Garden of Lies

by Eileen Goudge

  Rose slipped from the confessional into the cool, incense-fragrant dimness of the sanctuary. The old plank flooring squeaked softly in protest as she followed the scuffed-white path up the center [44] aisle. Genuflecting, she slid into an empty pew, sinking to her knees, and dropping her forehead onto her clenched hands. She knew she should be thinking of God, but she couldn’t seem to get her mind off Brian.

  She struggled to shut him away, and concentrate on the rugged miles of Penance that lay ahead.

  “Hail, Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with Thee, blessed art Thou, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. ...”

  But, no, she wasn’t getting that penitent feeling, that good hating-what-she-was-doing-but-loving-herself-for-doing-it feeling she got when she put a whole dollar of her baby-sitting money in the collection basket on Sunday, or stuck to her promise and gave up sweets for all of Lent. She half-expected to look up and find Bri standing before the Communion rail in his old altar boy robes, tipping her a wink.

  Thinking about what they’d done, she felt her heart beat fast and high in her throat.

  But not because she felt ashamed or sorry. God forgive me. ...

  All the Penance in heaven, that couldn’t change the fact that she loved Brian. She would walk through fire for him. Even the fires of hell.

  And deep in her heart she knew that if Bri wanted her, she would do what they’d done all over again.

  If. The possibility that now he wouldn’t want her, even as a friend, put a chill in her heart. Today was Saturday, and she hadn’t seen him since Monday, the night they ... well, they forgot they were supposed to be only best friends. Had he been purposely avoiding her? She could have gone up and knocked on his door to find out, but every time she thought about doing it her stomach turned cartwheels inside her.

  “Hail, Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with Thee, ...

  please don’t let Bri hate me ...

  blessed art Thou, ...

  he’s all I’ve got ...

  and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, ...

  I don’t think I could make it without him, I honestly don’t ...

  Jesus.”

  Rose stopped fingering her rosary, and gazed at the [45] white-clothed altar, flanked by marble figures of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The bank of votive candles beside the vestibule guttered and smoked in the draft, which seemed as much a part of this place as its pocked wooden pews and dog-eared missals. As Rose stared ahead, a hump-backed figure in a black dress and shapeless cardigan genuflected before the altar, then shuffled on to light one of the candles, dropping a coin into the offering box with a hollow rattle. Rose noticed that the wooden lid was gouged and the padlock on it a new one. Oh yes, she remembered Sister Boniface saying there had been a theft.

  A church was supposed to be the house of God, she thought. But if God could live anywhere, Rose wondered, would He really have chosen Holy Martyrs on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue R?

  She doubted it. She doubted it very much.

  Rose looked up. The late afternoon sun shone grudgingly through the peaked windows, casting everything around her in a gritty gray light. The windows were striped with bird shit from the pigeons that roosted in the eaves, but no one ever bothered to clean them. Father’s heart, they said, had gone out of it two years ago when some street gang had smashed the beautiful stained-glass windows, and they had been replaced by plain safety glass, which was all the parish could afford.

  Rose knew just how Father must have felt. Something dear snatched away from him. Smashed to bits. Never to be restored. Gone forever. And it was the same for her. With her grandmother. The one dream Rose treasured, the best one, Nonnie had soiled it, ruined it, smashed it to pieces.

  Her mother.

  ... whore cheap little whore that’s all she was ...

  The memory of Nonnie’s hateful words twisted in the pit of Rose’s stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut. Hate rose in her, red hot and poisonous.

  An even bigger sin, she knew, than the one she had committed with Brian.

  I wish she were dead. I wish the old witch had burned instead of my mother.

  Rose, struggling in vain to blot away her evil thoughts, bowed her head into her clenched hands, and prayed in a feverish whisper, [46] “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation ...” She thought about Marie, how it had all started last week with her sister’s terrible announcement.

  They had been eating dinner, the kitchen stagnant with the smell of overcooked pot roast and potatoes, she and Clare and Nonnie, when Marie walked in, late as usual. Rose had sensed immediately that something was up. Something big. Marie just stood there in the middle of the kitchen, arms stiff at her sides, her jaw cocked at an angle and her blue eyes blazing with sullen defiance. She was out of breath, her chest heaving, as if she’d run up all four flights without stopping once. Wearing her tight black skirt with the rolled up waistband, pink Flame-Glo lipstick, and black patent leather flats, she stirred the stale kitchen air, somehow made it vibrate, hum with danger.

