Even Now (6 page)

Though his medical license hadn’t been revoked, though he was never arrested, accused, or tried, he was sentenced all the
same. His reputation in Cullen was too marred by the scandal for him to continue practicing there. I was already a mother
by the time the O’Connors moved to Tennessee.

Snared in memory, I hardly noticed that Hal had materialized at my elbow. “You must be Daintry Whicker.”

“I use my maiden name, O’Connor. Even though Peter thinks it scandalizes the parishioners.”

“Doesn’t it get confusing with children?” Hal asked.

“Not in our case,” Daintry said. “We don’t have any.”

No children,
I thought. And realized,
We never got around to that topic, either, Peter and I.

“That’s certainly understandable,” Hal continued. “As busy as you both must be. Not to mention moving from parish to parish.”

“No, no,” Daintry said. “We opted not. I had enough domestic chaos the first twenty years of my life.” A disorganization and
communal chaos I myself had craved. Often left to fend for themselves, the O’Connor children existed on frozen pizza, ants
on a log, fluffernutter sandwiches, or whatever they came across in the cabinets. Dishes went unwashed, food was taken to
bedrooms, and if Heather or Daintry decided to change the furniture position in their rooms, no one objected. With no adult
present, arguments were decided by strength or cunning. The last Popsicle or the stereo volume, the best chair before the
television—and even the particular television show—depended upon the first sibling to claim it and keep it. When Daintry was
assigned the task of bathing Sean, she was merciless with her taunts, calling him spaghetti dick, making fun of his tightiewhities.
The ruthlessness thrilled me. My household, with its dull requirement of taking turns, was prim and rigid and straitlaced
by comparison.

Doesy Howard approached us. “Isn’t it a wonder what Ceel’s done with these sunflowers? They’re so perfectly arranged! Where
is
Ceel? I’ve been looking for her all night.”

Daintry glanced away from me, as though she might oblige Doesy’s intrusion by locating Ceel. I didn’t look, didn’t help, didn’t
want Ceel to be found. Couldn’t bear for my sister, yearning desperately for a child, to hear Daintry’s easy explanation,
the cruel, casual rhyme:
“We opted not.”

Doesy tapped Daintry’s arm. “You must be Daintry Whicker. I’m Doesy Howard.”

“O’Connor,” Daintry corrected again, bemused but never wavering.

“Welcome to you, too. Are you as talented as these two sisters? I swear, they can do anything. Ceel’s the hostess with the
mostest, and I hear Hannah’s a dirt wizard. Can I bring over my ailing orchid, Hannah?”

But I scarcely acknowledged Doesy, because I’d suddenly remembered the last time I’d seen Daintry. A spring afternoon late
in my junior year, when I’d left sorority sisters basking on the sundeck and gone to the little-used stacks in the graduate
library. Smitten with Hal, in the throes of dreamy romance, I was combing through Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
to find Arthur’s instructions to his knights on the topic of love, a particular portion I remembered from Wyndham Hall and
wanted to enter in my quote book.

A phantom, she appeared from around a bookshelf. I was flat on my stomach in the carpeted hush, the open book before me. “Hello,
Hannah.”

She was wearing a bandanna. Not around her neck in the current style, but tied tightly to her head, covering her hair. I hadn’t
seen her in months, and only then when I glimpsed her walking somewhere across campus. We weren’t. . .
together
anymore.

“What are you doing?” she asked with typical boldness. Boldness I had reason to both admire and fear, and I swiftly shut the
volume on the passage it had taken an hour of tedious searching to locate.

I’d showed Daintry my quote book when we roomed together our freshman year. When we were still friends. Or at least when we
were still close, trading notes at the end of the day, not only from classes, but from whom we’d seen, what boys we’d talked
with.

I lied instinctively. “Working on a paper.”

“Mmm.”

“C’mon, O’Connor,” a male voice said. He’d loomed up behind her, bearded and blue jeaned, hooking his fingers through the
belt loops of her jeans. I was jealous of that obvious possessiveness, a possessiveness that Hal, for all our parking lot
passion, never demonstrated.

“This is my preppie friend,” Daintry said. “Here in the library just like in the movie. Of course,
Love Story
never came to Cullen. Too intellectual.”

