by Mary Gordon
Hearing the sounds he does, he believes he has no choice; his immortal soul is at stake: eternal damnation. In November of 1938, he is baptized in the same church where Thomas Merton was welcomed into the Mystical Body of Christ. Seymour’s family, irreligious, had made money in the fur business. At his baptism, they not only cut him off without a penny, they sit shiva for him; they declare him dead. He declares this tolerable. All this time he has lightly courted Pearl Robbins, whom he has known since childhood: an orphan, brought up by an aunt. He persuades her to convert; having no family to sit shiva, it is not quite as difficult for her. He is what she has that is of value; he is luminous and her past is drab, confining: not much to give up.
To support his wife, to use his gifts for nourishment of the Mystical Body of which he is now a member, Seymour Meyers starts a business in religious art. He is determined to take a stand against the vulgar taste of immigrants and their instinct to display the most gross of what the religious imagination of Europe has reproduced, rejecting the finely wrought, the austere line, the demanding countenance. Their cloying taste for sentimental pieties, which he thought they often confused with food: girly haired Sacred Hearts pointing to their chests at something the shape of a pimento, fat-faced Madonnas on clouds that looked as if they had been carved from marzipan. Statues of the Infant of Prague, dressed by women like dolls whose costumes they changed with the season: green for Pentecost, white for Easter, purple for Lent. The faithful were starved for beauty; he would feed them with the bread of angels. He named his company Panis Angelicus, Inc. He specialized at first in Eric Gill woodcuts, Dürer engravings, birthday cards of Fra Angelico’s annunciation: the shy Madonna, the angel strong in his news-bearing, his wings a striped marmoreal construction: green, red, peach, white, yellow. Oh, but the faithful did not want his food, so he convinced himself that he must train their appetite slowly: gradually, over the years. He included in his stock Carlo Dolci and Guido Reni, and then miraculous medals and then holy-water fonts in the shape of a lamb (glowing in the dark), rulers with the Ten Commandments printed on them, planters in the form of the Virgin’s head (a slot in the back of the neck for soil and philodendra). But in his mind he was the purveyor of the work of the great masters of religious art; when the time came to stock Christmas cards of Sister Corita’s penmanship and ones with a flower saying War is not healthy for children and other living things, Seymour Meyers filled the order forms, pretending he was not, casting his eye on the Byzantine image of Christ Pancreator, suitable for framing, 8 by 10, or laminated, 2 by 3, perfect for wallet or purse. Later, when the church, probably because of birth control, was losing its share of the consumer market (people didn’t parade their Catholicism as they used to, either in decoration, jewelry, sacred images for hallway or living room, or birthday and anniversary gifts; fewer Catholics had their children baptized or confirmed), the business did not go under. A commercial crisis might have undone Panis Angelicus, Inc., as it had undone others, had not Joseph, in the seventies, eighties, and now the nineties, branched out into less sectarian realms, adding to his stock Serenity Prayer mugs, angel pins, Velcro hearts that said I’M SPECIAL CHRIST DIED FOR ME, and chip clips (available to match the colors of Dorito bags) with the name JESUS embossed on the plastic in white script.
But enough about the business. We’ll get on with the story. With one of the stories. For now we again take up the chronicle.
Maria Meyers grew up a wealthy Catholic child in the suburbs of New York City in the 1950s, a successful and triumphalist period for both the United States of America and the Catholic Church, no longer adversaries but linked in their determined hatred of Russian communism.
You must understand something of the history of that time, of the intersection in those years between the United States of America and the Roman Catholic Church, to understand Maria and Joseph and Pearl.
You will remember that both Maria and her father and Joseph and his mother lived in Seymour Meyers’s house in Larchmont. The 1950s were famous for unexcitement. Maria and Joseph are good children, good students, and do not make public trouble; Maria and Joseph’s mother dislike each other to the point of silent hatred, but these are years in which such secrets are not made public but are feverishly kept.
