by Selena Kitt
Leah’s mother took a drink of her wine, looking over at her daughter. “It doesn’t matter, really. You’re young, you’re getting married. You’ll have plenty more children.”
Erica grabbed Clay’s hand under the table, squeezing hard. How could she say something like that? She saw the pain in Leah’s eyes.
Father Michael stood, putting his hand on the old man’s arm, trying to make peace, like always. “We can make exceptions…”
“We can.” Father Patrick glared at Leah. “But we will not.”
“You hypocrite!” Leah lunged across the table at the clergyman, but Rob grabbed her in time to save what was left of the goose in the middle of the table and to keep her from gouging out the old man’s eyes. “Half the babies that are born at Magdalene House are your responsibility! You—!”
“I think you’d better go, Father,” Rob interrupted her and Leah struggled against the restraint of his arms, hissing at him like a cat, but he didn’t let her go.
“I’m sorry.” Father Michael took the older priest’s elbow, guiding him out of the dining room without another word.
“I think you’d better go with him, Mother!” Leah snapped, eyes blazing.
“Fine.” Patty Wendt stood, following the clergyman, glancing over her shoulder and calling back, “You really need to help her start accepting the way things are, Rob. You can’t coddle her forever.”
Leah screamed at that. It wasn’t intelligible, it was just a scream, so loud and blood-curdling that Erica felt frozen in her chair.
“Yeah. I should go too.” Clay stood, looking at Erica as he edged his way around the table. Leah was still screaming, crying now, turning in Rob’s arms, clawing at him. Erica begged Clay with her eyes, but he didn’t understand. He just gave a little wave. “Thanks for dinner, Nolans.”
Erica jumped up. “I’m going with you!”
“No you’re not,” her father countered, not letting go of Leah. Solie appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishrag and looking at them all like they were crazy. Erica thought she was probably correct in her assessment.
“You can’t tell me what to do anymore.” Erica sneered at him, catching up with Clay and following him down the hall. She ignored her father calling after her, insisting she come back. She ignored the sound of her best friend’s screams. They were like the howls of a dying animal.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” Erica whispered in the hallway as she and Clay pulled on their coats. “Well you’ve met my crazy family.”
Clay grabbed her hand as they walked out the door. “That’s okay, you haven’t met mine yet.”
“It can’t be as bad as that,” Erica shivered as they stood on the sidewalk in the snow. She saw Father Michael helping Father Patrick into the car, saw the hurt on his face, the concern in his eyes, and turned away from it.
Clay was there, holding her hand and smiling a big, goofy smile.
“Sure you want to sign up for this?” Erica jerked her head toward the warehouse. “They’re all a couple bananas short of a bunch.”
“Girl, I’m already bananas for you.” He took her into his arms and kissed her right there on the street. And she let him.
Chapter Five
Leah wouldn’t let Rob come with her to pick a wedding dress, insisting on tradition, even though they wouldn’t be married in the church after all. She should have expected something like it from Father Patrick, but somehow it still came as a shock to be ostracized from the church. She’d discovered so much about the hypocrisy of the church in the past year, so many shameful, scandalous secrets, she knew it should be she who rejected them, not the other way around, but somehow the seeds of faith that had been planted when she was young had wound themselves through her life and had taken root. She could no longer throw over her belief in God and the Catholic Church than she could have cut out her own heart.
Hudson’s bridal section took up the entire, magical sixth floor of the twenty-something story building. She and Erica used to sneak up there when they were little and play hide and seek in the sea of white satin dresses on the rack while their mothers lunched on the thirteenth floor. They thought the girls were playing in the toys section of the store. Both girls had cut out pictures of wedding dresses from magazines, putting them into the hope chests at the foot of their beds. They had compared notes on cuts, color (white, of course, but bridesmaid dresses could be any color) and style for years, changing their minds a hundred times over, dreaming of prince charming all the while.
She couldn’t believe she was entering Hudson’s bridal department as a bride, and she never could have fathomed she would be marrying her best friend’s father, a man she’d called “Mr. Nolan,” most of her life and had always thought of as sort of her replacement father. Things had changed so drastically in the past year, her life now was unrecognizable to the one she’d lived until falling in love with Rob. Things felt flipped, upside down even. Here she was shopping for a wedding dress, but she’d already given birth to her future husband’s child, had already been transformed from the young girl she’d been into a woman and a mother.
So when the elevator operator stopped it at the sixth, calling out, “Bridal shop!” it was with some trepidation that she stepped off. The entire floor smelled like floral perfume from the sachets hanging amidst the rows of dresses, the carpet a thick, bridal white, the mass of dresses, literally hundreds of them to choose from, an overwhelming sea of virginal satin and lace. It took a girl’s breath away in an instant and made Leah’s pulse race. If Pavlov had studied the shopping habits of females, he would have discovered that bridal shops had the same effect on the feminine population as potential nourishment did on canines.
