Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  Peter is not sure how to respond to such images. He tries to limit himself to matters of diction, of syntax, avoiding discussions concerning the nature of sexuality repressed or of love’s safer alternatives. He says things like “can thoughts be ‘chaste’ if they are about a naked person?” or “Do you really mean ‘may not pronounce’ or should you say ‘will not pronounce’?”

  What perplexes is that the poems arouse in him emotions he is not supposed to feel. One is not to be attracted to a nun; she is Christ’s woman. Yet when he is home at the end of the day, the light fading in his study, the smell of supper filling the small house he shares with his wife, the lines from Sister Mary Martha’s poems swim across the currents of his thinking. He sees Sister’s face, the pale, earnest features framed by her habit, and though the mouth is solemn, the eyes are mischievous and hold promises better unspoken.

  One day she shows him a photograph of herself, taken before she entered the convent. It is at the end of one of their poetry conferences and, as it happens, they have spent much of the hour talking not about Sister’s poems, but about those of one of her former pupils, a girl named Connie Lamontagne.

  “I knew you’d be good for her,” Sister Mary Martha tells him. “She raves about you, that you know what she means to say even better than she does herself.”

  “She takes suggestions well,” Peter says.

  “And you excite her.” Sister opens her notebook and turns its pages. “She reminds me of myself when it finally dawned on me what Brendan meant in my life. Here.”

  She offers him a snapshot: the secular Mary Martha, in a tweed coat and wool scarf, hatless, her hair loose around her smiling face. He guesses she was in her early twenties.

  “Brendan took it. Can you see what he meant to me?”

  “Yes,” Peter says. “It shows in your eyes, your mouth.”

  Sister takes back the photograph. “That’s how Connie looks,” she says, “when she talks to me about you.”

  * * *

  CONSTANCE THERESA LAMONTAGNE is the latest of Sister Mary Martha’s ninth-grade protégées, passed on to Peter with Sister’s praise and recommendation: Connie is a serious young woman with an interest in the sciences, but don’t be put off by that. She’s a fine writer with a head full of ideas I know you can help her give shape to.

  In her junior year, Connie is a slender sixteen-year-old, with honey-blond hair and pale, almost translucent skin. The hair is straight and long, a breathtaking fall that cascades over her shoulders to the middle of her back in a way that reminds him of the pictures in mythology books of the sirens wooing Odysseus. Her eyes are a pale, mystical blue; Peter has sometimes wondered if she wears contact lenses tinted to reinforce the blueness of her gaze, but he believes not. Nature, or the God he doubts, has created those miraculous irises.

  And the brain, the mind, the quickness of her thought in the classroom she shares with him—it is an intelligence that shames all the rest. He sees her in the school lunchroom, natural, joking with boys who are straining to be individual—blackened lower lids, blue hair, studs in their noses, earrings, gold chains with innumerable keys suspended down their thighs. Connie dresses in jeans and sweatshirts, wears white tennies, seems not to own a makeup kit. Her skin is unflawed; her hair, bound into a ponytail, is clean and silken and (he imagines) sweet-smelling, perhaps like a pine forest or a seaside place at high tide. Her only jewelry is a heavy, silver-colored bracelet that rides over the delicate bone of her left wrist. Whose gift? he wonders, and feels an unjustifiable thrill of jealousy. She is one of those achingly pretty girls who is continually shadowed—or stalked—by boys, but Peter cannot imagine that any one of them has found her favor, for there is no boy in the Ducharme school who is not so far beneath Constance Lamontagne as to be an unthinkable partner.

  He notices her more times than he can count—in the halls, on the fractured sidewalks in front of the dilapidated school, at the door of the bus that takes her home every afternoon. Each time he sees her he is moved as if for the first time, caught by some aspect of her that he had not yet marked: the way she raises her hand to push back a lock of hair that has fallen to shadow her brow, the melody of her voice as she calls out to a friend, the lift and tilt of her chin as she looks up at the wall-clock in his first-hour class. Is she bored? he wonders. Does she wish he would stop his talk, let her get on with her magical life?

