by Mary Gordon
But she had been right to talk about it that light way. It made Moe feel that he could talk about it, it was not so terrible. “The way I figure, honey,” Moe said, “is live and let live. But personally I don't get it. Once a Jew always a Jew. Ask the late Mr. Hitler.”
“Oh, if the Germans won the war, my father and I would have been sent to concentration camps. We would have died together,” Maria said, her eyes getting tearful. Which was the kind of thing that made Moe love her. And made Joseph feel if that had happened, he would go with them, Maria and her father, and would die with them, suffer their same fate. But what would happen to his mother?
Moe had no idea that when Maria asked him all those things about the temple and the services she was planning to sneak in. Joseph had no idea himself, and when she told him, he was shocked. Didn't she know that Catholics were forbidden to attend the services of other faiths? And they would be sure to be found out. Moe said that there were people in the back collecting tickets.
“Listen, dodo,” she said, “we'll wait till it's started. Way started. Then we'll sneak up to that balcony Moe said there was. With the people that have no tickets. Everyone'll be paying attention to the service. It's a very sad day. The day of atonement.”
“But we won't know what to wear or what to do. I don't have one of those little hats.”
“A yarmulke,” she said, casually, as if she'd used the word every day of her life. “It's a reform temple. You don't need one.”
“It's a terrible idea,” he said, stamping his foot and feeling close to tears, because he knew he couldn't stop her.
“All right, don't go. I'll go myself. It's not your heritage anyway.”
He couldn't let her go. To let her go meant he was not a part of her, her life, her past, her family. And then suppose she got in trouble. He could not leave her alone.
The plan worked perfectly. They waited ten minutes after the last person had gone into the temple. Carefully, they opened up the heavy door and saw the staircase to the balcony, just as Moe had described it. No one saw them climb the stairs or sit in the last seat in the back. How happy she seemed then, her face filmed with the lightest sweat, the down above her lips just moistened, her eyes shining with the look he knew so well: her look of triumph. They watched below. The man who sang, whom Moe had called the cantor, had the most beautiful voice Joseph had ever heard. The cantor's voice made him forget Maria. He rode the music, let it carry him. The sadness and the loneliness, the darkness and the hope. The winding music, thick and secret. Like the secrets of his heart. The secrets he had had to keep from everyone, that he would have to keep forever. When he felt Maria pulling at his arm, he realized that for the first time in his life when he was with her he had forgotten she was there.
“Let's go,” she whispered silently.
“Why?” he mouthed at her. He didn't want to go.
“I hate this. I'm leaving.”
He knew he must leave with her. It was the reason he was here, to be with her, and to protect her if danger came. He couldn't leave her now, and she had broken it, the ladder of the music. He had lost his footing; now he must drop down.
When they got outside, she ran away from him. He ran after, knowing he couldn't catch her, waiting for her to be out of breath. When he caught up to her, he saw that she was crying.
“I hated it. It was so dark and ugly. It was disgusting. Let's not talk about it ever again. Let's just forget we ever did it.”
“Okay,” he said. He let her run home by herself.
But he did not forget it, the dark secret music, like the secrets of his heart. The music that traveled to a God who listened, distant and invisible, and heard the sins of men and their atonement in the darkness and in darkness would forgive or not forgive. But would give back to men the music they sent up, a thick braid of justice and kept promises and somber hope.
He knew she didn't like it because it was nothing like the music that she loved, the nuns’ high voices that had changed her life, that made her know that she would never marry but would join them, singing in the convent, lifting up to God those voices which except for these times were silent the whole day. That day in the convent she was far away from him, and knew it, and looked down at him from the lit mountain on whose top she stood, and kept him from the women's voices, rising by themselves into the air, so weightless, neither hopeful nor unhopeful, neither sorrowing nor free from sorrow, only rising, rising without effort above everything that made up life. You never saw the faces of the women who made these sounds that rose up, hovered high above their heads and disappeared. You saw only the light that struck the floor, shot through the blue glass and the red glass of the windows, slowed down, thickened, landing finally as oblong jewels on the wooden floor. He saw Maria rise up on the breaths of the faceless nuns, rise up and leave him, leave the body that ran and knocked down, that lay on the grass. The body she loved that did always what she told it, that could dance and climb or run behind him and put cool hands over his eyes and say “Guess who?” as if it could be someone different. But in the chapel she rose up and wanted to leave the body life that she had loved. Leave him and all their life together. The men singing in the temple did not want to rise up and leave. And that was why he liked them better. And why she did not.
They heard the nuns’ music the day Sister Lucy was professed. Sister Lucy who had been Louise La Marr and who had worked for Dr. Meyers. For five years she had been his secretary. “She was, of course, much more than a secretary. I deferred to her in so many questions of taste,” Dr. Meyers had said. Neither Joseph nor Maria remembered her very well; they had been seven when she entered Carmel, and she'd not made much of an impression. “God, when I think she was right there, right in my father's office, and I didn't talk to her. I didn't pay attention to her. But that's the way it is with saints, from what I've read,” Maria said.