“Cullen?” he said. “Or
Love Story?”
The two laughed with private glee. Laughed the way Daintry and I once had, excluding everyone else. As though he didn’t need
to know me, she didn’t call me by name, never introduced him. His name was Ford, I remembered from the masthead of the campus
paper. Ford-something. An out-of-stater, a Yankee.

“’Oh wonderful, wonderful and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful,‘” her voice called as they walked away. “Shakespeare,
right?”

Chilled, I hadn’t answered, heard only their low laughter rows away, the sound of books tumbling to the floor, then a pregnant
silence. Had Daintry stumbled, toppling books with her elbow? Or had she been pushed against the shelves in a spontaneous
passionate embrace? That. That was the last time I’d seen Daintry O’Connor.

“So you’re a gardener,” she said to me, ignoring Doesy. “Like your mother.”

“I’m jealous! I feel left out,” Doesy squealed. “You two already know each other!”

I waited for Daintry to answer, certain of her response. Once upon a time we knew exactly what the other would say, spoke
in unison more often than not.
Jinx you owe me a Pepsi onetwothreefourfivesixseven.
I’d let Daintry find the words, define and encompass for Doesy our strong, long ties.

“Hannah and I were just neighbors for a while,” she said, gazing over my new neighbor’s head, and mine. “Like the two of you.”

From Hannah’s quote book:

Moments big as years. . .

—John Keats

W
hat are you doing?”

My sleep-fuzzed brain was slow to respond to Ceel. “Being woken up by you,” I said into the phone.

“Jeez. Of all the gin joints in all the world.”

Breakfast aromas wafted into the room. Then I remembered. The party. Daintry.

“What are the odds,” I agreed, stretching. “I move to Rural Ridge for the way things used to be, and she appears. Answered
prayers.”

“Yeah, and there’s some quote about grief and answered prayers,” Ceel said. “I hardly had a chance to speak to her. What’s
she like now?”

“She’s . . .” I curled my toes. “Did you know you were double-billing me with Daintry?”

“No, but that’s nothing new, is it?”

I hesitated, caught by a question that, however playful and casual, held a darker, more tangled truth in its answer. Something
smelled scorched.

“Coming to church? It’s Peter Whicker’s first service.”

His face—open, teasing—replaced Daintry’s, a face I’d known much longer.
“Come support me,”
he’d said. “I know.”

“You do?”

I sniffed again. Burned batter, from Mark’s waffle iron. The first one off the griddle is never right.

Ceel hadn’t exaggerated. St. Martin’s–in-the-Mountains was lovely, picturesque. Tiny and stone walled, the church was sequestered
from the curving road amid tall oaks and poplars. The arched entrance was a single planked door whose handle was a thick iron
bracelet.

“A rich family who summered in Rural Ridge built it as their personal chapel,” Ceel whispered as we took a pew. “All the stained-glass
windows are given in memory of some Chisolm or another.” Scanning the congregation for Daintry, I scarcely heard her.

The church’s interior was dim, lit only by sconces on the rough rock walls. The wooden pew was glossy, and I was touched to
see squashed velvet cushions, kneelers of another era, tucked beneath them, though as a child I’d hated those square lumps.
My Methodist peers didn’t kneel, and I longed to be one of them, to attend their youth fellowship meetings and retreats to
Lake Junaluska, wherever that was. Sundays after spending the night with a Methodist friend, I admired the orderliness of
their communion, the miniature cups of grape juice and cubes of white bread passed like cocktails and canapés. First Methodist
had been so
white,
pristine and uncluttered. I’d even envied their sincere and clean-lined rectory, home of my eighth-grade boyfriend, Alan
Geer.

St. Francis, my family’s church, was located on Cullen’s outskirts and populated with strange characters who genuflected or
crossed themselves at mysterious intervals in the service, elderly women wearing lace doilies on their heads. In contrast
with First Methodist’s clipped square of churchyard and wide, marble Main Street steps, the grounds of St. Francis seemed
neglected and spooky, dotted with irregular stepping-stones, a cracked concrete birdbath, and a forlorn-faced knee-high statue
of the church’s namesake saint. As an Episcopalian, I was a denominational oddball in Cullen.

Until Daintry moved to town, saving me in a way religion hadn’t. The O’Connors attended St. Francis by default. Since no Catholic
church existed in Cullen, the few Catholics made do with St. Francis, where incense was burned on high holy days.

