“M.M.?”
“Well I didn’t mean Marilyn Monroe,” she says.
“No,” he answers. “I didn’t meet her until Ducharme.”
“I asked because the two of you seem quite close.”
Peter smiles. “We have literature in common,” he says.
When they have talked about her poem, and she has scrawled his suggestions—his questions—in the margins of the page, she says, “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”
“You weren’t,” he says. “As it happens, Sister and I both started here in the same year.”
“I knew it had to be something special,” Connie says.
“It is.”
Connie folds her poem lengthwise and slides the page inside one of her textbooks. Peter moves his feet, ready to stand, but she makes no move to leave. Instead, she leans back in the chair and lets her shoulders slump.
“I’ve done a really stupid thing,” she says.
* * *
ON THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, a cold and rainy one, he is late getting home—a detour to the post office for stamps, a stop at a drugstore where blank videotape is on sale—and when he is hanging his raincoat in the front hall closet he hears voices from the kitchen. Both voices are familiar: his wife’s of course—and Connie Lamontagne’s. He thinks he might interrupt by walking into the kitchen, but decides instead to go to his study, where he sits pretending to work until he hears the voices move to the downstairs hall and the front door open and close. He stands at the head of the stairs and sees Shelley just turning away from the door.
“Wasn’t that the Lamontagne girl?” he says. It’s awkward phrasing; he never thinks of her that way.
“Yes.”
“Had you met her before today?”
“She’s come by the bookstore a couple of times,” Shelley says. “Today she said she wanted to talk privately, so I asked Terri to take over and brought the girl here for hot chocolate.”
“What’s it all about?” Peter says.
“You don’t know?” Shelley says. “You with your talent for drawing out the most personal revelations from your female students?”
“Spare me the sarcasm.”
“She’s pregnant,” Shelley says. “That’s all. She missed her period, and then she bought one of those do-it-yourself pregnancy test kits that came out positive.”
“Do-it-yourself,” he echoes. “That means she might be wrong.”
“She might. And she might not. She’s missed a second period.”
Of course Peter already knows—has heard the whole story from Connie’s own lips as she sat that afternoon in his office. He knows who the father is—Michael—and even where it happened: in her parents’ bed while the parents were visiting Grandmother Lamontagne in a Portland hospital. If he didn’t share the knowledge with Shelley, certainly it was only to avoid yet another critique of his intimate dealings with students.
“So, what is she going to do?”
“I told her I’d take her to the women’s clinic. We’ll drive down to Boston Saturday morning. Unless something goes wrong, I’ll have her home in time for supper.”
Peter shivers. He thinks about abortion—and about the efficiency of a procedure that obliterates mortality in time for supper. He is neither “pro-abortion” nor “pro-life,” nor can he understand except in the most imagined and distant way the arguments that pivot on the integrity of women’s bodies. In the abstract, he despises the fanaticism abortion provokes, and he is angered by the suggestion that if one isn’t for something, then one must be against it— and vice versa. At this moment, in the particular, all he knows is that he wants Connie Lamontagne’s life not to be screwed up by one mistake, but something—perhaps a weak echo of the lost faith he argues with Sister—bothers him about his wife’s decisiveness.
“Is Connie O.K. with that?” he says. “Does she agree that abortion is the way to go?”
Shelley frowns. “You think she should have the baby? You want your favorite bright student to be a mother at the age of sixteen? Never mind that her father would probably throw her out in the cold.”
“I didn’t say I wanted her to have it. I asked does she think getting rid of it is the right thing to do.”
“Some things you can’t let a teenager decide,” his wife says. “This is one of them.”
“I suppose.”
“Think about your own daughter,” she says.
And he remembers how he fretted when Jackie, in high school, overstayed her curfew, how he mistrusted her boyfriends—especially the boys with cars—and how many times he had rehearsed in his own mind the possibility of his daughter being pregnant: how would he respond, what would he do?
“Did she tell you who’s responsible?”
