Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  Below them, the soprano had a pretty face and a lovely voice; but she could not hold a candle to Tessa.

  Then, Joseph felt a flicker at his wrist, followed by a tug at the fingertips of his glove. Tessa had unbuttoned it. She was pulling it off! As soon as his hand was bare, she slid her own naked flesh against his. Joseph nearly fainted. He’d tied his choker far too tightly.

  It was her left hand, but she was not wearing her wedding ring. Tessa’s daring did not stop there. She kept their fingers locked; but as the heroine sang of her ecstasy, Tessa canted her hand from his just enough to stroke his palm with her thumb. She chose the lines “He brings light to my days, and solace to my suffering…” As if she were underlining the words on his flesh.

  Joseph remembered the claim of his Roman confessor, that forbidden fruit was more delicious in the mind than in the mouth. But if Tessa could do this to him by touching only his hand…

  “It seems that when I am near him, Heaven opens for me…” Tessa told him with Lucia’s voice.

  If they went on like this, Heaven would close to them.

  The tenor, Edgardo Ravenswood, appeared and told his beloved that he must go into exile. Lucia implored Edgardo to forget his feud against her brother, while he argued in glorious counterpoint.

  “Renounce all other passions!” she pleaded as only a soprano could. Tessa traced the words into Joseph’s flesh: “The holiest of all vows is love!” Her voice became lower, impossible to deny, like the beating of a steady heart: “Yield to me! Yield to love!”

  At last Edgardo’s voice harmonized with Lucia’s. The couple exchanged secret vows, in spite of all the reasons why their love was doomed. “God hears us,” Edgardo declared. “A loving heart is both church and altar.”

  The couple promised: “Death alone shall end our love.” They poured out the agony of their parting in an exquisite duet, each syllable stretching out to bridge the growing distance between them. Donizetti had surpassed himself. Joseph felt their heartbreak as if it were his own.

  Tessa kept her hand fast in his, through the last soaring notes and the explosion of applause. The singers bowed, and conversations started up below them. Tessa remained facing the stage. “Do you remember”—her voice was just loud enough for him to hear—“during my wedding Mass, how you began to say the vows using your own name?”

  “I, Joseph Lazare, take thee, Teresa Conley,” he’d said. “How could I forget?”

  “While you were blushing and everyone else was laughing, under my breath I said my vow back to you, before I ever exchanged vows with Edward.” Joseph realized she was cradling his stolen glove in her other hand. “So one might say that you are my true husband, and that I am unfaithful only when I am with Edward.”

  This was not an opera. “Even if you were widowed tonight, I can never stop being a Priest, Tessa. I don’t mean I will not; I mean I cannot. I can be suspended; I can be forbidden to exercise my Office; I can even be excommunicated. But in the eyes of the Church, in the eyes of God, I have been irreversibly changed. I will remain ‘a Priest forever.’”

  Almost imperceptibly, without meeting his eyes, Tessa turned her head to him. “Whatever you can give me, Joseph, I will accept it gladly.” She stroked his palm with her thumb again.

  He swallowed, staring down at their clasped hands. “On the day I was ordained, when you kissed my palms, you weren’t doing it for the indulgences, were you?”

  “I needed every one of them.”

  Somehow, Joseph withdrew from her and stood. Not only his hand but his entire body felt bereft, as if a part of him had been amputated. This proximity deceived him into believing the impossible: that they were already one.

  Perhaps their captors had relented. Joseph tried the door again. It still wouldn’t budge. His sister must have heard the rattling, because she giggled.

  “What if one of us has to use the necessary?!” Joseph cried.

  Whispers, sniggers, and then a gale of laughter from the other box. Even Tessa was amused. Joseph turned to see that his father was holding a spittoon around the wall that separated them. “Will this do?”

  After the jokers had recovered, Liam called: “Seriously, Tessa—I’m going to stretch my legs. Do you need anything?”

  Before she answered, she turned her eyes to Joseph. “Only a longer opera.” Her smile was warm and sad at once.

  His sister asked: “Was it worth the wait, Joseph?”

  Mutely, he nodded.

