Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  “I will.” Joseph knew most of them would be pleased. He suspected his father would be furious.

  After Joseph crossed Queen Street, he paused at the sight of the two steeples ahead: the Unitarian Church and St. John’s Lutheran. He thought of the congregations who assembled there every Sunday and the graves in those churchyards: so many lost souls… Once he was a Priest, Joseph could baptize them and grant them Absolution; he could save all those people—the living ones, at least. All he had to do was convince his father.

  Resolutely, Joseph continued down Archdale Street toward home. He found a tall, grey-haired man standing outside their gate. The man turned at his approach, and Joseph slowed. It was Philippe Noisette, holding a cutting in a pot. “Ah, Joseph! What fortunate timing. I am in need of an ambassador.” Noisette lowered his voice. “I know your mother saw me, but she is pretending she didn’t.”

  Joseph was tall enough now to peer through the slats at the top of their gate, and he followed the Frenchman’s gaze into their yard. Mama strolled the garden beds alongside the piazza, selecting blooms to take inside. Careful to keep her back to the gate, she glanced surreptitiously over her shoulder and scowled at Noisette. Deafness had few advantages, but the freedom to ignore someone you didn’t like was one of them.

  “The sign says your father is out, but I promised him this cutting.” Noisette extended the flower-pot, so Joseph had to look back at him. “Would you take it? It’s rooted, but best to leave it in the pot another week.”

  Reluctantly Joseph accepted the cutting. For a minute, he only stood there on the sidewalk and stared at the small severed branch. Joseph wanted nothing to do with this man or his plants. Noisette lived in sin with one of his slaves; he could legally sell his own children—and yet…that also meant he understood the Curse of Ham in a way Bishop England never could. Perhaps African blood did not matter to God, but it mattered to everyone else. “You know about my father, don’t you?”

  Noisette’s caution gave Joseph his answer. The Frenchman glanced again toward Mama. She glared back and hurried into the house, slamming the door behind her. Finally Noisette replied: “I know he is a skilled physician, a loyal friend, a devoted husband, and a doting father.”

  Joseph clenched his teeth. “I mean about…” He was not going to say it aloud. They were completely exposed, but he wasn’t about to invite Noisette in. Joseph glanced behind him. Two men approached on the other side of Archdale Street, deep in their own conversation. Strangers, Joseph told himself, who would not draw conclusions from a few guarded French words.

  Noisette leaned closer and dropped his voice to an urgent whisper. “What I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is this, Joseph: the prevailing theories that mulattos inherit the worst of each race, that they’re weak, even sterile—it’s absolute rubbish.” He pointed to the cutting in Joseph’s hands. “Noisette roses have been so successful because they possess the qualities of both Rosa moschata and Rosa chinensis. They don’t lose anything. Botany thrives on hybrids: taking two good things and combining them to make something great.”

  People weren’t plants.

  “Other men of science—and men of color—will argue that mulattos are superior to negroes because of their white blood. That is equally ridiculous. I know my children’s virtues didn’t come from me alone. Your father’s intelligence, his humor, his compassion, his courage—do you really think all of that derives from his French blood? Do you really believe that you have inherited nothing good from him and his mother?”

  Perhaps Joseph’s father was intelligent, but so was Satan. His father’s humor was usually ribald. As for his compassion… Where was the compassion—or the courage—in raping a deaf woman? Noisette saw only what he wanted to see.

  Chapter 14

  His situation is peculiarly unfortunate and disturbing…

  — “The Humble Petition of Philippe Stanislaus Noisette” to emancipate Celestine and their children, denied 1820s

  Grandmama took her meals with them now, so Joseph could tell everyone about his vocation at once. He was so anxious he could hardly eat, yet the words wouldn’t leave his tongue. When Cathy asked to be excused, finally he managed: “Wait—I have…” Haltingly his hands followed his speech so that Mama would understand too. “I talked to Bishop England today, about attending the College of the Propaganda in Rome.”

  “Are you going to be a Priest?” Hélène gasped in delight.

  “I want to be,” Joseph answered, careful to avoid his father’s stare.

