A Bigamist's Daughter (22 page)

All her other lovers.

God was first, of course. He was Zeus, Merlin, the Handsome Prince in all her fairy tales. Every night, her mother would read to her from a book called
Lives of the Saints,
concentrating—as she herself would do when she learned to read—on the female saints, not because they were to provide her with role models (her mother would have known nothing of the term), but because their stories were so much more romantic and dramatic than the males’. Because the woman saints were so much more given to grand gestures and heartbreaking miracles, to throwing themselves at the feet of the Lord—the quintessential Lover, Father, Husband, Knight.

There was the story of young Saint Agnes, a mere child, whom the Romans tried three times to burn at the stake, but whose lovely skin God would not allow to be harmed. (Eventually, they chopped off her head, her complexion preserved.)

There was Saint Lucy, so adamant about saving herself for the Lord that she plucked out her eyes and handed them to the young prince who, while trying to seduce her, had told her they were beautiful.

There was Saint Theresa of the Little Flower, a young orphan raised in a convent who wanted so much to receive the
body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion, that God, like an indulgent father, ignored the opinion of the humorless nuns who felt she was still too young to receive and made a floating host appear before her during mass. A girl whose body was rained with rose petals from heaven when she died.

And then, of course, there was her patron saint, Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary and the mother of John the Baptist, who conceived her son in her old age, not with the help of her husband, the priest Zachariah (who, having doubted God’s word, was struck dumb throughout her pregnancy), but through the will of God himself.

The story goes that Mary, after hearing that she was to be the mother of Jesus, packed her bags and went to visit Elizabeth, who was six months pregnant herself. There was a painting in the vestibule of the Connelly’s parish church, St. Elizabeth’s, depicting the scene: Mary, young and blond, in her perennial blue robes, greeting the gray-haired (and still slim) Elizabeth outside her home in Judaea. Elizabeth is reaching out to touch Mary’s arm, and Mary is smiling, her eyes and one white hand raised toward heaven, the other reaching for Elizabeth. The skirts of their long robes are spread out and seem to be rustling, as if the two women had run toward each other, and Mary’s pale, sandaled foot peaks out from under her hem. Both women have golden haloes around their heads and their faces are bright, beautiful.

Under the picture, in a yellowing glass frame, were the words of their greeting: Elizabeth’s, “Blessed art thou among women,” and Mary’s, “My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour … for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because he that is mighty hath done great things to me.”

It was for her the most romantic, most human, even most miraculous scene in the Bible: The young virgin and the old
barren woman rejoicing in their pregnancies, and God alone—God the Prince, Father, Husband, Lover, Knight, was its sponsor. Elizabeth’s husband after all was old, struck speechless, lacking even the imagination to accept the miracle without question or doubt. Mary’s fiancé was puzzled, unsure, back home in Nazareth with his wood and his tools. One a mere priest, one a mere carpenter. No match for the virile God whose will alone could fill their wombs: The God who was the hero of all her dreams and fairy tales and prayers throughout the first decade of her life; through the years when she, as every Catholic schoolgirl must at some time do, planned to be a nun and played at being a mother.

The exact transition is unclear, but after God, there were the Beatles. Their importance should not be underestimated. They established in her and, she sometimes likes to believe, in her entire generation, a quality of devotion that to this day endures, if only to fill her with a sweet nostalgia when faced with the concept of undying and unrequited love. If only to keep her believing, as all women are said to believe, that the imported male is always more desirable than the domestic.

For two years (eleven to thirteen? twelve to fourteen?), she lived and breathed the Beatles, wrote their names all over her notebooks at school, plastered her bedroom walls with their pictures, studied their lives. At the time, she and her friends were too young to be allowed to actually go see them in concert, and so they went to their first movie and, imitating the audiences they had seen on Ed Sullivan, screamed at the images on the film, crying, reaching out, calling names and secret messages. When the movie ended, they hugged one another, their own Paul, George, John and Ringo surrogates.

