Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  “Ohhh, I feel awful,” he said. “Going to barf.”

  I pushed him towards the toilet and he collapsed over it and began to vomit, his whole body heaving as everything in his stomach came up. He kept vomiting until nothing more came up, and then he got the dry heaves, his whole body shaking.

  “Ohhhhh, dying,” he moaned.

  I wiped his face with a wet towel.

  “Want to die!”

  “Poor baby,” I said, wiping his face again.

  “Come on,” Con said, “let’s get the Kissing Priest back to the bedroom.”

  We helped Sean back to my bedroom and I said to Con, “He shouldn’t have those wet underpants on, he could get chilled,” and she said, “O.K., get him a pair of yours.”

  I went to my drawer and pulled out my last clean pair of panties, blue nylon ones with yellow daisies on them. We wrapped a towel around Sean’s waist and I said, “Sean, take your shorts off.”

  “Want to die. Now,” he said. I reached up under the towel, and managed to drag the wet underpants down his legs. Sean stepped out of them. Then Con held the daisy panties down by Sean’s feet.

  “Step!” she commanded. He obeyed her.

  “Other foot.” He put his other foot in the leg of the panties.

  “Pull them up, Sean,” I said.

  “Up,” he repeated. He just stood there.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake!” I said, and I bent over, and with a lot of pulling and hauling, I got the panties up, under the towel.

  “Now what?” Con said.

  “He can’t stay here. We’ve got to get him home.”

  “And just how do we do that?”

  “His bedroom is on the first floor in the back. The window’s never locked.”

  “O.K., let’s do it.”

  We wrapped Sean in a blanket and I put an old pair of slippers, pink fuzzy ones, on his feet and we propelled him down the back hall to the door.

  “Where we goin?” he slurred.

  “Home. Be quiet, Sean.”

  “Dying.”

  We walked him through the backyard to the back of his house, looking like a scene from The Ransom of Red Chief and I quietly lifted the window to his bedroom as far as it would go. Sean’s bed was right by the window; we shoved his torso through the frame until his head and shoulders were resting on the bed, but his feet were still on the ground.

  “Sean, crawl through!” I ordered. “Come on!”

  “Drunk,” he said. He closed his eyes. He didn’t move.

  “We can’t leave him like this!” Con said.

  “We’ll have to drag him through. Come on.”

  Con and I crawled over Sean, into the room; we dragged Sean’s legs through the window and turned him around on the bed so that he was lying in it the right way.

  “Ooohhhhhh!” he moaned.

  “Sean, shut up!”

  “Oohhhhh! Don’t feel good!”

  Just then we heard a noise in the hail outside the bedroom. “Sean? Sean, is that you? It was Dr. McCaffrey’s voice. His footsteps moved toward the door to the room. Con and I took one look at each other, and we were both thinking exactly the same thing. We made a dive for under the bed and smacked our heads together as we did. Con just managed to drag her foot under the bed as the door opened and the light snapped on.

  “Sean? Sean, what on earth—Mary, Mary, come quick!”

  “Ohhhhh!” Sean moaned.

  “Sean, are you ill?” his father asked. Sean had wrapped both hands around his pillow and shoved his face into it.

  Sean’s mother’s footsteps moved into the room.

  “What is it, Liam? Is Sean ill?”

  We saw Dr. McCaffrey’s feet move close to the bed. We heard him sniffing the air, as well.

  “Young man, what’s the meaning of this!”

  “Dying,” Sean said.

  “Look at him. Look at him!” Dr. McCaffrey said to his wife. “Mary, he’s as drunk as a lord!”

  “Oh, Sean. My baby!”

  “What is he wearing? What is that he’s wearing?”

  Now we could see Sean’s mother’s tiny feet as she too moved close to the bed.

  “Panties,” she said. “He’s wearing girls’ panties.”

  “Oh my God!” said Dr. McCaffrey.

  Sean, darling, why are you wearing girls’ panties? And slippers? Look, Liam, girls’ slippers.”

  “He smells like a brewery and he’s wearing panties! Young man, where the hell have you been? Answer me!”

