Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  Henry brought the hot water. Joseph, his mother, his nephew, and May crossed around the Chinese screen to the other end of the piazza. David took up the book he’d left on a chair, while Joseph and his mother knelt on prie-Dieus, May close beside them.

  As he prayed, Joseph’s ears strained for every sound on the other side of the screen. Liam and Tessa murmured encouragement while the doctors murmured to each other.

  “We’ll need samples of both tumors,” Dr. Mortimer said clearly.

  Hélène sucked in her breath. The first puncture, Joseph imagined. There were footfalls and a long pause, followed by male whispers. Joseph caught only scattered words that held little meaning for him: “colloid,” “encephaloid,” “muco-serous”—and then, unmistakably, “cancer juice.”

  Sloshing in the water basin. Footfalls. Dr. Mortimer spoke distinctly again, as if instructing Dr. Michaels: “The situation of the smaller tumor…”

  Another sound from Hélène, halfway between a whimper and cry. Footfalls to the table and microscope again. Murmurs, increasing in volume. The doctors conferred with animation. David looked up from his reading. A glance at the distressing illustration told Joseph it was a medical text, not a prayer book.

  Finally, his father stepped around the edge of the screen. He exhaled—and smiled. His hands followed his words so Joseph’s mother would understand too: “The matter is not cancerous. Not in either growth.”

  “You mean…” came Hélène’s feeble voice.

  “We will remove the tumors only,” Dr. Mortimer affirmed.

  Joseph released his breath and praised God for this mercy. His mother wept her thanksgiving, while May shouted hers.

  Even as they celebrated, Joseph’s father returned to the other side of the screen. The worst of the surgery was yet to come. Dr. Mortimer promised: “We’ll be as quick as we can, Mrs. Conley.”

  Still she cried out and sobbed. Her breaths became more and more ragged.

  Liam’s voice broke through her pain: “I bet you cannot recite our sonnet anymore.”

  “Of course I can!” she yelled at him.

  “Prove it to me then, Ellie.”

  Her rendition would never have won an oratory prize. The words were as jagged as her breaths, climbing and falling with a meter entirely separate from Shakespeare’s. The pagan verses invaded Joseph’s prayers even still, desperate and defiant:

  “Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove:

  O no; it is an ever-fixèd mark,

  That looks on tempests, and is never…”

  That was as far as she got before she fainted. Practicality replaced poetry. Joseph’s father informed them that Hélène’s pulse remained strong, but could Liam please fetch the smelling-salts, to have them at hand? Liam must have hesitated to leave Hélène’s side; after a moment, Tessa offered: “I’ll get them.” Joseph heard her flit to the table.

  An instrument clattered in a basin. Dr. Mortimer assured them: “We’re nearly finished.” Yet several more minutes passed before they called Joseph, his mother, his nephew, and May around the screen again. “Everything went as planned,” the surgeon declared. “There will be a scar, but I kept it as small as I could.”

  Hélène sat slumped in the easy chair, her head resting against one wing. Her right shoulder and arm were bare, and clean bandages encircled the right side of her chest. Joseph tried not to look at the bloody linen surrounding her. Their father untied her ankles and roused her with the smelling-salts.

  Hélène sucked in a panicked breath. “Papa?”

  “It’s over, ma poulette. It’s all over.”

  Her eyes darted to each of them, as if for confirmation.

  “Welcome back,” Joseph and Tessa said almost in unison, then blushed.

  “You were magnificent, Ellie,” Liam told her. “As brave as any man would have been.”

  “How is the pain now?” Joseph’s father asked. “Would you like a little laudanum?”

  She nodded without hesitation.

  Gently, Liam carried her to their bedchamber.

  In addition to the abandoned instruments streaked with gore, beside the operating chair lay a porcelain bowl covered with a towel. David watched with interest as Dr. Mortimer transferred the bowl to the dining table, setting it down next to the microscope.

  The surgeon offered: “Perhaps we might dissect the tumors together, Mr. Lazare?”

