Conceived Without Sin (4 page)

"You just gave a very Catholic answer."

Sam gave Buzz a confused look.

"It was based on direct reality–computers, business, your life."

Sam bit into his cheeseburger.

"I don't know about your concept of reality. What you're saying
is just words to me. Words aren't reality. If you're so into reality, how come you talk so much?"

"How come you asked that word-filled question?"

"You can't answer a question with a question, Buzz."

"I just did. That's real." Buzz laughed.

Sam didn't get the joke; when Buzz noticed this, he said, "Look, I've never met anybody who's gotten more than half the things that make me laugh, except for
my ex-wife. Don't feel bad. I won't even explain why I found what I just said to be humorous. If you can live with that, it will help our friendship."

"There you go again with that best-friend stuff. Are you gay or something, or trying to convert me?"

"I'm not a homosexual. It's sad that your question is a reasonable one. No, I'm not that way. And I try to convert everybody, so I'm not treating
you exceptionally in that sense, any more than I believe that God helps one quarterback win and his opponents lose. I just like to talk about weird stuff. The fact that you follow even some of it qualifies you to be my friend. You don't have to be."

"Thank you, Buzz, for the permission to reject you as a friend," Sam said with mock solemnity.

"You're certainly welcome. Live and let live. Your
reality is as valid as mine. What is truth–is it unchanging law? And what of truth–is mine the same as yours?"

"Where's that from?" Sam asked. "Sounds familiar."

"Jesus Christ Superstar, a decidedly un-Catholic musical, despite the subject matter."

"Should I start calling you Pope Buzz? After all, you seem to be the judge of what's Catholic and what isn't."

"Don't bother. I doubt the College of
Cardinals would ever elect a divorced, alcoholic, cigarette-smoking, pompous jerk like me."

"Now you're talking reality," Sam laughed.

"You're going to make a great Catholic, someday, reality-wise, I mean," Buzz replied, not laughing so much as expressing his mirth with a smirk and a shake of his head.

"There you go again. Look, I don't want to be converted. I like being an agnostic. No church
on Sundays. No moral codes. So on and so forth."

"You haven't got a moral code? Do you steal?" Buzz asked, suddenly serious.

"I don't steal. Bad for business. Stealing comes back and haunts you. I couldn't stay in business if I made a habit of ripping people off–"

"So your personal moral code, for whatever reason you have it, precludes you from stealing. Why?"

"Why? I don't know. Like I said,
it's bad for business. And my father taught me not to steal," Sam replied somewhat sheepishly, wondering where this would go, a bit more aware that he was enjoying himself, the beer, the food–this strange guy. "What do you say to that, Pope Buzz?"

"Where did your father get his moral code?"

"From his parents…"

"And they got it from their parents, or from somewhere else, like the culture, which
your dad already said was based on Judeo-Christianity. You might be an agnostic–let's shorten that to aggie–but I bet we share a common moral code, except for sex. That's too much to hope for. Everybody in our generation believes in having maximum amounts of sex."

"Actually, Buzz, I don't believe in sex until I get married, unless I really love the girl and plan to marry her–" Sam caught himself
saying a very personal thing.

"Really?" Buzz looked down at his plate. Something in Sam's voice had conveyed a level of discomfort. A heavy silence ensued.

"Religion, sex–that only leaves politics, Sammy Boy. We'll run out of things to talk about before we're done with dinner."

"Yeah, right. But I bet you're more repressed than I am, being a personal pope and all."

"I detect a challenge in the
area of sexual ethics. Let's go, Sammy. Wanna hear my NFL Proof that Premarital Sex is Wrong Theory?"

"I bet it's reality-based," Sam quipped.

"Right! Okay, let's start out with a little known fact–practically all of the most successful NFL coaches are devout Catholics. For example, both Don Shula and Chuck Noll are daily communicants–"

"Daily communicants?"

"Yeah, that's when you go to Mass every
day and receive communion–hold on. Waitress?" Buzz called out. "May I have another Pepsi?"

"Coincidence," Sam said, implying that Shula and Noll's religion had nothing to do with their coaching records.

