Three
Charles stretched in his bed, under the whirling ceiling fan. The day was warm and muggy, as many November days are in New Orleans. Morning light passed through the French doors that opened out to a courtyard balcony, or gallery, but the sun’s direct rays wouldn’t clear the building that fronted the gallery until almost noon. In nothing but his briefs, Charles kicked off the sheets, climbed out of bed, pulled on a plush terry cloth bathrobe, and went to the kitchen to make coffee. The trip took him through the cozy living room, furnished with rattan chairs and a sectional sofa, with scenes of Rome hanging in box frames on the walls. The gallery ran the full length of Charles’s second-floor apartment in the remodeled slave quarters of the front building, once a family mansion. The archdiocese had purchased the whole property for the priests who staffed the cathedral. The old slave quarters housed Monsignor Dupree on the first floor and Charles on the second. Apartments had been created for them from several small rooms, once deemed of sufficient size for the house servants. On the third floor, the original walls divided the space into small guest rooms.
Charles carried his coffee out onto the gallery where lush ferns hung from the decorative ironwork framing the whole balcony. A fountain gurgled down in the courtyard around a statue of the Madonna. Ficuses, philodendrons, and flowering hibiscus flourished on the perimeters of the brick floor of the courtyard, and wisteria covered the walls joining the front and back buildings. A light glowed in a window of the front building, now used as the cathedral offices and reception rooms. The monsignor was an early riser. He worked in his office until it was time to walk the three blocks to the cathedral to say morning Mass each weekday. Charles took care of the weekday evening Masses.
Charles sat in an iron chair on the gallery and picked up his breviary, which he kept on a table next to it. The third-floor gallery provided a protective cover for the book, but the once gilded edges of the pages had turned pink from rain that had blown in during a bad storm. Charles made the sign of the cross and devoutly read the psalms and scripture readings. In his five months as a priest, he had never once forsaken his duty to read the Divine Office. But his faithfulness to the ritual didn’t preclude distractions, and halfway through the second psalm, his mind wandered to the pale duo he’d seen last week at the All Saints’ Mass. He’d thought about them frequently, especially wondering what miserable bond kept Kyle at Victor’s beck and call. Kyle’s strange confession about craving blood played through his mind. Had Kyle been referring to sadomasochism? During his own wild days, Charles had gone home on occasion with someone into bondage or beating. Not my thing, he’d said. I like it clean, so you decide. Usually the guy had yielded, while managing to draw Charles into a little wrestling match. But something told Charles that there was more to Kyle’s dependency than conventional S & M. He’d looked for Kyle every night at Mass, but without luck. Maybe he attended morning Mass, or maybe Victor had successfully prevented him from returning to the cathedral altogether. Charles wished he could help Kyle. But he was afraid of his own motives. Was he moved by brotherly love, or by something more primal? Whenever he thought of Kyle’s sweet face and compact, muscular body—the body of a soccer player—he felt breathless, his groin tingling. He was afraid that if Kyle’s bare body showed up on Dr. Beauchamp’s monitor, the plethysmograph would indict him. Could Christ retract his cure? If so, why would he? Had Charles done something to offend Christ? He could think of nothing. He had been faithful to prayer and dedicated to his parishioners. Maybe he’d presumed too much on God’s power, not taking care to guard his eyes, to guard his thoughts. “You shalt not tempt the Lord thy God!”—thus did Christ reply to Satan, when Satan coaxed him to leap from the temple to prove that God’s angels would rescue him from death.
Or were the urgings some kind of test of his trust in Christ’s power to heal?
He had no answers. He only knew that the tranquility he had experienced ever since his cure was now shaken. He promised Christ to do his best to overcome his illicit feelings. He prayed for strength. Because surely Christ did not want him to abandon Kyle. Keep me pure, O Lord. The prayer he whispered that morning on his gallery was his frequent prayer.
