Madeleine's Ghost Read Online Free Page A

street? The high-voltage transformers half a block up zap and fizz at regular intervals, throwing trails of blue static in the summer evenings.
    Or perhaps the answer is more simple than all this. Perhaps I am going mad. It would be nice to go mad, absolutely insane, free of the mundanities and responsibilities of life, every day a holiday.
    Unfortunately I am sane as a piece of toast.

5
    T HE CRYPT of the church smells like old bones and camphor. We advance through the vaulted dimness past mortuary plaques, wilting flowers, and a heap of broken wooden chairs to a small unfinished chapel set off by an iron grate. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling here over a battered wooden table. This place is full of moldering U-Haul boxes. About thirty of them are stacked against the walls of rough stone. Another dozen are lumped together in the center of the room.
    â€œThese are the records I spoke of,” Father Rose says, pointing to theboxes with his putter. “They moved them over here when St. Catherine’s was razed to make room for that Korean shopping mall.”
    I pull up the flap on one of the boxes. A dusty ledger, leather bound and edged in faded gilt, shows the date 1849; a letter written in the spidery handwriting of another era has fallen out of its envelope into a mess of other such letters. There are easily thousands of documents here, hundreds of thousands of manuscript pages in these boxes. Missalets, sermons, receipts, laundry lists, personal correspondence, accounts, you name it, all succumbing to the dampness and the years.
    Father Rose pulls a rickety chair from the pile in the crypt, brings it in, and offers it to me. He crouches down, putter over his shoulder, and his eyes go half closed. When he speaks, his voice has an odd singsong quality, as if he is repeating something memorized by rote.
    â€œA young nun came to this parish in 1846 from New Orleans. She was known as Sister Januarius. We don’t know her given name. It was the rule of her order that the novitiates take the name of a male saint or martyr. In those troubled times it was much as it is now. Violence and poverty and ignorance. The neighborhood around the navy yard alone was home to a hundred-odd brothels and an equal number of grogshops and gambling dens. Because of the flood of unwashed Irish immigrants, anti-Catholic sentiment ran high. Murderous gangs of xenophobic hooligans called Know-Nothings roamed the streets at night, and no Catholic was safe. The parish priest was dragged off in the middle of mass, brutally beaten, and left naked and bloody in the middle of High Street, and the original wooden church was burned to the ground.
    â€œSister Januarius arrived two weeks after this incident. Because the situation was so bad, the bishop of New York asked that she return to her order, the Nursing Sisters of the Cross. She refused. She said that St. Benedict and St. Teresa of Avila came to her at night in the form of hummingbirds and told her to stay. It is certain that she was seized by an irresistible religious fervor. She knocked on every door in the parish; she personally closed a hundred brothels with her proselytizing; and she wonconverts and doubled the congregation of St. Basil’s in three months. In one year a new brick church stood on the spot of the old one. In five years she was able to oversee the construction of the dome and steeple and the transepts. Five years after that she obtained a dispensation from Pope Pius the Ninth to create the cathedral you see now, the first on Long Island.
    â€œThese are the actions of an able administrator, you might say, an energetic woman. But Sister Januarius possessed other, more mysterious abilities. The sick came to her door and were healed with a touch. The hungry were fed by the hundreds on days when the church’s larders were absolutely empty. After a lifetime of service to the parish, she died here at one hundred one years old in 1919, a peaceful death at vespers,