“One of your good Catholic boys. I was appropriately horrified. She said she asked him if he was taking precautions, but he said no, he wasn’t.”
“That should have been the end of it,” Peter says.
“But don’t forget: this was in the heat of the moment.” Peter recalls such heat. “What’s worse is that apparently she did say to him, ‘What if I get pregnant?’ And what he said was, ‘Then it’s God’s will.’ Can you believe?”
“I can imagine it being said,” he tells his wife, “but I can’t imagine a woman being persuaded by it.”
“Oh, well,” his wife says, “‘persuaded.’ That’s something else again.”
* * *
SATURDAY, ALL DAY LONG, Peter is restless, acting in much the way animals behave under sudden changes in the barometer. He wonders what is happening in the weather of his thoughts as he goes from his study, where student writing awaits his red pencil, to the living room, where he turns on the television but doesn’t stay to watch anything. Suspended between dangling modifiers and college football, he can opt for neither.
He wonders if he should have talked with Sister about the implications, spiritual and secular, of abortion. Here was a real-world matter appropriate to their occasional discussions of Catholic policy and protocol. Here was an opportunity to forswear abstraction, to talk about two actual students known to them both. Now that the deed is done, who is sinner, who sinned against?
At a little after six-thirty he hears Shelley’s car in the driveway— the engine stopped, a door slamming closed. Peter turns off the television, settles himself in his armchair and adopts an attitude of alert concern. Shelley comes in alone, bringing the cold outside air with her. She takes off her orange quilted jacket and sits with it in her lap on the sofa opposite Peter.
“How did it go?” he asks.
“Let me unwind for a minute,” she says. “Maybe you could mix a manhattan.”
“You bet.” He badly wants to ask about the clinic, the drive, the medical procedure, though he is not exactly sure how to phrase the questions. He mixes the drinks, pours them—Shelley’s on the rocks, his own in a stemmed glass—and delivers hers to her. She holds the jacket up to him and he takes it and hangs it in the front hall closet.
When he comes back into the living room Shelley is cradling the glass but not drinking. She looks tired, frazzled, the way she is sometimes when she works late at the bookstore and wants to complain to him about encounters with evil customers.
“You all right?” he says.
“I don’t want to do that again. Not ever.”
“I should have been the one to do it,” he says.
“Oh, Peter, that’s insane. You’re the last person on earth.” Now she drinks.
Of course she is right. He has imagined himself in Boston, sitting in the old Subaru at the edge of the clinic parking lot, watching Connie Lamontagne disappear behind the clinic doors—going in alone because of course her teacher dares not be mistaken for the father. The scene is vivid in his mind’s eye: only two or three other cars in the lot, the pavement gray and rain-washed, the clinic housed in a low, windowless building—the abattoir—that swallows up the forlorn child he has delivered a hundred awkward miles. No, he could never have mana
ged it; he truly is the last person on earth.
“Did you leave Connie in Boston?” It seems to him possible that she would need to recuperate, that the complex and delicate mechanisms of Woman would require time and quiet to recovery.
“No, no. I drove her home. She seemed fine.”
“What did you tell the parents?”
“Shopping trip,” Shelley says. “I bought her a cashmere sweater.”
“Was it difficult—the abortion thing?”
“It’s ridiculously simple,” Shelley says. “It makes you wonder.”
* * *
WHEN SHELLEY IS IN THE BIG BED beside him, propped against the pillows with her hair loose over her shoulders, she looks like the woman Peter knew nearly thirty years ago. No wonder he loves her; no wonder he wanted children with her. There is a photograph she sent him then—somewhere he still has it, squirreled away in the depths of a desk drawer—taken at the shore. She is lying on the beach at Ogunquit, left cheek resting against her right hand, palm flat against the smooth sand, her face sultry and lovely as a mermaid’s: this is what Peter sees, watching her now in the room’s dim lamplight. He realizes this is one more of those intimations of mortality that touch us as we age: how gravity favors us when our faces are turned upward; how it punishes us when we look down. It transcends religion, this awareness—or, he is beginning to think, it cries out for it.
