The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Jane knew her father would relent eventually. She could make him. He was a certified public accountant, an orderly and logical man, attentive to numbers, stats, formulae. Watching sports suited him because he seemed to approach it like a monthslong word problem. On the day of the home game against the Broncos, if O. J. Simpson misses his train out of Syracuse and has to run all the way to Buffalo, what pace per mile would he have to maintain— Her father struck Jane as a person who had freed himself from interiority, from psychology and foibles and God; he believed in his platitudes, took them literally, and his life was simpler and better for it. He edited out choice wherever possible, a tendency he had in common with Jane. He built his cell. His need for order and logic in his day-to-day life would be thwarted by the fury of Jane and the Rome trip, fury for days, his youngest and most obedient child, the one who helped around the house without complaint or prompting, the one who always agreed. She wept for hours from the moment she arrived home from school in the afternoons, so violently she choked on her own spit. One vessel in her eye broke the surface, then another, each the width and color of the little red string on a Band-Aid. She flung herself against walls and onto linoleum. She bit the backs of her wrists and scratched at her forearms and yanked at her hair.

  “Stop acting!” Jane’s mother shrieked at the height of these fits, fleeing into another room. The admonition further incensed Jane for being correct, because she did feel an actorly distance from her tantrums; she hesitated, measuring arcs and wingspans, before she threw her books against the wall; her fingernails raised red runes on her forearms that flattened and faded after a quick shower. Even in the fullest grip of her saintly convulsions, Jane felt more pity for her mother than righteous, levitating rage. Pity or resentment. How fiercely Jane resented her now, how desperately she wished she could bite down hard enough on her arm to drain the resentment forever, to burst it open with the sweet pain of God. Because God could see all the way inside her mother.

  God could also see all the way inside Jane’s resentment. Sometimes she thinks he can even now.

  So Jane fought and cried until her candy tins were handed back to her. First time on an airplane, first time in a hotel. She signed up to room with Elise Davis, pale-freckled and dun-haired, scholarly and sarcastic. Assiduously Catholic. A girl who based her constantly exercised moral judgments on a bedrock of rueful compassion. Jane suspected that her own life would be easier if Elise were her best friend and thus her steadiest influence, if she could mold her opinions and the management of her time solely according to Elise’s preferences, even if Jane herself was too high-strung and daydreamy, too often half swooning under the spell of devotion and semistarvation, to lock perfectly into Elise’s orbit of scholar-athletes: Christy Torres, who had regional honors in both violin and chess; Sonja Spiegelman, the only girl on the Mathletes team and the only cross-country runner with a shot at qualifying for States; Geeta Banerjee, a varsity gymnast who was already taking premed classes at the local Jesuit college. Jane made straight As, but generic ones, Regents and the occasional AP. It seemed cosmically unfair that Jane was ranked fifth in their class, right behind Geeta, who should have been valedictorian but who had tanked her GPA as a junior when she tried to take calculus and AP Physics a year early, at the same time.

  “I don’t really know how they calculate the rankings, but you shouldn’t be punished for having ambition,” Jane remarked to her mother. She was surprised by her ranking and happy with it, and hoped her mother would be, too.

  “That Geeta—what is she?” Jane’s mother asked, not for the first time.

  “Geeta is Geeta,” Jane replied, as she had before.

  “But where is she from?” Jane’s mother asked.

  “She was born at Children’s Hospital, like me,” Jane replied.

  “You know what I mean,” Jane’s mother said. “Where did your other friends land?”

  “Elise, Christy, and Sonja went one-two-three,” Jane said.

  “That Sonja,” her mother said. “She is so Jewish-looking.” She had said this before.

  “Whatever that means,” Jane replied. As she always did.

  “Well, not all of them look like it,” her mother said. “You don’t always know for sure.”

  Jane was puzzled yet again by her own habit of trying to chat with her mother about her friends.

  Although Jane often joined Elise’s Friday-night homework parties and tagged along to cheer Geeta and Sonja at their competitions, the people with whom Jane spent the most time were children. The children she babysat were why she made it to Rome. The Vine girls, those sweet sparrows. Jane fantasized about living with the Vines, sleeping on the gold couch beneath the skylight. She could be their governess, swooshing around them in hoop skirts, running conjugation drills in multiple European languages.

