Messi@ (7 page)

“Then why,” asked Andrea, proving that she was a diligent student, “was the Magdalene the first to see Jesus after his resurrection?”

“He forgave her,” Sister Rodica said, and thought to herself: Just like a man; I bet Mary didn't. And then she crossed herself, feeling blasphemous.

“I forgot, I just plain forgot about Mr. Rabindranath! I heard he did it again today,” said Sister Maria, barging in and interrupting Sister Rodica's cautionary tale of the Magdalene. “I didn't see him actually floating, but I heard him chanting verses, and I smelled burnt milk coming from his room!”

“That,” said Sister Rodica petulantly, wrinkling her nose in distaste, “was absolutely forbidden by Mother Superior, but he keeps doing it!”

“Part of his religion. Milk is offered to Pasupati, an ithyphallic god!” Andrea said in English.

“What is … ithy …?” Sister Rodica asked, her red cheeks blazing.

The answer didn't relieve her embarrassment.

“A god with a big erect penis!” Andrea blurted.

The nuns crossed themselves. Andrea was clearly improving. Humor, Sister Rodica knew, was proof of recovery. Soon, Andrea might be able to leave the guest house and live with the other children, in the convent dormitory. There was, however, one impediment. Andrea was extraordinarily messy. To the sisters' heightened sense of discipline and cleanliness, the girl's behavior was nothing less than shocking. She managed to scatter her few items of clothing widely and disrespectfully. The trunks and shelves in the storage room might have been crammed, but even in that state they projected a German sense of order. One of her socks ended up suspended from the light fixture on the ceiling. One of her shoes fell from the windowsill into the garden. She never put anything away. She moved constantly, leaving whatever she happened to be holding wherever she put it down. She then spent nervous minutes searching for the lost item. Most shocking, she had absolutely refused to bathe more than once. She sprawled when she talked to people, often exposing more flesh than was seemly. Her clothes were wrinkled, bunched, and twisted. Her hair took on astonishing shapes, covering half her face. Often she chewed on a stray lock, pursing her lips in unconscious delight. She gave the impression of a storm, but she was so youthful, so fresh, and so unconcerned that everyone inhaled her scent deeply rather than turning away. And of course, Sister Rodica's reproaches rolled off her like water off a mirror. At least that is how Sister Rodica, rather fancifully, put it to herself.

Sister Rodica prayed as hard as she could for two things: one, that Andrea would soon regain her health and begin to forget the terrible things that must have happened to her in the camp, and two, that the inappropriate attraction she felt for the girl would be channeled immediately into stronger faith. Sister Rodica, like most of the other nuns, was refusing to consider the mysterious gap of four years in Andrea's biography. She believed that her memories of war were still fresh, which explained the girl's absent behavior.

Sister Maria was fascinated by Andrea as well, but for other reasons. She could not forget the girl's luminiscent eyes looking up at her the night she had arrived. Her eyes had never again achieved that feverish intensity, but Sister Maria felt to the depths of her soul that Andrea was not an earthly being. She would have been hard put to describe what kind of being she believed Andrea to be. She was certainly not an evil being, not one of the legions of Satan's minions; but neither was she holy, in the way Maria conceived it. Holy was modest like beeswax, sweet like honey, having the sound of crystal. Something with wings and flesh woven of mild light. Everything about Andrea bespoke fever and a stormy upcoming womanhood. Something hummed like an engine behind those green eyes, something bigger than the sister's imagination. And Sister Maria was more offended by Andrea's compulsive messiness because she, among the many neat German nuns, was the neatest. Her habit was so crisp it sounded like snapping leaves when she sat down. Not one of her lustrous black hairs showed underneath her wimple. Her shoes were polished to even perfection, and her rosy fingernails were rounded, pared, and ever clean. In Andrea she saw a repudiation of everything she spent her life perfecting.

Sister Rodica confessed her carnal feelings to Mother Superior, who admonished her to pray harder. The abbess was familiar with this important moment in the development of a young nun. It was the first of many critical tests of faith to come. She comforted the young woman with a tale from the life of Saint Teresa de Avila, who had spent much of her life inflamed by a passion she was finally able to transcend. The abbess promised to initiate Sister Rodica into the mysteries of flagellation. The Knights Templar, who had once lived in the confines of Saint Hildegard's, had been self-flagellators, too, and had bequeathed their blessed whips to the convent. One of these surely had Sister Rodica's name on it. The time had come to begin her journey of communal identity.

