You were the first Catholic family ever admitted.
So you know the Protestants were desperate. It was after the Crash, and the club needed cash. But still they forced us to bow down before them.
The filter for the pool?
Exactly. Legend has it that Father went over there one weekend and fixed it because he happened to be such a genius. The truth is Mother went with him and told him what to do. I snuck in. I saw the whole thing. I was there, professor. Father could have no more fixed the algae problem than the man from Roto-Rooter.
You actually make him sound stupid, almost dense.
He never had a single idea unless Mother gave it to him. Don’t you know their history? Father was Edison’s bastard son—but he was no Edison. When Mother met Father he was working for Edison—on Direct Current, for God’s sake. DC was a mistake, a disaster. That’s why no one uses it any more.
That’s how your father got his start as an inventor.
He used to go around from town to town killing off dogs in an electric chair to prove that Alternating Current wasn’t safe—killing puppies, for God’s sake! That was the great Edison’s brainstorm.
Isn’t that how John Patrick Cushing died? In the electric chair?
Yes. That was really Day One for The Tommies.
They found your mother in the bakery after John Patrick had raped her.
It was early in the morning. She was bleeding to death. When the women in the town saw what had happened, they lost it—they went crazy.
Is your brother Will’s account true?
It’s as close as he ever got. They all went after John Patrick Cushing and beat him to a bloody pulp. Then they threw him into a potato sack and dragged him up the hill.
To the electric chair.
My father had it all set up. He was going to execute a dog! A puppy! It was supposed to show how dangerous Alternating Current was going to be. This was after Mother had explained to him all the reasons why AC was the way to go, and that Edison’s DC would never work. Father had no clue until he met her. None. Don’t you get it? Mother told Father what to think. That was the way it worked.
So he electrocuted John Patrick Cushing.
My mother was there. She tried to stop it, actually. She never wanted John Patrick to die.
Why not?
I don’t know. She just never blamed him the way she could have. That makes her a saint, in my book.
And that child—your mother’s child by John Patrick Cushing—was Atomic Tom O’Kell?
That’s the way it all began. Sick, isn’t it?
But then The Tommies got their revenge on the rest of the Cushing sons.
Yes they did. But first they needed the town whore. She was dying from the clap. They raped the Cushing sons and made sure the whore mounted them last so they would all get the clap and die. And that’s what happened. They all died a long, slow death—all except Mordechai, the one who got away.
Murder?
Justifiable homicide.
What happened to The Tommies?
It took them 50 years to recover from their first victory.
What do you mean?
In one day they had wiped out John Patrick and the rest of the Cushing sons. The bogeymen were all gone. Aside from Mordechai, and then his son Eli, there were no Cushings left to hate any more—and no one hated Mordechai. They thought he was harmless.
When did you decide to go there, to the last town along the canal?
After I left the Sisters of Mercy.
Why did you leave?
The real question is why did I join. It had nothing to do with God. It was all about escape. I had to get out of that house.
What was it like there growing up?
It was pure hell. Atomic Tom would rape any one of us any time he wanted.
How did you know Atomic Tom was raping the others?
I didn’t at the time, but I could tell something was wrong by looking at Rebecca or Diana at the breakfast table. And by looking in the mirror. The three of us always looked so ashamed. Of course, Diana still won’t admit a thing.
Did you do anything about it?
Nothing. We never even talked about it back then. I suppose we didn’t know there was anything we could do. Father was always working. Mother was always drugged by that time, when she wasn’t telling Father what to think. It’s not like we could call the local police chief and tell him what happened.
Why not?
It was a different time then, and we were all in a different place. We were O’Kells, after all. O’Kells didn’t do that sort of thing.
When did it start?
I don’t remember exactly. But it didn’t stop until I joined the Convent.
Is that why you joined?
Yes. It took me a long time to admit that to myself. But there’s no doubt about it—it was the only way out. And of course I believed all the mumbo-jumbo.
Such as?
One true God, God the father, God the Son, The Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity—the whole nine yards.
Do you still believe?
Not a word. Like I said, it’s all mumbo-jumbo. It’s all about men when it should be about God.
Yet you did so well with the Sisters of Mercy. In many ways, you prospered.
I was so happy not to be in my house any more that I felt like I was in heaven, as if all of my prayers had been answered. And I took everything in the convent very seriously. I had a mentor who did all the books for the Order—a mentor, a man’s word—and that’s how it happened for me. Before I knew it I was the chief financial officer, then the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters of Currency, they called us.
