I hesitated. Sister George nodded slowly. “Tell him what you’ve learned, Jessica. It’s alright. Just tell him what you know.” She put a hand on my head.
What I know, I mused silently. Here is what I know. “I have constellations and a sea on my ceiling. And animals and a clown there, too. I have Mother and Father, Nana and Ned, baby Jeanine and Cassidy. These are the things He made because He’s the Maker, the Assembler. That’s what He does. That’s His nature. To assemble. But He forgot my ears and my thumbs and the hair up your nose. Or He didn’t forget, He just wanted to leave them out. Whatever He makes, He does it just to make Himself happy. That’s why God made me. I make Him happy.” After a pause, I added, “That’s what Cassidy thinks, too.”
I felt Sister’s hand grow heavy on my head before she removed it. Father Murray raised an eyebrow. It looked like a pale quarter moon rising in the sky of dusk. “Joe Cassidy? Is it Joe Cassidy, now? Is that the Sadducee you learn from? Joe Cassidy?”
“Joe Cassidy.”
The priest dropped his arms and squared his shoulders. “I will not allow this candidate to go forward until I’ve met with her parents. I’m sorry, Sister, but this now borders on heresy.” He bent to retrieve his box, squared his skinny shoulders again and turned sharply away. I could see the dark wet circles of the sprinkled holy water like a pox on the light brown cardboard.
“What’s heresy?” I asked Sister George. Her maroon robes trembled like a bowl of black cherry Jell-O. All she did was shake her head and look sad.
The meeting was arranged for Monday night. Mother and Father didn’t want to tell Cassidy the real reason for it, but they needed him to babysit after supper. They told him, instead, they were going to an organizational meeting for all the parents of children preparing for First Holy Communion.
Cassidy was happy to stay. We fed Jeanine a bottle and I burped her on my lap. She was almost a year old by then, and felt heavy as an anchor on me. She had already learned the signs for “more” and “good” just by watching me. So I tried teaching her how to say “Mama” and “bottle” and “book.” “Bo-awk,” I’d say over and over. “Bo-awk,” holding Goodnight Moon between my palms for her to see. It made Mother laugh when Jeanine answered with a sound that wasn’t right. When Jeanine sat on my lap, she liked to stroke the slippery plastic of my left ear’s hearing aid. Her fat fingers would slide lightly over its arc, stop for a second, and slide back again, over and over, until she fell asleep. The movement caused me to hear a sound like the tumble and crash of the big breaking waves at the ocean, one after another, building, collapsing, crashing, retreating. She had Neptune’s hands, with fingers that sloshed the sea. It was beautiful.
That night she fell asleep doing just that to me. Cassidy carried her upstairs. We changed her diaper and put her in her crib. He boosted me up high enough to wind the pony mobile I had let her have. We left her door partly open to hear her if she cried.
We had just settled on the couch with a plate of chocolate after-dinner mints and The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends when I remembered the word.
“AceyDee, what is heresy?” He laughed so hard I could see his whole chocolate-covered tongue.
“Heresy, Jess, is somethin’ you never need ta think about. It’s for old folks, like me.”
“Father Murray said I border heresy. He told me yesterday.” Cassidy swallowed his candy fast and turned on the couch to look at me.
“He told you what?”
“That I border heresy.”
“Why would he say that?”
“I gave him the wrong answer in class. He asked me the second question in the Catechism and I gave him my own answer. He didn’t like it.”
“Why did God make you? That’s the second question, right?”
“To love Him and serve Him in this life so I can be happy with Him in the next. But I didn’t say that. What’s heresy?”
“It’s sayin’ something—well, probably it’s believin’ something—that’s contrary ta the Church’s teaching. What’d you say ta him in your answer?”
“That God made me to make Himself happy. That He just likes to make stuff. People and stars and babies. He makes them just the way He wants. Just to make Himself happy. He made Father Murray with no nose hairs. That makes God happy. A nose without hair where every other nose has it. It even makes me happy.” I thought for a second, shrugged my shoulders, and added, “Or maybe He just forgot to give it hair and He’s saying, ‘See, it doesn’t even matter. I’m still happy.’”
