Lovely, Dark, and Deep (12 page)

“Well, it's just—at the time—a couple we knew, a couple from our church, had broken up. The Smiths. Rachel asked me a lot of questions, about Mrs. Smith, mostly, how she was feeling, did I think she'd forgive him, all that. It doesn't matter, because they're dead, too. He got cancer soon after he took up with the other woman, and she died a few years later of a heart attack.”

She handed me the yearbook and a manila envelope. She slipped them into a bag for me, along with some muffins to go. “You can bring some to your husband,” she said. “You are married, aren't you, a pretty girl like you?”

I hung my head like a shy eighth grader and said, “I will be in June.”

The Yardleys congratulated me; Abel even dumped the cat so that he could stand and shake my hand. Snow was obviously resentful, but still squinting.

“You be careful in that blizzard, now,” Abel Yardley warned, walking me to the door. I promised that I would, thanked them both again, and said that I'd be in touch.

I dashed to my car, my hood pulled close over my face, and made it inside quickly. The snow was still coming down, but with not quite as much force as before. I started my car and sat in it, letting it warm up as my father had always instructed, and adjusting the heat. I glanced inside the manila envelope. A couple of letters were within, as well as some little notes jotted on stationary that said "From the Desk of Sister Joanna" and was covered with musical notes. A Christmas present from a student if I ever saw one. Jack got that kind of stuff all the time.

Then I grabbed the yearbook and flipped through it by the pale glow of my interior light. Faces of people smiled up at me from endless flashing squares; I couldn't imagine this having much significance. Jeremy's friends had written all sorts of things within, some of them quite ribald.

I flipped to the faculty section, where no students tended to sign their names. There was an old post-it note at the bottom of the page, with a notation in red ink: “Check into T's involvement. Fran would know what to do.”

I stared out the window at the little white flakes that cavorted in the beams of my headlights. Could this have been written by Joanna? Certainly it wasn't addressed to Jeremy, and wasn't written on the book itself.

Fran? Who was Fran? And how did Rachel/Joanna know her?

By the time I pulled out of the driveway it had come to me: Fran was obviously Sister Francis, who lived in the convent with Joanna, who saw Joanna on a daily basis, who had stood in the convent doorway and watched Joanna die.

Chapter Seven

In my dream
I was in church, squirming in the hard pew, my little legs in red tights and black patent leather shoes; a hand clamped on my knees to keep them from swinging. I looked up at my mother's face: her mouth was stern, her eyes less so. “Stop, Madeline,” she said. “Listen to what Father is saying.”

She left the pew then, and I looked toward the altar, which was receding as though it were on a traveling iceberg. The man in the alb and cassock was faceless at this distance; I sought the cross that should have hung above him and saw only sky.

Fritz was singing somewhere, his old standby, Amazing Grapes, and I wanted to find him, to tell him to stop goofing around, that Mom said we should listen to the priest. I looked to my right: the pew was long and vacant.

I turned slowly to my left, and Sister Joanna was there in close-up, her face clear and detailed. “Hello, Madeline,” she said, and I woke with a jolt.

Dreams are strange; sometimes we wake up with all the emotions we felt in our unconscious state, but we aren't sure why. What I felt was fear, and a touch of something like awe. I also had a strong sense of deja vu. I sat there looking at my bedspread and wondering. The other interesting phenomenon about dreams is that they fade quickly. I was already starting to feel normal again after about five minutes passed, but I understood what Sister Moira had meant when she said that she had only taken away one distinct message from her dream. In her case it was that Joanna was murdered. In my case, it was that I had talked with Joanna before. The fact that this had never happened didn't change the realism of my dream. The discrepancy between what I experienced in the sleeping and waking worlds was making me feel a bit dizzy.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes, consulted the clock. It was 6:30, and sunlight filtered wanly into the room. I heard Jack talking in the next room; then he came jogging in and began a little dance in his pajamas. “Snowed in, snowed in, I got the call, we're snowed in!” He grabbed his guitar and started playing “School's out.”

I eyed him, smiling. “You know that you're a shame to your profession?”

Jack stopped strumming. “They're all dancing, Madeline, don't kid yourself.”

