The Jewels of Tessa Kent (3 page)

“If only we’d had more children? Don’t you dare, Sandor! I wanted them as much as you did. Are you saying it was my fault that I had those miscarriages …?”

“Agnes, you can’t possibly be starting this nonsense again, please, I beg you. I was going to say that if only it were ten years ago life would be simpler, if only there were
standards
 … if only people stayed the same! In my country teenagers behaved like the school children they are. Please stop talking about fault. The Blessed Virgin didn’t mean it to be, and we must accept that.”

But he did blame her, Agnes Horvath brooded angrily, he blamed her in his heart of hearts, but never as much as she blamed herself, no matter how ridiculous and futile and morally wrong she knew it was to use the word “blame” about a situation that was in the hands of God alone.

But at least she had Teresa, and wasn’t one Teresa worth a houseful of ordinary children?

She wished her parents wouldn’t fight about her, Teresa thought in misery as she tried to go to sleep. She couldn’t hear them from her room, but she knew from their expressions while they’d listened to her say her bedtime prayers that another of their quarrels was hatching.

Long ago she’d stopped listening outside their door; their basic differences never changed, and yet nothing she did seemed to make it better for either of them.
For years she’d tried so hard to please
. There were her mother, her father, the nuns who taught her catechism class on Saturday, the priests who listened to her confession
each Thursday, her teachers, the many Madams of the Sacred Heart, even every last one of her relatives. For a long time she had believed she could change her mother’s disappointment, make her father less severe. But nothing worked. Her mother was utterly concentrated on her; her father was suspicious and disapproving, he corrected her pronunciation, refused to let her use slang. Other kids said she sounded “stuck up.”

If her parents knew everything there was to know about her! They’d die if they knew,
die
, Teresa told herself, caught up in a combination of defiance, shame, guilt, and—worst of all—the dreadful fear that she had lived with for the past year, ever since she’d realized that she wasn’t going to get anywhere by pleasing.

It was their own fault! As Mimi said, the atmosphere around Teresa’s house was enough to make a cat fart. To Teresa her home life was maddeningly irritable, so tense that it made her want to scream and break every dish in the house and rip up her frilly bedspread and take a sharp kitchen knife to the pile of pretty pillows on her bed so all the feathers would fly out and cover the floor with a mess that couldn’t be cleaned up.

There was never a time in which she could take a deep breath, feel a sense of contentment, and, most important of all, feel safe. Oh how she yearned for a safe day, a safe hour, even a safe minute, in which all pressure would dissipate and be replaced by easy, loving, unqualified approval.

Just yesterday she’d caught a glimpse of her mother sitting in a back row of the darkened school auditorium, while the rehearsals for the school play went on, sitting so far scrunched down that nobody but she would have noticed her.

“Mother,” she exclaimed furiously, as soon as she got home from her last class, “you know you promised me never to do that again!”

“Teresa, Mother O’Toole said it was all right with her so long as I stayed out of sight. No one saw me, absolutely no one,” Agnes defended herself vigorously.

“Except me. How do you expect me to concentrate when I know you’re there, watching my every move?
You’ve been doing that all my life!
Ever since the first part I had in a kindergarten pageant. I hate it! It makes everything so much more difficult. I’ve explained that to you again and again, but you won’t leave me alone!”

“I see nothing to apologize for,” Agnes responded coolly. “It’s excellent training for you to have to ignore me. When you start acting for a living, you’ll be the center of everyone’s attention, not just mine. No one acts without an audience, and at least, in my case, you know I’m biased in your direction.”

Helplessly Teresa had watched her mother head toward the kitchen, with the self-righteous conviction of someone who hasn’t the slightest doubt that she always acts in your own best interests.

If it weren’t for Mimi she didn’t know what she’d do, Teresa thought. She didn’t know how she’d manage to keep on pretending to be the good little girl her father expected her to be as well as enduring the burden of being her mother’s “pride and joy.”

But at least she could escape the atmosphere of her home, when she went over to Mimi’s to do their homework together—to Mimi’s big, luxurious house that impressed her mother although she’d never admit it. She and Mimi, another only child, were sworn blood sisters, and Mrs. Peterson, lively, easygoing, and expensively dressed with blond streaks in her hair, was too busy playing bridge or golf every afternoon to give a thought about what the two little convent girls were up to.

“Teresa, sweetie, you’re a good influence on Mimi,” she’d say if she came in before Teresa had left for home. “She never got her homework done before you started studying together.”

But Mrs. Peterson had no idea how easy the homework was when Teresa and Mimi put their heads together and attacked it. Both bright, they could polish it all off in an hour with a system of tutoring each other that divided the work in half.

And then, homework done, at least twice a week they’d “engage in an adult experience,” as Mimi called it. The Petersons’ bar was crammed with bottles of everything any liquor store could supply.

Teresa and Mimi, sharing Mimi’s bathroom glass, would pour three jiggers full of whatever drink took their fancy, replacing what they took with water, and carry the glass up to Mimi’s room. They’d lock the door and sip slowly, taking turns, giggling like maniacs as each reported the fascinating alterations they felt in themselves.

They hadn’t yet used the same bottle more than once and they’d never dared make a second trip downstairs for more, just in case they couldn’t handle more than one generous drink each. They were always careful to brush their teeth and use mouthwash before Mimi’s mother was expected home.

The Petersons were a couple in their mid-thirties who, Mimi reported proudly, still loved a good time. On their exploration of her parents’ bedroom they easily found a large collection of
Penthouse
and a smaller-sized publication called
Variations
, which contained erotic short stories and wild letters to the editor. Two drawers of Mrs. Peterson’s dresser were filled with underwear that it was impossible to imagine her wearing for anything but sex. Mimi and Teresa would select several pieces at a time—tiny, lacy panties; garter belts that attached to slinky black stockings; dainty push-up bras; or transparent chiffon teddies—and carry their loot swiftly back to Mimi’s room, where they’d try on everything, using old pairs of her mother’s high-heeled shoes to see themselves at best advantage.