  Then she dropped her A-bomb.

  “Pete and I are getting married,” she announced in the same the-hell-with-you tone in which she might have said, Pete and I robbed a bank.

  For an instant, no one had moved. It was like a tableau, Rose later thought, a weird parody of the Last Supper tableau that Brother Paul, over at Precious Blood, where Brian had gone to school, staged every year on Holy Thursday. The three of them frozen around the chrome-legged Formica table, under the ceiling’s fluorescent halo. Nonnie in her black rayon dress (the one she wore to church every Sunday and First Friday), she and Clare in their school uniforms. Their forks poised over their plates, their eyes on the Judas before them.

  Rose watched Nonnie’s pale blue eyes narrow as they came to rest on the bulky sweater drooped over Marie’s waist. Suddenly, Rose understood. It all fell into place—the miserable retching she’d heard from behind the locked bathroom door every morning for the past week, Marie’s jumpiness lately, snapping at everything Rose said. And, of course, her running off to be with Pete all hours of the day and night.

  [47] Holy Mother of God, Marie was pregnant.

  Nonnie stopped chewing and rose slowly, palms flat against the Formica on either side of her plate, pushing herself up with her bony arms until she stood facing Marie across the table. The light winked across the lenses of Nonnie’s rimless spectacles, and for a fleeting instant Rose had seen her own face reflected, no larger than a flyspeck. She sucked in air to steady herself against the sudden, dizzying plunge her stomach had taken.

  Nonnie pushed her chair back, and even more slowly walked around the table to where Marie stood. She raised her hand, her bones in sharp relief against the loose mottled flesh, like a Halloween skeleton’s. She slapped Marie full across the face. A cracking sound like stamping on a frozen puddle.

  “Shame,” Nonnie hissed. “For shame. You. No better than a filthy whore!”

  Marie just stood there, white and frozen. Hectic stripes of color now blazed against the cottage-cheese color of her face. Her eyes glittered with angry unshed tears. But she didn’t move or cry out.

  It was Clare who let loose an anguished sob. With a harsh, skittering scrape of her chair, she fled the room, face buried in her hands, weeping. Watching her, her numbness gone, Rose thought evilly, That’s right, run. Run to your prayer book, like you always do. Miss Goody-Goody-Gumdrops. Or are you scared it might be catching, like a disease, and you might get pregnant too?

  Then she swung back to Marie, staring at her sister, trying to make sense of all this. Marie, almost twenty now, had worked behind the budget cosmetics counter at A & S—where she met Pete—since she’d graduated from Sacred Heart. So even though the toes of her black flats usually were scuffed, and most of the time she had a run
in one of her stockings, her face was always perfect, eyebrows plucked and redrawn like Audrey Hepburn’s, and lipstick the palest shade of pink. Her light brown hair ratted into a bubble, wispy bangs sprayed into a line of stiff commas across her forehead.

  Marie had it all. Nothing really bad ever seemed to happen to Marie. She was the tough one. Nonnie’s anger slid off her like water down a drainpipe.

  Despite her anguish, Rose felt her chest swell with pride and love for her older sister. Marie was tough, sure, but she could be generous and kind, too. Rose thought of the time she had begged [48] and begged Marie to let her wear her treasured charm bracelet. And then, coming home from school, she’d lost it somehow. She had been so sure Marie would be furious with her. And Marie had been angry ... at first. Then, in typical Marie fashion, she had shrugged, and said, “Oh, stop bawling, it’s not the end of the world. I know you didn’t mean it. Go on, blow your nose, and I’ll take you out for an ice cream.”

  “Shaaaame.” Nonnie’s sharp voice jolted Rose from her thoughts.

  Rose watched in horror as Nonnie jabbed a bony finger in Marie’s face. “Whatsa matter with you? I feed you. I put food on the table in front of you. I raise you like my own daughter. And you do this to me. For shame. You, workin’ in a store, paintin’ your face like no decent girl. Runnin’ around at night like a alleycat with that no-good spic boyfriend of yours.”

