Ever had a butter mint? Most people nowadays haven’t even heard of them, much less tasted one. If you have, then you know that the name is a misnomer-they’re not minty but rather rich and milky and sweet. It’s a vanished taste from a vanished world, the world of my childhood. I grew up in South Boston in the seventies, attending St. Bartholomew’s Church School for the greater part of my primary education, and when I taste a butter mint now, I see glimpses of that vanished world again. Black robes whipping around corners. Choral voices ringing down marble hallways dappled with wan wintry light. Snow falling silent on the statues standing sentry in the courtyard. And I see her, fixing me with her steady gaze, smiling her private little smile.
When most people think of Catholic school, they imagine one of two things: grim, hatchet-faced harridans rapping on students’ knuckles with rulers, or pederast priests getting handsy with the altar boys. Let me address the latter right out of the gate and say I was an altar boy for many years and nothing like that ever happened to me, though I heard rumors about it happening to others, and there were certainly a few priests on the staff with whom you wouldn’t necessarily want to be caught alone in a room together. As for the former, well, don’t get me wrong-plenty of the nuns who taught at St. Bartholomew’s were happy to fill that role. Sister Catherine was a mean hand with the paddle, and if you saw a student hobbling down the hallway, you knew it was her handiwork. Sister Anne preferred torment of the psychological variety-everyone remembered the time she brought Bobby McNamara up to the front of class to confess that the stains on his pants were not from water.
But on the whole, most of the nuns at St. Bartholomew’s were harried and well-meaning women doing the best they could with difficult circumstances, and several were teachers I remembered for the rest of my life. Sister Eloise, who taught the humanities, infected me with my love of literature, and kind Sister Margaret would dispense tissues and listen to my tearful accounts of schoolyard injustices. And then there was Sister Joan.
Sister Joan was the headmistress of the school and something of an enigma. For one thing, she seemed far too young to hold her position. Her age was difficult to place, but her features were still described as “pretty” and not yet “handsome”. (Most of the boys at the school would have crushed on her from afar, if they’d dared, but none of us did. Something about her forbade it. It seemed like she’d know.) She looked younger than most of the staff, but they treated her with a respect and deference bordering on terror, something which didn’t escape the notice of the students. We’d look on with bafflement and high amusement as the classroom tyrants who ruled our days were reduced to stammering sycophants in Sister Joan’s presence. What made it even odder was how benign and mild Sister Joan’s demeanor was. When she made her rare drop-ins to classes, she would graciously accept the teacher’s prostrations and then she would urge them to continue. She’d stand silently in the back of the classroom, hands tucked primly in her habit, surveying us with kind eyes and a serene smile. She was always smiling private little smiles, as if she was in on a big joke that the rest of us were not privy to.
Another strange thing about Sister Joan: we almost never saw her. The priests and nuns on the staff were well-integrated in the community; you’d see them at church, at the grocery store, at community events. Many of them were regularly invited over to our parents’ houses for dinner. Sister Joan made no such house calls. You could walk the halls of St. Bartholomew’s for months at a time and never catch a glimpse of her, and then one day, you’d stumble upon her standing alone amidst the statues in the garden or staring out the window at the rain. On such occasions, she’d always greet you by name and ask how you were doing. She seemed to know every single one of her students’ names, as well as details about their family life, their hopes, ambitions, talents, fears. No one, however, seemed to know anything about her. Only the oldest members of the staff could remember a time before she ran the school. Not that they’d suffer anyone impertinent enough to ask questions about her. When they did speak of her, the staff would speak in tones of awe and reverence. Some of them seemed convinced that Sister Joan was a living saint.
Us kids filled in the blanks about Sister Joan with outrageous rumors. She’s the bastard child of a Kennedy! No, idiot, she’s the daughter of the pope. One particularly imaginative boy claimed Sister Joan was an immortal being who had lived through the Crusades. It seemed as likely as anything else we knew about her.
She had her mysteries and eccentricities, but mostly, us students liked Sister Joan. She never raised her voice in anger, and while she permitted corporal punishment in the school, she did not practice it herself. She was of the opinion that a long talk with a student was all that was necessary to correct misbehavior, and she seemed to be right. Only the worst cases, the repeat offenders who failed to respond to the paddle or the cane, were sent to her office. When we saw them again, they’d be changed. The rowdiest and most defiant children would come back from her office and sit meekly at their desks, sucking on a butter mint. Another quirk of Sister Joan’s: she would keep the candies in a jar on her desk and dispense them whenever she felt the proper lesson had been learned.