“Are your Ma and Pa meetin’ with him over the heresy just now, Jess? Is that why they’re out ta the church?”
“Sister gave me a note.”
He was quiet for a while, just sitting with the big book on his lap and his eyes narrowed to slits like the eyes of Cleopatra’s asp.
“Jess, don’t ever let a man of the cloth convince you otherwise about God and what He is, what He done and why. Just don’t. Anything you say about Him and His ways is as good as what those old, dried-up Pharisees have ta say. Especially Father Murray and that Father Larrie. They’re nothing but mouse farts in black sacks.”
“He told Sister I shouldn’t study anymore for my First Communion. He said I wasn’t ready.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. I began to open the book.
“What’s a Sadducee?” I asked him, just then remembering the word.
“Someone who don’t take any crap from a Pharisee,” Cassidy said. He looked off into the distance for a second, then down at the book. “Grendel,” he said low and rumbly. “Let’s read what happens ta Grendel.”
Beowulf reminded me of Theseus. I guessed both were Sadducees, like Cassidy.
I was in bed in the dark with my stars when Mother and Father returned. Even with my door closed, their voices were loud. “I will, too, Ford. I will, too! I’ll settle with Murray and then go on ta Larrie. I will!” Jeanine woke and cried for a minute and their voices faded. On my ceiling the constellations shone. They made me happy, the Horse, the Crab, both Bears, the Water Bearer. The joy I took from their existence convinced me I was right about God. Somehow, the stuff He made, stars and people, even Minotaurs and Grendels, made Him happy. Sometimes He was a show-off.
It was my short brown hair that finally got me expelled from the preparations for First Holy Communion a month later. Initially, Father Murray relented, at least a little bit, and let me continue taking instruction with the class. Provisional time, he called it during that meeting with Mother and Father and me later that week.
“Provisional, provisional time,” he intoned from behind his big black desk. I counted three crucifixes and seven likenesses of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He seemed to keep his head bent, reverently perhaps, in the presence of all that religious symbolism, but really maybe so I couldn’t look up there again. What he meant was another wrong answer, another lapse into shadowy theology, and I would be switched to a different and younger CCD group, forced to wait out the year singing and coloring. No white dress, no lace veil, no patent leather pumps, no red rose wrist corsage for me in May.
Every week he came into the room, skinny, pale, and pink as raw bacon, and asked his questions. Sister had drilled the answers into us the week before.
Who is God?
What is sin?
What is grace?
What is confession?
Who is man?
I did fine, always the first to be asked, the first to answer, the first to chant the responses: the Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen. (He made my unseen thumbs, or my thumbs unseen. But I held back.) Sister smiled. Father Murray nodded gravely, hoping for more. I stilled my lips.
It is an offense against the law of God. Venial sin is lesser, mortal is grave. (But truth was never a sin. Timmy was ugly. He was that, and fat, as I was deaf and shy of bones. No sin in any of that, I thought. But I held back.) Sister nodded. Father nodded. I nodded.
It is a sharing in the very life of God. Sanctifying. Sacr
amental. (But it was actual grace I prized, the grace in being. It was this I gave God, this grace from me to Him. What Maker doesn’t take the life and soul of all He makes to His heart? It’s what makes the Maker happy. But I held back.) Sister’s face was beatific, the priest’s soft as snow.
It is when we confess our sins to a priest and ask God’s forgiveness. (The hardest one, but I fought to contain myself. I prayed for grace. I was almost seven. I had been full of forgiveness since the moment of my birth. In the cold of the delivery room, with blue fingers, only eight, in the silence of the new breath in me, I had forgiven my doctor, had forgiven my God, for what I was, was not. I was proud of this. It was my first act of faith, my first creation, a forgiven God. But for Father Murray, forgiveness bent only in a single direction. My tongue was still.) Very good, said the nun. Yes, added Father Murray, his first word to me since provisional, provisional.
Man is a being created in the image and likeness of God. (The easiest one for me, because it explained so much about the Assembler, about me. If all men are created imperfect yet reflect the image of the Assembler, then He, too, surely must share in those same imperfections. Why else would He be so quick to forgive? Why else would we?) Yes, he said, we are all God’s children. More words that came without a smile.
