Mother Felicitas walked Katherine through the cool convent corridors to one of the side doors. There they stood in the stone shadows of the foyer, and the nun’s smile seemed no more than a reflection of Katherine’s own happiness at realizing to what extent she had become an object of the convent’s interest and solicitude.
“Two of our postulants will be enrolled in the summer schedule as well, and you’re welcome to accompany them to and from the school each day. They’ll be driving from the convent every morning, and it’ll save you the expense and the bother of the subway trip—and give you a little company as well. Believe me, Katherine, this time of waiting will be good for you. It will take you out into the world a little and your decision will be a more realistic one. And I don’t want you to worry about grades, either. I want you to learn. A good heart is always accounted of more worth than the quickest mind.” Mother Felicitas pulled open the front door, and the hot sunlight of the noon hour spilled over Katherine’s already radiant face.
8
By the end of July, three weeks into classes at Boston College, with one short paper already behind her, Katherine could scarcely believe how easily it all came to her. At ImCon, though she had longed to please the nuns with acceptable work, she had never seemed to get anything just right. But at the college, although ostensibly the courses were much more specialized and difficult, the professors far more rigorous than the indulgent sisters of the Convent of Saint Agnes, Katherine was working for the glory of God—and she never passed an uneasy moment in the classroom. Every scrap of knowledge she garnered was a tiny jewel added to her trousseau for her marriage to Christ. Every moment, every movement was dedicated to her future in the church.
Five mornings a week Katherine waited anxiously on the steps of the Medford Street house for the Volkswagen Beetle belonging to the convent. She insisted on sitting in the back in deference to the exalted position of the two postulants who were also enrolled at Boston College that summer. The ride was nearly forty-five minutes long through rush hour traffic, but Katherine only wished it had been more protracted so that she might have heard more of the gossip of the convent. Jealous of the two postulants, she further modified her own apparel to blend with their flowing black robes, as if she were a kind of apprentice to the postulancy. Despite the wretchedly hot weather prevailing that summer, Katherine wore heavy navy blue skirts, dark hose, and low-heeled black loafers. To her starched white cotton blouses she affixed narrow black collars and pinned a tiny gold crucifix to one flap. When it rained she wore a black scarf over her hair. Like the postulants, she covered her textbooks in brown paper cut from grocery bags.
When Katherine had told her mother that she would be attending Boston College, she did not think it served her purpose to admit that this was a prerequisite to becoming a Slave of the Immaculate Conception. Anne Dolan took her daughter’s enrollment to mean that Katherine had given over the idea of becoming a nun. She fell into relieved whimpering: “Oh, Kathy, I knew you wouldn’t leave me! We’ll be happy again, and after you graduate you’ll be able to get a nice job teaching here in Somerville. You’ll meet some nice young man, and even if you get married there’s plenty of room here for both of you. And when you start to have children, we can find a bigger place. Oh it’ll be so good for both of us! Oh, Kathy, we’re going to start a new life!”
Anne Dolan’s vision of her daughter’s future expanded as her own life contracted. Now the widow slept on the sofa, and the television set was never turned off. Anne Dolan said she couldn’t sleep without the late-night static: it made her feel warm, and without it she was so cold! Katherine returned from classes late in the afternoon, shopped at the corner grocery, did housework, and then prepared dinner for her mother and herself. In the evening she studied, coming out of her room only when it was time to say good night. Katherine saw her home life as a continual penance.
One night, as she lay on the couch with her dinner on a TV tray across her lap, Anne Dolan burst into tears without apparent reason. Katherine look up perplexed, and her mother, in a paroxysm, overturned her plate of beans and franks onto the floor.
“Ma! What is it?” cried Katherine angrily, and went to the kitchen for a towel. When she returned, her mother whimpered: “I was thinking about Jim. He’s still not buried! Oh lord, Kathy, he was a good man! How he loved you! How he loved both of us! He worked himself to the bone for us, there never was a man to work like he did, and people kept him down! He was a family man and people kept him down! I loved him so much, didn’t you, Kathy? You must have loved him like he was your own father!”
“Ma,” said Katherine, “you spilled your entire dinner on the rug and now there’s not any left. There’s nothing else in the house and you’re going to have to go without.”
Between her schoolwork and her mother’s demands, Katherine hadn’t an idle moment. At eleven o’clock she’d fall asleep exhausted, but long before morning her sleep would be disturbed by the old dreams. They had come upon her once more, and with more than their former intensity. She’d wake startled, with a fine film of perspiration coating her body, and against the bare wall of her close, darkened room she’d see the lingering image of the girl she might have been. And after that she could not find sleep again.
On the last Saturday in July Katherine took a bus to Cambridge and entered the sprawling Lechmere department store. She slipped into the last in a line of enclosed telephone booths at the end of the appliance department and dialled the number of the Somerville police station. Turning her back to the glass door, she placed three tissues over the mouthpiece. She asked to be connected with a detective, and when it proved that none was available, she told the man on desk duty that she was a neighbor of the Dolans on Medford Street and was certain that James Dolan had been murdered by his wife.
