When She Was Good (11 page)

Only, Lucy didn’t believe her. And from then on she refused ever to tell a lie again, to anyone about anything; from then on she brought no one to her home, and did not offer explanations for her behavior either. So, from the age of ten, though she had no friend who was her confidante, nobody she cared about ever saw her mother taking from her students the little envelopes of money (and saying, “Thank you very much,” so very, very sweetly), or what was far worse, the dread of dreads, saw her father coming through the front door and falling down drunk in the hall.

Not even Kitty Egan, whom she discovered in her second year of high school, and who for four months was as intimate a companion as Lucy had ever had. Kitty didn’t go to Liberty Center High, but to the parish school of St. Mary’s. Lucy had just started working four nights a week at the Dairy Bar, and she met Kitty because of the scandal: Kitty’s older sister, Babs, who was only seventeen, had run away from home. She hadn’t even waited until Friday, when the girls at the Dairy Bar were paid, but had taken flight after work on a rainy Tuesday night, probably still in her waitress uniform. Her accomplice was an eighteen-year-old boy who swept up at the packing company and came from Selkirk. A post card addressed to “The Slaves at Dale’s Dairy Bar” and mailed from Aurora, Illinois, had arrived in town at the end of the week. “Headed for West Virginia. Keep up the good work, KIDS.” And signed, “Mrs. Homer ‘Babs’ Cook.”

Kitty was sent around to the Dairy Bar by her father to pick up Babs’ wages for Monday and Tuesday. She was a tall,
skinny girl whose most striking feature was the absence of any complexion; she had no more coloring than the inside of a potato, even when she came in out of the cold. At first she seemed as unlike Babs as she could be, until Lucy learned that Babs had dyed her hair black so as to look like Linda Darnell (it had originally been orange like Kitty’s); as for her skin, Babs caked it in so much mud, Kitty said, you would never know that actually she was part anemic.

The family had always had their troubles with Babs. The only satisfaction she gave them was to wear crucifix earrings in her pierced ears and a cross around her neck, and
that
, Kitty said, was only to draw attention to the space between her breasts—which was the only real thing there anyway, the space. The breasts were things like toilet paper or her brother Francis’ socks that she stuffed into her brassiere. Babs wasn’t five minutes away from St. Mary’s—a dark brick building just by the Winnisaw Bridge—when she would duck into some alleyway to cover herself with pancake make-up, from the roots of her dyed hair to the tops of her homemade breasts, all the while puffing a Lucky Strike cigarette. Kitty told Lucy about the terrible thing she had once found in her sister’s purse—“Then I found this terrible thing once in her purse”—and when Babs discovered that Kitty had flushed it down the toilet, she screamed and yelled and struck her in the face. Kitty never told anyone—except the priest—for fear that her parents would severely punish her older sister, who, she said, needed mercy and forgiveness and love. Babs was a sinner and knew not what she was doing, and Kitty loved her, and every morning and every night she prayed for her sister living down there in West Virginia with a boy who Kitty believed was not even her husband.

There were three more children at home, all younger than Kitty, and she prayed for them too, especially for Francis Jr., who was soon to have an operation for his “mastoidistis.” The Egans lived out near the Maurer Dairy Farm, where Mr. Egan worked, in a house that was nothing more than a dilapidated old shack. There were nails poking out of the timbers, and flypaper dangling, though it was already fall, and every unpainted
two-by-four seemed to have its decoration of exposed wire. Lucy, upon entering, was afraid to move for fear of brushing up against something that would cause her to feel even more nausea and more despair than came from simply seeing the place where Kitty had to eat and sleep and do her homework.

And when Kitty said that in the afternoons her mother had to take a nap, Lucy was afraid to ask why, knowing that behind such a lie there could only be some dreadful truth she did not want to hear; she wanted only to get outside into the air, and so, thinking that the door nearest her led to the yard, she pushed against it. In a tiny room, asleep on a double bed, lay a pale woman in a long gray cotton slip, wearing on her left foot—in bed!—a crippled person’s shoe. Then she was introduced to Francis Jr., who instantly showed her the spot where he appeared to have been whacked with a stick behind the ear. And Joseph, aged eight, whom Kitty had to take into the house to change out of his overalls, which were—“as usual,” Kitty said—soaking wet. And tiny Bing—named for the singer—who just dragged his sleeping blanket around and around the backyard, crying for someone named Fay, who Kitty said didn’t even exist. And then Mr. Egan appeared, whom Lucy might even have liked for his big lumbering stride and his blazing green eyes had not Kitty earlier pointed to something hanging from a nail in the rear of an open shed, which she whispered was a cat-o’-nine-tails. In all, it was the most wretched and unhappy family Lucy had ever seen, heard of, or imagined; if possible, it was worse even than her own.

