Charisma Read Free Page B

me at all,” Susan said. “They certainly wouldn’t be writing now.”
    “I think now was exactly when they’d write.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it, Mary Jerome.”
    Mary Jerome stared at the pamphlet Susan was unwrapping, glossy and four-colored and crammed full of pictures of the Virgin on a cloud, GOOD NEWS FOR CATECHISTS , was written across the top of it. “I would never have entered the kind of order where I’d be the one buying catechisms instead of Reverend Mother. I mean, why would I have bothered? What’s the point of being a nun if you’re going to run around in makeup and live in an apartment?”
    Susan almost said: What’s the point of being a nun? But she had answers to that question, better ones than Mary Jerome had, and she could only have asked it out of spite.
    She dumped the circulars back into their manila envelope and took out the only interesting thing, a small box wrapped in brown paper, the kind of box samples of toothpaste came in when you lived in a suburban house. It had been addressed by hand.
    Mary Jerome eyed it, the envy plain on her face, turning her ugly. “Is that from one of your former students? If it is, it’ll be a tube of hand lotion. That’s what they always send. Scentless hand lotion.”
    It wasn’t a tube of hand lotion. It was a five-decade rosary, made out of amber, a slightly more expensive-looking version of the kind of thing laypeople used when they said “a third part.” Mary Jerome’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead to the edge of her veil, making her look Neanderthal.
    “Good Lord,” she said. “Who’d send a rosary to a nun?”
    Susan closed her eyes and told herself: I am not a nun.
    I.
    Am.
    Not.
    A.
    Nun.

Chapter Three
1
    Y EARS AGO, LONG BEFORE he was even old enough for high school, Pat Mallory used to come up to Edge Hill Road to see the houses. In those days, New Haven was a “nice” town, a half-city with an urban feel but a country rhythm. It was also solidly Catholic. With the exception of Yale, an Anglo-Saxon fortress spread out across Prospect and Chapel streets and tucked into the trees on the narrow offshoots of the business district, New Haven then might as well have been dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Maybe it had been. What he remembered most about those trips up the hill were the names on the mailboxes. Meehan, Carroll, Hanrahan, Burke: all those great stone houses, seven and eight and nine thousand square feet big; all those broad front lawns; all those long black cars; all of it, every piece of it, Irish. A year or two later, when Kennedy was inaugurated and the nuns at school opened every class by thanking God for putting a Catholic in the White House, Pat had thought he’d finally understood. Edge Hill Road was the kind of place people like the Kennedys came from.
    Now, getting out of the car into the cold stiff wind of the dark December 2 morning, he half wished he were ten years old again. The great stone houses were still there, but they meant less to him than they once had. Everything did. Three abortive years on scholarship at a very expensive Jesuit college in New York had taught him that Edge Hill Road was not the kind of place Kennedys came from. It didn’t represent enough money, and it was too close to town. Seventeen years with the New Haven Police Department had taught him that New Haven wasn’t a very “nice” town, not anymore, and that it was getting less nice all the time. Lately he had begun to wonder why he was living in it. The neighborhood where he had grown up, with half a dozen brothers and sisters stuffed into seven rooms and a statue of the Virgin on the front lawn, was now a crack alley. The street in front of Holy Name School was lined with prostitutes. The Green was full of bums. Sometimes he felt like a science-fiction version of Rip Van Winkle: a man who has been asleep just long enough for his world to have turned into the antithesis of itself.
    Still, it looked strange, a