Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  He sat through the celebration of mass. Afterward, he listened to the door of the confessional creak open and shut a number of times, with a hushed space between each movement. The church emptied; then one of the priests came to ask Daniel what he was doing there during school hours.

  Daniel said the nurse had given him a note for his mother.

  “And your mother is out?” the priest said.

  Daniel nodded.

  “That’s a very bad case of conjunctivitis.”

  “I can hardly see,” said Daniel.

  The priest was sniffing his knuckles. Daniel had noticed how many people had that habit. They began to talk to him, then covered their mouths and stuffed their knuckles into their nostrils. The priest said, “The note from your nurse tells your mother to take you to a doctor, I presume?”

  “Yes. It’s contagious. But my mother says the school once sent me home with spots they said were measles when I’d had the measles and it was just a virus.”

  “Is this what you anticipate your mother saying or what she has said?”

  “She said it. I don’t want her to get into another argument with my school.”

  The priest asked Daniel what his name was. Then, “Will your mother take you to a doctor?”

  Daniel said that his mother didn’t trust doctors because the doctors at St. Vincent’s killed Grandma by what they omitted to do.

  The priest told him to please get out of that corner. He took Daniel by his dirty hand and went and made his excuses to the older priest. Then he walked Daniel to the bus stop and went with him to his school. As they rode, the priest asked Daniel questions—for instance, was he a Catholic?

  Yes, Daniel said, he’d been baptized at St. Surplice’s. When Grandma was alive they would get on a tram to go across town to St. Surplice’s. They went all that way because, before Daniel was born, Grandma had had an argument with a priest at Notre Dame de Bon Secours. An argument about Daniel. About Daniel’s father, who was an Indian grocer with a family of five who had given Daniel’s mother an after-school job.

  The priest looked at Daniel closely. He said, “Ah, yes.” Then he asked Daniel who’d told him this story.

  “My mother. She isn’t a prude.” (Daniel’s mother thought most other woman were prudes. She’d say, “They’re always going, ‘Shh, shh,’ at me about sexual matters. What’s the good of that, eh? How are young people supposed to learn what’s what?”)

  “Evidently not,” the priest said.

  At Daniel’s school the priest asked the school secretary if he could speak to the principal. They got in in under five minutes, which impressed Daniel—the few times he’d been sent there he’d invariably kicked his heels for twenty minutes before being called in and told that he had some problem that needed to be “addressed immediately.”

  The priest explained to the principal that Daniel often sat in his church for an hour or two after school. “He’s very good. And we’re hardly packed to capacity. Today, however, I looked out after the midday mass to find him in his after-school spot. He has a problem with his eyes, certainly contagious, but could you not check that his mother is at home before sending him home?”

  The principal sent for the nurse. She explained that she’d sent Daniel home yesterday with a note for his mother. Furthermore, he’d stayed in the sickroom and had gone home at the usual time.

  They all looked at Daniel.

  The principal looked at Daniel’s file. “His mother doesn’t have a phone.”

  “Did you give your mother my note, Daniel?” the nurse asked.

  Daniel nodded. He was wondering how long this interview would take if he was quiet and compliant. How long before these adults lost interest in him?

  “Have you been to the doctor?”

  Daniel lied. He nodded his head. He knew he could talk his mother into taking him. What had upset her was the nurse’s recommendation that she wash all the towels and bedding.

  The nurse folded her arms. She asked, “What did the doctor give you for it?”

  “Medicine.”

  “What sort of medicine?”

  “It has a long name.”

  The nurse, principal, and priest exchanged looks. Then the nurse pressed on. “But how is it administered?”

  Daniel didn’t panic—he pondered—then his head cleared and he felt happy. “Liberally,” he said. “It’s sprinkled, liberally.”

  The priest coughed—or laughed. Then he asked Daniel to please go and wait outside.

