by Kate Mulgrew
“Don’t forget your curfew, birthday girl!” my father shouted, lifting his glass in mock salute.
We spoke very little on the way into town, but I could sense Frank’s growing alarm. I sat rigidly in the passenger seat, hands clasped tightly in my lap, unable to look at him. The familiar had been replaced by the strange, and for this I could not forgive him. This new face—open, wolfish, ardent—frightened me, and at the same time enraged me. It was unfair, this sudden, inexplicable switch, from something I could count on to something I could not. This face belonged to a younger man, one who felt he could do anything he liked with his face, without giving a moment’s thought to how I would react. His jeans were clean and pressed, and he was wearing a new, light blue chambray shirt. As he drove, he glanced at me, again and again, uncomfortable in this silence.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said at last, “for your birthday.”
“My seventeenth birthday,” I corrected him.
“Yes.”
“Why did you do that to your face?” I asked, petulantly.
“My God, Kate, I didn’t have plastic surgery, I shaved my mustache! What’s the big deal?”
“It’s very strange. You seem like someone else,” I said.
“Well, I’m not someone else—I’m me. And I have a nice surprise waiting for you,” Frank replied, smiling.
This smile unnerved me, and I felt a sudden, profound disappointment. We were not going to a restaurant, after all. He had a surprise waiting for me, and that could mean only one thing. It was waiting for me at his place.
Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into the paved driveway and O’Connor drove the car around to the back of the house, where he shut off the ignition.
“Come on,” he said, “the surprise is inside.”
O’Connor did not live in the house, but rented the basement from his landlady, Mrs. Murphy. The basement, like the house itself, was plain, squat, and gray. Gray brick on the outside, gray brick makeshift bookshelves, gray bricks supporting the sheet of glass that served as a coffee table.
On this night, a large bouquet of flowers sat in a glass vase on the coffee table, as well as two wineglasses and a bottle of champagne in a bowl of ice.
“Surprised?” he asked, sheepishly, before crossing to me and taking me in his arms. I immediately pulled away from him.
“What’s wrong?” Frank asked, but this was a question he asked often, and just as often I gave him the same answer. Tonight was no different.
“Just give me a minute to get used to everything,” I said, stepping back to take in the room.
“Let’s have some champagne,” he suggested, uncorking the bottle of Korbel and pouring some liberally into our glasses. The foam bubbled over the rim of my glass, and I caught it with my lips.
“Still there,” O’Connor said, softly, and brushed my lips with his tongue.
This was my first taste of his new mouth, and I didn’t like it. I was accustomed to his mustache, the way it concealed his old mouth and somehow lessened the impact of his ardor. This mouth was glaring, and willful. It was as if he no longer had the decency to hide his hunger, or his years, and was coming at me with a forcefulness that made me jittery.
“Drink up,” O’Connor encouraged, pouring another glass of champagne. “I am making you dinner. Rib eye steaks and baked potatoes. What do you say?”
I wanted to say, I’m not hungry, please take me home. But I didn’t. I just kept drinking.
Over dinner, seated at the small round dining table on the other side of the gray brick bookshelves, he opened a bottle of red wine. He repeatedly asked if I was having a happy birthday, and I repeatedly said yes.
“But I’m saving your real surprise for dessert,” he teased, clinking my glass with his. I suspected it would be something extravagant, something beautiful. A necklace, maybe, or even a ring, something of real value, a token of his true affection.
After dinner, O’Connor excused himself, and I thought, Here it comes! and cautioned myself to maintain my composure, even as he reappeared carrying a plate, upon which sat a small chocolate cupcake sprouting a single lighted candle. I laughed, sure this was merely the prelude.
“Follow me,” he instructed, backing up and moving slowly down the short hallway that led to the bedroom. Blushing, I realized that he had strewn roses on the floor. I shook my head as we approached the closed door, but O’Connor took my hand and said, “You have to see your surprise. Just for a minute.”
