her neck the first morning back at school. Clare was part of their sorority now.
In the second week of the term, a priest visited, as was tradition, to hear confessions and to say Mass, but he was a young guy-a new assistant at a nearby parish-with thinning hair and an effeminate voice, and in an effort to keep the sacrament relevant to the girls he asked that they first meet with him in small groups so they could all have a conversation about life, about their accomplishments (he said) as well as their transgressions, before he met with them individually to offer absolution. He was pale and earnest, gay, they were pretty sure.
In Clare’s group discussion, held in the small room that usually served as the PE teacher’s office, she and Christine Dodd and Cynthia Pechulis talked about being nasty behind their friends’ backs and lying to their parents about stupid things and using fake IDs to buy beer, but no one said anything about sex. In her individual meeting, Clare shyly bent her head when the young priest asked her if she had anything more she wanted to discuss. He suggested that they both take a minute to “open our hearts to God” before they said an Act of Contrition together, and although she bowed her head again, it was not as easy, at that moment, to keep a silent conscience. For surely if she had ever sinned it was when she had first let him, helped him, to slip her sweater up over her head, to slide her jeans off over her hips.
Without opening his eyes, the young priest suddenly began to say an Act of Contrition and softly, Clare followed along. He then blessed her, and absolved her, and as he did, she noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the core. It was the kind of thing Pauline would have pointed out. It was the kind of thing that indicated, Clare already knew, that the man wasn’t as sure of himself as he seemed.
That Saturday afternoon she walked down to St. Gabriel’s and slipped through the eight-paneled door of one of the confessionals. This, too, in the way of contemporary churches, was just a room, not terribly different from the PE teacher’s office at school, but empty except for a freestanding kneeler before a folded screen. Early on (Clare had memories of her first confessions here), when everything still smelled of wood and paint, there had been just two chairs, but her parents, and others, it seemed, had claimed Father McShane had taken the modernization thing too far and the kneeling bench and the screen had been added. Father McShane, now Monsignor McShane, was seated behind the screen, she could see his profile clearly, his cheek in his hand. There had been rumors, when she was in grammar school, that he slept through most confessions, sometimes even snored if you went on too long. She repeated the list of sins she had been confessing since those days-adding only “I let my boyfriend take some liberties,” which she placed between, “I lied to my mother three times” and “I took the Lord’s name in vain twice.” The priest prescribed for her penance four Our Father’s and four Hail Mary’s and the avoidance of the “occasion of sin.”
Kneeling in the pew to say her prayers, she recalled how she once had thought an occasion of sin meant a social occasion dedicated to wrongdoing-St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras most likely. She smiled into her hands. Of course, what it meant now was the backseat of Greg’s father’s car, the couch in her basement when her parents weren’t home, the friend’s apartment near Marist where, he had assured her, he and she would have a room to themselves, undisturbed, when she came up to visit him this weekend, getting a ride from his sister, who would stay with friends at Ladycliff and assure both sets of parents that Clare too was staying there. She had bought new pajamas. He said he was buying new sheets. She would brush her teeth and wash her face, tie up her hair in a ribbon and then kiss him. They would sleep together in the same bed for the first time and in the morning they’d go out to breakfast together-he’d said the diners upstate were pretty lousy but he had a favorite spot for waffles and fresh juice. After breakfast, they would take a long walk-he had the trail all planned. The leaves were just changing and he knew a farm where they sold hot cider. There was a rugby game to watch Saturday afternoon and a keg party that night. His friends would treat her with that delicious graciousness otherwise wild and sometimes gross boys reserved for the girls who were loved by their buddies. And then a second night in bed together, like a married couple.
She could feel her own heart under the softness of her breast, beating against her folded hands as she knelt, anticipating it, the best weekend of her life, losing count of what prayer she was on, or how it was, here in St. Gabriel’s, that her thoughts had wandered so pleasurably and so far. She raised her eyes. In the past few months, statues had been added to the altar, a recognizable Joseph and Mary, a formidable Saint Gabriel, blond and fine- featured, kneeling on one knee. It was what the parishioners had wanted, realistic statues, easily identifiable. She blessed herself and rose and slipped out of the pew, suddenly struck by the conviction that she was going to have the happiest life. And then she paused and knelt again to say a prayer to Jacob, who had once sat beside her, here in this place, to thank him for it.
Her baby began, as she reckoned it, sometime during the first cold days of that autumn. She pictured it forming like the far-off swirl of some distant galaxy in the darkness of her womb, more blood than flesh, and then, perhaps by Christmas, more flesh than blood. Because she had always been so thin, no one was surprised to find she had begun to fill out, and because the winter uniform meant wool skirt and soft blouse and V-neck sweater, if you wished, under the blue blazer, because Pauline had shown her years ago how to adjust a hem and open a seam, she had no worry all through the winter that she would have to tell anyone yet. Not Gregory or her parents or the teachers at school. Gregory had midterms just after the first of the year and then the weather turned bad, so he was spending fewer weekends home. With only a vague idea of what next year would be like, she told her parents she’d decided she’d rather go to college nearby and applied only to Malloy and St. John’s. On Saturdays she drove herself to the library and spent long hours in the overheated rooms studying biology books and medical texts, Dr. Spock and
In her prayers she sometimes said, “What you could do for me, what you could do for me, is let this winter never end.”
It was only the birth itself that frightened her. In health class that fall, they’d been shown a film: a hospital birth, the woman red-faced and panting, her pale, raised knees, more blood and less privacy than any of them had imagined. A scalpel moving in for what they called the episiotomy (“It won’t appease me,” was the joke later). Girls with their hands over their mouths stumbled from the room. All week long, as the film was shown to each class, green-faced students could be found lined up on the floor in the hallways, slumped against the walls like wounded soldiers in trenches. Later, there was talk of a conspiracy: moral injunctions having failed, the powers that be at Mary Immaculate Academy were merely trying to terrify them into chastity. “Too late,” the more troublesome and popular girls had said, laughing, Clare now among them. “Try not to think about it.”
In the library, bent over the amber-tinted photographs of a baby coming into life, she could manage not to think about it: the pain she was headed for in eight, then seven, then six months’ time, the humiliation of bare knees raised, body convulsed, nothing appeased. In the warmth and quiet of the library-the smell of books, the rustle of newspapers, the occasional voice of a child-she thought instead of the life that was forming, not just the baby’s life but the life of nights in bed beside him and the mornings she would wake with him at her side.
She set the weekend of daylight savings, the beginning of spring, for the time to shake herself out of her lovely stupor and face the world. She told Gregory on the phone on Saturday, and he cursed softly, the way he did when he made a wrong turn while driving or left his wallet in his other pants, cursing himself and his own stupidity. “What do you want to do?” he said, finally. “What is there?” she said, not really a question, and he cursed again.
She made her way into Pauline’s room that night, touched her gently on the hip and then sat on the edge of Michael’s bed. With her sister gone, she no longer troubled to give the excuse that she had to sleep here because Annie was reading. She was certain Pauline never bought it anyway. She came in here because it was where Jacob had slept all the years he was home, even in the years before she was born, and there was comfort in looking into the same darkness he had known, guessing at the shapes beneath the same shadows. She sat on Michael’s bed. This was the hour, she guessed, that they were meant to spring forward. The hour erased out of time from this night until the one in the fall, when it would be restored again. As good a time as any, she thought, to plan with a bit more precision just what she wanted to do.
She told her mother the next night, the first Sunday evening when there was still light left after dinner. They had finished eating, her father and Pauline had left the table, and she watched her mother’s mouth draw down
