The Cape Ann (5 page)

“Sally,” Sister Mary Frances began when we had completed an Our Father and a Hail Mary, “can you tell us what happens to babies who die without being baptized?”

What I had begun to ponder as I sat twitching beneath Sister Mary Frances’s gaze, so close to her that I could hear her soft, impatient breathing, was the moral ramifications of gambling. While it was presumptuous to question the state of Papa’s soul, I knew that Mama was upset by his poker playing. Was poker a mortal sin? If I could find out, maybe I could put Mama’s mind at ease.

While our catechism responses droned or faltered, and we acquitted or disgraced ourselves, I formulated queries for the nuns. Is poker a sin? Is it only a sin if you lose?

“Lark.” Sister Mary Frances frowned down her long, perpetually sunburned nose at me. It was not a frown of anger, not yet at any rate, but a frown of speculation. What response has this child failed to memorize? For what was the point of asking questions to which the answer was known?

Taking the heavy cross hanging around her neck into her two hands, which were always red and wounded-looking, as if in her world it was eternally winter and she were forever without mittens, Sister demanded, “Without looking anywhere but at this crucifix, name the fourteen Stations of the Cross.”

Pushing myself up from the seat, my heart beating in the perversely pleasant way it did when I was called on to answer a difficult question, I lay my furled
Baltimore Catechism
on the pew behind me. I stared fixedly at the silver and onyx cross and at Sister’s knuckles, in whose creases were tiny pinpoints of dried blood.

“Pontius Pilate condemns Jesus,” I began, turning under the thumb of my right hand. Did Sister use lye soap to wash clothes? Grandma Browning made her own lye soap, and it was strong and harsh. It could make your hands look like that if you weren’t careful.

“Jesus takes up the cross.” I turned under the index finger of my right hand. Maybe Sister washed her linens on a washboard.

“Jesus falls to the ground for the first time.” Had she been working in the vegetable garden behind the nuns’ house?

“Jesus meets his mother, Mary.” Did Sister have Jergens lotion, like Mama had, to soothe her hands?

“Simon helps Jesus carry the cross.” Maybe nuns couldn’t afford Jergens lotion.

“Veronica wipes Jesus’ face.” Mama had said that nuns were poor, that they promised to be poor when they married Jesus.

“Jesus falls down again.” Wasn’t it funny how Jesus had so many brides?

“Jesus meets women of Jerusalem.” Did Sister mind that Jesus had so many other brides?

“Jesus falls down a third time.” Maybe Sister refused lotion. Maybe she offered up her pain.

“The soldiers tear Jesus’ clothing off of him.” She had told us we could offer up our suffering if we ever had any.

“They nail Jesus on the cross.” If you offered up your suffering, you got out of purgatory sooner.

“Jesus dies.” Mama had added up for me (based on estimates Sister had provided us) the number of years I would suffer in purgatory for various weaknesses of the body and spirit. According to my calculations, I would spend nearly forever in purgatory unless I was lucky enough to die a martyr’s death. Then, if I understood correctly, I would go directly to heaven.

“They take Jesus down from the cross.” But surely Sister didn’t have to worry about spending millions of years in purgatory, so why refuse Jergens lotion?

“They put Jesus in the tomb.” I had turned all my fingers under once, and four of them had gone down twice. Fourteen stations in order, none left out.

Without the smallest congratulatory notice, Sister Mary Frances began again at the opposite end of the pew. “Beverly, the Act of Contrition, please.” Sister never congratulated us. Why would one make a fuss over a child learning that which was needed in order to be spared the tortures of hell, torments so heinous they could only be devised by a God of infinite ingenuity and love?

The morning crawled forward on the bloodied knees of martyred saints. Sister Mary Clair took over, and Sister Mary Frances opened the lower portion of the windows. These stained-glass panels bore the names of departed members of the parish, departed members whose families could afford a window in their memory.
“In Memory of Our Beloved Mother, Edna Ripath,” or “Our Beloved Baby Daughter, Evelyn Shelton.”

If I were cut down in my childhood, I hoped that Mama and Papa would buy a pretty stained-glass panel for me. “In Memory of Our Beautiful Lark,” it would read. Every time someone opened my window, I would smile and blow the perfume of peonies and wet earth through the opening. The nuns had assured us that in heaven we would have no interest in Earth’s pleasures, so paltry were they beside the delights of God’s home, but I was sure that I’d be interested.

