by Caryl Rivers
“You could keep her out of sight.”
“No, Lee would think it was vulgar.” She was quiet for a minute and then added, “He thinks a lot of things are vulgar.”
“Well, I’ll keep her safe.”
Later that day, I told Sean about Con’s engagement and her upcoming marriage.
“Con getting married? Gee!”
“Yeah, I sure didn’t expect that.”
“But wasn’t she already accepted at Maryland?”
“Yeah, she was. We were going to room together.”
“I thought so.”
“Now I’ll be the only kid from Immaculate Heart who’s going to Maryland,” I said. We were walking home from school, slowly. “I won’t know anybody.”
“You’ll make friends.”
“I guess so. But I don’t make friends real easy, Sean. I wish. . .”
“What?”
“I guess I wish Con wasn’t getting married so soon. I mean, things just seem to be happening so fast.”
“I know,” he said quietly.
“I wish I could go back and start the year all over again. I remember, freshman year seemed to drag on forever, and this year—it’s almost gone.”
“Yeah, it is.”
I stopped walking, suddenly. “Everybody leaves me,” I said. “My father and now Con, and then you—” I felt the tears starting in my eyes.
“Oh Peggy!” Sean said, and he put his arms around me and I just wanted to bawl, right there, like I did when I was a little kid and something hurt. But I didn’t. If I was going to be a grown-up, I couldn’t go around blubbering every time something hurt. Besides, I hated people who wallowed in self-pity. Things changed, nothing was forever. You had to learn that to grow up. But it sure was hard sometimes.
So I just sniffled a little and said, “Don’t mind me. Just a little graduation blues.”
“Peggy—” Sean said, and I could see the pain in his green eyes. Another minute and he’d be putting iodine on me.
I tried to smile. “I’m O.K., Sean, really I am. Actually, it’ll be a lot of fun meeting new people. I’ll have new friends, we’ll have lots of good times. I’m really looking forward to it,” I said cheerfully. If I kept blathering on, maybe I could actually convince myself.
But I didn’t have a lot of time to brood about my problems, because a new one cropped up the next day that put everything else on the back burner. Con walked up to me right before the history final, looking totally drained of color.
“You got your period? You look rotten.”
“I should only have my period. I should only have the stigmata!”
“Oh my God, Con, you’re pregnant!”
“Peggy, I am not pregnant. I have heard of birth control, you know. What do you think I am, Catholic?”
“Then what’s up?”
“This,” she said, and she handed me a copy of the Catholic Herald.
There it was, under a big black headline—ST. LEON OF SKORYTT: A MAN FOR OUR TIMES. The blurb that introduced the story gave full credit and thanks to the source of the story—the Marian Messenger at Immaculate Heart High School.
“Oh shit.”
“What a time for this to happen. A couple of weeks, and they couldn’t lay a glove on us.”
“Hey, Con, maybe our luck will hold. Maybe no one will notice.”
“Are you kidding? Everyone reads the Catholic Herald—even those guys at Catholic University who specialize in saints. There’s obscure saints that even God doesn’t know about, but those guys do.”
Two days went by, then three, then four, and at first we held our breath, and then began to relax a little bit. We were the Greatest Messenger Staff in history. Nothing could go wrong for us.
But on a Thursday afternoon, in the middle of the Religion final, the P.A. system squawked on, and Sister Robert Mary’s voice coughed out, “Will Miss Peggy Ann Morrison and Miss Constance Marie Wepplener please come to the office immediately!” I knew we were in deep shit. When Sister Robert Mary used your middle name, it was nothing but trouble.
I looked at Con and she looked at me. We got up and walked out of the room together.
“This is it,” I said. “Curtains.”
“I wonder if we’ll be expelled?” Con said.
I saw my whole future shattering in front of me. I would be drummed out of high school and probably drummed out of journalism. The New York Herald Tribune would never hire anybody who’d invented a saint. I wouldn’t get into college, and I’d probably start to drink. I’d age thirty years in five, and I’d end up wandering the streets of Washington with all my belongings in a shopping bag, begging. My former classmates would pass by me on the street and when I asked them for a dime, they’d kick me away.
