CHAPTER 27
THE COMMUNION
POV: MAE
The Chancery smells like pine and beeswax and money.
It’s a big stone house on Lake Street in Brighton, next to the seminary, with a long gravel drive lined with lanterns and a wreath on the front door the size of a cartwheel.
Inside, everything is dark wood and red carpet and gold picture frames.
Cardinals in paintings. Popes in paintings.
A Christmas tree in the front hall so tall they’ve had to bend the angel on top sideways against the ceiling.
There are three hundred people here again. Some of the same ones from the Copley. The councilors. The judges. The woman in silver who opened her mouth.
They all turn when we come in.
It doesn’t stop the room this time. It ripples. A murmur. Heads leaning together.
That’s her. The one from the gala. The nun.
Did you hear about the Kavanagh boy?
Look at her face.
My face is fine now. The bruise is gone. There’s a faint yellow shadow along my cheekbone that the concealer Rosa bought me at CVS covers almost all the way. My lip has healed. My wrists are covered by the long black sleeves.
I’m wearing the black dress from our wedding. High neck. Long sleeves. And over my hair, pinned at the crown, falling down my back, the black lace veil that Conor Kavanagh’s people washed and sent back to me with a Mass card for his son.
Ronan’s hand is at the small of my back.
It doesn’t move from there the whole way across the room.
***
Crewe finds us in ten minutes.
He’s in his full Christmas robes. Red silk. A gold pectoral cross. A red skullcap. He looks like a painting of himself. He comes through the crowd with both hands out, and people step back for him, and he takes Ronan’s hand in both of his.
“Ronan. Merry Christmas. Thank you for coming. I know it hasn’t been an easy month.”
“No,” Ronan says.
“And Magdalene.” He turns to me. He doesn’t take my hand. He just looks at me, with his head a little on one side and his eyes soft and sad and full of understanding. “Merry Christmas, child.”
“Merry Christmas, Your Excellency.”
His eyes go to the veil and rest there, the way they rested on my throat at the Copley.
“Such a beautiful veil,” he says.
“Thank you. It was a gift.”
“Was it?”
“From a friend of my father’s.”
Something flickers behind the softness in his face. Then it’s gone.
“Well,” he says warmly. “You must both have some punch. The eggnog is terribly strong, I’m told. I’ll find you later, Magdalene.” He squeezes Ronan’s arm. “We’ll talk later, child.”
He goes.
Ronan’s hand at my back hasn’t moved.
“You all right?” he says, very low.
“Yes.”
“Your heart’s at one-twelve.”
“Stop looking at it.”
“Never.”
***
His father arrives at ten-thirty.
I feel it before I see him. Ronan’s hand at my back goes still, and then heavy, and then warm, like he’s leaning a little of his weight on me without meaning to.
Conrad Draven comes through the crowd in a camel overcoat and a red silk tie, tanned and white-haired, with the silver hound’s head of his cane in his hand. People greet him. Old men with their wives. He smiles at them, and touches arms, and bends to kiss cheeks.
He comes to us.
He doesn’t look at me. He looks at his son.
“Ronan.”
“Dad.”
I’ve never heard Ronan call him that. It comes out of him flat and strange, like a word in a language he learned as a child and hasn’t spoken since.
Conrad’s eyes are wet. Genuinely wet. I watch them fill. I watch him let them.
“Thank you for coming,” he says.
He turns to me. He takes my hand and bends and kisses it. His lips are dry and cool.
“Magdalene. You look lovely. I owe you an apology, too. I hope you’ll let me make it.”
“Of course,” I say.
His hand is still on mine. His thumb moves over my ring. The little gold rosary. The R.
“Would you give us a few minutes?” he says gently. “My son and I. There are some things I’d like to say to him that should have been said a long time ago.”
I look up at Ronan.
His face gives nothing. His eyes find mine.
“Go on,” he says. “Get some punch.”
I go.
I walk away from them across the crowded room, and I don’t look back, and I feel Conrad Draven’s eyes on my back the whole way.
***
At five minutes to eleven, the Bishop finds me by the Christmas tree.
