Virgins

by Caryl Rivers

  “Well, I couldn’t tell him I was going as St. Leon Trotsky, could I?”

  The party was in full swing when we got to the cabin in the park. There was a fire roaring in the big stone fireplace, and kids were roasting hot dogs and guzzling beer and talking about their plans for next year. The beer was really flowing—a lot of the seniors had reached eighteen and could drink legally, and the rest of us just did what we always did, drank it anyhow. Con was there—without a date, of course—in a black dress and heels and lots of mascara. “Mata Hari,” she explained. Mollie was Pocahontas, with a feather in her hair, and Davy was James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, wearing black pants and a leather jacket—which he wore a lot anyhow. I hadn’t seen much of Davy lately. Mollie said he was in a rotten mood, because of graduation.

  “Hey Davy,” I said. “Do they have it worked out? Are you graduating?”

  “Yeah, they’re changing a couple of F’s to D’s to get me out. They sure as hell don’t want me back again next year.”

  “What are you going to do this summer, Davy?” Sean asked.

  “Burn around for a while. I don’t know yet. Go up to Pittsburgh a little later on, maybe.”

  Mollie had a math scholarship to Penn, and during the summer she had a job at her uncle’s store in Pittsburgh. Davy already looked a little bit lost. I wondered if Mollie didn’t mean a lot more to him than he ever let on.

  Con came over and dragged me to the fire to roast a hot dog with her, and we ate hot dogs until we were stuffed, and then we had a piece of the special cake that had a big red heart on it and said, “Congrats, Hearters!” The kids started to break up in little groups–the jocks in one corner, the drama kids in another—talking, drinking, and in some cases, necking. We were all feeling nostalgic. We even sang the Immaculate Heart school song, which we all loathed:

  “Immaculate Heart

  Immaculate Heart

  Girls forever brave and true

  We’ll follow Mary our Mother

  Always loyal to you.”

  Con and Sean and I settled in one corner of the room, sitting very close together.

  “Hey,” Sean said, “remember our manage a trois. We never did get to finish it.”

  “Ménage,” Con said. “And we didn’t finish it because you nearly drowned yourself in the goddamned creek.”

  `"I’ll never forget you lying on your bed in my panties and moaning that you were going to die,” I said.

  “Actually, Sean,” Con said, “you look real cute in panties.”

  “Almost as cute as you look in a bra,” I added.

  “Too bad Mr. Kasten wasn’t there,” Sean said. “He would have had an orgasm for sure.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I said. We were already talking about high school as if it were in the past. As if we were old grads come back for reunion and reminiscing.

  “Come on, let’s ménage, for old time’s sakes,” Con said, and she leaned over and kissed Sean. He laughed and kissed her back. The three of us just sat there, kissing, not really with passion, but because it felt so good to be together, feeling the warmth of the fire and the sweetness of nostalgia. While Con and Sean were kissing, I looked up and saw Mollie, sitting and talking with a group of kids, and Davy standing by the fire—looking out of place and alone, like a Martian, I thought.

  Sean kissed my ear and growled and I giggled and took another swig of beer. Things were getting fuzzy around the edges. I was pleasantly high, but I’d have to watch it, because I usually went right from high to throw up, and I was having too much fun to bad and ruin it all.

  I noticed that Con was kissing Sean very enthusiastically and I said, “Hey, you’re not supposed to kiss like that; you’re practically a married woman!” She giggled and said, “I’m practicing,” and went right on kissing Sean.

  I took another sip of beer and glanced around again. Davy was standing, now, by the table where the food was spread out. He looked very strange, intent, and there was something about his face that made me go rigid with alarm. I knew something was about to happen. I saw Davy reach out his hand and pick up the knife we used to cut the cake.

  He’s going to slash his wrists again! I thought. But I was wrong. Davy took the knife, looked at it, and plunged it right into his chest with a swift, decisive motion. Then he got a quizzical look on his face and began to crumple, slowly—it seemed he was falling in slow motion to the ground.