I remember one day when Michael Broyles’s name was called. Mikey Broyles was the terror of my days, the self-appointed antagonist of my life, and he had promised that very day that he’d find me after school and give me the thrashing to end all thrashings (I do not recall what offense I had committed to earn this sentence). But midway through the day, a Sister interrupted the class to announce that Michael Broyles was to come with her to Sister Joan’s office immediately. Mikey mustered the best swagger he could, making sure to shoot me a look of malice as he left. I didn’t permit myself a feeling of triumph or even relief- the punishment would be even more merciless now that he believed I had tattled on him. I spent the rest of the day imagining the cruel fate I no doubt had in store. But when, despite my best efforts at avoiding him, I bumped into Mike in the school hallways, he didn’t even look me in the eye. He gave me a little half-hearted push and then he kept on walking, eyes on the floor. He was worrying at a wrapped butter mint in his hands, not eating it. For a moment, shock overcame fear, and I called out to him.
“Mikey?”
He turned around and regarded me for the first time. There was a dazed and distant look in his eye.
“It wasn’t me, you know.”
“Mmm.” A noncommittal grunt. I was beginning to curse myself for not taking the opportunity to run.
“I didn’t report you, I mean.”
He finally unwrapped the butter mint and popped it into his mouth expressionlessly. He let the wrapper drift to the floor. “Okay,” he said, and then he kept walking. Nonplussed, I reflexively bent down and picked up the discarded wrapper. It depicted a cartoon boy and a cartoon cow with identical smiles. Something about it unnerved me. I tossed the wrapper into the nearest trashcan and then hastened home before Mikey changed his mind.
I never had trouble from him again. Did I wonder what Sister Joan had said to him? Of course, but I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyone who could reform Mikey Broyles was surely an agent of God. Anyway, it wasn’t as if it was a position I’d ever be in. I was a model student with a clean record. Nothing would happen to me.
I was thirteen when my turn came.
A few months after I turned twelve, my parents pulled me into the dining room and told me without meeting my gaze that they were getting a divorce. Enduring your parents’ divorce is never fun. Perhaps you can imagine how nightmarish it was in the insular world of Catholic Boston in the seventies. My family was ostracized. The other children began to avoid me, as if divorce were a plague I could spread to their families. My teachers were even worse. I hated the looks of pity in their eyes, as if they expected me to go down a bad path and regretted that they couldn’t stop it. I did my best to live down to that expectation. I became cynical, disillusioned, apathetic. Both my parents were too occupied with their mutually assured destruction to notice my burgeoning career as an aspiring dropout.
Most of my teachers gave me more leeway than they might have another student, but the more they gave me, the more I tried to take, and in time, the inevitable happened and Sister Catherine hauled me into Sister Joan’s office.
As we entered the room, I noted how bare and featureless it was. It was austere even by St. Bartholomew’s standards-barren white walls, barren white desk, a single chair. There were no icons, no crosses. The only ornamentation in the room was a painting on the wall. It was by one of those phantasmagorical medieval painters whose names I would know if I paid attention in art class, and it depicted in sallow and feverish brush strokes a huge, squatting, toadlike demon with cold black eyes. The toad was gorging on sinners, their eyes wide and mouths agape as they tried to claw their way out of his gaping jaws.
Sister Joan was standing behind her desk, hands folded primly in her habit as usual. I hadn’t seen her in months. She looked genuinely pleased to see me, as if we had come upon each other by happenstance. Sister Catherine shut the door and directed me to the only chair. I sat on the chair and folded my arms, defiant. I noticed the jar of butter mints before me. It was the only thing on the desk. The little boy and the cow beamed at me from the candy wrappers. The longer I looked at their eyes, the more they looked like that of the toad’s in the painting. I thought of Mikey Broyles, that thousand-yard stare he’d had, and I started to feel that inexplicable unnerving feeling again. I fought it down and told myself that at best, I was in for another beating or a moralizing lecture, both of which I had practice in suffering through stoically, and at worst, I was going to be expelled, which at least would free me from a school I had come to loathe, though the beating my dad would give me would make any thrashing I got from Mikey Broyles pale in comparison.
Sister Joan regarded us in her smiling silence. She seemed to be waiting for one of us to say something. Finally, Sister Catherine cleared her throat. “Sixth offense, Sister. I’ve finally despaired of the boy.”
Sister Joan looked at me with interest. “Sixth, is it? That is impressive.” There was amusement in her cool, mellow tones.
Sister Catherine frowned. “Forgive me, Sister, but this is no laughing matter. We’ve tried and tried and tried. The boy should be expelled.”
“I’d say that rests with me, wouldn’t you?”
Sister Catherine lowered her eyes. “Yes, Sister.”
