by Chris Cander
He fumbled with the thousands of buttons down the front of her warm, dull nightgown, the one she’d worn every night for the past several years, regardless of the season. She pushed at him briefly but realized it was futile, so instead she rolled her face away and looked at the wreath and the veil, and her eyes went blank as a doll’s.
“You liked it before. I know you did,” he said, pressing himself against her.
She knew then that she would never let herself enjoy intimacy with him again. Or let herself slide into some banal form of domestic bliss. No, she would save herself for God.
He reached down behind and between his strong legs and grabbed the hem of her gown, working it up from her ankles to her knees, her dead weight no aid, and then past her white thighs that made him gasp in the moonlight, and up higher. Then he reversed the direction with her undergarments, exposing a triangle of dark against the pale skin. She lay, unmoving, white and cool and passive as a corpse as he pulled her underthings off and tossed them on the hardwood floor with a whispery thud.
His weight on her was like the weight of sin, and she felt the loneliness and sense of abandonment that sin always produces. He bent down and tried to kiss her, but she pressed her face farther into the pillow. Below, something feathery and savage was taking place. It was different now that she didn’t want it. She thought of the roosters her mother kept in the henhouse to defend the flock. How they chased down and violated the hens they were meant to protect.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Back and forth, back and forth, like a ship rocking over unknown seas. Against her will, she began to enjoy the sensation. But she forced herself, as she thereafter would, not to, and to think of God instead, to keep her thoughts, if not her body, pure. She reached out with her left hand and grasped the wreath that lay nearby. John saw her. “What are you doing with that?”
“Just get it over with,” Myrthen muttered.
While her husband chiseled drunkenly at her, she lifted her head and placed the wreath around it, then let her head fall back against the pillow. She pulled the veil down over her face, and closed her eyes.
Thy will be done, God. If this is what you want for me, then I will endure it.
Back and forth, the weight of sin ruthlessly crushed crushed crushed her into the bed and soon the thorns dug into her temples and she began to bleed.
December 12, 1931
Alta paced the bottom floor of her small house with a new gait: a cross between a skip and a trot that instinct told her would calm the screaming baby. Without her own mother to help her navigate these early days, instinct was the only thing she had.
Instinct, and a dog-eared copy of Infant Care put out by the Children’s Bureau that Renata had lent her. Alta had read it cover to cover during one of the almost-sleepless nights, while Abel slept against her, snug in the curve of her arm, wrapped in a blanket she’d crocheted for him before he was born. The book emphasized the “absolute regularity and consistency in the formation of habits,” and suggested the mother create a strict schedule for the baby’s daily program and habit training. But her heart ached and her breasts leaked and her instinct admonished her whenever she put him down for a nap just because the grandfather clock at the base of the stairs told her it was time to do so.
So instead she held him, and rocked him, and nursed him whenever he wanted, which was nearly all the time. When he fell into that warm sleep that only babies can, she cradled him in her arms, breathing in his milky scent, watching his rosebud mouth pantomime a suckle. Tired as she was, she sometimes refused sleep just so she could stare at him and wonder at the depth of love that had been discovered deep within her.
It was at times like these that she longed for her mother the most.
One midmorning toward the end of winter in 1926, two months after Alta’s fourteenth birthday, her mother put down her dishtowel and took off the apron that she’d worn from dawn to dusk every day that Alta could remember. She pressed her hands against the kitchen sink and dropped her head. Alta looked up from the piecrust she was rolling out on the kitchen table.
“Mama?”
A tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“Mama!”
Alta dropped her rolling pin and rushed to her mother. Her mother’s back felt as if she’d been standing too close to the Glenwood C stove. “Help me lie down, Alta,” she said. “My head hurts something awful.”
