Blood Rubies Read online

  James Dolan lumbered down the hall and through the open door of the large, darkened bedroom at the end. A sharp gale of tinny laughter erupting from the television behind her made Katherine jump. She turned round and flicked off the set.

  “Kathy,” her father called, “you come in now and read to me.”

  Katherine lingered a moment longer, staring at the small tapestry of the Last Supper that was hung above the couch. She nervously fingered the hard ruby that pierced the lobe of her left ear. At last, when her father called again, she took her book from the table and advanced toward the partially opened door of her parents’ bedroom.

  The shade on the bedside table lamp had been tilted, and the room was in heavy shadow. James Dolan lay on the bed with two pillows propping him against the scarred mahogany headboard. He was flicking the ashes of his cigarette into the ashtray that rested on the smooth flesh of his bare chest. His belt buckle had been loosened, and the bulge had returned beneath his gray cotton work pants. Katherine’s hands tightened on her book.

  James Dolan patted the mattress beside him. “Come sit over here, Kathy.”

  Katherine moved to the bed. James Dolan crushed his cigarette and set the ashtray aside. He took the book out of her hands, glanced at the title, and then dropped it on the floor. Katherine blinked in surprise.

  “It’s cold in here, Kathy. Give your daddy a hug to warm him up.” He took her hand and held it flat against his belly. Then he drew her down close to him.

  2

  When Katherine was thirteen her menstrual cycle began. The unexpected blood so frightened her that she thought it was God’s punishment for what her father had been doing to her—a vengeful stigmata. When she realized she could control neither the flow of blood nor the cramps that made her ill, she went in desperation to Anne Dolan. Her mother told her only that all women were cursed with such a bloody discharge, and commented that none deserved it more than Katherine. After that Katherine never again brought up the subject with her mother, but would find, each month thereafter near the time of her period, a box of sanitary napkins tucked into her top bureau drawer.

  Katherine accepted the monthly bleeding as a deserved penance. She was certain that her mother exaggerated when she said that all women were thus afflicted; she could not imagine that the Slaves of the Immaculate Conception also experienced this biological event, and finally decided that the women of the Convent of Saint Agnes had been miraculously spared the humiliation as reward for placing their lives in the service of God.

  At about this time Katherine’s sleep became haunted by dreams—dreams that were no less disturbing for their being bright and joyous. In them she was always happy, her hair always fixed prettily, her clothes costly and flattering. She played with girls her age and was ever their favored companion, sought after, adored, and emulated. Even when her father appeared in these dreams—his shadow looming first upon an endless wall behind her—she would stare up at him without fear, almost without recognition. When he tried to touch her, she avoided him easily and still was not afraid. By the time she was fourteen Katherine began to think that perhaps the girl in her dreams was a vision of what she might someday become, and this prospect disturbed her the more. In the dreams were no nuns, no sense of the presence of God; sometimes she would see young men vying for her favor and herself accepting one or another, and although they were innocent, even gallant exchanges, she found these visions to be the most sinful of all.

  When she entered the last year of the junior high school level, Katherine felt substantial alienation from her classmates as their conversation turned increasingly to the topics of hairstyles, clothes, rock music, and boyfriends. Katherine found their preoccupations distasteful, and it dismayed her that so many of the girls drank liquor and smoked—with or without their parents’ knowledge. She went into an agony of conscience whether she ought not tell the nuns which of the girls had admitted to trying marijuana. Talk of sex immediately put Katherine to flight.

  By the time she graduated into the high school of ImCon, Katherine had only two interests in her life: her studies and the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. Unfortunately, no matter that Katherine read every assignment through twice, studied three or four hours for the simplest exam, and worked for weeks on every paper, she seemed never to struggle above C grades; however, on her report cards year after year, these were recorded as B-minuses by the nuns, who knew how hard Katherine tried.

