Brian grabbed at her roughly, pulled and yanked at her. Her red face, damp with fury, struggled against tears. “Let go of me. Get your damn hands off of me. I’ll kill you, Kevin, I’ll kill you!”
Kevin leaped to his feet, his face white with rage and anticipation. “I didn’t tell her nothing like that. She’s a rotten little lying troublemaker.”
“You said she was gonna die,” Kit yelled and tried to break free of Brian’s hold.
Brian turned to his brother and Kevin yelled, “Liar! You asked and I said everybody dies sometime or other.”
Brian shoved Kit from him and reached for Kevin’s shirt front. “You little bastard,” he said in a harsh whisper. He shook his brother savagely with a surge of violence. “How would you like to get your ass kicked from one end of the street to the other?”
Kevin blinked compulsively and tried to pull himself free. “I didn’t, I swear, Bri. She’s a liar. I didn’t tell her anything bad.”
His sister swung past him at Kevin and he put himself between them. “Cut it out. Damn it, now cut it out!” He shook them both to gasping silence. “If there’s another sound from either one of you”—he jostled them both—”I’ll crack your skulls together, you got that?” Kevin nodded and he was released. “Go and change your clothes; you look like a damn slob. And you,” he told his sister, “you go and wash your face and comb your hair and get to school.” He pushed Kit from him and she stalked away, turned at the door, put her hands low on her hips and glared at him.
“I’m not afraid of you, Brian,” she said in a furious voice.
Brian shook his head and sighed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
TWELVE
HE DIDN’T WANT TO think about the visit to his mother, and so on the trolley ride to the hospital, he let his mind become vacant. The wheels of the trolley car hummed along the tracks and the hum rumbled through the floor, through the soles of his shoes, up his legs and along his thighs. The vibrations became a part of him and he floated along, encased in vague sensation.
Sensation led to memory: fragmented memories, unbidden, each connected to the other through the medium of his flesh. As the streets of the Bronx slid and jerked past his unseeing gaze, Brian let himself be possessed by other times.
Everyone called her “Mad Sister Louise.” It was a known and established fact that she was mad but her madness did not noticeably interfere with her teaching ability until the time of Kathleen Gagan’s murder.
Sixth grade. Twelve years old.
She had been a totally unexceptional girl who resembled every other girl in Sister Louise’s class. Neither heavy nor thin, her body unremarkable beneath the shapeless brown jumper, arms and throat concealed by the light-tan school blouse. What had there been about Kathleen Gagan that had caused some insane devil of a man to snatch out at her as she walked home from some errand? Her small bag of spilled groceries had been found outside of the alley which led to the basement which contained her battered and violated body. The man had been caught within hours; had been dragged away moaning and crying, his sounds dimmed beneath the screams and terrible voices of the neighborhood women, He had disappeared from Brian’s life in a flash, lost behind unknowable walls of adult silence and glances. But Kathleen Gagan remained. The tantalizing mystery of Kathleen Gagan remained.
They had attended a Mass of the Angels for Kathleen, all thirty-five of her classmates. Stretched out in her small white box, her Sacred Heart Medal on a “bright-red velvet ribbon flat against the whiteness of her confirmation dress, she did not look either murdered or violated, merely asleep. They all said their prayers and a lightheaded hysteria traveled from one child to the other for there was at the center of all this something no one would explain to them. Sister Louise made a shrine out of Kathleen Gagan’s desk and each day for the remainder of the school year, each day for nearly seven months, the small candle flickered throughout the school day and each school day began with each of them in turn offering at Kathleen Gagan’s shrine a Hail Mary on her behalf. But while his lips automatically formed the words, Brian’s brain attempted visions of Kathleen and Kathleen’s body, violated. Because he had no true idea of what her violation consisted of, what he imagined were gross mutilations, as shown in comic hooks, which he devoured in great gulps. Whatever he imagined, however, totally failed to satisfy some deep inexplicable need to know. It was an eighth grader who eventually told him: a dirty, sly, cigarette-puffing eighth grader.
