by John Saul
Monsignor Vernon was waiting for her, seated at his desk, his fingers drumming impatiently. His lips tightened when he saw Penny Anderson framed in the doorway.
“Your mother has asked me to hear your confession,” he said.
“Couldn’t we talk here?” Penny countered. She knew she would have to tell the priest the truth in the confessional. Here, in the office, she could avoid it
“Shall we go into the church?” Monsignor Vernon said, and Penny knew that he was not asking a question, Silently, she followed the priest out of the school and into the church.
When she was in the tiny confessional, the door latched firmly, Penny knelt and began praying. She heard the shutter open. The priest was waiting for her to begin.
The story came out slowly. But Monsignor Vernon prodded, and poked, dragging it from her detail by detail.
“Did you know it was going to happen?” the priest’s voice asked.
“No,” Penny replied.
“Are you sure?”
She tried to remember. “Not at first,” she said hesitantly.
“But then you knew?”
“When he took his shirt off—”
“How did you feel?”
“I’m—I’m not sure. I wanted to—to—”
“To touch him?” the disembodied voice accused.
“Yes,” Penny hissed. “Yes, I wanted to touch him.”
“And you wanted him to touch you?”
“Yes,” Penny wailed.
In the other half of the booth, Monsignor Vernon was sweating. It was sinful. What they did was repulsive and sinful. He could see them, the naked boy lying on top of her, her hands on his back, on his buttocks, then reaching around, touching him, touching him. He pictured her hands on the boy’s organ, and his own hands began working. He could almost feel the hardness of the boy …
“Tell it to me,” he urged her softly. “Tell me all of it.”
Once more Penny went into the recital of her sins, and the priest felt the wrath of a vengeful God rise in him. A combination of excitement and revulsion. And then it was over. Monsignor Vernon felt a sudden release within himself. Now he would have to deal with the penitent who knelt quietly on the other side of the screen, waiting for him to speak.
He began the prayer of absolution, but was suddenly conscious of a stirring from Penny’s side of the confessional. He broke off the prayer.
“Is there more?”
There was a slight hesitation, and then he heard Penny’s voice.
“The penance, Father. What is the penance?” In the dimness of the tiny booth, Monsignor Vernon smiled softly.
“You will know what the penance is,” he whispered. “When the time comes, you will know what to do.”
Then, as Penny wondered what he meant, Monsignor Vernon absolved her of all her sins.
Monsignor Vernon glanced at one of the hall clocks. “We’re late,” he said, increasing his stride. Penny almost had to run to keep up with him.
“Late for what?”
“Your class,” the priest announced. “I’m conducting it today.”
Penny stopped in her tracks, the one bright spot in her day ruined. “Mr. Balsam isn’t here today?” she asked. She wondered if she could plead sickness, and go home; she had been looking forward to the psychology class as the one ray of hope: Mr. Balsam always seemed to know what was happening with the kids, and what to say to them. And today he wasn’t there.
“He went to the hospital,” Monsignor Vernon said placidly. “Janet Connally wanted to talk to him, and we thought it best that he go.”
“I see,” Penny said vaguely, though she didn’t see at all. They walked the rest of the way to Room 16 in silence.
Penny hesitated at the door, and stared at the empty seats in the front row. Judy Nelson was there, but all the other seats were empty: Karen Morton’s, Janet Connally’s, and Jim Mulvey’s. Where was Jim? she wondered. Home in bed, probably, she thought bitterly.
She started to slip into a vacant seat in the back of the room, but Judy Nelson was signaling to her, so she walked to the front and took the seat next to Judy.
“I had to tell,” Judy whispered urgently. She was speaking so fast Penny could hardly follow her. “Right after you left with Jim, we heard about Janet. We all went over there, and your mother was already there, and when you weren’t with us, and Jim wasn’t with us, well—she just put it together. What could I say?” She looked eagerly at Penny. “What happened? Did you—” But before she could finish her question, Monsignor Vernon rapped on the desk and cleared his throat
He gazed out over the room, taking note of the empty desks in the front row. He stared at them for a long time, long enough for the class to be certain what he was thinking. As the silence lengthened, the class began to squirm, and the questions in their minds showed on their faces.
Why is he here?
Where’s Mr. Balsam?
What’s he going to do?
Monsignor Vernon cleared his throat and the squirming suddenly stopped.
He spoke without preamble, offering no explanation for their teacher’s absence. He made a simple announcement.
“Your assignment today will be to write a paper.”
There was a rustling in Room 16. Maybe the hour wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“A paper about death,” Monsignor Vernon said. Suddenly the silence in the room was tangible. They stared at him, not sure they had heard him correctly. They had.
“Something is happening in this class,” Monsignor Vernon went on, “and I don’t know too much about it So I want you, each of you, to tell me. You will spend the rest of this hour writing about death. Specifically, your own deaths.”
Now the students looked terrified. The Monsignor continued.
“You are to look within yourselves. You will decide if there are any circumstances under which you would contemplate committing suicide. If you find that there are, you will describe those circumstances in your papers, and then attempt to reconcile your feelings with the Doctrines of the Church.” He looked out over the class. “Your papers will be entirely confidential. No one will see them except me and Mr. Balsam. We will read them, evaluate them, and destroy them. They won’t be graded, and they won’t be recorded. But I think we might be able to get some valuable information about what has been happening to—some of you.”