Of course, even Mimi had to admit that, although the two of them were as tall as most women, at twelve, they were still too young and too undeveloped to look right in sexy underwear. But if you squinted your eyes and lifted your nipples in cupped hands, and stuck out your ass, you could get a pretty good idea of how you’d look in a couple of years.

As for
Penthouse
and
Variations
, they pored over one issue at a time, discovering that some of the subject matter was heart-pounding and passionately fascinating. Teresa couldn’t keep from thinking about all the forbidden, unutterably exciting things a man and a woman could do together—except when she was brooding on the certainty that she was going to go to Hell after she died.

It was amazing, Teresa thought grimly, that she was able to lie with such calm to the priest at confession, producing a normal series of venial sins as she tried not to breathe the stale air in the red velvet, padded phone booth of the confessional that the old church still used in spite of Vatican II. But she knew the truth. She was unquestionably guilty of at least four of what her catechism class had been taught were the seven deadly or mortal sins. She was guilty of lust, the sin of impurity, and of gluttony, the sin of drinking too much. When she and Mimi dressed up and admired themselves she was guilty of the sin of pride … their sessions certainly didn’t conform to the “normal pride in a neat appearance” the nuns talked of.

Every single week of her life, as she left any of these three mortal sins unconfessed, by name and number of times it had happened, she was committing yet
another
mortal sin by not confessing, so her sins were not forgiven but lay on her heavily and painfully, almost too much to endure. Yet, to rid herself of them would have been worse. If she’d ever been tempted to make a full confession, she’d be kneeling in front of a pew doing penance for hours—for days!—before she could receive absolution and the sacrament of penance. Since her mother waited to drive her home from church, praying quietly in a pew not far from the confessional, any such penance would cause an inquisition.

Hell waited for her, Teresa never doubted that. Her weekly catechism class had started when she was five and a half. From that time on she spent all of every Saturday morning being indoctrinated into the rules, laws, and prayers of the church, by a different nun every
year. When she’d made her First Holy Communion at eight, she’d been certain that she’d go to Heaven. Just thinking of how pure and light-filled she’d felt walking down the church aisle in her beautifully embroidered long white dress, a little bride accompanied by a little groom, could still bring tears to her eyes.

Yes, the forest of fear of Hell she lived in now was a place she’d been prepared for from the beginning of her memory. Hell, the certainty of Hell for a sinner who hadn’t confessed and wasn’t absolved, had been seared into her for seven years. It wasn’t knowledge she could question any more than she could question the fact that she was a girl or an American.

Hell, actually going to Hell, had only started to be a reality to Teresa after she met Mimi. Before that she had been able to confess to the mortal sins of envy or sloth and anger, as well as all the minor venial sins, and feel cleansed when she left the confessional.

Now she couldn’t give up her lies of omission in the confessional any more than she could possibly tell a priest that she’d spent hours looking at pictures of naked men and women and reading vivid details about people having sex in every way anyone could imagine.

As the year passed, Teresa’s confirmation loomed. “Oh, what am I going to do?” she moaned to Mimi. “I have to make a full confession, a good confession, before I’m confirmed, and even if I managed to admit—you know—my mother would know I’d done something very bad.”

“What if … what if you went to a strange church, by yourself, without your mother, and got it over with before your confirmation?” Mimi asked, inspired. “I’d go with you, we could take a taxi, no one would ever know … it’s a perfect plan! Then you could stop sinning, except for little stuff like swearing, until you made the official pre-confirmation confession. How about that? Am I brilliant or what? I think I could make a living giving advice to bad Catholic girls like you.” Mimi pinched her companionably.

“I’d still have to
intend
never to repeat my sins—
really, truly believe that I wasn’t going to. Oh, God, how I wish I’d been born to your parents!”

“Me too, then we’d really be sisters. Oops, it’s Listerine time, not a minute to lose. Mom’ll be back in half an hour.”

Using Mimi’s plan, Teresa got through her confirmation with the eyes of the entire Riley clan upon her as she walked down the church aisle, a slender, angelic, dignified young girl, whose long black hair was plaited tightly and held severely away from her unsmiling, austere, heartbreakingly lovely profile under her plain illusion veil. Her features were eloquent with reverence and her green eyes, under her smooth, expressive eyelids, were filled with perfect tranquillity. She walked, restraining her usual stride, with poetry in her steps, wearing an unadorned dress, as plain and straight a gown as she’d been able to find, much to her mother’s disappointment. As the day had drawn near, Teresa had been adamant in refusing to enter the catechism class’s covert competition for the most elaborate, full-skirted confirmation dress.

“She’s not thinking she’s got a vocation?” one of Agnes’s sisters murmured to her in a worried tone as she contemplated her niece, startling in the unbending line of her marvelously shaped back and in the stern simplicity with which her long neck rose from a rolled white collar. All around her were girls decorated in a garden of billowing, complicated dresses, worn with smiling, innocent pleasure. Teresa looked years older than they did, and no smile had crossed her lips.

“Never,” Agnes laughed. “It’s just a matter of her personal taste. Teresa’s buying
Vogue
these days, with her allowance. Does that sound like a vocation to you?”

“
Vogue
? Good heavens, that’s for rich women, society women. It’s much too old and fancy for her. What’s wrong with
Seventeen
?”

“She says it’s silly. Oh, Millie, I think she’s growing up too fast.”

“It’s always going to be too fast from now on. Trust me, Agnes, I have six of them to worry about.”