She and Kitty began to meet regularly after school. Lucy, standing in the park across the street from St. Mary’s, would watch the Catholic kids rushing out the side doors and imagine them all going back to houses just like Kitty Egan’s, even though the old Snyders, who were Catholics and lived three doors down on Franklin Street, owned a house almost exactly like her Daddy Will’s.

Lucy told Kitty her secret. They walked down to the south end of Water Street, and from a safe distance she pointed out
the door to Earl’s Dugout of Buddies. Kitty whispered, “Is he there now?”

“No. He’s working. At least he is supposed to be. He goes there at night.”

“Every single night?”

“Almost.”

“Are there women?”

“No. Whiskey.”

“Are you sure there are no women?”

“Well, no,” Lucy said. “Oh, it’s awful. It’s horrible. I hate it!”

It didn’t take very long for Kitty to tell Lucy about Saint Teresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower—Saint Teresa, who once said, “It is for us to console Our Lord, not for him to be consoling us …” Kitty had a little book with a blue cover called
The Story of a Soul
, in which Saint Teresa herself had written down all the wonderful things she had ever thought or said. Even though the weather had begun to turn and the days to grow dim by late afternoon, the two girls would sit on a bench in the little park across from St. Mary’s, huddled close together in their coats, while Kitty read to Lucy passages that she said would change her whole life, and get her into heaven for all eternity.

In the beginning Lucy could not seem to get the hang of it. She listened attentively, sometimes with her eyes closed so as to concentrate better, but soon it began to seem that not being a Catholic, she was fated never to understand whatever it was that so inspired Kitty. She herself was Lutheran on one side and Presbyterian on the other, and the latter had been her church, back when her mother had been able to get her to go. A kind of melancholy about her spiritual stupidity slowly settled upon her, until one day, despising both herself and her narrow Protestant background, she looked over Kitty’s shoulder at a page of the mysterious book, and discovered that it wasn’t hard to understand at all. It was only that in reading aloud, Kitty—who suddenly seemed to her so hopelessly, so disgustingly, ignorant—substituted “a” for “the” and “he” for
“she” and “what” for “when,” and left out entirely those words she couldn’t pronounce, or changed them into others.

Still, Kitty loved Saint Teresa as Lucy had never loved anything, at least that she could remember; and so, gradually, when she began to get the drift of Saint Teresa’s meaning, and saw again and again how it flooded Kitty with joy to pronounce aloud those very words, nearly all of which Saint Teresa herself had written, she began to wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t forgive Kitty Egan her reading problem and try to love Saint Teresa too.

It was Kitty who brought her to meet Father Damrosch. She began to take instruction from him for an hour after school two days a week, and to spend still other hours in the church, lighting endless candles to Saint Teresa, after whose life she and Kitty were going to model their own. At her first retreat she was given a black veil to keep by Sister Angelica of the Passion, a dark little woman with shiny skin and rimless spectacles and hair beneath her nose that so resembled a man’s mustache that Lucy said nothing of it for fear of offending Kitty, who adored Sister Angelica and didn’t even seem to notice the long black hairs. Kitty had told Sister Angelica about Lucy in a letter, and so the sister knew all about Lucy’s father, for whom she had already prayed at Kitty’s request. Sister Angelica was also praying for Babs in West Virginia. In vain, however, did they all wait for news from the vanished sinner. It was as though she had stepped directly from that restaurant in Aurora, Illinois, into Hell itself.