"At first glance, yes, it looks like a coincidence, but let's look at it from another angle…" Buzz continued, the understated excitement building. He had a high voice for a man his size.

It was
an excitement Sam was having trouble resisting.

I was wrong,
he thought of his initial impression that Buzz was a jerk, listening to Buzz's sometimes terrible, but always interesting logic.
I wonder how he got the name Buzz?

And so the conversation went on for two more hours, with two additional beers and three more glasses of Pepsi, as Sam and Buzz became friends.

Chapter Two

1

"Still driving that old pick-up truck, Mr. Computer Magnate?" Buzz asked Sam a few days later after the hoops had ended.

"Yeah," Sam replied, wrapping a towel around his neck.

"Great, do me a favor–"

"What kind of favor?"

"An easy one. Look, I can't get any more days off from UPS, and I need someone to pick up a used refrigerator at this place that's only open during working hours.
I figured you were your own boss, and that–"

"And that I would be super-willing to pick up your fridge because we're world record best friends. Hey, I've got work to do during the day, Buzz, and just because I own my company doesn't mean–"

"Forget it, then. I'll ask someone else." Buzz sounded disappointed.

"I didn't say I wouldn't do it," Sam added tentatively.

"Great!" Buzz lit up like a Christmas
tree. "You're really easy to manipulate. Here's the directions." He shoved a folded piece of legal paper into Sam's hands. "I'll meet you after work at my apartment and we'll bring it up together. You look like a strong guy."

"Bring it up? How many flights?"

"I don't know. Three or four. Or seven." Buzz looked away, a slight smile on his lips. He lit a cigarette.

"Or seven, eh? I get the picture,
now."

"Will you do it?" Buzz asked seriously.

"Sure. I can't wait," Sam said. "I'm looking forward to it already. In fact, I'm upset that I have to wait a whole day to get over there. You know, I'll be up all night, tingling with excitement–"

"Okay, okay. Sorry, man. I don't have anybody else to ask, and I've been living without a fridge since I moved here a month ago."

"Please stop; you're making
me sad."

"You sure you weren't born in New Jersey?" Buzz asked. "You're pretty sarcastic when you want to be."

Sam just smiled.

2

It's funny how an entire life can change because of a chance meeting. But was it really chance? Because Buzz Woodward was a Catholic, he had asked Saint Anthony to help him round up an affordable refrigerator. Buzz also asked a few of the drivers at UPS. One driver
sometimes made deliveries to a tiny appliance repair shop in Little Italy which often had a few used refrigerators for sale. Buzz called the place and arranged to buy an ancient fridge for fifty dollars, sight unseen. Then he asked Sam to pick it up…

It was not love at first sight.

But there was a kind of warmth at first sight when Donna Beck turned and first saw Sam walk into Nardi's TV & Appliance,
the bell clanging on the door behind him. She turned back. She was not attracted to the tall man.

He stood behind her in line, looking down at the dirty tile floor.

It was late afternoon. There were two men in line in front of them. The proprietor of Nardi's was not the fastest man in the world. In fact, after a long argument in Italian with the man at the front of the line, he disappeared into
the back with a huff. The sounds of banging promptly came from the back room.

Sam looked at his watch. "Is he fixing something in there?"

Donna, who was not facing Sam, shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe. He said something about it needing a new heating element in Italian before he went back there."

"You speak Italian?" Sam asked, looking down, wondering what the girl in front of him looked like,
hoping she was as pretty as her voice, hoping she would turn around.

Donna Beck turned, smiling. Sam tried not to show his disappointment because she was not particularly pretty. She had dark, curly hair, a somewhat pudgy nose, a shiny forehead, and indistinct brown eyes.

"Yes, a little. Mostly from what my parents yell at me. I also took it in high school. And you?"

She did have a warm smile.
Sam liked that, and maybe because she wasn't pretty, he didn't feel uncomfortable making small talk with this girl.

"Me? Italian? No. Foxpro. Fortran. Cobol. C++. Those are my languages."

"Computers, eh?"

"Yeah," Sam said, slightly excited. "Do you know computers?"

"Nah. Not for me. Too dull. Basketball is what I like to do more than anything else," somehow slipped from Donna's lips.