  The children were why she made it to Santa Maria della Vittoria, where the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa hung too high in a chapel shrine for Jane to see it closely. Jane logged her disappointment as a minor entry in that day’s catalog of saintly pain. She had consumed nothing but water and Coca-Cola for breakfast and lunch. She refused to apply bandages to the blisters mushrooming across her heels, one of which had started to bleed and stick over the miles they covered on foot through the city. Jane looked up at Teresa as she worked her heel against her shoe, the friction turning wet and warm, the corners of her eyes crinkling with virtuous discomfort.

  Behind Jane, a boy muttered, “Fairy stuck her with his spear,” as another boy laughed.

  Colin Chase and Patrick Brennan. Pat. Football players. B+ students. Smart enough, but indifferent to school. Colin tall and horse-faced, shaggy-blond, jaw strong or overbearing depending on the angle. Pat slighter, darker, objectively pretty. Wide-set deer eyes. Elise and the others called them Thing One and Thing Two.

  At the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the Salus Populi Romani glittered atop the altar. Mary, Mother of God, was pinched, maybe resentful, gaudy crown perched atop her hooded robe, state-fair baubles hanging from her neck and pinned to her shoulder. Baby Jesus, a skinny homunculus, sat stiff on Mary’s lap, peering up at her skeptically. Are you my mother? he seemed to wonder, the same question that haunted the just-hatched baby bird in the book that Jane had read a hundred times to Jeanette Vine.

  Behind Jane, big blond Thing One muttered to dark pretty Thing Two, “Mary got fucked by God.”

  Gaat fucked. Gaad. Jane’s mother made sure her children were vigilant about the Buffalo accent. “Round your vowels,” she commanded them.

  Thing Two laughed as Thing One huffed and grunted in an orgasmic imitation of Mary. “Oh Gaad. Oh Gaaahhd.”

  Jane’s upper lip kicked. A puff of air escaped her throat. It was funny—all of it. The carvings, the sparkles, the incantations, the incense, the spectacle, the money. Her money. How many little piles of fives and ones would equal the value of one marble pillar in this place, one square foot of mosaic? Jane’s tears dropping on a cheap dumb candy tin as she sobbingly latched it shut, her mother yelling in the vicinity—the whole thing was hilarious.

  Jane looked at Elise beside her, who rolled her eyes. For almost laughing at Colin’s blasphemy, Jane assigned herself ten Hail Marys and a few smacks to the head the next time she had a bathroom stall to herself.

  Sister Tabitha, their catechism teacher, had told them in class that sinful thoughts didn’t put your soul in danger, “so long as you don’t consent to the thought,” she said.

  “But how do you consent to a thought?” Alyssa Piotrowski asked without being called on, her hand in the air. Jane felt gratitude toward Alyssa for always posing the questions she was too timid to ask herself. Maybe someday Alyssa would ask Sister Tabitha for Jesus’s precise cause of death.

  “You consent by taking pleasure in the thought,” Sister Tabitha replied. “By not fighting it off with prayer.”

  “But—the thought is still there,” Alyssa said. “Didn’t you consent to the thought by thinking it in the first place?”
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  “Alyssa got raped by her own brain,” Thing One said, and Thing Two laughed into his sleeve.

  In Vatican City, Michelangelo’s Pietà presented an optical illusion: vast and solid Mary, curtained knees spread, Jesus’ shrunken corpse slung across her lap. Jane squinted at the sculpture, willing Jesus and Mary to change positions, to strike new poses for her mind’s camera. She guessed that if the sculpted figures thawed and rose to their full heights, Mary would tower over her son, twice his width.

  “Jesus died because Mary sat on him,” Thing One said to Thing Two. “Fat cow.”

  At the Santa Maria del Popolo, Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus and Crucifixion of St. Peter hung facing each other. The apostle Paul, fallen from his horse, his arms outstretched, his dirty legs parted and quivering, his eyes closed against the light of God. Peter at first appeared decrepit, wretched in the hands of his captors and tormentors, but further contemplation revealed him as powerful in his insistence to be nailed to the cross—not just nailed to it but nailed upside down, so as not to offend Christ through straight mimicry. Peter was powerful in the pride he took in his degradation, in confronting the desecration of his flesh. His flesh would be seen. It was evidence. His tormentors would look him in the eye.

