“They’ll be frantic enough.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake. That’s not our fault, is it?”
“Keep your hairshirt on. I’m sure it’s your fault one way or the other, you just aren’t concentrating. You want to go get a beer while Sleeping Beauty tosses in her bed of pain up there?”
“I’m going home, I’ll come back in the morning. Call me if there’s a crisis.”
“I don’t know why you’re mad at me all of a sudden,” said Marty, without rancor. “But knowing you, there must be some odd twisted rationale behind it. It’s so comforting to have you as a friend, even when you’ve got PMS.”
On the phone next morning, Marty sounded a lot less jocular. “I’m hauling Sean down the stairs and into the car whether he wants to go or not. Why don’t you just meet us at the clinic in an hour? Can you do that?”
“I guess,” said Jeremy.
“Here’s the hard part. Would you call his folks?”
“Does he know I’m going to do that?”
“He’s not knowing a whole lot this morning. High fever or something.”
Jeremy futzed around with a cup of instant coffee and, trying to stall, he remembered he had an appointment about plans for decorating the church at Christmas. He called to postpone the meeting. “Taking one of my friends to the clinic on Morse Hill Road,” he told Sister Alice.
“Oh. I see. Is it one of the singers?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s serious. Is it Sean Riley?”
“Uh-huh. I don’t know how serious it is. I think very. How should I know?”
“You’ll keep me posted this afternoon?”
“I will.”
He hung up, said an Our Father, a Hail Mary, a Glory Be, and another Our Father. When he started in on “Bless us O Lord, and these Thy gifts,” he knew he was stalling. So he took a deep breath and dialed Sean’s home.
“Hi, Mrs. Riley? This is Jeremy Carr. The choir director from Our Lady’s. Hi. Look, I have some news for you—kind of serious. Sean isn’t feeling so hot and so we’re taking him over to the clinic on Morse Hill Road.” He was talking as fast as he could to keep Sean’s mother from having a chance to explode, but there was only an editorial silence on the other end of the line. “Mrs. Riley? You there?”
“This is Colum Riley,” said a new voice after a moment. “What is it?”
The dad. Jeremy drew in a breath and began again. “He doesn’t know I’m telling you this, but I thought you should know.”
“Well, run that by me again.” Mr. Riley’s voice sounded as if he’d been following something on the TV while Jeremy had been speaking. Jeremy obliged. “I don’t like the look of it, actually,” he finished.
“He’s been poorly this year, we noticed. Well, we’ll get ourselves down there and see what’s what. Thanks a lot, young man.” Mr. Riley didn’t sound exercised over the whole thing. As he was hanging up the phone, though, Jeremy heard him saying to his wife, “Don’t break a hip, Deirdre, he’ll keep—”
The air was fine, choked with a dusty sort of snow that the wind kept beating off the tops of the paper-thin drifts. Cloudy bright. The combed fields on either side of Morse Hill Road stood suddenly yellow, gold, like something from Breughel, and then went back to being brown, like something from Sears. The road was busy, all that northbound traffic still being diverted due to the stalled construction. At East Tupham, a school bus had stopped, perhaps engine trouble, and a flock of children in candy-colored snowsuits and hats and red plastic boots were making of some dark ravaged cornfield a cheery board game.
He had only been to the clinic on Morse Hill Road once, though he had heard Tabitha Scales talk about it with a great deal of scorn. It didn’t seem so terrible to him. The Oswego County Clinic was a couple of prefab buildings joined by an airy elbow corridor, glass on both sides and rangy geraniums perched on spray-painted overturned milk crates. More like an animal hospital than anything else; he expected to hear yipping.
He found Marty in the waiting room. “Told me to stay out here. I’m not family.”
Jeremy stood near the double doors. A sign said NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. Every time the doors opened, he glared at the nurse behind the desk just beyond, but she was gifted at ignoring visitors. Once he entered anyway, and she said, without looking up, “Out. Out.” She pointed back the way he’d come.
“But you don’t even know who I’ve come to find out about.”
“It’s Sean Riley, and someone will be out when there’s something to say. He’s still in examination, and it’ll be a while yet. You might go get some lunch.”
“It’s only eleven o’clock.”
