“Three weeks! That’s all it is. If it is. You don’t have to do anything for months and months! Anything could happen!”
“I know. That’s what I’m counting on. It’s too early to have to deal with it. I waited as long as I could to tell you but I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.”
“If only …” Mimi said, and stopped.
“What?”
“Oh, damn it, Teresa, if only you weren’t such a Catholic! My mom knows a doctor, he’s a perfectly good one—”
“Don’t even say it, Mimi. Never, absolutely never. As bad as I am, that’s the one thing I cannot do. Never. Ever.”
“I know,” Mimi sighed deeply. She’d been sure from the beginning of this conversation that if Teresa were really pregnant, she’d never consider abortion, but she’d had to say something, just in case there was a chance that she’d see reason. My God, to ruin her future, to wreck her life over religious conviction! Mimi couldn’t make herself accept it, although she understood that for Teresa there was no other way.
“What are we going to do?” Mimi asked after a long silence.
“Pray. If God decides to stop a pregnancy, that’s His decision, and not my fault, not anything I’ve done to cause it. I’m allowed to pray, pray and wait. There’s nothing else.”
“If I pray too, will it help, or do only Catholic prayers get through?”
“Pray. ‘Pray without ceasing,’ as Saint Paul recommended.” Teresa tried to smile at her friend, but tears rolled steadily down her cheeks. “You’re such a pagan, it might be good for God to hear from the likes of you.”
Agnes Horvath had not been the youngest in a family of five sisters without absorbing a great stock of female lore. She had never experienced morning sickness when she was pregnant with Teresa, but when she heard, three days in a row, the smothered sounds of vomiting coming from Teresa’s bathroom before her daughter finally appeared, pale and red-eyed, late for breakfast, unable to eat, and mumbling something about stomach flu going around the school, she began to suspect. When Teresa arrived home from school each day, the stomach flu miraculously cured until the next morning, her heart was speared by the truth.
But Teresa was a virgin, to her knowledge. Teresa was absolutely a good girl, to her knowledge. Teresa had never been alone with a boy, to her knowledge. Teresa, to her knowledge, had never yet been kissed.
But Teresa must be pregnant. Teresa her daughter, perfect and adored, for whose future she had lived, was a stranger to her; immoral, unclean, evil, cunning, lying, and damned to Hell Fire for Eternity.
On Friday morning Agnes lay in wait outside Teresa’s bathroom. As the girl emerged, staggering and deathly pale, her mother gripped her by one arm and slapped her with all her strength across her cheek.
“How could you do this to me!” she spat, and slapped her again, on the other cheek. “How? How? You filthy slut!”
Teresa burst into tears and would have fallen to the carpet if Agnes’s clutching hand hadn’t been keeping her upright.
“Oh yes, cry, that’s going to make a difference, that’s going to make you a decent girl again, you fool, you criminal little fool. Go to your room. I’ll call Sacred Heart to say you’re sick. Wait for me.”
A minute later she returned to find Teresa huddled in an armchair, sobbing so hard that she was getting hysterical.
“Shut up! If you don’t, I’ll hit you until you do! Do you think you have a right to those tears? I’m the one who should be crying,” Agnes panted in rage. “I’m the one you put aside because your lust was stronger than your love for your mother.”
“No … no … it had nothing to do with you,” Teresa wailed.
“It has everything to do with me. You know that lust is a mortal, deadly sin and yet you choose it, just as you chose the influence of Mimi Peterson rather than mine—she must have had a hand in this, how else could you have met a man? But who has watched over you all your life, who has given you everything She could, who managed to find the money to send you to Sacred Heart, who has believed utterly in your future, who has nourished your talent? Look at how you’ve repaid my love. You are beneath contempt. I have no words to use for the kind of girl you are. All my pride and love was folly. I never knew you.”
“Mother!” Teresa cried in anguish.
“Don’t call me mother. No daughter of mine could do what you’ve done. Who is he? No, don’t tell me! I don’t want to know any of the vile details, they’d make me sicker than I am. Have you confessed your sin?”