The younger nun certainly hoped so. Every day she found it harder to keep her feelings contained. They migrated like a swarm of bees to the surface of her skin and threatened to break out. She had prayed for relief on her bare knees on the stone floor, but her limits were being sorely tested. She craved the lashes of that purifying whip like water for thirst.

“Andrea,” Mother Superior said, “has been sent to us for a very special reason, which we have not yet fathomed. Father Eustratius, blessed among men, named after the one who was martyred with Saint Orestes”—she had looked it up—“had an agreement with the blessed Mother Ingeborg to protect the soul of this orphan. You, Rodica, are now full of sinful and wicked thoughts which might endanger and spoil our gift. You must not attend to Andrea any longer. She will be the sole charge of Sister Maria.”

This was a great blow to Sister Rodica, who cried herself to sleep that night. In the morning, though, she decided that it was for the best. Who knows where her attraction might lead? Saint Hildegard had been a virgin, a poetess, and a prophetess who had rebuked popes and princes, bishops and lay folk. How could Rodica ever aspire to stand in the sight of that great woman if she couldn't even gain control of her flesh? She looked forward to the Templars' whip, and in preparation, she lashed herself with a switch across her thighs and back until her body was like a wire mesh under her clean habit.

Sister Maria's confession, that Andrea might be otherworldly, was received more thoughtfully by Mother Superior. The possibility that Andrea might be an angel of some kind agreed with her own reasoning. Sister Ingeborg had been dead one year to the day when Andrea arrived. It was certainly miraculous. There was also the matter of the debt Father Eustratius mentioned. On the other hand, how could a Bosnian Muslim girl be an angel? She'd never even been baptized!

“Watch her carefully, Sister,” Mother Superior advised the nun. “We can only hope and pray.”

Sister Maria complained also of the girl's disorderly habits, which seemed impossible to correct. This was another proof, in her opinion, of demonic influence.

“It is possible,” Mother Superior said, “that the girl completely lost her sense of boundaries during her sufferings. She may not know where she herself begins and ends, so she has no respect for anyone else's privacy or property.”

This explanation satisfied neither woman, but it was the beginning of an attempt to understand the baffling creature who had landed in their midst.

Chapter Five

Wherein Felicity LeJeune sees Grandmère to her final resting place, observes Reverend Mullin in flagrante delicto, has an encounter with the real America at Home Depot stumbles on an extraordinary Web page, and gets to practice her profession by facing a very dangerous situation

The burial of Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec attracted far more mourners to Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 than Felicity had imagined would attend. Nearly a century of life had produced a great number of acquaintances. Most of the family had forgiven her defection from the church. Several relations of Felicity's, people in their seventies and eighties, came dressed in severe black and stood stoically by the Duclos–Le Jeune crypts. All in all, almost a hundred people huddled under the gray sky, while Mullin poured forth an insincere eulogy. Even some of the nuns had come, and Felicity wanted to rush over and kiss them, but something in their eyes stopped her. My God. They are disapproving of
me
. For a moment Felicity saw herself as they saw her: the girl arrested in sixth grade for spitting at a rent-a-cop who turned out to be epileptic. The high school junior who spent a night in lockup for trying to prevent the ousting of a homeless couple from the doorway of the mayor's house. The senior who chained herself to a tree the city was trying to cut down, and had to be freed with a blowtorch before being arrested. The fifteen-year-old who ate nothing but peach nectar through a straw and became so thin you could see the blue veins under the light cocoa skin. The simultaneously hyper and slurry speed and downer queen who teased every boy in her class in alphabetical order but never consummated the act with any of them, though she signed all her notes “The Erotomaniac.” The college freshman who took off her clothes to protest the opening of a Pizza Hut in the French Quarter.

But Sisters, Felicity cried telepathically in her own defense, these were all acts of conscience. I have never joined a group and have nothing but contempt for the throngs of delirious world enders and would-be saviors who clog the streets and obstruct traffic, in whose ranks the old woman you are burying ended up. That corpse has done more grievous harm than all my acts of adolescent sickness and rebellion! But the nuns just turned their heads and looked into the wind. A tear made its way down Felicity's cheek.

Felicity looked away, too. Charred chicken bones, half-smoked cigars, used condoms, and shot glasses full of rum littered the graves where voodoo priestesses were reputedly interred. They believed in your Catholic juju, too. I still remember all the crap you taught me, Sisters. I remember that the soul is a garden, and prayer waters it in four ways: by irrigation, by the waters of a stream, with a bucket from the well, or just rain. That's my way. Just rain. Falling when it wants.