“Have a long lunch and come back at two,” she said. “Cafeteria downstairs, or you can go get the regrettable coffee at the International House of Pancakes.” Her name was Nurse Gompers, Marilee Gompers. Jeremy thought she looked as if she chewed on thermometers to relieve her sexual tension. Marty and Jeremy took her advice, though, and went and ordered pancakes and lingered over the endless cup of coffee until the lunch rush was done. It was ten after two when they returned.
Nurse Gompers pointed them upstairs. The Riley parents stood in the hallway, several yards apart from each other. “Look who’s here,” said Marty. “Us.”
Deirdre Riley was a small woman with a bird-like pelvis; her thighs seemed bowed to the front somehow. She wore a blue Windbreaker that said OUR LADY’S SODALITY in white shadow-box letters, and she carried a canvas satchel of needles and yarn. She looked prepared for a stay. Colum Riley was bald and silent.
“Hi,” said Jeremy. Mrs. Riley looked suspicious, but since she also had this expression as she approached the altar for communion Jeremy wasn’t alarmed. “You know me from church.”
“I realize that,” said Mrs. Riley.
“Does he know you’re here?” asked Jeremy.
They didn’t answer.
“When can we go in?” asked Marty.
“In good time. They’re taking care of some business just now,” said Mr. Riley. A muffled sound behind the door, and Sean’s voice, distinctly: “Fuck.” Mrs. Riley pursed her lips and Mr. Riley’s face registered no particular expression. He might have been waiting for an elevator. Jeremy recognized the strategy from his own dad.
When a couple of blue-clad male orderlies left the room, one pointed to the parents and said, “You. Only the two of you. Fifteen minutes. Nurse Gompers will come up and check. Watch it.” The parents pushed in without evidence of having heard, but the door shut in Jeremy’s face as he tried to follow them.
“I like the Puerto Rican,” Marty said. “A bedside manner to stiffen my—resolve. He can take my rectal temperature any time.”
“How about you shut up.”
“God, his folks are just like he said. I always thought he must be exaggerating.”
“They didn’t seem so bad. They aren’t in a good mood.”
“Well, they were a matched pair of grouches. They’re like, like Ernest Borgnine and that little Exorcist kid. Linda Hunt.”
“It was Linda Blair.”
“Right. Linda Hunt is what happened to Linda Blair after she was possessed. That explains a lot.”
“Let’s not talk about being possessed in the company of a virus.”
Marty ignored Jeremy. “What’re we doing, leaving him alone with them? They don’t get to make the rules. We must be crazy.” Marty pushed past Jeremy, threw open the door, and sang out, “Honey, we’re home.”
“This is not a farce. This is a nightmare,” said Jeremy, following.
Sean was sitting up in bed halfway, with a paper mask hanging from one ear. “Thrush,” he said in a croaky voice. “On top of everything else. You can’t believe the sore throat.”
“We want some privacy here,” said Mrs. Riley, turning on the boys.
“Don’t mind me mam,” Sean said to them, an Irish softness in his voice they’d rarely heard. “Mam, don’t get your knickers in a twist. It’s too late
for privacy. Come on.” It was a patois to calm them down, Jeremy thought.
“Don’t talk,” said Mr. Riley.
“You better talk,” said Mrs. Riley. “You’ve got some explaining to do.” She wrestled a crucifix out of the knitting and looked around the room. There was a faded print of some daisies, 1970s style, in a frame without glass; she took it down and slapped the crucifix in its place against the wall.
“Saints and begorrah, is this the wee magic portable confessional? I never dreamed I’d catch sight of one,” said Marty.
Sean’s head fell back on the pillow as if unable to imagine he was present, at last, at a meeting of his parents and his gay compañeros. His face looked bluish-gray. Worse than last night.
“This is a hell of a way to learn about this,” said Mrs. Riley, though it wasn’t clear if she meant her son’s homosexuality or his illness, or if she had quite yet put the two together. “I would like to know what you actually thought you were up to?” Was she talking to her son or to all of them?
“Sweet Jaysus of Nazareth, Deirdre,” said her husband, “‘tis neither the time nor the place.” They were all turning into parodies of Frank McCourt, thought Jeremy. Anxiety does weird things to a family. Pretty soon they’re going to start singing “Danny Boy.”
“Coughing up blood for several days and nobody thinks to call his mither? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you all?” She answered her own question. “I know what’s wrong with you. You’re bloody selfish.”
“Mam,” said Sean. “Don’t do the Mam thing with quite such accuracy—”
“Don’t talk. Save your breath. You’ll be needing it. I know what we’re talking about here. I’m not stupid. You’re not lying here because of—of—an ingrown toenail, for the love of Pete!”
