Leo sipped his martini. He said, “You through?” and took another sip. “The one that’s going with you isn’t a relative, it’s a sister, a nun, who knew the deceased when she was in Nicaragua and, I think, brought her up here for treatment. I was still prepping your friend while Sister Teresa Victor’s telling me this on the phone. Then something came up, she had to cut it short.”
“The one I’m picking up is a nun? The dead one?”
“Look,” Leo said. “The deceased is a young Nicaraguan woman, twenty-three years old. I wrote her name down, it’s on the counter in the prep room. Also the name of the person that’s going with you, a Sister Lucy. You got it?”
“What’d she die of?”
“Whatever it was you can’t catch it. Okay? You pick up Sister Lucy at the Holy Family Mission on Camp Street, tomorrow, one o’clock. It’s near Julia.”
“The soup kitchen.”
“That’s the place. She’ll be waiting for you.”
“We run out of conversation we’ll say a rosary.”
“There you are.” Leo finished his martini. “You gonna be all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You won’t forget. One o’clock.”
“No problem.”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea you stayed in tonight.”
“You still worried about me?”
“You see your old pal on the table, the next thing I know you’re eighty proof. Who drank the Sazeracs, Buddy or Helene?”
Jack smiled, feeling relaxed, wise, confident, in his favorite place to drink at the end of the day; rainy outside and growing dark, ideal conditions. He said, “You want me to tell you about Helene, don’t you? What it was like seeing her again. You’re dying to know, aren’t you?”
“I told you,” Leo said, “I was somewhat apprehensive when I heard.”
“Then you’ll be glad to know my heart didn’t leap.”
“How about any other area on your person?”
Jack shook his head. “The thrill is gone. She’s got curly hair now and it makes her look different. Hey, but, Leo?” Jack smiled. “Mmmmm, did she smell good. Had on a kind of perfume I know is expensive ’cause I picked up a bottle off a dresser one night in the Peabody Hotel, in Memphis, and gave it to Maureen.”
“Guilty conscience,” Leo said.
“Maybe. Maureen goes, ‘Jack, this costs a hundred and fifty dollars an ounce. You bought this? Tell me the truth.’ You know how Maureen looks you right in the eye? It was after I’d left Uncle Brother and Emile—”
“After they fired you.”
“And everybody thought I was on the road selling coffee. There was a friend of mine did that, sold La Louisianne. I’d say good-bye to Maureen Sunday night and not see her again till Friday. I’m back in New Orleans or at the Bay while some conventioneer in Nashville is asking hotel security, ‘But how could anybody get in the room when the chain’s still on the door, when we woke up this morning?’ ”
“How did you?” Leo said.
Jack heard the clink of silverware—Henry the waiter setting a table—and in that pause realized he had never talked to Leo about details. Or told anyone before how he’d met Buddy Jeannette. Well, Buddy was dead. It was okay to tell about that night. But was he talking too much? He said to Leo, “The point I was making, I always felt Maureen suspected I was into some other line of work. I didn’t know shit about coffee other than you drink it. But I know she never said a word to anybody.”
Leo said, “Unlike another girl we could mention that we happen to be talking about, as a matter of fact.”
“You get something in your head, Leo, that’s it.”
Leo said, “Jack, you’ve always been a little crazy, but you were never dumb. The Jesuits taught you how to think to some degree, put things in their proper order. What I’ll never understand is how you could let that redheaded broad lead you around by your privates—”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“When you had a wonderful girl like Maureen dying to marry you. A girl that has everything, looks, intelligence, a good Catholic upbringing, she even cooks better than your mother or Raejeanne.”
Jack said, “I saw you working for your dad and her dad, Leo. I saw if I married her I’d become a Mullen and Sons son-in-law, and I wouldn’t need a Jesuit education to tell me I’d be stuck for good, committed. Like doing time.”
Leo said, “Maureen wouldn’t a cared what you did for a living. She was crazy about you.”