Her mother lay in bed for a full day with fever and chills before the real illness set in. The company doctor was called. He examined her while she shivered in her nightgown, and jotted her symptoms down in a notebook: flush, photophobia, conjunctivitis, diffuse pharyngitis. He diagnosed influenza, rinsed her sinuses with Ringer’s solution, and told her to rest. Then he said to Alta, “Young lady, you’ll take care of your father and brothers so your mama can get well, now, hear?” She nodded. She’d already helped cook and clean for years.
Her mother died in her bed eight days later.
Then her grandmother, crumpled by then to a ninety-degree angle, died a little over a month later. From that point on, even surrounded as she was by the men in her family and all the responsibilities that her mother had left behind, Alta felt utterly invisible. Utterly alone.
Now, five years later, with her own child nestled against her for nourishment and comfort, she began to feel again a sense of deep connection to another human being. She whispered lullabies to her sleeping Abel, kissed him gently on his velvet cheeks. She loved him like she’d never loved anyone, not even her mother. Nor her father or brothers. Nor Walter Pulaski, her hardworking husband of one fragile year.
Abel finally released a loud burp and fell asleep after several patting, bouncing laps around the house. Placing him carefully in the kitchen cradle her uncle had made, Alta tucked his blanket in around him. She would have liked to lie down for a rest herself, but the breakfast dishes hadn’t yet been done, nor the washing, and she needed to start thinking about dinner.
She tied an apron around her waist, which she noticed was steadily shrinking back down to normal size, then rolled up her sleeves and filled the sink with soap and water. As she scrubbed, she watched a gray-eared rabbit hopping along the fenced-off garden, which she could see from her kitchen window. She wondered if it was a mama rabbit, looking for food for her babies. Knowing now how exhausting it was to care for a newborn, Alta had an urge to go pull up some arugula and kale and offer it to her.
She was so tired and lost in thought, she didn’t hear Walter, who was quiet anyway in spite of his bulk, come in through the back screen door.
He saw her there at the kitchen sink, her strong, graceful hands working in the soapy water. Seeing the curve of her hips and the swell of her full breasts moved him. She looked beautiful, ethereal in that mysterious way of hers that made him wish he were a man of words so he could tell her what he saw, but his ineloquence made him shy. He stepped up behind her, wanting only to be closer to her, to understand his unnamable desire — not just to be intimate with her but to know her. Her thoughts, her secrets. Underneath her plain beauty and dutiful habits, he could sense that something far more passionate coursed through her veins. He reached out and placed one hand on her waist.
Immediately, her hands stopped moving through the dirty water. Her back straightened into a rigid posture, startled, caught. As though she were that mama rabbit snatched up from her gathering. She took a deep breath, wiped her hands on her apron, and turned slowly around. He let his hand, calloused and coal-stained no matter how hard he washed, drop to his side. Then he lifted the other to show her his prize from his morning hunt. A gray rabbit, already stiff, that he held aloft by the ears.
“Thought we could have him for dinner,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I’ll save the skin if you want.”
She stared at it a moment, then shook her head.
“All right then.”
He stood there, looking at her in that pleading way he had.
She sighed, tired and now inexplicably sad. “The baby’s asleep,” she said, looking down at the tiny figure wrapped in blue wool.
“All right.”
She interpreted this as a request, and so without a word, she reached out and took his free hand. He put the dead rabbit down next to the clean dishes and let himself be led upstairs to their bedroom.
Walter seemed embarrassed whenever he reached for her, and that cautious fumbling in turn embarrassed her. His movements were awkward, his enormous hands like paws. He didn’t know how to seduce or please her, how to be graceful or patient. She didn’t know if it was something she had to ask for, but she sensed that it would hurt his feelings if she did. So even after more than a year of marriage, they retained their early, sheepish habits. About this misfortune, neither of them ever spoke.
As he moved over and into her, she glanced at him briefly, smiled in a vague, polite way, then turned her head to the side and closed her eyes. Then, when he rolled himself off her, he saw her staring with a blank expression out the window.
