in shallow graves. They had been raped and shot to death. Their names had not yet been released.
I didn’t want to believe what I knew. I insisted that without the names we couldn’t be sure that Mary Elizabeth Riordan was one of the nuns.
Langley climbed upstairs and found the little tin box where we kept her letters. She had written us from time to time as her order moved her about the world: she had gone from one African country to another, and then to South Asian countries and, after some years, to villages in Central America. The letters were always the same wherever she was, as if she was on a world tour of destitution and death. Dear friends, she had written in her last letter, I am here in this bereft little country torn by civil war. Just last week soldiers came through and took away several men of the village and killed them for being with the insurgency. They were only poor farmers trying to feed their families. It is only old men, women, and children now. They cry out in their sleep. Three of my sisters are here with me. We provide what solace we can.
The letter had been written a few months before from the same village named in the newspaper.
I AM NOT A religious person. I prayed to be forgiven for having been jealous of her calling, for having longed for her, for having despoiled her in my dreams. But in truth I have to admit that I was numbed enough by this awful fate of the sister to be not quite able to connect it with my piano student Mary Elizabeth Riordan. Even now, I have the clean scent of her as we sit together on the piano bench. I can summon that up at will. She speaks softly in my ear as, night after night, the moving pictures roll by: Here it’s a funny chase with people hanging out of cars … here the hero is riding a horse at a gallop … here firemen are sliding down a pole … and here (I feel her hand on my shoulder) the lovers embrace, they’re looking into each other’s eyes, and now the card says … “I love you.”
——
AFTER SOME DAYS of silence in our house I said to Langley: This is martyrdom, this is what martyrdom is.
Why, said Langley, because they were nuns? Martyrdom is a religious invention. If it isn’t, why do you not say the four little girls murdered in their Sunday school in Birmingham are martyrs?
I thought about this. I could see the possibility that the sister would have forgiven her abuser and touched his face with two fingers as he brought his gun up to her temple.
There is a difference, I said. The nuns’ religious beliefs put them in harm’s way. They knew there was a civil war, that armed savages roamed the land.
You idiot! Langley shouted. Who do you think armed them! They’re our savages!
But now I am not sure when all of this happened. Either my mind is turning in on itself and its memories are eliding, or I have finally understood the prophecy of Langley’s timeless newspaper.
OUR SHUTTERS WERE never again to be opened. Langley made arrangements with the newsstand where he got his papers to have them delivered to our front door. The early editions of the morning papers arrived usually at about eleven at night. The evening papers were left at our door by three in the afternoon. When Langley did go out, it was always at night. He did our marketing at a small grocery store that had opened just a few blocks north of us and that sold day-old bread. He made a point of patronizing this store, of buying more than we needed, actually, because a local free newspaper that covered embassy receptions, and fashion shows, and ran interviews with interior decorators reported that the store owner was Hispanic. My heavens, Langley shouted, run for your lives, they’re here!
In truth that was one sign of a changing city—a slow, almost imperceptible lapping of a tide from the north—but something like a little grocery store, or a couple of Negro faces seen on the street, was enough for our neighbors to throw up their hands. And, of course, inevitably, my brother and I were deemed the First Cause—it was the Collyers, to the manner born, who had fomented this disaster. Whatever animosity had been directed at us since the fire in