Death of the Black-Haired Girl

14

ONE COLD MORNING, AFTER Maud’s piece had appeared and protest demonstrations against it had begun, Jo Carr walked up College Hill to take a shift at Whelan Hospital. The wind at the top of the hill blew hard and the demonstrators had not arrived, but the Indian flute players were huddled near the glass hospital doorways cradling their instruments. With them was a man Jo thought she recognized. She had been trying to put the sense of recognition beyond her awareness. The sight of him brought her a thrill of fear that reached over time, distance and agonies of spirit.

He reminded her for all the world of a former priest who had called himself the Mourner. That priest had been one of her own order, a Devotionist in South America. She had known him only briefly then, and though she had not seen him for many years, she heard from time to time about his street theater. His movement raised money through the street performances of Andean music. He was the person she had been reminded of in the dark eyes of the young woman who sang with the montañeros.

A few days later, on a weekend evening, she was reading alone in the counseling office. The office was mainly below the sidewalk, but the upper third of the window commanded a view of the pavement, a drain full of frozen leaves and the footwear of passersby. When she had first taken the job years before, she had thought the office a strange place: a rather cast-down room in which to rouse depressed, confused or homesick students from their misery. For a while the counseling office had occupied the lobby floor of a downtown office building, sleek and sixties-modern. Now it had been shifted to this cellar of improvisatory afterthought. Owing to a confluence of ironies, counseling had been downgraded in the ranking nomenclature of the college.

There had been a time when students were simply expected to follow the rules and keep their own counsel. At the end of that era, the introduction of a dozen therapies, from gestalt to transformational breathing, collided with a crisis of confidence in these therapies, with extended individual rights and with the disappearance of in loco parentis as a defining relationship between institution and student. Then there was the expansion of legal liability. All at once it seemed that while nobody was responsible for anything, everybody was responsible for everything. In any case, Jo had low seniority in the counseling service and a subterranean chamber to go with it. But she had a following as a sympathetic presence, a word-of-mouth credibility passed along by students who managed to find her.

She had been at the desk with her uneasiness for a few minutes when the bell at the street door rang. Lone women — everyone — tended to proceed with caution around the college after dark. There were frequent buses and group safety routes. Jo went up the half flight of stairs to the street level and, looking through the solid glass doors at the building’s main entrance, saw him on the sidewalk outside. A tall, thin man in his fifties with a scarred face stood in the lighted doorway. He was wearing a black beret, which he was stuffing into his overcoat pocket as he reached for the doorbell again. All the other offices in her building had closed and the street was winter dark. When he saw her through the glass door his eyes came alight. She let him in and gave him a chair in the office.

“I thought I saw you at the hospital the other day,” she told him.

“Indeed you did. And I saw you, Josephine.”

“Don’t call me Josephine, by the way. Makes me feel like I’m married to Napoleon.”

“Jo, is it?”

“Yes. Do we know each other?” How strange it would be, she thought, if this were the man she remembered.

He gave her face a long study. From his coat pocket he took a printout of one of the pictures from Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation and a copy of the Gazette with Maud’s article and picture.

“I thought there might be a chaplain’s office. Then I checked the Newman Center. They directed me.”

“I’m a layperson now. I withdrew almost thirty years ago. I’m on the counseling staff.”

“Did you counsel Maud Stack?”

“That’s confidential.”

The man shrugged.

“She didn’t seek counseling,” Jo told him.

“Is she pregnant?”

Quite without meaning to, Jo gave him a look of disgust.

“None of my business?”

“I know you’d like to make it your business. Fortunately it’s not, and you know it.”

The man before her bore an uncanny resemblance to the one known as the Mourner. He had been the most extreme of those who embraced the option for the poor, the most avid defender of violent methods. He required approval, and more than approval he required power, moral and tactical. His way of exercising power was to become the fiercest of the revolution’s priests. He took great risks with the government’s death squads.

