Edith tilts her head and reads the book’s cover. “I’d have thought you’d be finished with Chandler by now.”
“I keep re-reading. He’s good.”
“I wish I could get you interested in Simenon.”
Madden shrugs. “He’s French,” he says.
“What’s wrong with the French?” She drags a beach chair over and sits beside him.
“Nothing,” he says. He puts the book face down against his chest and glances across the pool. He doesn’t know when it happened, but the two pretty women are naked—their bikinis are tiny blobs of color near the end of the diving board—and they have begun making love in the center of the pool. Madden watches them, memorizing them so that he can give Dr. Himmel explicit details. They kissed, he will say. They touched breasts against breasts. They lay in the water face to belly, belly to face. Then they made a living water wheel, revolving while they devoured each other: bare backs and plump buttocks and flowing dark hair, like dolphin shapes in the turbulent pool.
When they have climbed out of the pool and gone away, Madden lies back, enervated, drained.
“Did you see all that?” he asks.
“See what?” his wife answers. She has slid down in the cloth seat, her neck resting on the chair back, her arms folded over her stomach. Her legs still wear water beads that shine on her skin like small diamonds.
“Nothing.” He sits upright with an effort. “Why don’t we go back to the room?”
“After a while. I’m feeling wonderfully relaxed.”
“Maybe… I could relax you a bit more.” He puts a hand out to his wife. With a tentative forefinger he touches a water droplet on the inside of one thigh, close to the vee of her swimsuit.
Edith turns her head lazily and half opens her eyes.
“Oh, Thomas,” she says. “Act your age.”
* * *
SUNDAY NIGHT HE AND HIS WIFE are back home, and the next morning, standing before the bathroom mirror to shave, Madden experiences a wicked anxiety attack. Such attacks are rare in his life, and this one is of an unusual violence; he wants to scream, like a man suffering physical pain. He drops his razor into the sink and hammers both fists against his stomach, as if he could by force obliterate the fear that churns there. He rummages through the medicine chest, hoping to find a few tranquilizers left over from years ago, but of course his wife, as a precaution, throws away all leftover prescriptions. A precaution against what? he wonders, and he thinks a stale Valium would be as useful now as a fresh one. He knows that, ethically, no doctor can prescribe a tranquilizer over the telephone; fortunately, Monday is Madden’s regular appointment day—at two o’clock. If he can make it through the morning, somehow Himmel will rescue him.
He arrives in the waiting room twenty minutes early, even though he is aware that Himmel generally runs behind schedule. Madden has in fact had a terrible day, reduced at one point to perching on the edge of his desk chair at work, hugging himself—his hands gripping his arms so hard that he imagines he will find black-and-blue finger marks when he goes to bed tonight—and shaking uncontrollably. He has gone to The Swan for lunch, but wasn’t able to eat. He has sat in the Public Gardens for a half-hour, hoping Nature might soothe him, but the anxiety held a firm grip on the scruff of his mind. Now he sorts through the stacks of old magazines, hoping to find one of recent vintage that will carry him up to the moment of asking the doctor to write him a prescription. He manages to find an issue of People that is barely two months old and settles himself at one end of a scuffed leather couch.
He has scarcely begun to turn pages when the hall door opens and a strikingly lovely woman enters. She reports to the receptionist, hangs her fur jacket in the corner, and sits at the other end of his couch. Madden studies her, obliquely, pretending to read the tattered magazine in his lap. She is in her early thirties, he thinks; her hair is reddish-brown, her skin pale; she uses very little makeup. She is dressed in casual good taste: a soft blue cardigan worn over a plain blouse, a gray corduroy skirt, short-heeled black shoes. Is she barelegged? She seems to be.
After a few minutes, Madden is aware that she is sizing him up, though she is much more direct about it than he has been. She is, after all, not pretending to read an out-of-date magazine. Instead, she has nested herself in the corner of the couch, folded her arms, and chosen to stare at him. Madden feels himself blushing. Why? he asks himself. Because she is an attractive woman, he answers, and I am embarrassed and perplexed by her attention.
“I haven’t seen you before,” the woman says.
