Charisma Page 6

  “No. And I don’t intend to. You want to do something, though.”

  “You’re right, I do.”

  “If it requires physical labor, I won’t help.”

  Susan had been sitting on a loveseat, the only piece of furniture in the foyer. She stood up and started walking around the checkerboard marble floor. “Do you ever think about it? About Mother and Daddy and everything that happened?”

  “No,” Andy said. “You shouldn’t think about it, either.”

  “I know. I don’t, usually. Something Dan told me this morning got my mind on it.”

  “Well,” Andy said, “that makes Dan a jerk, but we always knew he was a jerk. You don’t have to be a jerk along with him.”

  “Maybe I can’t help myself. I told Reverend Mother all about it when I was, I don’t know. A novice. A canonical novice? A senior novice? I don’t remember. I thought I’d tell her and then she’d kick me out.”

  “She didn’t, though.”

  “No,” Susan said. “I should have known better. I’m sorry. I know I’m acting morbid. And I want a favor from you, too.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “I want to go downtown. I want you to come with me.”

  Now it was Andy who was sitting on the loveseat. He always claimed he was indolent. He didn’t like standing up for long. “If you want to go buying dresses,” he said, “I don’t want to come. The last time I did that with a woman, I ruined a beautiful relationship.”

  “I don’t want to buy dresses.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go down to this place off Congress Avenue. It’s called Damien House.”

  Andy tilted his head back and stared up, at the chandelier, at the domed ceiling beyond it. His body had gone very still.

  “Does Dan know you want to do this?”

  “He probably suspects.”

  “He probably told you not to go.”

  “I’m thirty-five years old, Andy. I’m not a baby.”

  “You’re not a baby, but this is a bad idea. A very bad idea. You don’t know the half of what you’re getting yourself into. They had a murder there last Friday night.”

  “Does that mean you won’t take me?”

  Andy sighed. His head was at a normal angle again. His arms were wrapped around his chest. Susan thought he looked infinitely tired, as if he’d taken a sleeping pill when she wasn’t looking and it had just started to hit him.

  “Oh, I’ll take you all right,” he said. “But I want you to know up front I think you’re crazy.”

  Chapter Two

  1

  SUSAN HAD DRIVEN TO New Haven from Saint Michael’s. She could remember it in detail, mostly because she had been so terrified. Nuns in traditional orders weren’t handed car keys as a matter of course. There were designated drivers and designated riders. Susan had always been one of the latter. Getting into a car again, bumping along beside the Housatonic River on the Derby Road, had been the second most frightening thing Susan had ever done. She’d thought the particulars of that trip had been burned into her brain: the shacks that had once been summer cottages now lying in ruin next to the water; the patches of ice in front of every stoplight along the new six-lane stretch between Derby and New Haven proper; the car dealerships that cluttered the intersection at the turn-off to Orange and promised Mazdas and BMWs for practically no money at all. Searching her memories of that trip, she came up with a picture so complete it was almost documentary footage.

  Sitting in the bus next to Andy, she realized she didn’t really remember anything. She’d been so wrapped up in her fear, she’d barely taken anything in. The people around her, on the bus and at the curbs where the bus stopped, were so alien they made her dizzy. Most of them were black. A fair proportion of the rest were Hispanic. What few whites there were were all men and all what her mother would have called muscle-headed Irish, or some other ethnic culture’s version of the same: big, fat, ham-handed, rough, and obsessively reading the numbers on their lottery tickets. Among these people, she felt like Tinkerbell. Worse. She felt like a fraud. The clothes Andy had made her change into—all of them worn and all of them pulled from the junk closet in the service hall—made her feel as if she were wearing a sign on her forehead that said SLUMMING.

  “We can’t take my car,” he’d told her, back at the house. “It’s a Porsche and it’s practically brand new. It’d get ripped off with us in it before we got halfway to where we were going.”

  Now he sat with his legs stretched out across the aisle, just a little too broad for the plastic seat he was sitting in. If it hadn’t been for the intelligence in his face, he would have looked like all the other white men here. Susan thought the white men might not notice the difference. They weren’t staring.

  “We’re going to have to make a transfer,” Andy was saying, “and then when we get to Congress Avenue we’re going to have to get out and walk. That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “There isn’t a bus that goes to Amora Street?”

  “There isn’t anything that goes to Amora Street. Except for Damien House, there isn’t anything on Amora Street. The place was abandoned years ago. It looks like those pictures you see of the South Bronx.”

  “Oh.”

  Andy shook his head. He’d already told her he wouldn’t have come with her at all if she hadn’t “still looked so much like a nun.” Whatever that meant. Susan supposed he was thinking now that she still thought like a nun. She pressed her great mass of black hair more firmly into her combs and twisted until she could see out the window behind her. The view was dislocating. There was Yale: a medieval landscape of turrets and lawns. Then there were the bums. A little colony of them had set up a cardboard housing project under cover of a stand of leafless trees on a street off Prospect. Every one of them had his own brown bottle and his own paper bag.

  Susan turned back. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not the New Haven I remember.”

