Chicago Stories: West of Western (34 page)

Who were all these guys? Mario had told her the gangs were small, fewer than twenty members each, but she saw more different cars, more bodies than that. New recruits? Reinforcements from allied gangs? Wanna-bes?

Cigarettes flew like fireflies from car windows. Rings and bracelets flashed as riders jeered and gestured. The cars continued to parade, passing ever closer. Dueling horns punctuated the night. Circling, circling.

Not chicken, more like a bullfight, she thought, remembering a hot afternoon in Pamplona. The parade of the matadors.

The first shots rattled like popcorn, sharp against the deeper engine noise and reverberating rap. The cars kept formation, circling as before. Clockwise, counter-clockwise. Engines. Rap. Car horns. Jeers. Shots.

She remembered night vision glasses, packed up ten years ago, in the last unopened box in the closet. It took only a moment to dig them out and return to the parade. Just as she got the glasses focused, a big Lincoln Navigator passed in front of her, Mario high in the driver's seat.

“No, Mario. No. Shit. Don't do this,” she whispered. Now she could make out the guns, little street guns and bigger, deadlier MAC-10s, held out the windows, pointing at the sky. Great, more asshole display. A volley, a passing car answered. Where the hell were the cops? Any moment this could end like a strike of lightening, leaving scorched earth behind.

Suddenly the cars flashed their lights and, one after another, sped up and disappeared into the alleys. Police cars converged from all directions, screeching to a stop on Rockwell, lights flashing, bull horns blaring.

“Fun's over, boys.” She could hear the bullhorn, so loud even her Maalon windows rattled. “Daddy says put your toys away. Time for beddy-bye.”

Five minutes later the street lay deserted and silent in the night.

Chapter 30

Seraphy woke to
Emily's blue eyes. Wide open and staring from an inch away. Emily looked as surprised as she was.

“Hi, Emily, happy day after Thanksgiving,” she said, reaching to stroke the golden fur. When Emily purred, her whole body vibrated like a diesel engine.

“How did you ever manage to get up on the bed?” At the sound of her voice, Black Jack flew hissing across the duvet and landed on her hand. He chomped down once, let go, wrapped his claws around her hand and repeated his attack, his whole body shaking with rage, his tail straight up. Emily leaned back and watched her brother and purred. She had no masculinity to prove.

“Yeah, okay, good morning to you, too, Black Jack,” Seraphy said, shaking her hand loose.“You've got to stop that before you get big enough to do any real damage. I wasn't going to hurt her.” She looked at her watch. Jesus Christ. Seven already? It was hardly light out. Tired of waiting for her to get up and provide food, Black Jack yowled and sank his fangs in her thumb.

“Jesus, Black Jack, you're as bad as Sister Ann.” Sister Ann? The photo of the guerilla, Caritas Sisters, Sister Ann in the jungle. Dead nuns. Could it possibly be—

Formidable.
She'd never met a woman who truly fit that description, but it was the only word for Aunt Bennie. Tall, upright, iron gray hair cut close to her head, steely eyes, no makeup. Her clothes, black jacket, sweater, skirt and opaque black hose, echoed the Benedictine habit she'd left behind years ago. It seemed impossible this immaculate woman could ever have been in the same anything as Sister Ann.

“You could say I know Sister Ann, I guess.” Seraphy, seated in her aunt's kitchen, watched as Benedicta Pelligrini Keating manipulated an ancient espresso machine, the only luxury item in an austerely functional room. “Aside from the fact that I'm a bloodsucking capitalist pig and an oppressor of the poor, etcetera, etcetera, we seem to get along okay.”

Benedicta chuckled and poured espresso into cups, watched the milky froth come to the top, brought them to the small kitchen table. “It sounds like Ann's not changed much since I knew her,” she said as she sat down across from Seraphy. “I hope you like latte.”

“Need you ask?” said Seraphy. “There must be a gene for coffee addiction. I have an espresso machine, Dad loved his espresso and Mom made sure he had the best. I think all of us kids inherited it. We're all coffee fanatics. Even Tony, who's always moving around, has his own machine.”

“I'm not surprised. I remember our parents had a fantastic old monster back in Italy when I was a little girl. I still remember it hissing and blowing out steam. It scared me. I thought it was alive.”

