Household Saints

by Francine Prose

  But what did any of this have to do with the future of Catholic education? And how could she tell a roomful of college students that she had sworn off television because the contents of the Fatima letter were never revealed?

  Distracted by these questions, Theresa couldn’t concentrate on the opening panel and didn’t begin to relax till the audience broke up into small discussion groups and it became clear that the leader of Theresa’s group—a young man who smoothly introduced himself as Leonard Villanova, a second-year law student at St. John’s—planned to do all the talking.

  Leonard Villanova was an expert talker. He spoke like the former Loyola High debating team captain he was, like the Jesuit he was in his secret heart. In one sentence, he could propose theories, suggest alternatives, weigh their merits, and ask pertinent questions which he answered with dozens of appropriate examples. Leonard had the facts at his command—statistics, percentages, television sets per capita, television hours per family per week. To hear Leonard talk, you would have thought that there was nothing in the world but television.

  Theresa was happy to listen to him; she certainly had nothing to say. And though she was impressed by his eloquence and knowledge, she was not nearly so impressed by Leonard. A gangly boy with tortoiseshell glasses and a greased-up brush of dark hair, he was wearing a button-down shirt, a frayed crewneck sweater, khaki chinos too short by at least an inch. Watching him, Theresa thought it a pity that Leonard didn’t know as much about personal grooming as he knew about television. His face was pocked with shallow pits, his cheeks covered with a faint oily down, as if they were still too tender from a recent bout with acne for Leonard to risk shaving.

  Ashamed to be entertaining such unworthy thoughts about someone who was putting himself to so much trouble, Theresa forced herself to stare straight at Leonard with the open steady gaze which she could envision St. Therese bestowing on a loyal and treasured brother.

  Theresa’s stare attracted Leonard’s attention, but he failed to identify it as a saintly look and thought that she was trying to pick him up.

  As soon as the discussion group ended, Leonard approached Theresa, reached behind her and rather clumsily helped her into her coat. Faking a boldness which he did not feel but imagined he saw on Theresa’s face, he asked if she would like to join him for a cup of coffee at the Automat.

  Right away, Theresa recognized Leonard as an expert at taking girls for coffee at the cafeteria—an expert at door-holding, at plucking a tray off the stack in such a way that she knew not to bother getting one for herself, at guiding her through the line, asking how she took her coffee and paying before she could reach into her purse. Not only did he steer her expertly through the cavernous restaurant, but his expertise seemed to come naturally. For when Theresa asked him if he went there often, he shook his head and said, “Of course not.”

  And yet for all that, Theresa was unimpressed by his worldliness, unmoved when he smiled conspiratorially and called the other students at the retreat a bunch of idiots who deserved to spend their lives teaching Catholic school. She was not even stirred by the one thing which—given her own belief in the importance of a conscious life-plan—should have impressed her most: Within the first five minutes of their conversation, Leonard had outlined an elaborate plan for the rest of his life. This scheme included a St. John’s law degree, a Lincoln Continental, a family, a town-house in the East Eighties, a summer place in the Hamptons, membership in a dozen clubs which had never admitted Italians, and a brilliant career in the new and wide-open field of television law.

  “You mean like Perry Mason?” Theresa knew that this was not what Leonard meant, but it was all she could think of to say.

  Leonard laughed—a tight, strained chuckle, high in his throat.

  “That’s good. Very good. But not quite what I had in mind. I’d be strictly behind the scenes.”

  “Behind the scenes?”

  “Behind a big fancy desk on the top floor of Rockefeller Center.” After a moment, Leonard said, “And you? No doubt you have plans of your own?”

  “No. Not me.”

  “Come on now. It’s a lawyer’s business to read human nature, and the minute I saw you at that discussion group, I thought, ‘There’s a girl who knows what she wants and knows how to get it.’”

  “Me?” Theresa was shocked. “I wish I did.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Leonard leaned across the table. Theresa couldn’t look at him.

  “I guess what I want …” She stopped. “What I really wanted was to go into the convent.”

  There was a long silence, and suddenly Theresa was afraid that Leonard was regretting the money he’d spent on her coffee. This possibility so dismayed her that she would have said anything. What she did say was, “I just wanted to serve God the best way I could. Ever since I read about St. Therese—”

  “Ah ha! The Little Flower! So you’re one of those!”

  “One of whiches?” Were there others like her?

  “The Little Flowers. Half the girls in my neighborhood wanted to grow up to be the Little Flower.”

  “Is that true?” Theresa was encouraged to learn she had so much company. “Well,” she rambled on, “you can see why. Everything the Little Flower did, she did for God. And she didn’t do anything, really, didn’t live out on the desert or get shot full of arrows. She just washed the floors and the dishes and said her prayers….” Theresa froze. She’d never told anyone this before. Out loud, it sounded like something a five-year-old might say.

  But Leonard seemed intrigued.

  “Theresa,” he said, in the cagey tone of a lawyer beginning what he thinks will be a brilliant cross-examination. “Why shut yourself off from life? Didn’t it ever occur to you that a woman can serve God and her family at the same time? All those things you mention—the floors, the dishes—you can do them in a home of your own, for a family of your own, and God will be just as pleased.”