Katherine spoke quickly, fearful that the line would be traced. “You could hear their fights all over the neighborhood, they used to wake up my baby at night. Mrs. Dolan told me she would kill her husband if she thought she could get away with it. Everybody in the neighborhood knew they didn’t get along, they were only staying together because of their daughter. People won’t talk about it unless you make ’em, though. Go back and ask people, they’re mad because she’s getting away with it. Go ask the neighbors what they think, ask ’em what they heard. They’ll all tell you she killed him.”
When the police officer on desk duty asked her name, Katherine wadded the tissue and, in her normal voice, whispered, “I can’t tell you . . .”
The next day, as she was returning from mass, Katherine noted a suited man emerging from the house next door to her own. He climbed into a car that was parked beside a fire hydrant and there conferred with a man dressed similarly. Later in the afternoon she saw him ring the bell of the house on the other side.
When Katherine returned from Boston College on Monday afternoon, a policeman was waiting for her at the apartment. He informed her that her mother had been arrested for the murder of James Dolan. The neighbors, prodded with the right questions, had told of loud arguments between Anne and James Dolan. “We learned that a number of these arguments centered on your decision to become a nun,” said the detective.
“I don’t know . . .” faltered Katherine.
“Didn’t you hear them? The neighbors certainly did.”
“When Ma and Daddy argued, I left the house. When I couldn’t leave the house, I tried not to listen. Why . . . why did it take you so long?”
“To arrest your mother? We weren’t sure. Your neighbors didn’t talk right away. Then it seems somebody got mad at her and called us up, somebody who was mad at her for ‘getting away with it.’ That just clinched what we already believed. Listen, I’m sorry that—”
“Who was it?” demanded Katherine. “Who called you up?”
“One of your neighbors.”
“Which one?”
“I can’t tell you
that,” said the detective. “It wouldn’t do you any good to know.”
Katherine, reassured that the detective did not suspect her of making that telephone call, accompanied him to the police station, where she was questioned in much greater detail. She told what little she knew of her parents’ history, she tried to excuse her father’s drinking and her mother’s slovenliness, she attempted to play down the controversy that had surrounded her decision to join the convent. The detectives questioning her came away with a stronger feeling against Anne Dolan than had been generated by all the emphatically negative testimony of the neighbors.
She saw her mother in a temporary cell in the Somerville jail, and only nodded in response to Anne Dolan’s plea that she never desert her. “Everything will be fine, Ma,” said Katherine. “Nobody thinks you did it.”
Katherine returned to Medford Street in the unmarked police car she had seen the day before. Word of the arrest had spread quickly in the neighborhood, and several women were gathered before the house. They parted with little whispered words of consolation as Katherine passed numbly between them and up the steps of the triple-decker.
Reverend Mother Felicitas telephoned that night to tell Katherine that a room had been prepared for her in the convent. “It cannot be good for you to remain in that apartment alone. Shall I send someone for you now?”
“No,” Katherine had said in a weary voice, “I’ll be all right, at least for tonight.”
It was the first night she had ever spent alone in her home, and the first night in a long while she spent without dreaming. Next morning she was wakened by the telephone. She picked up the receiver listlessly, but without either fear or anxiety. It was the realtor to whom the Dolans had paid their rent each month. Katherine realized she did not even know how much the apartment had cost her parents.
“We here at the company just want you to know, Miss Dolan, that we sympathize fully with the . . . um, unhappiness you’re experiencing at the present moment. But we also need to know what arrangements have been made for the payment of your rent. We still have not received the check for July’s rent, and this month’s was due on the tenth. I know it’s difficult at a time—”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Katherine softly. “But it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to be living here anymore.”
She wandered from room to room through the house, glanced at the worn and scarred furniture and the faded wallpaper, studied the pictures on the wall, and thought, All this is mine now. This is what I’m giving up to join the convent. This is the material world.
Her tour ended in her own bedroom, at the door of her own closet. She counted the pairs of shoes she had and touched the sleeves of all the blouses that hung upon the rack. At last, from the shelf above that rack, she brought down a suitcase and opened it upon the bed. In one side she laid out her rosaries and scapulars, a small stack of holy cards wrapped in tissue and secured with a ribbon, and the pendant with the relic of Saint Adelaide. Then she packed her best clothes, and did not sigh to abandon the rest. At the very last, she removed the crucifix from the wall above her bed and laid it atop her diary.
When she had closed and locked the case, she carried it out to the hallway. She walked through the apartment once more to make certain that the lights were out, the windows latched, and the shades drawn. She unplugged the television set and pushed it back against the wall. She locked the door behind her unhesitatingly and dropped the keys in Mrs. Shea’s mailbox, without bothering to leave a note. She did not respond to the neighbors who called softly to her from their front porches, but kept her eyes straight ahead as she moved down Medford Street in the direction of the Convent of Saint Agnes.
