Punish the Sinners (3 page)

   On the tennis court the four girls gave up their game and gathered together. Judy Nelson, a few months older than the other three, was snickering.

“We really bugged him that time,” she said. “He always tries to pretend we don’t exist”

“Only during the summer.” Penny Anderson shuddered. “During the year you can’t get away from him.” If any of the girls heard her, they didn’t respond. They were still watching the two figures as they disappeared into the school building.

“Did you see what happened when I waved to him?” Karen Morton asked. “I thought he was going to freak. I hate the way he stares at me.”

“Everyone stares at you,” Judy replied, trying to keep the envy out of her voice. “And the way you flash your body around, who can blame them?” Judy was pleased to see her Mend blush.

“She can’t help it,” Janet Connally defended Karen. “We can’t all afford to get new clothes every week.”

Karen Morton flushed again, unsure whether her overdeveloped figure or her poverty was the most shameful, and wishing someone would change the subject To her relief, the fourth girl in the group did.

“That must have been the new teacher with Monsignor,” Penny Anderson said. “My mother picked him up at the train this afternoon and took him to his apartment. She says he’s weird.”

“Then he’ll fit in here just fine,” Judy commented.
“If you ask me, this whole town’s weird.” She shuddered a little, but the other three girls ignored it: Judy had hated Neilsville as long as they could remember.

“Are you going to take his course?” Penny asked Judy.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Judy said, a conspiratorial look coming over her face. “Let’s all take it.”

“I don’t know if my mother will let me,” Penny said doubtfully. “She doesn’t think they ought to be teaching psychology.”

“Nobody does, except Monsignor,” Janet put in. “And I keep wondering why he wants it so badly. I mean, it seems like the last thing he’d want us to know anything about.”

“Maybe he had to put it in,” Karen suggested. “Maybe the Bishop insisted.”

“Oh, who cares?” Judy Nelson said impatiently. “The point is, if we can all get into that class, and they don’t split us up like they usually do, we can get away with anything. I mean, a new teacher, who isn’t even a nun? It’ll be too much. After the first week he won’t know what hit him.”

“It would be fun,” Penny agreed. “But I’ll have to work on Mother.”

“And speaking of mothers,” Judy cut in with a grimace, “I have to meet mine down at Osgood’s to buy a new dress. You want to come along?” The question was addressed to the group, but only Karen Morton responded:

”I’ll come. We’ll find you something sexy to wear to the party Saturday.”

“As if she’d let me buy something sexy,” Judy groaned. “She thinks I’m twelve years old.” The two of them wandered off, leaving Penny and Janet alone on the court. After a moment, Judy spotted the fifth girl
still silently serving balls to herself on the handball court. She nudged Karen, then turned and called to her friends, loudly enough for the other girl to hear, “You coming, or are you just going to stand there and watch the elephant play?”

Janet Connally’s eyes widened in surprise at her friend’s meanness, but she said nothing. She just tugged at Penny’s arm, and began walking away. At the other end of the court Judy Nelson was giggling at her own wit.

   The object of Judy’s wit, Marilyn Crane, wanted to shrink up and die. She’d heard the crack, as she knew she was intended to, and she tried to hold back her tears.

It wasn’t her fault she was clumsy, she told herself. It was just the way things were—the way things had always been. All her life, ever since she was small, she’d been too big, and too homely. All her life her mother had read her the story of the ugly duckling, and tried to convince her that someday she’d grow up to be a swan. But Marilyn knew it wasn’t true.

She tried to swat another ball neatly against the concrete wall, but missed. She glanced quickly around, relieved to see that she hadn’t been observed.

She scooped up her balls and stuffed them into a can. She would have done it much earlier, but the foursome had arrived, and Marilyn hadn’t wanted them to think she was leaving just because they were there. Staying had been even worse, since what little skill she had developed over the summer had immediately escaped her with the arrival of an audience. With the stoicism she had developed over her fifteen years of life, she had stuck it out. Now, finally, she was able to make her escape.

She decided to go into the church. It would be cool in there, but more important, in the church she knew she could find solace from her confusion. It was only there, sitting in the chilly gloom, that Marilyn felt she belonged, that no one was laughing at her, or making cruel remarks just loudly enough for her to overhear.