  The boy leapt to his side. “Yes, sir!”

  Joseph grimaced and followed his sister.

  Chapter 47

  And it makes no difference how honorable may be the cause of a man’s insanity. … It is disgraceful to love another man’s wife at all, or one’s own too much. … The wise man should love his wife reasonably, not emotionally. … Nothing is more sordid than to make love to your wife as you would to an adulteress.

  — Saint Jerome, Against Jovinianus (393)

  When Joseph came to visit his sister the following afternoon, he passed Tessa and her daughter in the entry hall.

  “She’s asleep,” Tessa whispered.

  “Clare, or Hélène?”

  Tessa laughed quietly. “Both, in fact.”

  Joseph knew he shouldn’t disturb his sister’s rest. He would have to find something—or someone—to occupy him till Hélène woke. Except Tessa was glancing at the door. He lowered his voice even further. “Can you stay?”

  Her beautiful features tightened in apology. “That would be unwise.” Tessa looked down at her slumbering daughter. “I’m afraid we’re on our last diaper.”

  He chuckled. So much for a tête-à-tête. Yet Joseph realized he and Tessa could communicate volumes even without words—now that they were speaking the same language.

  I should like nothing more in all the world than to sit with you for the rest of the afternoon, Tessa’s luminous bronze eyes told him. She checked the stairs for observers and squeezed his hand, to make certain he’d understood.

  This was enough, Joseph told himself. The caress of their eyes; the embrace of their hands; the marriage of their minds. This was all he wanted, all she wanted. They had no need of midnight meetings in the light of Hélène’s blue lamp.

  In Tessa’s absence, he wandered the garden, where the jonquils were already wilting. He pulled up a few weeds. He talked to Prince, who tossed his head and whinnied his displeasure when he realized Joseph wasn’t there for a ride. Finally, Joseph found himself on the threshold of his father’s office.

  Joseph had meant to walk past it up the stairs; but the door was open, and he noticed a new painting. It hung between the Holy Family with the nursing Christ Child and Saint Denis reclaiming his severed head. The new painting was a Noli Me Tangere—Do Not Touch Me—representing Christ’s reunion with Mary Magdalene after His resurrection. Joseph had seen many Noli Me Tangeres in Rome, but none quite like this.

  Christ was nearly nude, wearing only a shroud knotted around His neck like a cape and another bunch of linen around His loins like a diaper. He gripped a hoe—in Saint John’s account, Mary Magdalene had mistaken the risen Christ for a gardener. Having realized her error, she knelt at His feet, reaching out to Him in wonder. He denied her, His posture expressing the words of the Gospel: “Do not touch Me, for I am not yet ascended to My Father.”

  This artist was certainly a master, but Joseph found the composition oddly sensual. True, in holy art, the Magdalene was usually voluptuous and always surrounded by her luxurious hair. Sometimes, her breasts were bare—or she appeared as she did here, in robes of scarlet, to represent her former life of sin. But somehow, the combination of these elements and Christ’s near nudity, when His exposed flesh bore none of the marks of His crucifixion… The landscape behind the couple was simply pastoral, with no hint of the empty sepulchre.

  Most of all where the Magdalene seemed to be looking—and reaching—disconcerted Joseph
: the shadowed center of Christ’s flawless flesh, barely concealed by loose linen… Christ was bundling up His shroud to protect Himself, His hips retreating from the Magdalene even as His upper body leant toward her. He seemed to be wielding the hoe as a weapon.

  Joseph supposed these elements were the reasons his father had chosen this painting. Or perhaps the bronze color of the Magdalene’s hair had simply sent Joseph’s thoughts spiralling into sin, and his own wickedness was distorting an innocent painting. Surely the Magdalene only sought to confirm that her eyes did not deceive her, that Christ was real and not a ghost.

  And yet…a few verses later, He was inviting Saint Thomas to “bring hither thy hand, and put it into My side.” Christ let His male disciples touch Him. Why had He refused her?