“High church in Cullen, of all places,” Mother said. “Catholics need those smells, bells, and yells.” All I’d known of Catholics
was that they were responsible for fish sticks in the school cafeteria every Friday.

Craning my neck, I looked again. Hal frowned at me, so I faced the altar, where Peter Whicker was beginning his promised sermon.
His message was connected to the Gospel, not the path he’d taken to find himself at St. Martin’s. I’d hoped for something
personal, including Daintry. Thinking of her boldness in not attending her husband’s service made me smile. Where I’d feel
obligated, Daintry was evidently fearless. That, I could tell Ceel, hadn’t changed.

Beside me in the pew, Ellen placed her open palm in my lap and smiled inquiringly, wordlessly asking me to trace her fingers
with my own to pass the time. The high point in the Sunday service for Ellen was the offertory— action at last! audience participation!—when
she could clasp her fingers around the chill golden heft of the platter filled with bills and coins. With predictable sibling
torture, Mark tried to deny his sister’s pleasure by reaching over her head for it. She fished the bulletin from the hymnal
rack to play hangman.

I sympathized with their fidgeting. As a church-captive child I’d tapped fingers against the pew to count, calculating the
ages of dead patrons who’d donated the stained-glass windows. I looked at St. Martin’s Chisolm windows. Muted reds and blues
of light leaked through the stained glass and rainbowed my hands. Grown now, I wasn’t bored, but neither was I attentive.
Church, if not religion, had begun to nag me with its expectations.

Yet even as I fought its invisible imprisonment, I was prisoner to the familiar. I ached for changelessness, missed the old
responses and prayers replaced with contemporary, “accessible” language. I was missing not faith, not belief in God, but simply
what had once been.
Propitiation,
Peter Whicker had challenged me last night. He understood.

We rose for the beginning of Communion. After years of the new prayer book I still had to consult it for the creed, the Prayers
of the People, unable to recite from memory.

“I’ve killed off too many brain cells,” I’d sighed to Mark. “Or maybe they just died. Use it or lose it.” Prepped for confirmation,
he’d challenged his new knowledge against mine, winning handily. In Mark’s confirmation classes he visited different denominations
and watched
A Man for All Seasons.
Mine had been tedious after-school sessions culminating in the bishop mashing my head into my neck, and receiving a charm
that read
I am an Episcopalian.
But at least Daintry had been with me, stopping on our way to confirmation classes at Rexall Drugs to share a warmed oatmeal
cookie gooed with icing.

Peter Whicker was deep into the Eucharist. His every gesture seemed wholly personal, replete with reverence as, palms opened
toward the communion offerings, he touched his thumb to lips and shoulders and finally to heart. I watched. It’s hard to think
of priests as only men: sons, fathers, husbands. “Thus we proclaim the mystery of faith,” he said, and, closing his eyes,
extended his arms again. As he raised the wine and bread he shuddered slightly, and as though I’d stumbled and intruded upon
a private rapture, I quickly looked down again, joining the rest of the congregation’s bowed heads. That was what I wanted:
what Peter had.

So that I almost missed her, the last to come. And not parading, no, just that leisurely gait I knew immediately, even from
behind. Were her pace faster, Daintry’s arms would swing side to side past her stomach rather than front to back as mine did,
a difference we’d noticed in our shadows one summer evening.

Her black jersey skirt was ankle length, noiseless and fluid as she made her way down the aisle. She wore a hip-length sweater,
hiding, I knew, her short waist, a torso trait she’d despaired of and despised. Daintry knew, too, that I’d have traded my
evenly proportioned but short-legged stature for those long legs of hers. Several heads turned or bent to remark to a partner,
and I sensed the parishioners’ curiosity about this person, the rector’s wife.

Coolness drifted from the rock walls, blending with the mountain scents of wood rot and stray skunk and bitter galax. She
walked down the aisle oblivious of me, just as she had before.

Religious fervor had arrived in Cullen three weeks before I would enter Wyndham Hall as a high school sophomore. Not the revival
energy that annually overtook our Bible Belt community, tented camp meetings advertised on rainbow-hued cardboard placards
in the barbershop window no different from those for stock car races or country bands. It arrived in the form of Up with People,
a roving troupe of young evangelists whose target audience was teenagers. Their medium was an evening show of patriotic and
religious anthems, a clapping, foot-stomping musical presentation held in Cullen High’s auditorium.