You built the order up like it was a corporation.
Wall Street loved us—they knew hospital bonds from the Sisters were always good. But I was in a trance.
Because you fell in love with another nun?
How do you know that?
One of my graduate assistants dug it out.
I don’t want her name used here. She’s still in the Order.
Call her “Sister X.”
Yes—Sister X. I like the ring of that. And yes it was love.
For her too?
Yes. For her too. Very much for her, too. A beautiful platonic love that became beautifully, blatantly physical.
But it had to be a secret.
Love works best as a secret, Professor.
How long did this go on in the convent?
For years. Almost as if we were married.
Why did it end?
Sister X said we had to stop or leave. And she didn’t want to leave. She was very much a nun despite it all. She said she was married to God and that she loved God and that what we were doing was wrong—but that she loved doing it.
How could that be wrong?
She felt she was putting her love for me above her love for God. And she was.
How did you feel when you left?
Devastated—morally, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually—you can’t argue with a woman’s love for God. You can’t make sense of it, because it makes no sense.
That must have hurt.
It did. Of course it did. But maybe I needed that shock to my system.
Why did you go back to the last town along the canal?
When I joined the Sisters of Mercy I told everyone that I had a calling to marry God. When I went to the last town along the canal I had a calling to marry my sisters. If I still believed in God I would say She sent me back.
A “calling”?
Very much so.
Were you called by God to help your sisters?
Very clever, Professor.
Who was doing the calling, if not God?
Perhaps my sisters were calling out to me. Or perhaps I called myself.
You said you joined the Sisters of Mercy because you had to escape your own home as a girl. Was joining The Tommies after you left the Convent another way to escape?
You have to remember I was
a rich woman when I left the convent. I was an O’Kell, don’t forget. All my money was waiting for me in a trust. And I had turned the Sisters of Mercy into a major hospital corporation. Charles Evans was begging me to work with him on Wall Street. I could have done anything I wanted to do. Or nothing.
Yet you put your time and money into The Tommies. Why?
They were dying, that’s why. There were already dead inside—a shell of what they should have been. That’s exactly how I felt about myself when I left the order.
A shell?
When I fell in love with Sister X I realized everything about my life was a lie. I was praying to Someone or Something I never believed in. The Father. The Son. The Holy Ghost. They were all men—even The Holy Ghost was a man dressed up like a ghost.
You fell in love with a woman—a nun.
I had been locked up in a dark closet called God. Then a lightbulb went off in my head. I started to see the All-Knowing All-Macho God kept women on their knees—including me.
You sound angry.
Everything about it makes me angry. Especially the Sisters of Mercy. It was a business just like any other—it just happened to be the business of God. The Sisters were another bureaucracy set up to make sure the people on top stayed on top. And that’s what happened.
You were one of those people on top.
That did me no good whatsoever once I fell in love.
After you fell in love, did you still love God?
I did at first. I guess that proves there is a God.
And Sister X?
It was easier for her. She believed in God but she also believed the flesh was weak. She loved me even though she knew it was a sin.
That had to be hard for you both.
Not at first. There’s nothing more erotic than sin.
Yet Sister X never left the order.
It’s still very hard for her now. And for me.
Did you want her to come out? To follow you?
Every minute of every day.
Do you talk to her about it? Or see her?
It’s too painful. But it would have been worse to stay in the Convent and not be able to have her.
How come you didn’t join The Tommies right away?
The Tommies were the last thing on my mind when I left the order. I wouldn’t even have called myself a feminist at that point. I had no idea what to expect. We Sisters were pure and good and not of this world—the world was a place where other people lived. Don’t forget this was The Sixties—the early Sixties—about the time you heard the word “hippie” and people started to wear their hair long and to sleep around.
But you never joined the movement.
I didn’t join anything, not right away. The hair, the beads, the sit-ins, even the fucking—it all looked trivial to me. I thought people in the movement were on to something, but after all those years in the convent I needed to find a higher calling. Something beyond free love.
Why?
A love that costs you nothing is worth nothing.
What was it like to go to the last town along the canal for the first time?
Like a time warp. Or like I was warped by time.
In what way?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if women really ruled the world?
Many times.
That was the opportunity in the last town along the canal. And they were letting it slip away.
You said it took The Tommies “fifty years to recover from their first victory.”