Kitty and Lucy would read aloud to each other their favorite passages from Saint Teresa, who had left this fallen world at twenty-four, a gruesome death of weakness, cold, coughing and blood. “ ‘… to become a saint one must suffer the great deal,’ ” Kitty read, “ ‘always seek when is best, and forgot oneselfish …’ ”

They both chose what Sister Angelica called “Saint Teresa’s little way of spiritual childhood.” Teresa’s only care, said Sister Angelica to Lucy, was that no person should ever be
distressed or even inconvenienced by what she was enduring; “daily she sought opportunities for humiliating herself” (Sister Angelica read this to Lucy from a book, so it was not just something she was making up)—“for instance, by allowing herself to be unjustly rebuked. She forced herself to appear serene, and always courteous, and to let no word of complaint escape her, to exercise charity in secret, and to make self-denial the rule of her life.” The doctor who attended Teresa in her final illness had said, “Never have I seen anybody suffer so intensely with such an expression of supernatural joy.” And her last words, in the slow agony of her dying, were, “My God, I love Thee.”

So Lucy dedicated herself to a life of submission, humility, silence and suffering; until the night her father pulled down the shade and up-ended the pan of water in which her mother was soaking her beautiful, frail feet. After calling upon Saint Teresa of Lisieux and Our Lord—and getting no reply—she called the police.

Father Damrosch did not choose to call upon her himself when she (who usually attended at least two) failed to show up at a single Mass that Sunday, nor when she did not appear the following week for her instruction. Instead he apparently arranged for Kitty to be excused early from school one day so as to meet Lucy outside the high school, which recessed each afternoon thirty minutes before St. Mary’s. Kitty said that Father Damrosch knew about Lucy’s father spending the night in jail. Kitty said that this was only another reason for her to hurry and be converted. She was sure that if Lucy asked, Father Damrosch would see her an extra hour a week, and rush the conversion along so that she could be taking her first Communion within a month. “Jesus will forgive you, Lucy,” Kitty said, whereupon Lucy turned in anger and said that she did not see that she had anything for which to be forgiven. Kitty begged and begged, and finally when Lucy told her, “Stop following me! You don’t know anything!” Kitty began to weep and said she was going to
write Sister Angelica so that she too would pray for Lucy to embrace the teachings of the Church before it was too late.

She feared for a while that she would run into Father Damrosch downtown. He was a big burly man, with a mop of black hair, who liked to kick the soccer ball around with the Catholic boys after school. His voice and his looks made girls who were even Protestant swoon openly in the street. He and Lucy had had such serious discussions, during which she had tried so hard to believe the things he said. “This life is not our real life,” and she had tried with all her might to believe him … How had he found out so quickly what had happened? How did everybody know? At school, kids she hardly recogized had begun to say, “Hi,” as though it had been discovered she were dying of some dread disease and everybody had been told to be nice in the few weeks remaining to her. And after school a group of hideous boys who hung out smoking back of the billboard shouted after her, “Hey, Gang Busters!” and then imitated a machine gun firing. After they had kept at it for a whole week, she picked up a stone one afternoon, turned suddenly around, and threw it so hard that it left a dark mark where it struck against the billboard. But the boys only continued to jeer at her from where they had fled into a vacant lot.

At home she continued to insist upon eating by herself in the kitchen, rather than with
him
, whom her grandfather had gone down and taken out of jail the very next morning. If the phone beside the table rang while she sat looking angrily at her food, she prayed that it would be Father Damrosch. What would her grandmother do when the priest announced himself? But he never did. She even thought of going directly to him—not to ask his help or his advice, but because she recognized one of the boys who called her “Gang Busters” from seeing him at nine o’clock Mass with his family every Sunday. However, she would let Father Damrosch know right off, she had nothing to be forgiven for and nothing to confess. Who was Kitty Egan even to suggest such a thing? A homely, backward girl from an illiterate family, whose clothes smelled
like fried potatoes and who couldn’t read a sentence from a book without getting it all balled up! Who was she to tell Lucy
anything
? And as for Saint Teresa, that Little Flower, the truth was, Lucy couldn’t stand her suffering little guts.

She gathered together her black veil, her rosary, her catechism, her copy of
Story of a Soul
and all the pamphlets she had accumulated at the retreat and from the vestibule at St. Mary’s, and put them into a brown paper bag. What prevented her from simply dropping the items separately into the bottom of her wastebasket was the knowledge that her grandmother would see them there, and think that it was because of her objections to “all that Catholic hocus-pocus” that Lucy was giving up going into the Church. She did not wish her to have the satisfaction. What she decided to do about her religion, or about anything relating to her personal life, was the business of nobody in that house, least of all that snoop.