“Can I help you?” One of the saleswomen came around the other side of the counter where she had been flipping through a magazine. She was a blonde, her long hair falling in careful waves over her shoulders, wearing a smart, cream-colored pinstriped suit coat and matching skirt, the blouse underneath decorated with pink ruffles. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Oh, yes.” Leah glanced around, glimpsing another young bride in the back standing on a pedestal in a white dress and veil, surrounded by girls ohhhing and ahhhhhing over her choice. “Leah Wendt. Er, Nolan. Leah Nolan.”
Leah blinked at the name change. They had registered for gifts at Hudson’s too, under the Nolan name, but she’d never put her first name and Rob’s last name together out loud before.
“Oh good. You’re a little early.” The saleswoman went back behind the counter and Leah followed, watching her flip open a big book, her pink lacquered nail tracing its way down loopy, scrawled handwritten entries to Leah’s name. She looked older than Leah, but not by that much. Five or six years maybe.
“Is your bridal party coming?” the saleswoman asked, glancing behind Leah as if a gaggle of girls might appear out of thin air.
“Yes. Well, my maid of honor. And… my mother. That’s it.”
Leah had never been one to collect a bunch of friends, and considering her current circumstances, she was no longer in contact with the girls she might have asked from Mary Magdalene’s, either her former high school or their two-year preparatory college.
The only girls she would have asked were now scattered to the wind. She felt closer to the girls she’d met at the maternity home, all of them hidden away at Magdalene House, who she’d only known for six short months, than she did to any of the girls she’d gone to school with.
There was little Lizzie, with the face of a china doll, whose baby had been shockingly fathered by her own father. Slow Jean, poor dim-witted Jean, who had shadowed Lizzie like an adoring puppy dog, who had missed her friend so much when Lizzie had to leave Magdalene House, she’d thrown herself down a flight of stairs in an attempt to miscarry. And Frannie, whose belly had grown so big because she was carrying twins, whose babies had been separated and given to two different adoptive couples to maximize the donation to the church from the parents. And then there was Marty. Leah
missed her most of all. Spunky redheaded Marty, who had first introduced her to the Mary Magdalenes, the secret society Erica had somehow gotten herself involved with.
Leah still hadn’t told Erica she knew about the Mary Magdalenes, about the sex rituals and the literal Madonna/whore complex being played out by the Catholic priests and nuns who participated. Marty had explained how they split the girls into two categories, Marys and Magdalenes—Madonnas and whores—and while they had sex with all of them, only the Magdalenes bore Eve’s burden of sin, becoming pregnant with the seed of man, while the Marys remained pure, perpetual virgins, although Leah was still unclear on how they managed that last feat.
It was so shocking and horrific when you heard it expressed in black and white, it seemed too impossible to be true, and Leah probably wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, hadn’t witnessed her best friend’s nude body painted and strapped to a giant cross, if she hadn’t walked the secret tunnels under the church to its center where the Mary girls were on the virginal white side and the Magdalenes on the sinful red, and everywhere there was the smell of sex hanging in the air, the one thing that served to join them both.
Marty had tried to explain it, Leah remembered, how they became slowly indoctrinated—brainwashed was more like it, Leah thought—becoming connected as sisters, unwilling to tell their shocking, outlandish secret to the world, not only out of fear of retaliation from the church, but out of fear of compromising their sisters as well. And of course, there was incentive to stay. The virginal Marys were special and “taken care of” for the rest of their lives by the church. They and their families would want for nothing. The Magdalenes received a one-time payment of ten thousand dollars when they gave up their baby for adoption.
And of course, that worked out well for the maternity homes like Leah had been forced into. There were hundreds, if not thousands of places like Magdalene House all over the world, where Magdalene babies were born and then adopted out to infertile but rich Catholic couples who were willing to give a large donation to the church in exchange for a healthy newborn.
Marty had managed to cut ties with the Magdalenes. She’d found a way out, giving up the money she would have received from the church, initiating a secret correspondence and eventually going halfway across the world to enter into an arranged marriage in order to keep her baby.
Leah didn’t know where Marty was, didn’t have a forwarding address. She didn’t know where any of them were. They were the girls she would have asked to stand up in her wedding. They would have understood the bittersweet moment, marrying the man she loved while her baby was still out there, somewhere. They knew her more deeply than anyone, and she had never even known their real names.
All of the girls at Magdalene House had adopted fake names, and when their babies were adopted, they disappeared into the world, back to their homes, moving like shadows through their former lives, changed forever, immeasurably, but no one knew it, except those girls who had gone through it with them, whose names they never knew.
“Leah!”
She turned toward the sound of her name, hoping Erica had arrived, but it was Leah’s mother instead, stepping smiling off the elevator. Leah felt the knot in her stomach cinch a little tighter, and she instantly regretted her decision to let her mother take part in this process. She should have hardened her heart—she’d been taught by the best, after all—but it had been Donald Highbrow who had elicited Leah’s sympathy, who had softened her to this woman who had given birth to her.
“Your mother?” the saleswoman surmised and Leah nodded, although she knew it was an easy guess. They looked so much alike, they were often mistaken for sisters.
“Hi Mom.”
