by Selena Kitt
“She will in a minute. I’m sure Leah will be happy to see her mother. It is Christmas, after all.” Erica’s father put an arm around Patty’s shoulders, giving Erica her coat to hang up before guiding Leah’s mother toward the living room.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Erica whispered under her breath, watching them with a sinking feeling in her gut. She hung up Mrs. Wendt’s coat, anything to draw out her walk down the hallway to the living room where disaster was just waiting to happen.
But when she surreptitiously peeked around the corner, she found everyone sitting, Mrs. Wendt next to Father Michael, holding her own drink and chatting away. Erica practically tiptoed into the living room, edging around the furniture until she was standing next to Leah’s mother on the loveseat. Leah was still sitting quietly next to Erica’s dad, sipping her drink. There was no expression on her face—no anger, no surprise, no enthusiasm. Nothing. It was like she was there, but not.
Erica watched in disbelief as Leah accepted a gift from her mother. She even opened it—a new watch—and apologized for not having anything for her in return. Erica didn’t understand it. Leah had been adamant about not wanting to have anything to do with her mother after Grace had been taken. Leah seemed to believe—and Erica had no idea if it was true or not—Mrs. Wendt had somehow plotted, planned or orchestrated the kidnapping with the social worker. Leah’s mother denied it, of course, and there was a time when Erica would have believed her, but Erica also never would have thought Mrs. Wendt would secretly sequester her daughter in a maternity home for unwed mothers and refuse to tell anyone where she was either, and she’d done that, so...
Erica didn’t move when the doorbell rang again, and this time it was Solie who answered. The surprise of Clayton Marshall Webber III in the mix of dinner guests didn’t faze anyone by then. Although she saw Father Michael scowl at the way Clay stood so close to Erica, close enough he could whisper things to make her laugh, and Clay managed to snag the seat next to Erica before Father Michael could.
They all sat down to dinner and Father Michael said the prayer, which was beautiful enough to make Erica’s throat develop a lump she had to swallow down, and she thought, as food got passed and the goose got eaten, along with Solie’s mashed potatoes and sweet potato pie, this strange, surreal Christmas dinner might actually pass without incident, something she never would have expected when she answered the door and found Leah’s mother on their doorstep.
But that was before Father Patrick and Clay got into an argument about desegregation.
“Are you telling me you don’t believe institutions like schools and churches should be desegregated? What about Brown vs. the Board of Education? It’s the law!” Clay leaned his elbows on the table, looking across it at Father Patrick.
The old priest shook his head. “The letter of the law and the practical implementation of that law are two different things. We have all sorts of laws on the books, son, but we enforce some more than others.”
“I think there’s room in God’s house for everyone,” Father Michael interjected.
Clay sat back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “If we don’t desegregate our schools, our restaurants—yes, even our churches—we’re going to have race riots again like we had back in the forties. Mark my words.”
Father Patrick chuckled. “How many black Catholics do you know, son?”
“Solie, wouldn’t you like to go to midnight mass with the Nolans every year?” Clay turned to the black woman to his left who was clearing the main dishes to make room for dessert and Solie froze, blinking at him in surprise. “I mean, you make this beautiful dinner for them on Christmas, and I’m sure Mr. Nolan pays you a decent wage. But you can’t shop for food in the same stores. Your children can’t go to school with his. You can’t even go to church with them.”
“I like my little church,” Solie said with a laugh. “We have a lovely choir.”
Father Patrick smiled in triumph, wiping his lips with his napkin as Solie went back to the kitchen. “You see? Even blacks don’t want what the letter of the law tells us to do. Desegregation is just not enforceable.”
Clay wouldn’t drop it. “There are plenty of blacks who do want it. And I bet even Solie would change her mind if her wage didn’t depend on what she says.”
“Now wait a minute...” Robert Nolan tossed his napkin on his plate as Solie walked by. “If you’re implying—”
“They segregated the babies in the nursery.” Leah spoke up for the first time during dinner. Her voice was small, but they all heard her and stopped. “It was kind of sad to see all the little black babies on one side and all the white babies on the other. There was a window between them.”
“It’s not sad, it’s necessary,” Leah’s mother interjected. “Who knows what sorts of diseases those babies might pass on?”
Erica winced, feeling Clay stiffen beside her, and she met Leah’s incredulous stare, seeing the anger coming to a boil just under the surface. This wasn’t going to end well.
“What I mean is, they’re different.” Leah’s mother realized her mistake, trying to defend her original assertion. “They have different immune systems.”
“So white babies might catch something from the little black babies, Mrs. Wendt?” Clay asked. “I just want to be clear about what you’re saying. The white babies have inferior immune systems?”
“No...” Leah’s mother flushed, looking flustered, searching the table for someone to rescue her.
Father Patrick made the attempt. “I know what you mean, Patty.”