  I realized that no one else had seen it but me and I tried to scramble to my feet. Sean grabbed my wrist and pulled me back, saying, “Your turn,” and started to kiss me. But I said, “Sean, no, it’s Davy!”

  He looked up and then he said, “Oh my God!” and we both ran to Davy, who was lying on his back, the knife protruding from his chest, and his blood already soaking the front of his shirt. Some of the kids thought it was a gag, and started to laugh, “Hey, that’s a gas!” but Sean yelled, “Somebody go get the rescue squad. Fast!”

  One of the seniors who had a car ran out to the parking lot. I grabbed a dish towel from the table and tried to press it against the spot in Davy’s chest that the blood was coming from. Mollie was suddenly kneeling beside me, her gray eyes wide with disbelief.

  “They’ve got to hurry,” Sean said. “We need help.”

  Davy’s eyes were looking up at us, his gaze moving around. He focused first on Mollie, and then his eyes went to Sean.

  “Oh my God—” he said.

  “You’ll be O.K., Davy,” I said. “Help is on the way.”

  “Oh my God—” he said again.

  And then Sean took his hand and said, “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee—”

  And Davy nodded.

  “I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell—” Davy’s hand tightened on Sean’s as Sean said the Act of Contrition. And as I watched him, I thought that, if God had really called Sean, He had made a good choice, because people in trouble just turned to him instinctively. It was as if they sensed a power there, to help and to heal.

  Time seemed to have stopped, everything was frozen. It seemed to me, later, that I knelt there for hours and hours, hearing Sean’s steady voice reciting the prayer, and Davy’s eyes riveted on Sean’s face. But it must have been only a matter of seconds; then there was a strange gurgling sound that came from Davy’s chest—later I learned that blood was flooding his lungs, that he was literally drowning in his own blood. Mollie drew in her breath with a ragged, terrible sigh, and Davy’s eyes were suddenly blank and staring. His eyes were open but there was nothing—no one behind them. I knew he was gone.

  Sean knew it too. He reached over and closed Davy’s eyes and said, “Lord, have mercy on him. Grant him peace, grant him peace, grant him eternal peace.”

  I was worried afterward that I hadn’t done things right, that if I had just been able to press in the right place I could have stopped Davy’s bleeding. But one of the doctors in the emergency room told me that nothing would have saved Davy, not even a surgical team standing right beside him. The wound was mortal; this time, he meant it to be.

  Sean was shaken to the depths over Davy’s suicide. He agonized over it, ran it through his mind over and over again.

  “He called me a couple of times to go to the movies, and I said I was busy with finals. I turned away from him, when I could have helped. What kind of a person am I?”

  “Sean, Davy didn’t kill himself because you didn’t go to the movies. It wouldn’t have made any difference. How could you know?”

  “I could have helped.”

  “You said it yourself Sean, there wasn’t anyplace where he belonged. He couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “I think I could have helped.”

  “You helped him, Sean. At the end, you knew what he wanted and nobody else did. He wanted to die, Sean, and you helped him die in peace.”

  He shook his head. “I could have helped him, I know it.�
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  There was no arguing with him. There would never be any lost causes for Sean. He would always believe that if he could just try harder, if he could just be better, he could change things. He’d break his heart over battles that couldn’t be won, people who couldn’t be helped. I’d already started to learn that, sometimes, you had to cut your losses. You had to know when to walk away.

  Sean never would. Maybe that was why I loved him.

  Childhood’s End

  SEAN WENT into one of his moody spells after Davy died. I knew enough not to bug him when he got like that. He was all wrapped up inside his own head, trying to think things out, sifting. I was used to Sean’s moodiness, but this was a little different. There was something that hadn’t been there before: a sadness in those green eyes that was too old for a boy of eighteen. No, not a boy, a man. I thought I knew what I saw in his eyes the shadow of mortality. Davy was the first person our age Sean ever knew who’d died. He’d been holding Davy’s hand when the spirit just slid out of the flesh. In one instant he’d been holding the hand of his friend, and in the next, he was gripping a corpse. And if he was going to be a priest, he’d have to stare into the face of death again and again.

