by Caryl Rivers
“Now just crawl across,” Sean said.
“Oh God!” Con breathed. Her whole face was bathed in sweat now. “I’m going to be sick!”
“Don’t look down,” I said. “Just crawl across, fast. Come on, Con. You’ve got to do it, or we’ll all go to jail!”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Con prayed.
“GO!” Sean ordered.
Con crawled out on the limb, and she got halfway across, and that’s when she made her mistake. She looked down. A wave of nausea engulfed her, and she closed her eyes and froze, smack in the middle of the limb, on her hands and knees.
“I can’t!” she wailed. “I can’t!”
“Come on, Con, you can do it,” I said. She just stayed there, frozen. Suddenly, the breeze stirred up again, and it lifted her skirt like the sail on a frigate, leaving her white cheeks, bisected by a ribbon of red nylon, exposed to nature and to Sean.
“Oh GOD!” she breathed, but she was too terrified to move, or even to grab her skirt.
`"Con, hurry up!” I yelled.
“Con, for God’s sake, you can’t just kneel up there bare-assed in a tree,” Sean said.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“Con, the whole sophomore gym class is right beyond those trees,” Sean called. “You got ten seconds, and then I’m bringing them all over to look at your tail.”
That did it. Con scrambled over and we grabbed her arms and hauled her in the window. Sean flashed the Churchill V for Victory sign and disappeared into the woods. Con collapsed, panting, into a chair.
“I’m mortified!” she said. “Oh God, I’m mortified!”
“I should have got a picture,” Mollie said.
“My God, there I was in that tree with my ass hanging out!” Con said.
“I’ll make Sean take a vow of silence,” I said. “He won’t tell.”
“I must have looked like a cow up there. A huge cowl”
“You did look pretty funny,” Mollie said.
“Nobody breathes a word of this. Not a word!”
“Our lips are sealed.”
“They’d better be,” Con said, with a glance at us that said she’d strangle us with piano wire if we opened our mouths.
The next morning, the whole school was called to a special assembly. Everybody knew something was up, because we didn’t even say the Pledge of Allegiance or sing “Mother Dear, Oh Pray For Me.” Sister Robert Mary walked up to the stage, her mouth set in a grim line, followed by Sister Justinian. Sister Robert Mary waved what was left of Con’s panties in the air.
“Some Catholic girl, some girl in this school, set the fire,” she said. “I cannot believe that any girl could be so sick as to want to do this horrible thing. I want the girl responsible to step forward right now.”
A pall of silence settled on the room. I looked at Con out of the corner of my eye. She was nonchalantly peeling the nail polish off her thumb. Her lip was firm; her hands did not tremble. We sat in silence for a while, and then Sister Justinian said, “We have asked the Holy Ghost to intervene in this matter. The Holy Ghost will lead us to the culprit. We will not let this matter rest until we have hunted her down like a dog!” Sister Justinian had a way with words.
Later that day we heard that girls were being called into the principal’s office, one by one. When it was my turn, Sister Robert Mary held up Con’s tattered pants and said, “Peggy, do you recognize these?”
“They’re not mine, Sister.”
“Have you seen any girl wearing panties like these?”
I peered at them. They were the standard white nylon panties, elastic at the waist and legs.
“Well, I guess half the kids in school wear pants like those.”
“Hmmm,” said Sister Robert Mary.
“Maybe,” I said, “it wasn’t any of the kids from here. Maybe it was kids from Hoover High.”
“That’s possible, of course.”
“Those public school kids, they drink and they smoke.” Suddenly, I had an inspiration. “Maybe it was an anti-Catholic act. There are a lot of people who hate Catholics at Hoover High.”
“Have you found that to be so?” the principal said.
“Oh yes, Sister. When I walk home from school, sometimes, wearing my uniform, the Protestant kids taunt me for being a Catholic.”
I was warming to my tale. I never knew what a good liar I could be. My pulse was steady, my palms only slightly moist.
“What did they say to you, dear?”
