Doesy tapped Daintry’s arm. “You must be Daintry Whicker. I’m Doesy Howard.”
“O’Connor,” Daintry corrected again, bemused but never wavering.
“Welcome to you, too. Are you as talented as these two sisters? I swear, they can do anything. Ceel’s the hostess with the mostest, and I hear Hannah’s a dirt wizard. Can I bring over my ailing orchid, Hannah?”
But I scarcely acknowledged Doesy, because I’d suddenly remembered the last time I’d seen Daintry. A spring afternoon late in my junior year, when I’d left sorority sisters basking on the sundeck and gone to the little-used stacks in the graduate library. Smitten with Hal, in the throes of dreamy romance, I was combing through Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to find Arthur’s instructions to his knights on the topic of love, a particular portion I remembered from Wyndham Hall and wanted to enter in my quote book.
A phantom, she appeared from around a bookshelf. I was flat on my stomach in the carpeted hush, the open book before me. “Hello, Hannah.”
She was wearing a bandanna. Not around her neck in the current style, but tied tightly to her head, covering her hair. I hadn’t seen her in months, and only then when I glimpsed her walking somewhere across campus. We weren’t. . . together anymore.
“What are you doing?” she asked with typical boldness. Boldness I had reason to both admire and fear, and I swiftly shut the volume on the passage it had taken an hour of tedious searching to locate.
I’d showed Daintry my quote book when we roomed together our freshman year. When we were still friends. Or at least when we were still close, trading notes at the end of the day, not only from classes, but from whom we’d seen, what boys we’d talked with.
I lied instinctively. “Working on a paper.”
“Mmm.”
“C’mon, O’Connor,” a male voice said. He’d loomed up behind her, bearded and blue jeaned, hooking his fingers through the belt loops of her jeans. I was jealous of that obvious possessiveness, a possessiveness that Hal, for all our parking lot passion, never demonstrated.
“This is my preppie friend,” Daintry said. “Here in the library just like in the movie. Of course, Love Story never came to Cullen. Too intellectual.”
“Cullen?” he said. “Or Love Story?” The two laughed with private glee. Laughed the way Daintry and I once had, excluding everyone else. As though he didn’t need to know me, she didn’t call me by name, never introduced him. His name was Ford, I remembered from the masthead of the campus paper. Ford-something. An out-of-stater, a Yankee.
“’Oh wonderful, wonderful and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful,‘” her voice called as they walked away. “Shakespeare, right?”
Chilled, I hadn’t answered, heard only their low laughter rows away, the sound of books tumbling to the floor, then a pregnant silence. Had Daintry stumbled, toppling books with her elbow? Or had she been pushed against the shelves in a spontaneous passionate embrace? That. That was the last time I’d seen Daintry O’Connor.
“So you’re a gardener,” she said to me, ignoring Doesy. “Like your mother.”
“I’m jealous! I feel left out,” Doesy squealed. “You two already know each other!”
I waited for Daintry to answer, certain of her response. Once upon a time we knew exactly what the other would say, spoke in unison more often than not. Jinx you owe me a Pepsi onetwothreefourfivesixseven. I’d let Daintry find the words, define and encompass for Doesy our strong, long ties.
“Hannah and I were just neighbors for a while,” she said, gazing over my new neighbor’s head, and mine. “Like the two of you.”
From Hannah’s quote book:
Moments big as years. . .
—John Keats
Chapter 4
What are you doing?”
My sleep-fuzzed brain was slow to respond to Ceel. “Being woken up by you,” I said into the phone.
“Jeez. Of all the gin joints in all the world.”
Breakfast aromas wafted into the room. Then I remembered. The party. Daintry.
“What are the odds,” I agreed, stretching. “I move to Rural Ridge for the way things used to be, and she appears. Answered prayers.”
“Yeah, and there’s some quote about grief and answered prayers,” Ceel said. “I hardly had a chance to speak to her. What’s she like now?”
“She’s . . .” I curled my toes. “Did you know you were double-billing me with Daintry?”
“No, but that’s nothing new, is it?”