He advised me to call Bill and find out how passable the route to the
Wire
was this morning. I did so, and Bill told me to lie low, that plows were still at work, that he'd get back to me around noon.

I hung up, stretched, and padded to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The feeling from my dream was passing, and I was gaining confidence as I got my bearings in the waking world. I emerged from the bathroom to find Jack giving me his come-hither look.

There are lots of things in this world that I find sexy: British Accents, Indiana Jones, men who smoke pipes, that guy who sang “Some Enchanted Evening;” but at the top of my list has to be the sight of Jack Shea with a five o'clock shadow. I suddenly wanted him to rub those scratchy cheeks all over me.

“Come here, snow bunny,” he said.

“Snow minx,” I corrected, kissing him with my minty-fresh mouth.

This lasted for an enjoyable minute; then Jack hugged me and started whispering naughty suggestions into my ear. Over his shoulder I saw the manila envelope from Rebecca Yardley. It distracted me.

“Jack,” I said, remembering my dream, “do you believe in God?”

Jack's roaming hands paused on my flannel bottom. “This is an interesting moment to ask me that,” he said. “And you know I do.”

I pulled back enough to look into his face. Ironically, Jack gets sexier when he's a little put out with me. "It's just—you were practicing last night, and then you were working—I didn't really get to tell you . . . . "

“Tell me what?” he asked, leading me to the edge of the bed, where we both sat down.

“This Joanna thing.” I suddenly couldn't express what I'd been feeling, the twinges of conscience about my unexamined faith, the very strong vibe that something was amiss in this story of the past, the way my upbringing with a devout family was at odds with my skepticism. Even Jack's faith, I sometimes thought, was just an extension of his natural optimism.

In a case like Joanna's, though, where some mysterious and transforming experience left her without doubt, I felt a curious mixture of suspicion and envy.

I tried to explain this to Jack, haltingly, and he suddenly looked more tired than sexy. His body language was an indicator that we were going to be at odds. He stopped me with a raised hand.

“So now you think Joanna came to
you
in a dream?”

“No. No. It was just a dream, and really more like a memory. Like it had happened before. I still think—”

“Maddy, you're reading too much into this. You tend to do that, you know.”

I sat, dumbstruck. “That's an unfair assessment,” I said, stung. “Why do you always have to assume that at the root of everything I do is some form of irrationality?”

“You have a certain history,” he mumbled.

“Why exactly do you want to marry me, Jack? Aside from our physical relationship—which by definition in our faith makes us sinners, by the way—what is it that you love and respect about me?”

Jack shook his head, looking longingly at the bed. “This certainly went in the wrong direction. I merely suggested that you might not have examined your own motives, Maddy. And I love you because you're you and there's no one else
like
you and I wouldn't want anyone
but
you. I don't consider myself a sinner for loving you, but maybe I have a broader definition of marriage than most. As I see it, you're already my wife in everything but the pageantry.”

“And the eyes of God,” I added.

“God sees us for what we are,” Jack said. “Do you think that will change in June?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then what are we fighting about?” he asked, his blue eyes clear and focused on mine.

I shrugged. Jack gets me off my topic, and then I can't always remember what my point was. It merely encourages my reputation in the family as unstable, emotional, and prone to strange outbursts.

“I don't exactly know any more,” I admitted, rubbing his chest. “And I love you, too.” He smiled, and I saw the quest for sex re-ignite in his eyes. “I'm going to pursue this, you know. I might want your help,” I warned as he pulled me closer. He kissed my Blonde Minx hair and I pressed my ear against his heart; the steady, regular, eternal comfort of his very human heart.

Later
I called Cindy again. I managed to catch her at home, which was rare. I told her about my disagreement with Jack, about his comment, about my dream. It's easier to talk, sometimes, when people are far away.

“Madeline, you have to admit, this is about a lot of things for you. I mean, it comes down to faith, and you've been struggling with that since high school.”

“I have?” I asked.