  “It hasn’t been the New Haven you remember for ten years.”

  “I guess not. I’m surprised you and Dan haven’t sold the house.”

  “We can’t sell the house,” Andy said.

  Susan flushed. “The Hanrahans could have sold theirs, and they haven’t. Dec is living where he grew up. I saw the address on that invitation Dan is so crazy about. Why haven’t they moved to the suburbs like everyone else?”

  “Maybe Edge Hill Road is a special case.”

  “Why? We had a murder at the bottom of it the day after I got home.”

  “Is that what you want to talk about? Murders? If I’d wanted to talk about murders, I could have gone into the D.A.’s office and had a chat with Dan’s secretary. She’s got a running file in her head of every death in the city of New Haven back to 1962. She’s especially fond of murders.”

  Susan turned away again. This time, the window behind her looked out on the passing of small, neat streets of two-story houses. The houses were old and painted strange pastel colors, but they were reasonably well kept up. She turned back again and folded her arms across her chest.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand either of you. How can you live together in that house?”

  “It’s convenient and it’s cheap.”

  “A lot of things are convenient and cheap. What do you two do when I’m not around? Fight?”

  “I haven’t had a fight with Dan since Mother died.”

  “Mother or Daddy?”

  Andy didn’t look at her. The bus was pulling up to the curb. They were at the Green, and the Green was where half the people in the city changed directions. Andy stood up and zipped his jacket shut.

  “This is where we get off,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry. If we miss our connection, we get stuck in the cold for half an hour.”

  But Andy wasn’t really hurrying, so Susan didn’t hurry either. She just wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck and thought: We’re going to have to talk about thi
s sometime. I haven’t had seventeen years to get it out of my system. I haven’t had seventeen years to make myself forget.

  Of course, she should have had. That was what she’d gone into the convent for, something she hadn’t realized until much too late. But going into the convent hadn’t worked, and coming home hadn’t worked so far either. She still found herself tripping over it all at the most unlikely times, like now. She’d have her mind on something else and it would sneak up behind her, just to kick her in the rear. She was surprised she hadn’t started imagining things, like ghosts rattling chains through the hallways of the house on Edge Hill Road. Ghosts would have been appropriate in more ways than one.

  Maybe she was a ghost of a kind herself.

  When the bus stopped, it skidded into the curb and cut off abruptly. Andy fell halfway over, saving himself from landing on the floor only by keeping both hands wrapped around a metal pole. Susan didn’t, only because she hadn’t yet stood up. Seconds later, she was not only standing but running, chasing Andy down the ridged metal steps into the wet and slithering wind.

  The Green would have been beautiful in the snow, except that its benches were covered with bums.

  2

  There were no bums on Congress Avenue. Like Edge Hill Road, its sidewalks were clear of all but businesslike traffic. Unlike Edge Hill Road, on Congress Avenue there was a lot of it. Susan saw a line of girls standing under the chipped blue paint on a plate-glass window that said WASH-CENTER, a man changing a movie marquee from SOMETHING-PASSION to HOT-GIRLS-SOMETHING-ELSE, another man laying out watches on an orange crate covered with a piece of turquoise felt. It was early. Congress Avenue didn’t really get moving until after dark. Even so, the girls were wearing skirts that barely reached the tops of their thighs and fishnet stockings that revealed more skin than they covered. Susan thought they had to be freezing. She also thought they had to be fourteen.

  Andy tugged on her arm. “You can’t stand around and sightsee, for Christ’s sake. You’ll get them nervous. Either that, or they’ll think you’re buying.”

  “Do I look like someone who’s buying?”

  “Why not?”

  Susan let him pull her along. There might be a point to that “why not.” She’d never been in a place like this. There were orders that sent their sisters to work among the poor in red-light districts, but hers hadn’t been one of them. She’d done her time at the Motherhouse and in parish schools. Oddly enough, though, this place bothered her less than the Green had. She liked the rhythm of it. There was music blasting out of a window somewhere, a big radio turned up loud and pushed against a thin pane of glass. She didn’t recognize the song, but the backbeat was eternal. It reminded her of the Chuck Berry records they’d played in their rooms at Sacred Heart when the madames were all safely tucked in bed.

  “It doesn’t look anything like those pictures of the South Bronx,” she said. “It looks—happy.”

  “Anything would look happy on three vials of crack a day. A rock would look happy. That’s why people take crack.”

  “I thought you could tell when people were on dope. None of these people look like they’re on anything.”

  “Maybe they’re not, at the moment. Will you come on? If you keep this up, we’re going to get mugged.”

  “I know why people come down here,” she said. “If I was stuck in New Haven and I didn’t have anyplace to go, I’d come down here too. It would be better than staying in the middle of town.”

  Andy stopped. He had to. Susan had stopped already. They were standing in front of a movie theater called the Snake Charmer. A poster in a frame beside the ticket booth showed a woman in stockings and garters and no underwear, her legs spread wide. She was holding her ass in the air with hands tipped by sequined fingernails. Her face rose in the background, not quite clearing the knobby mountains that were her knees. Susan stepped closer and read the teaser line, half-obscured by a wash of mud at the bottom of the frame.