The major had paid for a coffin Grandmère would have hated for its ostentation. Felicity could imagine her inside the satin-lined box, calculating the bags of groceries the $2,300 might have bought. Mountains of potatoes, carts full of round steak, beans for a lifetime, crawfish for seven years, a river of catfish, a Niagara of milk. Grandmère's life had been evenly divided between food and God. Now she would have only one concern.

Standing at the major's voluminous flank, Felicity was aware of her itchy black stockings and the ill-fitting black dress she had worn once before, at Miles's funeral. She congratulated herself for not wearing any panties, though a chill breeze touched her now and then and she was shivering. She noticed two strange men standing behind Mullin. One of them looked Pakistani or Indian, and the other had a brutal face.

“Mullin goes about with bodyguards,” whispered the major, reading her mind.

After the coffin was slid into its burial oven, Felicity said a silent goodbye and couldn't help but admonish the old woman for leaving her with the unpleasant task of sorting through a century of junk for disposal to the Salvation Army. Grandmère had crammed trunks full of clothes and scraps in the attic and had kept every cracked dish. In addition, there were thousands of dusty religious tracts and bundled-up church newsletters. Anything that might have been of value to Felicity she had destroyed after she found Mullin.

When the service ended, Major Notz offered his niece a cup of hot chocolate at the Croissant d'Or, but Felicity declined. There was to be an elaborate repast for Grandmère's soul at the Autocrat Club, and she wanted to stay at the cemetery for a while to tend to her other dead.

Stacked in layers in their crypts like ancient loaves of bread eternally baking in the tropical sun were the people Felicity came from. Family legend had it that the bricks used to build the tombs came from the French Opera House, which had stood at Bourbon and Toulouse Streets and was destroyed by fire in 1866. “Our bricks are filled with music,” Grandmère had said once, in a rare lyric moment. In New Orleans the dead led quite a lyrical existence, and were always present. Unlike the dead elsewhere, it was not possible to bury them in the ground—the water table was less than a foot below the surface. Felicity had heard of coffins floating out during floods and returning to the houses of their kin, who hadn't had them properly entombed.

At the bottom of the crypt was one Monsieur Robert Armant. She gazed at the eroded angel and the rusted iron cross on his marker, then took out a lace handkerchief and began to carefully scrub the name on the stone. Reasonably satisfied with the amount of grime she had removed from her great-great-great-uncle's grave, she next paused on the name of one Louis-Philogène Duclos, a more distant relative, whose begrimed inscription carried this ambiguous note:
Ci-gît Louis-Philogène Duclos, Enseigne dans les Troupes des Etats d'Amérique, Fils Légitime de Rodolphe-Joseph Duclos et de Marie-Lucie de Reggi. Né le 18 Août 1781. Décédé le 4 Juillet 1801
. This side of the tomb was smothered in leaves. A banana tree was growing straight out of its back. A bunch of black bananas threatened to fall on her ancestor at any moment. The ambiguity of the grave marker rested in the single word
légitime
, which signaled to anyone cognizant of New Orleans ways that Louis-Philogène had been the product of a Creole mistress's liaison with a French nobleman. Questions of legitimacy were debated to this day in Felicity's milieu, though, blessed be Saint Expedite, the intensity of the debate had diminished in the recent past.

Felicity had never attempted to hide her origins. Her café-au-lait skin was lighter than that of her Italian or Jewish friends, but she had never resorted to the easy palliative
of the passe-blanc
, passing for white. It was difficult to maintain her identity, and had she left New Orleans, she might have lost the incentive for doing so. But she had lived all of her young life with her grandmère in the neighborhood where she was born, a faubourg once called the Mistresses' Quarter. The faubourg retained the sadness of its former inhabitants, beautiful light-skinned women who had spent their lives watched over by anxious matriarchs, awaiting the rare visits of their married, aristrocratic lovers. Weeping willows hid the low, well-kept houses leaning into one another like veiled sighs. Grandmère's home, now hers, was a nineteenth-century building with a shady porch where Felicity, a little girl in a hammock, sometimes thought she could hear the monotonous plaint of a young woman going crazy behind the cypress beams. The sadness of the house seeped into her, and she kept it at bay by reading, reading, reading, endlessly reading the books the major brought her. Felicity thought about that young woman's lament now. She found her present situation akin to that of the light-skinned girl who had been bought at an Octoroon Ball by a rich man and virtually imprisoned in the house in the bloom of her youth. True, no one had chosen Felicity in this fashion, and her leash was much longer. Still, there was something helpless in the way her life had unfolded.