Then the praying over Kathleen’s desk became more and more of an ordeal and the vision of Kathleen which appeared to him terrified him and he offered additional prayers for his own salvation rather than hers.
At the end of the term, Sister Louise was sent away for a rest and the shrine to Kathleen Gagan was removed from the sixth-grade room, but the shrine and all its implications remained forever in his brain.
He had ridden far past his destination. It was just as well. He needed to walk, to get some air, to physically move away from his memory.
But it was not the amorphous flesh of the violated Kathleen Gagan from which he tried to escape; it was the reality of his own flesh which sent Brian O’Malley plunging along the Bronx afternoon streets. His sense of being a physical entity overwhelmed him and he drove himself, hard, mercilessly, until his hard-pressed lungs gasped for air, the tight-chested pain distracted him; he slowed down, jammed his hands into his pockets, felt the thump of his heart against his rib cage, felt the sweat down his back and the dryness of his mouth.
He dogtrotted, eyes straight ahead, but he didn’t miss anything. He saw girls along the sidewalks, outside the houses, leaning against stairways; in idle conversation with each other, fingers raking short, waved hair, casual and nonchalant. But their eyes caught his, held for some brief instant of contact, signaled that mysterious quality of sexuality with no more than a glance.
The street he was on, no farther than a mile from his own neighborhood, had an exotic foreign flavor. Italian. Bathgate Avenue, Arthur Avenue. Heavy black-clothed women; dark hair and dark eyes and moist olive skin. Strange foods; long cylindrical cheeses tied with heavy string, which bit into the substance, like flesh, hung in grocery windows; salamis, hard and black; huge loaves of crusty bread, all tossed together, all piled up in a heap in the corner of a store window. Fragrance of spices, unknown, unfamiliar, wafted from a shop as a door opened for a moment; sound of a strange, dark, succinct language, some phrase that seemed significant, but which he could not grasp, intrigued him.
He watched as a woman, neither young nor old from his point of view, with a strong Madonna face, seized a small struggling boy by the collar and landed blows on the back of his head and shoulders. The sound of her words was fierce and hissing and the boy hunched his shoulders against the onslaught, but beneath the burst of the woman’s anger and wrath, through the unintelligible words, Brian sensed how held in was the power of the woman. The blows were not intended to destroy; the boy yelled because it was expected of him, not because he was in real pain. The woman shoved her son, ordered him into the house, then turned, surprised that she had been observed. She shrugged, a universal movement of her shoulders, and Brian felt the impact of the gesture which had been directed to him. He was removed forever from the hunched shoulders of childhood and included now in the world of the adult. She stared at him for a moment, puzzled, then turned her dark liquid eyes from him and hurried about her business.
Brian stood nervously at the entrance to the long, narrow hospital ward, the visitor’s pass held tightly in the grasp of his fingers, and searched for his mother. She was in the third bed to his left, her face turned from him; she seemed to be asleep. The room was warm, overheated, and she was covered with a thin white blanket which outlined the contours and divisions of her body. She was on her back and her legs were slightly parted and the blanket clung to her as though it were a sheet and he stood, fascinated, unable to move either toward the bed or away from it as some terribleness overwhelmed him. He had never seen his mother in
bed, never, not once in his life, and he saw her now, absolutely, totally vulnerable and female.
“Who are you here to see?”
He turned, his face burning with guilt, and he tried to meet the narrowed suspicious eyes of a heavy-set nurse. He held his pass up as though to exonerate himself from accusation. She snatched the pass, then jerked her head and led him to his mother’s bed.
The nurse leaned over and shook his mother’s foot from side to side.
“Mrs. O’Malley? You awake? This your son here to see you?”
Her face was pale and she blinked in confusion and seemed to be trying to sit up but the nurse said, “You just stay put now. And you,” she said brusquely to Brian, “don’t you be tiring her out.”
He leaned over awkwardly and kissed her cheek and felt her hand, fragile and weak on his. There was a white metal chair beside the bed and he sat on it, then handed her the box of cookies his grandmother had prepared.
