The Guineveres (27 page)

Ginny grew serious. “I've had a lot of time to think about it,” she said. “In the Penance Room. And what I've come up with is this: I don't know where it came from or how he got it. But if we were all judged based on just one action, called a bad seed for it—I know I wouldn't like that. My dad, he made a mistake when he … you know. And I'm not saying he was right. Sometimes you get pinned in a corner and you have no choice. I'm not making excuses, but I guess that's how I feel about My Boy. Maybe the War pushed him in ways we could never understand. Besides, if you love someone, really love him…” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes gleamed beneath a layer of mist. She rubbed her palms, her stigmata. In moments like these, we could understand why Ginny considered herself an artist. Her sensitivity was like an open wound that occasionally scabbed over but never healed completely.

“In fact, I've had time to think about a lot of different things. Exile does that to you,” Ginny said. When she spoke this time, her diminutive frame sprouted larger, and her grin contained just a hint of the devil. “I've been thinking about Father James.”

“What about him?” one of us asked.

“That he's a louse?” We described to Ginny how he'd come to the all-girl assembly to lecture us on drinking, how he wouldn't deign to look at us when he spoke of the sins of depravity.

“He owes us one, don't you think? More than one. After all, he introduced me to the depravity of intoxication in the first place. If he doesn't help us I might be inclined to confess the whole sordid tale to Sister Fran. And there's no telling what she'd do with that information.” Ginny grinned.

“How can he possibly help us?” Gwen asked.

“He can take us to the Veterans Administration, that's what he can do. He's a priest. He knows people. He knows
everyone,
practically. They can help us there. I've thought this through.”

“But we don't even know where that is,” Win said.

“But he does. That's where Peter Drexel's parents are writing—other parishioners, too. The letter-writing campaign? Remember?”

“That sounds like blackmail,” I said.

“That's precisely what it is,” Ginny said. “But we have no choice. We have to find out who they are. We're the only ones who can help them.” Ginny finished the final scoop of Gwen's beans, and Sister Fran blew her whistle again. “They're the only ones who can help us.”

“Why can't we just write the VA?” I asked, crumpling my napkin on my tray, pushing out my chair, standing.

“I've lost faith in letters,” she said. I understood what she meant. Writing letters felt like shouting in the dark. I'd written my mother faithfully over the years but never heard back. Ginny wrote her father, too. Mail Distribution had come to feel punitive.

“An excellent plan,” Gwen said.

“Or our swan song,” Win added.

“At least we'd go down fighting,” Ginny said. “At least we're doing something. You try living for weeks in the Penance Room. I practically died.”

And that is how it was decided that we'd blackmail Father James. Sister Fran expressly forbade any of the girls from leaving the convent, even for day trips, believing such ventures could impede our spiritual growth. “Do you know what lies beyond here, girls? Sin, that's what,” she'd say. “You'll be exposed to plenty of that when you're eighteen. I'm liable for each and every one of you until that day.” Even when Lottie asked permission to visit a nearby town where an apparition of Mary was known to appear every May, Sister Fran refused to budge. “But there won't be sin if Mary's around,” Lottie tried to reason. But rules were rules.

It'd been months since Our Boys arrived, and still no proof that they'd awake. Our own detective work had stalled, and so we believed that the VA was our final hope, our last chance at discovering Our Boys' identities. Maybe, like Father James said, they didn't know what they knew, bureaucracies and all. Someone, somewhere must have overlooked a crucial detail of Our Boys: where they'd been found, when, what other units were in the area at the time. Or maybe they could provide us a list of soldiers who, like Peter Drexel, were MIA. The Guineveres could work backward from this list, narrow it down, one by one. If they had photos on file, even better. Addresses, too.

