as a child and for dividing Angie and me. In time, I stopped going to mass altogether, and my parents didn’t force the issue. The three of them went every Sunday, while I stayed home with the Eagles pregame show. They prayed for my soul. I prayed for the Eagles.
“Do you remember Roman Gabriel?” I say to the cabbie. We’re almost there.
He looks into the rearview mirror with rheumy eyes. “Sure. Quarterback for the Birds. We got him from the Rams.”
“Do you remember when?”
He squints, in thought. “’Seventy-three, I think. Yeah, in ’seventy-three.”
So long ago. I can’t do the math in my head.
“What a fruit he was,” says the cabbie. “We shoulda kept Liske.”
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I can’t remember a thing about my last confession.
And I can’t forget a thing about my abortion.
22
It was so long ago.
I never told anyone, not even Mike. I intended to tell him, but changed my mind when we found out he couldn’t have kids. It would have made it worse. I know it did for me.
“This it?” says the cabbie, pulling up in front of the red-brick fortress on the corner of Ninth and Wolf. He ducks down to see it better. “It don’t look like a church. What’d you say it was? Our Lady of Perpetual-”
“Motion.” I get out of the cab and throw him a ten-dollar bill, with no tip. “Here. This is from a fruit I know.”
“Crazy broad,” he mutters. The cab lurches off.
I glance around to see if I’ve been followed, but the street is quiet. I turn and confront my church. From the outside, there is no way to tell what type of building it is. The windows are bricked in and the heavy oak doors are squared off at the top. But for the black sign that says the times of the masses in tiny white numbers, you would think that OLPH is a Mafia front. Except that the Mafia front is across the street.
In contrast to the bleakness of the church is the grassy lot beside it, a sheltered grotto for the statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Perpetual Help herself. I remember thinking that the grotto was a miraculous place, a baby’s blanket of perfect green grass tucked away from the city sidewalks. Gazing benignly over the grass, high above the electric trolley cars, was the slim, robed figure of the Virgin, tall as a spire in white marble, with her hands out-stretched in welcome. I felt peaceful there as a child.
I have the same feeling today. The statue looks the same, and so does the grass. It’s verdant and thick; it looks newly mown and raked. Tulips dip their heavy heads at the statue’s pedestal. No one’s around, so I sit on the bench in front of it, completing my Catholic impersonation. I’m eye level with the pedestal’s inscription, but don’t have to look at the Roman-carved letters to know what they say. I remember:
VIRGIN MARY
MARIAN YEAR1954
GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. RAFAELLO D. SABATINI
Mr. and Mrs. Rafaello D. Sabatini owned the Mafia front across the street, but who cared? They were good Catholics, they supported the church and the school. That was all that mattered.
At the statue’s feet are plastic bouquets of red roses, Mary’s flower, and along her hem are the lipsticked kisses of the insanely faithful. Rosaries dangle from her inanimate fingers, and she wears a crown made of glitter pasted onto cardboard, as if by a child. A little girl, no doubt, for little girls love the Virgin. Was I a little girl like that once? I feel a stab of pain. What does Mary think of Mary now, since her abortion?
I squint up at Mary’s eyes, there at the top of the tall statue. She doesn’t answer me but gazes straight ahead. She’s innocent, the Eternal Virgin. Her conception, unlike mine, was Immaculate. She knows nothing of couplings that happen to Catholic girls who are on the third date of their life, with Bobby Mancuso from Latin Club. Who, despite his braces, is terribly cute and plays varsity basketball. Who takes her to McDonald’s and then, in his Corvair, kisses her hotly, ignoring her protestations. Who doesn’t rape her exactly, but who complains that he’s in intense pain from something called blue balls, which means either that his balls are turning blue because the blood to them is cut off, or there’s too much blood getting to them. She’s confused about the physiology of the blue balls but understands clearly that his pain is all because of her.
His agony is all her fault.
Which makes her sorry, so sorry.
He says if she would just let him touch between her legs, just let him do what he wanted, his pain would be relieved and his balls wouldn’t be blue anymore. And before she knows it, her new plaid kilt is up and he is inside her. It’s over so fast, and the whole thing is so painful and strange, so impossiblystrange, that she’s really not sure she’s not a virgin Mary anymore. Until she gets home and finds the spots on her flowered Carter’s. Red splotches, shaped like infernal stars, among the delicate pink blossoms. Then she’s pregnant and decides to have an abortion.
No one knew. Not even Angie, and especially not Angie. I was terrified. I was ashamed. I had committed a mortal sin and would burn in eternal fire unless I repented. But the only way to repent was to confess my sin to God and to my parents, who would die from the shock. I felt trapped between commandments:THOU SHALT NOT KILL andHONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.
Not only that, but both Angie and I had been awarded scholarships to Penn, which was my only hope of going to college. Would the university extend mine until my baby-and Bobby’s, who ignored me from that day forward- was born? Of course not. Even if they did, how would I support a child? My mother couldn’t; her piecework sewing barely bought my uniform and books. My father couldn’t; he was already on disability.
I had no choice.
I found Planned Parenthood in the Yellow Pages and took the bus to center city one Saturday morning, with an Etienne Aigner wallet full of confirmation money. The abortion would cost the $150 earmarked for a white ten- speed, but I was putting away childish things. Of necessity.
When I got to the clinic, I filled out some forms, on which I lied about my age and changed my name. I told them I was Jane Hathaway, after Nancy Kulp inThe Beverly Hillbillies, because she seemed like such a classy lady. Then I was taken to see a counselor, a black woman named Adelaide Huckaby, who wore an African dashiki. Her nappy hair was close-cropped, revealing a marvelously round head, and her eyes were a dark brown, like her skin. We talked for a long time, and she gave me a warm hug when I cried. “You want to think about it some more?” she asked. “You can change your mind, even now.”
I said no.
Adelaide came with me into what they called the Procedure Room, and we waited for the doctor together. I was lying flat on a skinny and unforgiving table in a hospital gown, with my knees supported from underneath. On the ceiling was a circle of fluorescent light. I tried not to think of it as an all-seeing eye, looking down on me from above, witnessing everything in mute horror.
“I see you get those blotches on your chest,” Adelaide said softly. “My sister gets ’em too. Only you can’t see ’em so well on her.”
I smiled.
“It’s all right, baby. Everything’s gonna be all right.”
Then the doctor came in. He wore granny glasses and gave me a brief hello before he disappeared behind the white tent covering my knees. Adelaide took my hand and held it. She seemed to know I needed a hand to hold on to, and hers was strong and generous. While the doctor worked away, Adelaide described the procedure for me, her voice quietly resonant.
“Now he’s inserting the speculum, so you’ll feel some coldness. You know what a speculum is, baby?”
I shook my head, no.
“That’s what your doctor uses during a pelvic exam, the same instrument, to hold the walls of the vagina
