Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (10 page)

Jane is right, of course. Charles Evans is right. The Bishop is right. There’s no reason for me to be here any more. My demise is only a matter of time. But I am going to get my licks in before I go down.

September 11, 1969

I tell Todd the janitor I want him to watch.

I will take you through guided prayer, I tell Megan. I tell her to kneel with her hands pressed together in prayer, to close her eyes as I touch her and we say the “Our Father” together. I start with her neck and her shoulders, and then I run my fingers down either side of her spine to the small of her back. I work the small of Megan’s back back around to her hips, all the while praying with her. I rub her hips for a long time and then move my fingers in flat circles between her hips and down, down below her belly button. Prayer is harder to come by now because she is breathing so hard when I start to move my palm in soft circles around one nipple, then the other, then back, then both. I say the prayer more slowly until Megan moans so loud she can’t hear a word I say. Todd is watching.

September 13, 1969

It’s like Martha’s never been touched before, so I tell her to start touching herself anywhere she likes. “Anywhere?” Anywhere under the sun, I say, because this is a spiritual exercise, and the body has to give way to the spirit by giving in to the flesh.

I tell
Mary Beth I have learned this massage at Lourdes, though I have never been to Lourdes. I tell her it will work because she bears the name of the Virgin Mother, and this massage is meant to duplicate what Mary felt the night she conceived. Do you understand? I ask her. “Yes, Mother Superior,” she says. This is special, I tell her. You have been chosen. I won’t do this with any of the other girls. “Why me?” Because you have a special light that only I can see. “I do?” Indeed you do, I say. Then I tell her to turn out the lights.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Jane says.

Martha and Mary Beth are scared, blinking into headlights, but Megan knows my game and she loves it. She comes into my room late at night without even knocking, with a towel wrapped around her chest and nothing else between her and me. She clicks off my night light with a flick of her toe. “I wish my parents could see me now,” she says.

“They said if I lie I go to hell and I don’t want to go to hell, Mother Superior.” I tell Todd he’s not going anywhere. “I mean, you wanted me
to, you wanted me to watch, Mother Superior. You told me to. You knew I would have to tell them. I have to tell them. I have to.” Did you like watching, Todd? “I know I’m, I’m  bad. I know I’m bad. I know it’s a sin and I’m bad.” Yes, I say. You are very bad, Todd. You are a sinner. Not because you watched. But because you
liked
watching. To enjoy your sin is the worst sin of all.

So the Board knows. So what are they going to do about it?

“It’s the rumors, the very idea of these rumors, the continuation of these rumors,” the Bishop says. I tell him I will take the Order down with me. I tell him: I will take
you
down with me. No man is going to tell me how to live my life, not after all that I’ve been through.

“We have the goods on you,” Charles Evans says over lunch at “21.” “We have confessions.” You have Todd? “Yes. And we have your Jane. We have your Nancy. We have established a pattern of historical abuse of power, position, and authority that continues to the present day. Jesus God, Eleanor, what were you thinking?” I have a calling, I say.

Thanksgiving alone as planned.

“I’m leaving the Order,” Jane says. “So is Nancy. We’re leaving together, I mean. We’re going to be together.” What took you so long? I say. “Don’t you feel
anything
?” Jane says. I feel you two have a lot in common, I tell her.

“Why don’t you put us all out of our misery?” Charles Evans is drunk, this time at Toots Shor’s. “Chrissakes, Eleanor, what’s the point? Pisses me off about you. Never any point.” The point, I say, is that no man is going to tell me what to do, that I can be any way I want to be, and there’s not a damn thing any of you can do about it. The point is that you and the Bishop and the board can all go to hell. “Then Chrissakes go be whatever it is you are wanting to goddamn be. Just don’t rub my goddamn nose in it any more. It’s Christmas, for Chrissakes.” Merry Christmas, I say. I make sure he picks up the check.

Jane comes by to say goodbye. “I loved you, you know,” she says. I tell her that’s a mistake she won’t make again. “What’s to become of you?” Jane  says. “Does someone like you go straight to hell?”

December 31, 1969

I write an enormous check to the Order in my own honor. I endow a chair in comparative theology
at Yale to celebrate my reign as Mother Superior. It is the least I can do, and the last I will do. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

My first meal in freedom is a chili dog at Dairy Queen. My taste buds are dead from twenty years in the Convent. It’s nice to be alive and licking again.

Diana’s house in Southampton will do for now, until I can think of something better. I keep it dark at night, the fire going for as long as it takes for me to fall asleep. At dawn I’m down to ashes. I start the day from scratch.

All those years praying to God the Father. Every word of it wasted.