He acts surprised, pretends that he has just now realized he is not alone, even though the waiting room contains a number of men and women—not to mention several children—waiting to be counseled by other doctors and by the clinic’s family psychologists.
“Are you a regular?” she says.
He smiles. “I don’t think people come here if they’re ‘regular.’ I think all of us are ‘irregular,’ if you see what I mean.”
She cocks her head. “I see,” she says. “What’s your hang-up?”
The question startles him, and he can’t think of a fast response.
“Sex, probably.” She says it for him. “I saw you giving me the once-over, trying not to be obvious.”
“I don’t think…,” Madden begins.
“It’s all right,” she says. “Me too.”
Madden looks at her. She crosses her legs so that he is able to see a considerable field of white thigh under her skirt. Oh, God, he thinks, is it starting again? He takes a quick look at his watch. How near is his appointment? How late is Himmel today?
“I have this thing about men,” the woman says. “This compulsion.”
“Is that so?” Madden says. He says it coolly, but he makes a rapid survey of the room. All the adults are absorbed in dog-eared reading matter; the children—three of them—are playing with toy cars at the edge of the carpet.
The woman slides down the couch toward him. “Are you gay?”
“No,” Madden says. “Not at all.”
The woman slides closer and takes his magazine away from him. “I know plenty about men. What they like. What they don’t.” She rumples his hair. “Come to think of it,” she says, “what’s wrong with wanting every man I see?”
“It’s promiscuous,” Madden says.
The woman loosens his necktie, nibbles at his earlobe. His mind spins downward in the whirlpool of her exotic perfume.
“There’s ‘promise’ in ‘promiscuity,’” she says.
By now she is all over him, and Madden cannot help being excited. When she kisses him, her delicate tongue dancing in his mouth like a lascivious hummingbird, he hears himself moan; when she clutches at him, he pushes himself against her small, hot hand.
“Think about it,” she says hoarsely.
She has unbelted him; her slender hand and wrist are gliding over him like an inquisitive long-necked animal. Madden realizes that his own hands are moving in a frenzy under the woman’s skirt, that he is actually tearing at her blouse buttons with his teeth. What good is Himmel? he wonders. When the woman straddles him, he hurls himself upward with such force that the two of them topple onto the floor.
At this moment the doctor emerges from his office to discover the two of them. Himmel takes in the scene and claps his hands.
“Bravo, Thomas!” he cries. “Bravo!”
Thomas wonders how he should respond. In the meantime, the other adult clients wait quietly for their appointments, while their children say “Vrumm! Vrumm!” and rub toy cars against the carpet to make the tiny wheels spin and whirr.
Charm
The Maurice Ducharme School is a three-story brick building at the corner of Thompson and Nason streets in Scoggin, Maine. The brick is of two colors, sand-beige accented with scarlet in a stepped pattern at the building’s four corners and around the weathered-oak entrance doors. The walks in front of Ducharme are of WPA cement, with occasional squares of newer, raw-white stuff. The sc
hool was built in the early nineteen-thirties—nearly sixty years ago—and has had no updating except for a new roof after the 1938 hurricane. It houses all twelve grades of the town’s Catholic school children. It also houses, at the basement level, the St. Ignatius Church, one of two Catholic churches in the town, the other being Holy Family, on the west side of the river. Few of Scoggin’s Catholic families send their children to the public schools; they expect the nuns to do the teaching at least through middle school, ten years when the girl pupils are still required to wear the white blouse and navy-blue jumper uniform, and the boys are restricted to dark trousers, white shirts, and neckties. Even after ninth grade, only the more liberal Catholics turn to the public high school to prepare their teens for college.
Most of the townspeople, but especially the Protestants, refer to Ducharme as “the parochial school”; the children who attend it sometimes call it, not always sarcastically, “the charm school.”