“You okay, Ma?” he asked.
Her voice was thin and the smile was forced and her eyes seemed dark and filled with pain. “Now don’t you go worryin’, Bri. You’d no need to come at all. Sure I’ll be home in a few days and there’s an end to it. You’re not to come again, what with all your workin’ hours.”
“Listen, is there anything you need?”
She moved her head listlessly, her eyes stayed closed for a moment, and when she opened them, she seemed to gaze past him. It occurred to him that they were avoiding each other’s eyes, that there was something between them now that had never existed before: a knowledge which neither of them could even begin to approach. Instinctively, he realized the best way to handle it was to ignore it, to pretend whatever ignorance she needed from him.
“Don’t you worry about anything, Ma, okay? The kids are fine. Boy, Roseanne bosses them around more than you ever did.”
She smiled thinly. “They’re all good kids, Brian. All my children are good.” Her hand moved slightly and he pressed it. “Thank you for coming, son. I guess I’d best get some sleep now.”
He was grateful to her, released from the nearness of her, from the discomfort they felt in each other’s presence under these strange circumstances. He didn’t look back, but left the room quickly, in long strides. He had to control an urge to run from the building. He rubbed his eyes against the strong, piercing unexpected December sunlight which glinted from remnants of ice on the sidewalk. He bent against the wind and lit a cigarette but the image was engraved inside his brain and neither sunlight nor glare of ice nor rapidly inhaled nicotine could erase it or relieve him of the deep terror which assaulted him; he would live with it forever, through all of burning eternity he would live with the knowledge that he had stood and seen his mother, and that her body, mysterious and forbidden, had aroused him.
In a sudden impulse, Brian crushed the cigarette into the palm of his hand, clenched his teeth at the burning sensation. He felt his stomach churn with nausea, his head ached, his throat was dry; his whole body pounded with an anxiety that seemed to have no beginning and no end. He walked blindly, inhaled a faintly familiar fragrance, stopped in front of a small stone church: St. Lucia of the Cross. As some elderly women entered, a whiff of incense mingled with the air and he breathed it deeply and felt an odd sense of relief. He could be free of the strangulating sense of guilt which he had avoided facing these past few months. He had known all along that his confession to that nodding Italian priest hadn’t been a good confession, hadn’t been a true confession, hadn’t been the cleansing confession which could truly save him.
He’d convinced himself that he’d truly repented and received absolution and that would be the end of it, but Brian O’Malley knew better, and the sad-faced, brown-eyed Father Concertta, cool hand on his burning forehead, had soothed him, asked only, “Do you truly repent all your sins, my son?” and Brian had whispered from his hot, dry mouth, “Yes, Father,” and was given absolution: deathbed absolution.
Brian felt cold sweat chill his body. Dear Sweet Christ, if he’d died then, he’d have been condemned for all eternity because his sins went untold. He clenched his teeth because they began to chatter with cold and inexplicable fear and certainty such as he hadn’t known since he was a small child enraptured by the graphic pictures in his textbook of all the souls in hell. His sins had been worse than those described in his third-grade textbook.
Flesh. The sins of the flesh.
By the time he reached Father Donlon’s study, Brian O’Malley was bathed in the sweat of his own terror. The housekeeper took one look at his gray face, decided he must have come directly from murdering someone and ran to interrupt Father at his reading of the missal.
Father Donlon plucked off his wire-framed eyeglasses, blinked his small blue eyes in some confusion for the light in his study was dim. “Oh. Is that you then, Brian? For the instant, you looked so like your father, may he rest in peace, that you gave me a start.” He squinted tightly, sensed the boy’s state of mind and said calmly, “Well now, Brian, I’ve been rather expecting you’d come to see me sooner or later.”
“Father Donlon, I...Father...I...”
Father Donlon was a small man, short and fragile, and his strong face seemed misplaced on his delicate body as his deep voice seemed to come from someone else altogether.
