Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell

by Michael Conniff

  June 24, 1953

  Joe was fired from his job at NBC and Becca says no one will touch him, they won’t even take his calls any more. Not that money is a problem, it never is for us, but Joe won’t even get out of bed in the morning. He sits in his study with the shades down and the lights off, like his life is over. Becca tells him to keep writing, that writers can always write as long as they have a pencil and a piece of paper, that things will change. But Joe won’t buy it. Becca says he’s acting like he’s already dead.

  June 25, 1953

  Thinking about Rebecca and Diana and me as young girls at the breakfast table. Why do we look so ashamed?

  August 11, 1953

  Father has not been well since Becca’s wedding. He caught cold that night and he’s still coughing. It’s not like Father to be sick, not compared to Mother, who is always sick, but she is worried about him, and none of the remedies have worked. Mother’s afraid that it might be walking pneumonia. Thank goodness Tom knows enough about the business to take over.

  September 14, 1953

  I always hope this night will be the night I sleep. But I never do.

  September 18, 1953

  Father is finally taking a turn for the better, thank God. The pneumonia is gone and he’s back on his feet. Becca says he scratches away on his copper plates, the raw ideas of his inventions, until they pile up like dishes.

  December 7, 1953

  Terrible nightmares again. I can see the shape is a man. I smell his smell and I hear his breathing above the bomb exploding outside. There is no way to stop him or to say no. I see a cloud of smoke like a mushroom through the little round window high behind me and I scream. Please forgive me, Lord!

  January 17, 1954

  Mother St. Agnes died last night in her sleep. I cried and cried all day—I’m still crying. She was so good to me, so kind, a saint always by my side. She wore her habit lightly, like a smock you put on when it’s time to play with clay. At her funeral, I said she was the older sister I never had, and that I hoped she would hold a place for me in heaven by her side. I miss her so much already.

  January 31, 1954

  Mother Superior ordered me to see a doctor to get sleeping pills. That’s how bad I must look since Mother St. Agnes died, like the walking dead. The pills work too well and now I make it through my day feeling sluggish, drugged. All the Sisters here at the Convent tell me I look so much better, but I don’t feel it. It’s almost like I miss my exhaustion, my explosions, the living hell of my dreams.

  February 5, 1954

  So quiet here, with the numbers, without Mother St. Agnes. I have to take over all the accounting for the Order. It’s so different being in charge. I don’t know quite what to do, where to begin. I will never have her shoulder to cry upon again, though some nights I can hear her talking to me all the way from Heaven. She says it’s so beautiful in ways she never could have imagined.

  April 22, 1954

  Diana came to see me again with that ridiculous tennis player Luigi Campobello. Oh, Luigi is beautiful, black curly hair above pink cheeks, a body so hard you could bounce a ball on it. But he is so egotistical! Maybe it’s the way all men in Italy are. I don’t know. But I do know that every conversation, every sentence has to be about Luigi. Luigi this, Diana says, and then Luigi that. She’s so upset about Henry Ford that she’s going to marry his worst nightmare—and ours.

  August 8, 1954

  I can’t take the pills any more. I don’t want to feel that way all the time, like my brain is under water. Before I was exhausted, but at least I was myself. (A very tired version of myself.) With the pills, my body and my mind are starting to feel more and more like mush, like I have no mind of my own.

  December 30, 1954

  Father is dead. Becca and Diana came to tell me and we cried and cried. He was so smart, he had to start with nothing, and all you have to do is to turn on a light switch to see what he meant to everyone. But I wish I could feel more for him. I wish I could have known him better. I would have asked him what he found so fascinating about those copper plates where he scratched out his inventions. I’ll never forget the one time he was scratching something on one of those plates and I tried to climb up on his lap and he brushed me aside like I was a fly. I never tried to climb up again.

  January 6, 1955

  Father’s funeral was hell. He left instructions that we were to have it in the chapel he built for Rebecca’s wedding at The Big House, but his funeral could have filled St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Mother wanted to do it. There were limousines backed up all the way to Gin Lane trying to get in. The Mayor of New York was there, and the Governor, and the Cardinal, everyone there to pay their respects. There must have been a thousand people outside, listening to the public address system Mother had put up next to the entrance. High Mass dragged on and on, and a cold wind came off the water and froze everyone stiff. Tom gave the eulogy, the list of all the things that Father had done and all of his good deeds. Then I had to read another Psalm, crying the whole time. We buried Father on the bluff looking out over the sea, in the Sacred Ground of our family plot. Will could not stop shivering. It was so cold up there once the sun stopped shining.

  December 8, 1955

  The shape came back again tonight and my hand is shaking. It’s the middle of the night. I can’t write.