  Marie bristled. “Pete’s no spic! He’s half Puerto Rican, on his mother’s side. You got no right callin’ him a spic!”

  “He shamed you, didn’t he?”

  “If you mean am I gonna have a baby, the answer is yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna have a kid.” Marie took a step forward, almost menacing. Her pale pink mouth curled in disgust. “And let me tell you, something, old lady. My kid’s gonna have better than what I had.”

  “Ha!” Nonnie sneered. “You didn’t do so bad. The sidewalk, that’s where you’d a ended up if I hadn’t taken you in after the Lord took away my Dom, God rest his soul.”

  Rose stared down at the meatloaf on her plate. It was cold now; little islands of waxy gray fat had formed over it. She felt sick to her stomach. If only Marie would stop! Rose was afraid her sister might make Nonnie do or say something they’d all be sorry for.

  Marie’s eyes had a wild look in them. She advanced another step, shoulders hunched forward and fists clenched at her sides. “I’m not sorry I got knocked up. You know why? I’ll tell you why. ’Cause I’m finally gettin’ the hell outta here. I won’t have you around tellin’ me I’m bad all the time. Maybe that’s how come I turned out bad, with you tellin’ me all the time. I feel sorry for Clare. And for you, too, Rose.” She tossed Rose a pitying glance. “If you knew what was good for you, you’d get the hell out, too.”

  “You’re not good enough to speak your sister’s name!” Nonnie [49] spat. “Clare, she’s got the calling. She’s gonna be a holy sister. Not in a hundred years would she shame me this way.”

  “Sure, you been stuffin’ Jesus down her throat for so long she’d think she had the calling if somebody said ‘boo.’ And Rose, you treat her like she was dirt under your feet.” She turned toward Rose angrily. “How come you let her treat you that way, huh, Rose? Huh?”

  “Marie, please. Don’t ...” Rose felt so stricken she could barely move her lips. She gazed up at her sister, imploring her to stop.

  The kitchen seemed to be closing in on her. The yellowing walls with their faded fruit-cluster paper. The row of cabinets, once blue, now a sad dishwater gray.

  “Rose.” Nonnie pronounced her name almost spitting, lips drawn back in contempt. Her small pale eyes focused on Rose with a hateful glee. “She’s not your sister.”

  Rose felt as if the suffocating air had once more come alive, buzzing like a swarm of angry wasps. I must have heard it wrong, she thought. Nonnie couldn’t have said that.

  Marie just looked at her grandmother. “Are you crazy? What are you talkin’ about?”

  “She’s not my Dom’s child,” Nonnie insisted. “She’s a bastard just like what you got in your belly. Sure, I got no proof. But,” she went on as she tapped her chest, “there’s some things don’t need proof. Just look at her! It was God’s curse the day she was born. The first time Dom look at her, he cry. I tell him, ‘What you know about that fancy wife of yours with her silk stockings and fifty-dollar dresses? What you think a girl like that does with her husband off at war and not around to look after her proper?’ I tell you, it was a curse your mother died in that fire. A punishment sent on her from God!” Her voice rose to a shrill whine.

  Rose clapped her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t block it out. Each word came through like the sting of a wasp piercing into her flesh.

  “NO!” Rose shot from her chair, toppling it, erupting with rage. “You’re lying! My mother wasn’t like that! She was good and ... and ...” She couldn’t find the words to fit the huge hot hurting emotion that ballooned inside her chest.

  Brian. She had to find Brian. He would know, he’d help, he’d stop this and make it not hurt so much.

  [50] Rose pushed her way past Marie and Nonnie, tears spilling hot down her cheeks. She stumbled through the living room, momentarily blinded by its perpetual twilight. Then her eyes caught the gray light leaking through the tightly drawn Venetian blinds, the waxy gleam of the plastic-slipcovered sofa.

  Rose imagined herself a bug her grandmother wanted to crush and kill, a cockroach. She wrestled with the front-door chain, hating it, hating everything about this room, this awful apartment.

  Then she was in the hall, free, pelting up the stairwell to the top floor, to Brian, praying he would be home.

  The noisy confusion of the McClanahans’ apartment enveloped her the moment she stepped inside. Brian’s mother greeted her holding a baby braced against one generous hip, while another clung to her leg. A warm spicy odor invaded the living room, which was cluttered with kids, couch cushions on the floor, and empty baby bottles ringed with dried milk.