“No.”
“How long did you intend to go without confessing a mortal sin? So that you could repeat it and repeat it? You disgust me! But you’re caught now. We’re going to see Father Brennan this minute. After you confess, we’ll talk to him in his study. He’ll know where to send you.”
“What?”
“You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? There are places for evil, godless, shameful sinners like you, places to stay until the baby is born and adopted.”
“But it’ll be months, months! I can’t just disappear. The Madams of the Sacred Heart, all the family, they’ll know, and they’ll guess why.”
“Teresa, you’ve ruined my life. I’ve lived for you, the person I thought you were, a person who doesn’t exist. But if anyone else ever knows about this you will have killed me. I have only one thing left, our position in my family. Can you hear what my sisters would say about you? Do you think four women, even if they are family, will stay silent forever? Are you too stupid to imagine how the stain, the gossip will spread, how your life will become a dirty joke? Pregnant at fourteen! Don’t you see that no decent man will ever have anything to do with you? I’m giving you a second chance, don’t you understand? Not because you deserve it. You deserve nothing but punishment, and you will be punished, Teresa, trust in that.”
“But … why? Why are you giving me a second chance?”
“Because I can’t let my daughter become a neighborhood scandal, a dirty joke. The daughter of whom I was so proud, the girl I raised, never realizing what she really was.”
“I still don’t see how I can vanish and then come back here without people guessing,” Teresa persisted.
“It means all of us moving, as far away as possible, someplace where no one knows us. Your father will have to sacrifice his job and find work in another school. I’ll tell him tonight.”
“He doesn’t know? Only you?”
“It’s not a man’s business to know until he has to,” Agnes said grimly. “Go get dressed for church now, don’t forget your hat. And your rosary.”
* * *
“Help me to understand you clearly,” Sandor Horvath said to his wife that night, after she’d told him everything. “You expect me to give up my position and find another job?”
“You have to. There’s no other way. I’ve thought of everything and it’s the only way we can hide what’s happened.”
“And Father Brennan will arrange to send Teresa to this place in Texas to wait for the birth and the child will be adopted by strangers? And then she’ll come home and forget all about it?”
“Adopted by a good Catholic family. We can be sure of that.”
“And you can be sure I refuse!”
“Sandor! You can’t refuse! You can’t let her go away for six or seven months and then come back here. Everybody would be counting on their fingers, everybody would know. We might as well take out an announcement.”
“Agnes, this child is our grandchild. This child may be my grandson. I will never consent to give up this child. This is my flesh and blood.”
“We can’t afford to be sentimental. Teresa’s future—”
“I don’t give a damn about her future! I don’t give a damn about your sisters! Or your sacred reputation as mother of the family beauty. What you ask goes against everything I believe in and I simply will not do it. And you can’t do it without my consent.”
Agnes looked at him and realized immediately tha
t nothing she could say would move him now, unless, unless … he’d agree to the plan of last resort that she’d made during the four days she’d spent thinking.
“Sandor, if we moved, if you got another job, somewhere where nobody knows us, I could … bring up the child as … my own. I’m only thirty-three, it would seem perfectly natural.”
“The baby would become our child, Teresa’s brother?” he asked slowly.
“Or sister, but yes, our child, yours and mine.”
“And how would Teresa feel about that?”
“How she feels doesn’t matter. She’s given up any right to be considered. Do you think that the penance Father Brennan gave her wiped away her sin?”
“Did he give her absolution, did she receive the Sacrament of Penance?”
“Yes.”
“Then God has forgiven her. Can you do less? I’ll start inquiries about another position tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Sandor.”
How typically male, Agnes thought in strangled, furious silence. Men thought it was just that easy. Confess and be absolved. Act like a loathsome, lewd, impure whore, destroy your mother’s rightful joy and pride and hope, force your father to give up a position of prestige—and still be forgiven, forgiven because you’ve told the priest what you’d done and said hundreds of rote prayers. No, she could never accept that, not even if it went against all the teachings of the church.