  Daniel went out, took a seat, closed his eyes, and swung his legs. The school secretary went into the principal’s office. She came out and made murmuring phone calls. The nurse came out and asked Daniel to go with her. She took him to the nearest medical center and he saw a doctor. The doctor gave him medicine. Drops! Drops for his eyes and for his sinuses, ointment for the cracks between his toes, and painkilling pills for the trouble with his teeth, but he’d have to see a dentist.

  Daniel was taken back to the church, where he helped the priest remove a litter of old notices from a notice board.

  “What was his name?” Father Neske asked.

  “Father Gaston Groux—a Surplician.” Daniel told the old man that after that day the agents of change entered his life but didn’t invade or overthrow it. Welfare was accustomed to protecting children from parents who were child beaters or substance abusers. The school informed them that Daniel was not immediately at risk—only needed looking into. His personal hygiene was bad but his grades good. He was dirty, infested, and his teeth were full of cavities, but his bones were straight and he was well nourished.

  The people sent to investigate Daniel’s home did so sensitively. Daniel’s mother was defensive but showed them around. She explained all their odd arrangements. They had, for instance, abandoned the bathrooms on the top and ground floors when the toilet cisterns came to the ends of their natural lives. Daniel’s mother would say to Daniel, “We’re now using the second-floor bathroom,” and she’d close the door on the mess. They were nursing their last toilet, which no longer took paper, she explained, but was flushed twice a day with a bucket.

  “My mother was so blind to what others saw that she didn’t even attempt to conceal matters. So … though we weren’t flushing the toilet paper, we did use it. When Welfare came there was weeks’ worth of balled soiled toilet paper beside the pan, in an overflowing wastepaper basket. My mother wasn’t conscious of the impression this made. I was there—Father Groux had tried to tempt me away to the movies, but I stuck with my mother. I followed her and the Welfare people about, adding my excuses to her explanations. I hadn’t thought about the toilet paper, or the potato peelings adhered to the kitchen floor by their own starch—but I watched those people’s faces. I read in their expressions the real meaning of the arrangements of my home. My mother seemed unable to interpret their stares, silences, covered mouths. She just went on explaining all our catastrophes, articulate and knowing, but helpless about it all. I think it was the spectacle of my bedroom that finally decided them on what they would do about me—what they did do, which wasn’t to pluck me up out of the dingy, dirty bedlam of my mother’s house, but to send in help—health inspectors to condemn and seal parts of the house, City Council cleaners to remove the litter from others, and, on a grant from Welfare, a new washer and dryer.”

  “What was in your bedroom?”

  “Jungles, forested chasms, farmland, meadows with earthworks, rivers, rocky coasts. Castles and cathedrals and villages. Over a number of years my mother had created landscapes for my plastic animals and soldiers. She’d hung whole dressed, painted papier-mâché cliffs and buttes from shelf brackets on my walls. She’d covered tabletops, and had made a rag rug with grassland, and forests, and scrub cover. My bedroom was dusty, and littered with crumbs and crockery, but it was also a dream room, and lovingly done.

  “Between them, Child Welfare, the Department of Health, and Catholic Social Services sorted us out. I saw what I had to do, and every Saturd
ay morning I’d set to and clean the rooms we used, whether or not the dirt was visible to me. My mother borrowed do-it-yourself books from the library and built us a couple of cabinets and put up hooks on which to hang things. For a time she followed the diagrams; then she began to plan innovations on paper and the building stopped. My mother chose to see only a few of the new requirements of our lives as unreasonable and representative of the tyranny of convention. She spent some time campaigning to change a bylaw about how many doors must be between toilet and kitchen. Then she went back to her papier-mâché, and Father Groux drove her and her creations around the craft outlets. And, over that first summer, he worked on her, trying to persuade her to have me change schools. She’d gone to my state school and Father Groux’s argument was that, remembering her as ‘the girl with odd habits’—he was very discreet—the school had viewed my difficulties as ‘oddities,’ too. He was quite right—my school had remembered my mother and condemned me. Grandma had sent my mother in clean clothes, but she’d sat pulling her hair and picking her nose. Like me my mother was academically gifted, but my school knew that her gifts had come to nothing. She was a solo parent, a propertied derelict, a paranoid shut-in. Despite my grades, they had no great hopes of me. Groux didn’t need to elaborate, only convinced my mother to feel that I’d been shortchanged as she’d been slighted. The following year she—and Father Groux—sent me to the nearest parochial school.”

