The entire school community was funneling toward the big chapel: masters from their homes, students from their dorms and the dining hall, the tall, thin, long-haired rector crossing in an unbuttoned greatcoat, tails flapping, from the rectory.
Elise sighed. The bells began to ring. You had to not only be inside the doors by eight but be on your way to your seat, or you received detention. The several sets of doors—enormous wooden panels with Gothic studs—were policed by fifth-form chapel wardens. When the last of the eight o’clock bells sounded, things got interesting. Tina worked the left door straight ahead of me: one-half of a set of East Asian twins, she would let me slip through. But Morris, on the right, had two brothers, two uncles, and a father with St. Paul’s diplomas, and he’d guillotine you.
“Simone would say go to Paris,” Elise said.
“With my wolf.”
“Oui, avec le loup. And books.”
“And your leopard.”
“Yeah. I think I’m going to break up with Scotty.”
“You’re what? Why?”
But she was cutting left, toward the entry closest to her pew.
“I don’t know,” she said, with her usual breathy detachment. “See you.”
Morris, at the door, eyed me. “Well, good morning,” he said. The leer of a milk-toned, eyeglass-wearing Wasp such as this looks not unlike the result of a full ophthalmic exam. He held me in his dilated, unfocused stare, but he let me through.
When I could persuade Elise to come to meals, we’d swing through Center Upper, where Caroline, Sam, Brooke, and Maddy—along with two new friends, Meg and Tabby—would be sitting in the hall, notebooks out, waiting for us, and all together the eight of us would go to eat. This made the dining halls mostly safe. I walked to choir rehearsal with Sam, who sang too. Back in the dorm, I brought my books to Elise’s room and joined her on the futon on the floor, blues playing, windows darkened, to work.
With the rest of our form, we were hacking through Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, a mid-century existentialist’s argument for affirmation in the face of such annihilating concerns as guilt and death. I was in my element. My Religion instructor was a new chaplain, Reverend S., a young father whose faintly protruding eyes always looked to me just on the verge of tears. Mom had met him as she did all Episcopalian clergy, introducing herself as “from the Diocese of Chicago,” but his response was chillier than I thought that deserved. Reverend S. pressed out a smile and said, “Fred.” Come on, I thought, how many moms are on the inside? How cool is that?
I resolved to be his best Religion student, for her sake if not for mine. Because he was the school chaplain, my thinking went, if I was his best student, I’d be the best Religion student in the form. I felt born to it. I loved thinking about language and being and faith, and the more I thought about such notions, the less I worried about my failure to harness them. Whatever small affinity I might have had for this form of inquiry was bolstered by my confidence in my years of exposure to liturgy and Scripture, and the grandeur of the concepts neatly eclipsed my true concerns, which were only growing.
When I called home that fall, as I did routinely so my parents would not worry, I was often surprised by an impulse to tell my mom that something bad had happened. My throat grew cottony with the threat, and approaching tears made it hurt more. I learned to defend against this by talking about Religion class. How can we know God through the Gospels? I’d offer. In the beginning was the word, Mom would reply, growing animated, and Dad would “ring off” to leave us to it. The world was made from language, Mom said, therefore the divine was immanent in language. God lived in books. She got out her notes from seminary to feed our discussion and mailed me xeroxed chapters of Mary Daly on feminist ecology and Paul Ricoeur on the nature of being. What I wanted, of course, not that I understood this then, was to make a connection with my mother so she could take from me the horrible pain I was in. But I could not do this, so I hoped instead to make a connection, however tenuous, to my mother via my teacher—also a priest, the chaplain, the young father. I knew a lot about a certain God, but nothing I could use. What to say to the boys harassing me? What to do with my throat or the fact that I found myself shivering when I was not cold?
I tried to formulate questions a chaplain would jump to answer:
What does it mean when you feel marked? What if you think hope is self-indulgent and foolish? What if God doesn’t listen?
But Reverend S. did not respond to the questions I posed in my papers. I supposed he considered them rhetorical, or at least not meant to invite a pastoral response. The text sought an ontological conception of the notion of despair, and that’s what Fred wanted. Fine. I had hoped Religion would offer me rescue in a form I recognized. Instead I worked Tillich’s sentences the way I worked calculus sets: Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. The truth of the vitalistic interpretation of ethics is grace. These constructions made sense, but they did not touch me at all.
Elise, sprawled beside me, wearing fetching reading glasses she didn’t need, said, “Hey, listen to this: ‘Be always drunken.…With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.’”
“Where’s that?” I flipped the pages.
“Not Tillich. Baudelaire.”
“Makes more sense,” I said, and it did. I didn’t need help defining despair. I needed help feeling like a living girl. “That one’s not in Fleurs du Mal, I don’t think. Is it?”
“Don’t think so. But then it shows up in Long Day’s Journey into Night…” Elise was, as usual,
