Absolution, p.6
Absolution, page 6
Peter owned a copy of a full account of the apparition at Fátima, published in the late 1940s and written by a priest who seemed to have interviewed all the participants and witnesses—those still alive, anyway. Peter brought the book to our first apartment. It was dog-eared, the spine nearly broken, even then. It was one of the first books he asked me to read.
And it led to one of our first spats.
Early in the account, during one of the apparitions, Lucy, the oldest of the three children and the chief spokesperson (we’d say now), asked the Blessed Mother about two little friends of hers who had recently died.
Mary answered that one of the girls was with her in heaven, but the other was still in purgatory.
I remember telling Stella Carney about this when we met for lunch in Manhattan, not long after Peter and I returned from our honeymoon. Stella was already expecting her first child—the culprit, as she called him, who had kept her from being the matron of honor at my wedding, since, in those days, pregnant women were not allowed to walk down the aisle.
Stella argued that it was highly unlikely that a small shepherd child in Portugal who had died so young could have sinned enough to earn herself a stint in purgatory.
Maybe, Stella said in her own smarter-than-everyone way, the dead little girl had been a rival, and Lucy’s report that the Virgin said the child had not yet made it to heaven was only a bit of petty girlish revenge.
Girls—especially Catholic girls, Stella added—can be so catty.
“Don’t you and I know it,” she said.
That night, laughing, I told Peter about Stella’s theory.
He was not amused. In fact, he plucked the worn book from my hands. Threatened to withhold it from me until I had “gained some faith.”
I was a bit startled, but nevertheless full of regret. I loved him all the more for this unaccustomed glimpse into his very serious soul.
* * *
HARD TO UNDERSTAND IT NOW, I suppose, but my husband, for all his education and his worldliness—the navy and Colorado and law school and Esso on Park Avenue—had a deep and abiding, old-fashioned kind of faith. God become Man and the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, our infallible pope, and our immortal souls. His own life dedicated at birth to the Mother of God.
He believed entirely in the promise of the apparition at Fátima, that Russia would be converted. He believed communism would be defeated, in Russia, in China, here in Vietnam, not merely by the superior military power of the West, not even by mankind’s own yearning to breathe free, but by the intercession of Mary.
How peculiar it must seem to you—not only that Peter believed entirely in the promise the Virgin had made, but that he believed fully in the apparition itself, believed that the gentle Mother of God had appeared on earth in 1917, in the same body that had given birth, in the very usual way, to the Savior of the World.
Thinking of Stella, my irreverent friend, I wonder now if Mary appeared at Fátima in a matronly body, a belly pouched by childbirth, downward-turning breasts, a laugh line or two, or was it the trim, immaculate body she had inhabited before the angel appeared? A postpartum body or a pre-? As I recall it, the priest’s account of the apparition at Fátima said the children claimed the lady was beautiful, but how to interpret that beauty now? How to gauge the opinion of children who had never seen a Disney princess, or a Miss America, or a dewy movie star on the silver screen? It seems quite possible that a mother’s body, a mother’s careworn face, would have been more beautiful to these peasant children than a slim teenage figure not unlike their own.
I’m pretty sure that if there is indeed a resurrection of the body, as we Catholics are meant to believe, then my own mother will not appear at our reunion in the spectator shoes and permanent waves of her youth, but as I knew her in the brief time we shared: softly plump and weary-eyed, plain and dear.
Faithful as he was, Peter believed that a Catholic regime in this small country, a charismatic Catholic president in our own country, were indications enough that Mary’s promise, the hope she had offered in that spongy Portuguese grazing field, was slowly but inexorably moving toward its fulfillment.
I guess you could say our sense that we were a part of the one true faith was pretty solid in those days. Or maybe I should say that mine was solid because I so trusted my husband to be right.
