Book of O'Kells: Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Read online

  March 27, 1970

  I write another big check to the Order to make sure it will survive my departure. It’s only Christian to clean up your own mess.

  April 3, 1970

  Diana calls. “Why don’t you go on a trip?” she says. “Around the world in eighty days. That kind of thing. You could take Rebecca. She could take her pictures. You could go anywhere you want!” I’m not going anywhere until I know where I want to go.

  April 4, 1970

  I have to leave Southampton soon or spend the rest of my life licking my wounds, howling at the moon.

  April 30, 1970

  My own apartment, my own life uptown on the West Side where no O’Kell has ventured before. No one will find me here unless I want them to.

  May 21, 1970

  What kind of world have I walked into? Love-ins, be-ins. Free love, free sex. You can’t walk down the street without someone asking you to protest, to sign something, to try some drug, but I am not about to join anything. I want nothing to do with somebody else’s “movement.” I will not be moved.

  June 3, 1970

  Diana takes me shopping with Rebecca. “Now this is very with it,” Diana says, “especially with that.” I take her word for it, but I feel wobbly on platform shoes after a lifetime with my feet on the ground in Convent flats. My bell-bottoms flap in the wind. The lapels on my pants suit are wide enough to be wings. “Eleanor,” Rebecca says. “You are really happening now.” I tell her that’s what scares me.

  June 9, 1970

  I need to find a higher calling, something beyond drugs and free love, something that will matter long after the bell-bottoms and platform shoes are at the bottom of my closet. That was the beauty of the Convent, truth and beauty wrapped up into one neat package, with time off for the holidays.

  June 15, 1970

  Charles Evans is begging me to work with him on Wall Street. “You, the Order, were an absolute cash cow. You will always have a home at my firm. Just say the word.” After what happened at the Convent, I say, you’ve got to be kidding. “Never forget that you’re an O’Kell,” he says. “Take off that habit and you’re still made of money.”

  June 20, 1970

  I need to do something special. Something spectacular. If I knew whom to pray to I would get back down on my knees.

  June 23, 1970

  Charles Evans meets me at the Monkey Bar. He takes me upstairs to his room in the hotel but he’s too blotto to finish the job. “Where’s your habit?” he says. “Where’s your goddamn habit?” He blubbers like a bad novel. Men are so expendable, so easy to do without.

  June 30, 1970

  I go to an anti-war protest at the bandshell in Central Park. Bad language and finger-pointing about the government. The stink of pot is everywhere. Hippies who smell like a bad idea are selling pills by the handful. In the end everyone sings “Give Peace A Chance.” It’s too automatic for my taste, lines that have been learned but not lived.

  July 13, 1970

  Becca tells me Mother has taken a turn for the worse. Mother? Whatever became of Mother? Not just in her life, but in ours? She is bed-ridden or at least house-bound, from what Diana and Becca tell me. She has been dying for so long she might as well be dead. I wonder what it would be like to care.

  July 26, 1970

  I will go because I blame her, because I want her to pay in some way.

  August 1, 1970

  I walk down a twisted Park Avenue lobby, the corridors lacquered in marble, the mirrors lit by a golden light. An elevator man with white gloves and highball skin swings the elevator door open right into the penthouse. The apartment looks as if someone will be right back, with dark wood shining everywhere and a floor you could eat off of. But no one meets me or greets me. It is dead quiet and I wonder if my Mother is dead. I wander down hallways looking for signs of life, but the master bedroom is empty. I find her finally in a matchbox room off the kitchen, a maid’s room with a single bed and stiff white sheets pulled up to her chin. Mother? I say. Her eyes are closed and her face looks broken down, like continents breaking up. Her white hair, no longer fisted into a bun, is wild against the lace pillows. She opens her eyes without moving her head. Mother? I say again. She jacknifes up into a sitting position on the bed, the sheets still pulled up to her chin. “No heroic measures!” she says. I will tell them, I say. “And who the hell are you?” Eleanor, I say. Mother says: “It will be a cold day in hell before my Eleanor ever comes to see her Mother!” Today’s a cold day, Mother, I say.

  August 11, 1970

  “I’ve been expecting you. I’ve been expecting you all because of the money.” I have more money than God, I say. I don’t need your money. “Why, then, Eleanor? Why now?” I tell her I wish I knew.

  August 12, 1970

  What’s your name? “Sliv,” the elevator man says. Sliv, I say, I need you to look in on my Mother when you’re working. Once or twice a day. “Oh I’m already looking in on Missus O’Kell,” Sliv says. “She pays me to do it, but I don’t take nothing for it. I leave the money right there.” He opens a vase on Mother’s front table and it’s stuffed with cash, fives and tens and twenties. “I don’t need the lady’s money. I got what I need.” Why do you do it, then? “I like the lady. She’s a good egg, and somebody needs to do it, to look in on her to make sure everything’s square.”

  August 20, 1970

  Mother sleeps most of the day every day. When she wakes up I ask her why she stays in the maid’s room. “I will never sleep in the ‘master bedroom’ again.” Why not? “Because I’m not a slave,” she says.