  He won’t be, Theresa wanted to say. There won’t be enough left over for Him. It seemed too easy to cook for the husband, kiss the baby, and forget about God…. Or maybe it was just her insufficiency; she didn’t have enough for both. In her mind, Theresa rehearsed all the inner debates, the arguments with her father, the struggle which ended so ignominiously with a plate of sausage in the middle of the night. Until finally it dawned on her that Leonard had taken her hand and was awaiting a reply.

  Theresa turned away and gazed out the picture window at Fifty-seventh Street. It had been a crisp December afternoon, lit by that early winter sun which makes every surface seem to glitter with promise. All the little boys were carrying hockey sticks or clarinet cases, and the girls swung past in threes and fours, ice skates dangling from laces around their necks. Lovely women clicked by on high heels, clasping bunches of shopping bags like bouquets; down the block, couples waved to each other, met, kissed, then disappeared into movie theaters and taxis.

  It was growing chilly, and the light was beginning to fade. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, as if they had plans for an evening so magical that they couldn’t wait for it to come. As Theresa watched them, a certainty came over her; she felt, as at no other time, that those beautiful women were clicking their way toward God, that God was helping the lovers into their cabs. Perhaps it was the general excitement, the light, or simply the effect of the coffee which Theresa rarely drank. Whatever the cause, Theresa knew beyond any doubt that God was present everywhere—even in Leonard Villanova’s sweaty hand.

  “Ahem.” Leonard made a show of clearing his throat. “If you’re not busy next Saturday, we might get together again….”

  Theresa smiled, so transfixed and exhilarated that Leonard misunderstood the source of her radiance and imagined that he alone had caused her to shine.

  No one doubted that Leonard Villanova would make an excellent lawyer. Already he could recite whole pages from his property texts by rote. After his father, an accountant, chanced to mention television law, Leonard read every word ever printed on
this topic; he liked to think of his mind as a bloodhound, sniffing out the finest details.

  Something of an expert on public affairs, he conscientiously followed the papers and news magazines. Since junior high, he had subscribed to The National Review and considered William Buckley the greatest thinker of the decade. A practicing Catholic, Leonard was versed in scripture and doctrine, and kept up to date with the Vatican’s latest pronouncements on key issues.

  Yet even experts have their limits, and so it was with Leonard. It was one thing to know the history of the church’s stand on birth control; it was quite another to practice it. When it came to sex, Leonard was by no means the expert he pretended to be. When it came to women, he was as pure as a saint.

  One Saturday afternoon, after a long and tedious retreat on “Ecumenicism and the Catholic Teacher,” Leonard walked Theresa to the subway. As she started down the stairs, he grabbed her arm, yanked her back and kissed her.

  Theresa waited till he was through, then turned and went down the stairs as if nothing had happened. Leonard took a deep breath. The incident was over so fast, there had been no time to consider the fine points of technique he’d been agonizing over all week. Not counting his mother and sister, Theresa was the first girl Leonard had ever kissed.

  The next week, they met at the Metropolitan Museum to look at the religious paintings. As Leonard enlightened Theresa with a running lecture on Renaissance art, she allowed him to hold her hand. The museum was full of lovers, arm in arm, and each time they passed such a couple, Leonard felt honored and proud.

  Once again, at the subway entrance, Theresa let him kiss her. This time Leonard was less nervous and more aware. It was discouraging that Theresa didn’t kiss him back. But there was something about the way she stood there with her eyes closed, submitting patiently, which made Leonard think that she might let him do anything he wanted.

  At the start of the fall term, Leonard had moved from his parents’ Bay Ridge home to an apartment on Montague Street which he shared with Vince Migliore and Al DeMeo—boys who came from good families like Leonard’s and acted as if they were already partners in some prestigious and conservative law firm. Soon afterwards, the three of them chipped in on a two-year subscription to Playboy.

  “Even the Pope gets Playboy,” said Al.

  They kept the back issues stacked neatly in the living room, borrowing and returning them with the same care they would have shown crucial reference books from the office library. And that—as reference—was chiefly how they used them. Though none of them were music lovers, Al bought a stereo, which Leonard and Vince stocked with records mentioned in the Playboy music column. Occasional beer drinkers, they splurged on a bottle of good Scotch which they placed on a round tray with some highball glasses and cocktail napkins, near the stereo. In the optimism of that gentle Indian summer, it was understood that this set-up would be used for entertaining girls. And yet, throughout that fall, the only female to grace the apartment was the Miss October whom someone—no one admitted having put her there, nor did anyone volunteer to take her down—tacked to the inside of the bathroom door.

  Having read the step-by-step instructions, Leonard knew that you invited girls home to listen to your sound system, to admire the view from your terrace, to sample your twelve-year-old Chivas Regal. But instinct told him that these ploys would never work on Theresa Santangelo. Theresa would never go home with him to be entertained or served. She would have to do the serving.