“Oh.” I hadn’t thought she was going to ask me that. Nobody really ever taunted me. Sometimes they’d make fun of my uniform—these girls in their cute little sweaters and skirts, they’d giggle and yell, “Hey, the Navy just hit port,” and I’d clench my jaw and walk right by them, while I prayed to God to send a plague of flies to eat their faces.
“Well,” I said, “they, uh . . .”
“I know this is difficult for you, dear, but you should tell me about these things when they happen.”
“Well, they said . . .” My mind was a total blank. It was the Holy Ghost punishing me for lying by burning out my brain cells. I pictured a miniature dove, inside my head, kicking the crap out of my neurons with its little clawed feet.
“They said, ‘Death to Catholics!’” I blurted out.
“They said that?”
“Oh yes. And they said the pope ate babies. They said there was an underwater tunnel from the Vatican and one day the pope and his army were going to invade America and murder all the Protestants.”
“I’m going to call the principal of Hoover High and we’ll put a stop to this, right away,” she said, firmly.
“Oh no, Sister, don’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s just a few kids. Most of them don’t taunt Catholics.”
“It just takes a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel, dear. Thank you very much, Peggy, for telling me about this. You’ve been a big help. You may go back to your class now.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
I walked out into the hall and leaned against the wall. My legs were shaking. Not only did I lie like a rug, but I may have started a civil war between Immaculate Heart and Hoover High. In two days, I had turned from a nice, polite Catholic girl into an arsonist, a warmonger, and a liar.
My head hurt. I figured the Holy Ghost was still in there, stomping around.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the Holy Ghost, “but I would have got my friends expelled. Their lives would be ruined.”
And I knew that if I had to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing only I’d have toned down my act with Sister Robert Mary. So my apologies to the Holy Ghost weren’t valid. I had no remorse. If it had been just me, I’d have confessed and taken my punishment. But it seemed that Con and Sean and Mollie meant more to me than the Holy Ghost, and that meant more than God, and if that wasn’t a sin, what was? It was wrong, but it felt right. It was very confusing.
I grabbed my purse and found a couple of Midol. I went over to the water fountain and gulped them down. I didn’t have much hope. They worked O.K. for cramps, but nowhere on the label did it say they were any good against the Third Person of the Holy Trinity of God.
The Modesty Crusaders
ON THE second Saturday in October, the phone rang and Sean’s voice said, “Peggy, would you come over? I think my father is going to do something really dumb.”
“So what else is new?” I said.
“You better come over.”
I caught the edge of panic in Sean’s voice, so I hightailed it out the back door and over to Sean’s house. In the driveway, I saw a blue-and-white van, and it said MARYLIKE in big white letters on the side, and underneath it, in smaller letters, were the words, FASHIONS THE BLESSED MOTHERS APPROVES.
Oh shit, I thought to myself’ and when I went in the back door Sean was waiting for me in the hall.
“Is that—” I said, and Sean
nodded, putting his finger to his lips.
“They’re actually here?” I said.
“A bunch of fruitcakes!” he whispered. “My father thinks it’s practically the Second Coming.”
I walked to the front foyer and peered into the living room. There they were, the famous Modesty Crusaders from New Jersey, led by Father Clement Kliblicki of Paramus. Sean’s father had been singing their praises ever since he saw an article about them in Time magazine.
“A true Catholic hero! A St. George taking arms against the dragon of immodesty!” he declared. He bored Sean and me to death; we didn’t think that modesty was such a big deal in a world that also contained the A-bomb.
“Did your father bring them here?” I asked Sean.
“I think so. I heard Pop talking to them on the phone last week, but who’d have thought they’d actually come?”