  She would have done better work in school had her thoughts not so unremittingly centered upon the convent. As she read about Charlemagne and Renaissance art, her mind would drift to the spotless halls and spare chambers of the convent. She thought she could hear the sisters’ soft, squeaky tread on the quarry tiles, smell the odd combination of incense and starch that pervaded the convent’s atmosphere, taste the particular kind of China tea that was brewed there in astonishing quantity. She cast herself in the role of confidante to the nuns and imagined that she heard the secular confessions of this nun and that as they walked those quiet halls together. They would seek her advice on the problem of a difficult student; they would request her assistance on some outing with the younger classes. Time and again Katherine lost herself in these reveries, which were likely to capture her at any hour of the day, but were particularly distracting when she was at ImCon, so near to the cloistered halls.

  Katherine was certainly not disliked by her classmates, but she knew that they patronized her. At least once a week, a girl would offer to set up a double date with her brother or promise to accompany Katherine to Filene’s Basement or the Lodge in Harvard Square, where she might find attractive “with-it” outfits. Katherine always thanked the girl profusely, but said she was busy on the day suggested for these mild adventures. Because ImCon required a uniform—green plaid skirt, white blouse, black stockings—Katherine did not stick out from the ranks of the other girls so much as would have been the case had they all been clothed out of their own closets. The fact was that the most stylish outfit that Katherine had was her school uniform. She was actually embarrassed for her classmates when she met them on the street on Saturday and Sunday; their pants and their short skirts, their halter tops and their tight sweaters seemed to her only gaudy and whorish. How could Christ love a woman who went without a brassiere?

  The stark white wimples and flowing black robes of the Slaves of the Immaculate Conception set off their flawless pale complexions as though they were fine porcelain, and their beatific features seemed painted with the finest brushes and the purest inks. Katherine thought the heavy pewter crucifixes about their necks and the heavy-beaded rosaries dangling from their belts far more desirable than the jewels hung in the windows of Shreve Crump & Low. Katherine disapproved of the current practice of nuns wearing “street clothes” and taking up residence in apartment complexes or rooming houses. She could not understand how a nun could devote herself wholeheartedly to her calling and her God when she was at liberty to live and dress as the lay population of the community. Katherine could see little sacrifice in that kind of life.

  In her senior year Katherine grew particularly attached to Sister Mary Claire. The small, stout nun was now sixty, with clear, bright-blue eyes behind the round silver frames of her glasses. Katherine had been delighted when the nun had earned a certificate that enabled her to transfer from teaching in the lower grades to the high school. They had come up exactly together. Sister Mary Claire had no end of energy, and her classes in ancient and European history were lively and popular. But no matter how attentively Katherine listened to Sister Mary Claire, how detailed her notes, or how many hours late into the night she reread her texts, she did no better here than in any of her other classes.

  Of the few gifts that Katherine received that Christmas of 1977, her last year at ImCon, two were important to her. The first was a joint presentation by the nuns of the Convent of St. Agnes, in grateful recognition of all the cheerful wo
rk that Katherine had performed over the six years. It was a simple gold pendant that contained a tiny chip of bone from the thigh of Saint Adelaide, tenth-century empress of the Roman Empire, who had given up power, honor, and wealth to enter a convent. The relic had been blessed by the last pope but one, and thus was doubly sacred to Katherine.

  The second gift was from Sister Mary Claire alone: a small gilt-edged volume bound in fine oxblood leather, with a gold latch and a gold key.

  “It’s a diary,” said Sister Mary Claire, when Katherine appeared puzzled why a book should have a lock on it.

  “A diary?”

  “Yes, Katherine dear, for your personal observations and meditations. I keep a diary,” smiled Sister Mary Claire, “and I can’t tell you how often it’s proved a comfort to me. A diary is a perfect sounding board for our brightest hopes and deepest fears. It should of course always be employed only in conjunction with regular and full confessional.”