When he finished praying, Charles showered and shaved. Then he donned his clerical shirt and collar and boarded his Vespa, which he kept parked in the courtyard. Two house-bound parishioners who lived in the Garden District had asked him to bring them communion. He went by the cathedral to pick up two consecrated wafers. Morning Mass would be over by now, and he could retrieve the wafers from the tabernacle without interrupting worship. He entered the open doors of the church and proceeded down the aisle to find the monsignor and the sexton crouching over something near the side door.
“My God,” he said. It was the crucifix, its corpus broken into pieces. The bent legs of Christ and his midsection lay near the baptismal font. The upper body, arms, and head remained in one piece, still attached to the cross. On the wall, the dark outline of a cross indicated where the crucifix had hung.
The monsignor straightened up and shook his head. “Someone broke in through the side door,” he said, nodding to the door. Dupree was a tall, stern-looking man in his fifties, with deep creases in his brow and thick salt-and-pepper hair, cropped close. “Go ahead and call the police,” he said to the sexton.
The sexton, a stoop-shouldered man with snowy hair and eyebrows, nodded and disappeared into the sacristy.
“I didn’t want to report this until we finished Mass,” Dupree explained.
Incredulous, Charles shook his head and let out a long whistle. “This is crazy. Why would someone do it? You think they planned to steal it? Is anything missing?”
“Not from what I can tell. And it doesn’t look like they planned to steal it. It looks like they destroyed it on purpose. Like they threw it down.”
“Then there must have been two or three guys. This thing must weigh a ton.”
“The city has gone to the dogs!” the monsignor said in disgust. Then he sighed. “Of course, the police won’t do a thing about this. Not with a whole city still in shambles.”
“It looks like it can be repaired,” Charles said to console him.
“Let’s pray to God it can. For the sake of the parishioners. Mrs. Benette left Mass in tears.”
Charles nodded, sickened by the sight of the broken corpus. It was as if Christ himself had been mutilated. But he had to shake off his revulsion and attend to his pastoral duties. So he retrieved the consecrated wafers from the tabernacle and secured them in a pyx, round and gold as an old-fashioned pocket watch.
He went outside and boarded the Vespa. He whizzed along Royal Street, which turned into St. Charles on the other side of Canal Street. Many of the Royal Street antique and art shops were open again for business. And tourists strolled along the street, peering in the plate-glass windows. Traffic was fairly light on Canal, a busy thoroughfare before the hurricane. Windows here and there in stores and hotels along the street were still boarded from looting after the storm.
By the time he reached the first parishioner’s Georgian mansion, big drops of rain struck his helmet. He hurried to the door and rang the bell. An elderly woman appeared at the door and welcomed him into the house. He stayed with her until the storm subsided and then headed to the house of a wheelchair-bound parishioner, whose brother had drowned in the hurricane. A thin, timid woman in scrubs met him at the front door of the large house and led him to a sunroom in back of the house, which had been turned into a bedroom since the upper story was inaccessible to the man. Charles greeted the old parishioner in the wheelchair and sat down on the bed near him. The old man wasted little time in recounting the recent tragedy of his brother’s death.
“He went to the attic, Father,” the man said, his rheumy blue eyes filling. “The water kept rising in the house, and so he went up there. He must have thought it couldn’t rise any higher. But it did. He couldn’t get out. He didn’t have anything up there to break through the roof.”
“That’s horrible, Mr. Lanier.” He touched Mr. Lanier’s veinous hand to comfort him.
“Why did God let it happen?” the old man said.
Charles shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know. But he’s with God now. God was with him then.”
“He was the only brother I had left. The rest are dead. They’ve all gone.” The old man choked out the last words, close to sobbing.
“Let’s pray for him,” Charles suggested. He pulled his rosary out of his pocket. “Can we do that?”
The old man nodded his head without answering, and he followed Charles’s lead as the priest made the sign of the cross. They prayed the rosary, softly, the old man choking up from time to time. When they finished, Charles blessed him. He rose to go when the thin health care worker arrived to help the old man with his meds.