  September 7, 1970

  I come to look in on Mother every day. Dreams send words to her lips like “elevators” and “lightning.”

  October 14, 1970

  “Do you know what it’s like to be a bastard?” Mother asks me. “Your father was a bastard, too, Eleanor, and his father was Thomas Edison. That makes him and me both real bastards, because my father was Thomas Cushing, a real son of a bitch, and Atomic Tom’s father was John Patrick Cushing, the son who raped me. But you’re not a bastard, are you?” I tell her to tell me something I don’t know.

  October 31, 1970

  Outside there are little children in costumes, ghosts and devils and superheroes in capes, but inside Mother is in her own world. “You need to know what really happened,” she says. “Because you need to go back.” Why would anyone go back to that awful town? “To show the world,” Mother says, without saying why.

  November 9, 1970

  I need to know more, I need to know everything, but today Mother never wakes up.

  December 6, 1970

  Mother is sleeping (again) so I kill time. There are pictures everywhere in her penthouse, all of them posed, pictures of Mother and Father together in front of our fireplace, then each of them alone, then each of us alone, pictures of all of us together outside The Big House in Southampton. In front of my own eyes I turn 10, then 12, then 17. Tom’s hand on my shoulder in the picture makes me shiver, as if I’ve seen a ghost.

  December 13, 1970

  Is she trying to say goodbye? Mother asks that all of us, even Tom, come together for the first time since God knows when. Rebecca comes early to take pictures. She labors over the lighting, staring at dials that ring her neck. Diana arrives, breathless. She is now a senior editor at Imagine, sure one day to ascend to the editorial throne, and she reeks of perfume and the pitter-pat of petty talk. Tom comes late and last and none of us say a word to him. He has become huge, gargantuan, a bear upright in the woods, broad across the shoulders and the beam, a bristle of hair cut like a brush across the top, his skin scrubbed and gleaming, his shirt so tight across his chest it looks like the buttons might explode. We crowd into Mother’s matchbox room. She sits up in bed, her white hair fine and roped behind her, like a fuse, her face the hard mask that means someone is in trouble. “I know what you’ve done to the girls,” Mother says to Tom. “And I hope you rot in hell.”

  December 25, 19
70

  “She’s not so good today,” Sliv says. “She’s never so good around Christmas.” Shouldn’t you be home Christmas Day? I say. “I had to make sure Missus O’Kell was all right,” Sliv says. “She hasn’t been so good around the holidays, not so good at all. And nobody should be alone for Christmas.” Least of all your own mother, I tell him.

  January 8, 1971

  I tell Mother for the first time about my rape by Tom. In my own words. For the first time we cry together.

  January 9, 1971

  It’s like Mother’s come alive, as if my news about Tom and the bomb put the taste of blood back in her mouth. I need you to start at the beginning, I say. “Oh, I was beautiful in the beginning, Eleanor, so beautiful, more beautiful than I could even believe. I had this beautiful chestnut hair, big hanging hanks of it, and there was nothing I couldn’t do with my life in the beginning.” And then? “Think of it, Eleanor! To be raped by a Cushing, by John Patrick Cushing! I had to marry your father so that I could have that child, your own misbegotten half-brother Tom, a baby born with too much Cushing by half. After that I wasn’t the woman I should have been, could have been, would have been. Life itself leaked out of me, Eleanor. Can’t you smell the stink of it?”

  January 10, 1971

  I try to imagine what it was like for my mother to be in that bakery, with John Patrick Cushing, her half-brother, having at her, with everything changing in a blink, the way it changed for me after Tom, the color going out of life, life itself going out of life, Mother carrying Thomas Cushing’s grandson on both sides to term, then giving birth to the twisted creature who grew up to be Atomic Tom. I try to imagine the horror of those nine months for Mother, but the idea of carrying Tom’s child after he raped me is unthinkable, unbearable. The worst thing that ever happened to me could have been even worse.

  January 22, 1971

  I ask Mother to tell me about Father’s inventions. “My inventions, you mean.” What do you mean? I say. “I was inventing things long before I met your father, Eleanor. When I met him he was a little lost lamb. He was working for his father, for Edison, but Edison was all wrong about DC, and your Father had no clue. None. He thought Direct Current was the future. Ha! That’s a fat one even now! Your father had no idea about Alternating Current before he met me. None.” So he was a fake? “Not a fake. Nor a charlatan like so many in those days. And not a man with any badness in him, either, not then. Your father was simply a man of talent shy of greatness. Just a middling man. I had to take him by the hand.”

  January 24, 1971

  I’ve been thinking about what you said, I say—about Father. But it’s so hard to believe. “You want an example?” Mother says. “Your father could no more have eliminated the algae from the swimming pool at the Beach Club in Southampton than Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have got up and walked. ‘What do I do now, Katie?’ he asked me that night, after he told me about the algae. I told him what he had to do. It was child’s play for me. It was what I was put on this earth to do. But for your father it was a chore.” How come you never told anyone? I ask Mother. “Oh, I could never take the credit for anything, not in this man’s world. No one would believe me.” I say it’s never too late. “You don’t say?” Mother says. Sheets to chin, the corners of her lips slide up into a smile. Mother has time to tell me everything, and I have nothing but time to listen.

