by Caryl Rivers
I stood there, watching him vanish into the darkness, and then I turned and went into the house. I went upstairs and discovered that Con wasn’t back yet; she was probably having a grand old time necking away under a statue of some dead Navy guy someplace. I undressed and climbed into bed, and pulled the covers up to my chin, the way I used to do as a kid when I wanted to feel safe. I was feeling really rotten—lonely and miserable.
I sure had made a botch of it with Harry. No way was I going to get asked back to Annapolis. Calling a guy a killer—even if you apologized—was not one of the conversational ploys suggested by “How to Talk to a Man and Make Him Fall in Love with You.”
Let’s face it, I was just hopeless at this man-woman stuff. I wasn’t dainty; I couldn’t flirt without looking terminal; I didn’t know how to act when somebody unzipped his fly; I led when I danced; and I had sweaty palms and ear wax. I didn’t want to end up on the Frigid Ward, but on the other hand I don’t think I could ever be as casual as Dolly, calmly sipping my beer while some guy had his hand down my dress.
Maybe I made a mistake when I aimed my deflector shield at Ruthie Harridan. Maybe when I got back to Immaculate Heart I should just march up and tell her that she had my vocation and she had to give it back. Nobody cared if nuns had ear wax, and they didn’t dance, so leading wasn’t a problem, and they probably didn’t have to worry a lot about people unzipping their flies.
If it weren’t for the crappy clothes, maybe being a nun wasn’t such a bad deal.
Defying Decency
RIGHT BEFORE Christmas, we scored another coup for the Messenger staff, a five-minute interview with Senator John F. Kennedy on a trade bill he was sponsoring. It was our most thrilling interview yet. We had done the Philippine ambassador to the U.S., a center fielder for the Washington Senators, a missionary to the Congo, and a semi-well-known actor who was in a play at the National Theater. The actor dropped hints of a ménage a trois after the play, and Con said that one of the problems with being virgins, was that we couldn’t take him up on it.
“I mean, I would have been mortified, really mortified, if we were having an orgy and he couldn’t get it in,” Con said. “And then I’d bleed all over the dressing room and, God, that would be tacky.”
“You mean you’d really do it if you weren’t a virgin?”
“Sure. It would be something to put in my novel.”
“But he’s old, Con. He’s old enough to be our father.”
“Well, that means he knows how to do it, right? He didn’t get that old without learning something.”
“I’ll never be as sophisticated as you, Con,” I sighed.
We both went weak in the knees over Jack Kennedy. He was very nice and polite, and talked to us very earnestly about his trade bill. He wished us good luck in our career as journalists. We walked out into the corridor of the Senate office building, entranced.
“God, what a hunk!” Con said. “I felt like raping him, right there in the office.”
“I think that’s what’s called statutory rape,” I said, “doing it with a senator when he’s talking about his trade bill.”
Con looked at me. “Oh, Peg,” she said, “Dorothy Parker couldn’t have said it better!” and she gave me a hug. I felt wonderful. Con had actually compared me favorably to Dorothy Parker!
We got into Con’s black Ford—it belonged to her mother, but Con got to drive it all the time—and Con started back to Crystal Springs at her usual terrifying pace.
“In New York, Peg, well knock ‘em dead! Look, we’re only in high school, and look at what we’ve done!”
“There’s no stopping us, Con. You and me together, we can do anything!”
“Maybe we’ll have our own television show, like Meet the Press.”
“And now,” I said dramatically, “NBC brings you ‘People in the News,’ a weekly program of news and information starring Miss Constance Marie Wepplener of The New Yorker and Miss Peggy Morrison of the Herald Tribune!”
Con hummed the Washington Post march. Then she said, “Welcome to ‘People in the News.’ Our guest today is Senator John F. Kennedy—”
“Who will discuss foreign trade while Miss Wepplener puts her hand on his thigh.”
And we went around the curve at Fifteenth and L on two wheels, almost precipitously ending our own lives as well as those of a family of five in a station wagon.