But here was Father Clement Kliblicki, in the flesh, sitting in Sean’s living room. He was a tall, pasty-faced man with skin the shade of milk and vivid eyes, a sort of intense Ichabod Crane. Only a year ago he had been an obscure pastor in Paramus, spending most of his time—when he wasn’t running beano games or saying Mass—worrying about tits. Which made the bond between Father Clement and Dr. McCaffrey obvious right away. But while Dr. McCaffrey’s specialty was celebrity tit, Father Clement was concerned with the garden variety of mammary glands—specifically, the sort possessed by your average high school kid. It was his thesis that American clothing manufacturers were doing the devil’s handiwork by making dresses that displayed too much pubescent flesh, exposing the innocent eyes of Catholic young men to acres and acres of female bosom. Such a sight, he reasoned, would turn even the most pious Holy Communicant into a lust-crazed satyr, itching to get hands that should have been folded in prayer down the front of some girl’s prom dress.
So Father Clement adopted the old Populist technique of direct action. He formed the Modesty Crusade, and sallied forth to do battle with Seventh Avenue. The Sodality League of New Jersey chipped in for the van and a supply of 500,000 labels, on which were stamped the words, THIS IS A MARYLIKE DRESS, APPROVED BY THE VIRGIN MARY.
Father Clement and his band swept like Mongol hordes into the retail stores of New Jersey, looking for dresses that could get the stamp of approval of the B.V.M. The idea was that Catholic parents would buy for their daughters only those frocks that carried the Marylike tag, avoiding the others like the wages of sin. Sales of immodest dresses would plummet, the giants of Seventh Avenue would be brought cowering to their knees, and Modesty would reign.
“Do you believe they have a van, a fucking van!” Sean whispered.
“Why not? The Apostles would have used one. They could have kept the loaves and fishes in the back with the spare.”
Sean groaned and motioned toward the living room. “Would you look at them? Pathetic. Pathetic!”
Sitting beside Father Clement on the couch was his aide-de-camp, Brother Jonas, a monk set free from some abbey. He had switched jobs, from stamping grapes to stamping out plunging necklines. He wore a brown robe, and his feet, in open sandals, were really grubby. Brother Jonas looked as if he had collected dirt from half the retail outlets in Jersey on his tootsies.
Then there were Mrs. Sullivan and her daughter, Deirdre. Mrs. Sullivan, a woman of about fifty-five, had the hard, flinty eye of an I.R.A. executioner, and Deirdre was a pale, washed-out blonde who sat quietly and said little, her eyes shifting about the room.
Completing the little band of modesty warriors was Mr. Hardy, who weighed 300 pounds if he weighed an ounce, and who laughed at everything anybody said, whether it was funny or not.
“If my father gets mixed up with these people, he’s really going to make an ass of himself,” Sean said.
“Sean, I hate to say it—”
“I know, but this is the worst. Really the pits. Peggy, that man is crazy. I mean really crazy. You should hear him.”
I walked into the living room and Dr. McCaffrey introduced me to the Crusaders. Father Clement shook my hand and stared at my chest, and Brother Jonas, who had taken a vow of silence, merely nodded.
Mrs. Sullivan and Deirdre both shook my hand, and Mr. Hardy laughed.
Then Father Clement took out sketches of his latest project, a new manufacturing firm that was to be called Marylike, Inc., and which would make the kind of fashions suitable for Catholic girls. Dr. McCaffrey examined the sketches and handed them to me. I looked them over. If the B.V.M. really liked this stuff, I thought, her taste was in her mouth—and she was usually quite chic, judging by her pictures. She always dressed in your basic white tunic, blue mantle, no glitzy accessories or heavy makeup. If she’d been around today, I thought, she’d go for Chanel or Mainbocher; she wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the outfits Father Clement dreamed up, which were, in a word, icky.
First of all, they looked as if they were designed for eleven-year-olds, with puffed sleeves and high necks and little mother-of-pearl buttons. No self-respecting high school kid in America would put one of those on her back. But as I watched Dr. McCaffrey listening to Father Clement, I knew right away what caused the panic in Sean’s voice. The Nemesis of Smut had a transcendent look about him, a joy born of the hope of a new crusade stirring in his breast. His eyes were ravenous, as if he were starved for every word that fell from the pallid lips of Father Clement. Dr. McCaffrey sometimes had that same look about him—an air of demented luminosity—when he stood in front of the congregation every year to lead the Legion of Decency pledge. But that was fairly harmless. Everybody was against dirty movies—even the people who were first in line when The Outlaw came to town. But Father Clement Kliblicki and his merry band were clearly of a different order. They were dedicated, totally committed to action, and arguably loony. They would stop at naught in their guerrilla action against the apex of the evils of modern society: the strapless prom dress.