“Brian,” he said firmly, “go down into the confessional, lad, and say five Hail Marys to calm yourself and then I’ll be along.”
Brian shook his head, distracted, but Father Donlon’s hand guided him firmly and he did what he was told.
The prayers calmed him and when he heard the priest enter the confessional he felt more in control of himself. They went through the opening rituals quietly, by rote, and Brian began to feel a sense of security within the familiar ritual of confession: there was some sense of safety at last. He locked his eyes closed and resolved, with every fiber of his life, to make a good and true confession.
“Sins of the flesh, Father,” he began haltingly.
“Did you commit acts of self-abuse, my son?”
“That, too, Father, but worse. I...I ...When I left home, Father, there was a time, a period of time. In the south. I hitched a ride in a boxcar, Father, and I thought I was alone, and after a while, two...there were two other people in the car with me, Father.”
“Who were they, my son?”
“Well, I thought at first that they were just little kids. They looked like little kids, but they were...not so little. They were a brother and a sister, Father; they were twins. Fifteen years old. And...and...”
“Did you commit a sin of the flesh with either of them, my son?”
Brian bit his knuckle until he gasped, but the priest waited patiently, soundlessly, without judging. His question was calmly put, unstartled, uncondemning.
“With the girl, Father. I...I had sexual intercourse with the girl. But it was worse than that. The boy...the boy watched. He leaned close and he watched and then...and then...”
“Did you have sexual relations with the boy, my son?”
“We were together in that boxcar for three days and three nights, Father. The car was sealed and we were locked in. They had been on the road for three years. I didn’t know about...I swear, Father, I didn’t know some of the things. They were younger than me, but they knew all kinds of...of terrible things, Father. Yes.” Finally, strangling with the purging of it, Brian said, “Yes, Father, I had sexual relations with both of them.”
There was a soft sigh from behind the screen which separated them, a sad, sorrowful sound. “Do you realize, my son, how this has offended God?”
“Yes, Father, I do.”
“Do you truly repent, my son, not only the awfulness of the sins of your flesh, but the terrible pain you inflicted on our Savior through this weakness?”
“Yes, Father, I do.”
“Have you anything more to confess, my son? God is merciful beyond our comprehension, beyond anything we deserve. He will grant you absolution if you truly repent.”
He could not find words. There were no words to describe the constant, tantalizing, omnipresent sexuality which seemed to fill his brain more and more. There were specific and vaporous things. He tried to speak. “Father...I am locked in my flesh. I feel sexual desire. I can’t seem to...to...”
Father Donlon said softly, for the first time speaking to him personally, “We are all made of flesh, Brian. We are all mortal and therefore imperfect. God never demands perfection, only that we truly try. Are you capable of truly trying, Brian?”
“I want to be free of it, Father, truly I do.” He locked his eyes and the vision came to him: his mother’s body, covered with the thin white blanket, outlined, female. He clenched his fists and hammered them on his knees fiercely. Oh,’ Father Donlon, I think I’m beyond redemption.”
“If you were beyond redemption, my child, you wouldn’t be here, now would you?” He sighed quietly, patiently, and spoke in the measured tones of one who has heard all things, expected all things, was shocked by nothing. “You’re at an age, my child, where the devil will mock and torment you through your awakening sex. It is a time of terrible testing for some, my child, and you must be equal to it. You’ve been given a heavy responsibility, Brian, at a very young age, and you’ve been chosen to set a good example for your brothers and sisters. You must give yourself more to your work, my child, keep yourself busy. You can, Brian, for I know your strength and I also know that God never sends us a burden greater than we can bear.” It was a strong, determined, reasonable voice and Brian began to find some comfort, some reassurance.
“But, Father, sins of the imagination. Sometimes my thoughts drift off, they are so...so...”
“Yes, there are sins of the mind too, Brian; you’ve learned that. But is there any other specific act that you should confess? Search your soul, my child.”
He sat quietly hunched over, slowly shaking his head. “No, Father Donlon.”
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