* * *
I’M RECALLING NOW something Peter told me in this regard—again, this was many years later. He said when he was first recruited for intelligence work, he was both intimidated and impressed by the men who were offering to make him a colleague. They were WASPy Ivy Leaguers, uniformly fit, born to privilege and yacht clubs and, to his mind, old money—old, he said, but still virile enough to keep reproducing itself effortlessly. (That was Peter’s sense of humor.) Even the secretaries, he said, were beautiful girls from the best schools.
Made him feel something like a clodhopper, was how he put it.
And yet he was told in an early interview, by a man who had been recruited for the OSS by Wild Bill Donovan himself, that it was Catholics they were seeking. Who better understood the threat of godless communism?
In the middle of their conversation, Peter’s interviewer had reached into his pocket and placed a black rosary on the desk before him. Wordlessly, Peter did the same.
The Catholic Intelligence Agency was the joke.
* * *
PETER DIDN’T MUCH LIKE CHARLENE. When I told him she wanted us to come to the Episcopal service in order to expedite the selling of the Barbie ao dais, and thus to raise funds for all her good little works, he said, “She’s a dynamo, isn’t she?”—not as a compliment.
Uncertain as I was about the word “cabal”—there was no dictionary at our town house—I never mentioned to Peter your father’s peculiar warning. Neither did I mention the black-market money exchange, or the pillboxes, or the Manhattans, for that matter.
I was aware that it was not like me—not like us—to keep such things hidden from each other. I knew, in other circumstances, I could have made a funny story out of the luncheon: Helen Bickford’s girlish pink knits, the tortuous celebration of that shy housekeeper. I knew we would have speculated about what kind of guy Kent really was, or what Charlene was after—all the delicious mysteries of other people’s marriages. But I didn’t say a word. Maybe this strange, small silence was the beginning of my loyalty to a new woman friend. Or maybe the first small fissure in our post-newlywed lives.
Anyway, Charlene picked up twenty new orders in the hour after church. Enough to keep Lily busy for another week.
And you, Rainey, as I recall, were a charming little saleswoman. Every bit your mother’s daughter.
I SHOULD TELL YOU MORE about my friend Stella Carney. She was like your mother in so many ways. Her precursor, I suppose.
Stella drove a kelly green, utterly ramshackle Volkswagen bug. She’d bought it, “used and abused,” she said, from a newspaper ad, repainted it herself, and then christened it FIFAL: Freedom, Independence, Flight, At Last. She drove it across the Queensboro Bridge every morning with the passenger window stuck open, the hole for the missing cigarette lighter crossed with electrical tape, and the interior scattered with books and notepapers, discarded tissues, candy wrappers, tickets.
Seeing the little car squeezed into various parking spaces around the Upper East Side was for me somehow akin to running into Stella herself, since she, too, was always half-buttoned, disheveled, her smudged glasses repaired with tape and her books and papers an unwieldy bundle in her arms. She was tall, rangy, square-hipped, and pigeon-toed. There was always ink somewhere, on her fingers or her blouse, the corner of her mouth. Up close, she gave off a scent that was something like pencil shavings.
In the classes we shared at Marymount, Stella was ardent, argumentative—leaning in to every discussion, sixty years before that term referred to anything other than one’s posture. I remember how her large hands left puckered sweat marks on the lined pages of her notebooks. How her voice rose and fell in various registers of outrage or irony as she questioned whatever was being offered: the interpretation of a poem, the accuracy of a historical account, the end result of a complex equation.
She read everything, accepted none of it unconditionally. (She’s the one who got me reading The Village Voice.) She volunteered for JFK’s campaign but called him a phony baloney, a cold warrior, a rich jerk. She rode Fifal downtown two or three times a week to volunteer at the Catholic Worker, but said everyone there was a creep, an idiot, or a hanger-on. She told me Dorothy Day had no sense of humor.
In class, whenever anyone asked if she was a Democrat or a Republican, she said neither. She was irritated.