“Maureen wants security and everything to be nice. That’s why she married the doctor, that little asshole with his bow tie, his little mustache. But that’s beside the point,” Jack said. “You want to know why I didn’t marry Maureen? It wasn’t ’cause she was so sweet and nice. Hell, I could’ve changed that, got her to lay back and recognize the difference between bullshit and real life. You want to hear the real reason? Since I’m telling you my innermost secrets?”
“You mean since you’re shitfaced,” Leo said, “and won’t remember it anyway.”
Jack glanced around before leaning in close to the table. “I had the feeling Maureen, once she married and settled down, would have a tendency to get fat in her later years. I felt I could change her attitude about life, but not her metabolism.”
Leo stared at him. “You serious?”
“I say that knowing my sister, Raejeanne, is no lightweight. She’d get me pissed off about something and I’d tell her, ‘Raejeanne, you know what you look like? A waterbed wearing tennis shoes.’ ”
“That wasn’t nice.”
“No, and I don’t mean to offend you, like it’s something terrible. It’s just I felt Maureen was gonna put on size.”
Leo said, “I never heard of anything so dumb in my life.”
Jack said, “Our preferences are different, Leo, what I’ve been trying to tell you. Our likes and dislikes, what we enjoy, what lights up our eyes. . . . You want me to tell you what attracted me to Helene? The first time I saw her? The very first thing I noticed about her?”
“I’m dying to know,” Leo said.
“It was her nose.”
Leo stared at him.
“That classic, what you’d call aristocratic, kind of nose. The most perfect fucking nose, Leo, I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Leo said, “Do you hear yourself?” He said, loud enough for Henry and Mario to hear and look over from the bar, “You’re gonna sit there and tell me you went to prison on account of this broad’s nose?”
Jack said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
Even half in the bag, talking too much, he didn’t dare mention the fine spray of freckles or try to describe that pert tilt, that fragile beauty, her brown eyes . . .
Or the bare legs that went up into her skirt. Long slender legs, the high instep another delicate line with the high heel hanging from the toe, the young lady’s legs crossed on the bar stool in the Sazerac Lounge of the Roosevelt Hotel. Or the Monteleone or the Pontchartrain, the Peabody in Memphis, the Biltmore in Atlanta. It was never just the nose. But why try to tell all that to a man who prepared dead bodies, read novels that took place in times gone by, and was not drawn to live girls in cocktail lounges?
Leo would still have said what he did. “You’re never gonna grow up, are you?”
3
* * *
THE BUMS IN FRONT of Holy Family, squinting in the sunlight, shading their eyes, said, Hey, it’s the undertaker man. Who died? That ain’t for me, is it? I ain’t dead yet. Get outta here with that thing, Jesus. Come back after while. Hey, buddy, come back after we’ve et. They said, Here’s one good as dead. Here, take this guy. Jack told them not to touch the hearse. Keep away from it, okay? He walked through them in his navy-blue suit, white shirt and striped tie, sunglasses, nodding with a faint smile, careful to breathe through his mouth. One of them said it must be good soup today, it wasn’t all over the sidewalk. Most of them seemed to be hardcore alcoholics. They stood at the bottom of nowhere on
a spring day, done for, but could make observations, even try to hustle him. Mister, gimme a dollar, I’ll watch nobody pisses on your hearse. He got inside the storefront mission with only a couple of them brushing against him.
There were bums hunched over shoulder to shoulder along two rows of tables that reached to the serving counter, where a pair of round, gray-haired ladies wearing glasses and white aprons were dishing out the meal. Jack said to a little colored guy in bib overalls and an ageless tweed coat too big for him, “Which one’s Sister Lucy?”
The man was coming out. He looked back over his shoulder, then turned all the way around and pointed to the line approaching the serving counter. “She right there. See?”
Jack said, “You sure?”
The man grinned, nearly toothless, at the way Jack was staring. “ ‘Nough to make you believe in Jesus, huh? She cook good, too. Come Monday for the red beans and rice.”