I hesitated, caught by a question that, however playful and casual, held a darker, more tangled truth in its answer. Something smelled scorched.
“Coming to church? It’s Peter Whicker’s first service.”
His face—open, teasing—replaced Daintry’s, a face I’d known much longer. “Come support me,” he’d said. “I know.”
“You do?”
I sniffed again. Burned batter, from Mark’s waffle iron. The first one off the griddle is never right.
Ceel hadn’t exaggerated. St. Martin’s–in-the-Mountains was lovely, picturesque. Tiny and stone walled, the church was sequestered from the curving road amid tall oaks and poplars. The arched entrance was a single planked door whose handle was a thick iron bracelet.
“A rich family who summered in Rural Ridge built it as their personal chapel,” Ceel whispered as we took a pew. “All the stained-glass windows are given in memory of some Chisolm or another.” Scanning the congregation for Daintry, I scarcely heard her.
The church’s interior was dim, lit only by sconces on the rough rock walls. The wooden pew was glossy, and I was touched to see squashed velvet cushions, kneelers of another era, tucked beneath them, though as a child I’d hated those square lumps. My Methodist peers didn’t kneel, and I longed to be one of them, to attend their youth fellowship meetings and retreats to Lake Junaluska, wherever that was. Sundays after spending the night with a Methodist friend, I admired the orderliness of their communion, the miniature cups of grape juice and cubes of white bread passed like cocktails and canapés. First Methodist had been so white, pristine and uncluttered. I’d even envied their sincere and clean-lined rectory, home of my eighth-grade boyfriend, Alan Geer.
St. Francis, my family’s church, was located on Cullen’s outskirts and populated with strange characters who genuflected or crossed themselves at mysterious intervals in the service, elderly women wearing lace doilies on their heads. In contrast with First Methodist’s clipped square of churchyard and wide, marble Main Street steps, the grounds of St. Francis seemed neglected and spooky, dotted with irregular stepping-stones, a cracked concrete birdbath, and a forlorn-faced knee-high statue of the church’s namesake saint. As an Episcopalian, I was a denominational oddball in Cullen.
Until Daintry moved to town, saving me in a way religion hadn’t. The O’Connors attended St. Francis by default. Since no Catholic church existed in Cullen, the few Catholics made do with St. Francis, where incense was burned on high holy days.
“High church in Cullen, of all places,” Mother said. “Catholics need those smells, bells, and yells.” All I’d known of Catholics was that they were responsible for fish sticks in the school cafeteria every Friday.
Craning my neck, I looked again. Hal frowned at me, so I faced the altar, where Peter Whicker was beginning his promised sermon. His message was connected to the Gospel, not the path he’d taken to find himself at St. Martin’s. I’d hoped for something personal, including Daintry. Thinking of her boldness in not attending her husband’s service made me smile. Where I’d feel obligated, Daintry was evidently fearless. That, I could tell Ceel, hadn’t changed.
Beside me in the pew, Ellen placed her open palm in my lap and smiled inquiringly, wordlessly asking me to trace her fingers with my own to pass the time. The high point in the Sunday service for Ellen was the offertory— action at last! audience participation!—when she could clasp her fingers around the chill golden heft of the platter filled with bills and coins. With predict
able sibling torture, Mark tried to deny his sister’s pleasure by reaching over her head for it. She fished the bulletin from the hymnal rack to play hangman.
I sympathized with their fidgeting. As a church-captive child I’d tapped fingers against the pew to count, calculating the ages of dead patrons who’d donated the stained-glass windows. I looked at St. Martin’s Chisolm windows. Muted reds and blues of light leaked through the stained glass and rainbowed my hands. Grown now, I wasn’t bored, but neither was I attentive. Church, if not religion, had begun to nag me with its expectations.
Yet even as I fought its invisible imprisonment, I was prisoner to the familiar. I ached for changelessness, missed the old responses and prayers replaced with contemporary, “accessible” language. I was missing not faith, not belief in God, but simply what had once been. Propitiation, Peter Whicker had challenged me last night. He understood.