  He’d be called in, often, to make the sign of the Cross in oil on the foreheads of people who were about to shuffle off the mortal coil. In catechism class, the nuns had always told us that if you died in the state of grace you’d have a happy death. I always pictured myself, in bed, smiling a little wanly, sort of like I had gas, and then drifting off happily to heaven while everybody waved, as if they were seeing me off for two weeks at Ocean City. But there wasn’t any joy in Davy’s eyes that night, only pain and fear. I wondered if Sean was realizing what being a priest would really be like. He’d always thought it was going to be so glorious, saving souls for God. “I will make you fishers of men.” But what was it he would draw up into his net—people’s fears, people’s sins, people’s dying?

  I was waiting for Sean in his living room one Saturday—he was walking in the park—when Dr. McCaffrey came up to me and said, “Peggy, is Sean all right?”

  I looked at him. I was surprised that he had noticed, being so busy with tits and rubbers and all.

  “Yeah, he’s O.K. It’s just that Davy was his friend.”

  “I know. But Sean seems to be so quiet. So down. He . . . you don’t think that he . . .”

  “Sean? You mean you think that Sean might kill himself?”

  “Well, I’ve just read that sometimes suicides, well, teenagers sometimes—” He let the sentence hang in the air. I stared at him, astonished. He really was worried about Sean. And then I saw him, really saw him. You know how it is when you’re around somebody a lot, you look at them but you don’t really see I was startled at how old he looked. The wavy gray hair was thinning on top and the lines under his eyes were more deeply etched than I had thought. He didn’t look at all like The Nemesis of Smut. He looked like a worried, aging man. He seemed vulnerable.

  Life was really weird. For so long, grown-ups were so big, so powerful; and then all of a sudden one day you looked at them and they weren’t like grown-ups any more. You saw them plain and clear, and they were just ordinary. And that made you feel sad, somehow.

  I said to him, “You know Sean. He’s always been moody.”

  “I know, Peg, but—well, you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. He’s O.K.”

  When Sean got back I told him his father was worried about him and he gave a short laugh. It wasn’t like his explosion when he thought something was really hilarious, or the gleeful cackle he’d let out when something struck him as absurd. It was a hard, brittle sound. I looked at him sharply.

  “Yeah,” he said, “he doesn’t want the future Father McCaffrey snuffing himself. How do you give a dead person to God? ‘Here, Lord, take my son, he’s only decomposed a little bit around the edges.’”

  “Sean!”

  He repented instantly. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. But I knew he did. Now and then he let a little corner of the bitterness show. I found myself taking Dr. McCaffrey’s side, which was strange, considering the way he felt about me.

  “He really is worried, Sean.”

  “No he isn’t.”

  “He is too. Go talk to him. Don’t be a jerk, Sean.”

  We walked into the living room together. Sean’s father was standing by the fireplace, the inevitable Scotch in his hand. His face brightened when Sean came in.

  “Sean! Oh, Sean. Well, how are you, son?”

  “Fine, Pop.”

  Dr. McCaffrey put down his Scotch and walked over to Sean. He was about to put his arm around Sean’s shoulder in his fake hearty way, but thought better of it. He just stood there, awkwardly, looking at Sean expectantly. He was nervous, I realized. Here was a guy who taught Fundamentals of Communication—who drew little boxes showing how people encoded and decoded messages—and he didn’t know how to talk to his own son. Maybe because he hadn’t really done it in so long.

  “I’m sorry about Davy,” Dr. McCaffrey said.

  “Yeah,” Sean said. Sean could be real stubborn, sometimes, and proud. He wasn’t going to give his father the benefit of the doubt.

  “How could a boy that young, with everything to live for, do that?” Dr. McCaffrey asked. He seemed genuinely mystified.

  “He was unhappy,” Sean answered.

  “But he had everything ahead of him.”

  “No he didn’t,” Sean said, quietly. “Davy didn’t have anything ahead of him.”

