by Chris Cander
She had finished Jesus’s Last Supper and was well into the Agony in the Garden when there was an unexpected knock at the door.
John Esposito was standing, not perfectly upright, on her porch. “Evening, Myrthen.” He thrust a handful of flowers at her. She hadn’t seen him at all since sometime after the stock market crashed and before Thanksgiving, after her relentless unwillingness to flirt or even converse became obviously uncomfortable for them all. He’d stopped coming, finally. “It’s dark,” he said, pointing at the flowers. “Might be a few weeds mixed in by accident.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
“Why?”
He cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about you is all.” He cleared his throat again. “Do you think I could have a glass of water?”
“My parents aren’t home.”
“No offense, but we’re adults.” He cleared his throat a third time. “And I could really use a glass of water.”
She sighed, and pulled the door open to allow him in. “Wait here,” she said, and went into the kitchen. That’s when she caught her reflection in the window above the sink, and realized she wasn’t wearing her veil. It had become her habit, covering her head — hiding herself from other people — and now she felt exposed without it. Still, something made her smooth down her hair, tuck in a piece that had gone astray. Was it that mole on his cheek? The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled? She shook her head against such silly thoughts, and the stray lock of hair came loose again. Filling a glass, she rushed into her bedroom to put on the dark lace under which she could hide.
“Here.” She offered him the glass of water, and he drank it all in one long gulp. He smiled and handed it back to her and she could see by the way he rocked on his heels that he wasn’t in his right mind. “Have you been drinking?” For some reason, it didn’t occur to her that he’d come all the way inside, and wasn’t waiting at the door as she’d asked.
“Not much,” he said, shaking his head. “Just a couple sloe gin fizzes down at the Speakeasy with Pepper Pollock and some other fellas.” He raised his eyebrows and blinked a few times. “Maybe three.” He reached down for the armrest of the couch where he’d sat in her polite company the previous autumn. “Mind if I sit down?” he asked, not waiting for permission as he sank onto the cushions.
“What if I do?” She stood in front of him, holding the empty glass, uncertain of what to do next.
He patted the couch. “Come on and sit a minute.” She took a breath, and shifted her weight. “Aw, come on, I’m not gonna bite you,” he said, and smiled. The thoughtful way he looked at her was more than she could bear.
The lamp flickered behind him and cast a thick glow in Myrthen’s direction. John propped his head against his fist, leaned back into the corner, and looked at her. She sat down at the other end and stared intently at her mother’s sewing basket. They stayed that way for several minutes. The chill that had kept her company earlier, she noted, was gone.
“It’s actually nice sitting here with you, quiet like this,” he said.
In her mind, she heard herself begging her mother, I can sit quietly with you. Her mother saying no. Always no. It was a torment, not being wanted. She looked up at John.
“You know, you shouldn’t wear that thing all the time. Nobody can see your face that way.” His voice was gentle, soft.
“That’s the idea,” she said, not unkindly.
“Can I see your eyes?” he said. “I just mean so we can talk. It feels like I’m in the confessional with your face all covered up like that.”
She didn’t move, but neither did she decline. Instead, she tried to recall if anyone had ever asked her to remove her veil. She’d been wearing it in public for years. Her mother may have chided her in the beginning, but that wasn’t the same thing.
John slid closer to her, slowly, either because he was drunk or because he didn’t want to startle her. When she didn’t move away, he reached out and lifted the black lace off her face, and draped it back over the top of her dark hair. “That’s much better,” he said, whispering. Then he moved back away, and watched her profile. After a moment and without looking up, she spoke.
“Why did you come here?”
He shrugged. “I don’t honestly know. I know you don’t want to go out with me. But me and the fellas, well, we were sitting around and talking and of course the talk gets a little silly sometimes, about girls and such, and it just felt cheap after a while. And then I started thinking about you, and never mind that you’re so pretty, but I was just wondering … oh, I don’t know. I guess I thought maybe I’d just come and talk to you, like friends.”
She had no friends, she who was too different, who wanted things nobody else did. Over the years, the gap between her and everyone else had grown wider and wider. She was nineteen years old but felt like she was ninety, and was fairly certain that, by now, even if she put forth the effort, no one wanted to be around her except, perhaps, Father Timothy. Not other girls, not her mother. Instead, she had the Church, and her one-sided talks with her dead twin, and the abiding desire to enter monastic life as a Carmelite nun, which Father Timothy had promised to help her accomplish after her twentieth birthday. Exactly five months and twenty-five days from today. For the first time, the idea struck her as a lonely one.
“We could be friends, couldn’t we?” he said.
She stared at the empty glass in her hands, and thought of her mother in the sickroom of someone else’s daughter. Ava needs comforting. I don’t think you can help. A knot formed at the base of her throat and she felt a sting behind her eyes. Before she could stop them, tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Oh no, don’t cry,” John said. “I didn’t mean anything — ” He moved next to her, and she lifted a hand to cover her face. “Oh, please. I’m sorry. Don’t cry.” He took the glass from her and set it down on the table. Immediately, she brought her other hand up and curled her body forward.
John reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and handed it to her. But her eyes were closed, and she didn’t see it, so he moved closer, touched her lightly on the wrist, and when she didn’t jerk away, he brought first one hand and then the other away from her face. With the gentlest of dabs, he pressed away her tears. She couldn’t remember such tenderness.
When he finished, he offered her the handkerchief. She took it, fingering the damp white cloth, the raised embroidery. Someone cared enough about him to stitch a monogram onto a rag, and she responded to it with a surge of longing. For her mother, for Ruth. For anyone. She’d been huddled inside herself for so long she hadn’t realized until then how alone she really was. She wondered whether she’d ever feel anything but empty, even if she got everything she prayed for.
Myrthen looked up at him and smiled, weakly. “Yes,” she said. “We can be friends.”
He smiled back, and in that moment, something passed between them, a mutual understanding or curiosity or simple desire. She forgot about everything else — her mother and the Carmelites and Ruth and even God — and when John leaned in, she met him with parted lips.
He slipped her veil gently off her head, and threaded his fingers into her hair. Had there ever been anything so exquisite? Her mouth was dry but she didn’t want to move it from his and her heart pounded so loudly in her ears she couldn’t have heard the voice of God even if He had chosen in that moment, finally, to speak to her. No, no, this couldn’t happen. She was devoted to God, to the memory of Ruth. There was no place for this, no room for the mole or the crinkled smile. Please, God. There was a flutter at her throat — his hands, trembling also — working at the buttons on her black dress, the wool that felt irreconcilably suffocating, and so she helped him — she helped him — to free herself from it. And then they unbuttoned his shirt together, quickly, fumbling, then his pants and then they were both naked, John and Myrthen, and they were not ashamed.
John laid her back on the couch, tossing the polite throw pillow
s onto the floor to make room, and began the hasty process of exploring her. She unfurled inside herself, stretching and yawning, awakened for the first time. If there were a prayer to recite, she wouldn’t have known it. John might have stopped to ask, before he entered her, if she was certain, but there seemed to be no doubt in the way she gave herself over to him. He buried his face against her neck, kissing her there as he moved on top of her and spread one of her legs aside with his knee as though shooing a kitten. “Oh,” she said.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No,” she said, breathless. “No.” And she tipped her head and arched her back and made room for him, if not in her heart, at least inside her body.
They gave no thought to consequences, or the passage of time, or the idea of privacy. Their bodies had captured their minds, and so they couldn’t have imagined that anything would interrupt them: like Ava’s fever breaking, or Myrthen’s mother coming home once Ava was peacefully asleep. So when the steps up to the front porch creaked, they weren’t listening — and couldn’t have heard it over their own panting breaths — and when the door opened, they didn’t notice. In fact, they didn’t even stop when Rachel was upon them, standing with her mouth set and her arm raised. Only her fist landing with a thud against John’s back broke their trance. At once they scrambled to untwine themselves from each other, grabbing at discarded clothes and pillows to cover themselves, Rachel striking at John the entire time.
“Mama, stop!”
Rachel’s eyes flew open and her face turned red. She brought her hand up once more, and with all her apparent might, slapped her daughter’s face so hard it hurt them both.
“Du hure!” she screamed in a voice that Myrthen, in all the years to come, would never forget.
You whore.
There was no forgiveness. Rachel and Otto called on John’s parents early the following morning, and they sat gape-mouthed on their couch as Rachel lavished the sordid details of their children’s ruination. She was prepared to threaten a public attack on John’s character, but in the end it was unnecessary; his parents agreed with Rachel that the two should be married as soon as possible. Both good Catholic families and all.
“Mama, no, please, no!” The brief spell of seduction forever over, the attraction to John irrevocably spoiled. Myrthen dropped to her knees and desperately clutched at Rachel’s skirts. “I’m begging you, don’t make me marry him! I’ll leave Verra, I’ll do anything, but please! I can’t marry him. I can’t marry anybody!”
“Quiet!” Rachel hissed, snatching the fistful of skirt out of Myrthen’s sweating hands. Then she bent down and grabbed her by the chin and peered closely into her eyes so that there would be no mistake in her meaning. “You have ruined yourself. And you have brought shame upon this family. Did we raise you to become a whore? Is that what nuns do? No, I think not. They do not want whores living among them.” She let go of her daughter’s chin, and her hands fell to her sides. “What do you want people to think, that we brought disgrace with us from Germany to this country? What other choice do we have but for you to marry this boy?”
“No! I won’t do it! I’ll run away!”
“You can run away, but your God will know your disgrace no matter where you are,” she said in a voice made all the more menacing by its absence of passion. “He will never forgive you if you run away from your family and your duty.”
Myrthen buried her face in her hands and wailed. “All I’ve ever wanted is to be a Sister.”
“We all must learn to live with suffering, Myrthen,” she said. “We have all had things taken away from us that we hold most dear. You of all people should know this.” Then she turned on her heel. Walking away from Myrthen, she said over her shoulder, “I am going now to speak to Father Timothy. I will choose a wedding date that is far enough not to make gossip, but close enough to hide your shame if you are carrying a child.”