“I assure you that I regard this with the utmost seriousness. Now, the nature of the offense?”
Sister Catherine perked up at the opportunity to air her grievances. “Mr. Sullivan, as you know, has consistently failed to turn in assignments. When I confronted him in class today, he hurled the most vile and horrid epithets I have heard in over forty years of teaching.”
“That is all very vague, Sister. I’m going to need a little more than that. What exactly did the boy say?”
Sister Catherine reddened. “Must I repeat it?”
Sister Joan raised her hands in theatrical helplessness. “How can I arrive at a fitting judgment when I do not have possession of all the facts?”
“Very well. He called me…he said I was a decrepit old crone worshipping at the altar of a fairy tale.”
Sister Joan’s face remained controlled and impassive, but something about it suggested that she was on the verge of bursting into laughter. “I see. For all the other students to hear?”
“Oh, they heard all right. I could hear them sniggering in the back.”
Sister Joan loudly cleared her throat. “Yes, that is very serious.”
“I will not tolerate being abused by students.” Sister Catherine was working herself into a righteous fit. “I didn’t sacrifice decades of my life to be treated this way, and I don’t see what can be done for the boy. What are we going to do, call his parents in?” She snorted. “I tell you, this is what comes of broken families. Give it a few years. Mr. Sullivan will be out on the streets and- “
Sister Joan raised a hand. “I’m sure we’re all very interested in your predictions, Sister Catherine, but unless you have been gifted powers of prophecy, for now I must ask you to forbear. Please leave us. I will take matters in hand here.”
Sister Catherine glared at me one last time, and then she left. We listened to her angry footsteps recede down the hall, and then the room was dead silent once again. No ticking clock, no humming fan. Outside, a light dusting of snow was falling.
Of all the ways I had envisioned the dreaded summons to Sister Joan’s office going, Sister Catherine being mocked and dismissed was not one of them. It seemed too good to be true. I tried to keep my guard up and prepare for whatever else was coming next.
Sister Joan was smiling at me again. “I apologize for Sister Catherine. She believes her small-minded timidity to be moral uprightness. We can allow her these little illusions, can’t we?” Her expression grew serious. “You, on the other hand, have fewer illusions than you did before, don’t you?”
“Am I going to be expelled?” I asked.
Sister Joan ignored this. “You know what I think, Thomas? I think you’re experiencing a crisis of faith. Perhaps you feel you have learned too early that adults are flawed. Perhaps you feel that there was some more perfect version of events that was supposed to take place until your life took this abrupt left turn. Perhaps you’ve seen all the adults in your life fail to keep up their obligations, so you don’t see any point in keeping up yours. Am I hitting near the mark?”
I had nothing to say to this. No one had ever summed up so perfectly what I was feeling before, and I’m not sure anybody has since. Bizarrely, I felt a wave of tears welling up, and I hated myself for it. “I don’t want to talk about this with you.” I mustered. “I don’t want to talk about this at all.”
Sister Joan reached across the desk and squeezed my hand. “I think I can help you. Would you let me?”
Blinking back tears, I looked down at my hand hanging limply in hers. I saw then that both her hands were webbed and ridged with scars, as if from burns. They looked a little like mine did after I’d been in the pool too long. How did I not notice her scars before? Her hands were always concealed in her habit, I suppose. I don’t know why, but I saw those scars and then I decided.
“Ok,” I said. She smiled and squeezed my hand again. Her grip was very tight.
That was how we ended up walking down the hallways together. Classes had just finished for the day, and the corridors were filled shouts and laughter and gossip. More than a few heads turned our way as Sister Joan steered me through the tight-packed crowds of students. Several hooted and whistled-“Tommy Boy finally got expelled!” one cheered-but Sister Joan silenced all of these with a mild glance. We pressed on, down hallways and several stairwells, making our way deeper and deeper into the bowels of the school. The crowds began to thin out, the laughter dying in the distance. I looked out a window at a crowd of kids throwing snowballs at each other.
“Where are we going?” I asked Sister Joan.
“Trust me,” she said.
We passed through a succession of locked doors, which Sister Joan opened with a ring of rusted keys. I noticed we were entering the older wing of the school, which had supposedly been a plague hospital or an insane asylum in the Victorian era, or so the students whispered, though they were never clear on which. There were no classes here. The school used it only for storage space. The walls here were damp and dingy and peeling. Faded green windows in rusting doors peered into dark rooms where dust collected on old furniture and medical equipment. We passed an ancient elevator shaft and rows of old hospital beds propped end up against the wall. The air began to feel stuffy and unseasonably warm. It smelled of mildew and rot.
