Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (23 page)
to Andre and Jeb
I
GREW UP IN
Louisiana, and for twelve years I went to a boys’ school taught by Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order. In the eighth grade our teacher was Brother Thomas. I still have a picture he gave to each boy in the class at the end of that year; it’s a picture of Thomas Aquinas, two angels, and a woman. In the left foreground Aquinas is seated, leaning back against one angel whose hands grip his shoulders; he looks very much like a tired boxer between rounds, and his upturned face looks imploringly at the angel. The second angel is kneeling at his feet and, with both hands, is tightening a sash around Aquinas’s waist. In the left background of the picture, the woman is escaping up a flight of stone stairs; her face is turned backward for a final look before she bolts from the room. According to Brother Thomas, some of Aquinas’s family were against his becoming a priest, so they sent a woman to his room. He drove her out, then angels descended, encircled his waist with a cord, and squeezed all concupiscence from his body so he would never be tempted again. On the back of the picture, under the title
Angelic Warfare
, is a prayer for purity.
Brother Thomas was the first teacher who named for us the sins included in the Sixth and Ninth Commandments which, in the Catholic recording of the Decalogue, forbid adultery and coveting your neighbor’s wife. In an introductory way, he simply listed the various sins. Then he focused on what apparently was the most significant: he called it self-abuse and, quickly sweeping our faces, he saw that we understood. It was a mortal sin, he said, because first of all it wasted the precious seed which God had given us for marriage. Also, sexual pleasure was reserved for married people alone, to have children by performing the marriage act. Self-abuse was not even a natural act; it was unnatural, and if a boy did it he was no better than a monkey. It was a desecration of our bodies, which were temples of the Holy Ghost, a mortal sin that resulted in the loss of sanctifying grace and therefore could send us to hell. He walked a few paces from his desk, his legs hidden by the long black robe, then he went back and stood behind the desk again and pulled down on his white collar: the front of it hung straight down from his throat like two white and faceless playing cards.
‘Avoid being alone,’ he said. ‘When you go home from school, don’t just sit around the house—go out and play ball, or cut the grass, or wash your dad’s car. Do
any
thing, but use up your energy. And pray to the Blessed Mother: take your rosary to bed at night and say it while you’re going to sleep. If you fall asleep before you finish, the Blessed Mother won’t mind—that’s what she
wants
you to do.’
Then he urged us to receive the Holy Eucharist often. He told us of the benefits gained through the Eucharist: sanctifying grace, which helped us fight temptation; release from the temporal punishment of purgatory; and therefore, until we committed another mortal or venial sin, a guarantee of immediate entrance into heaven. He hoped and prayed, he said, that he would die with the Holy Eucharist on his tongue.
He had been talking with the excited voice yet wandering eyes of a man repeating by rote what he truly believes. But now his eyes focused on something out the window, as though a new truth had actually appeared to him on the dusty school ground of that hot spring day. One hand rose to scratch his jaw.
‘In a way,’ he said softly, ‘you’d actually be doing someone a favor if you killed him when he had just received the Eucharist.’
I made it until midsummer, about two weeks short of my fourteenth birthday. I actually believed I would make it forever. Then one hot summer night when my parents were out playing bridge, Janet was on a date, and I was alone in the house, looking at
Holiday
magazine—girls in advertisements drinking rum or lighting cigarettes, girls in bulky sweaters at ski resorts, girls at beaches, girls on horseback—I went to the bathroom, telling myself I was only going to piss, lingering there, thinking it was pain I felt but then I knew it wasn’t, that for the first wakeful time in my life it was about to happen, then it did, and I stood weak and trembling and, shutting my eyes, saw the faces of the Virgin Mary and Christ and Brother Thomas, then above them, descending to join them, the awful diaphanous bulk of God.
That was a Tuesday. I set the alarm clock and woke next morning at six-thirty, feeling that everyone on earth and in heaven had watched my sin, and had been watching me as I slept. I dressed quickly and crept past Janet’s bedroom; she slept on her side, one sun-dark arm on top of the sheet; then past the closed door of my parents’ room and out of the house. Riding my bicycle down the driveway I thought of being struck by a car, so I rode on the sidewalk to church and I got there in time for confession before Mass. When I got home Janet was sitting on the front steps, drinking orange juice. I rode across the lawn and stopped in front of her and looked at her smooth brown legs.
