Dear Old Dead (23 page)

Hector Sheed looked at his watch. “Quarter to twelve. I’d better eat something before I have to leave. I hate eating take-out at my desk. I get grease on my papers and the stuff tastes like shit anyway.”

“I think I’ll skip lunch until I get back to the center.”

“Really?” Hector Sheed shook his head. “You’re making a mistake, Mr. Demarkian. In spite of the low-rent atmosphere, this is one of the best restaurants in New York. Maybe because of the low-rent atmosphere. The food’s much better here than it is in the cafeteria uptown.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Gregor said. “It’s not the food that’s the point. It’s that I want an excuse to buy lunch for somebody at the center.”

“Who?”

“Martha van Straadt.”

“Why?”

Gregor smiled. “Because of a very interesting conversation I had on the afternoon before Rosalie van Straadt died with a young man named Robbie Yagger. Go ahead and order yourself some lunch and I’ll tell you all about it. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the death of Charles van Straadt when I first heard it, but now I’m not so sure.”

S
ISTER MARY AUGUSTINE HAD
been too well trained to have anything like a hair-trigger temper, or even what most people would call a spontaneous emotional life. She might let herself be called “Augie” and wear bright colorful sweatsuits under her tiny modern veil, but at heart she was the same sixteen-year-old girl who had left her Irish Catholic neighborhood in Boston at the end of her senior year in high school to enter her order’s Rhode Island motherhouse. That had been in the days well before Vatican II, when the church and the nuns who ran so much of her believed that a religious Sister ought to be a model of discipline, a beacon of self-control. Augie had started out with a hair-trigger temper. She had spent most of her novitiate doing penance for one outburst or another, the penances always being preceded by long lectures from the novice mistress, Sister Charles Madeleine. At the time, Augie had considered Sister Charles Madeleine the eighth wonder of the world, the only body in history that was able to walk and talk and breathe after having been entirely drained of blood. After all these years, Augie hadn’t changed her mind. In spite of the outfits, she wasn’t really a modern nun. She had no use whatsoever for those orders that had gone whole hog into self-actualization and the fulfillment of the person. She believed wholeheartedly in the emptying of the self, in living not for her own sake but for the glory of God and the good she could do to other people. On the other hand, there was a limit. Sister Charles Madeleine was well past Augie’s limit.

It was twelve o’clock noon on Friday, and Augie knew why she was thinking of Sister Charles Madeleine. Sister Charles Madeleine was like a lightning rod, the place Augie’s anger went to when she was angry, the one object Augie felt perfectly comfortable being furious at. Noon on Friday was always a slow time for the emergency room. Actually, except for the death of Rosalie van Straadt, they had been having a slow week. Augie came out of the head nurse’s office and looked around at the empty corridors and the admitting desk with nobody at it. She was wearing a jade green sweatsuit with “Luck of the Irish” printed across the chest. These days, everybody she knew gave her sweatsuits for Christmas and her name day. Her name day was what they celebrated in the convent instead of her birthday. She looked up and down again and then began to walk slowly toward the back of the floor. As she walked, she stooped to pick up scattered copies of the New York
Sentinel
from the floor. The New York
Sentinel
was still delivered to the center every morning in batches, intended to be given out free. Augie would have thought, with Charles van Straadt dead and gone, that the newspapers would stop coming. Maybe she had misjudged the van Straadt family—all of whom, with the exception of Ida, she considered absolutely worthless. Maybe nobody in the circulation department at the New York
Sentinel
knew that Charles van Straadt was dead.

I’m going senile, Augie thought. I’m descending into schizophrenia. I’m losing my mind.

She got to the door of Michael Pride’s examining room and stopped. The door was open. Augie looked inside and saw Michael with his back to her, standing next to his desk, going through a stack of papers. There was always a lot of paperwork to be got through these days. The Manhattan City Council didn’t like the Catholic Church much, or anything connected to her. They had closed down two of Mother Teresa’s AIDS hospices for “zoning violations,” and Augie knew they would close the Sojourner Truth Health Center if they could. They didn’t push it because Michael was no self-effacing, saintly nun. He wouldn’t accept defeat in meek resignation. He’d go to the newspapers and he’d get their attention, too. Still, the council felt free to harass. The center had to file document after document after document. Fire inspectors and health inspectors and other city inspectors showed up so often, Michael kept a volunteer lawyer on duty at the center at all times, to follow the inspectors around, to make sure the inspectors didn’t bribe anybody or intimidate anybody into believing the inspectors had to be bribed. It was crazy. And this was what happened when the mayor and the police department and the vast majority of ordinary citizens supported the center. What would happen to them if that support was ever withdrawn?

