Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  Anne put on a pot of water, and as she waited for the water to boil, she relived that long gray bus ride back to the South Bronx. Her mother and Sister Elizabeth were in the parlor, drinking tea, waiting for her. Anne had little to say. She didn’t mention Father Sacramoni or Sister Angeline.

  “What’s there to be confused about?” her mother scolded.

  “Give it time, dear. It isn’t how we stumble, it’s how we regain the path,” Sister Elizabeth offered.

  She couldn’t face their disappointment and escaped to the bedroom she shared with her sister Cathy. She removed her habit, dropped onto the bed, and prayed for forgiveness. In the evening, her father came home, his work boots clomping down the hall.

  “Annie dearest, what are we gonna—”

  “I’m sorry, Da.”

  “There’s no shame in it.” He sat at the end of the bed.

  “They made me hate it all. God, Mass—”

  “Don’t blaspheme, now.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “To hell with them, Anne girl.” And there was her father’s wry smile.

  In the Irish immigrant tradition, they ate meat and potatoes and no one spoke about it. Days became weeks, and Anne’s mother shrugged off her discontent. Anne applied to Fordham for the fall. She studied literature, the poems of Herbert and Hopkins her favorites. She met Pat Malone on a blind date during the ’66 transit strike. They cruised out to City Island for crab boil. She made the first move that night. They married after graduation. Anne earned her teaching license and had her baptism by fire at Teddy Roosevelt High School on East Fordham Road. The young Mrs. Malone became a fine teacher. Sister Elizabeth referred her to job after job teaching in the parochial schools, sometimes for better money than she was making under Shanker’s new deal, but she balked and demurred. When Pat finished law school, she went on to Hunter for a master’s in counseling. Anne never stopped going to church, that was a clear sin, but her faith wandered. She studied Freud and Jung, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Each poked at the veil in search of something, and the discovery was what she relished about being a teacher, even if it was with a class of clownish kids. The rules of grammar might never take, but her kids would occasionally express a truth or two in shambolic proto-essays about a brother serving in Indochina, an abuela in the hills outside San Juan. She had to be strict, in a constant holler, and was set back by simple tasks like collecting textbooks or getting names onto papers. But each year she battled and attained small victories of concentration. By graduation, her kids returned the favor with quarts of perfume and hilarious costume jewelry bought at Alexander’s. The wounds of Sister Angeline slowly scarred over, and Anne applied for the PhD program in psychology at Fordham. She scored well on Miller Analogies (catharsis : emotion :: absolution : guilt) and was accepted.

  Anne was brought out of her reverie by the sound of Dan tapping away at the computer keyboard, his game a bunch of annoying digital chirps. The pot was failing to boil. She made herself a vodka cran before starting on the rest of the dinner.

  * * *

  Later that night, one vodka cran had become three. Dan went to bed shortly after nine, and Pat had farted his way to the back room to watch the Saturday evening movie. Anne dug around in the clandestine recesses of her purse and found a crumpled pack of Benson & Hedges. She had pretty much quit smoking, and during the week, when everything was on a timetable, she was fine. But there was something about the unbounded arc of the weekend that led to nic fits.

  Anne’s first semester at Fordham as a doctoral candidate was daunting. Psychology being taught at a Catholic university was heretical to begin with, and Anne was well aware of the irony that in another century the Jebbies would have tried her as a witch. She was also the only woman in the program, but it was run by a younger lay faculty and very much up to speed. In the fall of 1968, as the teachers’ strike dragged on, she enrolled in “A History of Behaviors.”

  That’s when Anne first noticed Ronan Carroll. Dark Norman Irish features and an unruly brown beard and brown eyes. He wore a tweed jacket and an unironed oxford that left little doubt he was a bachelor. As the professor dragged them through trauma and apoplexy, repression and phobia, Carroll scribbled on long legal pads, apparently writing down everything said verbatim. At the hour break, they met at the coffee machine.