Then it is 1958: John XXIII is elected to the papacy; and 1960: John F. Kennedy is elected to the U.S. presidency.
In the fall of 1961, Maria became the special pet of Sister Berchmans, to whom she confided everything. In those years, there was great glamour in being the pet of a particular nun, especially if she was considered demanding or difficult. And in those years, there was a particular strictness, a particular anxiety, about the chastity of young girls in the world at large, but in a special way in the world presided over by priests like Father John Lynch and nuns like Sister Berchmans, of Sts. Cosmos and Damian Church and School.
Maria trusted Sister Berchmans and wanted to please her. To please her and to entertain her. To bring her the sweets of the outside world. Oh, they knew how to get you, did nuns like Sister Berchmans. They encouraged you to tell them everything and made you feel you were safe because you were special to them. They gave you little privileges: a visit to the nuns’ private chapel; a holy card with their signature on the back, in perfect blue-black script, the name preceded by a cross. They encouraged you to chatter. Sister Berchmans was fascinated by Maria’s father. For that kind of nun or priest in those days, a Jewish convert was a particular prize. “Your father is a very distinguished man,” she said. “It’s a high standard to live up to. But with God’s help” or “with the dear Lord’s blessing . . .”
It’s certainly possible that Maria enjoyed the suspicion that her father made Sister Berchmans feel a little worried about herself, maybe a tiny bit inadequate. If her father could do that and she was his daughter—that was a sentence she was afraid to finish for herself, even in the silence of her own vain heart. Oh, I must tell you that in those days she was very vain. The incomparable vanity of the pious adolescent. But they bred it in girls like Maria.
It was an impulse born of the diction of saints’ lives that made her say to Sister Berchmans, “Oh, but you know my father can be a lot of fun too.” She blames herself for wanting to tell the nun stories. She believes everything that followed sprang from that: the impulse to entertain, to impress the nun with tales, in the shape of the Lives of the Saints. Because she forgot herself; she lost herself in the story, not remembering that with nuns and priests you always had to be on the alert, because at any minute the gate could come down and the person you’d just been chattering with could bring into the room the whole authority of Rome. The Holy Roman Empire. Just when you’d been eating chocolate chip cookies or talking about My Fair Lady or a hat you’d seen in a store window or the Dodgers winning the World Series or your favorite shade of blue or the flowers that bloom in the spring.
Sister Berchmans loved the story about Dr. Meyers and Joseph and Maria in Rumpelmayer’s. Maria described the room; it was like a doll’s room, pink and white and ribboned, a room that looked like you could eat the whole thing up. “My father ordered cream puffs and hot chocolate for us. He put on his very serious face. ‘It is important,’ he said, ‘to know exactly how to eat a cream puff. When I was in Paris, very great ladies would say to me, C’est de la plus grand importance savoir manger un cream puff comme il faut.’” She told Sister Berchmans how he kept his pretend-serious face on and cut into one cream puff deliberately, carving up pieces with the right mixture of pastry and cream, then popping them into his mouth like Charlie Chaplin. “My dear children,” he said. “It takes a lot of practice. You must eat many, many cream puffs before you can truly say you know how to eat them comme il faut.”
She told how he ordered one cream puff for each of them and then said, “That’s good, that’s good; you’re getting the idea but I don’t think it’s quite yet comme il faut.” And he kept his serious face on, almost an angry face, and ordered another for them, and another, and then when h
e saw they were completely stuffed he said, “Ah, I think you’re getting there. You’re learning the fine art of eating cream puffs comme il faut.”
Oh, she was really getting into her saint’s-life narrative, saying, “He takes us to Laurel and Hardy movies, Three Stooges movies, and he laughs so hard we have to pound him on the back.” And, letting her know his tender side, “He’s very kind when I’m sick or anything,” painting her a domestic scene by Chardin of the time she and Joseph had had scarlet fever and had to stay at home for a week. “One night, we couldn’t sleep because we’d slept so much during the day,” she said to Sister Berchmans. All her life, she has been able to recall that feeling of feverish wakefulness, her eyes pressing out past the bones of her skull, pushed out as if on stalks, her hot restless body longing for sleep yet excited by its own overalertness; frightened too by the numbers on the thermometer going up, up, up.