  “Rome!” Grandmama hurried down the table to kiss the top of his head. “Your grandfather would be so proud!”

  Mama broke her rule about embraces. In fact, Joseph wondered if she’d ever let him go.

  ‘The Propaganda hasn’t accepted me yet,’ he reminded her.

  ‘They will,’ she assured him with a smile on her lips but tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘I know they will!’

  “They’re fools if they don’t,” Cathy agreed.

  Finally Joseph had no choice but to meet his father’s eyes.

  He stood scowling at the end of the table. “May I speak to you in my office, Joseph?”

  He knew it wasn’t really a question. So he left the approval of his sisters, his Mama, and his Grandmama to obey.

  His father told Joseph to close the door behind him. At first, he couldn’t even look at Joseph. He only stared at his painting of Saint Denis, one hand braced against the wall and the other hanging limply at his side. The decapitated forms of Denis’s fellow martyrs lay bleeding at the edges of the frame. At the center, Denis’s headless body groped for what it lacked. In the dim light that penetrated the white curtains, his father’s skin resembled the martyrs’: he was the color of a corpse. “I have dreaded this day,” Joseph’s father murmured without turning. How different his reaction was from Bishop England’s. “Must God have both my sons?”

  At first, Joseph bristled at such an equation. His brother Christophe was dead. Then Joseph remembered that becoming a Priest was a kind of death. Wasn’t that what he wanted, to die and be born again, better than before? He would enter seminary as a sinful colored boy but emerge as pure and white as new snow. He would cease to belong to his family, because he would belong to God and all families. He would wear black to remind himself and everyone else that he was dead to the world.

  “It would be one thing if you were staying here.” His father dropped his eyes to the floor. “You could come home every day. We could argue. I could keep you from becoming someone I don’t recognize.”

  “You want me to become like you.”

  “No, Joseph.” His father turned sharply. “But neither do I want you to become like your mother: terrified and ashamed of your own—” He stopped and began again. “I want you to have the chance to become yourself, Joseph.” His father pushed off the wall, but he still looked unsteady. “You’re barely thirteen years old!”

  “Many boys start studying for the Priesthood when they’re—”

  “Even younger! I know! That doesn’t make it right! You can’t possibly understand what you’re sacrificing—and that’s precisely why they take you so early. I know what happens in those seminaries. The Church locks boys away from the world and tries to prevent them from ever becoming men. They’ll tell you: ‘virginity is as superior to marriage as Heaven is to Earth.’”

  It was.

  “The Canon that mandates celibacy, do you know the reason it gives? ‘Since Priests ought to be temples of God, vessels of the Lord, and sanctuaries of the Holy Ghost, it is unbecoming that they give themselves up to marriage and impurity.’ As if the two were interchangeable! Even between husbands and wives, the Church will not permit pleasure. It is obsessed with purity—an impossible standard.”

  Impossible for him, perhaps.

  “All celibacy does is make Priests miserable. It is unnatural and unhealthy and ridiculous. God is not enough—human beings need each other.”

  That was heresy. God was everything. And Priest
s were no longer human. They were something more, something greater. Ordination changed them, made them supernatural. Of course that came at a cost.

  Joseph winced and stepped back as his father threw open the curtains to let in the afternoon sunlight. He scowled. He must try to make his father understand. “‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman.’”

  “‘It is not good for man to be alone.’” His father laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. “You’re quoting Saint Paul. I’m quoting God. He does not demand celibacy—the Church does. Men.”

  Divinely inspired men.

  His father pulled open the glass doors of his bookcase and began hunting for something. “Priests are taught to hate half their parishioners! The things Fathers and Doctors of the Church have said about women! ‘You are the Devil’s gateway,’ Tertullian tells them. Women are blamed for all sin.” His father pulled a worn volume from a bottom shelf and leafed through it. “Blessed Albertus Magnus—Albert the supposedly Great, teacher of Thomas Aquinas, Bishop—he went even further.” Joseph’s father found the passage he wanted. “This is what Albert taught: ‘A woman is nothing but a devil fashioned into human appearance. … One must be as mistrustful of every woman as of a venomous serpent.’” He slammed the book shut. “I won’t have you thinking of your mother or sisters that way. Milton had it right: woman is ‘Heaven’s last, best gift’.”

