“Thank you very much, Mr. Davenport. I appreciate the call. We certainly will have a talk with her.” Lily’s mother shook the Principal’s hand, which she then extended toward Lily. “Come along, Lily,” she said curtly. “You’re being sent home for the day.”
It was all Lily could do to contain her excitement, until she realized that “we certainly will have a talk with her” meant that Lily’s mother might be planning to tell her father. Suddenly, the whole water fountain plan seemed like a really bad idea, even if it was doing God’s work.
“So,” said Lily’s mother as they drove home. “What in the world is this all about, anyway?”
“Nothing,” said Lily, cranking the window open. She had never had to explain it to anyone before. It was a secret between her and Jesus.
“Lily Elizabeth,” said her mother. “You know that splashing other children isn’t allowed, don’t you?
“Yes.”
“But you’re doing it anyway. You must have a reason. I’m just asking you what the reason is.”
“Well,” said Lily. She looked over at her mother, who momentarily took her eyes from the road. Lily could see that she was genuinely curious, and since she used to be a Protestant, maybe she would understand. “The reason is… limbo.” Lily looked up at her mother, searching for signs of understanding on her face.
“Limbo?” her mother asked.
“Yeah, Limbo.“
“I’m lost, Lily. What does any of this have to do with Limbo?”
“In catechism class Sister Jerome says that children who die before they get baptized Catholic don’t get to go to Heaven – even if they don’t do anything wrong. They go to Limbo instead. She says it’s not good there and it’s not bad there, but it’s not Heaven and they don’t have any angels or Jesus in Limbo. Are you going to tell Daddy?”
“Tell him what? Lily, I still don’t understand. Why did you splash Claudia Johnson in the face? Honestly, her mother is in my sewing circle, and I’m sure I’ll have to hear all about it on Thursday.”
“I’m sorry,” said Lily. “But I had to do it - Claudia is a public - they’re all publics, Mommy,” Lily tried to erase the image of Claudia Johnson and Charlot Heinz and Ruthie Goldman banished to the desolation of Limbo for all eternity, with no flying horses, or cotton candy clouds, or rainbow to slide down, or any of the other treats Heaven was sure to hold. “None of the children in my class go to Sacred Family. And Sister Jerome says that if you are with a baby who is about to die and you don’t know if he has been baptized, then you should do it – even if you’re not a priest – and that will help the baby get into Heaven instead of Limbo. You just have to pour water on their head and say ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’ I figured if it works for babies, it works for third-graders, too.”
“Are you telling me that you’ve been secretly baptizing your classmates by splashing them with water from the fountain?” Lily’s mother squelched a smile, and then cleared her throat.
“I had to do it, Mommy,” Lily began to cry. “They don’t even know they’re going to Limbo, and their mothers and fathers don’t know any better and it’s just not fair. They didn’t do anything wrong at all and they should all get to go to Heaven.”
“Calm down, now. Calm down. No need to get all worked up about it.”
Really? Lily thought. All those children all alone in Limbo – and I shouldn’t be worried? “Are you going to tell Daddy?”
“We’ll see” she replied. Lily knew that “we’ll see” was her mother’s way of being noncommittal. Any time she didn’t know or didn’t have time to make a decision, she just said “we’ll see” which meant to drop the matter entirely, and that pushing her for an answer was quite likely to produce the one you didn’t want to hear.
The evening couldn’t pass quickly enough for Lily. The agony of not knowing whether her mother was going to tell her father, and the fear of what he would do if he found out that she was called to the Principal's office tied her stomach up in knots, so much that she was barely able to finish her Sloppy Joe at dinner. All she could think about was getting yelled at, or getting The Belt, and she hoped that Jesus or the Holy Ghost would come in time, like in the Bible when Issac was on the altar and Abraham was about to kill him. The Holy Ghost did come just in time, but as far as Lily was concerned, he cut it way too close, and she worried that he might not make it in time to save her. It scared her that God would take such a chance, but when she told Sister Jerome that she didn’t think it was right for God to wait until the last minute that way, she said it wasn’t our place to judge God and then informed Lily that she had broken the first commandment to “Love the Lord thy God with all thy Heart, all thy Mind, and all thy Soul.” So if you have to obey even though obeying might get you in trouble, and if you’re supposed to call upon God when you are in need but you can’t rely upon him to show up on time and if you can’t even complain about that without committing a sin, Lily wondered how people were ever supposed to manage.