"You're kinda
short for basketball."

"And you're kinda tall for stupidity. I'm a girl, in case you haven't noticed, and I only play against other girls, who are mostly short, and besides, I can make up for height with brains and speed," she finished with an air of confidence.

"Sorry," Sam said. "I didn't mean to offend you. I love basketball. As a matter of fact, I'm picking up a fridge for a buddy I play hoops
with at the Rocky River courts."

"No problem." Her lack of concern was genuine.

She turned back to face the counter. A few minutes passed. She was bored.

"So, you live on the West Side," she guessed, half-turning her shoulders.

Rush Limbaugh's voice started to drift in from the back room. His voice was not familiar to them.

"Me? Yeah. Buzz, my friend, does, too. He lives in Rocky River. Near the
lake. I live in Rocky River, too."

"So do I," she said. "With my parents. I still don't know why they insist on buying stuff in this dump."

There was an awkward silence.

"You men are lucky," she mused. "There's not much pick-up for women. I have to wait until the rec league opens the gym for us on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Even then, I play for five hours and feel like running for ten." Donna
looked away, as if picturing the games in her head.

Sam took a closer look, and noticed the easy, athletic way she swung her arms when she talked, and that she wasn't so much overweight, but thick with womanly muscle in her shoulders and legs.
She's a fireplug like Buzz, only a lot shorter,
he thought.

They went to a dusty old couch and sat down, continuing to make small talk. They both liked
the Cavs and loved the Indians–no surprise. She grew up in Little Italy and had one brother and two sisters, although her parents had moved to Rocky River a few years ago.

Sam's father, a widower, had moved to Ann Arbor to take a position at the University of Michigan a few years earlier. He told her about his computer company, but tried not to brag. It took more than twenty minutes for the repair
to be finished on the first man's oven.

When the time came, it seemed only natural to offer to drive her home. Donna was picking up a small countertop refrigerator, and was planning to take the bus otherwise. He helped the proprietor load the two refrigerators onto the truck.

"How were you going to get that to your house?" Sam asked reasonably as she stood next to his rusty Ford F-150 on Murray
Hill.

She hesitated, wondering if she could trust this stranger. She looked at him closely.
Yes, I can.

"I asked Saint Anthony to help me find a way. If worse came to worst, I could manage to carry it to the bus stop. Saint Anthony sent you instead."

"Saint Anthony? You and Buzz are going to get along just great," Sam said softly, almost to himself.

"Are we meeting Buzz?" she asked, feeling the
strangeness of the words, knowing that they assumed a bit too much, and were jumping the gun.

"Um," Sam paused. "Sure. If you want to. If you don't have any plans tonight. After we drop off your fridge, you can come with me to Buzz's place. That sucker back there has to go up seven flights. Maybe you could help."

He glanced at her stout legs. She noticed, and surprised him with a smile.

"Music
to a tomboy's ear," she practically sang.

Sam chuckled.

Thus, two quickly became three. The agnostic, the believer, and the tomboy.

3

Donna looked down at her fingers as she sat in the spotless, spartan cab of Sam's pick-up. Her nails were clean and closely clipped, with no nail polish, unlike many of her acquaintances from the old neighborhood. She and Sam had already dropped off her refrigerator
in her folks' garage.

This is a classy guy,
she thought. Breeding was all over him: his walk, his casual preppy clothes, the way he pronounced his words. She was very sensitive to such things, having grown up in a working class neighborhood where few of her peers went to college. Oh, there were always the local community colleges, but these struck Donna as mere extensions of high school, places
to kill time before getting dead end jobs in local factories or retail establishments.

She had related strongly to a movie that had come out recently,
Working Girl,
about a lower class Brooklyn girl who used cleverness and gumption to whittle her way into the professional world by posing as her high-class boss. It was not that Donna was ambitious for a professional career–she wasn't. She just
wanted to improve herself, to marry and raise children in the suburbs somewhere, anywhere, where prosperity itself seemed to sprout like strong grass from excellently-watered lawns. She was a devout Catholic, and getting married and having children was her ideal.