  You cherished a gift. You didn’t abuse it. Again his father proved himself a hypocrite. “The Church doesn’t hate women. It honors them. You’re forgetting Our Lady.”

  “Mary is honored only because she is ‘alone of all her sex’—conceived without sin, sinless, and above all ‘ever virgin.’ Heaven forbid she and her husband should actually touch each other!” His father motioned with his book to that dangerous portrait of the Holy Family, where the Blessed Virgin nursed the Christ Child and the white-haired Saint Joseph stood aloof.

  Joseph’s eyes strayed once more to the Virgin’s breast. He forced them back to Saint Denis.

  His father continued: “Mary is the Mother of God, yet the Church doesn’t permit her to give birth! They claim she bore Christ as if He were light and she were a window!” Joseph’s father threw the book on his desk. “Human mothers must conceive and bear children vaginally, so they have to be ‘churched’ afterwards in order to ‘purify’ them.”

  That had been a Jewish custom first; he couldn’t blame—

  “Motherhood is not a sin! And neither is sexual pleasure between a husband and wife! Don’t you ever tell your parishioners that!” His father stopped, but Joseph thought it was only because he was out of breath.

  “You’re not forbidding me to go to Rome, then?”

  His father threw up his hands. “How can I? You would despise me.”

  I already despise you, Joseph thought.

  “I know what it’s like to have a vocation…” His father sank onto the chair behind his desk. “But is that why you want this? Don’t become a Priest for the wrong reasons, Joseph.”

  He hesitated, but he knew he must ask. “What are the wrong reasons?”

  “Are you doing this because of my mother?” His father leaned forward earnestly. “Because you see the Priesthood as an escape? Because you’re seeking sanctuary?”

  “N-No.” He wasn’t really lying. That wasn’t the only reason.

  “Is this some kind of Penance?”

  Joseph shook his head again. “I—I want to do what you do. I mean: I want to be useful.”

  “And that is laudable, son. But there are other ways.”

  “No way that is equal to the Priesthood.”

  “I am begging you, Joseph: question everything they tell you. If you don’t…mark my words: you will regret this. Maybe not tomorrow—but ten, fifteen years from now. I can only hope those scales fall from your eyes before it’s too late.”

  Dr. Moretti also had an office in his home. Joseph’s father said he knew the man only by reputation, that they had never met face to face. He offered to walk Joseph to the doctor’s house for the examination, but Joseph refused. He could not risk Dr. Moretti seeing his father and realizing they were colored.

  The Church might not care that Joseph had African blood, and Bishop England might not care, but what if Dr. Moretti did? He might believe that mulattos were weak, that Joseph’s mind could not survive the rigors of seminary and his body could not survive the rigors of celibacy. The doctor might fail Joseph before he ever had the chance to prove himself.

  On the walls of his office, Dr. Moretti had no paintings of dismembered or half-naked saints, only a diagram of the nervous system and a chart for testing vision. The doctor sat behind his large desk with a portfolio open in front of him. He had not looked up since Joseph entered the room. Dr. Moretti wore spectacles, and he had lost much of his hair. “In addition to the examination, Dr. England has asked me to complete another portion of the application with you. He feels it is appropriate to have an impartial amanuensis. So I have several questions for you, Mr. Lazare, and you must answer truthfully. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you ever struck a Priest?”

  “No, sir!”

  “These are possible impediments. We must be thorough. An oversight now will only cause disappointment later.” The morning sunlight reflected off the doctor’s spectacles and obscured his eyes. “Dr. England has copies of your Confirmation and Baptismal records already…we’ll also need one for your parents’ Marriage. They were married when you were born?”

  Joseph swallowed hard. Dr. Moretti hadn’t asked if they were married when he was conceived, so Joseph could answer: “Yes, sir.”

