Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  “Peg, I swear, I didn’t mean to do that. Honest.”

  I reached over and brushed a lock of hair off his forehead, tenderly. I couldn’t put into words why we had done what we had done, but I knew it was all right. My father wouldn’t have minded. But I knew I couldn’t make Sean understand that. He’d write it down on his list of sins and he’d confess it to Father Ryan Friday night.

  “Bless me, Father, I have sinned; I—ah—Father, I got a hard-on in Pumphrey’s parking lot, right under the embalming room.”

  And Father Ryan would yawn and give him ten Hail Marys for a penance. Sean would say fifty Hail Marys, because he’d be sure that the geographic location of this particular hard-on couldn’t be washed out with ten lousy Hail Marys.

  We buried my father the next day, in a spot that was green and cool and beautiful. Sean stood by my side, holding my hand, as a bugler played Taps—my father had been in the Navy during the war. I liked that. It had a mournful dignity that was just right. Before I turned to go, I put my hand on the coffin and said to him, “I hope you’re flying, up there, somewhere above the clouds. I hope it’s wonderful, up there, and free. I love you. I’ll always love you. Thank you for being my father.”

  My mother told me that night she was going to take over running the business. “I can do it, Peg. I know how to keep the books. I always thought I’d be a good businesswoman.”

  I looked at her, surprised. There were more little lines under her eyes now, but she was as pretty as ever. She was always my happy, pretty mother. Where did this strength come from?

  “You can help, Peg. We’re going to be O.K., you and I. We’re going to make it.”

  And I knew she was right. For a lot of days afterward, I waited for something to happen—for the earth to split open, the sky to darken. Something should happen because my father died. But it didn’t. The world just went on, the way it always did. Sometimes, I’d find myself laughing, and I’d feel guilty—what right did I have to laugh, if my father was dead? But life went on. It just rolled on; people died and it didn’t stop. I went on, too.

  I had to.

  The Big Sex Talk

  BY LATE October, the campaign to be immortal was lagging, Con declared.

  We had begun in a blaze of glory, in the truest sense of that phrase, by nearly burning the school down and proving Mother Marie Claire’s total lack of fitness for sainthood. But time was flying by, and we couldn’t rest on our laurels.

  “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on,” Con intoned, darkly. Mollie and I swore to come up with new ideas.

  But my heart wasn’t in it, really. That week the father-daughter basketball game was scheduled to be played, and I was dreading the whole thing. It would be the first time my father wouldn’t be there.

  It had been his idea in the first place. He got the inspiration for the game freshman year, and rounded up a bunch of other fathers for it. The game wasn’t really serious. The fathers knew they couldn’t beat us, not with their cigarette coughs and the leg muscles atrophied from desk jobs. Nobody was into fitness then; middle-aged men were expected to be paunchy. Nobody jogged either. It would have been mortifying for any of us to have our fathers running up and down the street in little pants with stripes on them. A beer belly was a badge of maturity. So the fathers didn’t try to outplay us; they just devised the most outrageous ways to cheat. The whole affair had turned into a Harlem Globetrotters performance. Last year, the fathers even brought in a live mule to stand on so they could climb up on his back and drop the ball in the basket. Everybody roared when the mule went to the bathroom, right on the gym floor. The game had become a tradition, and all the kids in the school came out for it.

  Last year my father pulled a stunt that broke everybody up. He pretended to have a fit and collapse on the court, and three other fathers, dressed in hospital whites, ran in and carried him out on a stretcher. I just laughed and laughed at the time.

  The night of the game finally came around, and I pulled on my gym suit and my sneakers and went over to the gym. I played, but the whole thing didn’t seem real; I felt as if I was watching myself and everyone else and I was in two places at once. I had a smile frozen on my lips. After a while I lost all the feeling in my face and I thought that if I got hit in the face by a stray pass, my face would just shatter like a vase and fall in little hard pieces on the floor. Everybody was real nice to me, especially the fathers, and that just made it worse. The game just went on and on and I wished it would stop. Finally it did.