“Oh Peggy,” Con said, “I can’t wait for the future. So many wonderful things are going to happen to us!”
And when she said it, I knew it was true. Con could do that for me, cut away the underbrush of my doubts and fears and make everything seem so easy, so inevitable. Sometimes, at home alone in my room late at night, I’d get scared. I’d break out in a cold sweat, the fear clammy against my skin. I’ll never be able to do it, I’d think. I’m just little Peggy Morrison of Immaculate Heart High School. How could I have the nerve to think of working for the Herald Tribune or winning the Pulitzer Prize or ever being anything more than just a little editor on a high school newspaper in a suburb nobody knew about. Nobody I knew had ever become a journalist, especially not a woman. The world was such a big place, and there were so many people smarter and better than I was. How could I ever do it? I never would. I’d just stay in Crystal Springs and probably marry some guy and I’d get old and die and nothing would ever happen to me.
But now, sitting beside Con, those thoughts were blown away as if by a wind from the sea. Beside her in the Black Ford, breaking the speed limit on Sixteenth, I felt the future to be as real and as solid as the buildings, the trees, the sky.
We had it all planned; we’d been talking about it ever since we got back from Annapolis, where we took the sacred vow. We were both going to the University of Maryland, where we’d be editors of the Diamondback, and we’d be the staff to go down in history. We’d be immortal. And the offers would come flooding in from all over, but we’d pack our bags and go off to our New York apartment, where we’d meet everybody who was anybody. We’d be as witty as Clare Booth Luce, as brilliant as Rebecca West, have necklines like Faye Emerson.
“We’ll be brilliant! We’ll be beautiful!” Con said. “I’ll be so thin you can hardly see me when I stand sideways.” She took another bite of a Mars bar as she said it. She kept a hoard of them in the glove compartment. With her mouth full, she said, “I think my lovers will be Jack Kennedy, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. How about yours?”
“Can we share Kennedy? Johnny Lujack, Richard Burton, and maybe Sean.”
“He’s got a great body.”
“Burton?”
“No, Sean. What a waste that he’s going to be a priest.”
“God gets the best and the girls get the rest.”
“Well, tell you one thing. I’m not ever going to marry a Catholic.”
“You aren’t?”
“Not unless he believes in birth control. I don’t want to have a kid every year, do you?”
“No.” I had already decided that. It was the first major issue on which I decided not to do what the Church said. I knew my parents had used birth control; I found a pack of rubbers in my father’s drawer once. And he used to say that it was nobody’s business, even the Church’s, how many children people had. And he was a good, church-going Catholic, too.
“We can’t let anybody tell us what to think, Peggy. That’s what the whole Constitution is all about. Even the pope can’t tell us what to think. We’re Americans.”
“Especially us,” I said. “We’re journalists. We have to ask questions.”
“Nobody’s ever going to own my mind,” Con decreed solemnly. “Not ever.” She took a bite of Mars bar and grinned, a big chocolate grin. “My body, now that’s a different story.”
She had someone in mind for her body: First Classman Lee Masters, U.S.N. “Know what he told me?” she said with her mouth full of Mars bar. “He told me I was the kind of woman who looked better naked than with clothes on.”
“Con, how does he know?”
“Well, he doesn’t, but he has a good imagination. He says I have a womanly body, not one of those bodies like a twelve-year-old boy. He hates Audrey Hepburn.”
“I think she’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, but she probably looks just awful with her clothes off. Lee said he’d like me just to stay naked for a whole day, just walk around with my clothes off so he could look at me.”
“Didn’t you people talk about anything except you in your birthday suit?”
“Oh yeah, we talked a lot about J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Does Lee want to see him naked, too?”
“Very funny, Peg. Lee thinks J. Edgar Hoover is single-handedly saving America from the Red Menace.”
I yawned. The whole communism business bored me to death, even though I dutifully prayed for the conversion of Russia like everybody else.
“When are you going down to see him again?”