I suppose the myth about the loving God who watches over us is as good as any until I can make up my own. But I am between myths at the moment.

Is this mourning? In the end, did twenty-five years of hard labor in the Convent turn out to be any better than a life in slavery to Bucky Harwell?  I’m not so sure. At least in the Order I was able to rise to the top, to hack out a life of my own making without a man stealing the credit. With Bucky, lucky me, I would never have been anything other than Mrs. Bucky.

I have the money to go anywhere, to be anything or to buy anything I want. Why do I feel so empty?

I
had
to join the Sisters of Mercy. I
had
to escape from my house, from my past. I had no choice. Better to be a nun than to live out my life as a victim, as the daughter of a fraud, the half-sister of a full-time rapist.

Nightmares. The boat rocking in sight of Bimini. The explosion outside. The mushroom cloud in the round hole of a window. It’s always Tom or at least the shape of him, the weight of him, his awful groaning in my ear, the feel of his hard pole bursting up inside of me, breaking me apart into a thousand million pieces. I am so angry, so ashamed, so dead to the world.

February 22, 1970

I want to die or at least to forget.

February 26, 1970

“You must be hurting,” Diana says. She is trying to be good to me, but in the end she is playing the part of the concerned sister in private, just as she plays the part of the committed wife in public. Everyone knows her macho Luigi lusts after men, and everyone lets Diane play out the charade. Make-believe is
not
what I need right now.

I walk the beach at sunset without seeing a soul. I stare into the fire and lick at Luigi’s brandy. Nancy is on my mind today because of the way I used Jane in the Convent to hurt her. I drink until I puke all over the deck.

Worst hangover of my life. One of the worst days of my life.

I touch myself at night thinking about Nancy until my body shivers and my sheets are wet. But it’s too late to save myself or someone I tried to destroy.

I write another big check to the Order to make sure it will survive my departure. It’s only Christian to clean up your own mess.

Diana calls. “Why don’t you go on a trip?” she says. “Around the world in eighty days. That kind of thing. You could take Rebecca. She could take her pictures. You could go anywhere you want!” I’m not going anywhere until I know where I want to go.

I have to leave Southampton soon or spend the rest of my life licking my wounds, howling at the moon.

My own apartment, my own life uptown on the West Side where no O’Kell has ventured before. No one will find me here unless I want them to.

Diana takes me shopping with Rebecca. “Now
this
is very with it,” Diana says, “especially with
that
.” I take her word for it, but I feel wobbly on platform shoes after a lifetime with my feet on the ground in Convent flats. My bell-bottoms flap in the wind. The lapels on my pants suit are wide enough to be wings. “Eleanor,” Rebecca says. “You are really happening now.” I tell her that’s what scares me.

I need to find a higher calling, something beyond drugs and free love, something that will matter long after the bell-bottoms and platform shoes are at the bottom of my closet. That was the beauty of the Convent, truth and beauty wrapped up into one neat package, with time off for the holidays.

Charles Evans is begging me to work with him on Wall Street. “You, the Order, were an absolute cash cow. You will always have a home at my firm. Just say the word.” After what happened at the Convent, I say, you’ve got to be kidding. “Never forget that you’re an O’Kell,” he says. “Take off that habit and you’re still made of money.”

I need to do something special. Something
spectacular
. If I knew whom to pray to I would get back down on my knees.

I go to an anti-war protest at the bandshell in Central Park. Bad language and finger-pointing about the government. The stink of pot is everywhere. Hippies who smell like a bad idea are selling pills by the handful. In the end everyone sings “Give Peace A Chance.” It’s too automatic for my taste, lines that have been learned but not lived.

Becca tells me Mother has taken a turn for the worse.
Mother
? Whatever became of Mother? Not just in her life, but in ours? She is bed-ridden or at least house-bound, from what Diana and Becca tell me. She has been dying for so long she might as well be dead. I wonder what it would be like to care.

I will go because I blame her, because I want her to pay in some way.

I walk down a twisted Park Avenue lobby, the corridors lacquered in marble, the mirrors lit by a golden light. An elevator man with white gloves and highball skin swings the elevator door open right into the penthouse. The apartment looks as if someone will be right back, with dark wood shining everywhere and a floor you could eat off of. But no one meets me or greets me. It is dead quiet and I wonder if my Mother is dead. I wander down hallways looking for signs of life, but the master bedroom is empty. I find her finally in a matchbox room off the kitchen, a maid’s room with a single bed and stiff white sheets pulled up to her chin. Mother? I say. Her eyes are closed and her face looks broken down, like continents breaking up. Her white hair, no longer fisted into a bun, is wild against the lace pillows. She opens her eyes without moving her head. Mother? I say again. She jacknifes up into a sitting position on the bed, the sheets still pulled up to her chin. “
No heroic measures
!” she says. I will tell them, I say. “And who the hell are you?” Eleanor, I say. Mother says: “It will be a cold day in hell before my Eleanor ever comes to see her Mother!” Today’s a cold day, Mother, I say.