Secretly thrilled by the prospect of a grandson, a grandson to continue his name and his blood, Sandor quickly discovered a teaching position in the music department of the Harvard School, a well-known private boys’ school in Los Angeles. It didn’t pay as much as his present job, but it answered the problem of putting distance between his family and everyone they knew, and it was available immediately.
Within weeks the Horvaths moved to a small rented house in Reseda, a ranchlike section of the San Fernando Valley that was still so rustic that the streets had no pavement. The house had the additional advantage of being surrounded by an acre of scrubby land. Agnes had made her family believe, that the move was prompted by an offer so magnificent that she couldn’t ask Sandor to turn it down. Only Mimi Peterson, of all the people in Greenwich, knew the truth. She and Teresa parted in tears, knowing that they’d never be allowed to be together again after this stolen moment in the locker room of the Sacred Heart gym.
“Can’t you at least send me a message when the baby’s born, so I’ll know you’re okay?” Mimi asked.
“I’ll try, but don’t write back, whatever you do. I’ll know how you feel, I’ll know you’re thinking of me.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Mimi sobbed, “I’m not going to have sex until I’m married.”
“I’m not going to have sex ever.”
“Don’t be such a dope.”
“Oh, Mimi. I’ll never forget you.”
The months in Reseda passed more slowly than Teresa would have believed possible. She couldn’t go to school, nor could she walk around window shopping on any of the main streets of the nearby small towns where a decidedly pregnant teenager would turn heads.
Throughout the long winter months of her pregnancy she was a prisoner at home, with only the few uplifting paperbacks her mother grudgingly bought her, the local newspaper, and daytime television to keep her company. She was allowed to walk back and forth in those areas of the backyard that were screened from the neighbors, but otherwise there was nothing to do but wait, often alone, since her mother had bought a small, secondhand car and distracted herself by driving around the never-never land of Beverly Hills, on the other side of the Mulholland pass. She never asked Teresa to go with her on these drives and Teresa didn’t dare to suggest it, although, once in the car, she wouldn’t have been noticed.
Teresa’s most lonely moment of each week came on Sunday morning when her parents got into her father’s car and left her alone while they went to mass in the Reseda Catholic Church. She longed to be allowed to go with them, parched for the human contact and warmth of the service, aching for the consolation of communion, but of course it was impossible to show herself and arouse curiosity.
“Isn’t it a sin for me to miss mass, especially on the Holy Days of Obligation?” she asked her mother, still permitting herself a crumb of hope.
“You’re sick with the baby, you’re allowed to miss it,” her mother snapped. “You know that perfectly well. You’re a hypocrite to worry about such minor sins under the circumstances.”
Teresa lived for the single Friday or Saturday night each weekend when her father took her out for a drive after dark, stopping at a place that served ice cream sodas at the car. He would touch her hand gently from time to time, but, silent man that he was, he had become even more reserved. Teresa wanted desperately to throw herself into Sandor’s arms and be held there and comforted, as she had been, from time to time, when she was a little girl with a little sorrow, but she felt his deep reluctance to touch her because of her swollen breasts and her swollen belly.
She sat quietly by his side, her head turned away, so he wouldn’t see the tears of wishful need that filled her eyes. Her only experience with friendly touch was what she could extract from hugging herself tightly in her own arms or patting her stomach gently as she lay in bed at night and whispering to the dark room, “It’s going to be all right, little baby, it’s going to be all right.”
Teresa tried to attract as little of Agnes’s attention as possible, since her mother’s rage had only deepened with the isolation and the strangeness of California. Once Teresa’s morning sickness had passed, she felt her robust health return. Neither mother nor daughter mentioned the need to see a doctor until Teresa felt the child move within her.
“Oh! It just kicked me,” Teresa exclaimed, with excitement and wonder.
“Isn’t that nice for you.” Agnes turned away, shaking her head in disgust.