  “The connection between them is almost palpable, isn’t it?”

  Joseph started. His father had joined him.

  His father’s gaze remained on the painting. “Do you think He’ll give in any time soon?”

  Joseph narrowed his eyes. “You cannot be suggesting that Christ and Mary Magdalene—”

  “An attractive young man and an attractive young woman, who care deeply about one another and about the same things—why shouldn’t they delight in each other’s bodies as well as each other’s company?” Then his father looked away and sighed. “No. If God had ever truly loved a woman, He would have done something about childbirth.”

  “Do you hold nothing sacred?”

  “On the contrary, Joseph. Life is sacred. What Hélène and Liam have—what you and Tessa could have—that is sacred. These are divine gifts, fleeting and precious.” His father rounded his desk and opened a drawer. “Tessa is what I have always wanted for you. I certainly wish things had happened in a different order.” His father shrugged. “But ‘the course of true love never did run smooth.’” He found whatever treatise he’d been seeking. “Tessa will improve you, if you let her. She will make you a better Priest, just as your mother has made me a better doctor.”

  Joseph laughed. He couldn’t help himself, though the convulsion was painful in its bitterness.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” Joseph muttered.

  “Are you impugning my character as a doctor or your mother’s character as a wife?”

  “Neither.”

  “Then why—”

  “I am questioning your character as a husband!” Joseph was nearly thirty-one years old. He could do this. He could confront this monster at last. “I am laughing at the absurdity of you giving anyone advice about love!”

  “I am as qualified as the next—”

  “‘Absurd’ isn’t strong enough. It is ludicrous—obscene. I know your other secret, Father: the way you’ve abused my mother—the way you’re still abusing her, for all I know.”

  “‘Abused’ her? What in Heaven’s name are you talking about, Joseph?”

  “I saw you, the night the kitchen burned.”

  Across the desk, his father squinted at him in confusion. “You were thirteen years old when the kitchen burned.”

  “It was hardly something I can forget.”

  “You can’t forget the kitchen…?”

  “My mother! Bound to her bed! While you…”

  Realization dawned at last, and his father collapsed into his chair. But instead of bowing his head in shame, the man laughed: a full-throated, deep-belly guffaw. “Oh, Joseph. All these years, you’ve thought… No wonder you despise me.”

  “I don’t despise you. I—pray for you.”

  “Let me explain, son.”

  “I know what I saw!”

  “What you saw was one small piece of a whole, Joseph. Before you leap to any more erroneous conclusions, sit down and let me explain how your mother and I reached such a compromise.”

  “Compromise”? Joseph refused to sit. He only scowled at his father across the desk.

  His father inhaled a deep breath and began. “At the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, your mother was effectively raised by Priests and nuns—celibates and ascetics who knew little of sexual pleasure and flagellated themselves for what they did feel. You know the teaching of your Church: that all sexual pleasure is sin—that even husbands and wives sin if they come together for the ‘wrong’ reasons or engage in ‘forbidden’ acts. The only behavior the Church condones is penile-vaginal penetration for the purpose of conceiving children. But for the wife, that act in isolation is painful at worst and tolerable at best. She needs more. But desiring more, asking for more, is a mortal sin. In her terror of eternal damnation, she must actively refuse her husband if he tries to give her pleasure in other ways. If he merely seeks to prepare her body to accept his, she must push him away, because this preparation is pleasurable, and therefore sinful. The wife becomes nothing more than a passive vessel, the husband nothing more than a dispenser of semen. That isn’t the way God designed us, Joseph. He gave us everything we need at the tips of our fingers and tongues—and He intended us to use it all! But the Church keeps its head in the sand and goes on enforcing ridiculous rules so husbands and wives will be as miserable as celibates. Your mother refused to relinquish these rules, these fears of sin and damnation, no matter how I reasoned or pleaded. What was I to do? At last I remembered that a person cannot sin unless she consents to the sin. I realized this was the answer. If I—ostensibly—took away your mother’s capacity to consent, I could take all the ‘sin’ on myself.”