Michael looked away from his papers and stretched. He didn’t look at her. Augie came into the examining room and shut the door softly behind her. Michael turned and raised his eyebrows. It was worse than
déjà vu.
This had happened a million times before. This had been her life for over a decade now. Michael. The center. Herself.

Michael looked down at the papers he had been working on and then back at her again. He was smiling slightly. “Hello, Augie. I’ve been expecting you to show up. You’ve been banging around like a drummer all day.”

“Have I been that obvious?”

“To me, you have.”

“I talked to Eamon Donleavy,” Augie said. “He’s—let’s not use the word
upset.
It’s a stupid word. Upset.”

There really were a lot of papers in the stack Michael had. He picked them up and carried them across the room to his file cabinet, moving deliberately, as if he were playing a part in a dramatic dance. He looked fine, Augie thought, feeling how insane this meeting was. Michael looked
fine.
He couldn’t possibly have AIDS.

Michael opened the top drawer of the file cabinet, took out a nearly empty manila folder, and put the papers inside. Then he refiled the folder and closed the file cabinet drawer.

“Prescription records,” he said absently. “I’ve been meaning to get to them for a couple of weeks.”

Augie came farther into the room and sat down on the edge of the examining table. “I’m not Eamon Donleavy. I’m a nurse. I want you to tell me a few things.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Augie.”

“Do you actually have AIDS or are you just HIV positive?”

“I’ve got AIDS. The Kaposi’s sarcoma showed up about two weeks ago—at least, that was when I noticed.”

“If you noticed it, other people might notice it. People you were… intimate with.”

“I’m not intimate with anybody, Augie, you ought to know that. Not intimate in that way.”

“You could spread it.”

“I could if I wasn’t careful. But I am careful, Augie, I’m very careful. I’m careful at the center and I’m careful when I’m out.”

“You can’t always have been careful. If you had been, you wouldn’t have caught it.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Michael said. “We don’t really know much about how people catch AIDS—oh, we know about the contact of bodily fluids and all that, but for somebody who lives the way I do—”

“You don’t have to live that way,” Augie said harshly. “You really don’t.”

Michael made an impatient gesture. “I live the way I live because I want to, Augie, you ought to know that by now. I work at the center because I want to. I’ve never had a single reason for doing anything in my life except that it was what I wanted to do. I’m not a religious person, Sister Augustine. You ought to know that by now, too.”

Augie looked down at her hands. They were an old person’s hands, wrinkled and veined. She wouldn’t see the fair side of fifty again. Michael would never see fifty at all. Augie’s head ached.

“I’ve been thinking of the City Council,” she said. “Of what they could make of this. I’ve been thinking of the papers. I’ve been thinking of the center. What’s going to happen to the center?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to the center, Augie. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to me. Maybe, when I get too sick to work, I’ll just check in downstairs and have your nuns take care of me.”

“I don’t understand what you think you’re doing with your life,” Augie said, “I never have understood it. You’re an attractive man. So you’re gay. You’re gay. You could have found somebody to settle down with.”

“I didn’t want to find somebody to settle down with. Augie, don’t do this.”

“Why shouldn’t I do it? Why shouldn’t I? You’re one of the few people I’m close to in this world, one of the few people I’ve ever been close to, you’re closer to me than family, and you’re going to die, die, in two or three or five years, and what for? What for? Glory holes?”

“Augie—”

“Don’t patronize me, Michael. I’m not some seventeen-year-old blushing virgin and I’m not some hysterical woman, either. What you’ve been doing doesn’t make sense. It never made sense.”

“I’ll bet you’re a virgin,” Michael said.

“I told you not to patronize me.” Augie hopped off the examining table onto the floor. Had this room always been so shabby? Augie couldn’t remember ever having paid attention to it before. Augie couldn’t remember ever having had the time. Michael was staring at her. His hands were tucked into the patch pockets of his white smock. His face was set in a serious mask. Augie had the terrible feeling that she was letting him down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I suppose I ought to get back to work. We won’t be this quiet for long. We never are. I have things to get done.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes, Michael. I’m going to be fine. You’re the one who’s not going to be all right.”

“I’m going to be physically miserable, Augie, but I still think I’m going to be all right.”

“I don’t understand how you could have gone on doing the things you did, knowing what the risks were.”

“I never pay attention to risks, Augie, I can’t. I’m a coward. If I pay attention to risks, I get scared, and then I don’t do anything at all.”