  “He says Yes,” Tessa informed Hélène. Tessa stood, her gold dress glistening. She still grasped Joseph’s right glove. She moved closer to the next box. “This evening was supposed to be about you, Ellie. Are you enjoying it?”

  “Very much.” Then Hélène sighed. “Although, I would be enjoying it more if the ‘Scotsmen’ were wearing kilts…”

  Tessa laughed like a harp. Joseph’s father laughed like a kettledrum.

  Joseph did not laugh at all. He remained at the back of the box with his overcoat and Tessa’s cloak. He busied himself unknotting his choker, so that he could retie it more loosely. Then again, if he passed out, his father would have to open the door.

  Tessa leaned against the wall of the box, distressingly close to him. She did not offer to return his pilfered glove, and her own arm remained scandalously bare.

  He paused with the ends of his choker hanging down his chest. Still he avoided her eyes. “I am sorry I’ve not looked in on Clare—or on David.”

  She stared down at his glove. “I understand.”

  “They are well?”

  “They are.”

  Joseph continued his blind toilette. “How is David adjusting to the change?”

  “Sometimes, he almost seems happy.” Yet she was frowning. “He treats Clare with such affection and solicitousness; but beneath it… I’ve woken in the middle of the night to find David standing over her cradle, staring down at Clare with such a worried expression on his face. ‘I wanted to make sure she was all right,’ he will say, even though he knows Hannah and I are both there to watch over her. And last week, when I asked David if he wanted to hold Clare, he shook his head at once—as if the thought terrified him. ‘I might drop her!’ he cried. He actually ran from the room.”

  Joseph finished with his choker. “I think most boys—most men—find babies disconcerting. They’re so fragile and unpredictable. I’m sure it will be different when Clare is older.”

  At the edge of his vision, Tessa smiled and nodded.

  Her every movement excited her scent. He thought it also wafted from the folds of her cloak. Gardenia encircled him—overwhelming yet not nearly enough. He asked without thinking: “In the Language of Flowers, do you know what gardenias mean?”

  “The first book Hélène gave me said ‘purity.’ But the second book said ‘ecstasy.’ So, I suppose ’tis both.”

  He closed his eyes. He remembered Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa in ecstasy.

  Scattered applause told them the intermission entertainment had ended—some sort of acrobats. When he and Tessa settled back on the sofa, Joseph was careful to keep his hands beyond her reach. Finally, she relinquished his glove onto the seat between them. As he covered his hand again, she replaced her own long glove. They sat like two strangers, although they shared her libretto.

  Joseph ventured another glance at the boxes across from them. The young men had lost interest in him. The elderly couple leaned close to each other. For a moment, the woman looked up; and Joseph thought she smiled at him and Tessa. But from this distance, it was difficult to tell.

  In Act II, Enrico revealed his villainy. By seizing Edgardo’s letters and forging one in their place, he convinced his sister that her beloved had abandoned her. Enrico also claimed that his life was in danger, now that the Ashtons’ allies had fallen from power. He would be executed if they did not secure the protection of Lord Arturo—Lucia must marry him instead. The Ashtons’ chaplain, the bass Raimondo, also urged the distraught young woman to accept this new husband:
“You are offering yourself, Lucia, as a victim for your family’s good.”

  Heartbroken and trembling, Lucia signed the marriage contract. “I have sealed my doom,” she predicted.

  As soon as she released the pen, Edgardo burst into the castle. Lucia fainted and was revived. After a stunning sextet, Raimondo showed the marriage contract to Edgardo. “Forget this fatal love,” the minister counselled. “She belongs to another.” Edgardo denounced Lucia and wished he were dead.

  At the second intermission, their captors asked again if Joseph and Tessa needed anything. He did not humor them with a response; but Tessa answered. Joseph’s father passed her two coupes of champagne around the side of the box. For a while, Joseph and Tessa chatted awkwardly about the qualities of the score and singers. All along, he sensed that the music was not what concerned Tessa.

  Finally, she blurted: “I don’t understand why Lucia didn’t tear up the marriage contract the moment Edgardo returned. ’Tis a piece of paper—nothing more.”

