The Guineveres (38 page)

She laughed quietly and pointed toward My Boy, to his waist, or below his waist, where the sheet rose like something unholy now that she was looking at it.

My face grew hot, not from embarrassment, but because I realized that Gwen had been watching him, watching us, stealing from me these intimate moments.

“Go away,” I said. But she didn't move, just stood there grinning. “Don't look,” I said so forcefully I felt my stomach tighten and my neck muscles strain. I turned my body to block her view.

“What?” she said in a hush-hush voice. “I think it's sweet.”

“Go away,” I said again, swatting my arm toward her, pushing darkness and air. “Leave us alone.” And as I stood up and shook the bed, My Boy stirred. His eyes flitted open and closed, as if he had dirt in them and was trying to blink it away. He moaned, not a moan of pain or pleasure, but a moan of sleep.

I gasped, but then became quickly focused, remembering all I had forgotten to say the last time. “What's your name?” I asked him. “It's me again, Guinevere. What's your name?” I reached forward, and I picked up a hand and placed it between mine, then squeezed. Nothing. “Wake up. Please, wake up,” I begged him. “Wake up. Please.” Still nothing. But I wouldn't stop—how could I? I loved him. Love means we keep trying. Love means never giving up. “It's Guinevere. Remember me? I've been with you. Wake up. Please. Wake up.”

“He's not going to wake,” Gwen said softly. She looped her arm in mine and eased me away from the bed.

“I just want to know his name,” I said.

“I know,” Gwen said.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“I know.”

Win joined us, and we stood huddled together for a few minutes. Sister Fran reminded us during prayer that wherever two or more are gathered in His name, He is there. However, standing there in the Sick Ward that night, The Guineveres clinging to each other, it felt like we were the only people left in the world, that not even God could hear our silent pleas. Or maybe He just wasn't listening.

*   *   *

The next day was the Feast of the Ascension, the day Jesus was taken up into heaven, a holy day of obligation. During our writing lesson, Sister Fran explained to us that the Ascension was evidence of God's ongoing plan of redemption for us, and she asked us to write a five-paragraph essay explaining what we believed our own redemptive plans to be. “Don't forgot your thesis statement,” she instructed. “And clear topic sentences, too. Proverbs tells us that slack habits and sloppy work are as bad as vandalism, so please do not vandalize your essays, girls. Vandalized essays are a disgrace.”

The framed photographs of saints gawked at us as we slouched over our desks, staring at the blue lines on the blank page. What we believed, we couldn't write, and what we'd write, we didn't believe. “God has an extraordinary plan for me that I will outline in three parts,” I wrote, but my thesis statement was as far as I got. We were excused early to serve the holy day mass in the church.

“Still angry with me, girls?” Father said to us in the vestry after witnessing our glum faces. He offered us a piece of coconut cake a parishioner had baked. We declined.

How could we explain? How could we explain to him all that we felt and all that we'd seen? How could we hope he'd understand our forbidden love, like Romeo and Juliet's? Like three Romeos and three Juliets? Father James had taken vows of celibacy, after all. It wouldn't be worth the breath it'd take to explain it.

“No, Father,” we said.

He locked himself in his office while we dressed in the vestry, pulling the cassocks over our heads so that our hair stood on end from the static electricity and we had to spit in our hands and smooth it down. Gwen held the Bible, Win carried the processional cross, and I lit the incense and swung it back and forth, back and forth like a hypnotic pocket watch.

Forty days past Easter Jesus ascended into heaven, and the parishioners' clothes lost their pastel hues. The warm weather already encouraged the women to bare their arms. The girls our age wore linen dresses with hemlines above their knees now. Styles were changing. The world was changing, with or without us in it. Nothing extraordinary occurred during the service, except when Gwen held the Bible up for Father James to kiss before reading the Gospel, I thought I saw her pucker back. Her lips extended just barely—as if she were blowing out a candle.

After mass, when we finished hanging our robes and finger-combed our hair, Father James came in, smelling of whiskey and cologne. He was wearing an ornate purple robe, embellished with a gold trim at the sleeves and hem, and we noticed one of his shoes, shiny as little beetles, had come untied. When he bent over to tie it, he stumbled forward, and we helped him to the couch.

“Oh, girls,” he said, leaning back. “Always so helpful.” He shimmied his robe up to his hips, then managed to pull it over his head until he became stuck. His shirt rode up a bit, and we could see the dark, downy line of hair that traced a path down from his belly button. We untangled the twisted fabric from his arms and pulled it over his head. Father James smiled mischievously, the scar above his lip widening. He didn't look like a priest at all.

Years later, Father James would not deny being drunk at this moment; it was a tough time, he claimed, for everyone. The War and all. By then, he'd long since given up whiskey, and even swapped out the wine for grape juice in the chalice he used on the sacrament table. God had sent him to the depths of despair—he'd told me those years later—so that he could be brought back again, renewed. Only through absence can we understand presence, he told me, and I understood that by then. I understood it well.