  December 9, 1995

  Now I know. I know it was Tom. My own half-brother is the shape I have been seeing in my nightmares, in my dreams. His kiss at Father’s funeral and his awful scrub-brush beard and the smell of something slick he always wore in his hair are enough to make me remember everything. Now I know when it happened. And I know what happened, even if I don’t know why. Tom said he wanted me to come along to Bimini to watch the government test the atomic bomb, for the sake of my education. He said I needed to know how the world works. When the bomb was about to go off he said it would be too awful and too upsetting for me and that he would stay below to comfort me. Everyone was outside above us on deck looking out across the Pacific. I wasn’t afraid of the bomb at all, but he wouldn’t let me watch. When the bomb started to explode outside, Tom pushed my skirt up and pushed me down on the bed and took my legs up into the air like I was a rattle, the back of my knees on his shoulders so that he could grunt out the small round window above and behind me. I bent my back back and I could see the bomb out the round window, I could hear that smash/crash sound before the mushroom cloud came upside down behind me as Tom dribbled the word “fallout” into my ear.

  December 10, 1955

  I sleep all the time now that I know whom to hate.

  December 20, 1955

  How could I let it happen? I should never have gone on that boat to begin with. And I should never have let him take me back down below deck. He must have thought he was doing what I wanted. It has to be my fault.

  December 24, 1955

  Christmas Eve at the Convent. Big flakes of snow. After Mass I come back here by the fire to pray for help, to pray for hope. I feel so dead inside, like the me down there is dead and buried.

  January 3, 1956

  What did everyone used to say? That they didn’t see how we could be related? Maybe we’re not. Maybe that’s what I’m feeling. He is only my half-brother, after all. We are nothing like each other. He ignored me, left me alone. I have no real relationship with Tom. He was older than me, angrier, in a rush to get through the people who got in his way. The most I ever got from him was politeness, a birthday card, and a present Christmas morning. I’m only just starting to hate him. I can’t wait to hate him more.

  February 2, 1956

  I won’t go on boats now because I start retching, because of what he did to me. But I’m sleeping now. I’m crazy and mad but I’m sleeping. Tom comes back sometimes in my dreams but at least I know it’s him, I know what happened and what’s going to happen and so I’m not scared by not knowing the way I was before. Before bed every night I fall right onto my knees, I pray to understand why this h
as happened to me. I try to remember my sins, I tick them off one by one on my fingers and I always come back to my terrible pride. First as the first daughter of Thomas O’Kell, always acting as if that made me better than anyone else. I was so rich and so spoiled and I had anything any girl could want. And then coming to the Convent, the right path, but even here I have been drunk with pride. What a fool I’ve been! Thinking that I was serving the Lord when all the while I was just serving my own purposes. I hate myself for letting it happen. But at least I know who I am, what I am, why I am the way I am.

  February 12, 1956

  I’ve never seen Becca so worried, so jumpy. Joe’s just getting worse. Much worse, she says. He hasn’t had any work at all since the blacklist and Becca says she practically has to dress him every morning. She says the only thing he’ll do all day long is watch NBC with the shades drawn and the windows down, talking to himself or to the game show hosts on television. Becca finally got him to a doctor who said it was “melancholia” and gave him pills. But Becca says the pills make it so that Joe can barely move. She was practically screaming about Tom to me, blaming everything on him, how it was Tom who never liked Joe, Tom who was after Oppenheimer, that Joe was Tom’s way to get at Oppenheimer. I’m not ready yet to tell Becca about Tom and me on the boat, but I think about it all the time. Before I couldn’t sleep at all. Now sleep is my only escape.

  April 17, 1956

  I ask Mother Superior to move me away from here and she says that won’t do for the new chief financial officer of the Sisters of Mercy. The Order needs me strong but inside I am dying. There is no escape from my pride, not even at the Convent.

  July 1, 1956

  I jump every time a car backfires, and our old cars at the Convent backfire all the time. The bomb lives.

  July 21, 1956

  I convince the Order to let me take over my own blind trust. The idea of letting Tom control my money as the trustee is just too much to live with. Better to watch my own money than to watch him watching mine. I should also admit the chief financial officer of the Sisters of Mercy likes to follow the market. Must be the O’Kell in me.

  August 10, 1956

  I know what it’s like to have a man inside of me. I need to tell someone, to ask for help. I’ve never needed help so badly in my life.

  August 28, 1956

  Mother St. Joseph comes when I call, bless her. I arrange it so we can come together at the Order’s private lodge in the White Mountains. Just the two of us. The sky is so blue up here against the green of the trees before the weather blows in. We put blankets beneath the floor jamb and then jam together in front of the fireplace to keep warm, our hands cupped around cups of hot cocoa. We sleep here, in the lodge, leaning one into the other like two branches of the same tree. Mother St. Joseph wakes up first and the smell of bacon and coffee pulls me right up out of my sleep. We talk and talk. I tell her everything. No nightmares here for me. Just the joy of being with another woman, of being as close as two Sisters who aren’t sisters can be.

  September 13, 1956

  A new group arrives today and they ask me to tell everyone about the business of the Order, all the hospitals and the missions and the schools, and how each one of us fits into God’s plan. Funny to be talking about the world to a gaggle of girls who have given up their lives for God, every one of them scrubbed clean with faith. There’s not a wrinkle or a sag on their young bodies, and they all flutter with the joy of souls who have given up everything for God. I love to see their devotion so close at hand.