  February 5, 1971

  I ask Rebecca and Diana to dinner but they won’t come and I know why. They don’t want to talk about what Tom did to us, they don’t want to admit the worst thing in the world happened to every one of us.

  February 18, 1971

  Did Thomas Cushing rape your mother? I ask Mother. “No, child. My mother was married to an albino, a baker, and there was no way they could have children together. When Thomas Cushing came knocking my mother wanted him to knock her up. My own mother Constance Briody said to me: ‘That’s the only way I could have had a child. That makes you a love child, Caitlin.’ My mother Constance loved Thomas Cushing, you know, though he never loved anyone back.”

  March 8, 1971

  Tell me about The Tommies, I tell her. “I will,” Mother says. “I promise.”

  March 17, 1971

  Will’s day, a day for most people to forget themselves in the bottom of a bottle, my day to think of him as if he never left. Will is fading away in my memory, but he’s here today more than ever in my heart.

  April 2, 1971

  Were all the Sons all bad? I wonder. “Bad enough,” Mother says. “Don’t forget his Sons were the heroes during the Great Fire, saving everyone and their own half-sisters. They took over the town because they were the only men left worth a spit. But after the Great Fire, Thomas Cushing’s Sons had at Thomas Cushing’s own daughters, the daughters of Hads and Had Nots! The half-sisters born of Hads were like a harem at the beck and call of his godforsaken Sons, and their children were all Cushing, or nearly so. The Sons were plenty bad enough, Eleanor, even for that town.”

  April 11, 1971

  How did The Tommies get started? I ask Mother. “There would have been no Tommies if John Patrick Cushing hadn’t raped me like a nickel whore,” Mother says. That was the way the Hads and Had Nots came together.” Tell me more, I tell her. “Someone saved my life that morning, Eleanor. Someone came into the bakery out of nowhere and beat John Patrick Cushing to within an inch of his life. I never found out who saved me. No one ever did. But the Hads and Had Nots found John Patrick and me in the bakery, both of us half-dead, and they stuffed that Cushing son of a bitch into a burlap sack and dragged him away like an animal to the top of the hill, kicking and cursing at him from bottom to top. Your own father had Edison’s dog experiment all ready to go that day to prove the danger of Alternating Current—what a laugh that was, Eleanor!—but instead of a dog the Hads and Had Nots wired up John Patrick Cushing himself to the chair, and it was your father who threw the switch. I told them not to kill him, but John Patrick was doomed, a dead man from the get-go. The smell of dead Cushing was everywhere in the town that day, the day The Tommies came to life.”

  April 25, 1971

  What about the other Sons? I ask Mother. “The Hads and Had Nots raped the Sons after John Patrick Cushing raped me.” Come again? I say. “You should have seen the women of the town that day, Eleanor! There was a whore in the town who had the new disease, and The Tommies held down the Sons till the whore gave every one of them Cushings the germ of it. That’s the gospel truth. They all died from the disease, the Sons did, slowly, all except for Mordechai, though God knows how he got away. That’s the truth. That’s how The Tommies took hold of the town.”

  May 13, 1971

  Do The Tommies still exist? I ask Mother when she comes to. “Does it matter?” Mother says. “The only thing that matters is for you to go back.” Why me? “Can’t you see?” Mother says. “The Great Fire turned the last town along the canal into the perfect place for you, a place with no memory, with nothing but your story waiting to be told.” I don’t have a story, I say. “Yes you do,” Mother says. “You just don’t know how it ends.”

  May 20, 1971

  The last town along the canal was the last thing on my mind when I left the Order. Now I can’t get it out of my mind. I need to suck up everything Mother remembers about when she was young. I need to know it all while she still has something left to tell. “Not today,” her doctor says.

  June 2, 1971

  I wait outside Mother’s room while the doctor goes inside. He comes out and says: “Her time to be going is coming.”

  July 5, 1971

  I can’t blame Mother for anything any more, now that I know what happened to her.

  July 15, 1971

  I am here every day but Mother might as well be dead.

  July 25, 1971

  She drops in and out of her dreams. What happened to The Tommies? I say. What happened next? “White as a sheet,” Mother says, eyes closed. “As a ghost.” Mother might as well be deaf, and I feel
numb.

  August 4, 1971

  I wait all day for Mother to come back to life, if only for a moment, if only in her dreams.

  August 14, 1971

  “Johnny Cake,” Mothers says out loud. She is sifting, drifting through her dreams.

  September 4, 1971

  Mother is dying and we all know it. Today Diana and Rebecca come because I tell them they need to say goodbye. Rebecca, pale as a ghost, unable to look Mother in the eye, comes in without her camera, with just her other self. Diana, for her part, is chittering away about the latest this and the next that and who’s going where and wearing what for the winter season. Mother watches Diana’s mouth without listening to a word she says.