Jack saw a slim young woman with dark hair brushed behind her ear in profile. He took off his sunglasses. Saw she was wearing a beige, double-breasted jacket, high-styled, made of linen or fine cotton, moving down a line of skid-row derelicts, touching them. He had posed with girls in designer jeans—but this was a nun wearing pressed Calvins, a straw bag hanging from her shoulder, long slim legs that seemed longer in plain tan heels. Across the room in a bare, whitewashed soup kitchen—look at that. Touching them, touching their arms beneath layers of clothes they lived in, taking their hands in hers, talking to them . . .
She came over with calm eyes to take his clean hand and he said, “Sister? Jack Delaney. I’m with Mullen’s.” And was surprised again to feel calluses that didn’t go with the stylish look.
Though her face did. Her face startled him. The slender, delicate nose, dark hair brushed back though it lay on her forehead, deep blue eyes looking up at him. She was small up close and now that surprised him; only about five three, he decided, without the heels. She said, “Lucy Nichols, Jack. I’m ready if you are.”
The derelicts outside told her not to go with him. Stay outta that thing, Sister. That’s a one-way ride, Sister. Hey, Sister, you looking good. She smiled at them, put a hand on her hip, and let her shoulders go slack, like a fashion model. “Not bad, uh? You like it?” She stopped to look over the hearse, then at Jack, and said, “You know what? I’ve always wanted to drive one of these.”
She blew the horn pulling away and the bums sunning themselves on Camp Street waved.
“You can handle it all right?”
“This is a pleasure. I used to drive a ton-and-a-half truck with broken springs. Last month, when we had to leave in a hurry, I managed to buy a Volkswagen in León and drove it all the way to Cozumel. That was a trip.”
Jack had to think a minute. But it didn’t do any good. “You drove from where?”
“From León, in Nicaragua, through Honduras to Guatemala. We wore what passed for habits and had papers saying we were going to the Maryknoll language school in Huehuetenango. Then we had to scrounge more papers to get us into Mexico. After that it was fairly easy, from Cozumel to New Orleans and then to Carville. We could have flown out of Managua to Mexico City, but it seemed risky at the time, waiting around the airport. That feeling you shouldn’t be standing still. My one concern was to get Amelita out of there, fast, and continue her therapy. You know she’s the one we’re picking up.”
Jack said, “Oh.” The one they were picking up. Kind of an offhand way to refer to the deceased. But that was the name Leo had written down, Amelita Sosa. He wondered if Sister Lucy thought he knew more about her than he did. What she’d been doing down there. He wondered what she did with the VW, if she sold it. It was like coming in in the middle of a conversation. He didn’t want to sound dumb. He said, “You go around Lee Circle to get on the interstate. Take it all the way to the Saint Gabriel exit. You get tired, just let me know.”
She said, “You don’t know how much I appreciate what you’re doing.”
He kept quiet. What was he doing? His job. Then wondered if Leo had told them there’d be no charge. He couldn’t imagine it. Then looked out the window, trying to think of nun-related things to talk about.
“I had sisters all the way through grade school.”
She said, “You did?”
“At Incarnate Word. Then I went to Jesuit High.” Hearing himself it sounded like he was still going there. “I went to Tulane one year, but I didn’t know what to take, I mean that would help me. So I left.”
She said, “I did the same thing. Spent a year at Newcomb.”
“Is that right?” He felt a little better.
“Before that I went to the Convent, Sacred Heart.”
Jack said, “Yeah, I knew some girls that went there, but they would’ve been before your time. Well, there was one. Did you happen to know a Maureen Mullen?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She got out in, let’s see, ’70.”
Sister Lucy didn’t say when she got out.
He guessed she was somewhere in her late twenties, not more than thirty. Younger than Maureen.
“I almost married her. Maureen Mullen.”
“You did?”
“But, I don’t know. Everybody expected it, our families. I guess I felt pressured. Or didn’t care for what I saw, looking into the future. So I made a run for it.”
She looked at him and smiled. Then looked at the road again as she said, “It almost happened to me, too, the same kind of situation. I was at my own engagement party when I woke up.”
