“Rose, is Jack in the morgue?” I ask.
“Oh God, working on that poor kid.” Rose gets off the subject of me, and her indignation turns to pity. “Lord, Lord. Have you seen him?”
“I just got here…”
“Looks like a little choir boy. Just the most beautiful blue-eyed blond. Lord, Lord. If that was my child…”
I interrupt Rose by putting a finger to my lips as I hear Cleta coming up the hallway with the boy’s poor mother. I mouth his mother to Rose and she gets quiet. Her eyes linger on mine. She is fidgety and high-strung this morning, and dressed severely in black, her hair pulled back and pinned up, reminding me of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. “I’m okay,” I tell her quietly.
“Well, I don’t believe that.” Her eyes get dewy and she nervously busies herself with paperwork.
Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has decimated my entire staff. Everyone who knows and depends on me is dismayed, bewildered. They don’t completely trust me anymore and secretly anguish over what will happen to their lives and jobs. I am reminded of my worst moment in school when I was twelve like Lucy, precocious, the youngest in my class. My father died that school year on December 23, and the only thing good I can find in his waiting until two days before Christmas is at least the neighbors were winding down from work, most of them home and cooking and baking. In the good Italian-Catholic tradition, my father’s life was celebrated with abundance. For several days, our house was filled with laughter, tears, food, drink and song.
When I returned to school after the New Year, I became even more relentless in my cerebral conquests and explorations. Making perfect scores on tests was no longer enough. I was desperate for attention, desperate to please, and begged the nuns for special projects, any project, I didn’t care what. Eventually, I was hanging around the parochial school all afternoon, beating chalkboard erasers on the school steps, helping the teachers grade tests, putting together bulletin boards. I got very good with scissors and staplers. When there was a need to cut out letters of the alphabet or numbers and exactly assemble them into words, sentences, calendars, the nuns came looking for me.
Martha was a girl in my math class who sat in front of me and never spoke. She glanced back at me a lot, cold but curi-ous, always trying to catch a peek at the grades circled in red on top of my folded homework and tests, hopeful she had scored better than I had. One day, after an especially difficult algebra test, I noticed that Sister Teresa’s demeanor toward me decidedly chilled. She waited until I was cleaning erasers again, squatting outside on stucco steps, pounding, creating clouds of chalk dust in the winter tropical sun, and I looked up. There she was in her habit, towering over me like a giant, frowning Antarctic bird wearing a crucifix. Someone had accused me of cheating on my algebra test, and although Sister Teresa did not identify the source of this lie, I had no doubt of the culprit: Martha. The only way I could prove my innocence was to take the test again and make another perfect score.
Sister Teresa watched me closely after that. I dared never let my eyes stray from what I was doing at my desk. Several days passed. I was emptying the trash baskets, just the two of us alone in the classroom, and she told me I must pray constantly that God would keep me free of sin. I must thank our Heavenly Father for the great gifts I have and look to Him to keep me honest, because I was so smart I could get away with a lot of things. God knows everything, Sister Teresa said. I can’t fool God. I protested that I was honest and not trying to fool God and she could ask God herself. I began to cry. “I am not a cheater,” I sobbed. “I want my daddy.”
When I was at Johns Hopkins in my first year of medical school, I wrote Sister Teresa a letter and recounted that wrenching, unfair incident. I reiterated my innocence, still bothered, still furious that I had been falsely accused and the nuns didn’t defend me and never seemed quite as sure of me afterward.