In church, Marilyn would be close to the Blessed Virgin, and the Blessed Virgin always brought her peace.

Indeed, when she sat in the church, staring up at the statue of the Madonna, it was almost as if the Virgin were alive and reaching out to her. Marilyn wanted to reach back, to touch that presence who brought her peace.

But each day, for Marilyn Crane, there was less and less peace. One day, she knew, there would be none at all. And on that day, she would finally touch the Sorrowful Mother, and her own sorrow would be transferred to the Mother of God.

Marilyn slipped into the church, and silently began praying for forgiveness of all her sins.

As they moved from room to room, exploring St. Francis Xavier’s High School, Peter Balsam began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. Most of the parochial schools he had seen had begun to take on the same casual flavor as the public schools, emphasizing secular subjects rather than religious training. But here in Neilsville, the classrooms were stark, decorated only with a small statue of the Blessed Virgin, placed in identical niches in each of the rooms. As the tour progressed, Monsignor Vernon became aware of Balsam’s discomfort.

“I told you we were formal around here,” he said with a tight smile. “I suppose you think we are a bit backward.”

Once again, Peter tried to make light of his feelings. “I was just wondering how St Francis Xavier himself would feel about all this,” he said. “As I recall, the old boy was pretty famous for his lack of formality. In fact, he tended to be pretty merry about most everything, didn’t he?”

Monsignor Vernon paused a moment, his hand resting on the doorknob of the only room they hadn’t yet inspected. He looked at Balsam for almost a full minute, and when he spoke it was obvious that he was choosing his words carefully.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Despite the fact
that St Francis Xavier was a Jesuit, this is obviously not a Jesuit school. The fact of the matter is that Neilsville, and the people of this parish, myself included, tend to feel much more at home with the Dominicans than with the Jesuits. Do I make myself clear?”

Balsam tried to keep his smile genuine, and his voice easy. “Perfectly,” he said. “Although I have to admit that I tend to associate the Dominicans with the Inquisition. I’ll do my best to get over it”

Monsignor Vernon stared at him once more, then a smile began playing around his lips. “I hope you will,” he said, his voice taking on a warm heartiness. He unlocked the door of the last classroom, then stood aside to let Peter enter. “This room is going to be yours.”

Balsam looked around the room with more curiosity than he had felt in any of the others. It seemed the same: square, overlooking the schoolyard, a blackboard on one wall, desks perfectly lined up in five rows of six desks each, with his own desk squatting forbiddingly in one corner, so placed that none of the students could ever be obstructed from his view. At the back of the room, as in all the other rooms, there was a niche for the ever-present statue of the Virgin Mary. But in this room the niche contained a different statue. Balsam stared at it for a moment, then turned to Monsignor Vernon. He was surprised to see that the beginnings of a smile had grown into a full-fledged grin.

“I don’t get it,” Balsam said finally, moving closer to the statue and examining it carefully. “Who is he?”

“That,” Monsignor Vernon replied in the jovial voice Peter Balsam remembered from their college days together, “is St. Peter Martyr.”

When Balsam still looked blank, Vernon continued, “That’s the Dominican you’re going to have to get used to. While St. Francis Xavier may have been famous for
his merriment, St. Peter Martyr was equally famous for his vigilance in the matter of heresy.”

“Heresy?” Balsam repeated, still not seeing the point.

The grin faded from Monsignor Vernon’s face. “My idea of a joke,” he explained. “I thought, since you’re going to be teaching pyschology, and some of the modern psychological theories seem pretty heretical to the Church, that it might be amusing to put St Peter Martyr in here. To keep an eye on you.”

Balsam shook his head sadly, then looked closely at the man who had once been his Mend, trying to determine if the priest really had thought it would be amusing to put the statue in his room, or whether he was trying to say something to Balsam, to warn him about something. It was impossible to tell.

“Well,” the Monsignor said finally, breaking what was fast turning into an embarrassing silence, “suppose we go back to the rectory for a few minutes? There’re a few things we should talk about, and I have some excellent sherry. If it isn’t too early?”