After dinner, she sat in front of the television with Iris, Charles, and Ricci, pretending to watch I Dream of Jeannie. It was one of her favorite TV shows, but she couldn’t stay focused on it tonight. She kept one watchful eye on the kitchen, where her mother was wiping the table down with one of the tattered and faded kitchen washcloths (which always felt slightly slimy and smelled slightly moldy, leaving their stink upon your hands long after the dishes were done), while her father was having his after dinner coffee and cigarette. The kitchen light went out, and Lily heard the scraping of the wooden benches against the linoleum floor as they were being pushed back into their places at the table. Her father emerged from the kitchen and passed through the living room, followed by her mother. They both went into their bedroom and closed the door. If she was going to tell him, it was going to be now.
Lily slowly got up from the couch, without giving any thought to losing her spot or asking anyone to save it for her, even though it was a very big deal to have a good seat for watching TV. Most of the time, there were several children watching, and only a couple of places to sit besides the floor. If you got hungry, or had to go to the bathroom, and you had a good seat, it was sure to be gone when you returned to it - unless you could get someone to save it for you. There was an unspoken code about saving seats. If you agreed to do it, it was law. No one else could come along and claim that place if it was being saved, especially if it was being saved in exchange for a favor. And it always was. If you got up and left someone else in charge of saving your seat, you would have to bring him back an orange, or a slice of toast with butter. But tonight, Lily didn’t care about much except for what was going on in her parent’s bedroom.
The sun room was separated from the living room by a set of French doors, a fact that Lily loved to share whenever a new friend came to visit for the first time. It added an air of sophistication to the old farmhouse, which almost made up for the fact that there was a chicken coop in the backyard. “This is the sun room,” Lily would announce, “and these are French doors.”
The sun room faced south toward the street and had windows all across the front and along the eastern wall. It was the room that was home to all the things that didn’t or couldn’t fit or didn’t belong elsewhere in the house: a writing desk, Jasmine’s record player, and often, Lily. She felt most at home among the Capotosti odds and ends. Her mother had placed a collection of classical music there in the seductive sunshine. Lily learned her Roman numerals as she filed them volume-by-issue, in the old wooden record cabinet, listening to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven while warming herself on wintry Sunday afternoons.
The sun room also shared a wall with Lily’s parent’s bedroom. She gently pulled the French doors closed and crouched down, pressing her ear against the adjacent wall, hoping to hear the conversation that would reveal her fate.
“… so I said ‘Limbo?’ and she said, ‘Yes, they’re all publics Mommy,’ and then she went on to tell me how wor
ried she was about them being sent to Limbo. Carlo – she was baptizing them.”
“Baptizing them?”
“Yes – she would wait until they were at the drinking fountain, and then she would get her fingers wet, and splash one of the other children while saying some blessing they taught her in catechism class, because she wants to make sure they get into Heaven.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me…” said Lily’s father.
As Lily’s mother told her father all about the talk she’d had with Mr. Davenport and the conversation Lily and her mother had on the way home, Lily kept trying to imagine her punishment, hoping that her father would come and get her now and just get it over with. Thinking about getting The Belt was almost as bad as actually getting it, and it seemed like Lily had already been thinking about it all day.
“Baptizing them?” repeated Lily’s father. “In the drinking fountain at school?”
“Yes – well, sort of, I guess,” said Lily’s mother. “Except none of them actually knew they were being baptized.”