  One afternoon they met by previous arrangement at Borough Hall. By now, Leonard had persuaded Theresa that the retreats were a waste of her time; he had promised her a tour of Brooklyn Heights. As they walked along the Promenade, Leonard recounted the history of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence and said,

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.

  “It’s these curtains…. My mother sent them to me for my room. For days now, I’ve been trying to figure out … Being a male, I’m not exactly an expert at hanging—”

  “I’ll put them up for you,” said Theresa. “I’d be glad to.”

  It was so simple, Leonard couldn’t believe it had worked, not even when Theresa was actually sitting beside him on the living room couch, with Bitch’s Brew playing on the stereo. Though he knew that such scenes took place every day, it didn’t seem possible that he would be personally involved in one. Other men, maybe, but not Leonard—who had never had much luck with girls beyond a few uncomfortable college coffee dates. And now that it was really happening, now that he was clinking the ice cubes in his Chivas Regal (which, he discovered, he didn’t much like), he felt a peculiar detachment, as if he were somewhere else, far away, looking at a Chivas Regal ad in a magazine.

  He reached out and took Theresa’s hand. As he ran his fingers over her palm, his detachment gave way to anxiety. What in the name of God was he supposed to do next?

  Leonard knew, from his reading, how other girls reacted at this critical juncture: They swished across the room to check out the view from your terrace. They asked you to freshen their drink. They pointed out that the record on the turntable had run out. But Theresa did none of these things. She said, “The curtains?”

  “Right,” said Leonard. “The curtains.”

  He recognized this as the crucial point in a seduction—certainly no time to give up or get discouraged. Yet still he could not get it through his head that seduction was humanly possible.

  “Come on,” he said. “They’re in the bedroom.”

  Astonishingly, Theresa followed him into his room. After much searching, he found the dark blue fiberglass drapes in a box at the back of the closet. It was obvious that they were not the urgent problem he’d claimed to be facing, but Theresa didn’t seem to care.

  “Anything to hang them on?” she said.

  Leonard located a neatly stapled package of collapsible rods and pins. He pictured his mother buying them at A&S, barraging the salesgirls with nervous questions…. The last thing he wanted to be thinking about now was his mother.

  Theresa sat on a chair by the bed and began slipping the hooks beneath the pre-sewn pleats, her fingers working so nimbly that Leonard was moved, and felt that he was witnessing some age-old—even primal—female activity. She stood on the chair to hang them, and Leonard was so stirred by the way her blouse tightened over her back that he was ready to risk anything for a look at the flesh beneath that white school-girl’s shirt.

  And yet when he said, “Take off your clothes” (the words came out so garbled that he had to clear his throat and repeat himself), it was less out of lust than curiosity to see if such a thing could happen.

  Acting as if she hadn’t heard, Theresa drew the curtains, got down off the chair and stepped back to admire her work. The afternoon light shone blue into the room. She had heard him, but it hadn’t sounded like Leonard. For the voice which had ordered her to take off her clothes was so commanding, its authority so plainly derived from some secret knowledge of her own destiny, that it never occurred to her to disobey.

  Theresa turned to face Leonard. Then very slowly, looking straight at him, she undressed and lay on top of the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  In the blue light, she looked like a drowned woman, floating, pale and lovely, miraculously uncorrupted by the water. It was a sight so beautiful—so wondrous, so unexpected in his room—that Leonard began to pray.

  “Blessed Lord Jesus,” he whispered. “Get me through this and I promise you, I’ll never do it again.”

  But it couldn’t have been Jesus who showed him how to undress and lie down beside Theresa so quietly that she wasn’t even startled. How would Jesus have known how to hold her and kiss her, how to enter a virgin so slowly that it didn’t hurt? It couldn’t have been Jesus who told him to wait and let Theresa catch her breath, then gave him the go-ahead to move—slowly at first, then faster, like the expert Leonard knew in his soul he wasn’t.

  And so, because it was not Jesu
s who had gotten him through, Leonard felt no obligation to keep the solemn vow he had made Him, and he and Theresa did it again and again and again.

  As Leonard and Theresa piled sin upon sin, Theresa wasn’t thinking of anything so abstract as sinning. At the time, her mind was empty, but later, while Leonard slept and Theresa lay watching the light change from blue to black, she had plenty of time to think. And what she thought was: Her mind had not been empty so much as absent altogether.

  Someone else had done those things in bed with Leonard.

  The possibility of winding up in Leonard Villanova’s bed had honestly never occurred to her. Over the past months, she had come to think of him as a brother, a friend. And if he sometimes held her hand and kissed her … She knew boys liked such things. She herself had felt nothing impure. What was the harm?

  Even as she undressed and lay naked on the blankets, she had felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. The saints spoke of floating out of your body, and that was how it was for her. She was not in bed with Leonard of her own free will. She was following someone else’s orders.

  Now she wondered: Whose?

  Obviously, Leonard was the one who’d told her to take off her clothes—but she’d never felt as if she were obeying Leonard. Traditionally, it was the devil who tempted and wheedled and dragged you into sin—but she hadn’t felt the devil’s presence in the room.

  That left God. But why would God lead her into bed with Leonard Villanova?