“That’s just about the size of it,” said Marty. He turned to Sean. “You dog, you never told me about Pete. Pete who? Is he cute? Taken? Well, let’s not be fussy. Is he free for an hour?”
“Oh Christ,” said Sean. “Oh Jesus McGillicuddy Christ. Oh Christ. Christ on a crutch in the foothills.”
Mrs. Riley’s tears were hasty and plenty. “And the mercy of God be on you, you selfish boys, keeping yourselves for yourselves, and the unnamable sins you suffer for now.”
“Little Bird,” said Mr. Riley, reaching out his hand and moving it in the air as if patting an invisible deer somewhere between his wife and the bed. “Little Bird, don’t.”
Jeremy, catching Sean’s eye, handed over the shiny aluminum spit pan and they all averted their eyes. Mrs. Riley closed her eyes and her shoulders shook. “Bad enough you should turn your back on your faith, and the tabernacle light was burning for you all those years and you never looked in on your Friend; but that you should be so aloof and engage in the sin of selfishness—”
“I’ve never heard it called that before,” said Marty.
“I’ll rinse that out,” said Sean’s father.
The door opened. “Get her some Kleenex,” said Jeremy. “Come on, Marty, I think we better go—”
“—just when you need the faith of your fathers the most!” she said. “And you don’t turn to your parents, you can’t turn to your church, you have none to take you in but your so-called buddies—”
They all turned, expecting Nurse Marilee Gompers. “Here we are, right as rain,” said Mother Clare du Plessix. “Goodness, a little family party already?”
Mrs. Riley’s jaw couldn’t quite drop, as it was already opened ajar as it could go, but it wobbled on its hinge a bit. Mr. Riley stood up a little straighter.
Mother Clare was followed by Sister Jeanne d’Arc, Sister Felicity, Sister Perpetua, and Sister Clothilde, who was having a hard time squeezing through the doorway with everyone else already there. “How are you, dear boy?” said Mother Clare.
She approached the bedside in the quiet caesura of implacable intention, broken by Sister Clothilde’s stage whisper to the room at large. “Sister Alice called us to tell us, and it sounded serious enough to hire a cab. Sister Maria Goretti is still down with pneumonia, poor thing, and we thought her germs in this instance would be a real no-no.”
The old nuns stood on one side of the bed, taking little notice of Mr. and Mrs. Riley, and nodding only perfunctorily to the boys. “Sister Alice will be along a bit later,” said Mother Clare du Plessix. “Don’t worry, dear child, we’re not going to stay long.”
“I have no idea who you are,” said Mrs. Riley at last.
“We are the friends of Sean,” said Mother Clare du Plessix. “Shall we take a moment of silence?” They all closed their eyes. Sean did as well.
“This is a private family matter. I don’t believe I know you—” said Mrs. Riley.
“Silence,” Mother Clare du Plessix reminded her, gently. “Silence.”
29
THE NUNS IN their hired car and Jeremy in his were both caught in a slowdown beyond the I-81 traffic diversion. The pulsing ruby light of emergency vehicles had a weird Christmassy aspect, but by the time Jeremy breasted the wreck the rescue squads had left the scene. When he got home, the crummy old phone machine showed twelve calls. Sean, he thought. A turn for the worse this soon? Or hate phone mail from Mrs. Riley? Anonymous heavy breathing from his stalker, Kirk Scales? Before he could press the button to retrieve the messages, the phone rang again.
Peggy Mueller in high weepy mode. He couldn’t make it out at first. “Sister Alice what?” he said.
THE FUNERAL HAD the feel of a dress rehearsal, a quick run-through before the actual eminences would arrive to make witness to Sister Alice’s life. But, thought Jeremy, what eminences would that be? The shivering Theban souls in their winter garb were it. If something like the Holy Spirit—the Holy Ghost, he was enough of a romantic to prefer that outdated terminology—were to arrive, who would notice? Would the balsawood angels in the ceiling begin to sing in reedy voices? In their skeletal leading, would the figures in the stained glass windows add their hosannas through throats of sanguine pink glass?
Jeremy had been asked to lead the congregation in a couple of anthems and some hymns. His choir sat on folding chairs in front of the right side altar. Peggy Mueller, her face contorted with desolation. Polly Osterhaus, who must be thinking of her own wedding in three weeks’ time. Marty, who had asked to join the singers, was the most skeptical among them, but he wore the most devout expression, and he kept his head bowed during the entire ceremony.
