Suddenly she remembered all the saints who had fornicated, lied and stolen, all the pickpockets and con-men and whores. Augustine, Magdalene, Mary of Egypt—Theresa made a mental list. She thought of the robber crucified with Jesus and saved, the great sinners plucked from the midst of their evil lives and sanctified. For a moment, she thought: Maybe St. Therese’s Little Way wasn’t the only one; maybe that was why God had brought her to Leonard Villanova’s dark bedroom.
She put her hand on Leonard’s bare chest, felt his measured breathing and experienced a rush of tenderness and awe. It was as if she were touching God there, in Leonard Villanova’s skinny chest.
Leonard stirred.
“Jesus,” he mumbled. A long time later, he said, “What time is it?”
Turning, Theresa saw a luminous plastic clock on the night table. It scared her, as if its dial were a human face which had been watching them all afternoon.
“Nine.”
“Won’t your folks be worried?”
“No,” said Theresa, doubly guilty for the lie and for the fact that her parents were probably very worried. Two sins, she thought. She felt confused, and heard that old refrain in her mind: What would the Little Flower do now? Even St. Therese had made her family worry. But she had never done the things which Theresa had done that day with Leonard.
“Mea culpa,” she mumbled under her breath, pretending to cough so Leonard wouldn’t wonder why she was hitting herself in the chest. Then she lay very still. This is it, she thought. I’m going to hell. She waited for a chill of fear, but all that came was a vague nostalgia and a not-unfamiliar disappointment. She felt as if she were remembering herself as a little girl and thinking of all the childish wishes which hadn’t come true: I wanted to become a nun, but I didn’t. I wanted to go to heaven, but I went to hell.
“Are you okay?” said Leonard.
“I’m fine. I just better get going.”
It was pitch-black, and warm enough, but Theresa dressed with her elbows drawn in and her arms across her breasts for protection. She thought of a painting Leonard had shown her at the museum: Adam and Eve after the Fall, so ashamed that they walked bent over, like old people. The painting had embarrassed her—Adam in his fig leaf looked a million times more naked than Jesus in a loincloth. But it was nothing compared to the embarrassment she felt now.
“It’s true,” she thought. “Afterwards, you walk different.”
Dressed, she switched on the night-light. The first thing she noticed was the brownish bloodstain on Leonard’s sheet, and her impulse was to cover it with both hands. For though she was still disoriented enough to think that she must have gotten her period, she never doubted that the blood was hers.
Without getting out of bed, Leonard eased her hands away and pulled up the blanket.
“Forget it. It’s nothing.”
“I’ll wash it for you,” said Theresa, her tone too urgent to be offering a casual favor.
“I’ll take care of it.” Now Leonard too was embarrassed, for nowhere in his Playboys had he seen this problem discussed. In all his fantasies about this first time in his room, he had never imagined a girl insisting on washing the blood off the bed linen. He understood that such things were important to women, and wondered if Theresa meant to take the sheet home and keep it, substituting another. Leonard felt a wave of possessiveness: It was his sheet, and now it was just as much his memento as hers. He pictured himself taking it to the laundromat with the secret satisfaction of knowing that his wash concealed the blood of a virgin. And besides, he was hardly about to jump up and hop into his clothes while Theresa stripped the bed.
“I want to,” said Theresa.
“I said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’” Leonard’s tone was sharp.
Theresa dove for the corner of the sheet with such determination that Leonard knew: There was no way to stop her short of physical violence. It took him less than a second to weigh the evidence and decide: No dirty sheet on earth was worth using violence on the first girl he’d ever gone to bed with. If she wanted it so badly, how could he deny her?
So he got up and grabbed for his clothes while Theresa unmade the bed, folded the dirty sheets, then remade it with some clean ones he found for her in a drawer. Normally Leonard considered himself a gentleman. But as he watched Theresa fluff the pillows, he felt such pride, such a sense of accomplishment that he was taken out of his normal self and moved to think something which would never have crossed a gentleman’s mind.
“One afternoon in the sack with me,” thought Leonard, “and she’s begging to do my laundry.”
