The Guineveres (15 page)

“We're already done with it,” one of us said.

“Oh. Well, maybe I'll paint a picture to send to my dad. He really is a general in the War,” she said. “And he really is coming back to take me home. He said so.”

We didn't believe her, and as if sensing this she added, “He is.”

“If that's the case, why don't you write him,” Gwen said. “Write him and see if he'll tell us who those soldiers in the Sick Ward are. If generals are so important, then surely he can do that.”

“Okay,” she said.

“And if he can answer that,” Win added, “
then
we'll believe you.”

“Will you come to my party?” Reggie asked, her eyes brightening. “If Sister Fran lets you?”

“If Sister Fran lets us,” one of us said, even though we knew she wouldn't. Girls were strictly forbidden from leaving the convent until the day they turned eighteen. With the exception, of course, of Ebbie. But there was the War to consider.

Reggie skipped off to join Lottie, Dorrie Sue, Shirley, and Nan. They'd abandoned their knitting projects on the couch. So much for the War Effort. Now they giggled as they danced to the music that played from the radio. Their arms swung in the air, and their feet shuffled against the tile floor, making chirping sounds. They held their arms upward and allowed themselves to be spun by invisible dance partners who clearly stood taller than they did, since they peered toward the tin ceiling as they did this.

The Guineveres reclined on the couch and shot them menacing looks. Win grunted audibly through a closed mouth, which came out like a growl. The Specials were acting special again.

“What?” Lottie kept saying as she twirled in the arms of her imaginary man.

“What?” Gwen repeated in a high-pitched baby voice.

“Just because you're not happy doesn't mean we can't be,” said Shirley, whose shoes looked new, so we wondered if her wealthy parents had anything to do with it. Special Shirley and her special shoes.

“Who says we're not happy?” Ginny said. She scowled defensively.

“Fine, you're happy,” Lottie said. She fiddled with her glasses again. They covered nearly a third of her face.

“Happiness is boring,” Gwen said. “Happiness means you've stopped trying.”

“I feel sorry for you, then,” Lottie said.

“No wonder your parents threw you away,” Shirley added.

At this, Win hurled herself from the couch and grabbed a mound of Shirley's hair before we had time to stop her. Shirley bent forward at a ninety-degree angle, and we pried Win's hand off, knuckle by knuckle. “It's not worth it,” one of us said to her. We walked back to the Ping-Pong table, where we brought out a new canvas. We began painting again, this time a field of grass, some trees in the distance.

“I really do love My Boy,” Ginny said midstroke. “I can't help it. It just happened one day. Love is like that. You can't control it.” She dabbed four quick red spots to create a patch of flowers. And then at the top, near what should have been the sky, she drew some hearts raining down from the horizon.

Maybe it was the fact that it was Thanksgiving. Maybe it was the fact that we were stuck far from home and wished we were almost anywhere else on earth than here. Maybe it was that Sick Ward duty ended the following day, and Our Boys still slumbered, so far from wakefulness that leaving the convent seemed like an impossibility.

Or maybe it was simply the way Ginny looked, her red hair pulled back, her small arm shaking as she blotted paint, her calves too thin to even hold up the socks that had slouched down around her ankles. She was pitiful and she was angsty, and yet she was a reflection of all of us. Maybe love isn't too far a cry from suffering. Maybe that's why we fell in love with Our Boys, or why, at first, we said we did. Because we wanted our suffering to be useful; we wanted it to lead us to a greater good.

“I love My Boy, too,” Gwen said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“Of course,” Win said.

“And I want to have a baby,” Gwen said.

“After we're married,” I said.

“And after he gets a job as an executive,” Gwen said.

“Yes,” we all agreed. “Yes! Yes!” And suddenly Thanksgiving didn't seem so depressing anymore because we were together and we were in love, and what more could we ask for on a rainy Thursday than that?

 

Saint Cecelia

FEAST DAY: NOVEMBER 22

Beneath her silken gowns, Saint Cecelia wore a sackcloth so rough it chafed her skin when she moved. She fasted often and prayed to the angels above, kneeling so the coarseness of her clothing burned her knees. Her knuckles grew red from pressing her hands together in such fervent devotion. “Oh, save me from the flesh,” she'd pray.