“Please, just a dime for a glass of muscatel so I can get through the day.”
“You’re a disgrace to Immaculate Heart. To all the girls Forever Brave and True. To the Blessed Mother. To the uniform!”
“Please, a piece of gum, an old Tootsie Roll, anything, for old time’s sake!”
“And to think, once you were the managing editor of the Greatest Messenger in history!”
My stomach started to quiver. I felt the tears welling up. I gritted my teeth. I am not going to cry! I told myself. They could put me up against the wall and shoot me, but they weren’t going to get one lousy tear.
“We’ll probably get excommunicated,” I said. “They’ll tack our names on the doors of churches all over the world. ‘Peggy Ann Morrison and Constance Marie Wepplener are cast into the outer darkness.’ They’ll deny us the sacraments and we won’t graduate and people will shun us.”
“They can’t do that,” Con said.
“Why not?”
“Because we are under the personal protection of the Little Flower. And the Maidenform Bra Company.”
I looked at her. “I Dreamed I Was Excommunicated in My Maidenform Bra?”
“That’s the spirit,” she said. “We may go down, Peggy, but we go down with class.”
I had to grin at that, and the grin was still on my face as we walked into Sister Robert Mary’s office. It faded, fast. Waiting for us there were my mother, her face pale and tense, and Sean, and Dr. McCaffrey, and Brother Martin from Sacred Heart, and the principal. (Con’s mother had been called, we later learned, but had said she was too ill to come. “Yeah,” Con said, “how was I going to introduce her with all the crud on her? This is my mother, Joe Louis?")
The whole group looked as if they’d all been invited to a wake. My stomach started to quiver again. But I glanced at Con, who had her head up and was looking nonchalant, as if she’d just dropped in for a chat. You had to say one thing for Con. She had style.
Sister Robert Mary held up a copy of the Catholic Herald and said, “It has come to my attention that the story reprinted here from the Messenger is a fake. A complete fabrication. Is this true?”
“Yes, Sister, it is,” I said. Con nodded. I looked over at Sean. I knew why he was here. He’d passed a copy of the Messenger story to the editor of the Sacred Heart Beacon suggesting that the Beacon run it. The editor did.
“So stories that appeared in the Beacon and the Messenger were untrue,” the principal said.
“Yes,” Con said.
“Sean isn’t to blame for any of this,” I said to Brother Martin, a thin, reedy man with bug eyes and a reputation for an ill temper. “He didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Brother Martin looked at Sean. “Is this true?”
“Yes, Brother. I mean, I didn’t make up the story.”
“When it came out in the Messenger, Sean didn’t know it was a fake,” I said. I had chosen my words carefully. I was telling the truth. Sean didn’t know about St. Leon until three days after it ran.
“Is this right, Sean?” asked his father.
“Yes, sir.”
Dr. McCaffrey gave a little sigh of relief, and then he gave me a lo
ok that said if he had his way, I’d be an instant martyr. I wondered whether he’d boil me in oil or turn me on the rank until I looked like a licorice stick. Then he turned to Sean and said, “I’m very glad to know you weren’t involved in this willful, this malicious deception.”
Brother Martin said, “Sean, I’m sorry to have included you in this. It seems you were just another victim. Dr. McCaffrey, I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
“Sean’s going to be a priest, you know,” Dr. McCaffrey said. I saw Sean wince.
“Yes, we’re very proud of Sean,” Brother Martin said, his bug eyes showing a hint of human kindness.
Sean looked at me and I jerked my head toward the door, trying not to be too conspicuous. Go. Get the hell out. You’re in the clear! Getting excommunicated could put a small dent in his plans for the priesthood.
But Sean didn’t move, and those cool green eyes were opaque. “Brother,” he said, “it’s true that I didn’t know about it at first, but I knew St. Leon was a fake when I gave the story to the Beacon.”