  An odor of old sweat wafted from the canvases. Burlap and hay. The paintings heaved and groaned. Their lights flickered beneath the shadows of shifting bodies. The paintings were alive, animal. They stirred like a sleepy beast who slowly emerges from darkness. The first thing you’d see would be the blinking yellow eyes.

  Jane never could have said—she could not say now—what constituted a “religious experience.” But if she had to guess, standing right there between the Caravaggios, it was a nauseating little quake of dread and ecstasy. Your throat opens up and you think you might be in love. For a second, it’s like the ghost of God is inside you. You can contort yourself however you want to see his face, but he will always elude you.

  He is not even looking at you, Jane thought. It existed beyond language, or before it. You had to kill it first, before you could put it into words.

  Not for the first time, in another church but far from home, Jane felt the boundaries dissolving. If only for a second, she could flow in and out of her surroundings, take on their colors and compositions without hardening or getting stuck in place; she could absorb and reflect light like a panel of tesserae. She was no longer petrified by the eyes of God. Between the Caravaggios, something opened up in Jane, just then, and it would never close.

  Behind Jane, Thing One muttered to Thing Two, “Cara-fag-io.”

  Jane turned away from the paintings and toward the voice. She met Colin’s eyes, then Pat’s. Colin bucked his big jaw at her and thrust his tongue inside one cheek. Pat stared placidly back at Jane.

  The next day, on the Metro, Colin pulled to the edge of his seat across from Jane and Elise and said, to Jane, “Fucking you would be like fucking a rag doll.” Beside him, Pat snickered into his collar and looked away.

  That’s when Jane knew. Knew it was going to happen. Not that day, probably not on this trip—the students’ days were too scheduled, too chaperoned, their hotel rooms closely monitored. She hadn’t even found the opportunity to smack herself in the head for laughing at the Virgin Mary. But Thing One and Thing Two had discussed and evaluated her as a prospect, and come to a decision, and now, gathered and seated here on the Metro, she was being advised of their decision.

  “And you would know, wouldn’t you, Colin? You love to play with your dollies,” said Elise, as Jane flushed hot with her shame and her power.

  She tried and failed to find a reproduction of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome. Instead she brought home a print of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with Saint Anne: a buxom, sexy Mary and a naked toddler Jesus stomping decorously on the evil serpent, as Anne, gaunt and ancient, struggles to pretend to admire their work while still remaining upright. Jane also bought a packaged chunk of the Colosseum, about as big as a softball.

  “That’s not real,” her mother told her. “How many hours did you have to babysit to buy that hunk of crap?”

  Cree-ap. Jane’s mother, too, at moments of high dudgeon, could fall prey to the Buffalo accent.

  Jane propped up the Caravaggio reproduction on a matboard atop her bedroom dresser, and as she expected, her mother said nothing about it. Surely she objected to it—Mary’s bosom, Jesus’s penis—but if her mother said a word, she would only be revealing the places where her own dirty mind could go.

  Jane felt prepared for the pain. Sonja had done it with Larry Priven over Thanksgiving, much to Elise’s restrained dismay; Sonja said the pain was narrowly preferable to a torn ligament. On the thinly carpeted cement floor of Pat’s family’s freshly drywalled basement, where Pat and Colin and Brad Bender spent off-season afternoons lifting weights and drinking smuggled Budweiser, Jane observed the pain from a distance, her body splayed alongside a kettle ball and a dumbbell rack, but her mind’s eye elevated, like Teresa atop her plume of marble, as Pat’s courtly ministrations—the tender forehead kisses, the stroking of hair—began to give way to a procedure more autonomic and zoological, something Jane seemed almost incidental to. For an instant, Jane wondered if God was watching, if pain, even in this case, was the presence of God. She bit down on her tongue to punish herself for the thought. God was not so lewd, so prurient. His mind didn’t go to those places; he had better things to do.

