“You once told me the grade-school nuns were Old World, even in Wisconsin. And that the Christian Brothers ran a tight ship in your high school too.”
“Apparently they did, if Sean and I graduated as virgins. He died one too. Poor bastard.” Max sighed. “That was the purpose of Catholic same-sex education. Worked for quite some time, until the free workforce dried up.”
Max momentarily shut his eyes. Behind his studied cynicism, an image was assembling in pieces like a torn photograph. Gaptoothed twelve-year-old grin, a freckled face growing angular with hints of a man’s strength. Sean. As redheaded Irish as a leprechaun. Max was Black Irish. Dark hair, no freckles sprouting in sunshine as freely as mushrooms do in the shade for him. Always a flat-black dark seriousness beneath any age-appropriate banter. Temper. An icy vengeful temper that gives nothing away, and no quarter. And never forgets, without the intervention of amnesia … even now.
That surge of teenage memory and emotion shook him. If he was getting pieces of himself back, he couldn’t control them as he’d probably learned to by age thirty-four, the hard way. He’d have to recall and reclaim every stupid, vain, idiotic, maybe crazy puzzle piece and subdue it again. Apparently Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella had been that obsessed. Apparently Garry Randolph, Gandolph the Great, cared enough to do his very best to fulfill that man’s crazy boyish bequest.
Max clapped the old man on the back. “You’ve teased your audience-of-one’s attention to the breath-stopping point, Gandolph. Show me the payoff behind the facade.”
Sister Mary Robert Emmet was older than God, who was older than Earth.
She wore a long black gown, and fanciful arrangements of starched white linen surrounded her face and shoulders, but the “penguin” look framed features worn with incalculable worry.
“Perhaps Mr. Randolph told you, Mr… . ?”
“Kinsella.”
A slash of sunshine flickered on the shadowed terrain, a smile.
“Irish, then. But American too, by your accent. I am something of a museum curator here at the convent. I am the ‘media liaison,’ God help me. I don’t even know what media is—are?—these days. Mr. Randolph swore to me on the tenets of his Lutheran faith, sadly disused, that what I have to impart is key to the salvation of your soul.”
Max wanted to blush. This situation was quite impossible. Damn Gandolph and his sometimes almost-Irish way with words. Max wasn’t sure he had a soul, or that it could be saved. This ancient nun, for all her weary sorrow, had a tried sort of innocence he found impossible to dismiss with mockery.
“I’d be honored if you’d suspend your rules for my benefit,” he said with a courtly bow. He was tall enough to pull off a bow even nowadays. And magician enough. “I can’t guarantee a saved soul, but perhaps a soothed one.”
“Very wise, young man. Salvation is not up to us. Only the effort. Well, what I am going to show and tell you was mostly before my time and place, thank God, and there is much denial even to this day. No institution—political, military, or religious—seems free of the cardinal sin of pride.”
Max was glad she wasn’t a priest, because he’d have to confess that he was jogging partners with that particular sin. He’d detected it in himself several dozen times in the week or so he remembered in detail. It had tempted him to sleep with a woman, fornicate, they’d call it here. Pride had helped him survive, though, and now it urged him to control his remaining slight limp as their footsteps echoed down a long wood-floored hall.
Sister Mary Robert Emmet, named for the Virgin and a long-ago “martyred” Irish patriot hung for his freedom fighting, led them down halls paneled in coffered, worm-eaten wood, then over tiled floors, through echoing rooms barren as very old buildings are, so that even antique luxury seems penitential.
Max felt panic rising, as if he were tunneling into a burrow of old-fashioned confession boxes or torture chambers. Even without much of a memory, he’d considered himself a modern man, a strong and clever man, a man who could cope. All that bracing outer ego was melting away. He was a kid again, facing the clawed fingers skittering from under the bed, the darkness in the corners of the closet, the King Kong in the basement, the mouse gnawing at his brain while he dreamed… .
Sister Mary Robert Emmet led them to a walled exterior garden, devoid of everything but the green moss that cloaks every stone in Ireland.
“This is where they found the bodies,” she said in her lilting Irish croon, as if reciting playwright Sean O’Casey at a wake. “Almost a hundred and fifty in unmarked graves. All women and girls. Ireland has long been a killing ground, and this is one of our hidden holocaust sites. The other wing of the … house … was the orphanage.
“Who knows where those unwanted babes went, into what situations, good or bad? Here the unwed mothers and the girls who were thought to be ungovernable were buried alive for years and then buried in unmarked graves when their eternal sentence to Mother Church was done. They were considered sinners or bound to be such. Their names were changed; they were lost to kith and kin, and they served God as scullions and laundresses, paid almost nothing and punished for merely being, while the convents thrived on the labor of their salvations, until these lost ones died, unrecognized even then.
“These grounds, of which there were many in Ireland and all over Europe, were called Magdalen asylums or houses or laundries, and they persisted until the current century, Mr. Kinsella. Until past the millennium. Certainly until you, Mr. Randolph says, came here as a boy in search of the troubled but colorful legendry of the Auld Sod.”
“Oh, my God,” Max said.
Sister bowed her head. “Mr. Randolph said you are afflicted with memory loss, that you have forgotten much of your personal past and even some of the world’s. I pray you may forget or at least forgive this piece of our common world.”
“Is that all you can do, pray for forgiveness?”
“I’m stationed here to pray daily for the dead, not for myself.”
Max could only look to his current guide, his past mentor.
“And Kathleen O’Connor?” he asked, afraid.
Gandolph must have primed the place’s sister-keeper well. She continued without question of hesitation.
“She was doubly cursed—or blessed—to be here, as they thought at the time. She was both an adopted ‘orphan’ child of a Magdalen laundress and in her turn an ‘incorrigible’ girl resident of this place. The records show they gave her the name Rebecca. She gave up a baby to the orphanage when she was sixteen. How she’d managed such a scandal under lock and key remained a mystery. She ‘escaped’ when she was seventeen.”
Max could understand why.
He wanted to turn and scrabble away screaming at what that short history of one young woman would mean to anyone who encountered her ever after.
Kathleen O’Connor’s body lay buried in a potter’s field in Las Vegas, but surely her unbroken but mangled spirit must haunt this place eternally.
Meow Mix
There is no such thing as an old cat’s home, unless you consider being dropped off at an animal shelter with a murderous overpopulation problem or abandoned on the street to be a nice retirement package.
I am not exactly a kit myself, but Three O’Clock has gotten a lot more creaky about the pins since last I saw him.
“What made you think you could stay at the old restaurant?” I ask him as soon as we are tucked away among the black video-camera cases in the back of the Channel 6 van. “That joint looked closed. Why did the old guys not forcibly take you with them when they decamped?”
“Because I did not want to go and I got ‘lost’ on purpose,” he huffs, trying to get comfy with his chin propped on a case.