Outside, he boarded the Vespa and took off. When he turned down First Avenue, he noticed someone opening the gate to a mansion hidden behind a vine-covered wall and tall magnolias. He recognized Kyle. He was dressed in blue jeans and a red knit shirt. By the time Charles called to him, it was too late. Kyle had disappeared behind the wall. Charles pulled up on the sidewalk and peered through the gates just as the front door of the Greek Revival mansion closed. The drapes were drawn over the windows. He looked for a bell to ring or a speaker to buzz, but there were none near the gate. So much for visitors. No wonder Kyle seemed miserable, immured inside the mansion, chained to Victor.
He considered waiting there for Kyle to reemerge. But when might that be? And what would Charles say to him, anyway? He lingered, reluctant to leave. But finally he gave up, heading down the street with a strong sense of foreboding rising in him. He felt that Kyle was in danger, spiritual and physical. Twice, he stopped and considered going back. But what could he do? He couldn’t break down the gate. He couldn’t call the police and tell them that Kyle was under the power of his companion. He finally returned to the Quarter.
That night, he tossed and turned in bed. At two thirty, he’d barely fallen asleep when his alarm went off. He got up and fumbled for his clothes. He’d signed up for the three o’clock Holy Hour at the cathedral. On Fridays the Blessed Sacrament was displayed in an ornate monstrance on the altar, and parishioners took turns keeping vigil before it, praying for the rebuilding of the city and the return of all the evacuees to the abandoned neighborhoods on low ground. For the devastated Ninth Ward, nothing short of a miracle could make that happen.
When he reached the dark cathedral, the monstrance rose on the altar between two glowing candelabra. Charles found the young sentinel nodding off in the first pew. He squeezed the boy’s shoulder, sent him on his way, then knelt and crossed himself. He prayed for Kyle, that he could escape Victor, that he could find happiness. And he prayed for himself, that his motives would be pure.
He had been kneeling for ten minutes, when the side door opened and someone entered. He assumed that it was one of the men in the parish who sometimes joined him in his nocturnal adoration. He waited for the man to emerge from the shadows. But for a long time, no one appeared. Finally a man in a cassock and Roman collar crossed the transept and climbed the sanctuary steps to the altar. Who could this be? The only priests at the cathedral were the monsignor and himself. Why would a strange priest, and one dressed so formally, show up now?
The priest knelt on the floor directly in front of the monstrance. Suddenly the flames of the candelabra swelled as though a jet of gas rushed through them. Charles started at the sight, which he’d barely absorbed when the whole altar suddenly burst into flames. Instantly, Charles shot to his feet, astounded.
“Get away from there!” he shouted to the man. Had someone poured fuel on the altar? What had caused it to suddenly ignite? These questions barely penetrated Charles’s consciousness, he was so alarmed about the priest. But the man remained transfixed, despite Charles’s cries. Finally, braving the flames, Charles approached the man to pull him away. He felt the heat from the blaze on his face and hands as he grabbed the man’s arm. “Come on,” he shouted.
The face that turned to look at him belonged to Kyle. His gray wolf-eyes were wild in the light of the fire.
“Kyle,” Charles shouted, frightened by the expression. “What are you doing?”
Kyle glared at Charles, finally jerking his arm away from Charles’s hold. He stood up and reached for the burning monstrance.
“Jesus!” Charles shouted, falling back. “Don’t touch it!”
Kyle could not be stopped. He hugged the fiercely hot, gleaming vessel to his face, kissing the wafer displayed in the round window at the center of the monstrance, oblivious to the fire around him. A red liquid streamed from the vessel, as though the sacred host, the body of Christ, oozed blood. The blood smeared Kyle’s face and dripped down his hands. He lowered the vessel, and a look of horror came over him. “In the name of Christ, help me!” he screamed to Charles.