  “Rose, you’re a godsend! Will you take Kevin while I get the cake out of the oven? It’s Jasper’s birthday and I—oh, here.” She shoved Kevin at her, soggy diaper and all, and scooted off toward the kitchen, calling, “Bri-an! Rose is here. If you don’t take Sean out of the tub, he’ll shrivel to a peanut!”

  Rose swiped at her runny eyes with the heel of her hand and sank down on the seat-sprung couch, balancing Kevin on one knee. “Hey, buddy. You want to do the cha-cha?”

  The baby broke into a huge toothless grin. His favorite game was Rose bouncing him to the rhythm of an invisible Latin band. He giggled helplessly. Rose began to feel a tiny bit better.

  The messiness cheered her somehow. The huge braided rug was a shipwreck of scattered Tinker toys and Lincoln logs, alphabet blocks half-chewed by teething babies, an empty Band-Aid box, Matchbox trucks, galoshes, broken crayons, and Golden Books with the covers ripped off. Atop the nicked coffee table was a pile of clumsily wrapped birthday presents. And perched on the old plaid recliner where nightly Mr. McClanahan put his feet up and read the Post, was two-year-old Jasper, mashing a graham cracker between his toes.

  “Welcome to Pandemonium City. Have you heard? President Eisenhower just declared this place a disaster area.”

  Rose looked up, and found Brian grinning at her, carrying [51] four-year-old Sean, all rosy from his bath. The sleeves of Brian’s Brooklyn College sweatshirt were rolled up over his elbows. Stray flecks of shampoo suds decorated his dark brown curls like snowflakes. Just seeing him made Rose feel almost happy.

  Before she could answer, he put Sean down and sank onto the sofa beside her. The front of his sweatshirt, she saw, bore the wet imprint of Sean’s little body. “Hey, Rose, you all right?” he asked softly. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  Rose shook her head, clamping her throat against the fresh tears that threatened. “I’m okay. But Kev here needs his diaper changed. I don’t think either of us can hold out much longer.”

  “Sean,”
Brian yelled across the room, “watch Jazzbo, willya? Don’t let him near the presents, okay?”

  In the shoe box of a room Brian shared with two of his brothers, Rose and he worked together to pin a clean diaper on Kevin despite all his squirming. Brian propped him in his playpen with a mangled Zwieback and a ring of plastic keys.

  “All quiet on the Western front,” he whispered, grabbing her hand. “Come on, now’s the time to make our getaway before the Indians get wind of our trail.”

  Rose thought, with a rush of affection, He knows. He’s taking me to the fort, because he knows something is wrong.

  The fort. They hadn’t been up to the fort in—how long?—a couple of years at least. Since Brian graduated from Precious Blood two years ago and enrolled at Brooklyn College. After that it had seemed sort of ... well, babyish. She could recall, though, when it had once seemed the most exciting place in the world.

  The McClanahans’ apartment was on the top floor. Brian’s mother had long ago installed window guards throughout the apartment. But Brian had devised a way to get into the super’s locked cleaning closet off the public hall. It had a window opening to a small exterior platform. Above that there was an access ladder to the roof. The regular stairway inside the building had been sealed off to tenants since four-year-old Jimmy Storelli tumbled over the edge eight summers ago while his mother was unpinning laundry from her clothesline. The access ladder consisted of eight rusted rungs bolted to the side of the building, with nothing below but a five-story drop.

  She’d been seven, Brian eight and a half, when they first [52] discovered it. She remembered being terrified to climb out on the platform, much less actually climb up. But Brian cajoled and encouraged her, promised he’d be right behind and promised he’d catch her if she fell. He even climbed it twice all alone, scampering up like a monkey, just to show her it was no sweat.

  God, had she been scared. Even now, scrabbling up behind Brian in the twilight, easily hoisting herself rung over rung, she could remember how back then the wind had torn at her corduroy jumper handed down from Marie. How it had filled with wind like a sail, billowing one moment, then snapping in hard against the backs of her knees. Her heart playing catch with her stomach, she had thought of poor little Jimmy Storelli, and imagined herself plunging down, then hitting the sidewalk with the hollow splat of a watermelon rolling off the back of a moving truck.