“I wish I was a black girl.” Once again, Leah stopped the rest of the conversation, looking across the table at her mother, who gaped at her in shock. “Do you know why? Can you guess?”
No one said anything. They didn’t even move. They were all looking at Leah.
“Because all the black girls, they got to keep their babies. It’s true! But all the white girls, they had to give theirs away. Why is that, I wonder?”
“Leah...” Rob put a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh I’m sorry, we’re all supposed to pretend, aren’t we?” Leah snapped, glaring across the table at her mother. “We’re all supposed to pretend I wasn’t sent away, that I didn’t have a baby. That my baby wasn’t stolen from me and given to some rich couple who could afford to give a very generous donation to the church!”
“Leah, stop.” Patty Wendt tossed her napkin on her plate. “No one wants to hear this.”
“You want me to stop? Why should I stop? Why? You don’t want everyone to know the shame I’ve brought on you? Please, Mother. What was my crime?” Leah stood, tears filling her eyes. “I fell in love. I got pregnant. I had a baby. In the end, the only difference between me and you was a wedding ring and a marriage license. And yours were fake anyway, weren’t they?”
“Leah!” Patty sat back in her chair like she’d been punched in the stomach.
“I’m going to be married, Mother. Does that finally make you happy? I have a ring.” She waved it under her mother’s nose across the table. “Does that make it better? I’m going to be married in the church like a good Catholic girl. And my marriage license will be real.”
“Leah.” Rob stood, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Enough.”
Father Patrick stood too, pointing a gnarled finger at her. “Not in my church, you’re not!”
“What?” Rob turned to look at the old priest, incredulous. “What are you saying?”
“Your child was born out of wedlock,” Father Patrick reminded her—reminded them all. “I have a right and a duty to guard the sacrament of marriage. You could never get married in the church. You have sinned in the eyes of God. And even if you do find this child, she can never be baptized in the faith.”
Leah’s mother took a drink of her wine, looking over at her daughter. “It doesn’t matter, really. You’re young, you’re getting married. You’ll have plenty more children.”
Erica grabbed Clay’s hand under the table,
squeezing hard. How could she say something like that? She saw the pain in Leah’s eyes.
Father Michael stood, putting his hand on the old man’s arm, trying to make peace, like always. “We can make exceptions...”
“We can.” Father Patrick glared at Leah. “But we will not.”
“You hypocrite!” Leah lunged across the table at the clergyman, but Rob grabbed her in time to save what was left of the goose in the middle of the table and to keep her from gouging out the old man’s eyes. “Half the babies born at Magdalene House are your responsibility! You—!”
“I think you’d better go, Father,” Rob interrupted her and Leah struggled against the restraint of his arms, hissing at him like a cat, but he didn’t let her go.
“I’m sorry.” Father Michael took the older priest’s elbow, guiding him out of the dining room without another word.
“I think you’d better go with him, Mother!” Leah snapped, eyes blazing.
“Fine.” Patty Wendt stood, following the clergyman, glancing over her shoulder and calling back, “You really need to help her start accepting the way things are, Rob. You can’t coddle her forever.”
Leah screamed at that. It wasn’t intelligible, it was just a scream, so loud and blood-curdling, Erica felt frozen in her chair.
“Yeah. I should go too.” Clay stood, looking at Erica as he edged his way around the table. Leah was still screaming, crying now, turning in Rob’s arms, clawing at him. Erica begged Clay with her eyes, but he didn’t understand. He just gave a little wave. “Thanks for dinner, Nolans.”
Erica jumped up. “I’m going with you!”
“No you’re not,” her father countered, not letting go of Leah. Solie appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishrag and looking at them all like they were crazy. Erica thought she was probably correct in her assessment.
“You can’t tell me what to do anymore.” Erica sneered at him, catching up with Clay and following him down the hall. She ignored her father calling after her, insisting she come back. She ignored the sound of her best friend’s screams. They were like the howls of a dying animal.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” Erica whispered in the hallway as she and Clay pulled on their coats. “Well you’ve met my crazy family.”
Clay grabbed her hand as they walked out the door. “That’s okay, you haven’t met mine yet.”
“It can’t be as bad as that.” Erica shivered as they stood on the sidewalk in the snow. She saw Father Michael helping Father Patrick into the car, saw the hurt on his face, the concern in his eyes, and turned away from it.
Clay was there, holding her hand and smiling a big, goofy smile.
“Sure you want to sign up for this?” Erica jerked her head toward the warehouse. “They’re all a couple bananas short of a bunch.”
“Girl, I’m already bananas for you.” He took her into his arms and kissed her right there on the street. And she let him.
Chapter Five
Leah wouldn’t let Rob come with her to pick a wedding dress, insisting on tradition, even though they wouldn’t be married in the church after all. She should have expected something like it from Father Patrick, but somehow it still came as a shock to be ostracized from the church. She’d discovered so much about the hypocrisy of the church in the past year, so many shameful, scandalous secrets, she knew it should be she who rejected them, not the other way around, but somehow the seeds of faith that had been planted when she was young had wound themselves through her life and had taken root. She could no more throw over her belief in God and the Catholic Church than she could have cut out her own heart.
