Iris sucked in a deep breath, then sighed. A long, loud sigh, that ended with a hmmpf.
“You sounded like Mom,” Lily remarked.
“What do you mean?”
“Just now, when you made that weird sound.”
She was right. It did sound like that sigh her mother made sometimes. Like a tea kettle just before it whistled, when all the steam built up inside.
“Go ahead, Iris. Start.”
“How do you want it to begin?”
“Like it always does in fairy stories. You know.”
“OK.” Iris took her storytelling seriously; she cleared the crumbs of laughter from her throat, paused a moment, then began.
“Once upon a time,” she said, her voice soft and low, as she set aside the considerations about present and future that had been worrying her, and tumbled freely back into the childhood that was quickly slipping into the past. She took hold of Lily’s hand, and held on tight as her imagination whisked them both away; out the open windows into the summer night they were carried, floating toward the world they alone shared. Iris was pretty sure she heard Lily sucking her thumb, but didn’t say anything. She figured it couldn’t hurt, just for tonight.
14. Lily
Even though all the children at Sacred Family wore the exact same uniform, you could still tell the rich kids from the poor ones. Mary McDonough’s father was a doctor, which was just about as rich as you could get. The pleats in Mary’s skirt were always razor sharp, and her dark green knee socks never slid down her shins. Hannah Cullen’s father worked at Kodak and they lived in Golden Oaks, which was all new houses with thick wall-to-wall shag carpeting and push-button telephones. Hannah wore a diamond pendant that her parents had given her for her First Holy Communion, and every day she came into school with her hair all done up fancy with shiny clips or ribbons, just like in the Professional Hair Salon magazines in the waiting room at Uncle Alfred’s guitar studio.
Like Lily, the girls from the poorer families wore standard issue forest green jumpers that had been shortened and lengthened many times as they were passed on from sister to sister. Since Father Delaney might burst onto the scene at any moment and conduct an inspection, lowering a hem was one of the first domestic tasks mastered by the poor girls at Sacred Family. They passed this skill along to one another the way a family might pass a secret recipe down from one generation to the next. When Iris taught Lily how to lower her hem, she was doing more than teaching a little sister how to sew. She was providing her protection from the humiliation of being chastised in front of the entire class for having her jumper too short.
One day a few months after Lily had arrived at Sacred Family, Father Delaney popped in to speak to the class, and to look for such infractions as short skirts on the girls, and boys’ hairlines touching shirt collars.
“Miss Capotosti,” he announced. “Get up here and let me look at that skirt of yours.”
Lily surveyed the faces of her classmates as she tentatively rose from her seat, leaving her pencil unattended rather than placing it in the pencil reservoir that was molded into the desktop. Lily’s gaze met first with Mary McDonough’s, who looked down at Lily’s hemline and back up to her face and, finding nothing of interest to hold her attention, casually turned back to her doodling. Lily’s eyes locked with those of Maureen Bevilacqua - who, like Lily, was named after an Irish grandmother, but because of her surname would be forever branded as a half-breed Irishman, her heritage contaminated with Italian blood, which was the same as not being Irish at all. Maureen wasn’t a carrot top like Elizabeth Kelly; her hair was a deep, dark red and she had bright blue eyes, but it didn’t help one bit. She looked from Lily to Father Delaney, back to Lily, and then quickly returned to her schoolwork without making a show of sympathy. The poor Italian children couldn’t afford to stick up for each other; they each had enough trouble of their own.
Father Delaney stood at the front of the room, staring, with his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were hidden behind lenses that reflected the fluorescent panels in the ceiling, making it look as though the light was coming straight out of his eyes like the very judgment of God, beaming condemnation directly onto Lily’s thighs. The room was completely silent except for the tick-tock of the wall clock and the rolling of Lily’s runaway pencil along the surface of the desk, followed by the sounds of it hitting her chair, and then landing on the floor - right at William Nolan’s feet. Lily crouched down to retrieve it and just as she touched the pencil with her fingertips, William nudged it, sending it further out of reach. He offered Lily his trademark smirk, a troublemaker’s pleasure at watching someone else walk into the fire. Lily lowered herself further, stretching and twisting her body to reach the pencil.