At last we came to a dark green door at the end of a long hallway. The door was triple-latched and barred. I looked up at Sister Joan, and she smiled encouragingly.
“What is this place?”
“I am with you. You are safe.”
“But what is it? Why are we here?”
Instead of answering, Sister Joan proceed to unlatch and unbar the door. The sound of its opening echoing through the empty halls was far too loud. The creaky hinges yielded to reveal a rusting metal staircase descending into pure darkness.
I backed away several paces. “We’re not going in there, are we?”
Sister Joan shook her head at my silliness. “It’s the only way, Thomas. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I’m not going down there.”
“I understand. Truly. We won’t do it. I think perhaps I misjudged you. I thought that you were so bright and fearless a boy that the usual forms of punishment-suspension, expulsion-could be waived. I see that I was wrong. Shall we go back to my office?”
I peered down into that absolute night. Almost everything in me was screaming to be anywhere else but here, in this place, with this woman. But another voice, a smaller but equally compelling, whispered to me that it wanted to know, wanted to see what was down there, wanted to see if it could confirm all the worst suspicions it had ever had about life. If you don’t step down there, it said, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering.
“Yes, you will.” Said Sister Joan. Her face was shrouded in shadow. As I watched, dry-mouthed, she raised her scarred hands and removed her coiff, shaking out her long blonde hair. She bent down to my eye-level and looked me in the eye. “Do it, Thomas. For me?”
I walked through the doorway and into the dark. Sister Joan swung the door shut on me.
I shut my eyes just before the door closed and the last of the light was snatched away. All I had now was darkness and the sound of my own breathing. For a moment, I thought I could hear Sister Joan’s light laughter on the other side of the door, but I might have imagined it. I stood there, stone still, for I don’t know how long. When I finally mustered the courage to open them, I found the effect to be identical. I waited for my eyes to acclimate, but the dark remained impenetrable. My legs grew weak and wobbly, and I had to sit down.
“Ohh, Thomas,” Sister Joan’s singsong voice through the door. “Thomas Thomas Thomas. I can see you sitting there on the top stair, Thomas, poor thing. That’s not good enough, Thomas. Down the stairs, Thomas.”
My legs were still trembling too much for me stand, but I could feel my body begin to move almost of its own volition, and I began to scoot my butt down the stairwell. Down and down and down. Something sharp-a rusted nail perhaps-tore through my pants but I carried on, heedless. When I looked back up, I could see the faintest rectangle of light where the door was. I knew now that whatever awaited me at the bottom of the stairs couldn’t be worse than what awaited me at the top. I kept going.
In my memory, the staircase goes on forever, hours and hours and hours, but it could have been two minutes. All I remember distinctly is listening very very carefully for the faintest sound, trying to control my heavy breathing. When I finally felt my feet hit what felt like solid ground, I did not wait, I did not linger and try and make out the details of whatever was down there. I immediately began scooting back up the way I had come, hoping it would be enough for her, hoping she’d let me out.
I was perhaps a quarter of the way up when I heard the first sound. The faintest, smallest little click just at the edge of hearing. An image popped unbidden to my head then, an image of Mikey Broyles trying to scare with his brother’s switchblade a few years before. What sound had the blade made as it leapt out? Click.
I pissed myself then, but I hardly let it stop me as I continued to mount the stairs one by one. No longer trying to control my breathing, trying to convince myself that the hoarse and shallow breaths I could hear following me up the stairs were mine alone.
My progress was abruplty halted by a shooting pain in my leg-whatever sharp thing had torn my pants on the way down had done a bit more damage on the way back up. I looked up at the door, calculating that it was maybe fifteen steps away. That’s when I felt something else. The gentlest little poke at one of my feet. I looked down and saw there by the weak light of the door a pale, fleshy hand spider-crawling up my leg. A large shape was huddled there, a couple steps below me. Its breathing was shallow and rapid and pained. As the hand made its way up my leg, I saw that, like a glove, the skin gave way at the wrist to raw bloody flesh, twining tendons and muscles and a paler hint of bone. The rest of the shape followed the hand, hitching and dragging itself up the stairs until it was hovering directly over me. Some part of me went away then. I don’t think it came back.
The rest of me was sprawled on that staircase beneath the shape. By the dim light, I could see the barest suggestion of a face overgrown with scar tissue, weeping with pustules. Its skin was covered with a fine layer of viscera, like a newborn’s. Two watery blue eyes regarded me sightlessly. I can still smell the sweetness of its breath. One of its hands poked and prodded and inspected me everywhere. The hand held the switchblade, which gleamed like an eye in the darkness.