“I’ve been expecting you. I’ve been expecting you all because of the money.” I have more money than God, I say. I don’t need your money. “Why, then, Eleanor? Why now?” I tell her I wish I knew.

What’s your name? “Sliv,” the elevator man says. Sliv, I say, I need you to look in on my Mother when you’re working. Once or twice a day. “Oh I’m already looking in on Missus O’Kell,” Sliv says. “She pays me to do it, but I don’t take nothing for it. I leave the money right there.” He opens a vase on Mother’s front table and it’s stuffed with cash, fives and tens and twenties. “I don’t need the lady’s money. I got what I need.” Why do you do it, then? “I like the lady. She’s a good egg, and somebody needs to do it, to look in on her to make sure everything’s square.”

Mother sleeps most of the day every day. When she wakes up I ask her why she stays in the maid’s room. “I will never sleep in the ‘master bedroom’ again.” Why not? “Because I’m not a slave,” she says.

I come to look in on Mother every day. Dreams send words to her lips like “elevators” and “lightning.”

“Do you know what it’s like to be a bastard?” Mother asks me. “Your father was a bastard, too, Eleanor, and
his
father was Thomas Edison. That makes him and me both real bastards, because
my
father was Thomas Cushing, a real son of a bitch, and Atomic Tom’s father was John Patrick Cushing, the son who raped me. But you’re not a bastard, are you?” I tell her to tell me something I don’t know.

Outside there are little children in costumes, ghosts and devils and superheroes in capes, but inside Mother is in her own world. “You need to know what really happened,” she says. “Because you need to go back.” Why would anyone go back to that awful town? “To show the world,” Mother says, without saying why.

I need to know more, I need to know everything, but today Mother never wakes up.

December 6, 1970

Mother is sleeping (again) so I kill time. There are pictures everywhere in her penthouse, all of them posed, pictures of Mother and Father together in front of our fireplace, then each of them alone, then each of
us
alone, pictures of all of us together outside The Big House in Southampton. In front of my own eyes I turn 10, then 12, then 17. Tom’s hand on my shoulder in the picture makes me shiver, as if I’ve seen a ghost.

Is she trying to say goodbye? Mother asks that all of us, even Tom, come together for the first time since God knows when. Rebecca comes early to take pictures. She labors over the lighting, staring at dials that ring her neck. Diana arrives, breathless. She is now a senior editor at
Imagine
, sure one day to ascend to the editorial throne, and she reeks of perfume and the pitter-pat of petty talk. Tom comes late and last and none of us say a word to him. He has become huge, gargantuan, a bear upright in the woods, broad across the shoulders and the beam, a bristle of hair cut like a brush across the top, his skin scrubbed and gleaming, his shirt so tight across his chest it looks like the buttons might explode. We crowd into Mother’s matchbox room. She sits up in bed, her white hair fine and roped behind her, like a fuse, her face the hard mask that means someone is in trouble. “I know what you’ve done to the girls,” Mother says to Tom. “And I hope you rot in hell.”

“She’s not so good today,” Sliv says. “She’s never so good around Christmas.” Shouldn’t you be home Christmas Day? I say. “I had to make sure Missus O’Kell was all right,” Sliv says. “She hasn’t been so good around the holidays, not so good at all. And nobody should be alone for Christmas.” Least of all your own mother, I tell him.

January 8, 1971

I tell Mother for the first time about my rape by Tom. In my own words. For the first time we cry together.

January 9, 1971

It’s like Mother’s come alive, as if my news about Tom and the bomb put the taste of blood back in her mouth. I need you to start at the beginning, I say. “Oh, I was beautiful in the beginning, Eleanor, so beautiful, more beautiful than I could even believe. I had this beautiful chestnut hair, big hanging hanks of it, and there was nothing I couldn’t do with my life in the beginning.” And then? “Think of it, Eleanor! To be raped by a Cushing, by John Patrick Cushing! I had to marry your father so that I could have that child, your own misbegotten half-brother Tom, a baby born with too much Cushing by half. After that I wasn’t the woman I
should
have been,
could
have been,
would
have been. Life itself leaked out of me, Eleanor. Can’t you smell the stink of it?”