Try to understand what they had done. Number one, a group of women had spontaneously beaten and killed a man—John Patrick Cushing—for raping a woman who happened to be my mother. That didn’t happen every day around the turn of the century.
And that baby—of a Cushing son and a Cushing daughter—became Atomic Tom O’Kell.
Right. My half-brother.
Number two?
These women, The Tommies, had raped John Patrick Cushing’s brothers and killed all but one of them off, very slowly and very painfully. Mordechai Cushing was the only one who escaped.
Thomas Cushing’s sons died from venereal disease.
From the clap, professor. Just like The Tommies planned it. And number three, the daughters of The Tommies started to grow up.
I’m confused. Weren’t The Tommies the daughters of Thomas Cushing?
The daughters of The Tommies were raped by Thomas Cushing sons. All eight of the sons raped their way through the town just like their father did.
So The Great Fornicator’s sons were fornicating with The Great Fornicator’s daughters.
And the daughters had more daughters. History was repeating itself. Just like it always does.
There were no men?
The male babies born to The Tommies never lived more than a day or two—if they even made it that far.
That seems impossible.
It’s enough to make you religious.
The will of God?
God, I hope so.
Were there any men at all in the last town along the canal?
Just The Nones, the men in the town who weren’t Cushings—but there were only a handful of them, and they were very, very weak characters, hardly men at all. The Great Fire had killed off just about all the men who counted in the town long ago. Except for Thomas Cushing’s sons.
You are really describing a town after two generations of the worst sort of inbreeding. A town of women without men who all shared the Cushing blood.
A town born of the prick that lived by the prick.
It’s like your brother Will wrote in SINS OF THE FLESH: “In another generation, if nature had its way, a new race would be created in the image of Thomas Cushing, in absentia, a new limb grafted onto the family of man.”
Will could write that because he knew it had already happened. His book is full of amazing predictions after the fact.
So The Tommies are a feminist movement born “out of wedlock,” if you will. That’s the great irony, isn’t it?
The Tommies are all about irony, professor. It’s a movement born of fucking that produced nothing but women tired of being fucked over.
So what went wrong?
They started to fuck each other.
You make it sound inevitable.
Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t she? Someone has to fill it.
That would be Molly O’Malley, the first woman to be “had” by Thomas Cushing.
Molly O’Malley and my grandmother, Constance Briody, were the powers that be in The Tommies in the last town along the canal. They convinced everyone to do without men. After the Cushing Sons died from the clap, they showed all The Tommies how to take care of themselves—and each other.
You’re talking about masturbation. About lesbianism.
I’m talking about love, professor.
It was like a honeymoon for women only, wasn’t it? How long did it last?
Not long enough. Molly O’Malley and my grandmother had a terrible falling out. Over Mordechai—over a Cushing man, of course. He was the only one left, as fat and harmless as a stuffed pig ready to have his throat slit. But both Molly O’Malley and Constance Briody had to have him.
Did anybody know about this?
Not right away. Molly O’Malley and my grandmother preached abstinence as the only way for The Tommies to purge themselves. Constance Briody—my grandmother—used to rail against men, against “the immortal cock.”
I think I know what’s coming.
They were both fucking Mordechai, of course. He came from a long line of pricks. He may have been fat and stupid, but he was still a Cushing, and they still wanted him.
Did anyone know?
The last town along the canal is a small town. Everybody knew.
Why did Molly O’Malley prevail?
She was just the stronger of the two, stronger than my grandmother. My grandmother was in so much pain over Mordechai she had to leave town. Some people said she joined the circus. But nobody knows where she wen
t. And nobody ever saw Constance Briody again.
Not even Kate Briody O’Kell, your mother?
No one. She was gone. She was history.
So you never knew your grandmother. Are The Tommies a way to find your family?
Are you a psychologist, professor?
I’m a professor of history who looks for connections because they are always there.
Next question.
What happened next?
Molly O’Malley was left to her own devices—and to Mordechai—may God rest her soul. The leader of The Tommies was the only woman in the town allowed to have a man. But no one was allowed to talk about it.
The last of the heterosexuals?
No—the first of the bisexuals. Molly O’Malley had also begun to develop an appetite for the daughters of the Cushing daughters. The younger the better. And she always got her way. It was like the Politburo and the peasants—they suffered for the sake of her rhetoric.
What did their mothers—The Tommies—say?
They spoke not a word but went straight to their work. It was only much, much later—after I came to the town—that they began to know the truth about Molly O’Malley.
Book of O'Kells: Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Page 22