  “I understand your mother is deaf?”

  “Y-Yes.”

  “Was she born deaf?”

  “She could hear until she was four years old. It was scarlet fever.”

  “Have you noticed any problems with your own hearing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good.” Dr. Moretti asked many other questions about the illnesses Joseph had had. Finally he said: “Now, I’ll need you to undress.”

  “Yes, sir.” Joseph tried not to sound reluctant. This sudden flutter in his stomach was ridiculous. He was perfectly healthy, and surely the doctor did not need to examine anything below his waist.

  Joseph shrugged off his coat and draped it over the nearby chair. He unbuttoned his waistcoat and laid it on top. He pulled his braces from his shoulders, gripped his shirt just above his trousers, and stopped. His nipples were brown too. Would Dr. Moretti be able to tell from those that Joseph was not pure-blooded? Maybe he didn’t need to take off his shirt at all. He looked up.

  The doctor stood waiting with his stethoscope. “Your shirt too,” he confirmed.

  Slowly Joseph freed the bottom of the shirt from his trousers. He worked the fabric up his back and turned it inside-outwards over his head, so that he could clutch it against his chest like a shield.

  “Is there something wrong with your spine, Mr. Lazare?” Dr. Moretti asked as he approached.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then stand up straight.”

  Joseph obeyed. The doctor made him set down his shirt. He pressed the end of his stethoscope against Joseph’s back and asked him to breathe in and out. He listened to Joseph’s heartbeat, studied his pulse, and poked his armpits. He peered at Joseph’s teeth and throat with an amplified candle. Dr. Moretti tested Joseph’s eyes and then his ears.

  The doctor concentrated on Joseph’s hands, asking Joseph to spread his fingers and then make fists. Joseph remembered what his cousin had said at the slave pen. A Priest’s hands must be even more important than a slave’s; they would perform Sacraments.

  Dr. Moretti made Joseph touch his toes, but he did not ask him to run up any stairs. He returned to the other side of his desk and dipped his pen in the inkwell again.

  With relief, Joseph reached for his shirt.

  “Now the rest,” said the doctor.

  Joseph froze. �
��Pardon?”

  “I need to see all of you, Mr. Lazare.”

  Surely he didn’t mean… Joseph’s eyes slid in horror to the front of his trousers.

  At the edge of his vision, Dr. Moretti motioned to the windows. “No one can see through the blinds. I need to confirm that you’re whole.”

  “W-Whole?”

  Dr. Moretti frowned the way Joseph’s father did when something interested him and looked up from his papers. “Are you a Jew?”

  “No…” Being a Jew was better than being colored, but not by much.

  The doctor returned to his notes. “Your hair; it made me wonder.”

  He was starting to suspect! “My grandmother was Spanish,” Joseph blurted, then closed his eyes for a moment in repentance. He’d promised to tell the truth.

  “You still might have Jewish blood. I am a descendant of converts myself. In any case, by ‘whole,’ I didn’t mean ‘uncircumcised.’ That doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Whatever you look like, whatever you’re worried about, Mr. Lazare, I do not care—unless you are a castrate.”

  “What?” Just because his voice hadn’t changed much yet, that didn’t mean—

  “If you are a castrate, that is an impediment.”

  Joseph didn’t know why the suggestion felt like an insult, when those parts would be utterly useless to him. “N-Nothing is missing!”

  “Unfortunately, I cannot take your word for that, Mr. Lazare. I must see for myself.” Dr. Moretti set down his pen.

  Joseph didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was becoming a Priest so that he could be free of this body! Even now, it had found a way to betray him.

  If the doctor had asked to cut open his chest instead, Joseph would have agreed instantly. That would have felt like less of a violation, less of a risk.

  Dr. Moretti would see the dark skin of Joseph’s genitals. He would see the black wool sprouting there. He would also see the pale splotch on Joseph’s left thigh. Until this summer, Joseph had found the birthmark interesting, like a permanent, vertical puddle of milk. Now, he knew it drew unmistakable attention to the fact that the rest of his skin was not so white. And was a birthmark an impediment?