I recall a morning, before I knew her well, when the city held one of those duck-and-cover air-raid drills that now seem such a relic of the era. To be honest, I loved these drills, the drama of them. I loved the thrilling way the sirens permeated the atmosphere, as if from some godly source, a sky-wide soundtrack that sent all the bustling world—my father at work in the Bronx, our neighbors in Yonkers, strangers in midtown, even businessmen on Wall Street—into the same quick, obedient pursuit of shelter, whether basements or subway stations or the undersides of kitchen tables.
At school, we slipped beneath our desks or lined the tiled corridors and crouched against the wall. We prayed out loud during the eight minutes until the all clear sounded. Even as I prayed, I entertained a heart-thudding vision of my postapocalyptic life: hopping heroically over a smoking, smoldering wasteland, rescuing from the ruins small children, frightened puppies, a series of only mildly injured but passionately grateful young men.
On that spring morning when the siren sounded through Manhattan, our freshman English class dutifully stood and headed for the hallway. But Stella remained in her seat, calmly reading. When the instructor asked her to comply, she looked up from her book, licked her finger as if in prelude to turning the page, and said, to him and to those of us who lingered long enough to see what would become of her, “Don’t you know this is ridiculous?”
A simple enough thing to say, I suppose, although until that moment I’m not sure any of us was truly aware that we did know this—knew that the whole exercise was ridiculous.
The teacher did his best. Fines were mentioned, the possibility of arrest, the risk to the college community, the importance of national unity. Stella merely shrugged. With the siren echoing, the poor man locked the classroom door, Stella still inside with her book, and joined us on the floor of the corridor. He was a sad, slim young man, always in the same dark suit and narrow tie. Stella told me once that he would have had a happy life if he’d never read a poem. I recall his lavender socks as he hitched up his pant legs and squatted among us, avoiding our eyes. We, his students, we Marymount girls, tucked our loafers under our bottoms and pulled our skirts over our knees, fully knowing, now anyway, that this was, of course, a sham.
Somehow or other, Stella and I became fast friends. I suppose she was grateful to discover one girl in the school who didn’t find her opinions dismaying. I was grateful to find someone who demanded to know what I thought. Stella wanted a sparring partner; I wanted someone who understood I was smarter than my shyness made me appear.
Anyway, we became a pair.
Once, I followed her to City Hall Park, for an annual demonstration against these very same ridiculous air-raid drills. Dorothy Day and a few other Catholic Worker “weirdos” had initiated the protests, Stella told me, and in years past they’d been arrested and released. But then they were sentenced to thirty days in jail. Dorothy had written about her experience, and, according to Stella, the publicity was not good for the powers that be. “An old lady like that,” Stella said. “Thrown in jail with hopheads and lesbians.”
Stella’s own plan was for us to go downtown to this year’s demonstration, to refuse to take shelter, and to get ourselves arrested instead—sacrificial lambs, she called us.
“They’ll want to arrest somebody,” she told me. “They have to. But they won’t want Dorothy again. We’ll let them take us.”
I was reluctant—I worried what my father would say—but I was also, in those days, easily led. And much as I parroted Stella’s courage and outrage, I was pretty certain that no policeman was going to throw girls like us into a paddy wagon, nice Catholic girls in pedal pushers and ponytails, our First Communion crucifixes on thin gold chains around our fair necks.
That morning, we parked Fifal somewhere downtown and made our way to City Hall on foot. I had convinced myself by then that we would quietly secure a bench in some leafy part of the park and then sit stubbornly but pleasantly, our hands folded in our laps, as the sirens sounded and the rest of the obedient city went underground. I imagined saintly Dorothy Day (my father called her a communist, but Stella knew better) on another bench nearby. I imagined she would catch my eye approvingly, send me a serene smile.
But as we approached the park, we saw that we were not to be the protest’s sole sacrificial lambs. There was a crowd, in fact, already well spread out onto the surrounding streets. Many looked to be university students like ourselves, many others looked to be their professors. There were also what Stella called the usual placard-carrying kooks, some of them crazy-eyed and malodorous, others looking like businessmen and secretaries.