“Miss Capo-tosti!”
A shock of fear zipped through Lily’s body and she bolted up, hitting her head on the underside of the desk, producing the definitive clang of skull against metal, and provoking a round of laughter. Lily quickly slapped the pencil into its holding place on the desk, and as she turned to walk to the front of the room she heard it as it again rolled off and onto the floor. Rubbing her head and straightening her jumper, she approached her accuser.
“I can see what you’re doing there,” said Father Delaney, impatiently gesturing for Lily to come forward more quickly. “Shimmying your skirt down to make the hemline appear lower. You Capotostis are all the same.”
Lily’s face grew hot, and her heart quickened with her gait. She finally stood facing Father Delaney, who took her by the shoulders and spun her around so that she faced her classmates. He then extracted a small ruler from his breast pocket and lowered his body into a crouch. He placed the ruler against Lily’s skin, and moving his hand from the front, to the side, and around to the back, tugged at her hem, measuring. The feel of his warm breath and his ruler against her skin made Lily flinch, despite her determination to remain still. She became momentarily distracted from her predicament, intrigued at this opportunity to see Father Delaney’s bald head close up, and from above. Tiny beads of sweat were bursting onto his shiny skin, which was stretched over the bumps and creases of his calvarium, as Auntie Rosa would call it. (Lily liked knowing the words that doctors and nurses used for parts of the body, with ischial tuberosities being her very favorite for sounding impressive, and coccyx number one for making someone laugh, although she couldn’t understand what was so funny about that.) When Lily leaned in slightly to get a better look, her long silky hair fell forward, brushing against Father Delaney’s cheek. He inhaled sharply and dropped his ruler. Rising to stand, he extracted a white cotton handkerchief from his pants pocket and dabbed at his brow.
“This is at least half an inch too short. The next time I see you, I expect it to be corrected.” He waved Lily away. “Sit down.”
The problem with the one-inch rule was that you could go home and rip out your hem, lower it, re-hem it, and then in a few months, the skirt would be too short again. Lily meant to keep track of it, to maybe borrow the tape measure from her mother’s sewing kit and check every once in awhile. But the length of her hem was something she only really thought about when Father Delaney came by, and by then it was too late.
“Boys and girls,” Father addressed the class. “Today I want to talk to you about something called accountability.” Lily was excited to be part of a discussion about such a big and impressive word. She could not wait to find out what it meant, so that she could look for an opportunity to use it at the supper table, or perhaps on her next essay assignment.
“Accountability means being responsible for the things that you say and do. Now, the little kindergarten babies we see in the hallway are accountable for very little, because they don’t know any better. But all of you here have already made your First Holy Communion, and so you have reached what we call the age of accountability - you must pay the consequences of your actions.”
Father Delaney picked up a stick of white chalk from the aluminum tray. He held his long arms up in front
of him, bent at the elbows and at the wrists, like the praying mantis Lily had found in the garden that summer. Even though it was said to be praying, the odd creature with its waving antennae and spindly appendages was made more repulsive to Lily after Louis told her that the females bit the heads off of the males after mating, in order to keep the males from eating the praying mantis babies. While Lily fully supported a praying mantis mother protecting her young, she felt that there surely must be a better way. Such an ugly and violent existence made her cringe, and filled her with dread.
Father Delaney turned toward the green chalkboard. “We have two kinds of sins, and when you commit these acts, you are held accountable by God. First, we have your mortal sins.” He wrote in large block letters on the board. “M-O-R-T-A-L. Mortal.” He underlined the word.