  Never having kept an account of her activities or thoughts, Katherine was not sure what information about herself she should inscribe on the thin, almost transparent pages. She wished that Sister Mary Claire had given her a better idea of what sort of thing she wrote in her own diary, but Katherine had been so surprised to discover that Sister Mary Claire stood sometimes in need of comfort and consolation that she had not the presence of mind to question the nun. Katherine could think of nothing in her own life that was worth the trouble of recording.

  “What do you think I should write about?” she asked Sister Mary Claire on the following day, as they stood in line next to one another in the school cafeteria.

  “About what matters to you, of course. You could, oh say, describe your parents, talk about the house you live in and the people in your neighborhood and what seasons you like best. Once you’ve started, it will be difficult to stop. There are a million billion things in our lives that are worth taking notice of, Katherine, even in lives that are as quiet as ours . . .”

  Katherine was thrilled that Sister Mary Claire would say such a thing as “lives as quiet as ours,” because it suggested that they were almost spiritual equals. But Katherine was brought down a little when she realized that when she said “ours,” Sister Mary Claire meant not the lives of herself and Katherine, but rather those of herself and the other Slaves of the Immaculate Conception.

  That evening, Katherine shoved a chair against the doorknob—her father kept the only key to her room—sat down at her little writing table, and opened the diary. She decided to begin with a description of her parents, but stopped mid-page, flushed with embarrassment, when she realized that everything she had written was uncomplimentary and disapproving. She tore out the page and cut it up into tiny pieces, which she hid in her pocketbook so that her mother couldn’t find them and piece them together again.

  James and Anne Dolan would have no place in Katherine’s diary.

  Instead, she made a list of all the nuns whom she knew by name and noted after each her position and duties in the convent. Then she listed all the religious holy days and the special prayers that were accorded to each. She ruled off half a page and made a little diagram of the nuns’ sleeping quarters; she showed where Sister Mary Claire’s room was and marked which windows had the best view. Then she went back over the past week and told what work she had done at the convent each day and how the nuns had praised her pious industry. Though she had filled three and a half pages in her tiny, crabbed script, Katherine wanted to go on, but she forced herself to close the book and lock it, to preserve for herself the pleasure of writing more the next day.

  Katherine kept her diary on the top shelf of her locker at school. She dared not leave it at home, for she knew that her mother, upon pretense of cleaning, searched through her room every day. Every Monday afternoon Katherine took the red leather book with her to study hall and wrote about the previous day’s services in the church; on Wednesday she described that morning’s confessional; and on Friday she told of the week’s work in the convent, the school’s day-care center, or the church’s charity kitchen.

  More than once Katherine told Sister Mary Claire how much she appreciated her gift and how much the diary had come to mean to her; but she was always disappointed that the sister did not ask permission to examine the book.

  In the first week of March, on a Tuesday, Katherine took the diary home, shut herself in her room, and, in an unsteady hand, while dropping tears on the pages, wrote of the death of Sister Bibiana, a nun in her late forties who had taught Katherine American literature. She had died in the collision of a trailer-truck with the taxi in which she had been riding. At the end of this unhappy entry Katherine inscribed passages from the Mass for the Dead, which she knew by heart, pronouncing each word silently as she wrote it.

  That night Katherine cried herself to sleep, unable to drive from her mind the picture of dark-robed Sister Bibiana struggling wildly to free herself from the fiery backseat of the taxi on the rain-soaked roadway beside the Charles River.

  The teaching vacancy left by the death of Sister Bibiana created a problem for the School of the Immaculate Conception. The nuns who were certified to teach literature at the high school level had full teaching loads already, and the principal of the school reluctantly decided that a lay teacher must be hired to fill out the semester.

  On the Monday morning after Sister Bibiana’s Saturday funeral, when Katherine entered her American literature class, she was greatly surprised to see at the front of the classroom not a nun—not a woman at all—but a handsome young man whose name, Mark Robbins, was scrawled on the blackboard behind him.