  Carroll rummaged for change. “Why do I bother? It’s like they’re pumping the East River through this thing.” Anne smiled and said nothing.

  A week later, they exited Dealy Hall together. Carroll leaned in with a stage whisper. “Is it me or did the good Professor Robbins develop a facial tic while describing what causes them?”

  “I saw that.” Anne pointed down at his notepad. “You don’t miss much.”

  “Shorthand. I learned it in college when I was going to be the next Jimmy Breslin.”

  “You wrote for the newspaper?”

  Carroll stuffed the notepad into a satchel already crammed with papers and folders. “Not really. I got sidetracked.”

  Anne raised an unsure eyebrow.

  “I thought I was going to be a priest.”

  * * *

  Anne took the garbage out to the alley, and hidden from the house behind the termite-ridden back fence, she dragged on a smoke. She peered down the alley at the back of the Schraeders’ house. She liked that family—the husband a deacon at Rita’s, the wife not above her station—German, reliable. Unlike the Callahans. Their backyard was a calamity—the aboveground pool an eyesore, the rotting cedar-shake cabana and deck quadrupling its hideousness. At least the Peñas next door had the decency to sink their pool into the ground. But their latest attempt to grow palms and banana trees—well, it just wasn’t going to happen, and Anne stood there in the light autumn chill considering the brown and yellow husks of the banana leaves and palm fronds. They looked like dried tobacco and Christ she had to quit smoking for good. She heard her father’s voice in her head—Stop this nonsense, Annie—stubbed out the butt, and kicked it into the drainage line of the alley. She stood there alone, a little cold, contemplating a waning moonrise above a dead banana tree. She walked back toward the porch light and the patio. Granted, she was a little drunk and therefore prone to stare into the void. At this tired hour, her operating valence could be sad and inert, a lot like her father.

  * * *

  Over proper tea at the student center, Ronan Carroll told Anne he had been a Jesuit scholastic for three years and how he came to flee Ireland.

  “My father wrote me off. My mother still speaks to me.”

  “Do you have siblings?”

  “An older brother—he’s a butcher, like my da. And an older sister who yielded a passel of nieces and nephews. I was the runt, the princeling, so they put me through the books, but honestly”—Carroll lowered his shoulders, still trying to parse it—“I never heard the call.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, but the disappointment was too much for them. I became a sinner.”

  “We all are,” Anne said quietly, and sipped tea, keeping her own failing to herself.

  He offered her a ride. Anne protested, the bus was fine, then agreed. Carroll drove a dilapidated Chrysler Imperial.

  “The junkyard paid me to take it off their hands.” He winked. “Be ready to push, Mrs. Malone.”

  The car barely made it across Fordham Road. Chugging along, the two of them diagnosed the faculty members of the department, each borderline in their own way.

  “So how’s it going as the only woman in this loony bin?”

  “Kind of like the Church. A lot of men with ideas, ignoring the women.”

  They passed under the IRT at Jerome Avenue. “So where am I taking you?”

  “Fordham Hill.”

  “Classy.”

  “We just moved. I grew up in Melrose.”

  “What does your husband do?”

>   “He works for an airline.”

  “Jet-setters.” Carroll nodded his head in an impressed fashion. In addition to having a barely functioning car, Carroll couldn’t operate the clutch. They lurched onto Sedgwick Avenue.

  “Listen, if you ever need a ride to campus—”

  “I’ll call a cab.” Anne put her hand on his arm as Carroll chose a lane. Horns blared from all sides.

  “I must admit I learned to drive last summer. In Kinsale, we tend to ride around on goats . . . or my uncle Finbar.”

  The Imperial growled up the incline to the Fordham Hill oval. “Last stop, Mrs. Malone.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Listen, Anne, Erikson is speaking at Columbia on Thursday night. I was going to go.”

  Anne had a foot out the door of the car. “What’s the lecture about?”