* * *
PETER GOODWIN IS HIMSELF a lapsed Catholic, but he has taught senior high English literature and creative composition at Ducharme for a dozen years. At Fordham, in the nineteen-sixties, he had intended to major in philosophy, but in all the upheavals of the age—the war, the peace movement, the licentiousness of soul and body that swept over American campuses—he dropped out, married a Unitarian from Schenectady, and eventually came home to Maine. He got a teaching degree, secondary, English and Language Arts, from the college at Farmington, spent four years in a rural junior high near Bangor and eight years at Coney High in Augusta, and finally—he and his wife, Shelley, having acquired along the way three children and a rusty Subaru—moved to Scoggin and the Ducharme school. This, he likes to tell their friends, was in the first year of the Reagan regime, A.D.—After Democrats.
Peter is forty-eight; his youngest child, the daughter, Jackie, will graduate from Bradford in May; the two boys, Tim and Vance, are both in sales in Boston. Shelley, four years Peter’s junior, runs a bookstore that specializes in children’s literature. Sometimes Peter finds himself, idly, assessing these facts of his life. He reviews the turns that have brought him to this former mill town—the textile and shoe factories moved South in the nineteen-fifties—and ensconced him in a school run by a Church whose faith he renounced long ago, though “renounced” seems, even to Peter, to put the matter too strongly.
When he tries nowadays to focus his mind on his loss of faith, he imagines New York City is to blame—that it was the City, with its aura of infinite temptation, that paganized him and made God seem unnecessary. Wherever the blame, Peter’s renunciation endures: St. Ignatius Church is directly below him; he has never descended to it, never knelt before its altar, never entered its confessional. The priests, Father Devon and his assistant, Father Guillaume, are acquaintances—Peter nods to them in the school corridors, they drink sweet punch together on Parents’ Night—but the three of them are neither friends nor adversaries. Day after day Peter is surrounded in his work by nuns and brothers, by women and men in black devoted to God and His Work, by children whose anxious concern is to be catechized and found worthy, by artifacts and icons and images that glorify Salvation and the Saviour. Peter is unmoved and uncontrite. The Deity is all but forgotten; He is not where Peter’s life is centered.
* * *
THAT CENTER—THAT STILL POINT around which, like feral animals just beyond the firelight, Peter’s concerns make a restless circling—is Woman. The word is not plural, never women. Peter is not unhappy in his marriage; carnal novelty does not tempt him. Even in his forties, he is not suffering midlife crisis. Though he may be without faith, at least he is not unfaithful. Simply, it is Woman, capitalized and abstracted and ideal, that holds him like a planet caught in regular orbit around a steadfast, unreachable star.
The day he arrived at Ducharme, it was one of the sisters who captured him: Mary Martha—Sisters of Charity, B.V.M.—a black-cloaked, white-cowled nun, her forehead pale and unlined, eyes brown and fawn-trusting, lips innocent of rouge. She and Peter sat side by side at student desks in the fifth-grade classroom, gathered with a half-dozen others for the rituals of new-teacher orientation. The principal, Sister Florence, conducted them through the forms for medical insurance, for keys to the outer doors, for income-tax withholding, for diocesan files. When the principal began her formal welcoming speech, Peter leaned toward Sister Mary Martha, partly to read her name from the top of one of the forms, partly to ask, sotto voce, “What do you teach?” Her brown eyes met his coolly. “Ninth-grade English,” she said. “What about you?” “Also English,” he whispered. “Senior high.” That they shared a common subject matter pleased him and made him feel less a stranger in this unaccustomed environment. Perhaps he and Sister Mary Martha would be friends; she looked nothing like the desiccated nuns of his growing up in Portland, of the overcrowded grammar school, of sports-mad Cheverus High School during the thousand days of a Catholic President, and though today she wore the habit, he knew that in these modern times she was not bound to that uniform. He wondered about her appearance in street clothes—how feminine she would seem, what vanity she might betray. So absorbed was he in the woman beyond the veil that he scarcely attended to Sister Florence’s orientation lecture, and when it was time for questions he directed his to Sister Mary Martha.
“But who is Maurice Ducharme?” he whispered.
“I think he was a lay brother in the local diocese,” she whispered back. “Didn’t Sister say so? Early in this century—maybe before World War I. He did something heroic and holy, or had a vision, or made a pronouncement that found God’s favor.”