With that, he opened the bedroom door and, as he drew me inside, began to sing “Happy Birthday.” The room was full of helium balloons of all shapes and colors, each one inscribed with a salutation or endearment, such as HAPPY BIRTHDAY or I LOVE YOU. The bed was covered with red roses and red carnations, red and white carnations littered the floor, and a blood-red heart-shaped box of chocolates adorned the pillow. O’Connor sat on the bed and, pulling me next to him, reached for the chocolates and said, “You know what this means.”
I wanted to giggle but couldn’t. It seemed strangely pathetic, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I stood and started for the door, but he blocked my way before my fingers reached the handle.
“We don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to,” he whispered, his face very close to mine. “But please, Kate, come in and lie down with me—just for a minute. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
Reluctantly, I sat beside him on the bed. He held my hand, he stroked my hair, he reached for my face and kissed me gently on the mouth. He never stopped promising me that we wouldn’t do anything I didn’t want to do, even as he laid me down on the bed and his hand found its way beneath my skirt, even as he assured me that he loved me and that he would never hurt me, but that he had waited so long and it had become almost unbearable, and his new mouth pressed itself against mine so that I had to struggle to catch my breath, and his words never for a moment ceased and they were full of love, of adoration, of longing, and he whispered in my ear, even as my satin bow unraveled, loosening my hair, he whispered that he loved me, that he wanted so badly to make me his, oh please, he said, Katy, Katy, let me be the one, don’t make me beg, look what you’ve done to me, and he kissed me again and again and again and soon he was above me, looking down at me, and then he was between my legs and I couldn’t believe his strength and I couldn’t believe his words because they were so full of love but his arms held me and his legs parted mine and then there was a struggle, brief and frantic, but I didn’t cry out because I was with him and hadn’t he promised he wouldn’t do anything I didn’t want to do and hadn’t he told me over and over how much he loved me, and then there was a piercing and a thrusting but I couldn’t be sure of anything because I didn’t know anything, and so we lay there like that, panting hard, and then it was over.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I whispered, sliding out from under him.
“Kate, are you okay? Oh, Kate,” O’Connor moaned, but I was out of the bed and in the bathroom before he could get to me. I locked the door and switched on the light. I was naked under the bare overhead bulb and watched in horror as the blood, in a single weak stream, ran slowly down my thigh. Pulling O’Connor’s robe from the hook on the back of the door, I covered myself, unlocked the door, and tiptoed into the hallway.
“Kate?” he called.
I hesitated, just outside the bedroom door, and then said, “I need a minute to myself, Frank.”
He made a sound like a whimper, and through the door I saw him cover his face with his arm.
It was April, but the Iowa winter had been brutal and even now the ground outside the patio doors was thorny with frost. I pulled open the doors and crept outside. It was late, the house was dark, a full moon illuminated the backyard. In bare feet, I walked out into the middle of the yard, knelt on the hard ground, and prayed to the Virgin Mary to restore my virginity.
I wept and went on weeping through the long night and into the dawn, when O’Connor dropped me off at the stone gates that marked our
property. I said nothing, slipped out of the car without saying good-bye, and hoped he would rot in hell for what he had done to me.
I had missed my curfew by a very wide margin and knew that my father would be waiting for me. My mother, too, I supposed, although this prospect was almost too painful to bear. Walking slowly down the driveway, paved with Mulgrew Blacktop, I weighed my options carefully. In the few minutes remaining until the jig was up, I calculated that bravado might be luckier than honesty, and climbed onto my father’s forest green tractor, which he kept parked outside the back door. There I sat, in my pleated camel skirt, hair once again tucked neatly into its ribbon, beating my shame into submission.
The back door swung open, banged shut. My father strode down the brick path, pausing only long enough to allow me to feel the full weight of his disgust. He could not bring himself to address me directly but lit a cigarette and, looking off into the timberland, said, “You and I are going to have a talk when I get home tonight. There will be no play practice, you will come home directly after school.”