“Shouldn’t I go to a doctor, just to see if everything’s all right?”
“You look fine to me.” She was twice as beautiful as ever, Agnes thought, the lines of her features were immaculate, exquisite and composed, above her disgusting body.
“But, Mother, I’ve never been to a doctor. Don’t you think I should? If I’m too sick to go to mass, aren’t I sick enough to need a doctor?”
“Nonsense. You’re sleeping well, you’re eating like a horse, you’re getting exercise, your ankles aren’t even swollen, you say you feel fine, why do you need to see a doctor at this point? Having a baby is a perfectly natural process.”
“But shouldn’t I find out if the baby’s all right?”
“Of course it’s all right. A baby is always all right when it isn’t wanted, every woman knows that, the only ones you lose are the ones you’re dying to have,” Agnes said with a bitter laugh. “Don’t you realize that there’s a good reason why you can’t have medical records? A doctor would only ask questions you must never answer, starting with your age. Any doctor will remember your face and your youth. This baby is going to be born in the county hospital under my name and the less trace there is of it in connection with you, the better.”
“You still have hopes for my future, or you wouldn’t bother being so secretive,” Teresa said, suddenly illuminated with knowledge.
“Of course I do. As far as I’m concerned, they’re more important than ever. Look at all I’ve done to give you an intact future, to provide you with a blank slate so you can make something of yourself. Do you realize how much you have to thank me for? Do you?”
“Yes, Mother. I do. I always will.”
The baby born on June 15, 1970, to Agnes Patricia Riley Horvath and Sandor Horvath, was a girl. One busy intern remarked to a busier nurse that the mothers were getting younger every year, but otherwise it was an unremarkable birth of a healthy baby on an unremarkable morning after an unremarkable labor.
The patient known as Agnes Horvath was discharged from the hospital two days later and returned to Reseda with her parents. No one at the county hospital g
ave a thought to the whereabouts of the father. The baby’s birth certificate gave her name as Mary Margaret Horvath, daughter of Agnes Patricia Riley Horvath and Sandor Horvath.
A week later the baby was baptized. Sandor Horvath had made no intimates at Harvard School, but he had struck up a friendship with one of the history teachers, an unusually friendly chap named Brian Kelly, who, Sandor discovered, was both a good Catholic and a married man. Brian Kelly and his wife, Helen, were surprised but flattered to be asked to become the child’s godparents, to make the act of faith in the child’s name and promise that the child would renounce the devil and live according to the teachings of Christ and His Church.
“How could I not have realized you were expecting this happy event, Sandy,” he said. “You’re a dark horse, never telling me.”
“My wife is superstitious; she asked me not to talk about it until it happened,” Sandor answered. “She’s had two miscarriages since Teresa.”
“Mary Margaret is a splendid baby,” he said, carefully touching one of the few hairs on her head. “Now it’s our duty to make sure she’s brought up to be a good Catholic.”
“Only if the parents don’t do it,” Agnes laughed. “Isn’t she beautiful?” She snatched the wailing baby away from Helen Kelly as quickly as she decently could. “No, darling, don’t cry,” she crooned, “don’t cry, your mommy won’t let anything bad ever happen to you. No never, my own, sweet little Maggie will never, ever have anything to cry about.”
“Maggie? Is that what you’re going to call her?” Teresa asked her mother in amazement. Throughout the ceremony she had stood to one side, watching quietly, wearing the best of her old Sunday dresses firmly belted around her waist, her breasts still aching dully. The worst pain of the milk that had made her breasts rock-hard and hot for three days was mercifully gone.
“It’s my grandmother’s name, you know that, Teresa,” Agnes said impatiently, too engrossed in the baby to look up.
“I guess I missed that part of the discussion,” Teresa said, feeling even more out of touch with anything to do with the baby than she had before. From the moment they had arrived home from the hospital, her mother had attended to every need, every cry, every sign of discomfort the baby had made, ordering Teresa to leave the baby alone, stay out of her way, and stop bothering her.
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 4