  “But you’re not removing her consent ‘ostensibly’; you’re actually removing it!”

  “You think I haven’t been vigilant every moment for her welfare?”

  “You can’t have been! Mama was in pain! She was moaning and biting her lip!”

  His father covered his face with his hand and muttered: “This would be so much easier if you weren’t a virgin.”

  “That does not make me an idiot!”

  “In this, it does. Coming is incredibly intense, Joseph.” His father frowned. “Have you not even—”

  “No!” Not while he was awake, at least.

  “Well, you feel as if you’re about to explode—and then you do.”

  That hardly sounded pleasurable.

  “It isn’t for nothing that some doctors refer to the sexual climax as a ‘paroxysm,’ or that the French call it ‘the little death.’ In the throes of passion, women—and men—make all sorts of strange faces and noises.”

  “Mama was weeping!”

  “Apparently that isn’t uncommon.” His father shrugged. “It’s another kind of release, I think. Your mother wept just yesterday when she learned Hélène’s tumors were benign—tears not of pain or grief but relief and joy.”

  Joseph turned away from him, back toward the Noli Me Tangere. He didn’t believe anything his father said. The man had always been a liar.

  “I love your mother, Joseph. I would sooner die than hurt her.”

  He glared at his father again. “Yet you defy her wishes.”

  “Her Church’s wishes that she experience no pleasure whatsoever? Absolutely.”

  “You cannot know it is pleasure and not pain she feels when—”

  “A man knows when a woman is responding to him, Joseph. Certainly a doctor does. When she is aroused, a woman’s body changes as profoundly as a man’s. There are physical signs. One of them is aptly described by another euphemism for the female climax: ‘to melt.’”

  Joseph didn’t have to listen to this obscenity. Yet he feared that if he attempted to move, he might shatter. It wasn’t possible, that something he’d known for eighteen long years could be—

  “When I untie the stockings from her wrists, your mother turns toward me, not away.” His father sat back in his chair and smiled. “You are welcome to confirm all this with her. Although I would recommend bringing smelling-salts. One of you is likely to faint from embarrassment.”

  Joseph managed to leave his father’s office without shattering or fainting; but when he reached the empty hall, he stood with his arm brac
ed against the staircase banister for a very long time. His heart was racing and his breaths were labored, as though he’d just escaped a burning building. If this was true—if his father had done such a thing to his mother not because he was a monster who couldn’t control himself but because…

  Joseph’s understanding of his father was so deeply rooted in that moment, in what he thought he’d seen. If he’d been wrong about that… Might not Joseph’s own capacity for restraint, for tenderness, be sufficient—

  He was still a Priest, Joseph reminded himself. He still had a dozen sick calls to make. He must conclude this one.

  Joseph didn’t have to ask anyone if Hélène was awake now; her excited voice drifted down the stairs. In the upper hall, her words became clear. She was planning her future with her husband. “I think my body was too distracted before. I’m certain I’ll be able to conceive now. It simply wasn’t the right time yet.”

  “You just get well first,” Liam told her. “We have all the time in the world.”

  Chapter 48

  So far well; but four days after the operation…a blush of red told the secret…

  — Dr. John Brown, “Rab and His Friends” (1859)

  Joseph visited his sister again the next day. Hélène was strangely sedate—her wound ached—but she remained cheerful. On his way down the stairs, Joseph caught Tessa on the first landing. He peered toward the entry hall. “Is anyone behind you?”

  “No…”

  He grasped Tessa’s left hand, the one that did not hold her slumbering daughter. He pulled them up the half-flight of stairs into the empty bedchamber. The curtains were drawn, so only the palest light sifted into the room. Joseph closed the door. Most recently, this had been his grandmother’s bedchamber; but until he left for seminary, and for a week after he returned, it had been his.

  “Joseph?” Tessa inquired from the darkness, a lilt of amusement in her voice.

  He pulled open the curtains that faced the piazza.