  “Doan feel good,” Sean moaned.

  “Dear, I don’t think he’s in any condition to discuss this right now.”

  “My boy,” Dr. McCaffrey said plaintively. “My little boy, what’s happened to you?”

  “Sean, dear, I’m putting your covers on,” his mother said.

  “He was such a good child,” Dr. McCaffrey said. “So quiet. So polite. And now he’s dead drunk and he’s wearing panties!”

  “They grow up so fast,” Sean’s mother said.

  “That Morrison kid,” Dr. McCaffrey growled. “I bet she has something to do with this.”

  Con jabbed me in the ribs. Meantime, I was struggling to ward off a sneeze—the dust under Sean’s bed was getting in my nose and I wanted to sneeze more than anything in the world. I practically strangled myself holding it in.

  “I’m going right over to that house and I’m going to get to the bottom of this!” Dr. McCaffrey announced, and he stormed out of the room.

  “Goodnight, dear, sleep tight,” Sean’s mother said as she left the room and closed the door.

  Con and I dragged ourselves out from under Sean’s bed. Sean moaned again.

  “The kissing priest is going to have one hell of a hangover,” Con said, looking at him.

  “Jeez, Con, let’s go. He’s halfway to my house by now!”

  We both scrambled back out the window and ran as fast as we’d ever run in our lives back to my house. We got inside, dashed into my room, turned on the record player and tried to steady our breathing down. There was a rap on my door, and my mother, in her bathrobe, said, “Peggy dear, Dr. McCaffrey would like to talk to you. He says it’s important.”

  Con and I walked out into the front hail to confront Dr. McCaffrey.

  “Have you been with my son!” he thundered.

  “With Sean? No, sir.”

  “We’ve been here playing records,” Con said. “Is something the matter?”

  “Is anything the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter! My son is lying in his bed dead drunk, that’s what’s the matter.”

  “Sean?” I said, trying to look shocked. “Drunk? Oh, I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. Drunk as a lord!”

  “Everybody knows Sean doesn’t drink,” Con said, her eyes wide and innocent. “Why, he’s an inspiration to the other boys at Sacred Heart.”

  “You weren’t with him?”

  “Oh no, sir,” I said.

  “That Davy kid. What’s his name?”

  “Davy Parelli?”

  “That’s the one. The juvenile delinquent. I bet he’s the one who got my boy drunk.”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Well—” he said. “Well, goodnight,” and he stomped off.

  “Poor Sean,” Con said. “If only we hadn’t put the panties on him. He’s really going to get it.”

  “Yeah, he will, this time.”

  “It’s partly our fault.”

  “I know. But he nagged us, Con, he really did.”

  “Well, he’ll have one hell of a story to tell in the seminary. Except I guess they don’t let you tell those kinds of stories there.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “He’s a crazy kid, Sean.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, he is.”

  Con looked at me. “Peggy,” she said, “how the hell is Sean going to turn into a priest?”

  “Bea
ts me,” I said.

  In Hoc Signo Vinces

  “WE MUST smash communism!” Con announced.

  “Yeah, sure,” I replied, writing the last line of an editorial on school spirit (nonexistent at Immaculate Heart, I decreed).

  “Peg, you don’t take the Red Menace seriously enough. Don’t you listen to J. Edgar Hoover?”

  Con was always a little to the right of me, politically. I couldn’t figure out how anybody who wanted to be beautiful and damned could wear an Eisenhower button, but life, I was learning, was full of contradictions.

  “This, from the person who canonized Leon Trotsky?” I said.

  “That was just a joke. This is serious.”

  “Yeah, the Red Hordes are all the way down Sixteenth Street,” I said.

  “They just took over Morris Miller Liquors.”

  “It’s people like you who will be sorry when we’re on our knees before Joe Stalin.”

  “You really are on an anti-commie kick lately. How come?”

  “Lee and I talked about it a lot last weekend. He opened my eyes. There are Russian spies everywhere, Peg. J. Edgar Hoover has drawers full of reports on them.”

  I groaned. “How does Midshipman Masters know what’s in J. Edgar Hoover’s drawers?” I chuckled at my own double entendre. “Get it? J. Edgar Hoover’s drawers!”