She tells Sister Berchmans her father let her and Joseph lie on his bed. “He read us Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.” Purposely naming the author: with nuns you could at any moment come upon a pocket of virtuous ignorance. She didn’t admit that Ivanhoe bored her; it is a famous book, an important book, and Joseph and her father like it, so she will not allow herself to understand that she is bored with it; she tells herself that what she’s feeling isn’t boredom but something else, something whose name she doesn’t know, because books are never boring and if her father and Joseph are interested it must be interesting, and what she is feeling is not important or not real but has to do with the fever.
“You and Joseph were lying on the bed together?”
Her alarm, then, seeing the nun thinks it’s wrong, realizing she should have known it.
“It was my father’s bed. Joseph’s and my rooms are next to each other and my father’s is across the hall. He could hear we were awake.”
“Your rooms are next to each other?”
A knife falls down between them.
“Your father has been very kind to Joseph and his mother. I’m sure they’re very grateful.”
“They’re like our family.”
She said that because she thought it was something the nun could understand, and she was hoping it would make her forget that there was something bad about her and Joseph lying on her father’s bed. But the minute Sister Berchmans asked the question—“Your rooms are next to each other?”—Maria knew it was wrong, although it wasn’t wrong before, so it was wrong but it wasn’t wrong, and for the first time in her life Maria experienced moral confusion. So she said, “Joseph is like a brother to me, we’re like brother and sister,” and Sister Berchmans said, “I’m sure.”
Maria saw the light glint off her rimless glasses and took in for the first time that the nun had some darkish hairs on her upper lip. And she knew that she and Joseph were in danger, and she had put them there.
It wasn’t long after that conversation with Sister Berchmans that Maria’s father took Joseph to the city, just the two of them.
When they came home, her father looked a little flushed and Joseph looked sick. He went right up to his room. When she knocked on the door, he said he was busy. Then she realized he was crying. When she went into her own room, she could hear his sobs through the wall. Joseph rarely cried, even as a child, and when he did his tears were modest, reluctant, whereas Maria’s were loud and violent.
Joseph still looked punished when he came down for dinner. Maria’s father tapped his water glass with a knife, as if demanding silence. But no one had been saying anything.
“I have an exciting announcement. Joseph and I had a marvelous adventure today. Today we met Brother Raphael, the head of Portsmouth Priory. Starting in September, Joseph will have the privilege of studying with the brothers at the finest boys’ school in America.”
Maria jumped up and stood close to her father, closer than he liked. “Joseph will be going away to school?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you doing this?” she shouted at her father.
“It’s a great opportunity for Joseph.”
And then she knew he was a liar, and she hated liars, and she saw his cruelty, and the cruelty of Sister Berchmans and Father Lynch, the cruelty of a whole way of life, a way that believed in purity and punishment, and she understood that this was happening because people, starting with Sister Berchmans, thought it was wrong that they were a boy and girl not related living in the same house. And this had happened because she trusted Sister Berchmans, who was unworthy of trust. She would never forgive them, any of them.
And she never has.
. . .
These were the Kennedy years, when people of Maria’s age dreamed of going into the Peace Corps, dreamed of facing down Bull Connor’s dogs and Lester Maddox’s hatchets. Maria saw Joseph’s being sent away as an injustice she must stand up against. If her father could be untruthful, she could, in the name of justice, be the same. If Joseph was being banished, she would see that she was banished too. She told her father it wasn’t fair: if Joseph was being given the opportunity for the finest education in the world for young men, she should be given the opportunity to have the finest Catholic education available to young women. She presented him with brochures for the Sacred Heart School in Noroton, Connecticut. She had chosen that school particularly because she knew it would appeal to her father’s Europhilic fantasies: the madames of the Sacred Heart, a French order (she didn’t know that almost all the nuns were Irish), with holidays called congés and four years of compulsory Latin.