They are both reading—or, rather, Peter has been pretending to read. The truth is that he is increasingly preoccupied with his work at school, and how in the few weeks since Connie’s confession the whole atmosphere of his vocation has changed. It is as if his renunciation of faith so many years back has finally had a consequence—a delayed revelation of what it means to reject even a disinterested God. Now he feels exiled, alone in a Ducharme community that had formerly nurtured him, fulfilled him, even kept him attached to Woman, as colleague, as pupil.
“I wonder if we did the right thing after all,” he says.
His wife lowers her magazine. “About what?”
“You know. Taking Connie to Boston,” as if Boston—like New York City in his youth—were the transgression, and the murder of a fetus merely incidental.
“I’ll say it again,” Shelley tells him. “She was too young to make the decision. She’ll thank us when she’s grown up.”
She raises the magazine, and Peter marvels at the difference between his wife and his colleague: how the one is so confidently dismissive of the case, while for the other there can be neither forgetting nor forgiving what Connie must have told her. Sister Mary Martha barely acknowledges him in the school corridors; she no longer speaks to him. He cannot even ask if Father Devon has heard the girl’s confession—if in spite of her actions she has been reconciled with the Church.
All Sister’s attentions are turned, apparently, toward Constance Lamontagne. The two appear inseparable; he scarcely ever sees one without the other. As for Connie, she has become only a vague recollection of closer times. Lately there have been no more notes, no more self-caricature with the squiggly hair, no more after-school interpretation of his aura. Peter has never known such loneliness.
Now, as he is about to put his book aside and turn out the light, he hears a siren outside. Fire truck, ambulance, Peter isn’t sure which, but on this crisp winter night just before Christmas, no wind, living as he does on the edge of town away from traffic, the siren sound is as clear as breaking crystal. Si-reen, say the town’s French-Canadian children.
He gets out of bed to look out the window. His wife closes her magazine.
“What’s that racket?” she says. “What’s going on?”
“Fire,” he says. “Must be big.”
Because now he hears a newer, closer siren. It dopplers past the house, and this means the fire equipment from Springvale, two miles north of Scoggin, has been called in. Standing at the bedroom window that faces toward the town center, Peter sees framed in a half-oval of frost at the bottom of the window pane a sky dancing with yellow-orange auras, like Northern Lights without the blue-green dazzle of arctic ice.
“I think it’s the school,” he tells her.
Shelley comes to the window and stands beside him. “My God,” she says. Her perfume—something lilac, lingering from her daytime self—is nearly aphrodisiac. He has to step away from the window, from his wife.
“I’m going to drive over. See what’s going on.”
He gets dressed, sweeps his keys off the dresser. As he leaves the room, his wife goes back to bed and picks up the novel he has been reading.
“Don’t lose my place,” he says.
* * *
HE PARKS THE SUBARU down the hill on Nason Street and trots toward the school. Even though the Scoggin fire station is only three short blocks away, he can see that the matter is hopeless. Flames are already leaping above the roofline, and heat has broken out the glass of all—or nearly all—the windows facing the street. There are fire trucks, police cars, precautionary ambulances ringing the area. Peter can see a pumper training water on the roof of the Knights of Columbus home behind the school, where the teaching brothers have upstairs apartments. Despite the late hour, a crowd has gathered, standing among the vehicles, fascinated by the fire. “It had to be the wiring,” somebody says. And another voice echoes: “They say it was wiring in the attic.” The attic, Peter knows, is where the archives are kept—the records of Maurice Ducharme, his faith, his celebrity, his school.