At ten o’clock we were herded out the door to sit on the broad front steps for ten minutes, and we fell apart into twos and threes. Although we were admonished to study, the nuns usually disappeared for a few minutes, leaving the boys to argue and shove and sometimes roll on the ground, getting grass stains on their clothes. Bleeding noses and scraped elbows, full of grit, were also not uncommon. We girls sat on the wide, cement balustrades—country girls on one side, town girls on the other—watching with horrified satisfaction.

This morning a grudging quiet hung over the nine of us. I needed to study. Arvin Winetsky, like me, was poring over his
Baltimore Catechism
, a holy and absorbed expression on his face. Beverly Ridza hastily flicked pages as if searching for pretty pictures, of which there were none. Sister Mary Frances had said that one or two of us might not be ready for Communion next year and might have to take the lessons over. She had stared along her sunburned nose at Arvin, who was slow-witted, and at Beverly, who repeatedly missed the Saturday morning classes and when she appeared, wearing her brother’s clothes, was half-asleep.

Leroy Mosley and Ronald Oster were looking at a Big Little Book. With three of the four boys bent over books, the break was peaceful.

My thoughts returned to Mama and poker. I would like to be able to go home at noon and assure her that Sister had said gambling wasn’t a sin.

The two nuns emerged before ten minutes had elapsed. Pleased to find things peaceful, they showed their pleasure by engaging in bits of conversation with us, an almost unheard of occurrence.

“Do you ever help your mother bake cookies?” Sister Mary Clair inquired of Beverly.

Beverly’s mother didn’t have a stove. What the Ridzas cooked, they cooked on an old hot plate.

“Sometimes,” Beverly lied casually, to save Sister embarrassment.

When the nuns leapt the wall of their own reserve, the exchanges were uncomfortable. They knew so little about us. And how would they? They lived in an austere, white cottage across the street from the church, and seldom went out on Main Street or elsewhere in town. Their groceries were delivered by Truska’s and their meat by Rabel’s.

The exterior of the nuns’ house was painfully barefaced. Everything was white—clapboard, window frames and sills, gutters and downspouts—everything. There was not a shutter or a scrap of trellis to adorn it. Nor was the front yard more showy than the house: green grass, a pair of self-effacing arborvitae on either side of the door. A three-foot, gray statue of the Virgin with clasped hands floated, lonely and cut-off, on the deep green sea, twenty feet from the door.

However, it was said that in the yard behind the cottage, they raised the finest vegetables and the showiest flowers in Harvester. Mama’s friend Bernice McGivern had seen the garden. “Rows as neat as knitting,” she had said. “And not a weed anywhere. Carrots and radishes and lettuce and tomatoes and whatever else you could think of. And corn. Beautiful corn. And all around the edge, flowers. Zinnias and marigolds and bachelor’s buttons and gladiolas and delphiniums and larkspur and roses as big as dinner plates.”

Old Father Delias seemed remote from the nuns, perpetually surprised to see them around the church. His life was very different from theirs. He was invited to dinner everywhere that a Catholic priest was welcome. And he went fishing with men from the parish. He liked to laugh and drink beer and tell funny stories about priests he knew and seminarians he had known. As loved by children as the nuns were feared, he was like the jolly father in a family where discipline is left to the mother.

On May Day, when the young children whose parents could afford it delivered May baskets, Father Delias’s front porch and steps were littered with colorful baskets, like spring flowers, filled with
candy and home-baked treats. Father chased each child who rang the doorbell and, catching him, gave him a hug and a penny.

It didn’t occur to anyone to leave a basket at the nuns’ house.

As Sister Mary Clair stood on the topmost step wanting to know about cookie baking in the kitchen of the Ridzas, who lived in a shack on the south edge of town where there was no street, only a hard-bitten path among the weeds, Beverly scratched her thigh and looked at her scuffed oxfords, which were her brother’s. She was running out of ready lies.

I shoved myself forward, toward Sister Mary Clair. “Sister,” I began, but my voice started to fade, like a radio station slipping out of reach.

“What did you say?” Sister asked, bending toward me. “Speak up.”

“I just wondered … I just wondered—is gambling a sin?”