Seraphy watched her aunt sip thoughtfully at the froth bubbling over the rim of her cup. Her hands were beautiful, long-fingered artist's hands.

“It's odd the things we find essential, isn't it?” Benedicta said. “All the time I was in the novitiate and later in the Benedictines, I longed for my latte more than anything else I'd left behind. I didn't miss clothes, or sweets or my social life, or anything but my coffee.”

“It was the same when I was in the Middle East. I never missed home except for the coffee. The Arabs love coffee, but it isn't the same, no milk, no foam. In the Marines, the coffee wasn't bad, but it wasn't the real thing, and with Darkpool, I never had a chance to sit down for anything. I never thought about it until now, but maybe that's when I realized I finally had a home: when I made my first cup of espresso on my own machine in my very own kitchen.”

“And that was, what, a week and a half ago?”

Seraphy nodded. “It feels like forever.”

Benedicta sat quietly, watching her niece begin to relax in the Shaker-like simplicity of her Evanston kitchen. Aunt and niece drank without speaking. When the cups were empty, it was time to talk about what had brought the architect here. Seraphy looked at her aunt and wondered again how she and Sister Ann could have been in the same order. Ever.

“Apparently Ann hasn't changed much over the years,” Bennie said, as if she had read her niece's thought. “Let me get us another round. If I'm going to talk about those days I'll need the caffeine.” She brought the small pot of coffee and another of hot milk to the table.

“She seems to fit in our neighborhood, more or less.”

“It does seem an interesting neighborhood. I must say I'm pleased you chose to settle there instead of Lincoln Park or Streeterville, where I thought you'd go. But you surprised me and picked a more interesting place. You're definitely your mother's daughter.”

“Excuse me?” Seraphy spilled coffee over the table. Benedicta laughed, her eyes crinkling, and brought a dishcloth to wipe up the spill.

“Of course. You've never thought about your mother as a new bride, a senator's daughter fresh out of Bryn Mawr and Kenilworth? About what it meant for her to elope with a poor young man, an immigrant, yet? To find herself suddenly living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the south side, in Little Italy? With the wives of bricklayers and truck drivers as her new peers?”

Seraphy blinked. “Actually, no. I never thought about what Mom was like before me. She was just Mom.”

“Try to imagine. Our parents were terrified of her, this strange blond creature from the North Shore. We all felt sorry for Vittorio. Mama didn't think she'd stay a year.”

“But she did, more than a year, there were six of us in eight years, remember?”

“Oh yes. Instead of the fragile North Shore deb we expected, Eleanor was amazing. Pitched right in and raised you all without turning a hair. And of course, Vittorio worshipped her.”

“I can't imagine doing that, moving across the city and raising six kids in Little Italy. Far north suburbs to the ethnic South Side, talk about culture shock. It must have almost been like moving to another country to Mom, but it was just home to me. I never thought about it.”

“You should.”

“Or about Mom as a person. I mean a person separate from Mom. I can't imagine raising six kids anywhere. Not kids like us, anyway. We were monsters.”

“Ah. Well, I remember Eleanor at twenty, and even at thirty, as much like you are now. Adventurous. Accepting, even relishing differences. Smart. Curious. Impatient. Honest. Stubborn. Brave. Dangerous. What did I forget? Oh, yes, kind.”

Seraphy, caught off-balance by this new vision of her mother, was struck dumb. She picked up her cup, then put it down hard. Made circles with its damp base.

Bennie let the silence stretch.

“Umm, okay, maybe I can see some of me in that, and I know she stood by you when the rest of the family didn't, but Mom? Mom dangerous?” Seraphy frowned.

“You've never seen her defend her young, Fee. May I call you Fee?” Bennie looked at her niece, her eyebrows questioning.

“Sure.” Seraphy tried to think of some way to change the subject. This aunt wasn't safe. Bennie sighed and shifted her weight on the kitchen chair.

“Arthritis, the curse of old age,” she said when her niece looked at her, “but you don't want to talk family now, do you? You want to know about Sister Ann. And it's imperative you do because Ann's dangerous, but not in the same sense as your mother. Ann's capable of anything.”

“Dangerous? I know she yells and curses and could certainly use a bath. But she's got some good in her, too.”