Suddenly everyone in the class began glancing at Judy Nelson. But Judy sat calmly in her seat, unaffected by what the priest had asked of them.
In the back of the room, Marilyn Crane tried to hold back her tears. To think of killing yourself was a mortal sin! But if it was a sin, surely a priest wouldn’t ask you to do it, would he? Then Marilyn realized that the Monsignor had given them an opportunity: if she was honest with herself, she knew that she had thought about it but had always stopped herself. Now she had a chance to think it through, and think it through with a clear conscience. She silently blessed the priest for giving her the assignment, and set to work.
Penny Anderson couldn’t think at all. She sat numbly in the front row, and stared at the Monsignor. How could he? With Karen dead and Janet in the hospital, how could he ask them to do such a thing?
Her head was still pounding from the night before, and she felt as though she hadn’t slept in a week. She tried to force herself to concentrate. But all she could do was sit and stare at Monsignor Vernon.
And then she realized that he was beckoning to her, signaling her to come to him. She responded to the summons.
“Is something wrong?” the priest asked when she was next to the desk.
“I—I can’t seem to concentrate,” Penny stammered.
The priest smiled at her. “Perhaps you’d better work in the quiet-room,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier for you if you were alone.”
But I don’t want to be alone, Penny’s mind cried out. I want to talk to someone. I want to talk to Mr. Balsam! Aloud she said: ““I’ll try.” Then she repeated it: “Really, I’ll t
ry!” She picked up her things and hurried out of Room 16.
On her way to the basement, where the quiet-room was, Penny hoped she’d find someone else already there. She didn’t care who—anyone—just someone she could talk to for a while, to take her mind off herself, off last night, off everything. But the quiet-room was empty, and as Penny closed the door behind her she felt even worse than before.
Resolutely, she put her things down on one of the tables and took out a pen and some paper. She put her name neany in the upper left-hand corner, and then printed the tide of her paper.
WHY SHOULD I KILL MYSELF?
Then, underneath, she wrote something else:
WHY SHOULDN’T I?
Penny stared at the paper for a long time, and after a while the paper blurred in her vision. She began to see other images. She saw Jim Mulvey, his chest glistening in the firelight, his eyes inviting her. She saw herself, kneeling in front of him, tearing at his pants.
And then the image was gone, and Penny saw Karen Morton. She was wearing a white dress—it was her confirmation dress—and she was walking toward Penny. But something was wrong. Penny looked closer. Now she knew what was wrong—Karen was walking toward her from the gravel But Karen was happy; she was smiling, and waving to Penny. How could she be happy? She was dead. Dead! Dead! Penny repeated the word to herself over and over again. Dead. DEAD! DEAD-DEAD-DEAD-deaddeaddead. And suddenly the word didn’t mean anything to her anymore. It was just a sound without any meaning at all. Karen wasn’t deaddeaddead. No. Karen was happy. She was wearing her confirmation dress, and she was happy. Penny wanted to be with her …
Penny Anderson sat up suddenly, and looked around. Where was she? The quiet-room. Of course. She was in the quiet-room and she was supposed to be writing a paper. What had happened?
She looked at the clock: a few minutes after four o’clock. It must be broken.
But the second hand was moving steadily.
She left her things in the quiet-room and climbed up the stairs to the main floor. The clock on the main floor said the same thing. Seven minutes after four.
It was impossible, of course. She had been downstairs only a few minutes. Then she stopped, and listened. It was quiet. Too quiet. Not the busy quiet of a building full of students, but the awful, deserted silence that comes over a school in late afternoons and on weekends.
Somehow, Penny Anderson had lost most of the day. Shaken, she pushed quickly through the door of the girls’ room. As she was washing her hands, she glanced at the mirror. What she saw horrified her.
Her eyes were puffy.
Her whole face seemed to have swollen.
She stared at herself, and began to feel sick at her stomach. Then, as if trying to blot out the image, her fist came up and smashed into the mirror. It shattered, and jagged pieces of glass crashed to the floor at her feet. Shocked, she stared at the mess around her, at the cut that was slowly beginning to ooze blood on her leg. And something clicked in her mind.
The penance.
Something about the penance.
“You will know what the penance is” That was what he had said. “When the times comes, you will know what to do.”
Penny Anderson knew what to do.
She reached down and picked up the largest shard. Then she went back into the stall she had just came out of, and carefully latched the door behind her.
She took off her shoes and her pantyhose.
She sat on the plumbing above the toilet, and carefully put both feet in the toilet bowl.
She grasped the fragment of broken mirror and reached down.
The blood came slowly at first, then faster, running down her ankles into the bowl. She stared at the red water, then flushed the toilet. A moment later, the bowl refilled with clean water, but that, too, soon turned red.
Over and over again, Penny slashed at herself with tibe broken glass, lacerating her legs until the blood poured from them as from a tap. Then she let the glass fall to the floor.
