“That was because he wants to fix me up with his daughter. It wasn’t directed at you.”
“No?”
“No. I’d take Martin over Berkowitz any day.”
“I’d take Berkowitz over Martin any day.”
We regard each other over the flowers. We seem to be lined up on opposing sides of a class war. It breaks the mood — which is a godsend, for what I have to do.
“Is this our first fight?” he asks, with a sad smile.
“Ned—”
“Then I have something to say.” He grabs the flowers and puts them on the desk. Then he walks over to me and takes me in his arms. “I’m sorry.”
I can smell his aftershave, familiar to me now, and feel the heavy cotton of his shirt. “Ned—”
“You don’t need a hard time from me this morning, do you?” He hugs me tighter, rocking a little, and I feel myself relax into the comfort of his arms. My hands slip easily around the small of his back. He wears no undershirt, which I love, and his shirt is slightly damp from the walk to work.
“The notes are missing, Ned.”
He kisses my hair. “No, they’re not. I have them.”
I pull away from him. “You have the notes, Ned? You?”
“Not with me. I put them in my safe at home, behind the picture of that old Lightning, at Wellfleet.”
“Where did you get them?”
“The notes? I went to the office after the memorial service.”
“Why?”
“I had work to do, honey. I was going to work the weekend, but we spent it in bed, remember? I stopped by your office and found them on top of your desk with a note.”
“But why were you even on this floor? Your office is on—”
“I don’t know. I just was.”
“Why did you go in my office?”
“On impulse, I guess. I wanted to be around something of yours. Look at your handwriting, you know. It was goony.” He laughs nervously. “What’s with all the questions?”
Fear rises in my throat. He has no reason to be on my floor, no right to come into my office. I imagine him rooting through my desk in the glow of the clock. I hope Judy isn’t right about him, but I can’t take any more chances. I steel myself. “Ned, I can’t see you for a while.”
“What?” He looks shocked.
“I want you to bring the notes to the office as soon as you can. Maybe you should go home at lunch.”
“What are you saying? What about us?”
“I’m… not ready for us. Not yet. Not now.”
“Wait a minute, what’s happening?” His voice breaks. “Mary, I love you!”
He hadn’t said that, not once the whole weekend, though I wondered how deep his feelings went. Now I know, if he’s telling the truth. I love you. The words reach out and grab me by the heart. I want so much for it not to be him, but I’m afraid Judy’s right. And now I’m afraid of him. “I need time.”
“Time? Time for what?”
“To think. I want the notes back.”
He grabs my arms. “Mary, I love you. I’ll get you the notes. I was only trying to help. I didn’t think they should be left out like that, where anybody could pick them up.”
I can’t look at him. “Ned, please.”
He releases me suddenly. “I get it. You think it’s me, don’t you? You suspect me.” His tone is bitter.
“I don’t know what I think.”
“You think it’s me. You think I’m trying to kill you. I can’t believe this.” He throws up his hands in disgust. “We spent the weekend together, Mary. I told you things I never told anybody else in the world!”
He falls silent suddenly. I look at him, and his face is full of anger.
“That’s why, isn’t it?” he asks quietly. “Because of what I told you. I was depressed, so now you have me pegged for a psycho killer. Oh, this is beautiful. This is really beautiful. Tell me again how proud you are of me, Mary.”
“That’s not it. I just need time, Ned.”
“Fine. You just got it.” He stalks to the door but stops there, his back to me. “Whoever it is, they’ll still be after you. And I won’t be around to keep you safe.”
I feel sick inside. He hurts so much, and it hurts to see him go.
“Is this really what you want?” he asks, without turning around.
I close my eyes. “Yes.”
“So be it.” The next sound is the harsh ca-chunk of the door as it closes.
When I open my eyes, I’m alone. I cross my arms and try to keep it together, looking around my office at the books and the files and the diplomas. They’re so cold, fungible. They could belong to anybody, and they do. Every lawyer here has the same rust-colored accordion files, the same framed diplomas from the same handful of schools. My eyes fall on the roses, so out of place in this cold little office with the clock staring in.