Then, the following week, came transubstantiation. My undoing. It was the sixth Sunday in Provisional, Provisional Time. Sister George showed us the drawings of the priest consecrating the bread and the wine. She told us how that became the Body and the Blood of Jesus. Still looks like bread and wine, tastes like bread and wine, but the priest changed it into something entirely different, in a second, with some few words of blessing. Now the bread wasn’t bread, the wine wasn’t wine. The power of the priest’s blessing prevailed over the power of nature. I was fascinated. Transfixed, with the idea. The power of blessing over the power of nature.
That Sunday night and every night that week, I stood on the side of the tub and fixed myself in the mirror with my gaze. I could have worked on my too-small chin to enlarge it like Mother’s, or on my too-wide eyes to draw them closer like Father’s, or on my flopping ears. Instead, I extended my hands and fingers before me and blessed my reflection. “Platinum blond hair,” I intoned with the same grave authority I’d heard from the altar each Sunday. I moved my hands like the priest at Mass, slicing my fingers through the brittle, reflected air. “Below my ears and soft as cats’ fur,” I concluded my blessing.
I had hoped—no, expected—to wake and see the silver-yellow hair grown magically in the night. At four a.m., I watched Mother’s face as she accepted my water, hoping to see the surprise in her eyes. I returned to the bathroom and tried again. A new hairbrush I bought at the drugstore with Nana’s birthday money, a bright white one never before used, lay on the sink ready to stroke the long shiny strands to the blessed count of a hundred. I slept. Morning came and my mouse-brown hair sat like a mop on my head.
I was saddened by my old looks that first morning. Later, after school, I talked to Mother about what I was doing, and to Father over supper and to Cassidy between stories. Mother thought it was sweet, Father foolish, and Cassidy, a start.
“But you don’t need different hair now, Jess,” Mother said peeling potatoes at the sink. “And when you’re a grown-up woman you can grow it long and color it at the hairdresser’s.”
When, an hour later, I passed Father those same potatoes, albeit in a different state of being, now mashed with butter and sour cream, I asked him simply if transubstantiation would work on my hair. If I wanted it long and platinum blond. “Jess, we’re not much on that sort of foolishness in this family. Hair is what hair is, is what I think. You’ve got perfectly fine hair for a young girl. Don’t go thinking about dying it. In time it will naturally go to a shade lighter just like your Mom’s. Some of that gravy, please.”
As she handed him the boat, Mother’s eyes were fixed on mine.
Cassidy considered my question at length before replying. “I don’t see a change just yet, Jess. But it takes a priest years of trainin’ before he gets the hang of it. I say keep tryin’. What’s the harm in it?” He opened the book.
“Was the Minotaur transubstantiated?” I asked as he flipped through the colored pictures on the pages. “Did he start out as a bull and make himself half man? Or a man and make himself half bull?”
“I don’t think so, Jess. It’s just the way he was made right from the start. Maybe he’s meant ta show there’s some bad parts in all men. All people.” He looked at me as I fingered my hair where it came to the tops of my ears. “Could be a touch lighter, now that I study it. Hard ta say really. Where’d we leave off?”
“Jason has just taken the Golden Fleece.”
“So he has. So he did.”
Beginning that night, I added dimples to the blessing. I’d wanted them since Jeanine had been born. She had them and they made her look cute. What was the harm in trying? My fingers flashed and flew in the mirrored light, cutting away the unneeded flesh of both my cheeks, as, standing on the rim of the tub, I prayed the blessing for the loss of substance.
By Saturday night, though, a new thought had overtaken me as I stared at my familiar face in the mirror. Perhaps my hair had become as lustrous as that shiny silvery blond mane I wanted, but I just couldn’t see it. Just like the bread and the wine. It wasn’t a change you could see. Perhaps the nature of my hair had changed, but its outward sign remained the same. I sensed in my heart at that moment the full understanding of the mystery at hand and went armed with it to Sister’s class the next morning.
As always, we practiced our answers with her, in singsong unison, before Father Murray opened the classroom door, walking stiff as Moses’s staff, as if there were nothing more important in all the mystical world than reaching the Mount Horeb of a desk at the front of the room.