Despite his fear, Charles reached to pull him from the flames. But in an instant, the blaze was suddenly extinguished—as though the air had been sucked from the room. Kyle, who had been as vivid, as real as his own flesh and blood, suddenly vanished. Confused, Charles turned and searched the shadowy church for a hint of movement behind a pillar or in one of the alcoves. But there was no sign of Kyle.
Charles’s attention returned to the dark sanctuary. There was no more heat. No more conflagration. Not even a scorch mark on the altar cloth. It was perfectly intact. The monstrance once again rested quietly on the altar, flanked by soft candlelight, no sign that it had ever been disturbed.
Stunned, his heart pounding, Charles sat on marble floor of the sanctuary, staring at the tranquil altar. What had he just witnessed? The scene before him had been as real as his own flesh. He’d felt the heat. He’d felt Kyle. He couldn’t have dreamed it. And yet… a real fire would have left traces—the acrid smell of fuel, soot on the monstrance, a charred altar cloth. Maybe the fire was some kind of apparition, like the apparition of Christ, four years ago. The experience had the same intensity as that apparition. But then, he’d been cured. What could be the point of this apparition? Why had Kyle been in it? Why had he been dressed like a priest?
He got up and ventured to touch the altar. It was as cool as the wall of a cave. No scorch marks anywhere. No smell of fire in the air. Not one sign that an inferno had just been raging in St. Louis Cathedral.
“Hey,” Charles whispered to the monstrance. “I’m no good at figuring out these things. Can you give me a clue?”
The only response was silence.
Weak now, exhausted and weak, Charles returned to the pew and sat, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, trying to understand. Was God telling him to help Kyle, no matter what his own feelings for Kyle might be? Surely, God would not call attention to Kyle’s torment and expect Charles to remain aloof? But if he was supposed to rescue Kyle, how would he accomplish that? The vision offered no clues. And what if Kyle didn’t really want to be saved from whatever perverse dependency he had on Victor? Then what? How was Charles supposed to rip him from Victor’s clutches?
* * * *
Charles slept little that night. The next morning, he rode to the Garden District and watched the mansion for over an hour with no sign of Kyle. When an elderly neighbor emerged from the Federal style mansion across the street, Charles told the woman who he was and that he was trying to contact Kyle. He told a white lie to reassure her. He said that Kyle was a parishioner of his. She had no reason not to believe him. He wore his Roman collar, and his good nature and good looks had the usual effect on her.
“I’ve never met the people who live there,” she said, buttoning her gray cardigan despite the warm, muggy air. “They come and go quietly. Did they evacuate during Katrina?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if they didn’t, I’m glad. There was no looting around here. Maybe they kept an eye on things.” As the woman spoke, a drop of blood suddenly fell from her nose onto her sweater, followed by another, and another. “Oh, my!” she said, cupping her spotted hands beneath her nose.
“Put pressure on it,” Charles said, concerned for her.
She squeezed her nostrils, turned abruptly without a sign of dismissal, and started back toward her house. As she made her way, the wind suddenly picked up, gusting in stormlike blasts. All around, the branches were shaking fiercely. Where had the storm come from all at once? The frail woman fought the force, which blew the sweater from her shoulders. Charles retrieved it for her and helped her to her door. Once she was inside, the air turned calm again. Charles stared at the mansion across the street with dread, feeling that somehow, as impossible as it seemed, the owner was responsible for the sudden storm.
Finally, Charles realized there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t break into the house if he’d wanted to. Feeling helpless, he went home, but all day he was haunted by the previous night’s vision in the cathedral and by the weird storm in the Garden District in the morning.
That evening after the five o’clock Mass, he returned to the Garden District and positioned himself behind the sagging branches of a magnolia across the street from Kyle and Victor’s dwelling. Victor suddenly appeared just outside the gate, though Charles had not seen him approaching it. Victor hesitated before turning the key, cocking his head as though he listened for a noise. Then the iron gate squealed open and clanged shut behind him. Victor climbed the porch steps and entered the house.