10:36.
I feel like I have to regroup, to sort out everything that’s been happening. I need to think things out in a safe place, but I can’t remember the last time I felt safe. In Mike’s arms. Another time.
In church, as a child.
In church, what a thought. I haven’t been to church in ages and had lapsed way before that. But I always felt safe in church as a little girl. Protected, watched over. The idea grows on me as I stand, frozen, facing the clock.
I think of the church I grew up in, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I was a believer then. A believer in a God who watched over us all, the cyclists and the gay secretaries. A believer in the goodness of all men, even partners, and lovers too. A believer in our fraternity with animals, including cats who won’t rub against your leg no matter what.
I grab my blazer from behind the door and stop by Miss Pershing’s desk. “Miss Pershing, I’ll be out of the office for a couple of hours.”
“Oh?” She takes off her glasses and places them carefully on her shallow chest, where they dangle on a lorgnette. “Where shall I say you are, Miss DiNunzio?”
“You shouldn’t say, but the answer is, in church.”
For the first time, Miss Pershing smiles at me.
I hail a cab outside our building. The cabbie, an old man with greasy white hair, stabs out his cigarette and flips down the flag on the meter. “Where to?”
“Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Ninth and Wolf.”
“Lawyers go to church?” A final puff of smoke bursts from his mouth.
“Only when they have to.”
He chuckles thickly, and it ends in a coughing spasm. We take off in silence, except for the crackling of the radio. The cab swings onto Broad Street, which bisects the city at City Hall and runs straight to South Philly. Broad Street is congested, as usual. We stop in the cool shadow cast by a skyscraper and then lurch into the bright light of the sun. I crank open the window, watching us pass through light and dark, listening to the old cabbie swear at the traffic, and trying to remember the last time I was in church.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 3,492,972 weeks since my last confession. The Jurassic Period. When I did everything the nuns told me to, so I wouldn’t get my knuckles rapped, and memorized the Baltimore Catechism. I made my First Holy Communion at age seven, during which the priest put a wafer onto my tongue that he said was the body of Jesus Christ. I didn’t swallow it until right before they took my picture, and my baby face is beatific in the photo. I’d swallowed my slice of Our Savior and was overjoyed that this cannibalistic act had not sent lightning zigzagging to my head.
“Shit!” The cabbie bangs on the steering wheel, foiled in his attempt to run a traffic light. Sunlight blazes into the old cab, illuminating its dusty interior and heating its duct-taped seat covers. “You think they’d time these goddamn lights, like on Chestnut Street. But no, that would make too much sense.”
I nod, half listening. As soon as the light changes, the cabbie guns the motor and we leap forward into the tall shadow cast by the Fidelity Building. Its darkness comes as a relief and seems to qui
et even the irritable driver.
As a child, I used to look at my communion picture on top of our boxy television. I wanted to be as good as the little girl in my picture, she of the praying hands and the lacquered corkscrews. But I wasn’t her. I knew it inside. The church told me so. They taught me that Jesus Christ suffered on the cross and died because of me. All because of me. Blood dripped from his crown of thorns and flowed in rivulets from rough bolts hammered clear through his wrists and insteps. His agony was all my fault. I felt so sorry, as a little girl, and so ashamed. Of myself.
“Hey, asshole!” shouts the cabbie, hanging out the window. “Move that shitwagon! I’m tryin’ to make a living here!” The cab bucks violently in the shade. I grab for the yellowed hand strap just as we burst free of the snarled traffic into the light.
And in my religious life, what happened next was calamitous. I grew up. It was Luke who said that whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it, and I stopped being a child. I stopped accepting on faith and started to doubt. Then I started to question, which brought the heavens, in the form of school administration, crashing down upon my head. I took biological issue with the Resurrection and was suspended for three days.
Light and dark, light and dark.