  Afterward, I got in the Caddy with Sean and he said, “Let’s go park,” and I said I didn’t feel like necking.

  “We don’t have to neck. I just want to be with you.”

  We parked, and I sat quietly for a while and Sean put his arms around me. Finally I said, “I hate God.”

  “You don’t mean that,” he said.

  “Yes I do. How can I pray to somebody who took my father away? Who lets killers and rapists and communists live and kills my father.”

  “I don’t think God did it.”

  “Then who did it? President Eisenhower?”

  “No,” he said.

  “If I was God, I wouldn’t be so rotten as to take my father away. How can I believe in a God who isn’t as kind as I am? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I thought about that a lot when your dad died,” Sean said. Sean was a thinker; he liked to sit, for hours sometimes, just turning an idea over and over in his mind, looking at it all different ways, until finally, things fell into place. “And I think maybe God doesn’t do a lot. I think he set up the rules, and once He did that, even He can’t break them.”

  “He can do everything.”

  “No he can’t. God can’t make a stone so big He can’t lift it. That’s impossible. Even God can’t exist and not exist at the same time. He made the rules of nature, and can’t break them.”

  “So He just—watches?”

  “Maybe. He doesn’t want bad things to happen, but He knows they have to. Maybe the universe can’t exist without bad things to balance the good things. So He has to let them both happen.”

  “Sean, that means you don’t believe in miracles and things. The Blessed Mother appearing to St. Bernadette and to the children at Fatima.” (It always seemed to me that the B.V.M. got to make all the appearances, as if she were God’s emcee.)

  “No,” he said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “Holy shit, and you’re going to be a priest!”

  He nodded.

  “What’s the point of praying, then, to some God who doesn’t do anything?”

  “Maybe just to get the strength so we can do things. Maybe just to touch him, to know he’s there, that life isn’t just meaningless.”

  It’s strange, but after that night I felt a lot better about God. Maybe He was just as sorry as I was that my father died.

  I sat quietly beside Sean, and he just held me and stroked my hair, and while I didn’t feel safe the way I used to before my father died—I’d never feel that way again—I felt peaceful. I’ll always be grateful to Sean for giving God back to me. It wasn’t the old God, the child’s God who hovered above my bed at night like a silver fog, keeping me safe from demons, but one I could accept when I came to understand that life is a complicated affair, full of twists and turns, and unfathomable mysteries.

  With my anger at God muted, I could get my mind back to the business of being brilliant and daring. But it was Con, of course, who came up with the idea of our next leap for glory. Not surprisingly, it had to do with another saint.

  We lived in a world that was just choc-a-bloc with saints. We had Holy Cards with their pictures on them, read books about their lives, saw movies (albeit rotten ones) about them. If you went to a Catholic school, you got the idea that saints proliferated like jackrabbits. I wouldn’t have been surprised to run into one of them shopping at the Hecht Company, or riding the bus, or just crossing the street. I’d know him or h
er by the little golden halo floating an inch or so over the top of the sainted head, and by the expression. It would be either the sour ball swallow like St. Theresa, or sort of a goofy Mona Lisa grin. Martyrs had that one a lot. Probably because they knew they were just moments away from heaven, just as soon as somebody stopped flogging or stabbing or burning them—more precisely, as soon as they expired from said activities—ZAP!—they’d be saints.

  Con decided that she was thoroughly sick of saints. They were boring, she said, especially the big favorite of the moment, Maria Goretti. She was an Italian teenager who was raped and murdered by a handyman but forgave her murderer with her dying breath.

  “People get raped every day, and they don’t make them saints,” Con reasoned. “Somebody should have taught that kid a few judo holds.”

  She was right, of course. It was only years later that I realized that the saints who were in vogue then were perfectly suited to the docile, subservient image of woman peculiar to the era. The feistier saints—scholars, rebels, warriors—took a back seat to St. Theresa, who stayed in a convent and prayed for fifty years, and St. Maria Goretti, who got raped.

