought, Let go of what?

  It was also up in Providence that Hadley had stopped attending Mass. There had been a scandal involving a parish priest and three young boys, the requisite cover-up, editorials in the paper, angry protests, but even Hadley realized in some vague way that she was just using the scandal as an excuse. The truth was she didn’t believe in a God who demanded her adoration. She believed in mystery. She believed in patterns and signs. She believed that quantum physics and the theory of relativity could not coexist in the same universe without help. She believed that there was no evolutionary reason for the way beautiful things could take the breath away or for the power of Art with a capital A. She missed the ritual of the Mass sometimes, the way it emptied her mind like meditation, but she could conjure that same powerful emptiness staring at the blazing WaterFire sculpture over the rivers in downtown Providence or while painting or in a sailboat on Mobile Bay.

  On impulse, however, the Sunday after Mardi Gras, she drove to Mass at Our Lady of the Roses. The church was small and old, listing toward shabby, but charming for those reasons, the flaking paint and plaster, the tired kneelers, though Hadley understood that the parishioners probably did not find those details quaint. The only other white faces she saw were elderly women, most likely women who had lived in this parish before it had gone to seed. She recognized several students from her classes. One of her second-grade girls, Regina, came over in her pink dress to give Hadley a hug. Sister Benedicta was sitting in the front row. Perhaps it was Sister Benedicta’s presence or because she had stayed away too long, but Hadley couldn’t give herself up to the proceedings. She had trouble paying attention to the Gospel and the homily and she couldn’t remember when to kneel and parts of the Nicene Creed escaped her.

  All of which is why it came as such a surprise when inspiration struck. The priest was blessing the Host before Communion. Behind the altar was a stained glass window depicting a rose, a symbol of Mary. Light beamed thickly, dustily through the window and she could see bird shadows playing on the glass, swooping and darting and disappearing into nothing. At that moment, in that light, the braces between the panes were cast in high relief and Hadley was acutely conscious that the flower was composed of dozens of smaller pieces of glass, rather than of a single piece. The word mosaic passed through her mind and then the word collage and she thought, Yes, that’s it, of course, we’ll do collage. The lesson fell into place as she lined up for Communion. The students would collage a rose. Picasso and Matisse had both worked in collage. The symbolism of the rose would please Sister Benedicta but it wasn’t so overt that it made Hadley feel like she was caving in. After she had her sip of wine—The Blood of Christ. Amen—Hadley hurried out into the day without waiting for the closing prayer and hymn.

  That afternoon, she put almost four hundred dollars on her Amex—her father paid the bill—loading up on construction paper and poster board. She bought dozens and dozens of magazines for cutting up and bolts of colorful felt so the students might employ different textures. She bought thirty pairs of scissors just in case. She bought gallons of glue. Her last stop was Walmart and as she was pushing her cart away from the store, looking for her car, she noticed a new message on her cell. Her father. For a second, she thought maybe he’d been contacted by the Amex people about all the sudden charges but the card was in her name, even if the bill went to his address. In the middle of the parking lot, still not sure where she’d left her car, she thumbed in the voice-mail code and pressed the phone against her ear.

  “Hey, sweetheart, it’s me, it’s Dad, it’s Louis. Listen, I just had the most intriguing call from your young man. He wants to buy me lunch next week. He wants to talk man-to-man. It’s all very hush-hush. He swore me to secrecy but I wanted to talk to you before we meet. I think I know what this is about. I hadn’t realized you two were so serious. Anyway, give me a shout when you have a minute. Pam says hello.”

  As his words washed over her, the tips of her fingers began to tingle and Hadley worried she might drop the phone. She could picture the scene so clearly, Davis and her father in some dim restaurant, Davis asking her father for permission to propose, for his blessing. A car horn honked behind her and Hadley realized she was blocking an open spot with her cart. She slipped the phone into her purse and resumed her search, rolling past her own car twice before she recognized it.

  Davis played soccer in the park with friends on Sunday afternoons. Hadley drove directly to his house, her trunk stuffed with art supplies. She had a key. She let herself in through the kitchen door and stood there for a moment on the tile, a breakfast plate drying in the dish rack, her own face smiling at her from a photograph magneted to the refrigerator. Taken last year, a weekend at Gulf Shores. As she moved from kitchen to living room to bedroom, the house felt stuffy and too neat, not a single stray sock on the floor, no half-empty glasses sweating on end tables. Hadley wasn’t sure what she intended but it didn’t matter. The ring box wasn’t there. She rummaged through his boxers and socks, poked her fingers into corners. Nothing. She checked the other drawers to be sure. The curtains were drawn, light seeping in around the edges.

  Back at her apartment complex, Hadley was met by a commotion in the parking lot. Several of her neighbors were gathered around a woman Hadley recognized but couldn’t name—red hair, freckles. She had a little boy, Hadley thought, but she didn’t know his name either. More neighbors
peering down from the gangways on several floors. Hadley wanted to slip by unobserved but a voice called out to her. She stopped, arms laden with shopping bags. The crowd parted. The woman with red hair and freckles was crying.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see her.”

  At the woman’s feet was a dark crumple the size of a loaf of bread. Wet-looking. Furred. Hadley didn’t know what she was seeing and then she did. She lugged the art supplies to her apartment on the second floor, dropped them in the foyer, fetched a garbage bag from the box under her kitchen sink. Back down the stairs, feeling watched, feeling blurry and slow.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said again. “She didn’t suffer.”

  She reached for Hadley but Hadley flinched and the woman withdrew her hand. Someone else said, “It was an accident. I saw it. Your cat just ran right out in front of the car.”

  Hadley tugged the garbage bag inside out and used it like a glove to pick up the body so she wouldn’t have to touch it, then let Jezebel’s weight, as the cat sagged to the bottom, turn the bag right side in. There was a Dumpster in the far corner of the lot. Hadley weaved between the cars, flipped the bag over the lip and returned to her apartment, fixing the chain behind her. The phone rang but she didn’t answer. A few hours later, it started ringing again. She was busy. She was faraway. She was cutting shapes from felt and glossy magazines to teach her students about collage.

  The lesson did not go as she had planned. Somehow her students failed to grasp what Hadley had always considered a fairly simple and liberating concept. She thought perhaps Picasso and Matisse had been the wrong examples, though she had wanted to allow her students the freedom to go abstract if so inspired. Even the rose Hadley cobbled together on the fly from scraps and pieces, a literal rose with recognizable petals and stem, had failed to get the point across. “Real rose petals aren’t uniformly red,” she said. “There are lots of different shades in them, even blacks and browns, and when you see the rose in a garden it’s tinted with shadow and light which brings more colors into play, and the petals don’t have the same texture as the stems. You can use the pieces you’ve cut up to capture those different shades and textures.” She roamed between the long tables, holding her quick collage up for display. Rain wisped against the windows. One of her eighth graders, Dante, was playing a video game on his phone.