She was just beginning to hear about the details of sex then, and although she found the concept of it somewhat repulsive
and certainly humiliating, she decided (recalling St. Lucy?) that, for the love of Paul McCartney, she could bear it.

With the right man, she was sure, all things were possible.

It shouldn’t be surprising that she spent her teenage years in a state of what might be called push-me pull-me virginity.

On the one hand, there were the nuns at Blessed Virgin who couldn’t say enough about the sacredness of sex—as if, having hooked the Almighty, they were anxious to prove that they were not scornful of those who had to settle for lesser mates. They constantly assured their students that “secular” marriage too was a divine union and the marriage act (what the girls were then calling “doing it”) quite nearly a religious experience. (A ceremony of Holy Orders for lay people, Sister Barbara had called it in Elizabeth’s junior year, coining a phrase.) And, ironically, it was their approbation of marriage and the marriage act and all the wonders it entailed, impressed upon her in religion class, during retreats, in her senior-year marriage course, and even in Home Ec, that brought her to the conclusion that the right man would be second only to the nuns’ Mate Himself, and that, as with Saint Theresa, once he appeared, all nit-picking details should be put aside and their consummation be immediate and miraculous.

On the other hand, there were the boys.

At the time, all the boys she knew she’d met at dances given by the all-male Catholic high schools in the area, and, later, at bars where everyone had phony proof and drank sloe gin fizzes or whiskey sours. They were typical Catholic high school boys, boys who tended to travel in groups, who often poked each other, slapped each other, held each other in headlocks and half Nelsons. Boys who threw up between cars and popped pimples while they danced. Who were without theories about love and sex and the role of women in their lives; who wanted
only to know if you would or you wouldn’t (and how their voices lacked—was it only a British accent?) because they had to get up early on Sunday to play basketball.

Often, she said she would.

Crushed up against a car door, believing the miracle of the act would somehow transform him, she’d hold her breath and whisper
yes,
trying to recall all the things she liked about this particular young man—the way a martyr must recall past favors in order to face the rack—trying to remember why she’d noticed him at the dance, the bar, why she’d been so happy he’d called and asked her out, praying he’d say some magic word that would make the moment perfect. But then, five well-bitten fingernails would be shoved down her pants or a penis would appear like the groping head of a curious one-eyed turtle, and she’d have to admit that she’d changed her mind.

(“You’ve gone too far,” she’d say, meaning, of course, that he’d gotten too close.)

And a week later, ever hopeful, she’d find herself in the same position, with the same or another boy, saying yes again. Then no again.

She chalked up her hesitation—and the dissatisfaction of her friends, who were one by one losing their virginity and assuring her that it was no big deal—to her theory of the right man. She, and they, simply hadn’t met the right man, or if she had met him, he hadn’t, like Rosemary Hart’s brother or Mr. McKinney, the basketball coach at one of the boys’ schools, been available to work that miracle that would change her life.

Gradually, like many of the bored or dateless girls in her school, she began to turn the bulk of her romantic energy toward a more appealing, more worldly, and, because of the upper middle class’s penchant for college deferments, an even more incorporeal set of knights: the boys in Vietnam.

No one she knew knew one personally. But still they watched them on TV and saw them in magazines and history-class documentaries, and every once in a while a girl would come to school with the story of someone’s brother’s friend’s friend who was blown up a week before he was, to return, or someone’s older sister’s boyfriend who came back without a leg, and they would all shake their heads and let their eyes fill with tears. They prayed for them in homeroom every morning, drew peace signs on their notebooks, cut bloody pictures out of
Life
magazine and hung them on their bulletin boards. They sandwiched tear-filled arguments about our boys in the swamps between discussions of prom decorations and who had just had an abortion. They were, once again, too young to actually participate in marches on Washington and takeovers of administration buildings, but they looked forward to college, when they would have that kind of freedom, and she began, as her senior year came to a close and her virginity was still upon her, to associate the romance of protest with other sorts of romance as well.