  September 23, 1956

  I comfort the young Sisters with my words, with my prayers, with my touch. I ask them where they want to go in the Order, I tell them I can get them there if they’ll just let me help, because I know every Sister who has passed through the Convent. Sometimes the slightest touch is all it takes for them to know they are not alone.

  October 2, 1956

  Eisenhower appoints Tom to the Nuclear Energy Commission, so now I get to see his face in every paper I see. It’s all about money, of course, and O’Kell money was enough to get Tom what he wanted, though I have no idea what he sees in nuclear power. Maybe Tom needs power of his own, a new kind of power to replace Father and his electricity. “Did you see? Did you see?” the Sisters in the Convent ask me. Oh yes, I say. I see it all. They congratulate me for having such an important brother. The tabloids call him “Atomic Tom.”

  October 12, 1957

  Diana and Luigi elope to Venice, then they drive to Rome so that Luigi can win the Italian Open, as a wedding present I suppose. Diana O’Kell is now Countessa Diana Campobello (coun-TESS-ahh / DEE-ahh-naah / camp-o-BELL-o) because Luigi is some kind of count or something in Italy. Diana tells us Luigi says marriage has been great for his forehand. That’s as deep as he gets. It’s so obvious what Diana is doing, and so obvious it’s not going to work. Luigi is the anti-Ford. He may have some kind of Italian title, but he has absolutely no breeding, no class, no manners, and no money. Diana thinks she will show Henry Ford that she doesn’t need him. All she has done so far is to show how badly she misses him.

  October 14, 1957

  Don’t call us the Sisters of Mercy, I tell Wall Street. Call us the Sisters of Currency. And that’s what they’re starting to do. If the Order is going to be strong then we are going to have to run it like a business. They are all starting to buy in on the Street, in part because the Catholics on Wall Street get such a kick when they see a nun traipsing down the halls. They treat me like royalty, like I’m Bishop Fulton Sheen’s personal messenger. I tell them the financing is all about trust and love and God-knows-what. They crack up, cackling by their second martinis. I’m like a good-luck charm who isn’t afraid to take a drink, and they all dearly love to let me walk through the door first, to make sure everyone sees the profane having their brush with the sacred.

  October 19, 1957

  Will. He will always be the youngest of us, not just in years, but in innocence, which is what counts. He came to the Convent today to tell me all about his plans for his life, for the world. I think Will would try to save the world and everyone in it if he ever had a chance. Instead he says he just wants to write. About what, I ask. About us, Will says, about the family. Why would anyone care? I ask. Will said no one has to care, as long as he cares. He says the O’Kells are different than everyone else, richer, darker.

  February 9, 1958

  Joe killed himself last night after Becca went to sleep. He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge from the very top and then he washed up this morning down by the ferry at the tip of Wall Street. Becca is incoherent now in the next room, shot full of drugs that make her so numb she could not tell you her name. I don’t think Joe ever quite understood what it meant to be an O’Kell. I know he was on the blacklist. But did that have to be the end of the world?

  February 10, 1958

  Becca is better today, but not much. She is bitter, screaming about Tom and the Communists, saying he might as well have pushed Joe right off the bridge. She says Tom did the same thing with Oppenheimer, pushed him right out of the government. She blames Tom for everything, but I can’t tell her yet what I blame Tom for. It’s still too soon for me. I’m still too raw.

  February 16, 1958

  I take Becca to The Big House after the funeral and we take long walks up and down the empty beach, walking east until we can’t see The Big House any more, then doubling back until who knows where we’ve been. The sun is enough to keep the cold at a distance. Becca likes to talk about everything but what she needs to talk about now, and at night she takes so many pills that she sounds like a record player slowed down to the wrong speed, telling me all about Joe very slowly, in a dead voice, about how alive he was, how alive they were together, the way they used to go to the restaurants no one went to until they became too popular, about how funny Sid and Carl and Imogene could be. Becca is crying instead of laughing, and there’s nothing I can do.

  April 19, 1958

  Becca and I are walki
ng on Job’s Lane in town and the only store open is the drug store. She buys a cheap camera with a roll of film and by the end of the street she has taken so many pictures we backtrack back to the store for a dozen rolls. Becca wants me to pose, and I do the best I can in my habit. She takes pictures of everything, and we go back later in the day for more film and to get the other pictures developed. It’s like the camera is the only way she can look outside of herself. Maybe it means her life can go on.

  May 1, 1958

  Diana and I meet in the city while Luigi is away playing on clay. I was wrong about Diana and Luigi. Diana says she’s never been happier, that Luigi loves her better and more than Henry The Second ever could. She is glowing, telling me all about Luigi’s tournaments, and the walks they take, and even their lovemaking, the way Luigi never wants to stop. Diana is even starting to talk with the tiniest accent, like she really is Countessa Campobello.