  Daniel held the top of the paper rubbish sack closed while Father Neske stapled it. The old man said, “You see … I’ve become a lay brother rather than a scholar father.” It was raining, and Daniel could see two of the seminary’s real lay brothers, shadows beyond the condensation-covered glass of the greenhouse in a garden where black earth was beginning to reappear from under a slushy crust of snow. Father Neske was not a lay brother; he was a highly educated teacher who had had a breakdown, whose name appeared in the Society of Jesus Catalog—a publication that kept track of North American Jesuits—followed by the phrase: “Praying for the Order.” “Praying for the Order” was a resigned and respectful code for “defeated, disgraced, depressed, ill, or mad.”

  Daniel and the old man each carried a bag to the plywood box near the seminary gate. They unbolted the box and put the bags inside. Father Neske asked Daniel if he’d kept in touch with Father Groux. He didn’t remember meeting a Father Groux at Daniel’s ordination.

  “Gaston Groux went to work in a mission in El Salvador. He was murdered in 1982. Murdered or martyred—it’s still being looked into. His family and the Church are at loggerheads. His family want it to be murder because they would like to bring a certain El Salvadoran officer to justice.” Daniel mused. He said he thought that it was what had happened to Gaston Groux that had sparked his interest in the modern martyrs.

  “Interest?” The old man was sharp. “Was that all your response to the death of this man? A man who would patiently ferry about the loud, redolent woman and her papier-mâché lampshades?”

  “Masks,” said Daniel. “She’d moved on to masks.”

  “She was at your ordination.”

  “Yes. That was her. No eyebrows.”

  “She was on crutches, as I recall.”

  “Yes. Nerve damage. Complications of diabetes. She’s in a retirement village. She clung to Grandmother’s house despite mounting pressure as the old town was restored. The council couldn’t get her out. Grandma’s liberal friends rallied enough to help her pay for the mandatory repairs so that it wouldn’t be completely condemned. They could make sense of that scenario—defending the underdog from civic cupidity. The city paid to have the building’s exterior done, its stone cleaned and patched, so that it at least blended in with all the galleries and cafés. When she found she couldn’t manage the stairs anymore she finally let it go. It was auctioned off. It had to be gutted inside, but even so it fetched enough to keep my mother in gracious, orderly old age for longer than she’s likely to last. And if there’s anything left over, and if Gaston Groux’s family is still chasing their cause through the courts, I’ll give it to them.”

  Father Neske smiled. “Daniel, you’re a delight to me.”

  They were walking back toward the gymnasium, but Father Neske stopped. He said he’d run out of chores. So they remained standing on the asphalt in the rain, where they could be alone, Father Neske squeezing Daniel’s arm—the nearest he’d ever come to bestowing a blessing.

  On the June evening in Dardo, when it had stopped raining, Daniel went for a walk. He followed the road along Dardo’s ridge and came onto the path up to the cemetery. The path-side foliage was sodden and drooping, and the legs of Daniel’s trousers grew wet as he swiped by. The morello cherry at the gate to the cemetery was in fruit, cherries ripe and black in the dusk. Daniel picked some wet fruit; their skins squeaked as they came together in his hand. He put one in his mouth, cracked its taut, cold skin. A spurt of juice broke through the seal of his lips and he was forced to stoop to spare his suit from the drips. When he looked up he found that he was not alone, that someone was climbing the hill—a man with ghostly hair and skin. A fifth albino, Daniel thought. Daniel said good evening. He said it to throw a line over the man, to slow him for a moment so that Daniel could get a better look at him—and see if he was, really.