Her parents had different ideas, instead giving her in marriage to a young pagan named Valerian. Their wedding did not lack for indulgence or festivity. Lyrists played while the bride and groom danced with such grace it seemed as if their feet never touched the ground. None of the guests returned home having the slightest idea that the bride was unwilling. After all, Valerian came from an aristocratic family. Besides, Cecelia had no choice in the matter.

When the last of the guests had left and the servant laid white sheets on their bed, the couple retired to their wedding chamber.

“Oh, dearest Valerian,” Cecelia said. “I must confess.” She was shaking; sweat formed at the small of her back.

“My beauty,” he said, moving in close to touch her dark hair, pinned back with a wreath of flowers. Cecelia had never seen such hunger in the eyes of a man not in want of food.

“Our vows are invalid,” she admitted. “I'm already wed to an angel.” Here she felt her face grow hot; she slanted her eyes toward the floor, where her servant had set her slippers beside the bed. The thought of undressing, even if only her stockings, made her nervous. “He stands here beside me now, in fact.”

Valerian moved toward his beautiful wife. “I see no angel,” he declared, wondering if she'd sipped from too many chalices of wine.

“He's here beside me,” she said, turning and looking up past her shoulder, pointing to what seemed to be the wall behind her. “He guards my maidenhood,” she said.

He looked at her in disbelief. Her father had told him she was a docile creature. He'd expected obedience. “You're my wife; I shall touch you if I will,” he said, indignant. Then he softened, figuring this a case of bedroom terror. The poor girl had never been alone with a man. Not like
that.

“I'm warning you: Great harm will come to you if you touch me. If you respect my virginity, he shall leave you alone,” she said, then pointed to the angel by her side, but Valerian saw only an empty wall, some candelabras, the fireplace now settling to dim embers.

“I'm not to touch you?” he asked in disbelief. He was certain this was an excuse—perhaps she was shy. Modesty is an admirable quality in a woman, but it is not the only admirable quality. “It shall only hurt at first,” he explained.

Cecelia grimaced.

“Show me your angel,” he said.

“You must first get baptized,” she said. “Then you can see him.”

Valerian, a kindhearted boy, went off to find a bishop to baptize him, if only to appease his wife. He suspected he'd return and then, knowing what lengths he had gone to for her pleasure, would be rewarded with pleasure of his own. Yet when he returned to Cecelia, he saw him with his own eyes: a giant angel with flaming wings. The crude-looking angel quickly produced two crowns of roses from behind his back, and he placed them on their heads. Valerian was woozy from shock, Cecelia woozy from prayer. They fell asleep fully clothed, their marriage never consummated.

The two spent the next year preaching their faith far and wide, converting thousands of the disinherited to the path of grace. They worked side by side, sometimes clasping hands as they raised them before crowds of people. Valerian's hand felt warm in her own. Once, after a stint in the river where they'd seen hundreds of bodies fall into the water and rise again reborn, Valerian raised her hand to his lips and gently kissed it. This was the only kiss they ever shared, and she felt a buzzing in her body, all the way down to her unspeakable regions. Afterward, she clung to his strong forearm as they walked through the crowded city, bustling with throngs of the unblessed.

Their work was dangerous, however. Their ruler was a godless man, a tyrant. When Valerian wouldn't recant his faith, he was slain, and Cecelia, heartbroken but still defiant, found herself arrested, thrown into a windowless cellar with gray walls of cold stone. Her fiery-winged angel flapped his wings in protest, but he could not speak in a language the unfaithful could hear.

Cecelia refused to renounce her faith, for what could she disavow? Could she reject her heart, or the blood running through her veins? And so she was sentenced to die by suffocation, barricaded into her own bathroom. As fires burned around her, she stood in the corner of the darkened room, pressed between a wall and her soaking tub, where she used to pray for hours as her fingertips pruned. She thought about her life, her sweet Valerian who never touched her but once to kiss her hand. He had been a decent man; she might have truly married him in a different life. Outside, her tormenters fed the furnace ten times the normal fuel. Fires were set outside her window. She could smell the thick smoke, but it didn't affect her senses.