  Yet she is attentive to him in ways his other students are not. She stops by his office nearly every afternoon—to talk poetry, to offer him a Coke, to complain about some other Ducharme teacher. If he happens not to be available, she leaves little notes, sometimes only a picture of herself—a smiley face with three squiggly lines on left and right for hair—or a draft of her latest poem. Sister Mary Martha may be right: that he “excites” the Lamontagne girl, that he does know what she means to say, but it is not intuition—merely age and experience and all Peter’s classroom years in the midst of adolescent turbulence.

  And then again there is the Woman thing: rows and ranks of teenaged girls on the cusp of maturity, testing their first male teacher against boyfriends, fathers, imagined husbands. How can Peter not feel the pressure of those comparisons, the energies focused on him, the daily provocations of blossoming sexuality? His tiny office seems to him to have become a secular confessional where solemn-faced woman-children tell him in low voices their stories: of menstruation—how their timid mothers lied about its meaning and import, how the odor of their own blood offends them; of learning to masturbate—how shame contends with pleasure, how it is a necessary virtue for good Catholic girls because it makes abstinence bearable; how they keep count of their orgasms. What does this have to do with your poetry? he wants to ask them, but if he asks he gives the lie to his insistence, his genuine belief, that the best writing proceeds from absolute honesty, perfect truth.

  “Those are things women don’t even tell other women,” his wife says. “How do you get them to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk about such intimate matters. What do you ask them, I wonder.”

  “I don’t ask them anything. They talk; I listen.”

  “But you must say something. My God, I’d never have talked to a teacher of mine, especially a male teacher, about sex.”

  Peter isn’t entirely certain about the grounds from which Shelley is launching this apparent attack on him. Is she envious? It makes no sense for her to be threatened by teenagers. Does she imagine there is something between himself and his students—that he would be stupid enough to risk his marriage, his job, and possibly his liberty by involving himself with a child? Jailbait—isn’t that the word people used to apply to the female underaged?

  “I can’t explain it,” he says. “I guess they trust me.”

  “It never happens with boys,” she says. “Your male students don’t seem to be so goddamned trusting.”

  “Some of them are. But they aren’t as interesting—aren’t as imaginative, I mean—as the girls, and I don’t tell you about them.”

  “Hah,” Shelley says, a response that makes him feel angry and guilty and superior, all in a single ineffable instant.

  He wants to go on to say something pompous about the efficacy of only listening, that among other things it’s crucial to the workings of Mother Church, that the justification for prayer is entirely dependent on the idea of Someone only listening. Father Devon, from his place on the other side of the confessional partition, would surely validate Peter’s innocence.

  “I don’t encourage them,” Peter says.

  But it occurs to him, just for a moment, that perhaps he is protesting too much—that if he were in fact in the confessional with Father Devon, he might have to admit that his students’ intimate revelations please him, because they indeed show trust—he is a “safe” confidant—even when they sometimes embarrass him and perplex his wife.

  * * *

  THIS IS WHY WHENEVER he encourages Sister Mary Martha to reminisce about the convent, h
e knows—everyone knows—she is not going to ensnare him in some sort of profane carnal web. He is an innocent; he has no designs on her, nor she on him. She is simply open and outgoing. At most, she might be nudging him to recapture his own abandoned faith when she talks about the convent’s liturgical routine. It’s true that Peter is endlessly curious about what she gave up after her time in the workaday world, and did she regret— what was his name?—did she regret Brendan and what might have been if he had not chosen the priesthood as his vocation? But Peter never presses, never pries.

  Sister has a wealth of anecdotes—activities and occasions that defined the convent for her, shaped her into the teacher she became in the narrow corridors of Ducharme. If the stories are rich in detail, their imagery vivid, sensual—well, he thinks, where is the harm if only his attention is seduced?