“Dad,” I said, “I’m sorry about my curfew, but it was my birthday after all, and then I just wanted to stay up and watch the sun rise.”
My father looked at me then, hard, and shook his head. He climbed into his car and sat behind the wheel for a minute, face set and silent, before driving slowly away down the gravel road.
Inside, my mother stood over the kitchen counter, wearing her laminated yellow apron. She turned and glanced at me as I came in, then just as quickly turned away, and bent to her work.
Seldom in all of my seventeen years had my mother not greeted me in the morning with her customary chime of “Kitten Kat Feathers of Joy,” but on this morning, when I longed for her greeting as I never had before, I was met with silence and, as I made my way up the front stairs and into my bedroom, I began to understand that there was a price to pay for bearing shame, and that I would be made to pay it for the rest of my life.
* * *
MY FATHER GROUNDED me for a year, and Frank O’Connor was banned from the property in perpetuity. Two months later, I looked out my bedroom window and saw O’Connor’s car parked in the driveway. He and my father stood a short distance away, their backs to the house, so I couldn’t see their expressions. Both looked directly forward, arms crossed in front of them, talking in low voices. Suddenly, I heard O’Connor laugh and watched as he put a hand on my father’s shoulder. This gesture seemed to put an end to their conversation. Both men turned and began to walk toward the house. I listened as the front door opened, swung shut. There was silence for a minute and then, from the base of the stairs, I heard O’Connor call my name.
Chapter Nine
I have loved you, I thought, looking at my father as he gazed darkly into the fire, but I have not known you. Fathers like you are not to be known, isn’t that why you are so loved? If we knew you, as we do our mothers, our criticism would be much harsher. As it is, you are an enigma, and adored. Dear God, I prayed silently, let him go easily. Invoking the name of God, even in my mind, struck me as absurd. What God was I praying to? The same God who would consign him to oblivion, a state that once upon a time he had disdained, just as he had disdained those who did not believe in Jesus Christ. How he had believed! Not just a devout Roman Catholic and a servant of the Church, but a handsome, witty, charming crusader for Christ!
How the women drank you in at Sunday Mass, all those farmers’ wives in their washed-out print dresses, their broadening asses concealed beneath the drab cloth, in whose eyes shone the naked hunger of the truly deprived, as they marked your every move once you entered the pew and were safely watchable. Now, this was a Catholic man worth his salt, they said to themselves, standing in rigid submission next to their muscled, sunburnt husbands. We’re standing next to our men, they assured themselves, but we’re drinking you in, and what a tall drink of water you are, Tom Mulgrew! They feasted on my father, and pitied him his many loudmouthed, ill-mannered brats, all jumbled helter-skelter in the pew, no order, no discipline, and the wife at the other end reading a book, for God Almighty’s sake. What did Tom Mulgrew do to deserve a family like that? So straight, so trim, so unchanged since his days as a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. No pretensions in that man, unlike his wife. No, T. J. Mulgrew had a handshake for every man, a kind word for every woman. At Sunday Mass, the women watched with longing and the men with admiration, this much I could see from my vantage point mid-pew, right smack in the middle of the Sacred Drama.
Just as I saw your power then, I can see that now, tonight, you are beginning to be afraid, and that there is nothing to be done about it. Your strength of character, which years of hard drinking and questionable behavior have not significantly diminished, will not allow you to reveal the extent of your fear, and you, yourself, are not at all convinced that this sudden excursion into uncharted waters is an altogether unsatisfactory proposition. I’d say that after as little as one more vodka you’ll be looking on the bright side and whispering to yourself that if it has to be hard and fast, then this is the way to go. A few days, a few weeks, a smooth slide into a painless end. You’re twitching a little now, too, curious about the pain, wondering how it will come upon you, its intensity, and how it will be alleviated. Now, you glance across the room and your eyes find mine, staring back at you, and you lift your glass in salutation and say to yourself, Thank God for that one, she’ll keep me in booze until I don’t want it, and then she’ll see to it that I don’t suffer, but before all of that happens, there’s something I want to tell her, something I’m forgetting.