We rose for the beginning of Communion. After years of the new prayer book I still had to consult it for the creed, the Prayers of the People, unable to recite from memory.
“I’ve killed off too many brain cells,” I’d sighed to Mark. “Or maybe they just died. Use it or lose it.” Prepped for confirmation, he’d challenged his new knowledge against mine, winning handily. In Mark’s confirmation classes he visited different denominations and watched A Man for All Seasons. Mine had been tedious after-school sessions culminating in the bishop mashing my head into my neck, and receiving a charm that read I am an Episcopalian. But at least Daintry had been with me, stopping on our way to confirmation classes at Rexall Drugs to share a warmed oatmeal cookie gooed with icing.
Peter Whicker was deep into the Eucharist. His every gesture seemed wholly personal, replete with reverence as, palms opened toward the communion offerings, he touched his thumb to lips and shoulders and finally to heart. I watched. It’s hard to think of priests as only men: sons, fathers, husbands. “Thus we proclaim the mystery of faith,” he said, and, closing his eyes, extended his arms again. As he raised the wine and bread he shuddered slightly, and as though I’d stumbled and intruded upon a private rapture, I quickly looked down again, joining the rest of the congregation’s bowed heads. That was what I wanted: what Peter had.
So that I almost missed her, the last to come. And not parading, no, just that leisurely gait I knew immediately, even from behind. Were her pace faster, Daintry’s arms would swing side to side past her stomach rather than front to back as mine did, a difference we’d noticed in our shadows one summer evening.
Her black jersey skirt was ankle length, noiseless and fluid as she made her way down the aisle. She wore a hip-length sweater, hiding, I knew, her short waist, a torso trait she’d despaired of and despised. Daintry knew, too, that I’d have traded my evenly proportioned but short-legged stature for those long legs of hers. Several heads turned or bent to remark to a partner, and I sensed the parishioners’ curiosity about this person, the rector’s wife.
Coolness drifted from the rock walls, blending with the mountain scents of wood rot and stray skunk and bitter galax. She walked down the aisle oblivious of me, just as she had before.
Religious fervor had arrived in Cullen three weeks before I would enter Wyndham Hall as a high school sophomore. Not the revival energy that annually overtook our Bible Belt community, tented camp meetings advertised on rainbow-hued cardboard placards in the barbershop window no different from those for stock car races or country bands. It arrived in the form of Up with People, a roving troupe of young evangelists whose target audience was teenagers. Their medium was an evening show of patriotic and religious anthems, a clapping, foot-stomping musical presentation held in Cullen High’s auditorium.
I knew the auditorium well, had sat there for lectures, band recitals, Tuesday assemblies when a minister from a local church would visit to preach. Except our church, of course, mine and Daintry’s. We laughed, a united front pretending not to care. Still, we felt hopeful every Tuesday morning on the bus and disappointed when an unfamiliar face invariably appeared at the podium.
The huge high windows were open, and in the low-lit room Daintry and I and six other girls sat where we pleased instead of alphabetically by class. People jostled and talked as we waited to be entertained, flipping the wooden seats up and down in excited anticipation. Parents had dropped us off, so we were in charge of ourselves; it was night; it wasn’t school; it was mysterious. The atmosphere in the auditorium was charged with a carnival air.
I remember it well, that peppy professional presentation, orchestrated and choreographed with quick-step dancing to rapid tempos and the harmonizing voices of clean-cut performers. A spectacle of pure, rousing fun. But not like I remember what happened afterward. At the conclusion a sweet-voiced soprano sang “America the Beautiful” and we waited for the houselights to brighten and signal for applause.
Instead, the born-again choir started swaying hypnotically as they began an unfamiliar song, slow and throbbing. At the microphone, the leader implored each person present to come forward and pledge their commitment to Jesus. Members of the chorus stepped down from the risers and wept as they spoke of their transformation, their sins, their beliefs. The lights indeed came on, and there was no hiding.
Daintry elbowed me. “There goes Laura Hodge,” she whispered. “God! Did you see Jimmy Stoneman trip when he went up the stairs?”