  Con didn’t crack a smile. Maybe it was a shame that Operation Middle had worked so well, if Con was going to be such a bore on the subject of communism. It figured that Lee Masters would be a commie baiter; any guy who had a blond crewcut, dimples in his chin, and came from St. Louis was bound to think Alger Hiss was guilty as hell.

  “Librarians,” Con said.

  “What?”

  “Do you know how much harm one communist librarian in a public school could do? Hundreds of American kids could get caught in The Web of Deception.”

  “I always did have my doubts about Sister Conception Rose,” I said, “ever since I wanted to take out Saints Are Not Sad and she made me take out Das Kapital instead.”

  But Con would not be jollied. She was dead serious about her new crusade, and her weekends at Annapolis weren’t making things any better. I didn’t know how she planned to lose her virginity, when they seemed to spend all their time talking about J. Edgar Hoover. I pictured them, sitting close together in the drag house, underlining all the dirty parts in I Was a Communist for the FBI.

  Con had even taken to hanging around the classroom of Sister Immelda Mary, who was Immaculate Heart’s numero uno booster of Joe McCarthy. Sister Immelda was behind a one woman campaign to get the pope to consider Joe McCarthy for sainthood, a prospect that made me want to barf. I could just picture tail-gunner Joe, roaming around heaven looking for commies. “I have in my hand a list.”

  It really blew my mind to see Con and Sister Immelda so chummy, because the two of them had had a big dust-up sophomore year when Con announced she believed in the theory of evolution.

  Sister Immelda was shocked. “Constance, do you really want to believe that your ancestors hung by their tails from trees?”

  “Why not? It’s scientific. You don’t expect me to believe that story of Adam and Eve. It’s right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

  “Miss Constance Wepplener, you are blaspheming!”

  “No I’m not. I just believe in Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest.”

  “You said that Adam and Eve was a-a-fairy tale!”

  “Sort of,” Con said. “A fable, like the Epic of Gilgamesh—that’s Hindu.”

  “Hindu! Miss Wepplener, do you mean to tell me you read things written by heathens?”

  “Hindus aren’t heathens, Sister. Their religion is a lot older than ours is.”

  “You march yourself right down to the principal, Miss Smarty Pants, and we’ll see about this!”

  The whole thing blew over when Sister Robert Mary told Con it was O.K. for her to believe in Darwin if she also believed in God. Con said that she did, and she also promised not to debate the point with Sister Immelda, who took a rather literal view of things Biblical. She believed that there was an apple, probably a Macintosh. She also told us that black people bore the mark of Cain. When Cain killed Abel, the Bible said, God put a mark on him so that everyone would know, and that mark was black skin. The N.A.A.C.P. would have thrown a fit over that one; fortunately, Sister Immelda’s theology didn’t have a very wide circulation. But then, Sister Immelda also said that Mary Magdalene had a part-time job tending goats, and that was why the snobby people in the Bible didn’t like her.

  Lately, however, the Great Monkey Battle between Con and Sister Immelda had apparently been forgotten because the two of them were thick as thieves. They were hatching something, but Con was circumspect and wouldn’t tell me anything about it. I think she suspected I’d go straight to the Russian embassy. So I didn’t meet Count Orlov until the day he came strolling into the Messenger room, right behind Con. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him. He was six foot seven if he was an inch, and he had to hunch down to get through the doorway. He wore, over his dark business suit, a black cape with a red silk lining and ermine trim, which he said had once belonged to Tsar Nicholas. I had my doubts; it looked as if he’d lifted it from the property room at the Metropolitan Opera.

  “Peggy, this is Count Vladimir Illyich Orlov,” said Con. “He’s Russian.”

  I was going to say that I really wasn’t about to mistake him for the exalted leader of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, but I thought better of it when I looked at the count. He didn’t seem like a guy with a big sense of humor.

  “The count is speaking at an assembly next week and we’re doing a story on him,” Con said.

