Felicity began to sense a cruddy substance emanating from the foul history of the Creole cottages on either side of the street. The former homes of slave-owning colonials stood rigidly inside their courtyards. They too had risen from pillage, extortion, slavery, gambling, and whoring. The longer she walked, the more convinced she became that Mullin had stolen her money.
When Felicity reached the corner of Chartres Street she realized where she was heading. Without thinking about it, she was walking toward Saint Louis Cathedral, where she’d often gone as a girl.
She kept her eyes fixed on the misty spires of the cathedral, which kept receding in the rain like a ship. It didn’t help that when she looked toward the river, a real ship loomed over the levee, floating so high in the river it threatened to sail right into the Quarter. She had known all her life that the city was below sea level, but she never stopped being startled by the sight of ships over her head. New Orleans was a bowl, hugged tightly by the Mississippi River. The levees that kept the river out were no match for a hurricane or a great flood. Felicity imagined herself floating like a gardenia in a porcelain bowl. It was only a matter of time before the people and buildings were washed away. “We are doomed,” she said out loud; “it’s the only thing that keeps us going.”
Two wet pigeons looked down on her from the facade as Felicity passed through the ironwork fence and walked through the open door of the old church. A gold-ringed, speckled gray marble holy water font greeted her. It looked smaller than it had when she had had to stand on tiptoes to look at the “blessing water.” The water, Grandmère told her, contained one of the Holy Mother’s tears, and the tears of all the brokenhearted women of New Orleans, of which, she added ominously, “there will never be no shortage.” Little Felicity didn’t know what she’d done, but she’d stood accused and guilty anyway, apologizing silently for her mother and praying for her safety in that unimaginable Yankee city.
The bank of votive lights in the foyer was ablaze. The sign below it read: Large 2 Dollars, Small 50 cents. Oh, large, definitely large. Felicity chose the brightest and largest.
The smells of her girlhood surrounded her: old books, melted wax, incense, damp old people, roses. A chandelier, like a crown with long crystal teardrops, hung from a long chain above the altar. As she walked up the center aisle she saw a few worshipers abstracted in prayer, kneeling or asleep. They had always been here, part of the furniture since the days of her childhood, lost in an endless conversation with God or one of his host. Poor Grandmère. Maybe Mother Mary hadn’t abandoned the old woman, though she’d forsaken the faith of her birth. Maybe the Holy Mother had kept up her end of the conversation, even after Grandmère had fallen silent, sure that one day the dialogue would resume. And that day was today; it had finally come. Perhaps at this very moment the two were deep in conversation. For her part, Felicity had never stopped speaking to that part of her soul which had shined so brightly in her early years. When she had decided to stop believing, she stopped addressing her interlocutor by the names she had learned long ago, but the talk went on.
Felicity carried her fat light to the left of the altar, where she planted it at the feet of the Holy Mother holding the infant Jesus like a precious pastry. She knelt in a pew before the Virgin and raised her eyes to the beatific face. The words ECCE PANIS ANGELORUM were written on the ceiling. Behold the bread of angels! God sat blessing the Lamb above the altar, while just below a motley crew of early Louisiana colonists partook of the divine light.
“Dear Blessed Mother,” said Felicity, “please take into account all the extenuating circumstances and help me!” Even as she spoke, she knew that she’d have to do better than that. “Dear Mary, is there no way for this string to be broken? The old woman’s dead and all she’s left me is another hole. More than half of me is gone, dear Mother, and there won’t be much left if you don’t help me.”
That wasn’t quite right either. If she’d had long hair she would have let it hang loose over her eyes and prostrated herself in the manner of penitents. Her hair was short, her language was petty, her belief shaky at best. Perhaps she’d be better off gone; there was no reason for her.
“All gone, all gone,” lamented Felicity, “and me so young. And that preacher devil stole my lottery ticket!”
“Get off it,” said the Virgin. “After what my son went through, the lottery just sounds comic.”
“Can I help it?” Felicity said, chastened, “that I only have two modes? The despondent and the comic?”