  Katherine slid into her seat near the back of the room and beside a window that looked out onto a side wall of the convent; but today, instead of hoping for glimpses of the nuns in the windows of their chambers, she fastened her eyes on Mark Robbins.

  Once she had got over the oddity of a man’s conducting the class, she realized that she felt a decided resentment against him. No matter how affable he tried to make himself, no matter how much he stressed his willingness to help the students in any way he could, Katherine knew that she would not be able to confide in him if she had difficulty in the interpretation of a Robert Frost poem or a short story by Saroyan.

  Sister Bibiana had always been lenient in grading, and Katherine’s marks in her classes were, she knew, better than she had deserved. Watching Mark Robbins, Katherine had uneasy visions of long and difficult reading assignments, unduly hard examinations, and low grades on her report card. Katherine did not hear the dismissal bell, and looked around her surprised when the other students suddenly rose from their chairs and began to file out.

  Mark Robbins cast a brief, curious glance in her direction. Katherine blinked, and realized that she’d been staring at him through narrowed eyes for a full fifty minutes. She gathered her books and hurried out of the room, almost in tears; whether she was more angry than embarrassed, she didn’t know.

  That night Katherine’s sleep was restless with uneasy dreams. Again she dreamt of herself, but an altered self: her blond hair was longer and fell in soft waves about her face. She had slight, subtle makeup about her eyes and cheeks. She wore expensive dresses that, although tasteful, emphasized—rather than hid—her full figure. She had numberless friends her own age, as fashionably got up as herself, with whom she laughed and talked as if nothing in the world were more natural than that she should be popular and admired.

  The next morning, her mother commented on how “poorly” she looked. “Nuns are working you too hard, Kathy, that’s what’s wrong with you.”

  “No, Ma,” returned Katherine, “it was only the dreams that I had. I think I had dreams all night long.”

  “Just like you used to,” said her mother.

  “What? I never dreamed like that before, did I?”

  “Yes, you most certainly did. When you were twelve, you had dreams
all night long, every night. I remember well enough: you used to wake me up every morning at four and say you didn’t want to dream anymore. Those dreams started right at the time you got the curse.”

  Katherine blushed and asked, “What did I dream about?”

  “About a little girl. You.”

  “Me?”

  “Now I suppose you’re dreaming about the nuns all night long.”

  “No,” said Katherine uneasily, “I’m not . . .”

  3

  Katherine’s resentment of her only male teacher was short lived; soon she found herself looking forward eagerly each day to Mark Robbins’s class. She stayed up late at night in order to read through every assignment twice and then kept herself awake in bed, imagining what questions he might ask of her and formulating loquacious replies to them. She began, in fact, to create entire dialogues between him and her on the subject of Vachel Lindsay’s poems or Thornton Wilder’s plays, in which the rest of the class sat by silent and jealous of their camaraderie.

  Mark Robbins was in his early twenties, with close-cropped auburn hair, large dark eyes, a square, strong-featured face, and a ruddy complexion that held a year-round tan. He was not much taller than she and had broad shoulders and a slender, athletic body. It did not escape Katherine’s notice, although she felt some guilt about it, how Mark’s shirts on warm days clung damply to his chest so that the faint outline of curly hair was visible through the white cotton.

  The final weeks of Katherine’s senior year went by rapidly. Prom committees were formed, yearbooks were distributed, concerts and exhibits were given by the various clubs and organizations within the school; throughout the senior class there prevailed an air of great expectancy. Katherine was unhappy, however, and refused to participate in either the senior dance or the senior picnic. She could not understand why all her classmates were so excited by the prospect of leaving ImCon behind; ImCon was Katherine’s greatest happiness—almost her only happiness—and the thought that a single ceremony, on June third, would sever her from that contentment was almost more than she could bear. When the nuns asked her why she seemed so dispirited, Katherine replied that it was only the thought of final examinations.