“Magdalene,” he says softly. “Come with me, child.”
I look back across the room.
Ronan is by the fireplace with his father. Conrad has his hand on Ronan’s arm and his face close to his son’s, and he’s talking, low and urgent, and Ronan is standing absolutely still with his head bowed, listening.
It looks exactly like what it’s supposed to look like.
“Yes, Your Excellency,” I say.
***
His private study is on the second floor at the back of the house.
It’s small and warm and very quiet after the noise of the party. Book-lined walls. A fire. Two green leather armchairs facing each other across a low table. A crucifix over the mantel. A window looking out on the dark garden, where snow is falling on a statue of the Virgin.
On the table between the chairs, a crystal decanter full of something dark red. Two small glasses.
The port.
Mother Clare told me about the port. Every Christmas for ten years, he brought her up here after the reception and poured her a glass and talked to her about vocations and dowries and the cost of heating a convent. Taylor Fladgate. Twenty years old. His one indulgence, he told her.
He closes the door behind us.
He doesn’t lock it. I listen for the click, and it doesn’t come.
“Sit, child. Sit.”
I sit in the green chair nearest the fire. He sits across from me. He arranges his red silk robes over his knees.
He looks at me for a long moment with his soft eyes.
“You’re very brave,” he says. “To come.”
“I’m very frightened.”
“Of course you are. Of course.” He leans forward and takes my hand.
His palm is soft and warm and a little damp.
“You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. That man—” He glances at the door.
“That man is a monster, Magdalene. You know that. Everyone in Boston knows it. What he’s done to you.
Taken you from the Church. Taken you from God.
Bruised you.” His thumb strokes the back of my hand. “I can take all of that away.”
“Can you?”
“The annulment is already filed. By Easter, it will be as if the marriage never happened. As if he never touched you.” He smiles. “You’ll be free.”
“Free to go where?”
“To Our Lady of the Harbor. For a while. Until you’ve healed.” His thumb keeps moving. “It’s a beautiful place. By the water. Quiet. We look after our girls.”
I look down at his hand on mine.
“I’d like that,” I say.
His smile deepens.
“There’s a car,” he says. “Downstairs. At the side door. My man will take you there tonight. You won’t have to see your husband again. You won’t have to go back to that house. You won’t have to—” His voice drops. “You won’t have to share his bed.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency.”
“Before you go,” he says. He lets go of my hand and sits back. “I’d like to give you my blessing. And I’d like to drink to your freedom. A small glass. It’s Christmas.”
He reaches for the decanter.
“Let me,” I say.
He pauses.
“Please,” I say. I stand up. I smooth my black dress. I give him my convent smile. Modest. Grateful. “Let me pour. I used to pour for Mother Clare after Compline. It’s the least I can do.”
He looks at me for a moment.
Then he laughs. Warm. Pleased.
“Of course, child.”
I pick up the decanter.
It’s heavy. Cut crystal. Firelight goes through the port and turns it the color of garnets, the color of blood held up to a lamp.
I turn my back to him to take it to the sideboard by the window, where the good glasses are, and he doesn’t think anything of it, because why would he, because I’m a frightened girl from Dorchester who used to pour for the Reverend Mother.
I stand at the sideboard with my back to the Bishop of Boston.
My hands don’t shake.
Inside my left sleeve, at the wrist, where the gauze used to be, there’s a little glass vial the size of my finger. Rosa’s kitchen. A saucepan. Wednesday night, while the house slept. I did it myself. I didn’t let anyone help.
I pour his glass first.
I tip the vial in after the port.
It doesn’t change the color. It doesn’t change anything. It sinks into the dark red and is gone.
I pour my own glass. Plain.
I turn around and carry them back across the room, one in each hand, and hold his out to him.
“Merry Christmas, Your Excellency.”
He takes it.
He raises it.
“To your freedom, Magdalene,” he says. “And to your soul.”
“Amen,” I say.
He drinks.
He drinks half of it in one long, appreciative swallow, the way men drink things they love. He closes his eyes. He sighs.
“Ahh,” he says. “Twenty years old. Like you, almost.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two.” He smiles at me with his eyes closed. “So young.”