‘Where’d you go?’
‘To Mass.’
‘Special day today?’
‘I woke up,’ I said. ‘So I went.’
A fly buzzed at my ear and I remembered Brother Thomas quoting some saint who had said if you couldn’t stand an insect buzzing at your ear while you were trying to sleep, how could you stand the eternal punishment of hell?
‘You set the alarm,’ she said. ‘I heard it.’
Then Mother called us in to breakfast. She asked where I had been, then said: ‘Well, that’s nice. Maybe you’ll be a priest.’
‘Ha,’ Daddy said.
‘Don’t worry, Daddy,’ Janet said. ‘We don’t hate Episcopalians anymore.’
I got through two more days, until Friday, then Saturday afternoon I had to go to confession again. Through the veil over the latticed window Father Broussard told me to pray often to the Virgin Mary, to avoid those people and places and things that were occasions of sin, to go to confession and receive Communion at least once a week. The tone of his whispering voice was kind, and the confessional itself was constructed to offer some comfort, for it enclosed me with my secret, and its interior was dark as my soul was, and Christ crucified stared back at me, inches from my face. Father Broussard told me to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys for my penance. I said them kneeling in a pew at the rear, then I went outside and walked around the church to the cemetery. In hot sun I moved among old graves and took out my rosary and began to pray.
Sunday we went to eleven o’clock Mass. Janet and I received Communion, but Mother had eaten toast and coffee, breaking her fast, so she didn’t receive. Most Sundays she broke her fast because we went to late Mass, and in those days you had to fast from midnight until you received Communion; around ten in the morning she would feel faint and have to eat something. After Mass, Janet started the car and lit a cigarette and waited for our line in the parking lot to move. I envied her nerve. She was only sixteen, but when she started smoking my parents couldn’t stop her.
‘I just can’t keep the fast,’ Mother said. ‘I must need vitamins.’
She was sitting in the front seat, opening and closing her black fan.
‘Maybe you do,’ Janet said.
‘Maybe so. If you have to smoke, I wish you’d do it at home.’
Janet smiled and drove in first gear out of the parking lot. Her window was down and on the way home I watched her dark hair blowing in the breeze.
That was how my fourteenth summer passed: baseball in the mornings, and friends and movies and some days of peace, of hope—then back to the confessional where the smell of sweat hung in the air like spewed-out sin. Once I saw the student body president walking down the main street; he recognized my face and told me hello, and I blushed not with timidity but shame, for he walked with a confident stride, he was strong and good while I was weak. A high school girl down the street gave me a ride one day, less than an hour after I had done it, and I sat against the door at my side and could not look at her; I answered her in a low voice and said nothing on my own and I knew she thought I was shy, but that was better than the truth, for I believed if she knew what sat next to her she would recoil in disgust. When fall came I was glad, for I hoped the school days would break the pattern of my sins. But I was also afraid the Brothers could see the summer in my eyes; then it wasn’t just summer, but fall and winter too, for the pattern wasn’t broken and I could not stop.
In the confessional the hardest priest was an old Dutchman who scolded and talked about manliness and will power and once told me to stick my finger in the flame of a candle, then imagine the eternal fire of hell. I didn’t do it. Father Broussard was firm, sometimes impatient, but easy compared to the Dutchman. The easiest was a young Italian, Father Grassi, who said very little: I doubt if he ever spoke to me for over thirty seconds, and he gave such light penances—three or four Hail Marys—that I began to think he couldn’t understand English well enough to know what I told him.
Then it was fall again, I was fifteen, and Janet was a freshman at the college in town. She was dating Bob Mitchell, a Yankee from Michigan. He was an airman from the SAC Base, so she had to argue with Mother for the first week or so. He was a high school graduate, intelligent, and he planned to go to the University of Michigan when he got out. That’s what she told Mother, who believed a man in uniform was less trustworthy than a local civilian. One weekend in October Mother and Daddy went to Baton Rouge to see L.S.U. play Ole Miss. It was a night game and they were going to spend Saturday night with friends in Baton Rouge. They left after lunch Saturday and as soon as they drove off, Janet called Bob and broke their date, then went to bed. She had the flu, she said, but she hadn’t told them because Mother would have felt it was her duty to stay home.