“You can just rest here a bit if you want,” he said in a hushed, low voice.
She sighed and nodded.
“I’ll let you know when Abel wakes up.”
“Thank you,” she said.
That night, she served him a lavish meal of rabbit cooked with mushrooms, stale kaiser rolls, onions, and eggs seasoned with paprika and nutmeg. She garnished it with strips of bacon, potato wedges, jarred tomatoes, and green onions, then she poured them each a small glass of wine and even lit a pair of candles.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
“You’re a good man.”
Serving him a heaping plate of food, she bent her head as he said a short prayer of thanks. She wasn’t a believer, but she thought her thanks anyway: for Abel, for Walter. He wasn’t whom she’d wanted, but he didn’t deserve to know that.
“Ain’t you having anything?” he asked.
Alta shook her head. After she came downstairs, she’d watched through the window as Walter gutted the rabbit, sliding the skin off and removing the entrails. There’d been babies in the rabbit’s belly.
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “But you go on. I’ll stay here with you, keep you company.”
He nodded, picking up his utensils. When he shoved a heaping forkful of the rabbit into his mouth, Alta felt her stomach lurch, and turned her face discreetly away to watch as dusk began to settle, inevitably, outside the window.
February 13, 1934
When Myrthen woke up that Tuesday morning as she always did, hours after her husband had packed his own dinner bucket and trudged off to work the first shift as electrician at Number Seventeen, she felt the sticky damp between her upper thighs that meant her womb would remain barren — at least for another month — as she always knew it should. Before she even opened her eyes, she gave thanks.
Myrthen crossed herself and flung back the covers, then swung her legs to the floor and looked back over her shoulder, pleased at the bloody mess on her marital bed. Nearly four years after their wedding, she still had not forgiven John for seducing her.
John felt that punishment in as many ways as she could think to inflict it. Not just the lack of a child — that miracle, she knew, was proof that God regretted not fulfilling her betrothal to His son and a monthly reminder of His remorse — but in the steady decline of standards about the house, irregular meals and mealtimes, unstocked cupboards, and general lack of cleanliness.
She knew from that first night, when John robbed her of her virginity — her only treasure — in his vile way, a common thief stealing chattel in the dark, that she would never love him. Would never honor nor obey. He was a decent man, she granted him that, but any kindness or concession she gave merely out of reluctance to waste a breath that could be better spent in prayer.
The issue of sex, however, was more complicated.
Once her purity was gone, she decided, it was gone. So she used her beauty to exact revenge. She quickly learned that the delicate curve of her breast, slightly revealed, widened her husband’s eyes. The sight of her untying her apron — slowly, from behind — whetted his appetite for more undressing. Sometimes she threw him a long, straight look — though she never said an inviting word, never beckoned him to bed — knowing his shameless lower half would strain in response. He was still a man, after all, even if she treated him without tenderness.
When his desire was at its most distracting, she would change behind the screen, then kneel by the bed with her rosary beads, meditating on the fifteen Mysteries, praying ten Hail Marys on the beads and one Our Father and the Glory Be at each mystery. Only then would she climb into the bed and allow him to lift her nightdress. But instead of letting him caress her breasts or encircle the tantalizing circumference of her waist with his coal-stained hands, she allowed him only to mount and enter her as best as he could, touching nothing with his hands, and never kissing.
She prayed the entire time, usually aloud.
When he finished, she would push him off with a strange satisfaction and go to clean herself. She always waited until he was asleep before she returned, and by then, the victory of ruining his pleasure was replaced with the kind of guilt reserved for drunkards after a binge. She was meant to be the bride of Christ, and so she felt like an adulteress whenever she lay with her husband.
That morning, she stripped off her bloody nightgown and dressed in her usual habit: a dark wool jumper with a white Peter Pan collar, dark stockings and shoes. She pulled her hair back into a low bun and secured it tightly with pins, not bothering to check her appearance in the mirror. It didn’t matter. She had nobody to impress but God.