“Fine,” Balsam agreed distractedly, not really hearing the question.

They returned to the rectory in silence, Balsam wondering how his friend could have changed so much in so few years. He had remembered Pete Vernon as someone who tended to take life as it came, and make the most of it. Now he seemed to have turned completely around, and taken on an odd stiffness, almost an awkwardness, he’d never had in their school days. Well, Balsam told himself as they reentered the study, I shouldn’t have expected him to be the same. We all change, and he has a lot of responsibilities. Balsam decided he was simply going to have to change his perspective with respect to Pete Vernon. Then he smiled to himself slightly
as he realized that the change in Pete would certainly make it easier for him to remember to call him “Monsignor.”

The priest handed him a glass of sherry, then picked up a folder from the desk that sat in one corner of the room, bringing it with him when he returned to the chair opposite Balsam. The two men sipped their sherry in silence for a moment, then the priest spoke.

“I have something here that intrigues me,” he said, tapping the folder. Balsam looked at him inquiringly.

“The synopsis of your thesis,” Vernon continued. “I keep going over and over it and I get the distinct impression that whoever wrote the summary left a lot out.”

Suddenly Balsam relaxed: he was on familiar territory.

“I can well imagine,” he said. “You have no idea how much trouble that thesis caused. For a while there, I thought I was going to be tossed out of St. Alban’s.”

Vernon fingered the folder. “I can well imagine.” He read the title of the thesis aloud: “ ‘Suicide As Sin: An Investigation of the Validity of the Doctrine.’ It almost sounds as if you were challenging the Doctrine. Were you?” He looked pointedly at Peter.

Balsam shrugged his shoulders. “That depends on what you mean by ‘challenge.’ All I set out to do was take a look at the Doctrine of the Chruch in light of what psychologists now know about the phenomenon of suicide,”

“And that’s not challenging the Doctrine?” the priest asked.

“Not in my mind,” Balsam said. “But I’m afraid at St Alban’s they didn’t see much difference between my investigation and an actual challenge.”

“I don’t suppose they did,” the Monsignor commented. “In fact, neither do I.”

“Well, I suppose the best way to explain it is in terms of a trial. What I was doing, I thought, was conducting a preliminary hearing to see if there was enough evidence for a trial.”

“And was there?”

Balsam shrugged. “Who knows? I found a few conflicts between the Doctrine of the Church and the science of psychology. As to the resolution of the conflicts, I’ll leave that to better minds than mine.”

Monsignor Vernon suddenly leaned back in his chair and seemed to relax. For the first time, Balsam realized that the subject of his thesis had disturbed the priest. He decided that a little explanation was in order.

“It’s just always seemed to me that the Doctrine of the Church with reference to suicide is a bit inhuman,” he began.

Monsignor Vernon smiled thinly. “The Doctrines of the Church are concerned with God,” he said. “That which may seem inhuman isn’t necessarily un-Godly.”

Balsam’s brows arched. Spoken like a true Inquisitor, he thought. Aloud he said: “It just seems to me that anybody who is deranged enough to want to kill himself can’t be called rational, and certainly deserves the same considerations the Church gives to what we like to call ‘morons and savages.’ “

“Your analogy doesn’t work,” Vernon replied stiffly. “Morons and savages are not responsible for themselves, not because they are morons and savages per
se
, but simply because they have no capacity for understanding the Doctrines.”

Balsam decided not to press his point. “Well, as I said, it’s going to have to be left to better minds than mine to decide whether or not the Doctrine should be
changed. I took no stand whatsoever in the thesis, which is probably why it passed.”

“And you came to no conclusions of your own?” the Monsignor pressed.

Balsam shook his head. “As far as I’m concerned, all I did was raise more questions. I don’t think I’m qualified enough in either psychology or theology to come up with any answers.”

Monsignor Vernon nodded his head slowly, as if digesting what Balsam had just said. When he spoke again, it took a moment for Balsam to see the continuity.

“I should tell you that there has been a lot of concern expressed in the parish about the course you’re going to teach,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s a strong feeling that psychology has no place in a religious school. Frankly, I had some doubts about whether or not I’d chosen the right man for the job.”