“I don’t know. He said he was going to write to me. He better.” Con said that if he didn’t ask her back down to Annapolis she was going to start cutting off little pieces of her body, starting with an earlobe.
“He’ll like that. When he gets all of you, he can put you together like a jigsaw puzzle, and see you naked that way. Maybe you just ought to send him brownies.”
“Oh Christ, brownies? I have to be clever, witty, brilliant. I want him to know he’s dealing with a sophisticate!”
“O.K., chocolate chip cookies.”
“You’re a big help.”
Con had already decided she wanted to lose her virginity to Lee Masters. “But not right away. I want him to think that I am just irresistibly passionate, not some slut who puts out for everybody.”
“Con, you mean you’re really going to Do It?”
“Yeah, but I got to get back down there first. It’s sort of hard losing your virginity long distance.”
Con agonized over strategy. “What can I send him?”
“How about a picture of you, starkers?”
“Not subtle.”
“How about a picture of you in your uniform?”
“Oh God! In that thing, I look like a cow that’s enlisted.”
“We could send him the collected Saints Corner.”
“He’s not Catholic.”
“Yeah, and the story of Lourdes isn’t exactly an aphrodisiac.”
“Hardly. What guy do you know that gets turned on by the B.V.M.?”
“Mr. Kasten. He would.”
“Yeah, she’s in big trouble if she appears to Mr. Kasten. He’d try to put his hand up her dress.”
We finally decided on a nifty little Dorothy Parker poem to send to Lee Masters. We’d have to wait a while to see if it worked. Christmas vacation was coming up, and Lee was going back to his home in St. Louis, so Con’s campaign to lose her virginity would have to be put on hold for a while. And I had a moral dilemma of my own coming up.
It was Legion of Decency pledge time again.
Every year, Dr. McCaffrey came to St. Malachy’s, and we all stood and formally pledged with him not to see any dirty movies for another year.
I was against the Legion, on principle. It wasn’t that I favored dirty movies, but it was like Con said, I didn’t want anybody owning my mind.
And the Legion really did dumb things—like condemning The Moon Is Blue because Audrey Hepburn used the word “virgin.” I’d felt like a real hypocrite standing up the last couple of years, even when I didn’t recite the pledge. If I was going to be a journalist, I would have to start standing up for what I believed in. I was going to have to stop being a nice, polite, Catholic girl who did what everybody else wanted.
I walked to Mass with Sean on Legion Sunday, and he noticed that I was quieter than usual, but he didn’t ask me any questions. I hadn’t told Sean what I was going to do, mainly because I was afraid I was going to chicken out, and I didn’t want to have to live that down.
Dr. McCaffrey gave the sermon that Sunday, at the invitation of Father Ryan. Wouldn’t you know it, he started talking about Jane Russell again. I had really had it with that subject. Besides, why shouldn’t I get to go see The Outlaw? Jane Russell’s boobs certainly weren’t a Near Occasion of Sin for me; they left me cold. I wondered what it was that men liked about big boobs, anyhow. I didn’t think I’d want things that dropped almost down to my belly button, even if it did mean that a lot of guys would pant after me all the time. I liked to think of mine as perky; they had personality; they didn’t just lie there. I stole a look at Sean. I wondered if he liked perky. I certainly hoped he wasn’t like his father, all hung up over great big ones. And then I realized what I was thinking and I stopped it immediately. Thinking about boobs—perky or otherwise—certainly was not proper at Mass. A venial sin, undoubtedly. I tuned in to Dr. McCaffrey again.
“And we can send a message to the moguls of Hollywood—to the panting purveyors of putrid pleasures—that we will not wallow with them in the gutters; we will not stoop to the sewers of slime and seduction!” (Seven alliterations in one sentence! A record, even for Dr. McCaffrey.) “Catholics of America, will you join with me in hurling a challenge at the silvered gates of Hollywood?”
I started to feel little quivers in my stomach.
“Will you say, with me, enough! Enough of your filth and your moral decay. We shall destroy you!”