To expedite the process, we'd bring them new information, all we had gleaned. The Ouroboros. The toy cowboy. Marjorie P. near a rocky place by the shore. We'd show them the postcards, Gwen's prized ring. We'd tell them which one smoked, which had mesh netting, which carried around with him a small Book of Psalms with a two-dollar bill inside. The VA was liable for veterans, after all, responsible for them as Sister Fran was for us. We were certain they could help us help Our Boys. With God all things are possible, especially if you're on the side of the good. That's what The Guineveres believed. And even if we hadn't believed it, we were running out of options.

Ginny was grounded for a month from serving as an altar girl at the church. This was Sister Fran's decision, and Ginny accepted her punishment without complaint. When the rest of us saw Father James on Sunday, he acted nervous in our presence. He fidgeted with his steno pad, pretending to study his sermon. When he joined us in the vestry, he dressed in silence, gave us our assignments, then waited outside the door for us. Since none of the other girls were trained as servers, Father James had to carry the Bible himself during the processional. He held it high, obscuring his face from us completely.

After mass we confronted him with our demands.

“Preposterous,” Father James said.

“We just want to help,” I explained. We didn't tell him about how we'd kissed Our Boys, or baptized them, or how we'd studied their sleeping bodies, every nuance, every tic. We didn't tell him how we loved them or that when they woke up, we planned to go home with them, make homes with them, marry them someday. Instead, we simply explained that we didn't want these soldiers to be forgotten, for their fighting to have been in vain. They were so far from home; their parents must be worried sick, like the Drexels.

“Sister Fran would never allow it. Do you know how many times in the history of her tenure she's let one of her girls leave the convent? The VA office is several hours away. It'd be an all-day affair.”

“Ginny went to the hospital once for an asthma attack,” Win reminded him.

“Barring medical emergencies. I could count the times on one hand. In fact, I wouldn't even need hands to count them.” Father James put his arms behind his back as though to demonstrate his point.

“What about Ebbie Beaumont?” we asked.

“That was different,” he said. “She was almost eighteen. Part of the War Effort.”

“
We're
part of the War Effort,” I offered.

“And weren't you the one who told us that there are certain things one does not have to confess? Certain things God already knows? Our personal joys and our personal sufferings, too?” Gwen said. She took a seat in one of the cushioned chairs, stretched her back, and crossed her legs at the knees. She smoothed her eyebrows and pinched her cheeks for color. “Now it would be a shame if Sister Fran found out about how Ginny was first introduced to the depravity of alcohol, don't you think? How we've all been exposed to spirits of the unholy kind.”

“Indulgence is a sin,” Win said.

“And the joy of God is the innocent,” I offered.

Father James's lips were poised on the brink of sound, but he remained speechless. He calmly took a seat at his desk. He pulled out a bottle of Sunny Brook. He did not offer us a drink. “I'll see what I can do,” he said. He took a slug.

“You'll have to do better than that,” said Gwen.

“You shouldn't rely on the Veterans Administration, girls.”

“And why not?” Win asked.

“Because it's an institution, just like any other. The bigger it gets, the more it requires to feed itself, the less it serves the people.”

We didn't know what he meant. Not quite. “We'll take our chances,” Gwen said.

“I'll look into it,” he said.

“You'll take us,” Gwen said.

“One can't simply saunter up to the VA unannounced. It isn't a church, after all.” He capped his Sunny Brook and returned it to his desk, then nodded to the door for us to leave.

As we walked back to the convent, we felt a rush of energy surge around us like a giant wave. The Guineveres were Noah on his ark, all but saved, given one last chance to prove we were worthy of our fate. We hurried to the cafeteria to find Ginny. We whispered our plans to each other. We ate peanut butter and pear sandwiches as though they were a feast. All we could do now was wait.

When we stood on the altar, lighting candles or wiping the chalice, or genuflecting as we received the bread and wine from the gift bearers, we weren't thinking of the body and blood. We weren't thinking about the girls our age who looked upon us with pity from their pews. We weren't thinking about how God could save us. Instead, we thought about Our Boys' families, if they vacationed at the shore, if they had a seashell collection, if their mothers made casseroles. Then we thought about Sister Fran, about how she so easily located Jack Murr's family, and in moments like these we wondered, if that was that simple for her—just a few phone calls to her network of clergy, really—why hadn't she bothered to find our parents, too? Why hadn't she tracked them down, asked them why they never wrote, told them that we're good girls, after all, and maybe they had overlooked that fact?