Oh Sean, I thought, that damned conscience! But I was proud of him, too, even though it was a dumb-ass thing to do. Sean never was one to duck and run.
“Sean!” his father groaned. “You didn’t!”
The kindness in Brother Martin’s eyes went out like a light. It was replaced, I thought, by simple blood-lust. I hoped the rack was safely put away in mothballs, because I could see Brother Martin smiling as he turned, and turned, and turned—there we’d be, Sean and Con and Mollie and me, hanging by our thumbs in the basement of the Vatican. The pope would walk by and say to Brother Martin, “These the four kids who canonized Leon Trotsky?”
Brother Martin would nod, and smile his cruel, Peter Lorre smile.
“Oh please, Your Holiness, we didn’t mean to do any harm!” I’d cry out.
“They’re just children, Brother Martin,” the pope would say. “Don’t you think we should show them mercy?”
Brother Martin would smile, and he’d raise his thumb toward the ceiling, higher, higher—and then he’d turn it over and plunge it toward his toes.
The pope would look, and then he’d shrug and walk away saying,
“That’s how the cookie crumbles, kids.”
Sister Robert Mary sighed. “Just what on earth got into you girls?”
“We just wanted to liven up Saints Corner,” I said. “It was pretty boring.”
“Boring!” croaked Brother Martin. “Are you saying saints are boring?”
“Very boring,” Con said, “after you’ve heard their stories 5,000 times.”
Her level gaze met that of Brother Martin, and she didn’t flinch.
“So you made up a saint,” said Sister Robert Mary.
“Right,” I said. “It was just a joke.”
Brother Martin practically foamed at the mouth. “A joke! Inventing a saint is a joke!” I didn’t guess Brother Martin had a real big sense of humor.
“You just made up the story? Out of whole cloth?” The principal asked.
I swallowed hard and said, “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, Peggy?”
“Skorytt is a proper name, scrambled up.”
“A name?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“What name?” I saw Sean blanch.
“Trotsky.”
Dr. McCaffrey’s mouth gaped open in astonishment. “Trotsky! St. Leon is Leon Trotsky?”
“More or less.”
Sister Robert Mary turned away. I had the sudden wild notion that she was hiding a grin, but when she turned back her face was somber.
“The speeches, where—”
“The Communist Manifesto,” I said.
Dr. McCaffrey glared at his son. “Sean, you knew this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you weren’t horrified?”
“No, sir. I thought it was pretty funny.”
“It was parody,” said Con. “An ancient art form.”
“It was a gag,” I said. “But we shouldn’t have printed it.”
Sister Robert Mary looked at me. “You know that you violated your trust, Peggy. The readers expect everything that appears in the Messenger to be true.”
“Yes, Sister, I know.”
“And you have embarrassed not only our school, but Sacred Heart and the Catholic Herald as well.”
Con nodded. “We didn’t figure it would go this far.”
Brother Martin was standing in the corner, his bug eyes bugging even further. He was getting real worked up, I thought. I expected to see his eyes just pop right out of their sockets and go sprong! across the room.
“Immediate expulsion!” he thundered. “We must demand immediate expulsion of anyone involved in this!”
I saw Dr. McCaffrey go pale. I had a suspicion he wasn’t thinking of Sean, but of how it was going to look for the Catholic Layman of the Year when his son got kicked out of Sacred Heart for making a saint out of Leon Trotsky. My mother looked as if she were about to cry.
“Expulsion!” thundered Brother Martin. Con and Sean and I looked at each other. (Mollie, the lucky dog, was home with the flu. Maybe they’d just excommunicate her by mail.) This was it, the worst thing that could happen. We were all going to get kicked out of school. Our lives were ruined. They might as well just shoot us now and get it over with.
“Perhaps we’d better discuss this,” said Sister Robert Mary.
A ray of hope. Maybe they weren’t going to pull the switch. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I prayed.
“I see no other choice,” said Brother Martin.