“Sorry, I got caught up at coat check on the mezzanine talking to Gertie Webber from the Ladies Auxiliary.” Leah’s mother smiled, holding her white-gloved hand out to the saleswoman, and they shook hands and shared a look Leah understood and resented. The grown-ups were here, so they could start now.
“Patty Wendt,” Leah’s mother introduced herself, pulling her gloves off one finger at a time.
“Irene Showalter.”
“Showalter. Any relation to Ruby Showalter?”
Irene nodded. “My mother.”
“I thought I saw a resemblance. I went to school with Ruby Showalter. How is she?”
“She’s passed on, ma’am,” Irene informed her.
“Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Leah’s mother patted the girl on the shoulder. “How awful to lose your mother so young.”
“Yes. Thank you.” Irene glanced toward the elevator. “Are you expecting anyone else?”
“My maid of honor.”
Leah’s mother smiled. “She’s obviously running a little late.”
“Well I can start showing you some dresses,” Irene said. “Do you have an idea of what you’re looking for?”
Only a lifetime of them, Leah thought, staring at the rows of white satin.
“Something with a high collar, lots of lace, a full veil,” Patty said, glancing at her daughter. “You do want a full veil don’t you, Leah?”
Leah blinked at her. “Umm…”
But they were already off and running, Irene leading them into the back where there were even more dresses, showing her mother a Scarlett O’Hara affair with so much tiered lace it looked as if the dress could stand up by itself.
“Eighty yards of lace.” Irene whispered this revelation as if it would shock them.
“How about this one?” Leah pulled one of the dresses out on its hanger, surprised by how heavy it was—a gorgeous white satin concoction, sleeveless with a sweetheart bodice.
“Oh Leah, sleeveless?” Patty Wendt made a face. “Besides, you can’t be thinking of white?”
Leah blinked at her in disbelief. “Well, Mother, you’re one to talk.”
“I just meant…” Patty sank down onto one of the cushioned benches.
“Why don’t I let you two look around for a while?” Irene said, taking a step back. “I think I hear the phone ringing…”
“I’m sorry, Leah,” her mother apologized. “I didn’t mean… I just…”
“Mother, this is my wedding. Don’t make me regret asking you to come here today.”
“I know that. I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said, holding up her hands, palms out in supplication. “I just thought, you know, since you’ve already given birth, you might want something a little more reserved in off-white or cream? They have some lovely bridal yellows now…”
Leah shoved the dress back in the mix, snagging the hanger on the rod. “I’m wearing white, and you’re not going to shame me out of it.”
“Oh Leah, I wasn’t trying to shame you.”
“Yes you were.” Leah flipped through the dresses on hangers, not really seeing anything except white. White, white and more white. A color that she wasn’t allowed to wear anymore apparently. She was too tainted. Damaged goods.
“I’m really sorry,” her mother insisted, pleading. “Can we start over?”
Leah looked at her, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t know. I was kind of hoping we could, but it isn’t starting out that way, is it?”
Her mother sighed. “I really am sorry.”
“Sorry is nice, but it doesn’t change anything.”
Patty Wendt threw up her hands in disgust. “What would you like from me?”
“Honesty.”
“I thought I was being honest.”
“Right.” Leah scoffed. “You’re only honest when you can use it on someone else as an excuse to be cruel. How about trying some honesty about yourself on for size?”
Leah’s mother glanced around, smoothing her skirt, picking imaginary lint off the black material. “What do you want to know?”
“Who is my father?” Leah just plunged ahead, not caring who overheard, whether it was Irene the salesgirl or the other bride and her bevy of bridesmaids.
“I don’t know.” Leah�
�s mother said this with no hesitation, lifting her chin and looking at her daughter.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Leah scowled. “For years I thought my father was a sailor named Victor Wendt who died in some accident out at sea. But it turns out that was a lie. You were never even married.”
Leah’s mother nodded, her weary eyes closing, resting her forehead against her hand. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Leah, but you have to understand, a girl in my position couldn’t be unmarried with a baby. It would have been far too scandalous. I couldn’t have held my head up anywhere in town.”
“And then you lied again and told me Robert Nolan was my father,” Leah reminded her.
“Leah, you have to understand, I really believed…” Her mother lifted her head, pleading at her with her eyes. “I didn’t know he wasn’t. I truly didn’t know.”
“Well, considering blood tests have completely ruled him out as my father, I guess you have some explaining to do. How many other men could it be, Mother?”
Patty winced, looking as if Leah had stabbed her in the gut with something small but painful, like an ice pick or a knitting needle.
Leah stabbed her again. “I know you didn’t have an opportunity to have a wedding, but it sounds like you couldn’t even have an off-white wedding. Perhaps red is more your color?”
Her mother made a small, wounded sound, actually flinching as if she’d been struck. “You have a tongue sharper than your grandmother’s.”
Leah laughed. “Funny, here I thought I learned from the best.”
“Leah, stop.”
“So tell me. How many men were there, Mother?” Leah didn’t bother to keep her voice down. She knew the girls around the corner were listening. Irene Showalter was certainly listening. Leah didn’t care. Let them all hear the truth. “Rob isn’t my father, we know that much. So let’s narrow it down. Should we make a list? Let me find a pen…”