Stopping at the cemetery on her way to the church, she knelt and spoke in warm tones to her sister’s headstone. “I’m saved again, Ruthie,” she whispered, and winked at the tiny cross at the top. She pressed on her thighs to stand and walked behind the headstone, then stood looking down at the two newer stones to the left of her sister’s.
“Hello, Papa. Mama. I pray you’re at peace.” Her voice was condescending, even though she was slightly envious of their reunion with Ruth. But it was not yet her time. The Lord would call her home when He was ready. That was not her choice to make, even though she’d thought about it more than once. She would not — could not — risk eternal damnation, eternal separation from her twin soul, for the greed of wanting to be with Ruth before the Lord decided it was time.
He’d taken her father within the first year of her marriage, his blackened lungs finally collapsed into ash. Her mother died the following year, bereft of any grandchildren. Rachel never failed to remind Myrthen of that fact, or of the suspicion that her daughter had refused to consummate her wedding vows to John.
“I’ll practice the Reproaches on the organ today,” Myrthen said to their headstones, “so if you can strain your ears, you’ll hear how well my inheritance was spent.”
Indeed, when her mother died, Myrthen was the sole heir to a humble fortune: a generous savings account and the small house that her father had bought from Blackstone Coal. It hadn’t been easy. Otto had only his scrip and money from modest investments in American products, chosen out of gratitude for the opportunities he found when he’d gotten there. Chevrolet and Lucky Strikes and Kellogg and William Waltke & Company, maker of Lava soap — the only detergent that could ever eliminate all but the deepest-embedded coal dust from the cracks and cuticles of his hands. While other men jumped out of New York City skyscrapers after the stock market crash in 1929, Otto remained underground with his pickax, loyal to his adopted country and faithful to the companies that made it great. When he died in early 1931, he left behind more assets than Rachel could use, and when Rachel died, they all went to Myrthen.
And Myrthen spent it all on a secondhand organ she had brought all the way from Philadelphia to St. Michael’s by train.
Just over a year earlier, on a January morning, Myrthen had arrived at the church and heard powerful music coming from F
ather Timothy’s small office. She knocked on the door and, when he didn’t answer, allowed herself in. There he sat in his chair, head dropped back and hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer but thrusting gently in the air along with the music as though he were directing each of the notes to their appointed place. His eyes were closed and a rhapsodic expression soothed away the lines on his forehead. Father Timothy was only forty-four, but he carried the girth and slump of a much older man. He didn’t hear her enter.
When the music stopped and the arm lifted off the record, Father Timothy mouthed a short prayer of thanks and crossed himself. He opened his eyes, gasped at the sight of Myrthen standing in the doorway, and flung his hand to his heart. “Child, I didn’t know you were there.”
“What was that music, Father?”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes again, savoring the grandeur of the sound. “That was the sound of angels singing. One single instrument that imitates the sounds of an entire orchestra.” He looked back at her. “I don’t believe you’ve ever seen an organ, have you? No, certainly not.” On a scrap of paper, he began to draw a box with three rows of what looked like piano keys, stair-stepped on top of one another. Behind that he quickly drew several rows of pipes of various heights. “This is only a rough sketch, of course. You see these?” He pointed. “They’re just like the piano keyboard you play with your hands, which you’re of course quite familiar with. Underneath, there’s sometimes another row of keys you play with your feet, but they don’t work the way piano pedals do. Then there are knobs called stops” — he drew several tiny circles — “that admit the passage of air into these pipes.”
His round face flushed pink, and he stood up with a quickness that defied his appearance, touching his thumb and fingers to either side of his throat. “The pipes are like vocal cords. Air goes through them and makes a range of sounds, deep to very high, just like the human voice. But the organ is the voice of not just one, but a hundred or even a thousand faithful, all lifting up together in praise. That’s why organs are used in connection with liturgy.”