  Joseph stared into his champagne. “She made a promise. She should take that seriously.”

  “But she was coerced! If she’d known her beloved was waiting for her, longing for her as she was for him—”

  “She believed her brother’s future depended on her marrying the other man.”

  For a moment, Tessa fell silent. Finally, she murmured: “No matter what it meant for his career, my brother told me not to marry Edward. Liam knew, even then…” She set down her champagne coupe and paced to the back of their little prison. “I think I would be fond of Edward, if he were a neighbor—or if we could live as brother and sister the way some of the married saints have. ’Tis only because he…” She broke off, her left hand braced in a fist, her right hand gripping her forearm, as if she were steeling herself. “The truth is, I am grateful when Edward leaves me alone. He’s kept his distance for nearly a year now, because of Clare; but I know ’tis only a matter of time. I feel it, like the Sword of Damocles. Even the scent of him—his sweat and the Florida water he uses after he shaves—I can hardly bear it. He can be across a room, and I still feel as though he is suffocating me. ’Tis all I can do not to retch.”

  Joseph closed his eyes in shame. All these nights, as he’d imagined Tessa in his bed, Joseph had told himself he had her consent. But he’d only twisted her words to serve his own depravity.

  In her Confession, she’d said she longed to touch him, which he’d promptly interpreted in the vilest way possible. He understood now: she’d meant caressing his face as she’d done beside the camellia, or his hand as she had a few minutes before. For her, that had not been a promise of something more but a consummation in itself. Perhaps her own dreams extended to a chaste kiss or a clothed embrace—but not coition!

  She’d spoken of wishing her children were also his—but this did not mean she desired the act that made children possible. How could she, when it had caused her nothing but pain? The weight and invasion of another sweating male body must be the last thing she wanted.

  Joseph had always known his sin was greater than hers, but now his true selfishness raked its claws across his heart. For weeks, he’d been violating her in his head, just as his father had violated his mother. If Tessa knew how Joseph had been aching to rip open that golden dress, his proximity would repulse her more than her husband’s. Tessa thought she was safe with Joseph. She had every right to expect it. Surely it was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with a Priest—because she knew he would never ask that of her.

  A burst of applause signalled the end of the second intermission. Tessa returned to Joseph’s side. She was safe with him, he vowed silently.

  The opera resumed. The guests celebrated Lucia’s wedding to Arturo. Then the chaplain Raimondo appeared, bearing terrible tidings. Lucia had gone mad. When her unwanted husband tried to claim his marital rights, she had killed him with his own dagger.

  Lucia staggered on stage, her hair loose, her husband’s blood smeared across her white night-dress. She did not see it; she seemed unaware of what she’d done. In her madness, Lucia’s arias were particularly breathtaking. Yet Joseph noticed that Tessa turned her face away from the stage and even the libretto; she failed to turn the page after the cadenza.

  In flights of coloratura, Lucia imagined she was marrying her beloved: “At last I am yours, at last you are mine; God has given you to me! Every pleasure, every joy I shall share with you!” Finally, she collapsed.

  After the soprano took her bows, the wedding party hurried off stage. Set dressers shoved fake gravestones into view. At the tombs of his ancestors, Edgardo poured out his grief. From the chorus, he learned that Lucia had never stopped loving him; but now she was dead. He resolved to join her: before Raimondo could stop him, Edgardo stabbed himself. As he lay dying, he continued to sing of Lucia’s “beautiful, loving soul,” in a melody more sublime than any music Joseph had ever heard.

  At the edge of his vision, Joseph saw a flash of white. It was Tessa’s handkerchief. She was weeping.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, he reached for her. Of his own free will, he joined his hand with hers. Tessa gripped it as if he were a life-raft and smiled at him through her tears.

  “I am coming to you!” cried the man on stage. “Though we were divided on Earth, God will unite us in Heaven!”

  While the deep voices of Raimondo and the chorus remained Earth-bound, Edgardo’s tenor seemed to soar to his beloved. The other men pleaded for the suicide’s soul: “God, forgive such a sin!” They were the final words of the opera.