Felicity wanted to be selfless and admirable like the Holy Mother herself, or the Magdalene with her hair loosened on the Via Dolorosa, or Saint Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel. Saint Agnes with her lamb. Saint Ursula, martyred at Cologne with eleven thousand virgins. The nuns had given her an obdurate store of images.
Felicity was aware of the strong smell of urine. A bum was kneeling in the pew behind her, bent in exaggerated humility. She felt a compulsion to pat the top of his dirty head. We are one, mon clochard, she murmured between clenched teeth. There is no difference between us. I will sleep with you, look for lice in your clothes, wash your intimate parts. Felicity saw herself cradling the destitute creature. As she nearly touched his head, she saw that the bum’s suffering pose was disguising the fact that he was fishing white envelopes from the back of her pew.
“Hey,” she said.
The bum straightened up and slunk away in a hurry, dropping an envelope. Felicity picked it up. Donations to the Christmas Campaign for the Restoration and Renovation of St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, La. There were a few crumpled dollars inside. Felicity dug in the hip pouch zipped to her shorts and took out a five. She put it in the envelope and was about to return it to the box when she had another thought. She dug deeper in the pouch and came up with a Post-it note and a pen. She wrote on it, 363-54-2122, and tucked the note in the envelope.
“Restore the cathedral, Mother of God, and restore my lottery ticket, and restore me to wholeness, and give me back all my loved ones, and take Grandmère to you!” concluded Felicity.
She stood up to go. “Oh,” she added, “and grant me that orgasm.”
That was her whole wish list.
As she rose from her knees she knew what she had to do. Her uncle, Major Notz, who lived in the Pontalba Apartments to the right of the cathedral, was the man for the job. Major Notz had always been there for her and, though he was not actually a blood relative, had been a kind of father to her. An army buddy of her dead father, he had appeared one day at their house with presents and affection, and had persisted in caring for Felicity against the formidable opposition of her grandmother, who had hated the major from the very beginning. Felicity needed his comforting bulk now.
In her absence—how long had she been gone?—Jackson Square and, indeed, the whole sky had undergone a miraculous transformation. The sun was shining through the drizzle, and the once nearly empty square was teeming. Several tattooed and pierced young people, called “Shadow people” by the Times-Picayune but known familiarly as “Shades,” lay playing cards under the mounted statue of General Jackson doffing his hat. The painters and fortune-tellers were back at their easels and cardboard tables. Behold humanity, Felicity thought, and smirked. Half of them want their portraits done; the other half want to know the future. And the other half provide it. That’s three halves, and there you have it. Expressionist math. Felicity was an expert at it ever since she’d decided, at age thirteen, that nothing adds up.
A mime with rain-streaked makeup, huge breasts, and hairy arms stood on a crate. A hand-lettered sash identified her as Miss Bra ’99. Two tourists made faces to try to make her move. When they walked away, Miss Bra ’99 came off her pedestal and took a few dollars out of a bucket at her feet. She ducked behind the Lucky Dog vendor, lifted her short skirt, and took a roll out of her panty hose. An unmistakable bulge remained. She added the dollars to the roll, stuck it back in, and climbed up on her box. The Lucky Dog vendor sold a hot dog to a midget who star
ed intently at Miss Bra. Why, thought Felicity, would anyone want to be such a sad parody of woman? Why, indeed, would anyone want to be a woman? Period. She had never sung, “You make me feel like a natural woman,” and she had experienced a genuine vertigo of nausea when she watched a television commercial for some female hygiene spray featuring a white woman belting out that song.
Holy Mother, holy, holy, bla, bla. She was moved by something both hilarious and infinitely sad. What times I live in. It was enough to make her wish she had been born in the fourteenth century, a nun sweet on Jesus. Anytime but now. Anyone but me.
Still, there was a tiny dot of mellowness in her wretchedness. Perhaps there wasn’t anyone to blame, really. Grandmère died thinking Jesus was holding her. For a moment, Felicity was even uncertain of Mullin’s evil. Perhaps what had befallen her was in the nature of a hurricane, a natural disaster. Mullin had perhaps been only an unwitting agent.