From then on, Leonard had only to say, “Let’s put up some curtains,” for Theresa to follow him into his room. After a while (when it became clear that Theresa didn’t particularly want them) Leonard dispensed with the preliminaries which Playboy claimed all women want. The love-making took only a few minutes which, Theresa told herself, were no more significant than any others in her day. Except that often, as Leonard finished, he would cry, “God!” And Theresa understood instinctively that it was not a blasphemy, but a prayer.
Then she would jump up and get to work. When Leonard’s room was spotless, she turned her attention to the rest of the apartment. The kitchen was a typical bachelor mess, and Theresa spent hours scrubbing jelly rings off the cupboard shelves. At first she blushed when Al and Vince came in to find her cleaning, but they treated her so politely that she overcame her shyness. And why should she be shy? She was doing it for them. Mercifully, she had no idea that they called her “the cleaning lady” behind her back. But perhaps she might not have cared. For already she was moving beyond the point of caring what people called her. A cleaning lady worked for money. A housewife worked for her family, her home, her husband—and by extension herself. But this wasn’t Theresa’s apartment, Leonard wasn’t her husband, and her service was pure, benefiting no one but Leonard, his roommates, and God.
Ever since that first afternoon in Leonard’s bed, she had decided that God could be served through Leonard Villanova. It was not yet a certainty—but she would never know for certain unless she tried. Meanwhile she enjoyed transforming the messy kitchen and took special delight in preparing complicated dishes—hot antipasto, mussels oreganata, tagliatelle, pasta with fresh pesto—with its rudimentary equipment. She served Leonard on trays in his room, and it pleased her to see the gratitude on his face. Clearly, Leonard was growing to love her, and she knew that loving another human being was one step closer to loving God. If nothing else, she was helping Leonard on his way.
Leonard was grateful, at least enough to endure his roommates’ teasing without ever making the kind of crude remark he’d heard in his mind that first afternoon. For even the most callous men never said such things about women they truly loved. And slowly, in his own fashion, Leonard was falling in love with Theresa. It was not just the thrill of going to bed with her, or the gratification of talking to her and seeing her suitably impressed by his expertise, but also the gentler contentment of watching her smile and hum to herself as she washed his coffee cups and sorted his socks. He loved the meals, the trays adorned with fresh flowers and linen napkins she’d borrowed from home. And as she set them in front of him, he couldn’t help thinking how much lovelier she was than Miss October.
His roommates’ opinion was that Theresa was one of those girls who go to college for their M.R.S. degree, and Leonard admitted the possibility that Theresa was trying to show him what a good wife she would make. Nevertheless, he assured them: The subject of marriage had never come up. If Theresa became pregnant, God forbid, he would do his duty as a Catholic and marry her. But Leonard had his heart set on a different sort of wife—a leggy blonde Grace Kelly-type whose idea of housework was a list of instructions for the maid. He imagined that you worked your way up to such a woman; along with the important business contacts came the wife to entertain them. And his passion for Theresa never grew much stronger than the love he felt for his education and would feel for his first job: S
he was someplace to start.
Nor was Theresa thinking of marriage—or not, at least, to Leonard. More and more, she saw her life with him as a test. Despite what she let him do to her, she still felt no more for him than sincere friendship; she’d seen enough movies to know that it wasn’t love. And if she could give herself totally to this boy she didn’t love, if she could make this dingy bachelor apartment her life’s work, these acts of devotion and sacrifice might reach all the way to God, and something would happen.
She could not imagine (nor was it hers to guess) what this something would be. Perhaps she would hear another call to the convent, stronger this time and accompanied by a more effective strategy. Perhaps God’s will would circumvent her entirely and work a miracle. Overnight, her parents would change their mind, they would take her out of college and escort her to the Carmelites’ door. Maybe He would show her the truth in a vision, a ray of light beamed on the dish suds. Or perhaps He meant to reconcile her to housework, to so addict her to the pleasures of a tidy kitchen that she gave up and married someone like Leonard.