“No doubt.” Bennie looked skeptical. She rubbed her chin, chewed the corner of her mouth, and took time to decide how to frame what she needed to say. “Let's go into the study. This chair's too hard for my old bones.” She settled into a well-used recliner and leaned back with her legs crossed at the ankles

“That's better. I think I should begin when I first met Sister Ann, as she calls herself now. Once upon a time, I was an innocent young thing, believe it or not, a nice girl from a conservative parochial school background. It was the seventies and my friends and I thought we could change the world. We grew up on idealism and fell into the romance of the religious life and the heady politics of the New Left at the same time, and saw nothing odd in mixing the two.”

Stopping to arrange a pillow under her legs, she went on, “Now I realize we were just young and full of hormones and lusting for adventure.” Bennie stopped and looked off into space. “I've often wondered if perhaps we educators do the students no favor when we fight to keep them safe and protect them from learning about the nastier realities of the world.”

“I agree. When I got home from the Middle East, I was surprised at how little most of our home-grown activists actually knew about the things they were demonstrating against. Or demonstrating for.”

Benedicta nodded. “With my best friend, Mary Margaret, I joined the Caritas Sisters the week we graduated from high school. We were both just eighteen, born a week apart. Our parents were relieved to have us settled, I think, and not to have to worry about finding us nice Catholic husbands and so on. No one thought to question the religious in those days and we were happily shipped off to the mother house.”

She shook her head. “We weren't there long. Most orders had a long novitiate before taking permanent vows. The Caritas Sisters shortened those years to a few weeks so they could fill the demand for teachers in their Central American missions.” Bennie stopped and looked across the room. “There's a picture on the mantel of the twenty of us in the novitiate that year.”

Seraphy got up to look.“Sister Ann has one like this.” She studied the group as Bennie continued her story.

“There we were, twenty novices. All young, American, middle class, idealistic, naïve as only girls educated in parochial schools could be. For eight weeks we learned to pray, to fast, to see manual labor as God's work, to see everything we'd learned about responsibility and tradition as old-fashioned. We were going out to cure poverty and injustice, by ourselves. We learned that the old rules were oppressive; now there would be new rules.

“Mary Margaret was brighter than I. She left after the sixth week, when one of our instructors railed against the professions. She couldn't believe her doctor father and uncles were bloodsuckers of the poor, etcetera, and had begun to question the sisterhood itself. I felt sorry for MM, poor unenlightened thing that she was, and quickly replaced her with a new friend, Ann Williams—the woman you know as Sister Ann.” Benedicta stared across the room, looking back through the years.

“When our eight weeks of indoctrination were over, Ann and I and five others were sent to Nicaragua to a small village in the jungle to build and staff a school. We didn't have a clue what we were doing, and I can't begin to tell you how dreadful the actuality of it was.

“No one had prepared us for the primitive conditions we found. We had no building skills, only one of us spoke any Spanish, we took all the wrong things and none of the tools and medicines we would need so desperately. When we arrived on the back of a decrepit truck, we were dumped out onto the red dirt in a clearing and abandoned. I remember the air was so humid it felt like trying to breathe Jello, and smelled like something was decaying nearby. No one was there to meet us and there was no shelter, nowhere to sleep and no supplies. It rained that night and the bugs came out.”

Seraphy stared at her aunt. “My God. I thought I had it rough it in Iraq, but I had equipment and a radio.”

“And proper training, no doubt. Sorry, I need to move a bit.” Bennie stood up and stretched, limped the length of the hallway to the kitchen and back, sat and resumed her story.

“We wouldn't have survived if some local people hadn't found us and taken us in. I'm not sure they would have been so helpful if they hadn't been fascinated by Ann's blond hair. Children would come up behind her to touch it—they'd never seen anything like it. Fee, this place was so remote there was no telephone service and the mail came, when it came at all, once a month in a sack dumped off a truck that didn't stop. We only had what we had brought with us in our bags to wear, and nothing with which to cook or wash with or sleep on, nothing. The women of the tiny village took care of us at first.

“It took us months to settle in and get the school started. We got some used concrete blocks by trading our watches, and anything we could do without, and we all suffered from the bugs and got skin rashes and dysentery and so on. The kids, and even some of the parents, sat under a big tree and we tried to teach what we could without books or paper. All we had were our missals because we thought there would be supplies and a school waiting for us. But it was a start, and we began to think about building our school.