She watched the blood flow into the toilet bowl, and when it again turned red, she readied down once more and pressed on the lever. She watched her life swirl down into the sewers, watched the clean water bubble into the bowl, watched her blood mix into it once more.
The fifth time she reached for the lever, she was too weak to press it. Instead she sat, resting her weight on one hand, watching the red fluid rise in the bowl. And she thought she heard music, somewhere in the background. It sounded like the nuns chanting vespers, but she knew it was too early for that. Or was it? It seemed to be getting darker.
She slipped from the toilet to the floor, and gave herself up to the darkness. She thought she saw a tunnel. At its end Karen Morton was waiting for her, still in her confirmation dress, beckoning to her. And in the background, the chanting continued, sending Penny onward.
In the room next to Room 16—not a room, really, but an oversized storeroom that had been converted into a makeshift laboratory—Marilyn Crane was patiently working with the white rat. She had set up a particularly difficult maze, with two routes through it—one shorter, but complicated, the other much longer, but much simpler. She was trying to determine if the rat would discover both routes, explore them, and then choose one. So far, the results had been inconclusive. The rat had made his way through the maze several times, but he seemed to take just as long by either route, and so far hadn’t shown any preference for either.
Marilyn had made herself come to the laboratory that afternoon. Until two days ago she had enjoyed working with the rats. Now, every time she was with them, the image of the disemboweled creature loomed up in front of her, and she had to force herself to pick up the live animals. Gingerly, she reached down and picked up the wriggling creature.
I should have gone home, she thought. Why did I stay? But she knew why she’d stayed. It had been the essay for Monsignor Vernon that morning. What she’d written had frightened her, and she was afraid her fear showed. She didn’t want her mother to ask her what had happened that day, so she’d decided to stay after school until she calmed down. It hadn’t helped.
She was about to drop the rat back at the beginning of the maze when she felt it. Hot. Wet. Instantly she knew what had happened. Marilyn cried out in disgust and dropped the rat. It missed the maze entirely, hit the floor, and scuffled off into a corner, where it sat looking curiously at Marilyn. But Marilyn was staring at the yellow fluid that was running off her hand onto the floor.
The rat had—had peed on her!
Mortified, she ran out of the room and down the hall to the girls’ room.
She knew something was wrong as soon as she opened the door. Glass all over the floor. She decided to ignore it, and began to pick her way carefully around it to use the other wash basin.
Then she saw the blood. At first, she thought it was just a drop, but then she realized it was a puddle of blood, oozing slowly toward the drain in the middle of the floor.
Almost against her will, her eyes followed the blood toward its source. It was coming from a closed stall.
“Is someone here?” Marilyn said softly, knowing there would be no answer. The silence only increased her fear. She pushed at the door. It didn’t give.
She knelt down, carefully avoiding the glass and blood, and looked under the door.
Penny Anderson, her eyes open and vacant, stared back at her.
Marilyn felt the sickness rise.
Moving with a strange calm, she let herself into the end stall, bent down, and threw up into the toilet. Then, detached, wondering why she was behaving as she was, she waited for the sickness to subside, washed out her mouth, and left the girls’ room. She returned to Room 16, gathered her things, and left the school.
The fresh air hit her like a bucket of water, and she knew what had happened. Penny had killed herself. But why was she so calm? Why wasn’t she screaming? Why wasn’t she running, calling for help? Maybe Penny was still alive. Maybe if she did something, they could still save Penny.
&nb
sp; And then she realized that Penny wouldn’t want her to do that, that Penny would want her to stay calm, and walk down the hill. And leave her alone.
Marilyn started down the steps, and away from the school. Suddenly it all seemed to be closing in on her, and she felt the pressure building in her, the pressure she had been fighting against for so long—the pressure to do what should be done, instead of what she wanted to do. Now she was going to do what she wanted to do. She was going to listen to the voices.
She was not going to tell anybody what she had seen in the restroom.
She passed the rectory, glancing at it as she passed. Then she stopped and looked more closely. Smoke was coming out of the chimney. It struck her as strange, since the afternoon was still warm. The evening would be cold, but not yet.
Then she heard the chanting. At first she thought it must be coming from the convent. Then she knew it wasn’t. It was coming from the rectory.
And it was telling her the same things the voices inside her were telling her. She listened for a moment, then hurried down the hill.
24
Margo looked surreptitiously across the table at Peter, trying to see him with his guard down, trying to decide whether he looked strained, or whether it was her imagination. He was concentrating on his food, unaware of her scrutiny.
“I’m not going to stay tonight,” Margo said, breaking the silence that had reigned over the table since they had sat down for dinner. Peter looked up from his steak.
“Don’t ask me why,” she went on, anticipating the question. “I couldn’t tell you. I just have a feeling Pm going to be needed at the hospital tonight.”
“It’s the atmosphere around here lately,” Peter said, putting down his fork. “I’ve felt the same way all day, ever since I talked to Janet Connally.”
“Can you tell me what she said, or is it confidential?” Margo wanted to know. She had already heard about Peter’s visit with Janet from Dr. Shields, but she wanted to hear it again, first-hand, from Peter. If his story differed much from the one Dr. Shields had told her, it might help her make up her mind.