That’s when it started, the split between me and the church. And me and my twin. For as I began to turn away from the light, Angie began to embrace it. I resented the church, for making me feel so terrible about myself as a child and for dividing Angie and me. In time, I stopped going to mass altogether, and my parents didn’t force the issue. The three of them went every Sunday, while I stayed home with the Eagles pregame show. They prayed for my soul. I prayed for the Eagles.
“Do you remember Roman Gabriel?” I say to the cabbie. We’re almost there.
He looks into the rearview mirror with rheumy eyes. “Sure. Quarterback for the Birds. We got him from the Rams.”
“Do you remember when?”
He squints, in thought. “’Seventy-three, I think. Yeah, in ’seventy-three.”
So long ago. I can’t do the math in my head.
“What a fruit he was,” says the cabbie. “We shoulda kept Liske.”
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I can’t remember a thing about my last confession.
And I can’t forget a thing about my abortion.
22
It was so long ago.
I never told anyone, not even Mike. I intended to tell him, but changed my mind when we found out he couldn’t have kids. It would have made it worse. I know it did for me.
“This it?” says the cabbie, pulling up in front of the red-brick fortress on the corner of Ninth and Wolf. He ducks down to see it better. “It don’t look like a church. What’d you say it was? Our Lady of Perpetual—”
“Motion.” I get out of the cab and throw him a ten-dollar bill, with no tip. “Here. This is from a fruit I know.”
“Crazy broad,” he mutters. The cab lurches off.
I glance around to see if I’ve been followed, but the street is quiet. I turn and confront my church. From the outside, there is no way to tell what type of building it is. The windows are bricked in and the heavy oak doors are squared off at the top. But for the black sign that says the times of the masses in tiny white numbers, you would think that OLPH is a Mafia front. Except that the Mafia front is across the street.
In contrast to the bleakness of the church is the grassy lot beside it, a sheltered grotto for the statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Perpetual Help herself. I remember thinking that the grotto was a miraculous place, a baby’s blanket of perfect green grass tucked away from the city sidewalks. Gazing benignly over the grass, high above the electric trolley cars, was the slim, robed figure of the Virgin, tall as a spire in white marble, with her hands out-stretched in welcome. I felt peaceful there as a child.
I have the same feeling today. The statue looks the same, and so does the grass. It’s verdant and thick; it looks newly mown and raked. Tulips dip their heavy heads at the statue’s pedestal. No one’s around, so I sit on the bench in front of it, completing my Catholic impersonation. I’m eye level with the pedestal’s inscription, but don’t have to look at the Roman-carved letters to know what they say. I remember:
VIRGIN MARY
MARIAN YEAR 1954
GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. RAFAELLO D. SABATINI
Mr. and Mrs. Rafaello D. Sabatini owned the Mafia front across the street, but who cared? They were good Catholics, they supported the church and the school. That was all that mattered.
At the statue’s feet are plastic bouquets of red roses, Mary’s flower, and along her hem are the lipsticked kisses of the insanely faithful. Rosaries dangle from her inanimate fingers, and she wears a crown made of glitter pasted onto cardboard, as if by a child. A little girl, no doubt, for little girls love the Virgin. Was I a little girl like that once? I feel a stab of pain. What does Mary think of Mary now, since her abortion?
I squint up at Mary’s eyes, there at the top of the tall statue. She doesn’t answer me but gazes straight ahead. She’s innocent, the Eternal Virgin. Her conception, unlike mine, was Immaculate. She knows nothing of couplings that happen to Catholic girls who are on the third date of their life, with Bobby Mancuso from Latin Club. Who, despite his braces, is terribly cute and plays varsity basketball. Who takes her to McDonald’s and then, in his Corvair, kisses her hotly, ignoring her protestations. Who doesn’t rape her exactly, but who complains that he’s in intense pain from something called blue balls, which means either that his balls are turning blue because the blood to them is cut off, or there’s too much blood getting to them. She’s confused about the physiology of the blue balls but understands clearly that his pain is all because of her.