Dr. McCaffrey turned to me and asked me what I thought of the sketches. That presented an obvious moral dilemma. If I told the truth ("The stuff is swill") Dr. McCaffrey would be rotten to Sean for at least a month. I thought that now was the time for “mental reservation"—which meant that you held back part of the truth for good and sufficient moral reasons. It was a good way to lie, but not sin, one of those neat Catholic tricks for getting around the rules. There were a lot of those, I discovered. So I said, “They’re very interesting,” but Dr. McCaffrey was so flushed with enthusiasm that he didn’t recognize a mental reservation when he heard one, and I was off the hook. Father Clement then began to outline the next phase of his campaign against immodesty, a bold and daring step.
“It is not enough simply to identify unMarylike dresses,” he said. “We must openly express our disapproval. Christ threw the money lenders out of the temple. We must follow his example!”
I saw Sean go pale. He was right, I thought; his father really was going to do something dumb. Dr. McCaffrey was still looking raptly at Father Clement.
Mrs. Sullivan’s eyes lighted up. She looked as if she’d just been ordered to firebomb the British Embassy. Deirdre just looked vacant. If it hadn’t been a time when drugs were used only by saxophone players and ghetto blacks, I’d have said Deirdre was off in some chemical fairyland all her own. She looked more stoned than any druggie I’ve ever seen.
“Direct action!” thundered Father Clement. “We must act against immodesty, against the immoral garments leading to sin and putrefaction!”
Father Clement was the only person 1 ever met who talked like the editorials in the Catholic Herald.
“Grind them into dust!” Mrs. Sullivan chortled.
Mr. Hardy laughed cheerfully.
“Uh, Father, what exactly do you have in mind?” Sean asked, nervously.
“An exorcism.”
“Exorcism?”
“To pray the devil of immodesty out of our presence, to command him to leave our fair community, to return to the fires and brimstone to hell, never to ret
urn to Crystal Springs!”
“Oh,” Sean said. “ You mean you’re going to do it here, in our house?”
“No,” Dr. McCaffrey said happily. “The Hecht Company.”
Sean went from pale to dead white. I knew at the moment he was wishing for the good fortune to have been born a Unitarian. The Hecht Company was the largest department store in Crystal Springs, the place where we all shopped.
“The Hecht Company? Don’t you think that’s sort of—public?” Sean said.
“Did Christ hide behind the safe walls of his dwelling in Nazareth? Did he not go into the streets, amid the teeming masses and the squalor of life?” roared Father Clement.
“That sounds like the Hecht Company,” I said. “Especially on Saturday.”
Sean flashed me a dirty look. He did not think this was funny at all.
“Uh, Pop, couldn’t you do it somewhere else?”
“The Hecht Company is perfect. Perfect. The money changers in the temple!”
I knew what that meant. The Hecht Company made a ton of money, and it was owned by Jews, which pissed off a lot of Catholics and Protestants. Dr. McCaffrey was one of those anti-Semites who never really said what he meant, but managed to get the point across.
“Well,” Dr. McCaffrey said, “shall we be off!” as if we were going for a Sunday drive and not to an exorcism of the devil.
“I wouldn’t miss it!” I said, and I grabbed Sean by the hand and dragged him out the door. He had turned from white to pale green. I thought he was going to throw up.
“This is all a dream, a bad dream!” he said. “In a minute I will wake up and all these crazy people will be gone.”
“I bet the Hecht Company never had an exorcism before, especially not in the Junior Miss department,” I said.
“Oh Peggy, he’s going to make such a fool of himself. In public!”