Open to any kind of revelation, she believed that the intensity of her devotion to Leonard was a way of forcing God’s hand, and that God had put it into her mind to force things this way. She felt this so strongly that she stopped going to confession for fear that the priests might try to talk her out of it. She refused to bother herself with the illogicality of it, or wonder: Why would God reward her for serving Leonard when—after all those years of helping her own mother—He hadn’t even given her the strength to resist a plate of sausage? Instead, she defrosted Leonard’s refrigerator and rinsed the shelves with boiling water, all in the euphoric state induced by that rare intoxicant—the belief that her work had a purpose, that the smallest acts were part of a larger plan. Engrossed in the vegetable bins, she felt a calm come over her, soothing as the hot lemon and honey her mother used to brew her when she had a cold. She wondered if this were all she would ever feel, and thought that it was almost—but not quite—enough.
Inevitably, her daily visits to Leonard’s cut into her school time. But she was convinced that cleaning his apartment would teach her more and bring faster, more permanent results than any college. Still, she tried to keep to her former hours and carried her texts with her—mostly for show, but also to skim on the subway back from Leonard’s. In the evenings, Joseph and Catherine would look at her, their faces full of love, and ask what she was learning in school. Praying for forgiveness for misleading them, Theresa would summarize the pages she’d read on the way home. The truth—that this subway cramming was the only studying she did—would only have hurt them more.
Because now, when she went to her room to do her homework, her doubts and fears besieged her, demons so numerous that the room seemed just as crowded and more distracting than a rush hour train. She began sleeping with the night-light on, as if to keep away the dark suspicion that Leonard had been sent by the devil to ensnare her in sin upon sin. Suppose she were wrong, suppose her relations with Leonard weren’t God’s secret way of saving her soul. Most likely, it happened all the time—misled sinners brought to Judgement, saying, “You, I did it all for You!” only to hear God answer, “Me? You must be mistaken.”
It was equally possible that neither God nor the devil were at work but simply, ordinary life. Nothing had happened which wasn’t happening to some girl somewhere every minute. She’d found a boyfriend, she’d let him go too far. At worst, she’d get pregnant—Leonard had promised to marry her. But that was all she could hope for: No grace, no vision, no revelation.
She was also afraid of angering God with the arrogance of her challenge. For who was she to say, “Look, I’m scrubbing my knuckles raw for this boy I hardly know. Now show me something”? Who was she to test Him? Lying awake in the dim light, she recalled all the Bible stories in which someone (Lucifer, Adam, the citizens of Babel) called God’s hand and lost the game. And finally, she was terrified of the stakes, the penalty for losing—an eternity of hellfire which would burn her to ash so black and fine that a legion of devils couldn’t scour it off the grill.
Later, when Catherine wondered how all this could have happened without her suspecting, she would think of a page from The Mother’s Medical Encyclopedia. In an image so clear that she could see the drawing of a thermometer in the upper righthand corner, she remembered the section on childhood diseases and in particular the warning against confusing the flush of fever with the glow of health.
In the beginning, Catherine took this admonition so seriously that she was constantly fighting the urge to take Theresa’s temperature. But after a few minor illnesses, Catherine learned to read her daughter’s color, and developed enough confidence in this ability to take it for granted. When Theresa came down with her annual winter cold, Catherine was warming lemon and honey hours before the first sneeze; for the rest of the year, she could relax.
By the time Theresa was burning with the fever to serve Leonard Villanova, Catherine had forgotten the warning. And besides: After Nicky’s death and all that trouble over the convent, Catherine so longed for health and normality that no thermometer could have convinced her otherwise.
Also the symptoms were easy to misinterpret. Theresa left home in time for school and returned promptly for dinner. Perhaps it was the walk from the subway, but she invariably sailed in with good color and bright eyes. She was eating like a normal person—no hunger strikes, no water in the gravy, no slings to catch the crumbs. She helped with the dishes, swept the kitchen, then went to her room to study—and never once mentioned the convent.
The best—and most misleading—sign was the fact that Theresa finally had a boyfriend.