“I have to get out of here,” Augie said.

And it was true. She did have to get out of there. She had to get through the door and back into the hall and then down the hall and then—where? She didn’t know. She was just glad that Michael wasn’t trying to stop her. She couldn’t see anything. Sister Kenna was in the corridor. She was saying hello. Augie felt her own head nod, stiffly, the way it used to with parents she didn’t like when she was working as the head nurse in the pediatrics ward at the last hospital her order had been able to run before Vatican II happened and the world fell apart. Augie was a little shocked at herself. She had never longed for the days before Vatican II. She was not an ecclesiastical Luddite. What was wrong with her?

Sister Kenna was gone. The corridor was empty. There was a big walk-in linen closet just this side of the stairs. Augie jerked the door of the linen closet open and walked inside. Then she closed the door tightly on herself and sat down on a pile of folded white sheets. She didn’t want the pre-Vatican II church back. That wasn’t it. She just wanted Michael. She wanted Michael. She wanted Michael not to be sick.

When Sister Mary Augustine was a very small child, the priest in her parish had been an immigrant from the old country with a head full of fire and brimstone. He had believed in delineating each of the separate flames in the fires of hell and in making his parishioners look on the terrible face of God. The face of God is in the tornado, Father Connaghie had said. The face of God is in the erupting volcano. The face of God is in the tidal wave engulfing the shore. The face of God is not comfort but power, unleashed and vast.

Sister Augustine folded her arms over her knees and put her head down on them. Every blood vessel in her body was throbbing. Her mind felt as if it had been wiped clean. Augie didn’t believe in a God who would send a disease like AIDS to punish people for sex. She did believe in a God who met each and every one of his creatures face to face at the moment of death. She didn’t know if that was orthodox Catholic theology or not, but it was what she had taken away from her from Father Connaghie’s homilies, and what she had held fast to ever since. She tried to make herself imagine Michael standing face to face with God, but all she got was a terrible hole, an absolute emptiness, standing here next to her on earth where Michael should be.

Then she tucked her head even lower, past her arms and onto her knees, and burst into tears.

I
DA GREEL KNEW THAT
ever since the reading of the will, Victor and Martha had been angry at her. To be precise, Victor had been vaguely annoyed, and Martha had been furious. Ida didn’t blame them. They suspected she had known about Grandfather’s intentions all along, and they were right. Ida had taken a certain amount of satisfaction in watching Grandfather string that silly twit Rosalie along. She hadn’t given a thought to how Victor and Martha would feel about it. Ida had never liked Rosalie very much. She had never liked any of her relatives, even her grandfather, but she had been especially intolerant about Rosalie. When they were all growing up, Rosalie had been the perfect one, thin, pretty, not stupid like Victor. Ida would go to her grave thinking she had heard twice as much as she needed to just how cute Rosalie was in curls.

If it had been Rosalie who was angry at her, Ida wouldn’t have bothered to do anything about it. She wouldn’t have cared. If it had been Victor, Ida would have let it ride. Victor always came around in the end. Martha was a special case. Ida wasn’t close to Martha. Nobody could be. Still, Ida relied on her. It was a relief for Ida to have somebody at the center that she could talk to without having to mentally translate everything she said. Before coming up here to work, Ida had never realized how many differences there were in simple vocabulary between rich people and poor people. Then there were the expectations. Ida had a whole list of different kinds of behavior that she considered “normal.” She wasn’t aware of it as a list, but it was there. When she had lunch with a large group of other people and they were going to split the check, she expected to
split
it, to divide it by the number of people at the table, to charge everyone an equal share. Up here, split checks were pored over endlessly, the charges parceled out bit by bit, each person being responsible only for what she had actually ordered. The check took half an hour to unravel and left at least one person in tears. Then there was the little matter of the coats. Ida put her winter coat anywhere, on the back of a chair, across a desk, shoved into a locker all crumpled up. If it fell on the floor, she picked it up, brushed it off, and put it out of the way again. All the other people here were very careful to hang their coats on hangers. If those coats fell on the floor, their owners cleaned and agonized and accused. Everyone got together and tried to figure out who had
caused
the coat to fall onto the floor. It drove Ida crazy. The big things were easy to take in stride. Race and class, education and politics—Ida had been astonished at how little any of these things had mattered. The small things were impossible. Ida had started to refuse invitations out to lunch and dinner from the people she worked with. She had begun to steer clear of the lockers and the racks and the other places people hung their coats. She had begun to use her cousin Martha as a tranquilizer.