Maria had begun reading all the books she could get about cloistered nuns. She would come to Joseph, holding in her hands the story of a Mexican woman who had seen the Virgin Mary, a French woman a hundred years dead, a Spanish woman whose father had been a count, and say, “Listen to this. Do you think it sounds like me?” Of course it would sound nothing like her, but he saw how much she wanted it and he'd say, “I think so. Yes. The part when she was young, our age, sounds like you.”
Then she would slap the book against the outside of her thigh, the front, the back, twisting her wrist. Then she would lie down on his bed or on the floor and put her hands behind her head and look up dreamily toward the ceiling. “I know they'll let me write to you in Carmel,” she would say, “so don't worry. We'll always be best friends. Even though we'll never see each other again. Except through the grille. The last time we'll see each other without the grille will be the day of my profession.” Then she would rise away from him, rise up into that world that was the breath of all those women, whose faces were never seen by men.
It was the end of everything, he understood now, her idea to join the convent. It was the first thing of hers he couldn't be a part of, the first thing that she kept back. He'd always known that there were things she hadn't told him before, things she thought about his mother, for example. But he had understood that. Always before, when they were together something pushed forward, pushed against him. She was always running toward him, running away from something else, something she didn't like, or was afraid of, or was bored by, or despised. And then, whatever she ran from became theirs: they opened it, like a surprise lunch, devoured it, took it in. Nothing was wasted; nothing could not be used. With her the hurts, the slights, the mockery of boys who found his life ridiculous, his mother's mistakes and tricks and hatreds, his sense that he was in the eyes of God unworthy, and in the eyes of man a million times inferior to the Meyers, all meant nothing when he was with Maria. Over all that she threw the rich cloak of her fantasy and all her body life.
Now she was taking back the cloak. Bit by bit she pulled it, leaving naked the poor flesh of all his doubts and fai
lures and his fears. She began spending hours with Sister Berchmans, who had terrified them both. But now Maria said that Sister Berchmans was her spiritual adviser and a saint. Maria said that Sister had confided to her that she knew she frightened the children, but it was because she felt she must be distant to avoid establishing particular affections for her students, which would get in the way of her life with God. Maria said she wouldn't be surprised if Sister Berchmans entered Carmel, although it was nothing the nun had said, it was an idea that Maria had picked up “from certain hints which I'm not free to tell you.”
For the first time, he disliked Maria, when she made her lips small and her eyes downcast and spoke of Sister Berchmans and the letters Sister Lucy had sent her “which I don't feel free to show.” To punish her, he became friends with Ronald Smalley, who collected rocks and vied with Joseph for the eighth-grade mathematics prize. When he came home one day, holding a crystal of rose quartz, she mooned around him asking what he did at Ronald's house. “Nothing,” he said, to taunt her.
“You're disgusting,” she said, stamping her foot. “You don't even care that I had a completely disgusting time here all alone on this rotten Sunday while you were off with your stupid friend and his disgusting rocks.”
But to please her he gave up Ronald. And she was pleased, and he was pleased to know that he had pleased her. For she had no friends; she could not keep a friend. When she tried to make a friend, the friendship ended sharply, and with grief. For no one but he understood her, he felt, and for the gift of her was willing to put up with her tempers and her scenes. For he knew that to keep them together she kept silent about his mother, kept silent so he would not be sent away. So she was his. His and her father's. And now Sister Berchmans's, who must keep herself for God.
But he suspected it was Sister Berchmans at the back of everything. Her white face looking out at him from her white coif. What did she see when she looked at him? And what had she told Dr. Meyers? Or did she never dare to speak to Dr. Meyers; had she spoken only in confession to Father Cunningham, who did the nun's bidding like a boy?
Joseph knew it was her fault. Because Maria told her things, and she had got things wrong. He knew the nun had spoken in confession, and then Father Cunningham had come to Dr. Meyers, and now everything was gone. He looked up at his mother, now, holding the Meyerses’ laundry.
“Look, it's not the end of the world. For me, it's a good thing. Listen, Butch, for both of us. A house to call our own. With my name on the deed. No one else's, only mine. And yours, someday, if you don't leave your mother in the lurch.”
They were sending him away, though they were keeping on his mother. Every day his mother could come back here to their home, the white house with the green shutters, the green-striped awning in the summer and the screened-in porch that in the winter turned into a house of glass. But how could he come back? He would have no part in the house now. What had been his room would become— what? What did they need a new room for, what could they do with his when they already had so many? The library and Dr. Meyers's study, Maria's room, the playroom (now their toys were gone and workmen years ago set up a Ping-Pong table there), his mother's laundry room, her sitting room (though never once in all the years had she had a guest). Would the Meyerses move from the house themselves? Would they buy some place smaller, thinking to themselves, “Now Joseph and his mother are not here the house is wrong for us”? No, they would never leave the library with its bookshelves specially made, the deep shadowy garden with its daylilies and columbines, the willow that grew roots into the plumbing that Maria made her father promise never to cut down. No, they would never leave the house. It was their home.