  She tells him, for example, how only after she had lived in the convent for a year was she permitted to work in the kitchen, and how of all the plain foods she learned to prepare, bread was her favorite. She devised her own secret recipe, created over months of trial that earned her sometimes praise and sometimes penalty, but when at last she was satisfied, it was a recipe others envied but might not aspire to. Nearly every Sunday she was in the kitchen, mixing, stirring, beating—hour upon hour of labor given for the finest possible texture—kneading and letting rise and kneading again and again. She could feel in her arms, her hands, in her fingers, in her shoulders and back, what strength she had, what love impelled her. In summer the perspiration dripped from her face and flowed down her arms as if to leaven the bread; in winter she held the rising dough in its stoneware bowl against her breast, embracing it to protect the yeast from the cold drafts knifing into the kitchen through cracked windowpanes.

  Next, she taught herself to slice the bread so exquisitely thin “you might have read a text through it,” so thin (she says) one could have imagined repairing the cracked kitchen glass by substituting rose windows whose petals were bread slices, whose leading was crust; so thin that when she arranged two slices side by side on a white plate she told herself she had made a butterfly against the full moon. Even her memories are poems, Peter thinks.

  He finds Sister Mary Martha’s convent stories provocative, her exaggerations charming, but he wonders what he is to make of them, why she shares with him such personal, such specific revelations. Ordinarily the two of them don’t discuss religion: the Church and what Peter considers its elitism, the disjunction between Catholic policy and real-world practice, the right or wrong of contraception and abortion, and whether faith is a private or a public matter. The stories lead him more and more to questions he prefers to think of as sophomoric—not merely why he has turned away from the Church, but how he feels toward God and His Son and His Son’s Mother, how does belief influence his actions in everyday life, what are his views on sin and redemption.

  He has not foreseen this; perhaps it genuinely is Sister’s plan, conscious or not, to coax him once more into the Catholic fold or, at the least, to sensitize him to the importance of his immortal soul. Or it is not Mary Martha’s plan, but Father Devon’s, passed down from the diocese in the interest of cleansing the Ducharme faculty by reconverting the lapsed.

  * * *

  MOST FRIDAYS, after classes are done for the week, Peter takes charge of detention in the school’s modest library, a room containing two long maple conference tables and a dozen seven-foot bookshelves ranked along three walls; the room is windowless, the front wall all blackboard and chalk rail. Detention is punishment for the Ducharme students’ various transgressions: contraband food or candy, unruliness during lessons, the vanity of swearing, sarcasm directed at a nun or brother. Detention, an extra hour deprived of weekend light and air, has long since replaced the strap, or the sharp rap of ruler across knuckles Peter recalls from his own early schooling; it is the first line of administrative punishment in a list that moves onward to suspension and, further still, expulsion.

  Though detention is perhaps unpleasant for the students, it is almost a pleasure for Peter. Shelley is at the bookstore late on Fridays, so there is no urgency for him to be at home; even when detention is done, he often spends the afternoon and early evening in his office, reading or grading papers. When he does go home, it’s to begin the Friday ritual: he puts two stemmed glasses into the freezer compartment, then he mixes manhattans for two, dumps out the ice, and stores the shaker in the freezer compartment against his wife’s arrival around seven. Usually they eat at one of Scoggin’s three restaurants, none of which has a liquor license; some Fridays, after they have finished their manhattans, they don’t go out at all.

  Today when detention is over Connie Lamontagne is waiting outside his office door. She wears jeans and a white blouse, tennis shoes and a pale blue sweater. She is sitting on the hall floor, lotus-like, a notebook cradled by her knees, a pencil rested pensively on her lower lip.

  “I peeked in at your detention,” she says. She gets to her feet as Peter unlocks his office. “I guess half those kids must have been sent there for dressing badly.”

  “Or for bad dye jobs,” he says. He enjoys the sense of sharing conspiracies with her, of being with her, allied. It is, he imagines, a way of pretending he is young, and he hopes she doesn’t perceive him as pathetic.

  He stands aside to let her precede him into the room. The trailing scent of her is like a tangible force that draws him in her wake.