We stood and said together, “Good morning, Father Murray.” He smiled and gently touched the cross of his handheld rosary to his thin lips. “Good morning, children. Please take your seats.” Sister extended a hand toward us and we sat. “Well. Now you’ve had a full week to learn transubstantiation. I’m sure it will be an easy morning here then.” He walked to my desk. “Jennifer,” he said. I stood, only because his slitty pink eyes were fixed on my face. “What is meant by ‘transubstantiation’?” His eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. He repeated, “Transubstantiation.” The word was slow in coming out of his mouth, like a long train coming out of a tunnel.
I swear I didn’t mean to say it. But it was the sight of his nose hairs—I mean, the absence of their sighting—that spurred me on; the dark, devoid cave in the center of his face that pushed me. That and the error in my name, as if to him I had been transubstantiated into someone else entirely, a Jennifer. I thought all at once, “Maybe he does have nose hairs. Maybe he transubstantiated that hair-naked space into a garden of dense black growth, but no one can see it.” He was a priest, an old priest, after all, and well practiced in these things, an expert on transubstantiation. So I answered in a way I thought would impress him about my depth of understanding.
“I have platinum blond hair. And it’s long and soft, way past my ears. I did it every night last week. In the mirror in my bathroom, standing on the side of my tub. With my hands and a blessing.” I moved my hands in well-practiced slashes through space. “That’s what transubstantiation is. Changing things into other things. I bet you really have nose hair. You transubstantiated it, so it’s really there but we can’t see it. Transubstantiation. The power of blessing over the power of nature.” For effect, I fluffed the dagger ends of my new long locks with my fingertips. “Do you like my dimples?” I smiled coyly.
Father Murray’s face flashed. He started to point a bony finger at me but lowered his hand and took a big step back. “What?” he managed to say after a few deep breaths. “Hair and dimples? Transubstantiation? This is the kind of heresy that sends people to an eternity of Hell, Jennifer!” His voice rose in pitch.
“
Nobody goes to Hell,” I said with certainty. “Cassidy told me that. It doesn’t make sense that God would send anyone He made there. Even the Minotaur or Medusa. Especially the Minotaur. It wouldn’t be fair because that’s how the Assembler—uh, I mean God—made them. Imperfect in just the way He’s imperfect. So He’s got to forgive. And Cassidy says Hell doesn’t even exist.”
The priest’s breath stuck in his chest. Finally, he let it out. A little line of sweat had broken out on his neck, just above his white collar. “Oh, Hell exists, young lady. I assure you it exists. And it exists just for people like that drunkard Joe Cassidy. And you can tell him that the next time you see him for a discussion of theology!” He dug at his pale neck with the side of his thumb.
“But what about God’s forgiveness? He always forgives. He said so. And I forgive Him.” I held up my hands for the priest to see. “So we’re even.”
Father Murray bent low so his face was just opposite mine. Slowly, so the words were separated by great gulfs, he said, “Not. If. You. Go. To. Hell. There. Is. No. Forgiveness. In. Hell.”
Two or three of the other children had begun to giggle. A girl in the first row smiled and said, “Jessica’s going to Hell,” but Sister clapped her hands three times to get our attention. Even Father Murray rose from his crouch to look at her.
“Thank you, Father, for coming this morning. Perhaps we shall continue next Sunday. Time to sing some songs, children. Say good-bye to Father Murray.” She walked to the door and held it open. He left at a brisk pace. She slammed the door missing his retreating left heel by inches.
Since he was associate pastor of St. Anthony’s Church, Father Murray’s decision was law. I was not allowed to make my First Holy Communion the coming spring. I was sent back a class to relearn the dogma that had eluded me. He would follow my progress carefully before deciding to let me begin again on the route to that sacrament the next fall. He was worried, he told my parents, that my “mental capacity” was diminished to such an extent that I may never qualify for Communion. And he warned them, keep me away from unsavory, heretical influences. Pagan influences. The Minotaur. Medusa. In Heaven! “What kind of Heaven does she see,” he nearly shouted, “if it’s populated by monsters of myth and legend?”
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Page 13