Like the Mourner, this man was long-faced, an inch or so over six feet, broad-shouldered but slender. He must have gone through repeated attacks of one kind of tropical fever or another that had left his skin discolored. His eyes were peculiar: swollen and mottled with flashes of unnatural light, outsize pupils, lids like flaking dirty lace. White men who lived in the lowlands under the montaña sometimes took on a look like that in the Mourner’s eyes. Once his eyes had fascinated, with the power to halt a breath or a word. She could hardly believe she had not seen him before. But it was not possible, she thought. Everyone said the Mourner was dead.

This man’s hair was white, trimmed closely and unevenly, possibly over a towel and a bathroom sink, but the effect suited him. The story was he had been badly beaten by the security police of several nations. Somehow the Mourner had got himself a reputation as a faith healer in one of the neighboring republics, a country traditionally hostile to the one whose regime he had been fighting to overthrow. Its security apparatus left him alone and he had begun to dabble in semi-miraculous cures. Jo had met him once at a conference at the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas. At that time he was already a man to be feared.

After the movement collapsed and his excommunication was complete, he stayed in South America and became famous as a wilderness mystic who restored health to the lame, the halt, the virtually deceased. He took a beautiful mistress, choosing with brazen effrontery the daughter of a local hacendado, a brutal man whom he had appeared to cure of syphilis with indigenous potions and hypnotic spells. When the girl became pregnant he engaged the practice of abortion in a fearsome crusade, equipped with Genesis, Deuteronomy and a litany of terrifying curses committing sinners to the eternal service of Satan. His reputation extended to the tabloids of the capital in features read aloud beside shepherds’ camps, in bandit caves and on river-borne canoes. His eyes were terrible, the eyes of a man of sorrows.

“Why did you come to this campus?” she asked the man before her.

“To visit Maud Stack. And to address her spiritual adviser. Someone needs to tell her that sometimes what we do when we’re adolescents haunts us the rest of our lives. She may pay for it.”

“Is that a threat, Father?”

He said nothing.

“In about half a minute,” Jo said, “I’m going to call security. There’s a surveillance camera in the hall outside.”

“The least you could have done was raise objections. For the kid’s own good. The thing she put in your newspaper! The blasphemy of it, Jo. So clever and so naive.”

“I call that a threat,” Jo said, but she made no move. She thought all at once of the raptor snake fixing its prey with a stare.

He treated her to his world-embracing smile. The smile that must have frozen the hearts of peasants when he arrived with his messages from the army of the people. The inquisitor of the proletariat come to show its suspected enemies the instruments. Quiet-spoken, with his educated diction and gentle clerical manner, he must have left the designated criminal element paralyzed with fear. And with remorse as well, overcome with repentance for whatever it was they were supposed to have done, ready to confess all night long to anyone ready to listen. Sometimes it took even longer before they could be made to comprehend what guilt was. In the end, everyone learned.

“Are you afraid of me, Jo?”

“I don’t know why you came here. I need you to leave this office.”

“I came to bear witness to murder and the mockery of Almighty God. To remind you of your duty.”

“And I’m reminding you that you’re trespassing here. You have no legitimate business on this campus and I’m letting our security know that you’re threatening our students and staff.”

“I’m not threatening anyone.”

“Threatening our students and staff,” Jo repeated. “I don’t believe I caught your name. Father, is it?” She looked over the desk at him, pencil poised on a memo sheet.

“Just call me one of the mourners.”

When she dialed campus security, he left quickly. The security chief was a middle-aged former national park policeman named Philip Polhemus. He arrived five minutes later accompanied by one of the young female officers. The college’s police people wore military-style uniforms again after a decade or so of affecting comfortably academic blazers.

“We’re keeping an eye open for him, Dr. Carr,” Polhemus told her. “We’ll make the city police aware of him. No clerical garb, right?”

“No clerical garb. He’s shabby but clean-shaven.”

“Let us know if you see him again and we’ll escort him off campus. If he comes back we’ll arrest him. Can you give us a description?”

“I’m sending you guys a memo,” Jo told him. “He wouldn’t give me a name.”

In the memo to Polhemus she included his calling himself a mourner. It troubled her to invoke the words.