Her father was in no position to refuse her. And so he lost her, and she lost her childhood faith in her father’s word. She believes she gave up her old love for him in the name of justice, in the name of standing beside Joseph. But none of this would have happened if the times were not as they were, in the reign of John F. Kennedy and John XXIII, when the glamorous dreams were of tipping the scales of justice but the chastity of young girls was considered fragile and beyond price.
. . .
Now we are in September 1962. Maria starts school at Noroton. For the first time she has friends, friends who are girls. For the first time she thinks of herself as one among many. These are the years for this, when many people think of we as opposed to they, whom we shall overcome.
Maria learns the joy of having friends, a joy she will never lose. She and her friends try to copy Joan Baez. They sing “I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow,” “I Was Born in East Virginia,” and “Long Black Veil” and iron their hair so it will look like Joan Baez’s (it never does), but only on the weekends when they go to someone’s house, because the nuns won’t allow hair ironing. Maria and her friends form a folk group, The Poor Girls, because to perform they wear herringbone skirts and poor-boy sweaters, short-sleeved ribbed sweaters that are the rage. Maria is happy wearing something that is the rage, happy shopping at Orbach’s and B. Altman on the weekends with her friends, sometimes even at Bloomingdale’s.
Maria and her girlfriends sail through stores like heiresses, buying their too-short skirts—or skirts the older nuns think are too short. But not their champion, Mother Dulcissima, who does not accuse them of anything and encourages The Poor Girls to sing at folk masses, which are allowed once a month. They make up liturgical words to Peter, Paul, and Mary songs: “Take this bread and take this wine and take our hearts and take our minds.” They sing this to the tune of “500 Miles.” Maria’s father abhors all liturgical reform and, most of all, folk masses. He travels to the city every Sunday for a Latin mass.
Her life is her friends. They think of their lives as a wonderful movie, perhaps a musical; at least a film with a great sound track.
Then it is November 1963. The president is shot. The palette of the world darkens. The music is silence; silence goes around the world, or if there is sound it is the sound of taps or bagpipes. For months, everyone moves as if they’d been the victims of a crippling blow. The world is not as they had thought, but still they think they can change it.
Maria and her friends a
re the heads of everything, presidents of everything. They have the solos in the glee club; they are the stars of the plays, the captains of the debate team and the basketball team and the volleyball team. They believe that one of them will be president of the United States, one will cure cancer, one will be the female Picasso. Maria, since she is thought of as a poet, will be the female e. e. cummings. They mention their femaleness in their plans for themselves; they know it is a factor, but they don’t know how, only that they don’t want to be boys and yet everyone they think is important is a man.
They rarely see boys, sometimes to debate in debate club or to sing with in glee club; there are dances, longed for, dreamed over, always disappointing. The boys are sweaty in their herringbone jackets; they spill punch, they drop potato chips and crush them into the floor with the soles of their desert boots. Their jokes are stupid. Everyone is in love with one or two of them, but they have girlfriends, girls who have no time for other girls. Maria and her friends dream of sex, but only as an accompaniment to their dreams of the great world. Their dreams of sex are mainly about kissing or about the moments after sex. Their images of themselves as great lovers are taken from the book in Mother Dulcissima’s homeroom, The Family of Man. In their dreams, they are not themselves, they are the black woman in the photograph in the book, gripping a lover’s back with strong red fingernails; they are the Parisian woman in the raincoat and high heels being kissed on the Champs-Élysées. They don’t know what the Champs-Élysées looks like, but it sounds like the right place to be kissed in Paris. Or they are Cathy Earnshaw, and Heathcliff is on a motorcycle. Or they are the girl at the edge of the sea in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; they are Holly Golightly, but only on the fire escape in the rain; or Jackie Kennedy, but only at the grave. They are Franny in Franny and Zooey. They are ancient peasant women surrounded by grandchildren who kiss their gnarled hands.