But by the time she started college, Kent State was old news and the war was “winding down.” Her visions of herself as a red-faced college student screaming her anger and crying her love on the barricades would have gone entirely unrealized if it hadn’t been for one demonstration, organized early in her freshman year: The last demonstration the college, which had been surrounded by the National Guard four separate times during the sixties, would ever see.

They walked through town on a warm fall day, in single file, chanting like acolytes and feeling very smug when men in bars or gas stations called them hippies and gave them the finger, and then, in the center of Main Street, they came to a halt. One of their leaders, the word went around, was to run down the line like a MIG fighter plane, and as he passed them,
they were to scream and fall to the ground, as if they’d been shot. They were to lie in the road like that, blocking traffic and representing the many civilians killed in the war, until the featured speaker had completed his address.

They nodded solemnly to one another, and then, from the front of the line, a fat boy with long, thinning hair came running toward them, his arms stretched, his cheeks puffed, his pale belly peeking out from under his American flag T-shirt and his fat, corduroyed thighs chafing each other with a soft, farting sound. As he passed them, he showed his teeth and screamed rat-tat-tat, and they fell like dominoes, clutching their hearts, screaming too. On the ground, she carefully rested her head on the thigh of the boy behind her—everyone was making pillows of everyone else—and prepared to listen closely to the bald, one-armed Vietnam vet who was the guest of honor. But just as the speech started (“Where have all the flowers gone?” the vet began), she felt a twitch beneath her head. At first it was just a slight ripple, but as the speech continued, it grew stronger and stronger, until she was sure her head was literally bouncing up and down. Behind her, the boy who owned the leg was giggling—holding his breath as if to stop, whining a little, and then giggling again. She caught it, her head bouncing, and started giggling too, and the boy in front of her, who had his arm across her stomach and his nose to the road, started whispering, “I’m going to pee. Stop it, you’re gonna make me pee,” which started the person in front of him giggling, and so on.

When the speech finally ended (“When will they ever learn? When will they
ever
learn?”), about a dozen of them lay immobile in the street, tears streaming down their faces. Two had actually peed.

That night, she went out with the boy whose leg she’d been
on. They drank beer until they’d convinced each other that they really were very concerned about the war, very serious about life in general, and then she went back to his dorm room with him to prove just how serious she could be.

First, they smoked some hash and discussed what was about to occur. (“Talk strategy,” he’d said, as if they were about to run a three-legged race together.) She told him she was on the Pill, although she wasn’t. And that she’d done this many times before, although she hadn’t.

He said he didn’t believe in commitment and thought sex was just a basic human need, like food and air and water.

Being an antiwar activist, she agreed.

He said he only thought they should be honest with each other.

She said, “We can ask no more.”

It took six minutes, by the clock, and the only perfect thing about it was the way he lit two cigarettes afterward, both at the same time, and handed one to her. The gesture made her believe she loved him for nearly six months.

Her next two years were occupied with a succession of boys who, with their plaid shirts and beer drunks and worn Cheech and Chong imitations, all seemed alike. (As, she is sure, she, with her uncertain major in social science and her crush on her anthropology professor and her dilemma of to pledge or not to pledge, must have seemed to them like every other girl.) Boys who were worth more to her as stories she could tell Sunday morning back at the dorm or apartment (or, for a semester, the sorority house) than as companions in bed or bar. Boys whom she often told, when drunk or high enough to be able to deny it in the morning, that she loved.

Early in her senior year she saw Bill for the first time, and thought of the height and breadth and depth that her soul had
yet to reach. Like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, she was struck, reprimanded, enlisted. She knew her life would never again be the same.

A year later, he spoke to her.

Tupper Daniels travels her body and returns with reports of spices and silks, strange seas, small treasures, deposits of pure gold. He details the pleasure she gives him.