The Passion of Mary-Margaret (23 page)

Rosalie answered the door to her row house, a two-story, narrow affair covered with postwar Formstone in the block between Eastern Avenue and Fleet Street.

I imagine she puttied on a fair amount of makeup for her act, but standing there behind the screen door, she looked sixteen, her brown hair feathering around her shoulders, her pale skin a perfect ivory expanse but for the pink blush of her cheeks. Her greenish grey eyes, hit from the side by the sunlight, glowed with gold flecks. An older baby sat on her hip.

“Mary-Margaret!” she said, her smile broad and baring pleasingly crooked teeth that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn's. “The club called and let me know you were coming. Come in!”

“Thank you.” I felt large and oafish when I stepped into her home. I'm not a large woman by any means, but Rosalie wouldn't have surprised me if she'd taken off her pink sweater and shown me a pair of shimmering wings. Ethereal didn't begin to describe her.

And yet, her home was quite the opposite. A heavy old wood-framed couch upholstered in gold and white damask, once likely her grandmother's or, well, somebody's grandmother's, was set against the green sidewall. Dime-store prints hung on the walls, mostly depicting opaque flowers in bulbous vases against dark backgrounds, what Morpheus calls “Almost Flemish.”

“Come keep me company while I make dinner.”

I skirted the television—she must have done pretty well to have afforded one back then—and followed her back to the kitchen as she chattered about Jude.

“I've known him for almost ten years now and he's told me so much about you, Mary-Margaret! I feel like I know you already!”

We could have been women meeting at the park, or at church.

She set the baby, dressed in a light blue dress, white tights, and black patent leather Mary-Janes, into a mahogany Jenny Lind high chair. “Just a minute, Alice, and I'll get you some din-din.”

Alice was almost bald with bright blue eyes—the picture of vulnerable innocence, naturally. I wondered if she'd ever find out what her mother did for a living or if Rosalie would quit by the time Alice could figure out something wasn't quite normal around their home. People have kept secrets far longer, I suppose, and double lives aren't so uncommon that nobody's ever heard of one before.

Rosalie motioned to a chrome chair upholstered in off-white vinyl with silver flecks. “Have a seat if you'd like. We're about to eat dinner. I eat early so I can have time with Alice before I leave for the club.”

“Who watches her when you're working?”

“Oh, my husband, Jack. He'll be home soon too. You're welcome to join us for a bite if you have the time.”

I shook my head, the wonderment obvious on my face.

She laughed. “It would take all night to explain it and neither of us have that kind of time, I'll warrant.” She rubbed her hands down the sides of her black skinny pants, then pushed back her bangs. Even a little harried and worn by the day, she was beautiful and glamorous in a carefree, natural way, as if her costumes and makeup colored in some of the missing bits. Her body, thin and lithe, didn't seem to be that of a stripper, her breasts small. She didn't ooze sex appeal. She did look French though, very
classy and continental. Maybe that provided its own sort of fantasy for those oafish men who would never get the opportunity to bed a woman with such seeming style and grace.

I became painfully aware of my shoes because it's one thing to wear such sensible shoes when you're a religious sister, but as a person on the street, well, it says more about you than you'd like someone else to know. Perhaps. Or it might just say you have corns and bunions. Which I didn't.

Oh dear.

“So you must have met Jude when he first made it to town?” I asked.

“Oh yes! Young and angry with everything to prove but nothing to show for it and very little to concretely offer in the long run. Especially coming from a place as remote as Abbeyville. We see those types all the time down there on Baltimore Street. But I liked Jude. We took him in for a few weeks until he found his feet. I tried to guide him a little, to not take it all so seriously, that it would kill him if he didn't view it as a job and nothing more.”

“Jude could never do that.”

“You're exactly right.” She leaned down and extracted a can of peas from the bottom cupboard, then slid open a drawer and plucked out a can opener. “Peas!” She jiggled the can at Alice. “Your favorite, sweet girl!”

I could barely take all of it in. Rosalie—LaBella. Housewife by day, stripper by night. How in heaven's name did she find herself at home in both worlds? Leering men, feathers, bumps and grinds on the one hand, canned peas, diapers, bibs, and sea foam green cabinets on the other? A dinette, for goodness sake!

I couldn't help it. “I just can't add up what I'm seeing here.”

She ground the blades into the top of the can. “It's like this. They're just breasts. That's all I bare.”

“But they're your breasts.”

“I know it's not the best of choices for a job, but I landed it years and years ago. I'd run away from home. Can we talk about Jude, Mary-Margaret? I don't know how you will possibly understand me.”

She was right. “If you'd like. I'm sorry.”

“No offense taken. So anyway, Jude and I have remained close friends over the years. Never intimate in any way. I never found him all that attractive.”

“Really?!” I blurted out.

“Well, your reaction is most women's when it comes to him, I'll tell you that.”

My cheeks burned and she laughed.

“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“About a week ago. He was planning on heading to Europe, he'd said, but came home to do one more piece of business. I don't know what it was. Said he'd been out to the island and saw you, but just couldn't bear to drag you any further into his life. Then he went to the doctor for a fever, headache, and a rash on his abdomen. I told him it might be scarlatina and he shouldn't mess with that. Well, he ended up with a diagnosis of syphilis.”

“Oh no!”