The room fell silent, and Lily imagined her father walking over to the highboy and retrieving The Belt, and then opening the bedroom door and calling her name. His footfall would shake the room and the wail of The Belt would sting Lily’s behind as she fought off brave tears, knowing in her heart that she was suffering for Our Lord and Savior. Instead, both of her parents burst into laughter. They laughed for what seemed like hours, and Lily went from feeling confused about what was so funny, to feeling relieved, to experiencing indignity that neither one of them realized the importance of what she was doing: she was saving souls.
“Shhhh …” Lily’s mother said. “Seriously, Carlo – what should we do about it? She’s obviously acting on a personal conviction – and she’s got one school telling her to do one thing and the other one punishing her for it.”
“Just let it go,” Carlo said. “The year is almost over, she’ll be in Sacred Family next year full-time, and then she won’t have to worry about the eternal destiny of her classmates anymore. I’ll talk to her just to reinforce the Principal's efforts, but the less we do at this point, the better. We certainly can’t punish her for saving her friends from Limbo, can we? By the way, how many children did she baptize?”
“I don’t know,” said Lily’s mother. “At least two or three, I suppose. By the end of the year, she’ll be personally responsible for populating the Protestant section of Heaven. Claudia’s mother is going to just die when I tell her not to worry - her daughter’s soul has been saved, thanks to Saint Lily.” Her parents laughed as they opened the bedroom door.
Lily quickly and quietly slipped out of the sun room and found a place on the floor in the living room. She acted as though she was engrossed in the show, sitting with her arms folded across her body - the way Jeannie did when she was about to blink Major Healey to the Antarctic - and refused to acknowledge her parents’ glances as they passed back through the living room. The only thing worse than getting The Belt for doing the Lord’s work was getting laughed at. Except at least with The Belt, you knew when it was over, and you could be pretty sure that when Thursday rolled around, the ladies wouldn’t be sitting in a circle, laughing at you when they should just be quiet and do their sewing.
13. Iris
It seemed curious to Iris that she never remembered anything good about winter. Maybe it was because except for Christmas, which both excited and disappointed her, winter offered nothing to look forward to and nothing worth remembering. Not unless for some unfathomable reason she wished to dwell on how she would rather die than crawl out of her warm bed on those cold, dark mornings, or how she could hardly move by the time she waddled from the house bundled up in coat and scarf and hat and mittens and boots, or how raw her face and chapped her lips felt after a pummeling by the biting wind and stinging snow, or how stiff and numb her toes and fingers became, she feared they might snap right off like the icicles she and Lily sometimes broke from the roof of the chicken coop to suck on when they got thirsty playing outdoors and were sick of eating snow.
Summer thoughts were another story altogether; they were worth hanging onto, like a sweet dream. Summer was sitting cross-legged in the grass with Lily, feeling the tall, cool blades tickle her feet and stick to the skin of her bare legs, while singing songs and stringing necklaces of clover, and shooing off the bumble bees that buzzed possessively over the flowers.
Summer was not really minding the splinters when she straddled the split wood fence to hop on Jasmine’s pony, Jiffy, as he grazed placidly with swishing tail and twitching ears in the shade of the cherry tree, then prodding him with calloused heels and thrusts of the pelvis to take her for a walk, but being content to just sit astride him, even if he refused to budge. It was wrapping her thighs around Jiffy’s back and feeling their sweat mingle, and resting her chest on his neck, and burying her face in the coarse hairs of his mane, inhaling his horsey scent as he chomped on the sweet summer grass.
Summer was blue dragonflies flitting past her as she sat on the bank of the duck pond, the dampness seeping through her shorts, her back resting against the trunk of her favorite willow tree, ensconced in a wispy cupola of feathery fronds. Some days, when it was too hot to stay outside, summer was hiding out with Lily to play house in the cool, dark basement, where she saw boyfriends to flirt with and husbands to marry lined up in place of the steel poles that stood tall and strong, stoically holding up the house, even when she pressed her puckered lips against them to practice kissing, until their impassivity drove her mad with frustration. It was unfurling musty curtains from a steamer trunk and seeing a wedding gown so lovely it made her clap her hands with joy; it was fluffing up an old pillow, and welcoming it into her arms as a newborn baby to cradle to her breast.