  “I sort of miss the middle-school days,” Connie says. She sits in the chair that faces his and stacks her textbooks and notebook on the corner of his desk. “You know? When we all had to wear the same clothes?”

  Peter sits. “Didn’t the uniform stifle the imagination a bit?”

  “I don’t think so. Imagination is what you do. Not what you wear.”

  “That’s a point,” Peter says.

  “And I think sometimes if you look like everybody else, that makes you free to be really different, deep-down.”

  Peter makes a tent of his fingers, letting the peak of the tent balance Connie’s serious face. Depending on how he moves his head, the joined fingers point to the girl’s mouth, one eye, the other eye. …He hopes she doesn’t think he is staring at her, that she realizes he is being thoughtful, trying to look wise. He is about to comment on this matter of appearance—its relationship to hidden individuality—but Connie is frowning and saying something about auras.

  “You have a peculiar aura today,” she says. “I think you must really hate detention.”

  “I have an aura?” he says.

  “Everybody has auras.”

  “And you can see mine?”

  She runs open fingers through her hair to push it back from her face. “I can see everybody’s.” She tosses her head and the hair falls again across one cheek. “Don’t ask how it happens. I’ve just always had the ability. Yours is usually white; today it’s a sort of pukey yellow.”

  “I assume the colors mean something,” Peter says. He thinks it’s what helps make him a successful teacher: this willingness to go along with the most ridiculous statements his students can come up with.

  “They do—but the colors mean different things with different people. With you, white is a sort of neutral. Like ‘I’m O.K., the world’s O.K.’ No stress, no bad stuff. But today—” Connie leans forward, elbows on her thighs, hands palm upward as if she is offering him an insight that’s palpable, that has veritable shape and weight. “I think detention bums you out.”

  “Actually, I rather enjoy it,” he says. “It’s quiet in the library. I can read, or catch up with paper-grading.”

  “But that’s on the surface,” she says. “Your aura comes from within.”

  “You mean I think I enjoy detention, but deep-down—your phrase—I hate it, and I don’t know I hate it.”

  “Exactly.” She sits back in the chair. “Michael’s aura is a very pale shade of blue. It’s a little like the color of the blue chalk Sister Mary Martha used to use to underline words on the bl
ackboard.”

  She looks at him, looks through him—or is she noticing how his own aura has suddenly changed at the mention of an unfamiliar name? From pukey yellow to pukey green, for burgeoning jealousy. He clears his throat and swings his knees toward the desk as if he is preparing to commence some necessary work.

  “Did I mention I have a boyfriend named Michael?” she says.

  “I don’t believe you did.”

  “He’s a senior. He’s already been accepted at Notre Dame.”

  “That’s impressive,” Peter says.

  * * *

  HE CAN’T SAY HOW HIS ATTRACTION to Connie Lamontagne is altered by the revelation that she has, as his wife might put it, a beau. Now when she shows him her poetry, he finds himself searching it for clues to Michael, looking for references to an other, reading into the poems their connection with the author’s real world. He lectures himself on the subject of the autobiographical fallacy, and tells himself, sternly, that it is foolish of him to spend his time ferreting out the indiscretions of a student. On the other hand, he reminds himself, this is the way he is—it’s nothing personal: Constance or Mary Martha or Jane Doe are all the same to him. It is simply part and parcel of his abstract appreciation for Woman. Perhaps it is his mother’s fault that women seem to him closer to secrets—Peter can’t define the word—men may not be privy to.

  One day he sees Connie talking with someone he imagines is her friend Michael: a tall, long-haired boy in the kind of heavy coat-sweater athletes wear. Notre Dame probably wants him for basketball, Peter thinks, all other things being equal. Connie looks serious, the boy is listening and nodding, shifting his books from one hand to the other.

  Later the same day she comes by the office to show him a new poem—it is about how snow takes color from the clothing of children who play in it. Before he finishes reading it, she says:

  “Did you know Sister M.M. before she was a nun?”