  “ ‘They can’t get enough and they like their men rough,’ ” she said. “Wonderful.”

  “Wonderful?”

  “I was being sarcastic, Andy.”

  “You were getting suckered.” He took her arm again. “You can’t walk around this place and look at these people as if you were walking through a zoo. They won’t like it. And they’re not stable.”

  “I’m not looking at these people as if they were in a zoo. I like it here.”

  “You like the exoticness of it.”

  “That’s not true.” It wasn’t, either. Andy had dragged her along a little farther. They were standing in front of a shop door covered by a hinged iron gate. The gate had been pushed open a little and the glass door beyond it propped back. Susan came to a stop again, to watch a frazzled old woman push a rack of Indian print shirts out onto the sidewalk.

  Andy was getting angry. Susan knew that. She was going to have to say something, but she didn’t know what. She didn’t know Andy very well anymore. She didn’t know anyone. She’d gotten out of the habit of talking about herself. That was one thing nuns were never allowed to do. They were supposed to take the lives they’d lived in the world and lay them down on Christ’s altar, to burn them as sacrifices in the fire of religious meditation. God only knew she’d never been able to do that, but she had learned to fake it very well. Her self was in a box somewhere, buried out of sight.

  She started moving on her own this time, but slowly, so she could take it all in. She did like it here. In fact, she loved it. It was like a heart that never stopped beating, but pumped up, fast—a runner’s heart hitting its stride in a marathon. The music had changed into something that really wasn’t music at all, just a voice talking in endlessly relentless meter and a background of percussion sticks. A bookstore was opening across the street. A young man with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a black leather jacket torn at the shoulder seams was dragging a stand-up board onto the sidewalk. When he got it where he wanted it, he took out a handkerchief and tried to wipe it off.

  “Ever since I got here,” she said, “not just since I got home, but ever since I got back to New Haven—the whole place has seemed dead. At first, I thought it was just the house. I wasn’t even surprised. I kept asking myself what else I could possibly expect. I mean—”

  “You mean nothing.” Andy had his arm braided around hers now. He was doing more than just pulling her along. She resented the hell out of it. “The house is not dead. The house isn’t anything. You’re making all this up.”

  “No, I’m not. But when we got to the Green today, I changed my mind. It isn’t just the house. It’s the whole city. It’s as if sometime while I was away the place lay down and turned over and decided to sleep its way to the grave. It just decided to give up and check out.”

  “This is where people give up and check out,” Andy said. “This is Suicide Hill.”

  “Don’t pull me.”

  Andy stopped instead. In anger, he looked like their father. His face got as red as if he’d drunk a quart of vodka in the last half hour, straight.

  “I’ll tell you what they didn’t do for you in that convent,” he said. “They didn’t make you grow up.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means they sell people down here, Susan. This place is a fucking slave market. Come six o’clock there are girls on this street not fifteen years old who’ll blow you off for a ten-dollar bill and let you cram your prick up their asses for forty. They don’t do it out of dedication to black-market capitalism. They do it because if they don’t their pimps will cut them up.”

  “And there are the boys,” Susan said.

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “There are the boys. Most of them are only ten.”

  “Let me tell you what they don’t do,” Susan said. “They don’t buy a bottle and sit down and let themselves go. They don’t pickle themselves into insensibility and call it relaxation. They don’t—”

  “They do. They just don’t use booze.”

/>   “Like Daddy,” Susan said.

  Andy blew a stream of white breath into her face. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I should have known. All the way back at the house, I should have known you’ve got to talk about Daddy.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. I didn’t know it myself.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  He turned his back to her and started walking up the street, away from the bus stop, away from the Indian print shirts and the bookstore with its stand-up board and the movie marquee that now read HOT GIRLS HOT CITY. Susan stood where she was for a moment and wondered what she was supposed to do, as if she had a choice. Then she followed him. After a while, she even picked up speed. She knew there were people watching her, faces behind curtains at the windows of apartments on the upper stories of the buildings across the street, but she couldn’t make herself feel afraid.

  When she reached Andy she took his arm and said, “It’s just that back there on the Green everything seemed hopeless. Nothing seems hopeless here at all.”

  “I’ll show you hopeless,” Andy said. “Hell, I’ll show it to you like you’ve never seen it before.”

  3

  Later, she had to admit he’d been right. It got bad, and not long after it got worse. First the stores and theaters and laundromats petered out. Then everything did. It was eerie, like walking through an abandoned movie set. The buildings were all there, intact and solid, but there wasn’t anyone in them. There wasn’t anyone anywhere.

  The weather was clearing. The wind had pushed back the clouds and the sun was shining through. It illuminated nothing.

  They turned onto Amora Street, and the landscape changed again. The buildings were no longer intact. Whole walls had collapsed into vacant lots. There wasn’t a pane of glass in a window anywhere. Even so, Susan could tell the street was inhabited. There was laughter everywhere, high hysterical laughter bubbling up out of the ground, floating into the wind, sounding insane. Sounding insane and homicidal.