‘Would you bring me a beer?’ she said. ‘I’ll just lie in bed and drink beer and you won’t have to bother with me at all.’
I sat in the living room and listened to Bill Stern broadcast Notre Dame and S.M.U. I kept checking on Janet to see if she wanted another beer; she’d smile at me over her book—
The Idiot
—then shake her beer can and say yes. When the game was over I told her I was going to confession and she gave me some money for cigarettes. I had enough to be ashamed of without people thinking I smoked too. When I got home I told her I had forgotten.
‘Would you see if Daddy left any?’
I went into their room. On the wall above the double bed was a small black crucifix with a silver Christ (Daddy called it a graven image, but he smiled when he said it); stuck behind the crucifix was a blade from a palm frond, dried brown and crisp since Palm Sunday. I opened the top drawer of Daddy’s bureau and took out the carton of Luckies. Then something else red-and-white caught my eye: the corner of a small box under his rolled-up socks. For a moment I didn’t take it out. I stood looking at that corner of cardboard, knowing immediately what it was and also knowing that I wasn’t learning anything new, that I had known for some indefinite and secret time, maybe a few months or a year or even two years. I stood there in the history of my knowledge, then I put down the cigarette carton and took the box of condoms from the drawer. I had slid the cover off the box and was looking at the vertically arranged rolled condoms when I heard the bedsprings, but it was too late, her bare feet were already crossing the floor, and all I could do was raise my eyes to her as she said: ‘Can’t you find—’ then stopped.
At first she blushed, but only for a second or two. She came into the room, gently took the box from me, put the cover on, and looked at it for a moment. Then she put it in the drawer, covered it with socks, got a pack of cigarettes, and started back to her room.
‘Why don’t you bring me a beer,’ she said over her shoulder.
‘And we’ll have a little talk.’
When I brought the beer she was propped up in bed, and
The Idiot
was closed on the bedside table.
‘Are you really surprised?’ she said.
I shook my head.
‘Does it bother you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re probably scrupulous. You confess enough for Eichmann, you know.’
I blushed and looked away.
‘Do you know that some people—theologians—believe a mortal sin is as rare as a capital crime? That most things we do aren’t really that evil?’
‘They must not be Catholics.’
‘Some of them are. Listen: Mother’s only mistake is she thinks it’s a sin, so she doesn’t receive Communion. And I guess that’s why she doesn’t get a diaphragm—that would be too committed.’
This sort of talk scared me, and I was relieved when she stopped.
She told me not to worry about Mother and especially not to blame Daddy, not to think of him as a Protestant who had led Mother away from the Church. She said the Church was wrong. Several times she used the word love, and that night in bed I thought: love? love? For all I could think of was semen and I remembered long ago a condom lying in the dust of a country road; a line of black ants was crawling into it. I got out of bed, turned on a lamp, and read the
Angelic Warfare
prayer, which ends like this:
O God, Who has vouchsafed to defend with the blessed cord of St. Thomas those who are engaged in the terrible conflict of chastity! grant to us Thy suppliants, by his help, happily to overcome in this warfare the terrible enemy of our body and souls, that, being crowned with the lily of perpetual purity, we may deserve to receive from Thee, amongst the chaste bands of the angels, the palm of bliss
….
Janet didn’t do so well in the war. That January she and Bob Mitchell drove to Port Arthur, Texas, and got married by a justice of the peace. Then they went to Father Broussard for a Catholic marriage, but when he found out Janet was pregnant he refused. He said he didn’t think this marriage would last, and he would not make it permanent in the eyes of God. My parents and I knew nothing of this until a couple of weeks later, when Bob was discharged from the Air Force. One night they told us, and two days later Janet was gone, up to Michigan; she wrote that although Bob wasn’t a Catholic, he had agreed to try again, and this time a priest had married them. Seven months after the Texas wedding she had twin sons and Mother went up there on the bus and stayed two weeks and sent us postcards from Ann Arbor.