“Listen to Becky Yelton,” I murmured in return, giggling as a girl from Latin class tearfully whispered something into the leader’s ear and he translated for the benefit of us sinners still in our seats. We knew this act. Wasn’t it stupid? Could you believe it?
But our snickering was silenced as one by one, a slow trickle from the audience became a steady stream. Classmates made their way to the lighted stage and sobbed a personal testament into the microphone. “Jesus loves you!” the leader crooned, moaned, beckoned, pleading for another sinner to join the newly saved. The aisles teemed, and what had seemed comical became menacing. A hairball of anxiety knotted in my stomach as, trancelike, surrounding friends left their seats for something that might have been magnetic, that might have been mesmerizing, but wasn’t God.
I was grateful for Daintry, experiencing the same un-ease as I. But watching the stage, Daintry had grown quiet. And then, incredibly, she stood. Her seat clattered up.
“Daintry,” I said, tugging at her skirt. We’d made them together, of blue jeans ripped open at the crotch and resewn as minis. She ignored me, strode purposefully toward the crowded stage where people clapped as though the last drowning holdout had been pulled from the waters. Rooted, alone, brutally visible, I watched Daintry far away and above me, her arms flung around and shoulder to shoulder with fellow penitents. She didn’t gesture Come. She smiled, and she sang, and she left me.
Two hours later the Up with People bus left Cullen and its converts, spirit-bound for the next town and the next auditorium. Daintry and I managed to avoid each other for three long weeks, until I left Cullen, too; the first time in my life I felt the pull of the new.
What peace I’d taken from the service and from Peter Whicker’s visible faith was shattered when Doesy Howard found me outside. “I want you to meet my daughter. Wendy!” she called, gesturing. “Looks like she and Mark have already found each other!”
A pretty, long-haired teenager wearing a flimsy spaghetti-strapped dress slouched over with the studied nonchalance available only to those who are wholly aware of their attraction. Wendy greeted me minimally, Mark trailing her like the sweetish cologne the girl exuded. If the collection plate had been the high point of Ellen’s Sunday morning, finding Wendy Howard was obviously Mark’s.
“And you’ll be going to Blue Ridge High, too, honey?” Doesy asked. Mark nodded. I made a mental note to tease him later as my father had done to me: Catching flies? Close your mouth.
“Didn’t you just adore high school?” Doesy asked me. “Wendy got a new car for her sixteenth birthday and would love to give Mark a ride to school every day! Although now that Wend
y has her license, we hardly see a hair of her, do we, darling.” Doesy clutched my sleeve. “Wendy’s so popular!”
I thought of Daintry’s mother. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she agreed if someone complimented her children. Kathleen O’Connor must have seemed an oddity and aberration to my mother and her self-deprecating friends, Southern women quick to deflect a compliment. Oh, it’s nothing.
“I’m so glad your family will be coming to St. Martin’s,” Doesy was saying. “We switched from West Methodist because we knew everyone there. It’s just wonderful the way you Episcopalians do things. Sunday school only lasts thirty minutes and the rest is all socializing. Got to run. Coming to Sunday school?”
It was hard to know which astounding sentence or question to respond to first. “I . . .” I looked for help in the form of Hal, but he’d taken Ellen to find her classroom. Mark, for a change, had been only too happy to go to Sunday school as long as Wendy Howard was going, too. People were dispersing to cars and classes and parish house coffee. Then I saw her, walking toward the far side of the church.
I nearly trotted, determined to move beyond the remnant discomfort of our stilted greeting the previous night. Hoping I’d imagined it. “Daintry,” I said, not wanting to overwhelm her with gushed enthusiasm as Doesy had me.
She turned, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. “Hannah.”
“Where were you?”
“Pardon?” Incredulity tinged the question, as though I’d presumed a claim upon her. Once, though, I did. We both did, demanding, “Where were you?” of one another after an absence of only hours. “I was sitting in the organ loft, upstairs out of sight,” she said. “The perfect Episcopal position: in the back, and above the hoi polloi.” I laughed at the deadpan tone, the ironic truth of it. “Not going to Sunday school?” she asked.
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