“Come on, Maddy. It all comes down to your Dad, doesn't it? And your Grandpa. I mean, that year you wrote all that dark poetry, remember? I kept a copy of that one about the lilacs, and how “even in fullest blossom, they are dying a little within.” Or something like that. You were depressed about those flowers in your back yard. You used to bum out the whole English class.”

“I did?” I asked.

“I know we never talked about this, because you put up one of those little walls of yours. But we're twenty-seven now, Madeline, I think I can safely say it. Remember when we discussed that Frost poem? It was with Sister Moira, too. She said the last line can be interpreted more than one way, but some see it as a reference to the appeal of suicide. You know, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep?” And you said that the word
dark
had only negative connotations, that it was, when you thought about it, a dark world. But everyone understood, I mean they knew what you were going through.”

Cindy was referring to something I rarely thought of. When I was a sophomore in high school (the year before Joanna died), my grandfather died. He was a sweet man, who used to come from Germany to visit us every other summer. He was my mother's father, and his full name was Hermann Schuler. When we were small, we had called him Opa, or Shoe, which was my baby pronunciation of his last name.

Whenever Shoe came to us, he would work in my parents' garden, always transforming it into something more lovely and disciplined than it had been before. One year he built a wooden bench and arbor that remains in the garden today, weathered to a lovely gray. My Opa smelled like tobacco and men's soap, and he smoked pipes and cigars. In the evenings, or on journeys in the car, he would invariably fall asleep with a cigar on his lip, and it would dangle, still burning, in a dangerous way, so that we children would feel compelled to go for it—then he woke up, every time, he woke up when our hands were reaching toward his face. He would laugh at us, as though we were silly for fearing the cigar would fall. It never did fall.

Shoe was supposed to come to us that summer—his wife, my grandmother, was afraid to fly—but he got sick, and our Oma sent word that he probably wouldn't make the trip. And then one day my father sat down with us, Fritz, Gerhard and me, and said “Your mother has had some bad news.” He told us that Shoe had died. It was only later that I learned he'd had cancer, and that he'd experienced terrible pain and suffering before his death. My sweet Shoe, who used to draw hopscotch for me with an engineer's precision, then watch me jump along the sidewalk, his head wreathed in fragrant pipe smoke, saying “Sehr schön, Madeline. Schön, schön, schön.”
Lovely, lovely, lovely
.

Because my relatives were in Germany, and because at that point in their lives my parents could not afford to fly back for the interment, we grieved at home. I remember once we went to the funeral of a woman from our church; I'd stood at the windy graveside, holding my father's hand, and with the others I'd placed a rose petal on the metal lid before I saw it lowered into the ground. There was that dreadful finality, but also a release, in watching it go. Even the rose petals had curled at the edges, dying before our eyes, and there was an understanding of it all, a satisfaction in the realities of nature that made funerals an important ritual for those who lived. Without that, I felt that my grandfather had been somehow cruelly eradicated from my life, in a way more merciless than I had believed death could be.

When she received the news, my mother spent the day in her room. She always closeted grief, and I had learned to do the same, so I went to school with my sadness for my grandfather in my pocket, and never fully talked about my feelings.

One month later my father found a lump under his arm, next to his rib. He went to the doctor, and was told, after some tests, that he had a malignant tumor. My parents never once said the word cancer to us, and yet we knew that my father had it, and we, the children, were as grave as if we'd heard he was scheduled for execution.

My father grew thinner, and lost some hair, as they treated his tumor, and then they determined that surgery, at first thought impossible, would be necessary. All this while my father continued to work, my mother continued to work, and we children went to school. I did my term papers, studied my Latin, labored at math.

The day of his surgery I sat in the school chapel. I'd been offered the opportunity to go there by my Latin teacher, a compassionate woman who must have seen my distracted state; I was there to pray, but I sat dully, staring at the altar. I didn't know how to pray, I'd found, nor did I have the inclination. I'd decided that any God who allowed his own son to die so horribly was not a compassionate God, and that something other than suffering could have been the answer. Why did love and suffering have to go hand in hand? Why couldn't Christ have come in some sort of magical form, and merely told people to clean up their act? Most importantly, why did people have to die? Why make them live at all? A part of my life-long belief slipped away from me then, and it never really returned.