He drinks the rest.
I sit down across from him with my own glass untouched in my lap.
***
He blesses me.
He does it properly. He stands up from his chair, and lays his soft damp hand on the top of my head, on the black lace, and says the words in Latin, and makes the sign of the cross over me, slow and beautiful, three fingers.
I bow my head under his hand.
I wait.
“Now,” he says, a little breathless, taking his hand away. “Now, my dear. The car.”
He takes a step toward the door.
He stops.
He puts his hand on the back of the green chair.
“Goodness,” he says. “The eggnog.”
“Sit down, Your Excellency.”
“I think I—” He sits. Heavily. Too heavily. The chair creaks under him. He puts his hand flat on the front of his red robes, over his heart. “I think I’d better—”
He looks at me.
I’m sitting very still in my green chair with my untouched glass of port in my lap.
He looks at the glass in my lap.
Then at his own, empty, on the table.
Then at me again.
I watch him understand it. It takes a long time. Longer than my father. He’s a clever man, but he’s never once in his life been the one who didn’t know.
“You—” he says.
“Yes.”
His face goes gray. Then white. He tries to stand, and his legs don’t do it, and he falls back into the green leather with his hand clawed on his chest. His breath is coming short and ragged. Sweat has broken out on his forehead under the red skullcap.
“Help,” he says. Not loudly. He can’t manage loudly. “Help me—”
“Nobody’s coming,” I say. “My husband is downstairs. His father is keeping him occupied.”
His eyes go wide.
“You—know—”
“About Conrad? Yes. About the car at the side door? Yes. About Our Lady of the Harbor, and the girls who don’t go home, and the Monsignor who picked which ones?” I lean forward and put my untouched glass on the table beside his empty one. “Yes, Your Excellency. I know all of it.”
He’s shaking now. The red silk is shaking. His lips have gone blue at the edges.
“Why—”
I get up.
I kneel on the carpet beside his chair. Right beside it, where he can see me. I take his hand. The soft, damp hand that held mine five minutes ago, that stroked the back of mine with his thumb, that’s lain on the heads of a thousand girls and blessed them before he sent them down to the side door.
It’s cold now. It grips mine. Hard. Like a drowning man’s.
He came up once. He reached.
“Because Albright picked me,” I say. “Because Declan was going to walk me out of the cathedral for air. Because my father told you about me in the confessional on Thursdays, and you told Conor. Because you looked at my throat at the Copley like it already belonged to you.” I hold his hand tighter.
“Because you’d have done it. Easter. Chelsea.
The boat. You’d have done it and said a lovely Mass afterward. ”
His mouth opens and closes. No sound.
“And because a nun who’s run the infirmary at St. Agnes for thirty years put this in my hand,” I say, “and told me nobody should die alone.”
His grip on my hand loosens.
His eyes are fixed on my face. Wide. Wet. Terrified.
I don’t look away.
I hold his hand while it happens. I hold it the whole time.
It isn’t quick. It isn’t slow. It’s exactly as long as it takes.
The fire snaps. Snow falls past the window on the Virgin in the garden.
Downstairs, far away through the floor, three hundred people laugh at something, and a string quartet starts playing “O Holy Night.”
His breathing goes shallow.
Then shallower.
He tries to say something. His lips move. The first word of something. I know the shape of it. I’ve said it ten thousand times in my life. I said it to Ronan on my knees. I said it to him in this room five minutes ago over a glass of port.
He can’t finish it.
His hand goes still in mine.
I stay on my knees beside the green chair for a long time. His hand is heavy. His eyes are still open, fixed on nothing now, on the place where my face was. The red skullcap has slipped sideways on his silver hair.
I reach up and close his eyes with two fingers.
I straighten his skullcap.
I cross his hands on his chest, over the gold pectoral cross, the way they lay out priests in the coffin.
Then I kneel back on my heels on the Bishop’s carpet, with the fire at my back and the snow at the window and “O Holy Night” drifting up through the floor, and I look at his still face.
He couldn’t finish it.
So I finish it for him.
I say the last amen for him.