Charles crossed the street and peered through the bars. The drapes on the first floor were open, and lamps glowed in the house. Victor passed before the window, standing in profile. He wore a black turtleneck, and his face seemed alabaster against it. For a split second, Charles imagined that Victor turned and stared at him with red, demonic eyes and with his canines bared, as he had imagined them to be bared that day in the cathedral. He shivered and stepped back from the gate. He had the urge to call out to Kyle, to beat on the gates until Victor opened them. But before he could act on it, a sense of disorientation overcame him. He felt himself falling. He seemed to feel the damp ground beneath his fingers. He lost consciousness.
* * * *
When he awoke it was dark. But he was no longer outside. He was in his own bed, the fan spinning overhead. He felt drugged. His head throbbed. What had happened? Had Victor attacked him. If so, how? Before blacking out, he’d seen Victor moving inside the house, nowhere near him. Maybe someone else had attacked him. But why? To rob him? He felt for his wallet in his hip pocket. Switching on the lamp, he inspected the wallet. His credit card was still there. So was a twenty dollar bill.
And how had he ended up back in his room? Maybe Kyle had seen the attack or had come upon him afterward and got help to carry him home. Nothing made sense.
He got up and took something for the headache and glanced outside to see if his Vespa was in the courtyard. It was there, parked beside the wall. He had no memory of riding it home. Could Kyle have retrieved it for him?
Too exhausted to think anymore about it, he climbed back into bed and fell deeply asleep.
* * * *
Every day for a week, Charles returned to his post outside the mansion. He wanted answers. Was Kyle all right? Was there an explanation for the attack on Charles? He was willing to risk his own safety to find out the truth, but he observed caution. He restricted his watch to the daylight hours. Whatever had caused his blackout had something to do with Victor, and he had no intention of provoking Kyle’s tormentor. He’d never feared anyone the way he feared Victor. Maybe it was the man’s act of sacrilege in the cathedral. Maybe it was the preternatural look he had seen in Victor’s gaze, and the canines that kept flashing before his mind’s eye.
Whatever it was, he sensed that Victor was pure evil. What else explained his intense determination to take advantage of Kyle’s obvious vulnerability? The worst kind of vulnerability. If Charles had learned anything since his cure, it was that God willed people to be whole and only one thing could guarantee that: knowing your belovedness, knowing that no one and nothing could control your destiny, because you belonged to God. This truth was lost on Kyle, and Victor exploited Kyle’s ignorance. Victor was ignorant of the truth too, but his ignorance took the form of pride and malice. They loomed in his soul like vicious predators, and they’d made him a predator, too.
During his vigils, Charles did not catch so much as a glimpse of Kyle. Of course, it was possible that Kyle came and went when Charles was not keeping watch. Still, he’d begun to consider calling the police to report his suspicion that Kyle was in danger, when Kyle finally came to him. It was during evening Mass. Charles watched him enter the church and kneel in a back pew. When it came time for communion, Kyle did not join the line that formed down the central aisle. He knelt with his face buried in his hands. After the final benediction, Charles quickly removed his vestments in the sacristy and hurried out. He was afraid Kyle might have rushed back out into the night. But he was still there, kneeling in the pew. As Charles advanced toward the back of the church, a woman leaving a pew stopped him.
“Father, I wanted to tell you about my brother’s family.” She clung to his arm. She was a short woman, in her sixties. Her dyed blond hair was bobbed.
Worried that Kyle would get away, Charles was tempted to shake himself free from her. But when he glanced at Kyle’s pew, he found Kyle still kneeling. So he turned his attention back to the woman.
“They evacuated the city. Went to Houston. They still can’t return to Lakeside. It just makes me sick. Please pray for them. I don’t know what I’ll do without him. He’s been a rock for me, ever since my husband died.”
As Charles listened sympathetically to her, his eyes wandered over to Kyle, who suddenly got up to leave.