Jeremy’s small chair perched on the grating above the crypt. He couldn’t overcome a feeling that the grille was loose in its marble framework, and it shifted incrementally as he rose from his seat or sat down again. Or was it just the world that was unsteady? Coming loose from its moorings at the millennium, ready to split its husk, convert, evolve, metastasize? He looked out over the faces of familiar people, faces rosy with grief or blank with grief, or faces that betrayed the exhaustion of the Christmas season, and the inconvenience of a funeral five days before the holiday. For most of the parishioners of Our Lady’s this must be their first visit to the chapel of the Motherhouse of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mysteries. Even finding it would have been a pain.
Facing out from the dais, Jeremy turned to look at the other side of the chapel. The Sisters seemed arrested in demonstrations of palsy. A hobbled band of ancient tuberculars. So many of them were too old to be alive. They couldn’t even sit up straight in the pews, but leaned and tilted like untended gravestones. It was the most of them he had seen at one time—he counted fifteen, and could name six of them. Sister Clothilde and Sister Jeanne d’Arc flanked Mother Clare du Plessix in the front row, and other familiar faces were slotted in among the new ones. Sister Maria Goretti apparently was still too sick with pneumonia to be released from the infirmary. Still, the representation was impressive. Impressive, and upsetting: Everyone knew this should be a funeral for an antique nun, one who had been letting go, or trying to let go, for decades now.
Father Mike Sheehy was the principal celebrant, and a couple o
f priests from Syracuse and one from Montreal had come to crowd the altar with their communal effort to attract the attention of God and to thank Him for the life of Sister Alice Coyne. Why it was thanks and not recrimination was one of the central mysteries of the faith, as far as Jeremy was concerned. Thank you, Forces of the Almighty, for giving Sister Alice Coyne to us all; You give and You take away; it is not ours to question why You allowed the truck of Christmas trees heading into the intersection to skid sideways into the driver’s side of Sister Alice’s Nissan. If Sean Casey hadn’t been in the clinic, Sister Alice wouldn’t have been heading west on Morse Hill Road at exactly that moment. If the repairs on I-81 had been finished as scheduled the Christmas tree truck would have been on the interstate, not on Morse Hill Road. If the German immigrants hadn’t deeply rooted the notion of Christmas trees onto the American celebration of Your Nativity, mirabile dictu, there might have been no truck there that particular moment. Amen. Your kingdom come. Your rotten kingdom come.
The nuns looked rheumy and disgruntled at the choir’s efforts. Only when he heard the noses being blown did Jeremy realize that they were affected. Next to Mother Clare du Plessix was a woman with blond hair, most likely a sibling of Sister Alice; she resembled her enough maybe even to be a twin. She looked grim, and as if her life had been hard; Mother Clare reached over and pressed her old claw over the woman’s clenched hands. Maybe at a time like this the call wasn’t for music, but silence.
They sat with the prospects of their own funerals in their laps. They would be back in church again before long for Sean’s funeral, and for Mother Clare du Plessix’s, and maybe some of them would be at the Cliffs of Zion Radical Radiant Pentecostal Church for the funeral of Mrs. Scales. Jeremy could see Tabitha Scales in the back of the chapel, squeezed in between her brother Kirk and Old Lady Scarcese. Tabitha looked pale, and Kirk was ruddy and bleary beneath his to-die perfect coif.
They had hardly known Sister Alice at all.
The procession to the graveyard was brief; a sanctified spot waited behind the chapel where other sisters were already at rest. The entire congregation squeezed out the side door of the chapel and stood amid the stones, and Father Mike led them in the final round of prayers. Some of the more infirm nuns did not come out, for the wind was high and the temperature dropping. More snow expected before the week was out. The sound of the wind in the arborvitae blocked out the few words that Mother Clare du Plessix was trying to say about Sister Alice; Jeremy had to move forward to hear. He didn’t catch much, though there was a moment when the wind rested, and he heard Mother Clare’s voice reach out, “It used to be said that when a nun died, God put another in her place, much as you replace a pane of glass—” Jeremy shifted to see how Mother Clare would update this thought, since Sister Alice had already been the last replacement pane. But suddenly Mother Clare had no more words, and bowed her head. Her veil wavered in the strengthening wind and hid her face.