Neah. She had a vivid fantasy of dismembering Mullin and feeding him piece by piece to her neighbor’s rottweilers. Yum-yum. Preacher meat. Raw and bloody. That made her feel better.
Chapter Two
Wherein a tender-aged orphan named Andrea is delivered to Saint Hildegard Hospice in the city of Jerusalem, to the bafflement of the sisters there
Night comes early to Jerusalem in December. The sisters at Saint Hildegard Hospice, in the German quarter, were decorating their Christmas trees and discussing the impending snowstorm. “The sun,” Sister Maria said, “hasn’t been out in a month.”
“When I was a young girl in the Carpathian Mountains, we never saw the sun in the winter,” Sister Rodica mused. “My father used to say that the sun went away because we were bad, and that if we didn’t say our prayers it would never come back again.”
The Ursuline sisters of Saint Hildegard’s came from a dozen nations, many from the German-speaking countries of Europe, but some from as far as the Sudan. Mother Superior required them to speak German, but they often lapsed and whispered to one another in their maternal tongues. The sisters had been raised for the most part in Catholic orphanages and had chosen quite early to stay within the church, but they felt particularly nostalgic now, around Christmas, when memories of their birthplaces became insistent. The scents and sounds of their childhoods were as varied as the hues of their native skies. Just now, decorating the trees and speaking to each other in Romanian, the two Transylvanian-born nuns tasted something heavy and sweet on their tongues, like coliva at a wake. The cake, made from nuts and honey and festooned with hard candy, was baked only for funerals, and it was redolent of Carpathian pinesap.
The buzzer at the outer gate sounded like an old-fashioned bronze knocker, eletronically generated. The sisters hastened to the TV monitor to see who was calling at this hour. It was after ten, the time when the convent shut itself off from the outside world. Two bulky shapes wrapped in raincoats stood there under a black umbrella. The rain glittered on the dome of the bumbershoot.
“All the guests are in. Maybe it’s a delivery,” Sister Maria speculated.
They studied the two shapes sparkling under the security light fastened to the Gothic G in the name of the blessed Saint Hildegard. One of the shapes was bigger than the other. In fact, one of them looked like a child. The sisters had strict orders from Mother Superior not to allow any strangers in. This was, after all, Jerusalem at the end of the millennium. “Every nutcase in the world is here, dragging a lit fuse behind him,” she had said, and it was true. Just in the past week, three terrorists had been captured in their neighborhood.
“Let’s ask what they want!” Sister Rodica’s curiosity got the better of her. “What do you want?” she shouted into the intercom, though there was no need to shout.
“I brought the child,” the man said.
The sisters looked at each other. The child? That was strange. They knew nothing about a child arriving here.
The nuns buzzed them in. The strangers dragged mud into the foyer. Their faces were covered by scarves, and water poured off the hoods of their raincoats. The man gazed at the two trees and exclaimed in wonder. “Fifteen years I don’t see any Christmas trees! Now I see two!”
He pushed the wet bundle next to him forward. When the creature pulled back the hood and lifted the wet scarf, they saw that it was a girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, skinny and starved looking. She had enormous green eyes, and in her hand she clutched a cardboard tube.
“This is where I get off,” said the man. “The tube has all the papers and things. She’s clear with immigration.”
Before they could ask him any questions, he had pulled his hood back up and was out the door. There was only a widening puddle where he’d been.
Sister Maria took the cardboard tube from the girl and laid it on the desk. Sister Rodica took away the dripping scarf and hastened to get a towel from the linen closet. Sister Maria inspected the girl thoughtfully.
“What is your name, child?” she asked in German, while Rodica dried the girl off with the towel. “Come here, next to the fire, where it’s warmer. Sit down.”
The girl sat obediently where she was told and allowed the nuns to remove her wet shoes and dry her feet with the towel. But she didn’t talk. She just looked at them with those bright green eyes. Something about her suggested to the sisters that she had come from very far away. If she was okay with immigration, as the man had said, perhaps she was Jewish. The Law of Return guaranteed all Jews the right to live in Israel. The sisters’ own situation was more precarious—Jerusalem was administered by a plethora of confusing immigration policies.