“What is it, Dad?” I asked, leaning forward on the ottoman, sensing a shift and alert, as always, to the dramatic possibilities.
“There’s not a goddam thing to do about this, is there?” my father asked, almost wistfully. I saw the shadow of a smile appear at the edges of his mouth and, because it pleased me, I egged him on.
“Not about your condition, no. You made the right decision, Dad,” I said, and immediately regretting having said it. He would be onto me in a second if I backpedaled, so I continued.
“You’re philosophical about it, aren’t you? At the root of it, I think you are.”
If this was provocative, or jarring, it was only because the hours were deepening and soon, I knew, we would have to say good night.
My father peered forlornly into his empty glass, which spurred me into action. I crossed the room and, taking his glass firmly in hand, announced that we were going to have a nightcap. Wearily, but not without humor, he shrugged with cavalier acquiescence. What must be, must be, his expression suggested, and if it must be a nightcap, let me endure it with grace.
I refilled our glasses with the last of the Popov and returned to the TV Room. This time, however, I pulled the ottoman across the room, to be closer to my father. I did not want him to strain himself in any way. I wanted the nightcap to soften the inevitability of the evening coming to an end. Much could be said without words, in fact, and although my father had always regarded me as loquacious, tonight we were gathered in sympathy, and we were alone. Tonight, he could not and would not need to tell me to lower my voice, tonight my voice was hushed, our two tidy figures bending toward the fire, and filled with the quiet, and the beauty of all that is, and must remain, unspoken.
“It’s a pity, having to become philosophical, especially when it was so good for so long,” my father said, and I understood him immediately.
“You mean your relationship with God?”
“Exactly. A real pity about that, particularly under the circumstances. That was a nifty relationship to lean on, when things got tough,” he mused.
“But it’s been some time, hasn’t it?” I asked, crossing one leg over the other, and resting my drink on an upraised knee.
“Since I stopped believing in a personal God? Yes. I clung to the notion of a deity for a long time, even after Tessie died. Hell, I’m still clinging to it, if I’m going to be honest. But faith no longer sustains me, as it on
ce did, and that was a beautiful thing. Complete forgiveness, absolved of all my sins, and not only that, but a guaranteed life after death. Wow. Pretty terrific. And it worked until I carried my daughter out of here in a casket. That flipped a switch. It ended, just like that. Jesus,” my father said tightly, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray, “I courted your mother on the strength of all that—baloney.”
He leaned back into the cushion of the couch, resting his head against the long, square pillow. His skin was gray, the growth of his beard uneven and unkempt, the corners of his mouth pulled into a frown. It was then that I glimpsed the magnitude of his exhaustion and realized that he had been in this fight for months, possibly longer, and had never said a word to anyone. Undoubtedly, he had hoped that this sluggishness would pass, this acute longing to stay in bed. His pride was such that he’d forced himself into his khakis every day, pulled his Notre Dame sweatshirt over his head, attempted to brush his teeth, crept down the staircase, holding tight to the banister. There was Lucy to contend with, after all, and his wife was still alive—after a fashion. There was a cup of hot coffee, a soft-boiled egg, a fuss to be made over him as he shuffled from coffeepot to cupboard. There was Lucy’s admiration and devotion as she watched him out of the corner of her eye, a spoonful of applesauce on its way to my mother’s mouth pausing in midair. There was the beauty of the place, still, and sometimes he’d look out beyond the grape arbor where his youngest daughter had married a Jewish trader, beyond the cornfields that he shared with Gilbert Merritt, a farmer who refused to install plumbing until the school board complained that all of his children had ringworm, beyond the bonfire which stood in a perpetual state of readiness, the logs carefully stacked by his grandson Rory, or maybe his grandson Ryan who, despite a bad heart, loved to carry the wood for his grandfather, beyond the fields and down the long gravel road that wound slowly toward the town, and he would think to himself, Best goddam thing I ever did, buying this place.