  As the cast luxuriated in the applause, without releasing Joseph’s hand, Tessa dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. She smiled apologetically. “I knew how it would end, and yet…”

  If she’d come with Edward tonight, Tessa would be alone right now. Joseph offered her his own handkerchief as well. She was not quite so beautiful with a reddened nose and a lapful of snotty linen. Yet he wanted to be nowhere else but beside her.

  Maybe, just maybe, they could do this, he thought. Now that he understood the limits of Tessa’s desire, surely he could restrain himself. He must, or he would lose her. The affection between them was still a sin; but free from physical violation, it was less grave. If they schooled themselves, their sins might even become venial and not mortal. They’d acknowledged how they felt and that they could do nothing about it. They would simply continue on as they had for the last seven years.

  Tessa squeezed his hand. “You know, you have a divine voice yourself, Joseph. ’Tis not only your sister and I who think so. Many of the other women in our parish have said what a joy ’tis to hear you chant a High Mass. You might have been an opera star yourself.”

  He glanced down at Edgardo and Enrico. “Tenors get all the hero rôles. A baritone is either the villain; a buffoon; or some forgettable supporting part. I wanted all eyes to be on me, so I had no choice but to become a Priest.”

  Tessa laughed as he had hoped, but she argued: “There are baritone heroes!”

  “In serious opera? Name one.”

  Tessa’s forehead bunched up in thought. “Don Giovanni.”

  “A Hell-bound libertine?” Joseph chuckled. “You are proving my point.”

  It took them a minute to realize the door was open at last. Their erstwhile captors stood watching him and Tessa with self-satisfied smiles. Joseph wasn’t sure whether to shake them or kiss them. All he knew for certain was: he never wanted to let go of Tessa.

  Chapter 45

  O, but they say the tongues of dying men

  Enforce attention like deep harmony:

  Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,

  For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

  — William Shakespeare, Richard II (1597)

  Tessa’s brother escorted her home—or at least, to Edward’s home. She was eager to reunite with Clare.

  Hélène linked her arm through Joseph’s and asked if he might stop at their parents’ house. “Papa says it�
��s no use my trying to stay awake tonight, in the hopes that I’ll be able to sleep through the surgery tomorrow. It will wake me.” She drew in a deep breath. “On the contrary, if I am not rested, the shock may be more severe. I know I shall rest easier if my favorite Priest blesses my dreams.”

  Joseph had never felt less like a Priest than he did tonight; but he could not refuse. Their father told them he needed to look in on a patient, so Joseph and Hélène walked back to Archdale Street alone.

  “Papa and Liam may have helped with the execution,” his sister informed Joseph, her chin elevated proudly, “but trapping you and Tessa together was my idea.”

  Joseph chuckled, then sighed.

  “We had to do something. And I owe it to Tessa, don’t I? To try and correct my selfishness six years ago.”

  “You mean when you encouraged her to marry Edward.”

  Hélène nodded.

  “Tessa made that decision, not you.”

  “She made it to please Liam and me, even more than Edward.”

  “She doesn’t blame you, Ellie.”

  “I know. She laid down her life for us willingly.”

  Joseph opened their parents’ gate. A light shone in the parlor. He wondered if their mother or May had waited up for them. But his sister steered him to their Mary Garden. A gibbous moon showed the way: the paths of crushed oyster-shell and the statue of the Virgin seemed to glow.

  “Holy Mother,” Hélène prayed as they knelt, “if I am spared tomorrow, I promise to be different—better. I will be selfless, like your Son and like Tessa. I will think first how I might help others.” She crossed herself and stood. “I’ve been pondering that a great deal these past weeks. How I might behave more like Christ. How I might manifest my thankfulness for my recovery.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you realize, Joseph, that it’s been nearly eighteen years since we learned about our grandmother in Haiti? And I have done nothing about it except write her letters. In this very city, thousands of people who share our blood suffer every day.” His sister looked behind them toward the gold glow of the parlor, then toward the dark slave quarters. “I sit here in my cozy little house, enjoying the labor of three of those people, and simply accept it as my right.” Hélène nodded decisively. “If I survive tomorrow, I will do it no longer.”