I clenched my teeth and my whole body must have gone rigid. I was about to take a stand in favor of putrid pleasures, of sewers of slime. Sean looked at me and I saw the alarm in his eyes.
I thought about the words of Christ, “Be ye either hot or cold or I shall vomit thee out of my mouth.”
“You’re not going to take it!” Sean whispered, and I whispered back, “No.”
“Jesus Christ!” he said.
“Shhh! He’ll hear you.”
I saw Sean’s fists clench. I knew I had triggered a war inside him. He made fun of the Legion of Decency as often as I did. I looked at him, and the expression on his face unsettled me It was a mixture of doubt and guilt; he could have posed for a portrait of Judas Iscariot.
“Peg,” he whispered, “I can’t! He’s my father!”
“I know,” I whispered back. “Stand up.”
He hesitated.
“Sean, stand up!”
He stood, slowly, and I just sat there. Everybody in the whole church had risen except me. I felt my heart beating and my face getting hot. I was sure everybody in the whole congregation could hear the clamorous pounding of my heart. At first, only a few people turned to look at me, but then the whispering began. I could see it spreading like a wind through tall grass, moving through the pews. More people turned to look. Dr. McCaffrey started the pledge.
I opened my missal and started to read: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth—” My face was really burning now, it felt as if it would burst into flame. I plowed through the Apostles’ Creed and started on the Agnus Dei—“Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”
I have done a few brave things in my life since then—I have been where guns were fired uncomfortably near me in anger and I did my job, did it well. But I never did anything as hard as not getting to my feet in church to recite the Legion of Decency pledge when I was a senior at Immaculate Heart High School.
The pledge just kept going on and on—had they made it longer?—and I could feel hundreds of eyes on me. I thought that when I went home and took off my blouse, I’d have lots of little eye-holes in my skin; the stares felt like lasers.
Then it was done, and Sean sat down beside me and took my hand. I was shaking, and he squeezed my hand hard. He looked more miserable than ever.
After Mass, Dr. McCaffrey stopped me on the church steps and said, “Peggy, I can’t believe it! Was that you? Sitting down during the pledge?”
His tone was incredulous, as if he were asking if that was me, there among
the folks nailing Christ to the Cross, just happily tacking away.
“Yes, sir. I didn’t stand.”
“For heaven’s sake, why not?”
“Because I am a journalist and I believe that the pledge violates the spirit of the First Amendment.”
“You are a Catholic, Peggy. That’s the important thing.”
“No, sir. I’m an American too. And I don’t believe that anybody has the right to tell me what I can see or read.”
“That’s very impertinent,” Dr. McCaffrey said.
“Thomas Jefferson was very impertinent,” I said tartly. “So was Thomas Paine.”
“Thomas Paine was an atheist.”
“Yes, sir, he was. But Thomas Jefferson was a Deist.”
“Young lady, I’m going to talk to Sister Robert Mary about you!”
“Dad, don’t do that,” Sean said.
“This young woman has been rude, and impertinent, and she has defied the Catholic Church!”
“She has a right to believe what she wants!”
“Young man, you are being impertinent, do you know that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are coming home from Mass with me. I don’t want you being seen with a young woman who has caused a scandal.”
“No, sir.”
“What?!”
“Sir, I’m walking home with Peggy.”
“Sean,” Dr. McCaffrey said through clenched teeth, “you are coming with me!”
“No, sir,” Sean said, planting his feet firmly and letting his lower jaw stick out a little, the way he used to do as a kid.
“Sean McCaffrey—” Dr. McCaffrey said, but just then a woman dashed up and grabbed his arm and said, “Oh, Dr. McCaffrey, you were so wonderful at the Sodality last week—” and Sean and I made our escape.
We walked home together, holding hands, and Sean sighed and said glumly, “I let you down. I let you take the heat all alone. And I lied.”
“You lied?”
“Taking the pledge was a lie. I don’t believe in it. I think it was a sin to stand up.”
“But if you didn’t stand up, Sean, it would have been like slapping your father in the face in public. It would have hurt him something awful, Sean?’