  “Identity crisis.”

  * * *

  Anne returned to the den and plunked down in one of the burnt-orange chairs she had brought down from the Bronx and had reupholstered. She wanted another drink but had to keep a semisober eye on Pat. I’ve picked too many fights with him lately. The man was sick, and she felt terrible about it. But when she saw him stumble around the house every evening, all she had was anger. You could have left this. No. You should have left this.

  For distraction she cracked open The Thorn Birds again to find Meggie plagued by brutish men. Oh, Meggie, where are you going to now, girl? Anne skimmed ahead, reading the dialogue to follow plot—a trick that got her through Dickens in school. Okay, look out: Father Ralph, now Archbishop de Bricassart, was back in Drogheda.

  “In a sense Ralph was like God; everything began and ended with him . . .”

  Pull it together, Meggie. Anne jumped ahead a few pages, her annoyance growing. Now she was on Matlock Island with Reverend Richard Chamberlain lurking around.

  “Before she could reach the veranda . . .”

  Anne looked out at the concrete patio of her house. Verandas caused a lot of adultery.

  “. . . he caught her, the impetus of her flight spinning her round against him, so hard he staggered . . .”

  Anne sat up. Here we go . . .

  “Up slid her arms around his neck, his across her back, spasmed; he bent his head, groped with his mouth for hers, found it . . . He could feel her yet he did not feel her . . . never again would he not know the upthrusts of breasts and belly and buttocks.”

  Anne fidgeted in her burnt-orange sofa chair, and for a few seconds she was able to turn off the part of her brain that realized this writing made getting laid sound like a butcher watching aerobics. Anne thought of Ronan and the afternoon she drove up to the College of New Rochelle. He had gone back to the cloth. Not as a Jesuit; Diocesan. They walked down to that park to be alone. Through the tree line, which opened up to a rocky shore and blue skies over the Long Island Sound.

  “Because at last he understood that what he had aimed to be was not a man . . . I can never be God; it was a delusion, that life in search of godhead . . .”

  Anne tossed the book on the end table and moved toward her purse and the B & Hs. Instead she retrieved a square of gum from a yellow box of Chiclets. These goddamn priests. All fragile, fallen angels.

  She couldn’t read, she couldn’t drink, she couldn’t think about him, and so—and who knows how this plan came to her—she went to the laundry closet and pulled out the phone book. She found the number for St. Monica’s.

  “A church named for a woman who just sat ’round weeping for her son Augustine, the big Church father,” Anne muttered to the washer and dryer. “Always kowtowing, venerating the venerated, that’s your role, Monica.”

  She dialed the main number for the church, figuring the call would bounce to the rectory. She hadn’t checked the clock in the kitchen, but it was past nine and closer to ten. Borderline too late.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, is Father Timmerman there?”

  “This is he.”

  Anne felt like hanging up then and there. She had already jammed the line for someone on their deathbed who needed last rites. No, keep your nerve.

  “Listen, Father, I was at Mass this evening, and I have to take issue with your homily.”

  “Who is this?”

  Arrogant from the get-go, Anne thought. Before embellishing her complaint, Anne craned her neck to check that neither Pat nor Dan was lurking in the kitchen.

  “Father, that’s not important. What’s important is that your homily, quite frankly, was offensive.”

  “Listen, ma’am, unless you can tell me—”

  “No, Father, this isn’t about me, it’s about what you said this evening.”

  “It’s rather late.” His tone was trying to wrap up and conclude. “If you want to come to my office and discuss this in person . . .”

  Anne nervously stretched the tangles in the phone cord. Here we go . . .

  “Father, do you think of all women as prostitutes?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Maybe because you are celibate you don’t understand us, but the least you can do, Father”—Anne coughed, her throat dry from the cigarette and the rush of excitement—“the least you can do for half your congregation is treat them with respect.”