But he had thought it was his home. What would he be allowed to take from this house with him? They had come, his mother often told him (he could not remember coming here), with nothing. And where had all the things he had lived with come from? The dresser and the beds, the Fra Angelico Madonna, the picture of the squirrel by Dürer and the horse by Stubbs, the paperweight that dropped white snow on the standing boy? He asked his mother which of all these things were theirs.
“You've got a head on your shoulders, I'll tell you that,” she said. “It's good stuff, the stuff in your room. I've got an eye for things like that, and I can tell you. Ask him to tell you, when he takes you on this little trip with the priest. Ask him if you can take the stuff in your room. But don't tell him that I told you first.”
Dr. Meyers had arranged for Joseph and himself to go on a weekend retreat with the Passionists in Springfield, Massachusetts. He had told Joseph's mother he would tell Joseph about his decision, his decision that they would have to leave the house. But he had asked Joseph's mother to keep quiet, to let him tell Joseph himself. But she had not kept quiet. She had told him: they are sending you away.
“I guess they want to get rid of you before the two of you get any bright ideas. Of course, she'd be the one to think it up, but you'd be the one to get the blame.”
His mother was right: Maria was the one with bright ideas, ideas that rose up, silver in a dark sky, shimmered and then flew
“It's like he just noticed what you've got between your legs. Like he just figured out she don't have the same thing between hers. Or maybe he needed the priest to tell him.”
Put the clothes down, Mother, he wanted to say. You have no right to touch them. You are filthy, with your red hair that you dye one Sunday night a month, with your fat body and your ugly clothes, your red hands and your yellow teeth. And with your filthy heart. The thing he had between his legs, his shame, that did things he could not help, that left the evidence of all he wished he could not be, the body life that he, because he was her son, was doomed to. And his mother knew, she found the evidence, the sheets, showing the thing he could not help, there in the morning. It all happened while he slept, and not his fault, even the priest said not his fault. But still it happened, all because he was her son. And now they knew, and they were sending him away. Because they did not want him in the house now with Maria. But Maria had nothing to do with all that. She hovered above it, like a nun, a saint. He prayed that they would never tell her, she would never know the things they knew about him. Perhaps if he left and said nothing they would not tell.
“I guess you're okay to be her playmate, but God forbid anything else. And for a husband, let's face it, he's got something better in mind than some dumb Polack whose mother washed his shitty underwear for ten years straight.”
Why wouldn't she stop talking? He wanted something terrible to happen. She wouldn't be quiet till he said something to make her.
“Maria doesn't want to get married,” he said, quietly so she would not know how he hated her and how he dreaded living with her by themselves in some house that belonged to her alone. “She's going to be a nun.”
Joseph's mother snorted. Her lips lifted and she showed her yellow teeth. He thought of Maria's mother in the photograph, her sad face frowning, looked at his mother, snorting, throwing laundry into the machine and wondered how it was that he could be her son.
“Wise up, buddy. There's no convent in the world that would take that one.”
He was almost as tall as his mother. She could say anything about him, terrible things, he wouldn't answer back. But she could not say things about Maria.
“Sister Berchmans said they'd take her when she finished school.”
“The nun tell you that?”
“No, but I know it's true.”
“Yeah, and you can buy the Brooklyn Bridge for fifteen bucks. Listen, nobody tells you this, or tells them it, because they're too polite. But they don't take Jews in the convent. And she'll always be a Jew.”
“You made that up. Who told you that?” he said. Now he was shouting at his mother. Now he clenched his fists. It was the first time in his life that he had clenched his fists at her. And it just made her laugh.
“Just look at them, those nuns. Just look at all their faces. Ever see a face like hers? Just think about it.
She'll find out and get her heart broken to boot, but it'll be too late. All his money won't be able to buy her way in. ‘Cause they don't let them in.”
She poked her finger at his chest. They. Don't. Let. Them. In. Each word the blow she wanted it to be. Could she be right? They wouldn't be so terrible. Was it the word of God? The God who sent unbaptized babies down to limbo? Who would separate a mother and a child because no water had been poured. He mustn't think about it. It was the sacrament of baptism he thought of. The indelible, fixed sign.
Was there a sign on them because their blood was Jewish? No, it couldn't be. He would find out from Dr. Meyers. He would ask him a clever way. This weekend at the monastery, when they were alone.
He packed his suitcase for himself. Pajamas, underwear, a shirt, his slippers. Then he packed an extra pair of pajamas. In case it happened. That thing in the night.
Maria was angry when they left. She dreaded being home for a whole weekend with Joseph's mother. But where could she go? She had no friends. She couldn't go to Sister Berchmans. For a moment Joseph was glad, then he hated the thought of her alone with his mother. He was glad when Dr. Meyers left her money for the movies and suggested she go to the library. She brightened at the thought of that. Then she would go to Moe's, she said, “and get a double black-and-white and think of you two fasting.”