Summer was hurdling over the lawn sprinkler to cool off, yelping as the cold spray shocked her body in unexpected places, rather than waiting for invitations that didn’t come from neighborhood kids with pools. It was the bell of the ice cream truck jangling as it rounded the corner, and dashing off in search of leftover allowance nickels to pacify the parched tongue screaming for the icy sweetness of a cherry Popsicle.
Summer was stripping the husks and picking the silk from mountains of freshly picked corn piled on the kitchen table, and jamming her teeth as she typewritered them across the rows of sweet, buttery kernels until her tummy felt like it would burst. Corn on the cob was her very favorite dinner, and always made Iris happy, but on one particular summer evening, her spirits hovered close to the ground, pestered by the mosquitoes that feasted on her ankles as she sat under the apple tree, feet dangling from the glider, and watched the light being sucked from the sky. It disturbed her to think that only a few months earlier, it had seemed she would be trudging through the slushy snow to Sacred Family forever and then, before she knew it, school was over and there she was, flying home to free her sweaty feet of their penniless penny loafers and darned to death knee socks.
Iris knew that it was precisely then, when she had kicked off those loafers, tossed her socks in the garbage bin, and stood barefoot on the cusp of an endless summer, that she had lived the season’s most sublime moment. Not that summer was over yet; there was another whole month of vacation ahead of her. Yet she couldn’t stop thinking about how perfect that moment had been, as delicious and tender as the kernels as they tumbled from cob to tongue, and how the memory of the summer’s first half was already fading, like the sweetness from her tastebuds, even as the corn sat in her bloated belly. Iris was conscious of each minute slipping by and receding into the past, its memory lasting no longer than the echo of its tick on the clock. She wondered what she would reminisce about when she was old, as she often heard the adults do, if each season of her life were to pass in an unremarkable blur of nothingness. She thought of Grandma Capotosti, and one of those ladies with thick ankles who wore hairnets over their buns and carried rosary beads in their pockets, the one Grandma called Comare Giuseppina. Comare was born up in that
Scurcola place, just like Grandma, and when she visited, the two of them spent hours swapping stories about things that had happened forty or even fifty years ago as if it were yesterday. Iris had witnessed so many of their emotionally charged conversations spoken in a hodgepodge of what little they had learned of English and retained of Italian that she could predict when they would cross themselves, or roll their eyes to heaven, or suddenly start wailing, right there in the middle of coffee and cookies. You would probably never run out of things to talk about if you did stuff like elope to another country, or cross the Atlantic in a steamer ship, or survive two world wars, a Depression, a death of a daughter, a string of illnesses. Iris wondered, when the day would come for her to glance over her own bent, arthritic shoulder, whether the portrait of her past would be etched in such dramatic strokes, or instead appear as an insignificant smudge on a vast blank canvas.
Such thoughts made her sigh as she lounged on the glider, digging her bare heels into the grass to make it swing back and forth in the muggy air. Not a leaf stirred on the low, laden branches of the apple tree which were appreciated for the shade they provided by day, but were constantly cursed for their nasty habit of dropping defective fruit on whomever sat beneath them.
“Gosh darn apples,” her father muttered from his lawn chair, as one bounced off his shoulder and landed at his feet with a dull thud, distracting him from his pleasurable pastime of blowing smoke rings and sipping coffee. Each year, her father threatened to spray the trees, and each year her mother convinced him not to, saying the kids liked to eat fruit straight from the branches when they played outdoors, and she did not want them munching on chemicals. The apples weren’t so bad, if you liked them tart, and didn’t mind spitting out the bad parts. And looking ugly didn’t stop them from tasting delicious when they ended up in her mother’s homemade pies and crisps.
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 20