  He is not even looking at you.

  Pat was two different people, and Jane liked that, for a long time. When he was sweet, he was so sweet. Mostly when they were alone. Jane loved how much he loved how skinny she was. She loved how easily he could scoop her up and sling her over his shoulder, how he kneaded her rib cage and hip bones with the pads of his fingers, called her String Bean and Mrs. Bones and Fatso and the Buttless Wonder. She loved that he loved how she would order French toast and souvlaki at Stavros’s Diner or hot wings at the Anchor Bar, manage a couple of small bites, and smile apologetically as she pushed her plate away, because she did love to eat, you see, but she was too dainty and adorable, too easily overwhelmed, too much his sweet girl—because when he was sweet, he saw her, too, as sweet—to eat up the world she was hungry for.

  “She tries so hard to pack it away,” he said to a waitress at Perkins one night, while they were waiting for Colin and Brad to join them, and she nibbled at pancakes already going cold.

  If Jane and Pat were with other people, they were usually with his squad of jocks, who found few points of intersection with Elise’s coalition of high achievers, although Elise and Christy did find time to sit beside Jane on the bleachers during Pat’s home games. With his friends, Pat tended to turn away, irritated, if Jane murmured in his ear; he’d scowl if she spoke to one of his friends in a way he found untoward.

  “Why do you have to say colossal when you can just say big—who are you trying to impress?” he asked at Perkins, after Colin and Brad showed up.

  And then: “Why do you have to make that face?” Her hand went up to her cheek to find out what kind of face she was making.

  But just when Jane would begin to grow bored of her own embarrassment and vigilance, when she was ready to retreat from Pat into Elise’s sober and mostly chaste world of homework parties and volunteering for bingo night at the senior center, the Saturday nights at the Vines’ and the Sunday afternoons in the chirring walnut chairs of the Clearfield Library, he would return to her. He would place her hand in his and gaze at their fingers curled together, tug playfully at her ponytail, press his thumb and forefinger on the nape of her neck or the base of her spine. Right there in front of his friends. He wouldn’t do his crossword puzzles in front of his friends, but he would do this. Jane’s head tipped back beneath the gravity of his benediction, his tactile declaration of ownership, his pride in what he owned. With his letterman jacket draped over her shoulders, she felt the privilege of being owned, of being wanted exclusively, and the joyous unlikelihood of Pa
t’s choice—that he’d passed over any of the cheerleaders waiting to pair off with him, all yellows and golds with their Farrah-feathered hair and fourteen-karat nameplate necklaces, in favor of her, of all people, shy and gangly, tongue-tied and flat-chested Jane.

  One time in the basement, Jane apologized for her small breasts.

  “Tits are for milking,” Pat said, and Jane was moved.

  She had accomplished something hard. Pat’s intervals of snappishness and indifference were the proof that she’d achieved a hard thing, because turning him sweet was hard. Convincing Pat to love her, and to like her, was hard, and it was work that was never done. She trusted hard.

  The time came to make the necessary arrangements. A wedding over Labor Day weekend at Saint Mary’s, Pat’s aunt Diane, the director of the Saint Mary’s children’s chorus, putting in a word to fit them in. Neither Jane’s nor Pat’s family was inclined to discuss why the happy event needed to be so hastily planned.

  Plenty of other girls who found themselves in the same situation would make a different kind of necessary arrangement.

  It’s not that she didn’t think about it.

  It wasn’t difficult to get done.

  She knew somebody who knew somebody who’d done it. You just had to know who to ask. How to ask. It would be like it never happened. Instead of getting married in September, she could start at the University of Buffalo, with Pat. Geeta and Christy were going to UB, too. Elise off to Vassar, Sonja to the University of Michigan. Jane would be showing by September, probably. But she didn’t have to be.

  The idea followed her around even after the wedding date was set. The idea was a tall lithe nurse in white linens: paper dressing gown over one arm, one hand beckoning Jane toward a small room with a large chair, a tray of sharp and gleaming instruments beside it. The nurse had a scent Jane couldn’t place, not antiseptic, but as wholesome and foreboding as peat and heavy rain. She smelled of wildflowers spattered with freshly dug earth.