Peter nodded. “I see,” he said.
Sister Mary Martha gave him a gentle nudge with her cloaked elbow. “You know how these things happen,” she said. “It’s just a trick of being in the right place at the right time.”
“Like the Virgin,” he said.
Her brown eyes widened in surprise, and then, trying not to laugh, she put both hands to her face and snorted. When she had regained her composure, she was blushing; the heightened color on her brow made the white of her cowl seem to glow, as if from inner light.
“Shame on you,” she whispered. “Shame, shame, shame.” But she was smiling, and Peter was entranced.
* * *
SISTER MARY MARTHA WRITES POETRY. Some afternoons when Peter comes into the school library he finds her bowed over sheets of scrap paper—the back sides of hektographed diocesan attendance reports or blank computer forms daubed with the red ink that warns of the end of the box—and he knows she is immersed in a poem. Now that they have been friends for so long a time, he isn’t afraid to be critical of her creative work, but early on, when he was feeling his way with her, he consciously held back his judgments— tempered them, made them as gentle and tentative as he knew how. Often he pleaded ignorance: “I don’t understand this image; educate me.” Then she was eager to explain and, if he was lucky, in the course of the explanation she would discover the imprecision he had been bothered by. “What a good teacher you are,” she would say. “How fortunate your students are to have the gift of you.”
Over time Peter has come to know Sister Mary Martha as well as he knows any of his other friends, and each piece of the jigsaw puzzle that comprises her life has surprised him by its banality— as if a nun could not have grown up like other women, or as if her decision to marry Christ ought to have transformed her mundane girlhood, retroactively, into an exemplary devotional apprenticeship. The truth is, Sister has said, that her early life was ordinary as pie and ice cream.
“Except that Daddy was older than most of my friends’ fathers.” She told him this, late one afternoon over stale coffee in the Maurice Ducharme cafeteria. “He was in his forties when he married my mother. I think having a daughter was a surprise to him; there was always a peculiar distance between us, as if he didn’t know how to express his feelings toward me.”
“And your mother?”
“Ordinary, quiet, what they used to call ‘a h
omemaker.’ She sang in the choir and belonged to Sodality and worked for the bake sales. Pushed Daddy to go to morning mass. I adored her, wanted to be her. I must have been the perfect Catholic child. I even made her put extra starch in my blouses.” Sister Mary Martha smiled across the table—not at Peter, but at the image of the schoolgirl self she had been. “There are snapshots,” she said. “Mousy but neat.”
“Then what?”
“The usual. Upper-middle of my high school class. Secretarial school in Boston. A job in the advertising department at Jordan Marsh, carrying proofs around, running artwork to the engraver’s. I liked it.”
“But not enough.”
“Oh, you know. A man. His name was Brendan and he did illustration for the store’s fashion ads. He was just always around, and we dated off and on.”
“And he did you wrong?” Peter was half-joking, he hoped, one eyebrow raised.
Sister shook her head. “Not the old Victorian cliché,” she said. “The fact is, he went into the priesthood. Just like that.” She pushed the heavy coffee cup aside. “It was funny that all the time we went together he scarcely ever touched me. He was a talker, amazingly serious for a young man, and I’d begun to think he didn’t like me. God knows I certainly liked him. But when he went off to the Church—one day he was here, the next he wasn’t—then I realized it was something abstract that drew him to me, maybe something downright holy, and the first thing you knew, I was the one ready to give my life to the Church. Brendan led the way to it; he’d held the lamp to light my path.”
* * *
IT SEEMS TO PETER that the path was never entirely toward the holy, for what emerges from the verses Sister Mary Martha shows him is as much of the flesh as of the spirit. There is in one poem “leaned / against your windowsill / a steep ladder of moonlight / my chaste thoughts climb / to the bed where you naked sleep.” In another the poet recalls “my knee touching / yours as we bow beneath / a painted crucifix. / I wonder which is blood / and which mere color. / Genuflection, crucifixion, / the two words whirl themselves / into a third whose syllables / body may not pronounce.”
Who Will Hear Your Secrets? Page 4