Catherine would have been longer in discovering this if not for the family laundry which Theresa did, as always, on Saturday mornings. Over the years, Catherine had grown so accustomed to Theresa’s steady efficient rhythm that she noticed immediately when Theresa began working faster, stuffing clothes into the machine with an awkward, secretive haste. When Catherine was busy in the kitchen, or anywhere near the washer, Theresa hovered over it, making idle conversation. If the cycle ended while Theresa was out of the room, she’d race back, as if to make sure that her mother didn’t get there first. She waited to unload the washer till Catherine stepped out; when Catherine wouldn’t leave, she pulled the clothes out in a tight little knot which she hid with her body.
In the shop, women were perpetually telling stories about teenagers who acted this way about their rooms, their purses, and mothers who ferreted out caches of marijuana and birth control pills. But what, Catherine wondered, could Theresa be hiding in the laundry?
One morning, Catherine waited in her room till she heard Theresa go into the bathroom, then hurried to the kitchen and opened the washing machine. As the spinning slowed, she saw several pairs of men’s socks plastered flat against the drum, white crews striped with blue. Where had Joseph gotten such socks? Then she realized: They weren’t Joseph’s. First she was embarrassed, then surprised to find herself so moved that tears came to her eyes. It wasn’t that she wanted to rush Theresa into a lifetime of washing some boy’s dirty socks; she herself had been doing it long enough to know that there was no intrinsic glory in it. Still, those blue stripes, stopped now in their orbit, had made her think: The next round of socks, and soon it’s the next set of baby clothes. Life goes on.
She closed the lid and told no one about her discovery. She knew from her magazines that girls wanted privacy in these matters, especially at first. Theresa would mention it when she was ready. Nor did she tell Joseph, for she knew how fathers worry.
Now more than ever, they had cause for alarm. In the afternoons, when Catherine turned on the television for company, a program didn’t go by without some reference to teenage sex, drugs, runaways, communes, gurus, innocent children ravaged by LSD and free love. Even in the neighborhood, life had changed. Women announced their daughters’ weddings and couldn’t look at you; but when the grandchildren came six mon
ths later, they dared you to look away. There had always been such babies, but now no one bothered pretending they were premature. Now the mothers said: “You think when the children are grown, you can stop worrying. But the worrying never stops.”
Yet Catherine wasn’t worried. She knew that Theresa would never turn into one of those commune girls with their frizzy hair, their beads and empty eyes. Theresa was the kind who had the wedding ring at least nine months before the baby. And even if she were doing more for this boy than washing his socks … Catherine knocked on wood and told herself that a slightly “premature” grandchild was better than a daughter in a convent.
Weeks passed, and Theresa remained so reticent about her boyfriend that Catherine had to reassure herself of his continued existence by examining the laundry. One Saturday, she found a T-shirt with a name tag—“Leonard Villanova”—carefully stitched on.
Later, remembering this, Catherine felt a chill—the shiver which, she imagined, would come over you on first hearing the name of someone who will eventually do you harm. But at the time, she thought: Thank God. An Italian boy with a mama who loves him.
Later, Catherine would recall all this to explain her misreading of the color in Theresa’s cheeks. And Joseph would comfort her, saying: How could they have known? Even if they had recognized the flush, they could never have diagnosed the disease. For how could they have suspected that Theresa’s flame for Leonard burned low beside her fever for those T-shirts and socks?
No one told Joseph and Catherine that Theresa had stopped going to school. No one noticed. She was not the kind of girl whose presence would be missed in a large lecture hall, nor had she ever been one to seek out her professors’ personal attention.
Each day, she stayed longer at Leonard’s apartment—dusting, straightening, intercepting discarded shirts on their way to the hamper. Salt stains were not permitted to accumulate on Leonard’s boots, nor was Leonard allowed to sleep on the same pillowcase twice. He couldn’t pick up a sugar spoon without her swiping beneath it to wipe the table. And yet, for all these intimate attentions, she seemed progressively less interested in going to bed with him. Often, in the midst of it, he’d catch her eyeing the clock, and it would turn out that she had put the spaghetti water on to boil before coming to his room.
Household Saints Page 17