She turned on the burner beneath the pan of peas, reached into the refrigerator, and pulled out a pound of ground beef. “Hamburgers,” she said. “Mashed potatoes and gravy too. Sure you can't stay?”

I shook my head almost wildly. She just told me someone had syphilis and then, another dinner invite. What a wacky world.

I didn't know much about syphilis. I'd have to get to the library.

“Yes, thank you, I'm sure. So after the diagnosis, what did he say?”

“He changed his plans. Said he didn't feel like going overseas after all.” She handed the baby some zwieback. Alice smashed it against her gums and grinned.

“What about the trouble he was in due to drugs?”

“He had a windfall. Probably bribed somebody important after he did his business with him.”

“That doesn't sound like Jude.”

“No. You're right. He's always been straightforward. Anyway, I didn't ask where the money came from. Jude doesn't confide in anybody, anyway.”

He always did with me, I thought.

Rosalie began to form the ground beef into patties. “The truth is, Mary-Margaret, the light had gone out of him. I don't know how to describe it, but something happens there on The Block. If you make it your entire life, pieces of you die. At least that's what I've noticed. I don't know if it's possible to see it when it's happening to you. I doubt many of the folks down there would say they weren't all they used to be. But it's true. And when enough dies, you either slink away or end up down at the mission.”

“What mission?”

“Brother Joe's. The Catholic priest down there. Heart of the City Mission. Does some good work with the alkies and the streetwalkers. Started up sometime after the war. Good man. Anyway, Jude found himself there and it scared him. Then the diagnosis came”—she sighed and laid a patty on top of the other two she'd formed while speaking—“and that was it for him.”

“So where did he go?”

“I'm not sure. All he said was that he was going to the place he should have never left in the first place. As I said, about a week ago.”

“Did he ever talk about his childhood, growing up out at the lighthouse?”

“Only once. And then in passing. When I'd ask him about it, he said he didn't like to talk about it.”

I nodded, giving her the one-minute version of Jude's childhood. “I don't know who he would have been had he stayed.”

“There's a wild streak in Jude, always one to do whatever he wants. Location wouldn't have changed that, Mary-Margaret. It's like he was born to go against the grain.”

Aren't we all? I wanted to say.

I stood up. “Well, I'd better go, I guess. Thank you for your time, Rosalie. Thank you for being Jude's friend.”

She set a cast-iron pan on a burner and turned on the gas flame. “Oh, you know Jude. Despite the edges, he's not bad to be around. There's something inside there you just feel sorry for.”

Jesus didn't have to tell me where Jude was. How he got out to Bethlehem Point Light without anybody knowing was beyond me, though. Maybe he hired somebody to take him across and paid them a little extra to keep quiet about it. Most likely that was the case. It being May by this point, the waters still would have been too cold to swim and in his weakened state, a fever and all, he couldn't have made the half-mile swim anyway.

What did Hattie think when he showed up?

Thoughts like those milled about my brain as I sat on the bus back to the island. The large tires vibrated against the tar joints of the Bay Bridge, and the sight of the water that next morning, the sun throwing a healthy smattering of glitter over the waves, comforted me. Water always does. Cleansing water. Holy water.

God likes water. Of that I'm sure. We baptize with it and the people of Israel would purify themselves ritually with it. And something holy happened. I don't pretend to understand why God uses the stuff of this earth to commit holy acts for his people, why he allows the ordinary to become sacred, but I read the Old Testament rituals he designed himself for Israel, and I can't escape the fact that he uses his creation, makes it holy, to bless his people.

So that morning, the expanse of water flowing from either side of that miles-long bridge, I drank in the power of the Spirit. I remembered the
circumstances of my baptism long ago. I remembered the love of God for me. I remembered my response in kind on a Pentecost Sunday in 1941 when I felt the Holy Spirit's power flood my soul and I said, “Yes, yes,” to a life of following Jesus. I thought about the expanse of water I sat in front of for more hours than I could count, staring out at the lighthouse, the same expanse of water that now separated Jude from his bride.

His bride. Me.

I felt sick again. I'd been feeling sick a lot.

The whole syphilis revelation didn't help any either. Was he getting treatment? Was I supposed to sleep with him if he refused to get help? Was there treatment? I didn't even know. I'd get to the library later. The first order of that day was find Jude. Hopefully, that little house on the water, the light swinging round and round, had not, or would not, become his tomb.

I stepped off the Greyhound around eleven a.m. and found a ride on a produce truck to the ferry. I knew the driver slightly, a quiet sixteen-year-old named Patrick whose family owned the supermarket on the island. I sat beside him as he drove without saying much. I said little as well. It was awkward when I offered to help with the gas, but Patrick wouldn't take so much as a dime. Patrick ended up in the military, dying in Viet Nam in 1968. His wife teaches second grade on the island and is very helpful with the altar society at church. She remarried and had six children, but she keeps a picture of Patrick in her Sunday missal.

Wondering for the first time where I was going to stay, I realized I couldn't ask the sisters at St. Mary to provide a room. I'd just, in all practicality, turned my back on them, on all the years and hours they'd invested in me, loved me, rebuked me, and encouraged me. Oh, how glad I am I didn't know Sister Thaddeus was my benefactress. And when I think how she supported my decision, how she trusted me implicitly, it amazes me further.