  The male saints were a little bit more interesting, but even their lives paled because of repetition. How many times can you listen with fascination to the yarn about St. Christopher, who was about to cross a stream when he saw a young child standing by the edge of the stream, hitching a ride.

  St. Christopher lifted the tiny child on his back and started across the deep stream. But the child kept getting heavier and heavier, until Chris was staggering to his knees.

  How can such a small child be so heavy? he wondered, and the Christ Child said, “It is because I carry the sins of the world on my shoulders.”

  Con wanted to do St. Christopher in the regular “Saints Corner” we ran in the Messenger, but with a zippier ending. She wanted to have Chris staggering and staggering, and finally, getting fed up with the whole thing, tossing the Christ Child in the drink and yelling, “Backstroke!”

  We knew we’d never get away with that one, of course. But we had to do something about Saints Corner. It was a point of honor. We’d tried to dump it, because it was terminally boring and nobody read it, but Sister Robert decreed that no issue of the Messenger would roll off the presses saintless.

  Con came into the Messenger room the first week of November with a Saints Corner she’d written herself. That was unusual, because we usually fobbed off the sainthood beat on some lowly freshman.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “St. Leon of Skorytt.”

  “Who’s he?”

  Con told his story. He lived in a small Slavic province in the fourteenth century. A feudal landlord had stolen all the land that belonged to the peasants and he had even forbidden them to pray in their little village church. St. Leon, a man of humble birth himself, rallied his people with a fiery speech: “The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its aim and end, the more hateful and the more embittering it is,” he cried. “But the landlord has forged the weapons that will bring death to himself, he has called into being the men who are to wield those weapons. Men of Skoryett, attack! You have naught to lose but the fetters that bind you!”

  St. Leon led the people in revolt, and when they had won, his property was divided equally, according to the teachings of Christ. This being done, they lived in peace for a while, but then the people began to squabble among themselves. St. Leon tried to make peace, but was killed by one of his former allies, who smacked him in the head with an axe.

  “That’s pretty interesting,” I said. “Where did you dig him up?”

  “I didn’t dig him up,” Con said. “I made him up.”

  “Holy shit! You invented a saint. Fantastic!”

  Con smiled. “That is not the half of it,” she said. “Look at the name of the village. Familiar?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Everybody knows Skorytt. There’s ‘April in Skorytt.’ Or how about ‘The Last Time I Saw Skorytt’—”

  “Look hard. The letters. Try rearranging the letters.”

  I tried, but I drew a blank. Con wrote it out for me.

  “Oh my God!” I said.

  She grinned triumphantly.

  “Leon Trotsky. You made a saint out of Leon Trotsky!”

  “The commie saint,” she said. “Recognize the speech?”

  I read it over. “Con, you didn’t!”

  “The Communist Manifesto. Practically word for word.”

  “Oh Con, you’re right; we’re going to be fucking immortal!”

  The Sunday after the Messenger with St. Leon in it came out, Sean and I went together, as usual, to 12:15 Mass and slid into the rear pew, hoping nobody would notice we were late for Mass again. It was Father Ryan, who could usually be counted on to wrap things up in forty minutes, sermon and all.

  I generally dozed or daydreamed through Father Ryan’s sermons—William Jennings Bryan he wasn’t. He’d usually pick some scriptural passage and babble on for fifteen minutes until he got to the important part of the Mass, passing the collection basket around.

  Father Ryan walked to the pulpit, and as my eyelids dropped low and I prepared to doze off, he said, “For my sermon today I am indebted to our fine girls’ Catholic high school, Immaculate Heart, and to the school newspaper, the Marian Messenger.”

  My eyelids popped up like a broken window shade.

  “This issue features an article on a saint from whom we can learn many things.”

  “Oh shit!” I said, sotto voce. Sean looked at me. I was not usually foulmouthed in church.