  “Do you really think that’s true?”

  “For Davy it was true.”

  I thought I saw Dr. McCaffrey shiver just a bit, as if somebody had walked across his grave. He said, “Not like you, Sean. You have so much ahead of you. Why, there’s the seminary, and ordination. . .”

  Sean frowned. Dr. McCaffrey, with his unerring talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, had done it again. I looked at Sean. His green eyes were like shuttered gates; no way was he going to let his father in. And Dr. McCaffrey was stumbling around, trying to reach out, and doing it all wrong. I wanted to yell at him, “Tell him you care about him, not the guy in the black suit. Tell him!”

  “And we’ll be so proud of you, your mother and I, we’re always talking about what it’ll be like, your ordination—”

  I saw Sean’s spine stiffen. His eyes now were tight little chips of green ice. Dr. McCaffrey could feel the freeze as well as I could. For the first time I could remember, he was at a loss for words. But he was trying. At least he was trying. Maybe Davy’s suicide had done it; maybe that made Dr. McCaffrey understand how lucky he was to have a son like Sean, a lovely, loving young man. Who was alive, and not lying forever still under the earth.

  Sean walked a few steps away from his father, and turned to the window. His head was up, his shoulders unnaturally erect. After all these years I could read his body like a book. He stood that way when his pride was hurt, like the time I beat him thirteen-zip in a game of Horse and he said it didn’t bother him but I knew better.

  Dr. McCaffrey took a tentative step toward his son. Sean turned around to look at him. I saw Sean waver. One thing about Sean, he didn’t stay mad too long, especially where his father was concerned. How he could love the Nemesis of Smut so much I couldn’t figure, but he did. It’s going to be O.K., I thought.

  And Dr. McCaffrey, seeing the thaw, rushed in where angels fear to tread.

  “Bill and you, you’re my boys!” he said.

  Sean stepped backward and his eyes iced up again. Always second string.

  I thought, at that moment, that I could actually see the crevice split the floor between them, stretching far down into an infinity that was cold and dark, and I sensed the chasm growing wider as they stood and looked at each other, the father on one side of the yawning gap and the son on the other. Dr. McCaffrey might not have been real swift, but he recognized his mistake. It was too late. He
tried to step forward again, but something in Sean’s eyes stopped him. His shoulders sagged and he retreated.

  Usually I just felt like shaking Dr. McCaffrey; right now I wanted to brain both of them. They just stood there, in painful silence, watching each other across the distance that would grow wider and wider over the years. Someday, I thought, they’d have to scream to be heard and finally they wouldn’t be able to hear each other at all. But what the one wanted to say and the other wanted to hear was so simple, so absurdly simple: “I love you.”

  “Well,” Dr. McCaffrey said. “Well.” His eyes implored Sean’s for an instant, but Sean just stood preternaturally still. Dr. McCaffrey turned to walk out of the room and Sean moved forward on the balls of his feet. I thought for an instant he was going to go after his father, but he didn’t. He turned and walked out the back door instead, leaving me standing alone in the living room. I just stood there, staring at the furniture.

  I had always thought that every part of life was pretty much the same as any other part; that it was a moving band, and while you couldn’t live anything over again ("The moving finger writes,” Omar said.), you always had time to make things right. But that wasn’t true. There were moments in life when doors opened—when you had a chance to say or do something—and if you didn’t do it the doors closed and the chance was lost beyond recall. That scared me, because of the way I kept things tucked inside of me, never wanting to show it when I was hurting. And I was stubborn, too, and proud, more than Sean, even. I wondered if, someday, a door would open for me and I’d see it, but somehow I’d mess it up, like Sean and his father just did. I’d hold my tongue and the door would close, and I’d never say it: “I love you.”

  But I didn’t have too long to brood about it, because the next day Con drafted me to go on an important errand. I agreed, but I was a little shocked at the size of the box I had to lug to the car.

  “Con, two gross of condoms? How the hell will you ever use all these?”

  “Go thru ‘em in a week,” she grinned.