And she left Myrthen sobbing on the floor, a butterfly in a cocoon of black wool, her life so abruptly inverted that when she finally emerged from the shock, she would metamorphose into a caterpillar.
June 6, 1930
The morning before the day Myrthen was to marry John Esposito, her mother handed her a pair of gardening shears. Myrthen crossed her arms slowly, refusing them.
“Mama, I’ve told you,” she said in a tired voice, pinched off so that it wouldn’t break. A month and a half after she’d been caught with John, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe a wedding would actually take place. “I don’t want to wear a wreath.”
“Myrthen,” her mother said. “I learned English when I came to this country. I unwound my braids. I gave up many things to be here with your father.” Rachel lowered the shears, then lifted her chin and stiffened her slender back. She was still a young woman herself, only thirty-six years old, but her blonde hair had gone mostly gray. The eyes that had long ago reflected the sparkling blue-green of the ocean now looked more like the sky clouded by fine coal dust. “I gave up many things. But I carried this myrtle from your grandmother’s garden in Germany. I used some of it for my own wedding wreath. I planted it here, and it took root, just as your father promised.”
Myrthen uncrossed her arms and clasped her hands into a prayerful knot. She closed her eyes and reminded herself, silent and slow and calm, Honor thy father and thy mother.
“Myrthen, stop it. Look at me.” Rachel was anxious to have the wreath made so she could attach the veil, the final step. But tradition held that the bride must cut the branches herself.
Rachel pointed the shears at her. The kettle top began to rattle above the water’s boil, and a moist heat filled the small kitchen. Myrthen reached up and took them, grasping the sharp ends safely with the hand that would be her own for only one more day.
As she stomped out into the garden, she glanced once over her shoulder at the house. Her mother stood at the open window, polishing her daughter’s white Mary Janes for a second time. Through the glass, Rachel frowned and made a “go on” gesture with both hands, one of which was holding a rag and the other, a shoe.
Myrthen turned away without expression, crouched down, and gathered her heavy skirt around her legs. She fingered the even-shaped, waxy myrtle leaves, then pushed her clasped hands into the folds of wool on her lap and closed her eyes.
Almighty Father, please don’t make me do this. I was wrong to give in to lust. It’s my fault that I was weak. I swear to you I’ll never give in to such impurity again. Please don’t make me marry him. I don’t love him; I love You. How can I convince You? I’ll give up anything, I’ll do anything. I’ll pray harder and —
“Myrthen!” her mother called from the window.
Myrthen turned her head slightly. “Amen,” she said, and paused a moment, letting the prayer take flight into the clear blue. Then she reached into the web of branches, grabbed the first two she felt, and hacked each off with a hard squeeze of the shears. She tossed them onto the ground and sheared off two more.
“There,” she said, dropping the branches onto the kitchen table.
“I’ll tell you how to weave it,” her mother said, putting aside the gleaming wedding shoes. “Sit.”
Myrthen put the shears down on the table, hard. “I cut the branches. But I’m not going to weave it.”
“You have to, Myrthen. It will bring good luck to your marriage.”
“I don’t need luck,” she said. “I need to go. I need to speak to Father Timothy.”
“What have you done since yesterday, Myrthen, that you could possibly need to confess?”
She lifted her chin and raised an eyebrow. “That’s between God and me.”
Rachel sighed. “At least let me measure your head.” She reached out and pulled Myrthen into a chair. She selected one of the branches and held the thick end in one hand. The she made a loop around her daughter’s head and pinched it where it fit.
“Ouch!”
“I’m sorry, Myrthen.”
“You pulled my hair.”
&n
bsp; “Of course I didn’t mean to,” Rachel said, then lifted the loop off Myrthen’s head and overlapped the large end, weaving it around the branch circle. Holding the wreath with one hand, she continued to weave the branch in and out and around the beginning circle. When she reached the end, she took the next branch and began to weave the next vine, starting at a different spot from the first, wrapping it in and out and around, in the opposite direction.
Rachel glanced up from her work. “You may go,” she said without stopping. “Give my regards to Father Timothy. Tell him we’ll be there sharp at nine-thirty in the morning.”
Myrthen dipped the middle finger of her right hand into the holy water basin and crossed herself.
“Good morning, child,” Father Timothy called out to her from the tiny sacristy closet. She was often the only parishioner there during the day, so even without turning around, he knew it was she who had entered.
“Good morning, Father.”
Father Timothy emerged, wiped his hands on a towel. “Myrthen, tomorrow is your big day. You don’t need to clean today.”
“I always clean on Fridays, Father.” But rather than move to gather her polishing cloth and lemon oil, the dustpan and broom, she stayed where she was with her chin nearly resting on her chest.
Father Timothy sighed. “It’s not necessary. You cleaned yesterday. And your mother-in-law has delivered the flowers already.” He pointed toward the altar. “Orange blossoms and hydrangea. Lovely, aren’t they? And tea roses from her garden.” He clasped his hands. “You are a fortunate young woman indeed, Myrthen.”
“She’s not my mother-in-law.”
“Mother-in-law-elect, then.” He smiled.
She pulled her mantilla lower over her face, then pressed her cheek against her shoulder. “Father, will you please hear my confession?”
“Now, child?”