“Gambling?” Sister asked in a neutral tone of voice, her eyes retreating from me. Later it occurred to me that she was perhaps thinking of the Wheel of Fortune and other innocent forms of gambling at the annual church bazaar. Was there Protestant criticism out there in the town? she likely wondered, feeling suddenly more estranged. “What kind of gambling?”

“Poker?”

“Well, that would depend,” Sister said. Had Father Delias and his fishing cronies been criticized?
Did
Father Delias play poker when he went fishing? It was probable. “Gambling isn’t necessarily a sin.”

“When would it be a sin?” I asked. I had to know, was Papa going to hell?

Leading the conversation away from anything that might have reference to Father Delias, Sister explained, “If a man gambled and lost all his money, and his wife and children suffered, that would be sinful.”

“Would he go to hell?”

“Not if he were truly sorry and went to confession and asked God to forgive him.” She fished a pocket watch out of the folds of her garment, glanced at it, and announced that it was time to go back in.

As I reached my fingers out to the holy water font, Sister asked in a voice so low I barely heard, “What made you ask?”

“Nothing.”

•  •  •

“You asked Sister
what?”
Mama demanded, bent imminently over me, hands on her hips.

“If gambling was a sin,” I repeated, though Mama had heard every word I’d said. “I thought you’d want to know. Sister said it wasn’t a sin unless a man lost all his money, and his wife and children suffered. Even if Papa loses all our money, he’ll still go to heaven if he confesses and is truly sorry and asks God to forgive him. Aren’t you happy, Mama?”

“Did you tell her
your
papa gambled?”

“No.”

“Well, she’s going to figure it out.”

“No, Mama. I told her I was just wondering.”

Mama laughed an unhappy laugh.

“Really, Mama. Sister didn’t think I was talking about Papa.”

“She’s not a fool, Lark.” Mama sat down across from me at the kitchen table. She had baked a spice cake while I was at catechism class. It was on the table waiting to be frosted. Mama was dressed in a cotton housedress, and she looked tired. “Everyone in town is going to know that your papa lost last night. If his pals don’t tell them, the nuns will.” Mama was always a little suspicious and skeptical about the nuns.

“How much?” I asked.

“Two hundred dollars.”

It was such a large sum, for a second I thought Mama was joking. But she got up and went in the bedroom, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of her dress. Two hundred dollars was more than Papa made in a month. Some people in town didn’t make half that much. Mama had said that Miss Hagen, my teacher, made eighty dollars a month. Two hundred dollars was so much, I was frightened by the number itself, as if its size gave it great power over me.

Big numbers carried awesome potential. Mama said our house would cost four thousand dollars. That was even bigger than two hundred. But it stood for something happy. It was worth the fear it conjured. But two hundred dollars
lost?
I was crushed by the number. I felt that I was carrying it around on my back, just as Mama and Papa were.

ONION AND BOLOGNA SANDWICHES
were my favorite, but I didn’t feel like eating the one Mama had waiting for me when I came home from catechism class. I sat staring at it, considering the big numbers in our lives. Mama said we needed a down payment to begin the house building. A thousand dollars was what she hoped to save. I didn’t know what part of a thousand dollars two hundred was, but it must be quite a bit.

In the bedroom, Mama had fallen asleep, a cotton handkerchief splashed with red roses gripped in her hand. I couldn’t get the buttons at the back of my dress undone, so I pulled off my shoes and climbed into the crib, still in my clothes.

There at the foot of the bed was the pile of house plans, with #127—The Cape Ann on top. The sketch of the house showed two dormer windows, one in each of the upstairs rooms. Sally Wheeler had a dormer window in her bedroom, with a vanity table built into it. It was very nice, but in my book
Happy Stories for Bedtime
, there was an illustration showing a dormer with a window seat built into it. A pensive looking boy in short pants sat on the seat, an elbow on the sill, staring out at the sea. In the illustration we couldn’t see the water, but in the story we were told that the boy’s father had crossed the sea to fight the Hun. The boy sat gazing across the gray waves, waiting for the soldier-father’s return.

I was fond of that boy. He had more serious matters on his mind than a dog named Spot and a cat called Puff. And his body had a grace and casual elegance which seemed foreign and which I admired. What would that boy be when he grew up? I wondered. A professor, maybe.