“Do you think…you know?” A voice, flat and monotone. “Do you think you know?”
The switchblade was raised. The index finger from the other hand hovered in the air, and as I watched, the shape took the blade, and methodically peeled the skin from the finger. Blood ran in droplets down his hand and fell onto my clothes, my skin.
“Do you think you know?” The shape took the knife blade and slipped it under the fingernail, ripping it out, roots and all.
“Do you think you know?” The next finger. The next. The next. Skin fell, molted, to the stairs. The man’s hands became so slippery with blood that he dropped the knife and had to grope for it and pick it up again.
“Do you think you know? Do you think you know? Do you think you know? Do you think you know?”His voice gained no urgency, no tempo, as he attended to his task. When he finished peeling his hand, he turned the knife to the skin remaining on his face.
“Do you think you know? Do you think you know?” His words became unintelligible as his mouth filled with blood. With a ruined hand, he grabbed a large flap of skin from his mouth and cheek and ripped it away, revealing a set of incongruously white teeth.
Then he took my hand in his and flourished the knife once more. He brought the knife down ever so gently into the flesh of my finger, producing the smallest drop of blood. Then he let the knife clatter to the stairs. He gripped the hand he’d pricked between his own and squeezed it, very tight. He kneeled above me, my hand clapsed in his, for the longest time, and then he bent down and embraced me.
“Do you think you know?” He whispered in my ear.
When I came to, I was lying alone on the stairwell. My clothes were soiled with blood and urine, but I was unharmed, except for the little prick on my finger. I could make out a slug smear of blood leading back down into the darkness. I groped around on the stair until my hands gripped the switchblade, and then I began crawling back up toward the light.
When I made to pound on the door, it instead swung open, spilling me out into blinding whiteness. Sprawled there, too worn out even to cry, I blinked until things swam into focus. A face above me, smiling warmly.
Sister Joan, her coif back on, her habit neatened. “You’ve done so well, Thomas, so well,” she said, pulling me back on my feet. She scrutinized my blood soaked face and dabbed pointlessly at it with a handkerchief.
“Do you understand now, Thomas? Do you understand?” I stared at her uncomprehendingly.
She smiled. “You will.” Then she placed something in my hand and tousled my hair. I looked down and saw it sitting in my palm. A butter mint.
Sister Joan provided me with a mismatched set of clothes from the school’s lost and found, and I stumbled home that day looking not much worse for wear. If I sleptwalk through the next few days and the next few weeks and the next few months and the next few years, it was hardly out of the ordinary. I was a child of a broken family, after all. My parents blamed themselves.
I attended St. Bartholomew’s for only a few more weeks. I looked in the eyes of the other students and tried to find the hollowness that I saw in my own. I saw Sister Joan only once more. Flitting by me in the hallway on her way to more pressing business, she turned her head to me and shot me a little wink. That was my last day at St. Bartholomew’s.
A few years ago, I returned at last to St. Bartholomew’s Church School. The school had shut down in the nineties, and remained condemned and abandoned in the years since. I happened to catch a headline in a local newspaper discussing its impending demolishment, and I felt that old dark urge to see, to know coming back. Hopping the chainlink fence now surrounding the property, I ambled about the grounds, taking my time, not sure if I was savoring or delaying what I had to see, what I had to do. The statues in the garden noted my passing, most of them now limbless or headless. Casually, leisurely, I grabbed a stone and smashed in a window. Casually, leisurely, I walked through the hallways and corridors and listened for the sound of choral voices, of children’s laughter. Just at the edge of vision, a woman in a black habit led a child by the hand through the halls. All I needed to do was follow them, through a succession of locked doors(smashed open with my shoulder), past dusty rooms full of relics, past an ancient elevator shaft and rows of old hospital beds, all the way to a long hallway, at the end of which stands a green door.
Readying my gun and my flashlight, I unbarred and unlatched the door and pulled it open. Did my legs wobble as I descended that staircase? Perhaps. Did I gaze back up the stairs and half-expect to see her standing at the top of them, young as I last saw her, smiling down at me? Perhaps. But she wasn’t there and I kept walking, noting the bloodstain about fifteen steps down from the door. Back then, the place at the bottom of the stairs felt vast, possibly endless, but now I found a cramped and tiny room. The ruins of what was plausibly once a bare mattress on the floor. A rocking chair in one corner, a rotting teddy bear in another. Before one wall was constructed a crude little altar. Depicted on the wall was a smiling child, holding the hand of a smiling woman in black. On the altar was a pile of discarded candy wrappers, and a switchblade. I opened the knife. Click. The blade was still sharp, like new.
Do you think you know?