9
The first part of her life, Katherine had come to see, had been a kind of death—eighteen useless, hideous years filled with meaningless pain, hardly to be endured. It had required a sharp, sudden, real death to engineer her rebirth. If James Dolan had not died, pierced to the heart with a carving knife, she would not be in the convent today. Although the hour she would assume the voluminous black habit was still uncertain, Katherine was happier than she had ever been before, and her occasional uneasiness that her necessary and justified crime would be discovered was but a small price to pay for the ecstasy she experienced in the Convent of Saint Agnes even though she walked those quiet, cool halls only as a guest of the order. Her room was segregated from the chambers where the nuns slept, and Katherine chafed nightly at this distance. She was regularly enrolled at Boston College and was taking one course more than the normal load. Her tuition was paid by a scholarship obtained through the agency of Reverend Mother Felicitas’s sister in the admissions office, and her incidental expenses were taken care of by a secret fund controlled by the head of the convent. Katherine took a postulant’s share of the convent work, and communal confessional was the only activity in which she did not participate. Her happiest moments were those in which one or other of the nuns would slip and address her as “Sister.”
The splendor of the evening services at the Church of Saint Agnes drove the remembrance of former distress from her mind, and Katherine knew that she might be happy for the rest of her life, moving from one glorious ceremonial of the church to the next. Her guilt that she had murdered her father she had long ago consecrated to herself as a penance, and she had even begun to take pride in the enormity of that crime and the suffering it engendered in her.
Anne Dolan had been charged with murder in the first degree. She had been so vague and alien during the arraignment, however, that the judge sent her to Bridgewater State Hospital to undergo extensive psychiatric treatment, and there her lawyer, Mr. Giovinco, had thought it advisable to keep her for as long as possible.
As soon as her mother had been locked into Bridgewater, Katherine had broken up the Medford Street apartment. She told Reverend Mother Felicitas that this was the especial wish of Anne Dolan, who had vowed never to return to the place. Most of the furniture was sold to a secondhand dealer from Cambridge, and the rest was got rid of at a yard sale presided over by Katherine and Mrs. Shea. Everyone in the neighborhood wanted a souvenir from the home of the murdered husband and his murderous wife. At the end, Katherine was $1,843 richer and wanted to contribute the money to the convent’s coffers, but Reverend Mother Felicitas insisted that it be deposited in the bank to help defray her mother’s legal expenses.
It was four months since Katherine had telephoned the police and accused her mother of the crime that she had committed, and still she was not free of the woman. It was a terrifying thought to the girl that her mother might be released on psychiatric grounds; then, Reverend Mother Felicitas would surely insist that Katherine return to Anne Dolan.
So far as Katherine knew, her plight was never discussed openly in the convent. If scandal followed her, Katherine did not feel its breath upon her back. Whenever the subject was mentioned, it was Katherine herself who broached it. As autumn hardened into winter, Katherine began to believe that her mother would never return from Bridgewater at all: she had been found insane or become lost in bureaucratic maneuverings. There were days on which she gave not a single thought to her mother, and those days were blessed.
But when she received a summons to the formal office of Mother Felicitas on the Monday following Thanksgiving, Katherine was certain that it had to do with her mother.
Anne Dolan had been deemed mentally competent to stand trial for the murder of her husband. Court date had been set for the fourth day of January of the new year. “Mr. Giovinco called not half an hour ago, Katherine, dear,” said Mother Superior Felicitas, her expression one of pain and concern. “He had tried for another stay, but failed.”
Katherine said nothing. Her fingers were wound together before her.
“Your mother will be returned to Middlesex County Jail,” said the nun, glancing at a page of notes she had taken during the conversation with the l
awyer. “I’m glad that you will be so close. This must be a terrible and a very lonely time for her.”
There was a pause, and Katherine imagined that she ought to say something. “I’ll be visiting Ma every chance I get,” she said in a choked voice. She looked up into the mother superior’s eyes, hoping for approval for this promise.
Mother Superior Felicitas had glanced away, troubled. “Katherine,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had not even heard Katherine’s resolve, “I hesitate to say this to you—”
“What, Reverend Mother?” asked Katherine anxiously, fearful that her mother’s transference back to jail would somehow revoke her uneasy position as lay guest within the convent. Waves of hate were tided in her brain against her mother for this anticipated misery.
Katherine’s unguarded voice pulled the Reverend Mother up sharply. “Katherine,” she said, “my discussion with Mr. Giovinco was more probing than I have indicated. It will be a hard trial for your mother. It is possible that things may turn out . . .”
“Bad?” suggested Katherine.
Reverend Mother Felicitas nodded. “We will all pray, of course, that they don’t, but . . .”
“Every moment,” said Katherine firmly, “I pray God that things turn out for the best!”
“But things may not, dear. Things may not,” she repeated sadly. “Though of course I’m not trying to discourage you. This news, too, comes at an awkward time. I’d hoped that this would be a day of unalloyed pleasure for you, dear.”
Blood Rubies Page 7