  The man stopped and peered at Daniel. His eyes were streaming—were they irritated? Or was he weeping? He said, “Good evening, Father.” His wet eyes were pale, the pupils evident in them, even in the failing light. The man took Daniel in, top to toe, then apologized for something. He said he was sorry about the body in the tomb. Giesen’s body in Raimondi’s tomb.

  “You’re sorry?” Daniel said. Was this sympathy—long delayed and exaggerated—or a claim of responsibility?

  “Yes. You didn’t like the surprise.”

  Though the man didn’t have an American accent, Daniel ventured to ask him if he was, by any chance, the person who had answered Martine Dardo’s phone. The person who’d said he hoped Daniel liked surprises.

  “Someone answered Martine’s mobile?” the man asked.

  “No. He was in her house. An American,” Daniel said.

  The man was still for a beat; then he said, “Oh.” He walked on past Daniel, ending their conversation.

  Daniel dropped the remaining cherry, followed it with his eyes as it tumbled down the path. Then he raised his head to call out after the man.

  The mule track was deserted.

  Chapter 9

  THE UNDERGROUND PILGRIMAGE

  Bad stood at the thin end of a sunny wedge of piazza that terminated in the facade of St. Barthelemy’s. The church’s doors were wide, its steps crowded. The people were dressed in warm clothes—scarves, polar fleeces, down jackets. Many were kneeling with these top garments puddled around their legs. The sun was high, and of the church and its interior all that was visible was candle flames, points of faint orange, a sparse foliage of light. Most of the worshipers spilling out of the church and into the piazza had already collected hard hats from the nested stacks of Small, Medium, and Large. These hard hats did not have headlamps.

  Bad was at the back of the crowd with those who weren’t celebrating mass and taking communion. His was a small group, comprised of several solemn and self-conscious German tourists, an American couple who were checking the lights on their video camera and explaining to Bad that they were there because they thought Martine Raimondi was wonderful, but he was Jewish and she was a Methodist. Behind Bad were a municipal engineer and two men in the uniforms of park rangers.

  Near the church door, at the edge of the crowd, a collection of camp stools had been set up. These were occupied by old men and their younger minders. Several of the old men had lapel badges—Italian Communist Party insignia and French military honors. By St. Barthelemy’s doors were two more local officials. These two were making a head count.

  At some sign from within the church the crowd rose to its feet and began to move, very slowly, up the steps. The head counters joine
d their coworkers, the engineer and parks people. One said that the count was a hundred and fifteen up on last year and if the weather had been better the day before there would have been more. The pilgrimage was becoming a Feste de Nice, one official remarked. The engineer expressed worries about the quality of the air in the crypt—the caves were well ventilated, their jumping-off point less so. He’d already been into the caves earlier that morning, he said, to do a final check on the sound system and video monitors. One of the parks people asked whether there were cavers already on the route of the pilgrims. The previous year the cavers were waiting for the pilgrims in the cavern called the Salle de Salvati. The cavers were spectators, like some in today’s crowd—he glared at the couple with the camera—but they’d been obstructive, territorial. The bishop wasn’t happy.

  The old people were assisted up off their folding chairs. A priest appeared on the church steps and summoned them, gesturing to the crowd to let them pass.

  “The surviving partisans of the commune of Dardo,” said the American, confidingly, to his video recorder. “The Blessed Martine’s contemporaries.” The Americans insinuated themselves into the space behind the partisans and rode their wake into the church. Bad and the Germans followed.

  In the church the aisle was full but the pews empty. Everyone was on the move. At the rail people were kneeling in rows three deep while the bishop and his helpers gave communion. Each celebrant supped and sipped, then got up, genuflected, and joined a line disappearing through a doorway to the right of the altar—the door to the crypt.