  “A man of God, a man of the Church, who speaks to us over the ages from a small medieval province in the fourteenth century.”

  I put my hands to my mouth to keep the giggle from escaping. Sean looked at me.

  “You’re up to something,” he said.

  I nodded, still trying not to laugh.

  “St. Leon of Skorytt,” Father Ryan intoned.

  “Who the hell is he?” Sean asked.

  “St. Leon. Who is he?”

  “Con made him up.”

  “What!”

  Heads turned our way.

  “Shh! We’re in church!”

  “What do you mean, made him up?” Sean whispered.

  “Con got tired of the old saints, so she made up a new one.”

  “Oh Jeez,” Sean said, and he started to giggle too, and he buried his head in his missal so no one would notice.

  Father Ryan told St. Leon’s story, quoting verbatim from Con’s article. He even read the stirring speech to the peasants: “You have naught to lose but the fetters that bind you!”

  Sean looked at me suspiciously. I knew what he was thinking. I had typed his junior history paper for him, “The Rise of the Godless Communist State.”

  “And for his efforts to bring peace,” Father Ryan said, this holy man was brutally murdered. Felled by his former comrades in arms, by a vicious blow to his head with an axe.”

  Sean stared at me, his mouth agape. “Leon Trotsky! It’s Leon Trotsky!”

  “Shh!” I said, pressing my lips together.

  Sean’s head went down into his missal again; I heard little choking sounds and then he suddenly slipped from the pew and ran out of the church.

  Mrs. Petersen, sitting next to me, stared and I whispered, “He’s coming down with the flu,” and I left too by the back door. I found Sean collapsed with laughter on the steps.

  “You’re going to do it,” he said. “You’re going to go down as the greatest Messenger staff in history. Leon Trotsky. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—Leon Trotsky!”

  Father Ryan was so impressed with St. Leon that he announced he was sending the Messenger piece to the Catholic Herald, asking them to reprint it. That caused a quick emergency meeting in the Messenger room.

  “What do they do to people who invent a saint?” Mollie asked.

  “They have this rack,” Con said, �
��and they keep turning it and turning it until you look like a pretzel.”

  “They don’t do that anymore,” I said.

  “For us, they’ll bring it out of mothballs,” Con said. “The Marian Messenger at Immaculate Heart High School will single-handedly bring back the Inquisition.”

  We sweated like mad for a while, but nothing showed up in the Catholic Herald, and that made us giddy with relief, and triumph. We were pulling it off! We were golden! Everything we touched was magic. Con announced that she was starting a journal, a historical document so that our deeds would live forever. We would set the standard. No one would match us, ever. But we had to go forward. Excelsior was our motto. We had to climb higher.

  “We’re going to get a boy into the Big Sex Talk!” Con announced.

  Each year, before Thanksgiving, the whole school went on retreat; classes were cancelled for two days, and we spent our time praying, meditating, and going to special assemblies. The grand finale of the retreat was the assembly on Christian Marriage, known to the student body as the Big Sex Talk.

  The Big Sex Talk was usually given by Father Thomas Milliken, a small, diffident man who referred to screwing as “The Marriage Act” and who liked to tell little stories to illustrate his point. His big finish was the one about Catholic couple, John and Mary. It went like this: Catholic girl Mary goes out with Catholic boy John, and they fall in love on the first date. He wants to kiss her good night at the front door, and she really wants to kiss him back, but she sees the shadow of the Holy Spirit overhead, and she draws back and says, “I am a child of Mary.”

  And John goes away and joins the Foreign Legion. He doesn’t see Mary for five years. Mary is sure she’s lost her true love. But then one day, John appears on her doorstep and asks her out again. Once again, she really, really wants to kiss him good night, but guess who flutters overhead? Right. The old reliable Holy Ghost. So Mary steps back again and says, “I am a child of Mary!”

  And John embraces her chastely and says, “Thank God! I was testing you! If you had kissed me, I would have gone away forever. But now I know you are the woman I want to be my wife and the mother of my children!”