“Is that right?”
“My family and his wanted to set the date.”
“You felt pressured?”
“Did I. I thought, wait a minute. This isn’t what I want, get married and join clubs. I guess I made a run for it, too. All the way . . . gone.”
He laid his left arm along the backrest of the seat and took a good look at her profile. She had a wonderful nose. Jesus, and one of those lower lips you wanted to bite. Her nose wasn’t quite as thin and delicate as Helene’s, but it was a beauty. He liked her dark hair better. He liked red hair a lot, but not frizzy, the way Helene had it now.
“What happened to the guy you didn’t marry?”
“He met someone else. He’s quite a successful neurologist.”
“Is that right? Maureen married a urologist.”
This Sister Lucy didn’t look anything like a nun; she looked rich. She had on a loose beige-and-white striped blouse, like a T-shirt, underneath the linen jacket. She was wearing, he decided, about three hundred dollars worth of clothes. He wanted to ask her why she became a nun.
Amazing, thinking that when she glanced at him and said, “How do you happen to be in the funeral business?”
“I’m not, really. I’m helping out my brother-in-law for a while. My sister’s husband.”
“What would you rather do?”
Jack edged up a little straighter. “That’s a hard one. There isn’t much I’ve done I cared for, or wouldn’t bore you to tears.” He paused, at first wondering if he should tell her, then wanting to for some reason, and said, “Except for a profession I got into when I made my run. There was sure nothing boring about it.”
She kept her eyes on the road. “What was that?”
“I was a jewel thief.”
Now she looked at him. Jack was ready, his expression resigned, weary, but with a nice grin.
“You broke into people’s homes?”
“Hotel rooms. But I never broke in. I used a key.”
There was a silence in the hearse as she passed a semi-trailer at 70 miles an hour.
“A jewel thief. You mean you only stole jewelry?”
Other girls, wide-eyed, had never asked that. They’d get squirmy and want to know if he was scared and if the people ever woke up and saw him. He said, “I’d take cash if I was tempted. If it was sitting there.” Which it always was.
“You only robbed the rich?”
“There’s no percentage robbing the poor. What was
I gonna take, their food stamps?”
She said, without looking at him, “You’ve never been to Central America. There the poor are the ones who are robbed. And murdered.”
That stopped him, until he thought to say, “How long were you there?”
“Almost nine years, not counting a few trips back to the States, to Carville for training seminars. There’s no place like it. If your purpose in life is the care of lepers, and what’s what the Sisters of Saint Francis do, then you have to go to Carville every few years, keep up with what’s going on in the field.”
“The Sisters of Saint Francis?”
“There’re a bunch of orders named for Francis, the guy had so much charisma. He might’ve been a little weird, too, but that’s okay. This one’s the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Stigmata.”
Jack had never heard of it. He thought of saying, I like your habit, but changed his mind. “And you were stationed in Nicaragua.”
“The hospital, Sagrada Familia, was near Jinotega, if you know where that is. On a lake, very picturesque. But it isn’t anymore, it’s gone.”
“You’re a nurse?”
“Not exactly. What I did was practice medicine without a license. Toward the end we didn’t have a staff physician. Our two Nicaraguan doctors were disappeared, one right after the other. It was only a matter of time. We weren’t for either side, but we knew who we were against.”
Were disappeared.
He’d save that one for later. “And now you’re back home for a while?”
She took several moments to say, “I’m not sure.” Then glanced at him. “How about you, Jack, are you still a jewel thief?”
He liked the easy way she said his name. “No, I gave it up for another line of work. I got into agriculture.”
“Really? You were a farmer?”
“More of a field hand. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola.”
She was looking at him again, now with a grin, showing dimples. It inspired him.
“Up the interstate to Baton Rouge, then Sixty-one till you get almost to the Mississippi line, turn off toward the river and you come to the main gate. Inside, you drive along a white rail fence. It’s hard to see, through the wire mesh they have on the windows of the bus, but it looks like a horse farm. Till you notice the gun towers.”