Charles panicked. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away from the woman. “I have to speak to someone.” Charles left her, hurrying after Kyle, but by the time he stepped outside the cathedral, Kyle was nowhere in sight. He seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
Charles approached a tarot card reader who had set up her table in the paved area in front of the church, and asked her if she’d seen where Kyle had gone.
“The guy who was crying?” she said. She wore heavy mascara and hoop earrings. “He went that way.” She motioned toward the river with a pudgy hand.
Charles darted away, running along Jackson Square to Decatur Street. A few tourists inspected an artist’s paintings on the sidewalk in front of the square. Two horses and their carriages stood nearby, the tour guides in the driver’s seats hoping for customers from the scant crowd of tourists seated at tables across the street at Café Du Monde. But there was no sign of Kyle. Where could he have gone? Charles crossed Decatur, looking up and down the street in vain, then mounted the concrete stairs that led to the promenade along the river. The night was damp and chilly. A barge made its slow way along the current. The town of Algiers lay dimly lit on the opposite bank.
Down the promenade, still dark after the hurricane, the silhouette of a man hovered near the water’s edge, as if he considered jumping into the river. Charles recognized Kyle. He did not call out for fear of precipitating a desperate move. Instead he walked quietly along the river until he was barely ten feet from Kyle. Then he softly spoke his name.
“Leave me alone,” Kyle answered.
“Come and sit down on this bench,” Charles coaxed, forcing himself to keep his voice calm and bring Kyle back to reason.
“It’s no use.”
“You don’t believe that. Why else would you come to the cathedral?”
“To ask forgiveness.”
“You have that. No matter what. So why try to hurt yourself?”
Kyle let out an incredulous laugh. “If you only knew.”
“Then tell me.” Charles ventured a step toward Kyle.
“You wouldn’t believe me. You would never believe me.” He threw a sidelong glance at Charles. “I’m not crazy.”
“No,” Charles said. “You’re just desperate. Look, why don’t we go to my place and talk? It’s quiet. I’ve got all night.” Nervous sweat streamed down Charles’s sides. Please, God, he said to himself. Make him listen.
“You won’t believe me,” Kyle repeated.
“I’ll do my best. I know you’re not crazy.” Charles slowly approached Kyle and touched his shoulder. “Please.”
Kyle pulled away, and Charles was ready to grab him and force him away from the river when suddenly Kyle went limp. He trembled and started crying. Charles embraced him, wrapping his arms around him. Finally Kyle allowed himself to be led away, and the pair walked quietly back into the Quarter. An occasional streetlamp glowed on the dormers and galleries and narrow streets, where the nineteenth-century structures varied from seedy to charming. Twice, Kyle stopped, appearing to listen for something. But the only sound was the low horn of a barge moaning on the river. Charles glanced around nervously, too. He believed he knew what Kyle feared, and he understood the fear. Victor on the prowl, determined to force his protégé to go back with him.
On Dumaine, Charles unlocked the gate to his home and led Kyle through the narrow mews that ran along the side of the front mansion. They walked through the courtyard and up the stairs to his apartment. In the stillness of the damp night, the ferns on the gallery hung motionless, like deformed stalactites.
Inside, Charles switched on a table lamp and led Kyle to the sectional sofa. “Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.”
“No. I don’t want anything.” Kyle sat down.
Charles sat across from him in a rattan chair.
“I want to start from the beginning,” Kyle said. He seemed in control now, fixed in his intention, a note of fatalism in his voice, as though he might as well explain everything before the world came crashing down.
“All right,” Charles said, settling back in his chair.
Kyle took a breath and let it out slowly. He unzipped his light jacket, revealing a pale blue T-shirt. There were rusty drops on it. At first, Charles thought they must be drops of paint. But on closer inspection they looked like bloodstains. Was Kyle wounded? Charles searched his face. He found no sign of a wound on the pale flesh. But Kyle’s eyes were full of pain.