After high school, Donna had briefly attended community college in pursuit of a teaching degree. Her father, a plumber, had not been
able to help much with the expense, and she had been forced to cut back on classes and take a part-time job as a clerk at a small accounting firm on Madison Avenue in Lakewood. She was good with numbers, and conscientious, and was soon offered a full-time position, so she quit school altogether. Only five accountants worked at the firm, and the only one who showed any romantic interest in her was
married. And he wasn't Catholic.

Donna was neither plain nor pretty. She had been asked out several times during her freshman and sophomore years of high school. After all, most guys were average-looking and there was something very approachable about Donna Beck. (
Beck
was an Americanized version of Becci, which had been shortened by a bureaucrat on Ellis Island in the late 1800s…) She almost
always turned down the boys, unless she particularly liked them. The ones she did go out with only wanted to do what Donna called the Three Bad Things: Get Drunk, Have Sex, Do Drugs.

Soon she developed a reputation as a prude, and the boys left her alone. Because she played sports, a rumor began that she was a lesbian. But Donna had turned down the lesbians, too, so the rumor died. By the end
of high school, her classes, athletics, and a handful of wholesome friends kept her comfortably insulated from the Three Bad Things. After high school and the move to Rocky River, she lost touch with her friends.

Were they really friends?

Why had she said
no
so many times to the Three Bad Things? At first, she wasn't quite sure–her refusals came like violent bolts from her gut. Then, as everyone
discovers while growing up, she had to decide
why
she was saying no. She needed to adopt the Three Good Things and make them her own. She inwardly called them Sobriety, Chastity, and Clarity.

She had also consulted often with her older sisters, who were both married. Her sisters had experimented with the Bad Things during the Seventies, and they told Donna that these weren't worth the trouble
they caused. Drugs got old and made you paranoid and apathetic–just look around at the 'heads' in your school, they told her. Sex before marriage was either a disappointing downer or a dangerous drug in its own right. Sex could make you
stunod
–stupid–about selfish men. Don't bother. One of her older sisters, Cindy, had been married briefly, outside of the Church, to an older divorced man, and
that
had been an ugly scene. The marriage had not been recognized by the Church.
"If I hadn't slept with him, I wouldn't have married him,"
Cindy had counseled Donna.

Then Donna answered the silent call. She wasn't aware it was a call at the time, but it was a real call nevertheless. It was the call of grace. A simple, lovely invitation from the Blessed Mother. Donna was walking home from school
alone, and decided to take an alternate route, a route which took her by her parish church, Holy Rosary.

She found herself walking into the empty church on a sunny winter afternoon, the wind stopping as the thick door closed behind her, and grace flooded unknown into her heart. The Blessed Mother had been keenly following Donna's search for the truth, and had procured from her Son special graces
for the stout little girl with nice hair and dark brown eyes.

While sitting in Sam's pick-up, Donna was suddenly back in the church, listening to her shoes tap the tile floor as she walked toward the front, which was filled with stained-glass-colored light reflecting off the marble and brass of the altar. She found herself kneeling before a particularly lifelike statue of Saint Anthony, but curiously
found herself asking Our Lady for help. She had one question, which was her only prayer:

Why should I be good? Just because my parents are good?

Donna did not feel the grace that flooded her heart on that day, but a sluice door was opened that afternoon which was never closed again.

In her human perception, the grace came in the form of a prompting to pray the Rosary. Her family had prayed the
Rosary every evening after dinner, but the prayer had become mere words to Donna over the last few years, even though she had loved the Rosary when she was a little girl. It was useless to try to get out of saying it because both her parents were so insistent.

Now, in this church, on this day, she felt an urge to say a
good
Rosary.

If I say this Rosary, I'll have the answer to my question,
she
thought, quite correctly.

She looked up at the statue of Saint Anthony, and then down to her right and saw a set of plastic rosary beads on the kneeler.

Strange,
she thought.

She picked up the beads and began to
pray,
not
say,
the Rosary for the first time in years. She concentrated on the words, her eyes closed, and did not rush through the prayers. She asked sincerely during the last part of
every Hail Mary, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."

The words struck her as never before, especially the part about the hour of death.