And young women, lots of them, young mothers, to be precise, many with children in strollers. Well-dressed young mothers who stood in tight groups, laughing and gossiping (it was Stella who accused them of gossiping), the tangled wheels of their strollers making our way impassable. Young mothers just taking up space. (Stella’s words again.) Some of them told us as we tried to push through that a police line had already been set up. Dorothy Day and the others were inside the park—Norman Mailer was there, someone said. But we could get no closer.
I was no doubt relieved. There was a carnival atmosphere, a sense of triumph even before the sirens began. But Stella grew furious as we navigated the crowd. She bounced impatiently on her tiptoes, trying to see over heads and shoulders. She abruptly—rudely, I thought—touched the backs of strangers to move them out of her way. She ranged impatiently this way and that, a tiger in a cage, sometimes pushing me ahead of her, sometimes leaving me to catch up.
At one point, we made it to a curb where there was a police barricade. Stella suddenly ducked to go under it, but a young cop gently blocked her way, simply by placing his hand on the top of her head. He said, pleasantly enough, I thought, “Come on, sweetheart,” touching her elbow to get her upright again on the proper side of the barricade. He was a redhead, with piercing blue eyes under the rim of his cap, crooked teeth in his grin. Not much older than we were. I know I smiled at him, even as Stella flailed to get his hand off her arm. I followed her as she turned back into the crowd. Everyone else was smiling, too.
* * *
AS WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE late that afternoon—I was sleeping over again at her parents’ house in Woodside—Stella banged the heel of her palm on Fifal’s steering wheel (a dirty bone white, as I recall it, like something out of a reliquary) when I remarked that the size of the crowd was surely an indication of the protest’s success. She disagreed.
Of course she disagreed.
Shouting above the traffic that roared through the stuck-open window, above Fifal’s farting engine, she quoted Stalin at me, “If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that is a statistic.”
A gathering of the masses was not what she had hoped for. The voice of the masses, she shouted, is an incoherent din. One person is what is needed. One, one. Again she struck the wheel.
One person bloodied, arrested, photographed by the Daily News, named, interviewed, sent to trial. That’s what was needed. Crowds are a joke, she said. Mass protest is a joke. (She was nearly crying.) Who cares if a thousand marched today; they were no more real to the rest of the population than the thousands who drowned in last year’s monsoons, or died in China’s famine, or were obliterated at Hiroshima. Their very numbers smeared them—“smeared,” she said, squinting through her glasses into Fifal’s dirty windshield—smeared them into meaninglessness. Their faces become a blur, their message a blot.
One person is what is needed. One face. One story. “One,” she shouted. “One, one.”
“I disagree,” I said evenly, although given the open window, I suppose I had to shout as well. This was the articulate sophistication I was able to call forth only in Stella’s presence. “One person is just a voice crying in the desert,” I said.
She kept her eyes on the road. After a pause, she laughed. “You just made my point, Patsy. One voice crying in the desert about one man who would change the course of history.” She couldn’t resist a grin. “One,” she said again.
“And who’s the one in this case,” I asked her. “You?”
I saw her fair skin, which had grown bright pink with her fury, now darken to an unpleasant shade of maroon.
“No,” she said, “Not me.”
I saw how her inherent Catholic girl humility was vying mightily with her Catholic girl hope of martyrdom. “Not necessarily me,” she added.
And then she cried out, striking the bone white wheel, “But everyone else is so goddamn timid!”
I can imagine Charlene saying exactly the same thing.
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY enough to believe that the Americans living in Saigon in those days had come over simply to go shopping. And not just the wives. Every American you saw on the street, man or woman, carried a shopping bag, or had two or three of them surrounding their feet at any café. Shopping was the one thing we all talked about at our parties and lectures and luncheons. Shopping for souvenirs, for clothing, for jewelry, radios, cameras, quarts of Johnnie Walker. And cigarettes, of course. All so cheap and abundant.