  “I always treat women in my ministry—”

  “Then stop telling stories about how we are all sinners,” Anne said, her voice rising. “We’re not all whores put on this earth to wash your feet with our goddamn hair.”

  Okay, that was a little aggressive, Anne realized. And there was a pause as Timmerman considered hanging up. He exhaled heavily and switched ears with the receiver.

  “That was not the point of the story,” he said in a grim tone.

  “I can hardly blame you.” Anne accidentally snapped her Chiclet with her tongue and spat it out into the dregs of her vodka cran. “The Church has always been this way. Women are either held up to this impossible standard, this Madonna, this perfect, docile, weeping figure of complete subservience. Or we’re held in the same company as the whore with the heart of gold. Iniquitous, feeble women with the lone hope of our Savior. I hope you agree there’s more to women than that.”

  “Of course there’s more to it—”

  “We’re all born of women, right? All raised by women?”

  “Ma’am, it’s late, and I’m not going to argue this for the sake of arguing.”

  “Please, Father, you’re not a bishop yet. Sorry if I don’t kiss your ring.” Anne tried to convince herself that this was what Thomas More would say to rebuke Wolsey or insult Cromwell. “But I think you’re afraid of women and that’s why you deride them.”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “The worst thing that happened to our Lord was he had twelve men for followers!”

  “Good night, and please don’t ever—”

  “I’m sorry, Father, I’m not trying to be rude,” Anne interrupted. That wasn’t true, but she wasn’t finished. “We’re not the enemy, Father. We’re the mothers of this Church and all its sons.”

  “Thank you for your call. I will pray for you.”

  “And I am praying for all our clergy to realize the respect women deserve.”

  “No one is disagreeing with you. You are arguing with yourself.”

  “So you agree I’m right? I’m not even coming with the hard stuff, Father. That if God made us equal, women should be allowed to be priests.”

  “Ma’am . . .” Timmerman sounded tired, Anne thought.

  “Focus your homilies on something besides this whole blame-your-spare-rib routine.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night. Remember: we’re not all whores, Father—”

  And he was gone. Anne Malone placed the pink Southwestern Bell Trimline receiver back in its cradle, like closing a plastic oyster. She stood and walked t
o the screen door and flicked on the back porch light, scattering a few crickets. She forced a self-satisfied smile and looked out on a veranda that was still a concrete-slab patio.

  [ OCTOBER 9 ]

  Mr. Oglesby marched into his classroom. Thumper, a long, narrow dowel, painted gray, with a rabbit’s foot chained to one end, marked his strides. He pulled his green-bottle-colored copy of Lord of the Flies from his army knapsack, found a nib of chalk, and wrote out the following line from Golding:

  “‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’”

  The bell rang, and Oglesby was about to start when a yell went up from the senior courtyard. Everyone turned to the windows as a blur of khaki pants—a doofy-looking freshman with curly blond hair and clear aviator glasses—sprinted by. It was the annual rabbit chase—when a freshman tried to cross the senior courtyard on a dare. He had made it past the benches, hooked around two half-stoned seniors, did a taunting Bugs Bunny soft-shoe in front of the chapel, and lit out for his escape route—the back door to the cafeteria kitchen.

  But there was a problem. The back door was locked. The freshman looked through the glass pane desperately. There was no one there to pop the door open. Betrayed by his accomplice, he turned and surrendered as seniors from each end of the breezeway poured into the courtyard. The vigilantes came out of nowhere, including the entire varsity o-line, their numbers, in the seventies, stretched across XXL game-day jerseys. The sophomores pressed to the windows to watch.

  Sticky shook his head. “Dead meat.”

  “Almost made it,” Dan replied, rooting for the underdog.

  “Swirlie?” Rick asked. “Or wind sprints in tighty-whiteys?”

  The seniors grabbed the freshman by the arms and legs and carried him out of the courtyard and toward the locker rooms. A freshman health class from down the courtyard cheered his attempt, and the hostage raised a defiant fist.