His agony is all her fault.
Which makes her sorry, so sorry.
He says if she would just let him touch between her legs, just let him do what he wanted, his pain would be relieved and his balls wouldn’t be blue anymore. And before she knows it, her new plaid kilt is up and he is inside her. It’s over so fast, and the whole thing is so painful and strange, so impossibly strange, that she’s really not sure she’s not a virgin Mary anymore. Until she gets home and finds the spots on her flowered Carter’s. Red splotches, shaped like infernal stars, among the delicate pink blossoms. Then she’s pregnant and decides to have an abortion.
No one knew. Not even Angie, and especially not Angie. I was terrified. I was ashamed. I had committed a mortal sin and would burn in eternal fire unless I repented. But the only way to repent was to confess my sin to God and to my parents, who would die from the shock. I felt trapped between commandments: THOU SHALT NOT KILL and HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.
Not only that, but both Angie and I had been awarded scholarships to Penn, which was my only hope of going to college. Would the university extend mine until my baby — and Bobby’s, who ignored me from that day forward — was born? Of course not. Even if they did, how would I support a child? My mother couldn’t; her piecework sewing barely bought my uniform and books. My father couldn’t; he was already on disability.
I had no choice.
I found Planned Parenthood in the Yellow Pages and took the bus to center city one Saturday morning, with an Etienne Aigner wallet full of confirmation money. The abortion would cost the $150 earmarked for a white ten-speed, but I was putting away childish things. Of necessity.
When I got to the clinic, I filled out some forms, on which I lied about my age and changed my name. I told them I was Jane Hathaway, after Nancy Kulp in The Beverly Hillbillies, because she seemed like such a classy lady. Then I was taken to see a counselor, a black woman named Adelaide Huckaby, who wore an African dashiki. Her nappy hair was close-cropped, revealing a marvelously round head, and her eyes were a dark brown, like her skin. We talked for a long time, and she gave me a warm hug when I cried. “You want to think about it some more?” she asked. “You can change your mind, even now.”
I said no.
Adelaide came with me into what they called the Procedure Room, and we waited for the doctor together. I was lying flat on a skinny and unforgiving table in a hospital gown, with my knees supported from underneath. On the ceiling was a circle of fluorescent light. I tried not to think of it as an all-seeing eye, looking down on me from above, witnessing everything in mute horror.
“I see you get those blotches on your chest,” Adelaide said softly. “My sister gets ’em too. Only you can’t see ’em so well on her.”
I smiled.
“It’s all right, baby. Everything’s gonna be all right.”
Then the doctor came in. He wore granny glasses and gave me a brief hello before he disappeared behind the white tent covering my knees. Adelaide took my hand and held it. She seemed to know I needed a hand to hold on to, and hers was strong and generous. While the doctor worked away, Adelaide described the procedure for me, her voice quietly resonant.
“Now he’s inserting the speculum, so you’ll feel some coldness. You know what a speculum is, baby?”
I shook my head, no.
“That’s what your doctor uses during a pelvic exam, the same instrument, to hold the walls of the vagina apart.”
I had never had a pelvic exam. This was, in effect, my first trip to the gynecologist. I didn’t tell Adelaide that. I was supposed to be nineteen and was already feeling bad about lying.
“Now he’s going to give you two shots, into your cervix, to relax the muscle.”
“Needles?”
“Don’t worry. In about two minutes you’ll feel two tiny little pinches, not too bad.”
Adelaide was as good as her word. One. Two. Like little pinpricks.
“Now we’re comin’ up on the part of the procedure where the doctor’s going to dilate you. He’s gonna use two rods, one small and one large, to open up your cervix. This is gonna be a little uncomfortable for you, honey, and I want you to hold my hand good and tight. It’s gonna feel like cramps, just like the kind you get on your period.”
“I don’t get cramps.”
“Not even the first day?”