Sister Rodica tried speaking to her in Hebrew, to no avail. Then Sister Maria tried English.
“Andrea,” the girl answered listlessly.
“That’s a pretty name,” Sister Rodica assured her.
“It’s an angel’s name,” confirmed Sister Maria.
The girl understood English. But the accent made it unlikely that she was American. It was Slavic or Caucasian, darkly flavored. The sisters wanted to peek inside the cardboard tube, but they feared their mother superior. The abbess had retired for the night and could be extremely unpleasant when wakened. The sisters decided to consult her in the morning, at which time they would also investigate the cardboard tube and the mystery of Andrea’s identity.
Meanwhile, they fussed over their guest. They brought her a snack. Andrea sipped the tea and ate the sandwich, and when she was done, she said, “Thank you,” in English. But when Sister Rodica invited her to help decorate the trees, Andrea shook her head and shuddered, as if the idea was truly distasteful to her. She also refused to go to bed when the sisters offered to see her to a room. She indicated with a shrug that she was content to stand in front of the fire and watch them work.
The rain intensified outside, and small bursts of hail pelted the convent roof and window.
Just as Sister Maria stood on tiptoes on the top rung of the ladder to hang the star, the lights went off. Somewhere down the dark corridor, one of the guest room doors opened, then closed. Sister Maria froze, holding the star. It was very dark, but she could see Andrea’s eyes looking up at her, two luminous points. The sister would have crossed herself had it been possible. When the twinkling lights resumed, she hung the gold star and quickly descended the ladder.
“Did you hear that door? Sounded like the Dark One himself,” whispered Sister Rodica. “Did you hear how first it opened then shut … pat—tap … pat … tap.”
Sister Maria could still see Andrea’s luminous eyes. A door opening and closing was the least of all the strange things! The convent was three hundred years old—there were twenty guest rooms, which were always occupied by visiting clergy or researchers. It was not at all odd for the electricity to fail, especially if more than five guests plugged their laptops or hair dryers in simultaneously. It was even less unusual for doors to open and close without discernible reason. Dozens, possibly hundreds of ghosts lived here. Once the headquarters of the mysterious Order of the German Templars,
the convent was famous for its spirits. Both sisters had heard and seen ghostly presences, shimmering ectoplasmic forms that vanished quickly or slowly. One night Sister Maria had seen a red tongue of flame issue from the center of one of these hapless ghouls. But it had not been as disturbing as Andrea’s green eyes glittering in the dark.
It wasn’t so much her eyes as the feeling that overcame the sister, a mixture of awe and animal fear. She didn’t have long to think about it, however, because a door opened in the corridor and the cross-legged form of a naked man with long flowing white hair, floating about a foot over the octagonal stones of the floor, rounded the corner. His eyes were closed under bushy silver eyebrows, and his penis lay delicately on his left thigh. In the twinkling Christmas lights he looked more fantastic than frightening.
“Mr. Rabindranath!” Sister Rodica exclaimed reproachfully. “Not now! Not just before Christmas!”
Gently, as if she were shooing away a butterfly, she stood before the form and agitated the air with her palms. Mr. Rabindranath floated in the opposite direction.
“When he’s like this, he can neither hear nor see,” Sister Rodica explained. She shooed him back around the corner to his room. There was a thud, a door shut, and Sister Rodica reappeared, blushing to the soles of her feet. She felt personally responsible for Andrea’s marred introduction to Saint Hildegard’s.
“I’m sorry,” she said in German, adding in Romanian, “You poor child! To see such a thing your first night in Jerusalem!”
“I know about Hindu meditation techniques,” Andrea said flatly in Hebrew. “Does Mr. Rabindranath often lose control of his meditation?”
“Only twice since he came to stay with us last year,” replied Sister Maria in German, crossing herself. “They say it’s a religion. From what I’ve seen, it’s of the devil!”
Messi@ Page 2