“It is possible,” said the principal, “that if we expel these students greater harm might be done.”
“I don’t understand,” said the brother.
“As it stands, the Catholic Herald is simply going to run a correction saying that the St. Leon story was a very tasteless joke thought up by some high school students. But if we expel these students, the entire story would come out. Wouldn’t the Washington Post just love a story about a group of high school students who sainted Leon Trotsky? Catholic students. Think what a scandal that would cause, Brother.”
“Yes, I hadn’t thought of that, Sister.”
“It could be most embarrassing, not only to our schools, but also to the whole archdiocese.”
“Yes, that’s true. But they cannot go unpunished.”
Now, I thought, he’s going to bring out the rack.
But Sister Robert Mary said, “Brother, these students are all graduating with honors. Peggy Morrison was going to deliver the second valedictory. I believe Sean McCaffrey was to write the student invocation. I suggest we strip them of all graduation honors and simply let them graduate, unheralded, with the rest of the class.”
I breathed a long, slow sigh of relief and looked at Sister Robert Mary with gratitude. This was a classy lady. Of course, it meant that I wouldn’t get to deliver my fiery tirade on abuses of censorship, and Angela Pignateui would give some wimpy talk about the Blessed Mother, but at least I wouldn’t have to be a bag lady.
“I hope,” she said, looking at us sternly, “that you have all learned a good lesson from this incident.”
We all nodded, somberly. I wondered if it would be in bad form to grovel in front of her and kiss the hem of her habit. My mother still looked as if she were going to cry from relief. Brother Martin looked like a barracuda whose prey had just escaped. I wondered what they’d do if they knew that it was us who kidnapped Christ and nearly burned the school down. One thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to tell them.
Dr. McCaffrey gave me a withering stare and then he looked at Sean. “I’ll see you at home, young man,” he said.
Sean and Con and I walked out of the office, weak in the knees, but glad we had got out with our skins.
“I’m sorry, Sean,” I said. I knew he had been working for weeks on the invocation.
“That’s O.K.,” he said.
Con flung her arms towards the sky. “I’ll wear Maidenform bras for the rest of my life!” she cried.
“She almost got thrown out of school and she’s thinking about underwear?” Sean said.
“You know Con, she’s such a fashion plate,” I said.
“I will never understand women,” he said.
I was sure Sean was going to get absolutely murdered by his father, but he only got grounded for three days. Dr. McCaffrey was so relieved that Sean hadn’t been kicked out of school that he tempered his justice with mercy. He didn’t even say Sean couldn’t go to the big graduation party, which the seniors at Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart were giving. Every year, the two senior classes rented a cabin in Sligo Creek Park and had a big blowout, complete with hot dogs, a graduation cake, and beer. It was a tradition that everybody came in costume, so I decided to be a jungle explorer and wore a khaki shirt, khaki bermudas, and Sean’s father’s pith helmet. Sean didn’t tell me what he was going as, so when I arrived at the back door of his house I was ready to be surprised. He came down the stairs wearing a long white shirt over jeans, a hatchet at his belt, a red bandanna around his forehead, and a very peculiar contraption suspended over his head made of a coat hanger covered with gold foil. I knew what it was supposed to be right away—a halo.
Just then Dr. McCaffrey came into the room, threw me a perfunctory grunt, and looked at Sean.
“What on earth are you supposed to be?” he asked.
“Johnny Appleseed,” Sean said.
“Johnny Appleseed?”
“Yeah, see my hatchet? It’s for chopping away the brush so I can plant seeds.”
“But what’s that thing on your head?”
“Oh, I’m a very modern Johnny Appleseed. It’s a radio transmitter. I’m in constant radio contact with the Department of Agriculture, so they can tell me where to plant the trees.”
“Oh,” said Dr. McCaffrey. “That’s nice. Very wholesome. That’s a good idea, Sean.”
“Thanks, Pop.”
“You’re rotten,” I told him as we walked out the door. “But sometimes, Sean, I think your father isn’t too swift.”