Hudson’s bridal section took up the entire, magical sixth floor of the twenty-something story building. She and Erica used to sneak up there when they were little and play hide and seek in the sea of white satin dresses on the rack while their mothers lunched on the thirteenth floor. They thought the girls were playing in the toys section of the store. Both girls had cut out pictures of wedding dresses from magazines, putting them into the hope chests at the foot of their beds. They had compared notes on cuts, color (white, of course, but bridesmaid dresses could be any color) and style for years, changing their minds a hundred times over, dreaming of prince charming all the while.
She couldn’t believe she was entering Hudson’s bridal department as a bride, and she never could have fathomed she would be marrying her best friend’s father, a man she’d called “Mr. Nolan,” most of her life and had always thought of as sort of her replacement father. Things had changed so drastically in the past year, her life now was unrecognizable to the one she’d lived until falling in love with Rob. Things felt flipped, upside down even. Here she was shopping for a wedding dress, but she’d already given birth to her future husband’s child, had already been transformed from the young girl she’d been into a woman and a mother.
So when the elevator operator stopped it at the sixth, calling out, “Bridal shop!” it was with some trepidation that she stepped off. The entire floor smelled like floral perfume from the sachets hanging amidst the rows of dresses, the carpet a thick, bridal white, the mass of dresses, literally hundreds of them to choose from, an overwhelming sea of virginal satin and lace. It took a girl’s breath away in an instant and made Leah’s pulse race. If Pavlov had studied the shopping habits of females, he would have discovered bridal shops had the same effect on the feminine population as potential nourishment did on canines.
“Can I help you?” One of the saleswomen came around the other side of the counter where she had been flipping through a magazine. She was a blonde, her long hair falling in careful waves over her shoulders, wearing a smart, cream-colored pinstriped suit coat and matching skirt, the blouse underneath decorated with pink ruffles. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Oh, yes.” Leah glanced around, glimpsing another young bride in the back standing on a pedestal in a white dress and veil, surrounded by girls ohhhing and ahhhhhing over her choice. “Leah Wendt. Er, Nolan. Leah Nolan.”
Leah blinked at the name change. They had registered for gifts at Hudson’s too, under the Nolan name, but she’d never put her first name and Rob’s last name together out loud before.
“Oh good. You’re a little early.” The saleswoman went back behind the counter and Leah followed, watching her flip open a big book, her pink lacquered nail tracing its way down loopy, scrawled handwritten entries to Leah’s name. She looked older than Leah, but not by that much. Five or six years maybe.
“Is your bridal party coming?” the saleswoman asked, glancing behind Leah as if a gaggle of girls might appear out of thin air.
“Yes. Well, my maid of honor. And… my mother. That’s it.”
Leah had never been one to collect a bunch of friends, and considering her current circumstances, she was no longer in contact with the girls she might have asked from Mary Magdalene’s, either her former high school or their two-year preparatory college.
The only girls she would have asked were now scattered to the wind. She felt closer to the girls she’d met at the maternity home, all of them hidden away at Magdalene House, who she’d only known for six short months, than she did to any of the girls she’d gone to school with.
There was little Lizzie, with the face of a china doll, whose baby had been shockingly fathered by her own father. Slow Jean, poor dim-witted Jean, who had shadowed Lizzie like an adoring puppy dog, who had missed her friend so much when Lizzie had to leave Magdalene House, she’d thrown herself down a flight of stairs in an attempt to miscarry. And Frannie, whose belly had grown so big because she was carrying twins, whose babies had been separated and given to two different adoptive couples to maximize the donation to the church from the parents. And then there was Marty. Leah missed her most of all. Spunky redheaded Marty, who had first introduced her to the Mary Magdalenes, the secret society Erica had somehow gotten herself involved with.
Leah still hadn’t told Erica she knew about the Mary Magdalenes, about the sex rituals and the lite
ral Madonna/whore complex being played out by the Catholic priests and nuns who participated. Marty had explained how they split the girls into two categories, Marys and Magdalenes—Madonnas and whores—and while they had sex with all of them, only the Magdalenes bore Eve’s burden of sin, becoming pregnant with the seed of man, while the Marys remained pure, perpetual virgins, although Leah was still unclear on how they managed that last feat.
It was so shocking and horrific when you heard it expressed in black and white, it seemed too impossible to be true, and Leah probably wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, hadn’t witnessed her best friend’s nude body painted and strapped to a giant cross, if she hadn’t walked the secret tunnels under the church to its center where the Mary girls were on the virginal white side and the Magdalenes on the sinful red, and everywhere there was the smell of sex hanging in the air, the one thing that served to join them both.