“Next, we have your venial sins. V-E-N-I-A-L.” He set the chalk back into the tray and brushed the palms of his hands back and forth against each other, sending a cloud of chalk dust into the air. Turning toward the class, he continued. “Now, a mortal sin is quite serious. These are willful acts against God, such as murdering someone or engaging in homosexual behavior. A mortal sin destroys the grace of God in your heart and cuts you off from His Love. So to put it in layman’s terms, if you have a mortal sin on your soul, God can’t even stand the sight of you. If you die with an unconfessed mortal sin, you cannot join our Lord and Savior in Heaven.”
A wave of panic rushed through Lily’s body. She knew she had never murdered anyone, but perhaps she was engaging in homosexual behavior. Terrified at the thought of dying with a mortal sin on her soul, she shot her hand up into the air.
“Do you have a question, Miss Capotosti?”
“Yes, Father.”
Lily stood up next to her desk, as was the requirement when addressing an adult in class. “What’s homosexual behavior?”
Father Delaney removed his black framed glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Eyes squeezed tightly shut, he paced back and forth across the front of the room. “Homosexual behavior is when two men engage in acts that men are supposed to engage in with women, or when two women do things together that they are only supposed to do with men.” He replaced his glasses. “In other words, there are some things that are good and right when a man and a woman do them together, but that cause damnation and eternal suffering if two men or two women do them together.”
Absentmindedly sliding her body back into her chair, Lily could only think of a few things that her parents did together: They had coffee after dinner every night, and then they took turns reading the Times-Union in the living room. But sometimes Auntie Rosa and Lily’s mother had coffee together, too, so that couldn’t be right because Auntie Rosa would never commit a mortal sin. She probably didn’t have any sins at all, just like Our Blessed Virgin Mother.
“Now venial sins are bad, but they are minor in comparison to mortal sins. They include acts such as disobeying your parents, lying to Sister Mary Ellen here about why your homework isn’t done, and of course touching yourself with lust.”
Lily looked around the room to see if any hands were going up, but all she saw were the blank stares and confused faces of her classmates. Again, she shot her hand into the air.
With a sigh, Father Delaney said, “Yes, Miss Capotosti? No doubt you have another question.”
“Yes, Father,” said Lily, standing. “What’s lust?”
“Lust is wanton pleasure. Touching yourself with lust is touching yourself with wanton pleasure. You may sit down.”
Unsatisfied and confused, Lily obeyed. Yet she still needed to know whether she was touching herself with wanting pleasure, so she could be sure to stop right away. Only her fear of further angering Father Delaney kept her from raising her hand yet again. Her mother sometimes said she was an “instigator” and she did not want to instigate Father Delaney - surely making him angry would be at least a venial sin. It might even be a mortal one, seeing how he was so close to God.
An entire school year had passed since then, and the subject of touching oneself with wanting pleasure never came up again in any of Father Delaney’s talks. Lily decided to just be careful, and whenever she had to touch herself - as in drying off from a bath or putting her socks on in the morning - she made sure it didn’t feel too good - and if it did, she would distract herself by pulling a hair out of her head or by thinking of the suffering of starving children in Biafra, or of all the lost souls in Purgatory and Limbo.
On her first day in the fourth grade, Lily felt excited about finally making the passage from the primary grades, and thrilled to be wearing her new school shoes. She had placed them on the dresser the night before and she could barely sleep, thinking of how wonderful it would feel to slip them on her feet for the very first time. Of all the shoes at the Buster Brown store, they were her favorites – even including the shoes that weren’t on the clearance rack. They were slip-ons, but not penny loafers like most of Lily’s classmates wore. Mary Hannah and some of the other rich kids wore penny loafers, but they put dimes in the slots where the pennies were supposed to go. What a waste of twenty cents. That was equal to a Three Musketeers bar, a Sugar Mama, and a handful of penny candies. If Lily had an extra twenty cents just laying around, she sure wouldn’t waste it by wearing it in her shoes.
