Family Honor

Chapter 5

It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Rosie and I had been to seven shelters. The eighth was the basement of a dingy Catholic church on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. We were talking to Sister Mary John. Actually I was doing most of the talking. Rosie was working on Sister to rub her belly. Sister Mary John was apparently not a dog person. She paid no attention to Rosie. I thought about mentioning St. Francis of Assisi, but decided it wouldn’t help me find Millicent Patton, which was what I’d been hired for.

Sister didn’t look too nunnish. She was dressed in an Aerosmith tee shirt, jeans, and loafers, no socks. I showed her my picture of Millicent Patton.

“Yes,” Sister said after a long look, “she was here. All she would tell us was that her name was Millie.”

“She’s not here now?”

“No.”

“Had she been abused?”

“Not that we could see,” Sister said.

“She tell you why she was running?”

“No. We try to help, but we try to do so without prying.”

“I have to pry.”

Sister smiled. For a non-dog person she had a good smile.

“I know,” she said.

“Why’d she leave?”

“She just left without a word,” Sister said. “But here’s my guess. Every day or so, Bobby Doyle, who’s the youth service officer at District 13, comes down and brings some donuts and we have coffee and sort of talk over who’s shown up and what we should do about them.”

“And Millicent spotted him?”

“Not even him, I think. She spotted the police car outside.”

“And she was gone.”

Sister nodded. She looked down at Rosie who was being completely seductive under the table.

“What’s wrong with this dog?” Sister said. “It is a dog, isn’t it?”

I decided to ignore the second part of the question.

“She wants you to rub her belly,” I said.

The prospect of rubbing a dog’s belly seemed deeply unappealing to Sister Mary John.

“Why do you suppose she ran at the first sign of a cop?”

“Afraid he’d come to take her home,” Sister said.

“Any idea where she would go from here?”

Sister shook her head.

“I assume that sooner or later a pimp will find her,” Sister said.

“That seems the prevailing assumption,” I said.

“And rightly so,” Sister said.

“Any thoughts on why kids do this?”

“Not brain surgery, Ms. Randall — they don’t like it at home.”

“There must be more to it than that.”

Sister leaned back a little in the folding chair she was sitting on, and looked at me more closely. I felt as if I might have asked a good question.

“Lot of people settle for the easy answer,” Sister said. “Of course there must be more than that.”

“So many of them run away from home and end up degraded,” I said. “It’s almost a pattern.”

“Maybe it’s what they deserve for running away.”

“Excuse me, Sister,” I said. “But no one deserves to be giving oral sex to strangers in the backseat of a car.”

“No, of course not. I’m a nun, not a shrink, but I’ve seen a lot of these kids, and they have equal measures of defiance and guilt. The defiance causes them to run away, and the guilt helps them end up selling their bodies.”

“So they can run away and get punished for it, too,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Some of it must be economic,” I said. “They haven’t finished high school. They haven’t got a social security card. They have no hirable skills. Some of them, perhaps, simply have no other way to stay alive.”

“Things usually have several causes,” Sister said.

“So what causes them to run in the first place, in Millicent’s case, from affluence?”

“Whatever is in that home is intolerable to her,” Sister said.

“Molestation?”

“Maybe. Maybe a situation which must be resolved and she can’t resolve it. Maybe simply the way being there makes her feel. What I know is that kids don’t give up a secure home for a desperately uncertain alternative simply because loving parents are firm with them.”

“There’s something wrong in that house,” I said.

“You can bank on it,” Sister said.

Rosie gave up on Sister Mary John and nosed my foot. I rubbed her belly with my toe.

“You save many of them?” I said.

“I don’t even know. They come here. They stay awhile. They move on. Some straighten out as they get older. Some we get psychiatric help for. Some we may save with prayer. A lot of them, I would guess, we don’t save at all.”

“Hard work,” I said.

“Brutally hard, sometimes,” Sister said.

“You ever want to give it up?”

“I’m a nun,” Sister said. “I believe in a divine purpose. I believe I am an instrument of it. I did not become a bride of Christ for the perks.”

We sat in silence for a moment in the small basement room paneled in cheap plywood, sitting in folding chairs on either side of a card table, with the shelter’s files stacked in milk crates around the walls.

“And you?” Sister said. “You seem in an odd profession.”

“My father is, was, a policeman. He’s retired now.”

“And you wanted to be like him?”

“Well, no, actually I got out of college with a degree in social work, but I wanted to be a painter. My father got me a police job to support myself until I sold my paintings.”

“And you’ve not yet sold them?”

“Some, now and then, and I’m trying to get a Master of Fine Arts at night, and this work supports me while I do the art.”

“You are no longer with the police?”

“Too hierarchical for me,” I said.

Sister smiled. “I often think that of the church,” she said. “If you became wildly successful as a painter, would you give this up?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“If you became wildly successful at this would you stop painting?”

“I don’t think so.”

Sister smiled as if I had said something smart. We were quiet again. Sister looked down at Rosie.

“What kind of dog is that?”

“An English bull terrier,” I said.

“Like General Patton’s dog?”

“Yes, only Rosie is a miniature.”

“She looks rather like a possum,” Sister said.

“No,” I said very firmly, “she doesn’t.”

Sister shrugged and stood up and put out her hand. “Good luck, Sunny Randall.”

I stood up, too. We shook hands.

Outside the church, walking to my car I looked down at Rosie.

“Possum?” I said.