When the roof falls in there is an enormous increase in light and heat, a shower of great orange sparks, a flaring-up of yellow flame half again the height of the building. Everyone recoils from the event, falling back two or three steps, sending up a collective gasp of shock and fright. The heat is terrific, forcing the onlookers to retreat and turn their faces away. The light is for an instant physical; people in the crowd put their hands up to shield themselves. Peter can make out individual wooden beams, black and rimmed with small petals of flame, already burned out and useless for support. They fall in pairs and threes from the top of the school, down through the third, the second, the first floors, down into the below-ground church, where prayers have always begun every school day. He imagines his office falling, there, at that front corner of the school: the cluttered desk and the file cabinets, the chair where Connie sat weeping for being “stupid,” the steel bookcase with its anthologies and grammar texts and the Bible his mother gave him for his First Communion— the only religious relic he still kept.
He looks away from the school. His face turns cold, and in that sharpened instant he discovers Connie Lamontagne and Sister Mary Martha standing side by side. He wonders how long they’ve been here, only a few feet behind him, not joining him. Connie’s eyes are uplifted and bright with reflected fire, her young skin ruddy from flame, damp with perspiration; her mouth is half opened as if from surprise or delight—or as if she sees something more than fire, something that might make sense to Sister Mary Martha but seems now forever denied to him. The two women might be siblings, wrapped in each other’s arms, their eyes uplifted, their faces suffused—there is no better word—with the radiance of the flames. Peter tries to work his way to them through the crowd, but by the time he reaches the place where he saw them they are gone.
Driving home, he wonders how he will ever recover his center— that necessary still point around which his life has for so long traced its circles—now that the Ducharme community is homeless. He will see even less of Sister. He will rarely see Connie Lamontagne except in some unlikely classroom temporary and secular—the Town Hall auditorium, the Scoggin Trust Community Room, the basement of the Masonic Temple—each space echoing with the clatter and scrape of metal folding chairs. And what is it Peter imagines he needs? Pushing through the gawkers toward his lost women, perhaps he had only wanted to ask: But who will read your poems? And who will hear your secrets?
Mind’s Eye
The pain in his eyes was extraordinary, and because he couldn’t see, there was no distraction fr
om it. He couldn’t read a magazine or look around at the pictures on the walls of the waiting room. He couldn’t name the plants whose potted earth was a small but acrid odor in his nostrils. He couldn’t determine if the receptionist was the same one who had worked here the last time he had an eye exam. He could only sit, the faint aura of canned music washing over him, his daughter’s hand holding his, as if without her touch he might lose his nerve and run.
“How’re you doing?” she said.
“Hurting,” he said. “You can’t believe.”
“He’ll give you something for the pain. You’ll be fine.”
She patted his hand; the gesture made him feel like an old man, but he didn’t tell her that. He was glad for her help—coming when he called, driving him here—and it would have been ungrateful of him to be critical.
“I can use it,” he said.
Now a blur of white shimmered before him.
“Mr. Reece? We’re ready for you now.”
He stood, his hand still in his daughter’s. “Is it all right if Jenny stays with me?”
“Certainly.”
The doctor’s assistant preceded him. He let Jenny be his guide, steer him around whatever furniture might have got in his way.
“I hope you don’t mind being needed,” he said.
* * *
HE SAT IN A NARROW CHAIR that smelled of vinyl, waiting for Doctor Gavin to attend to him. Arthur Gavin was affable, conservative, an acquaintance and fellow country club member for twenty years, but never what you could call a close friend. He sat at a desk nearby, a shadow against a lamp, turning pages of some sort.
“Three years since your last exam, Hal,” Gavin said. “Almost four. Any problems? I mean until today.”
“None,” Reece said. “I’ve torn a couple of lenses, but I’m told that’s par for the course.”
He remembered his last visit, the end of it when the doctor switched on the overhead lights—how the examining room reappeared, beginning to seem familiar: the posters of cross-sectioned eyeballs, the cabinet slotted to hold steel-rimmed lenses, the caddy bearing its variety of eye drop vials. Dominating everything was wallpaper that depicted a nature scene—background mountains, foreground a rushing of blue and white rapids. Today all such detail was lost in a fog, mostly blue.
Who Will Hear Your Secrets? Page 6