The best part about Lily’s new shoes was that they had a little flap of fringe that laid across the toe like a tiny leather fan, and no one else in the whole class had a pair just exactly like them. At the same time, however, she felt sad because she knew that in a month or two, they would be scuffed and dull, and she would have to wait until school started next year before she would have another new pair. It seemed inevitable; she knew that soon she would be sitting there, looking down at a pair of worn out, lackluster shoes. She vowed to herself to treat these shoes carefully. She wouldn’t wear them for play, she would gently place them under the bed at the end of each day instead of hurriedly kicking them off, and she would never ever wear them outside in the rain or snow. She just had to take care of them this year. They were so pretty. She could sit there and look at them all day.
She didn’t hear her name the first time, or even the second time.
“Lily Capotosti,” Sister Elaine repeated loudly. Whenever any of the nuns or priests at Sacred Family said her last name, they did so as though they were spitting it out, like Grandma Capotosti did with the pasta whenever it was overcooked.
Lily looked up from her shoes to see Sister Elaine glaring at her from the front of the room, rapidly tapping the eraser end of a yellow number two pencil on her desk.
“Here!” blurted Lily.
A spattering of laughter erupted among Lily’s classmates.
“Miss Capotosti,” said Sister Elaine. “We took roll call an hour ago. At this time, I would like you to stand up and read us your summer essay assignment on what you did during your break from school. That is, if you’re not too busy staring at the floor.”
Lily stood up and opened her black and white composition book to page one, where she had penned her first and usually most dreaded assignment of the year. Her family never took vacation, and it embarrassed her to talk about their Fourth of July family reunion and their annual summer excursion to the drive-in movies, when the other children had stories about vacations to Disneyland, Yellowstone Park, and camping in the Adirondack Mountains. But this year, Lily was sure she had something special to share, and she was almost as excited about reading her essay as she was about her new shoes. She was certain that no one else in her class had such a story to tell; it would surely set her apart.
“What I did on my summer vacation,” Lily began. “It all started when my whole family came over for my Grandma’s birthday on the Fourth of July. I used to think it would be just awful to have your birthday on the Fourth of July, but every year my Grandma gets sparklers on her cake instead of candles, which I think would be really fun.
“Everyone comes for Grandma Ca
potosti’s birthday – my cousins Bill and Nancy, Ed and Gloria, and of course Auntie Rosa and Uncle Alfred. Aunt Selma and Uncle B. come, too. I don’t really like Uncle B. because he smells like Genesee Cream Ale and he always makes me sit on his lap and if I try to get up he tells me, ‘Where are you going, Miss Lily of the Valley? What’s your rush?’”
Sister Elaine cleared her throat. Lily looked over to see her scribbling on a pad of paper. Lily looked up at her classmates before continuing. Neil Schickler was picking his nose, and Mary Dunne passed Margaret Callahan a note.
“Out of a clear blue sky,” Lily continued dramatically, borrowing one of Auntie Rosa’s signature phrases, “my cousin Nancy said to my mother, ‘Betty, we would love to have the girls come and stay with us for a couple weeks.’” Lily addressed her classmates. “’The girls’ – that’s my sister Iris and I – ‘They would have a blast!’ said Nancy.”
Lily didn’t exactly lie about Uncle B. in her essay, but she didn’t exactly tell the whole truth, either. Uncle B. (his given name was Bartolomeo, but since everyone had such a hard time pronouncing it, they just called him “B”) had a big round belly and most of his teeth were missing so that when he talked, tiny fountains of saliva shot up out of his mouth, and if you were sitting on his lap while he was engaged in a conversation, then you just had to hope and pray that you wouldn’t get nailed. Shielding your face with your hand or wiping spittle off your cheeks was not acceptable, and would be met with The Look - a form of non-verbal communication adults used to discreetly let the children know that they were behaving badly. Anyone could give you The Look, but it was most fearsome coming from Lily’s father. His nostrils would flare and he would get the Crazy Eyes, probably due to the fact that he wanted to yell, but wasn’t able to, on account of that The Look was used mostly out in public where things like nose-picking, expelling flatus, and yelling at children were unacceptable. So while The Look itself could be quite intimidating, if you were feeling lucky or brave, you could actually pretend you didn’t notice it at all, as it was just too hard to prove that you did.
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 22