In fact, her pores didn't excrete one drop of sweat. When she grew bored, she prayed—or she thought of her parents, her poor Valerian who would have made a handsome lover. Why had he kissed her knuckles that day? Why had she felt a jolt of energy course through her whole hand, her arm, through to her stomach, and farther down, too? Down
there.
She thought about her body, which did not belong to her, so she laid herself out on the floor as if on a funeral pyre, and she waited.

After a few days, her tormentors realized their death sentence had not worked. Instead, they resorted to a hatchet. They led Cecelia outside, placed her thin neck upon a boulder. The stone felt cold on her cheek and her ear. The world looked different sideways; everything had sharper edges.

She knew her death was near. Her body was not her body. Her angel sat next to her, but he did nothing. He tucked his wings into his armpits, and he lowered his eyes. Her tormentor raised his hatchet high above his head and brought it down upon Cecelia, once, twice, three times. Cecelia felt her neck grow cold. Her shoulders became wet, but her heart went on beating.

Crowds of people flocked to see the beautiful, maimed maiden. They remembered her from the river, looking on as they were dunked and blessed. They soaked up her blood with their napkins and sponges while she sang beautiful hymns to them in a voice as clear as a harp.

She bled for three days, after which the world became lighter, colors fading into the sky. First went the blues, then the reds, then the greens, then everything looked black and white. She saw her angel. His wings were no longer engulfed in flames. He was a young man now, and he was holding her, and they were flying up, up. She felt herself rising. She sang her beautiful hymns in a voice that sounded odd, like an untuned instrument. She couldn't recognize it as her own, though she felt the vibrating of her chest, the thumping of her heart within. She was rising and singing, rising and singing, and as she floated up high, cradled by her angel, so high she could see only the tops of the heads of the people below, her vision tunneled, and there she saw her sweet Valerian on their wedding night those years ago, his face filled with splendor, his cheeks plump and ruddy. They were dancing together, twirling to the music.

“Sing with me,” he said, his eyes wet like ink, his face glowing with youth and excitement. “Sing with me, dear,” he said, his smile so broad she thought she might be consumed by it.

So she sang. With her whole heart, she sang.

 

Advent

The day after Thanksgiving, Sister Fran called us into her office. We knew what the visit was about. The end of our JUG. Our progress report. Another lecture. A warning to be good.

As soon as we reached the threshold of the room, we were hit by the smell of holy oil mixed with the scent of cedar chips that lined her parrot's cage. Sister Fran sat with two fingers pressed to her lips. Her whistle rested on the desk in front of her, where she'd been cleaning it with silver polish.

“Sit down, girls,” Sister Fran said. Gwen and Win sat down on the two wooden chairs, and Ginny and I took a seat on the small bench off to the side, near Pretty's cage. The bird occasionally squawked and tossed a seed between the bars.

The walls of the office were otherwise bare except for a small cross that hung in the corner, and we tried to avoid looking in its direction. We once heard that if you looked at a crucifix with a heart full of sin, your eyes could burn out of their sockets. Although we knew this probably wasn't true, we couldn't help holding on to such superstitions—and other ones, too: like if you didn't cross yourself with holy water at church the devil could get into your heart, or if you went to bed without saying a prayer and you died in your sleep, you'd be relegated to purgatory forever.

“As you are aware, girls, your Justice Under God has officially concluded. I want you to know, on behalf of Father James and myself, we were very satisfied with your diligence. I can only describe your progress as touched by grace.” Sister Fran did not have an accent, a point we often debated, though she clenched her jaw as she spoke, and her voice was so high, so silvery, it seemed that she did. Sister Connie once bragged that Sister Fran came from wealth and pointed out that she'd given it all up to become a nun, as though proving to us the purity of her intentions. None of The Guineveres came from money—though we weren't as poor as The Poor Girls—and so we supposed that wealth gave one a monied accent, which wasn't really an accent at all.