  The count bowed gravely to me, and I stuck out my hand, democratic style. I didn’t hold with this royalty stuff. The count sat down in a chair and started to explain the subject of his talk, but every time he looked right at me I felt a chill run up and down my back. The count had large, wide, hypnotic eyes. They seemed vaguely familiar to me and I wondered where I had seen such eyes before. Then it came to me—in our history text, the Mad Monk Rasputin. Or maybe it was Eddie Cantor. Anyway, he had weird eyes.

  The count, it turned out, was a Russian nobleman (so he claimed) who had heard a voice from God commanding him to reclaim Russia in the name of the Holy Virgin. He was going to do it by holding bake sales and raffling off a new Buick. I tried to imagine his conversation with God:

  “Count Orlov! Count Orlov! Up here!”

  “What? What? That voice! From whence does it come?”

  “Up here, on the left, by the grease spot on the ceiling. It’s God talking.”

  “My God!”

  “Right the first time.”

  “What can I do, My Lord?”

  “I am calling you on a sacred mission. Reclaim Russia in the name of the Blessed Mother.”

  “But how, oh Lord? Where are my legions, my weapons?”

  “Tollhouse cookies.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “And sponge cakes and brownies and (you should excuse the expression) devil’s food. Go forth and hold bake sales.”

  “I am your humble servant, Lord!”

  “And while you’re at it, pick up a ‘56 Buick, hydromatic drive, white sidewalls.”

  Count Orlov was promoting something called Smash Godless Communism Day, which was to be a giant rally on the monument grounds, and in which a hundred thousand Catholics were to gather and pray like crazy at the same time, sending a huge tidal wave of Hail Marys against the gates of the Kremlin. Count Orlov actually seemed to think that would bring the walls tumbling down. I figured one well-placed ICBM would do it better, but it would take a hell of a lot of bake sales to buy one of those.

  I walked home from school with Sean the day Con brought the count to the office. Sean had survived the whole panties episode pretty well. He had been really hung over the next morning, but his brain was working
well enough to come up with a good story. He said that a bunch of the “wild” kids at Sacred Heart had made a bet that they could get Sean drunk, because everybody knew he didn’t drink. They gave him liquor in orange juice, and when he passed out, they took his clothes and put the panties on him as a gag. Dr. McCaffrey wanted to make a big deal out of it with the brothers, try to get those awful boys expelled, but Sean begged him not to, because he said he’d be branded as a squealer and he wouldn’t have any friends.

  As we were walking, Sean said to me, “There was a really weird guy at our house last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Big guy, with wild eyes, and he was wearing this cape. Scared the shit out of me when I walked in. I thought he was Dracula.”

  “Count Orlov!”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

  “Sean, what was Count Orlov doing at your house?”

  “I don’t know. He was talking to my father about some rally. I could hardly understand the guy. He talks like Boris Karloff.”

  “This is not good news,” I said. I explained to him about who Count Orlov was and what he was planning to do.

  “He’s going to pray the Kremlin into little pieces?”

  “He says the prayers of a hundred thousand Catholics will create a resonance in the upper atmosphere that will cause winds of a thousand miles an hour in Red Square.”

  “He said that? With a straight face?”

  “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “My God, my father is going to do it again!” Sean moaned.

  “It looks that way.”

  Sean sighed, another one of those grown-up sighs he’d been doing lately.

  “Why does he attract loonies? What is it about him?”

  “You’d think he’d have learned something after Father Clement Kliblicki and his modesty crusaders.”

  “My father doesn’t seem to learn things. He just keeps on smacking into one wall after another.”

  “Look at it this way, Sean. Your father isn’t dull.”

  “That’s for sure,” he said glumly.

  Sean hoped that the count would simply fade out of his father’s life—maybe just turn into a bat and sail off into the night—but no such luck. Smash Godless Communism Day was scheduled for a Saturday in March, and the planning went on at a feverish pace. The count and Dr. McCaffrey spent hours together, huddled around the dining room table, and Dr. McCaffrey started to get that expression of demented enthusiasm in his eyes again. The Catholic Herald ran a big story about the rally, although there was no mention of thousand-mile-an-hour winds. The count was playing it close to his chest on that one.