We decided we'd write our parents again. Win and I both wrote letters to our mothers. Ginny wrote another letter to her dad. Gwen said she didn't feel like writing a letter, that if her parents wanted to find her, they knew good and well where she was. We planned to deliver our letters to Sister Fran on Mail Distribution Day, but after Morning Instruction, as Sister Fran plucked envelopes from her burlap sack, slapping them down on the desks of expectant girls, she stopped beside Ginny. She hovered above her holding a postcard, pinched between the tips of her fingers like a handkerchief. “I believe you have mail today,” she said brightly.

“I do?” Ginny said. She stretched her small body as tall as it would go without getting out of her desk, and she pushed her mane of red hair from her face.

“Not just for you, though. For all of you Guineveres.”

We turned in our desks to look at each other, then watched as Ginny slowly raised her arm to pluck the postcard from Sister Fran's hand, her eyes full of astonishment, as though she'd just had a vision.

In the cafeteria, while the other girls lined up to fill their trays, we each took our turn holding the postcard. On the outside of it was a photograph of a fountain: a stone woman with arms outstretched, water pouring from her hands. We could see buildings in the background, men in fedoras, women in long skirts and collared shirts. A small boy in a suit leaned over the water, probably searching for coins. “I told you not to worry about getting letters,” it read. “They never say anything important.” The handwriting was loose, as if the card had been written on a train. The postcard was from Ebbie Beaumont.

Looking back, I can say this was probably the kindest gesture anyone had made toward us, The Guineveres, since we'd been dropped off at the convent. And even though the postcard didn't say much, didn't ask how we were doing or offer news, or even provide a return address, we had never felt more connected to the world in our lives. Ebbie had managed to leave. She was out there, nursing Jack Murr, Jr., waking up each morning to limitless possibilities. And yet she had taken the time to write us a note.

“It's a sign,” Ginny said. We were superstitious. All things were signs. Our plates were full of soggy spinach and buttered bread. We were more determined than ever to find a way out of the convent.

“We'll find Ebbie and thank her in person,” Win said. “Soon.”

“Maybe she's fallen in love with Junior,” Gwen said.

“Probably,” I said. “Do you think they'll get married?”

“After a proper courtship,” Ginny said. She folded the postcard into a napkin so it wouldn't get dirty. Until she left the convent, she'd consider this one of her prized possessions.

“He'll have to get better first. You can't woo someone from bed,” I said.

“That's what you think,” said Gwen.

We never did deliver to Sister Fran the letters we'd written for our parents. What good would it have done? Maybe Ebbie was right—nothing important ever comes by mail. Beneath the table, I crumpled the letter I'd written to my mother, which contained mostly a laundry list of questions: “Are you okay? Where are you? Are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking your medicine? Why haven't you come back?” Truth be told, The Guineveres weren't sure if we wanted our parents to come back, because we knew that if they did, we'd have a difficult choice to make: Our Parents or Our Boys. Our past or our future. Our old families or our new ones.

“Do you think the Veterans Administration can tell us anything about Junior?” Win asked. A piece of spinach was lodged in the gap in her front teeth. “We know his name, after all, and maybe he was found with Our Boys. Maybe they were in the same unit or something.”

“Maybe,” one of us said.

“What if they won't tell us anything because we're not next of kin or because we're not eighteen?” Ginny said.

“Then Father James can sign for us,” Gwen answered. She pulled the crust from her bread and ate it. “Or we can just lie.”

“I hope they haven't forgotten about Our Boys. I hope they aren't so focused on the War or on finding MIAs like Peter Drexel that they overlook the unknowns right here at home,” Win said. “It's easy to willfully forget.”

“Yes, just look at our parents. Selective amnesia has served them well,” Gwen added.