After we hung Father James's garment in his closet, ignoring the empty bottles of wine we saw there, we began quietly backpedaling toward the door. Gwen sat next to Father James on the couch; his eyes were closed, and he was humming the processional tune, something about all the ends of the earth and creatures of the sea.

I tried to motion for Gwen to come on. She leaned back on the couch, her fingers extended as though she were holding an invisible cigarette. We waited. We pointed to invisible watches on our wrists.

But Gwen didn't move from her spot. She sat with her legs crossed, her shoe dangling from the foot she was circling at the ankle. “Go on,” she said, her face placid, stiller than I'd ever seen it. “I want to speak with Father James,” she said. She blinked. “About my spiritual life. Alone.”

We narrowed our eyes, shooting her glances that might have had sound effects, like artillery fire. She didn't budge, except to cross her legs in the other direction and smooth down the pleats of her skirt. Win and I stood skirt to skirt, squeezed into the doorframe together. Father James didn't speak a word, only continued to hum, pretending he didn't notice us.

“I'll be there soon,” Gwen said in her breathy movie-star voice. We pitched our thumbs over our shoulders. “What?” she asked, then flashed us those blue eyes of hers, wide and unmoving. She puckered her lips, kissed her hand with a smack, and as she blew it in our direction, her cheeks tightened and her mouth formed a perfect O.

We left her there, Win and I did. Left her sitting cross-legged on that couch. Left her with Father James. Left her knowing we couldn't stop what was about to happen, even if we wanted to. We had Our Boys to think of now. And as they healed and rested—as they moved closer to us—we thought they could wake at any moment. And then we'd go home. It'd been forty days since Easter, and we were full of hope for our own redemption. We wanted to be there when they woke. We wanted to say, “Yes, yes,” when they called our names in dry, thirsty voices.

 

Saint Alice

FEAST DAY: JUNE 15

Even as a child, Alice was frail and had to take extra precautions so as not to catch a cold or otherwise injure her weakened constitution. This was easier said than done for a girl whose heart was ablaze with love, one who always wanted the company of others. Even in Brussels's mild winters, Alice was required to wear no fewer than three overcoats if she wished to join the other children outside. Even then, her small frame shivered as though her blood could do no warming.

At age seven she was delighted to be sent to the nunnery to receive a proper education, for there she knew she'd live in communion with women whose faith was as fervent as her own. On the day she left home, the only tears shed were those from her mother. “Don't cry, Mama,” sweet Alice said. “I'll be surrounded by love.”

At first this was true. Alice reveled in communal prayers, communal meals, and communal sleeping accommodations in a narrow room lined with cots. The Sisters instructed her in the ways of the spirit and of the intellect, and their young student excelled in both. Not long after arriving, she declared her wish to make the convent her permanent home. She was suited to the monastic life, and the Sisters admired her humility and piety. But most of all, they felt she was touched by the spirit, for even at a young age, she began to perform miracles. Once while she was in the chapel, a gust of wind knocked down the candles, extinguishing them completely. Alice, through prayerful intervention, by channeling the spirit through her own small body, was able to direct the candles to reignite on their own. Even the strictest of the nuns was impressed by this miraculous display of fire, and she permitted Alice to take her vows early, granting her admittance into the Sisterhood.

However, shortly thereafter, Alice contracted leprosy. The heavy-hearted Sisters forced her into isolation, into a small hut they'd erected for her, fifty paces from the convent's walls. At first Alice offered not a complaint, for such freedom of time granted her the liberty to contemplate her favorite subject: the suffering of the Lord. She spent her first days in prayerful meditation, but soon she grew bored.

The monastery's chaplain who came by weekly to offer communion did not help her situation. He'd toss the host inside as though she were a caged beast. This surly man feared contagion, and so furthermore barred her from receiving the chalice. Such denials made Alice lament her fate. More than anything else she desired to be inebriated with blood, to feel it coursing through her veins, warming her in parts unknown. That's when her first vision of the bridegroom appeared. He was handsome, His hair wavy, His beard thick but trimmed, and she couldn't help reaching out to touch it. Already, she was in love. “Where there is part, there is whole,” He said, stroking the bones of her face that had divulged her womanhood since her illness.

But Alice didn't feel like part of any whole. She was in pain. She was afraid. Leprosy was merely one of her sufferings. Beyond that: loneliness. To amuse herself, she counted the cracks in the floor or the pieces of straw that comprised the thatch roof. She traced the perimeter of the hut and tallied her paces. She'd crack the door and look up to enumerate the stars that twinkled there, reminding herself that her Bridegroom had once lived under this very sky. After a while, the effects of the disease withered her body. Skin sloughed off in flakes the shapes of crosses, chalices, Bibles, doves. She swept them to the corner, where they piled like snow. Cavernous lesions grew on her skin, and to relieve the pain she packed mud into these wounds. On the days the chaplain came to deliver her Holy Communion, he noticed she'd begun to resemble the crucified Savior: Beneath her gauzy gown, her ribs protruded from her now skeletal frame.

But such bodily impairments didn't deter Alice, nor her capacity to perform miracles. People far and wide, risking contagion themselves, stopped by her small hut, for they heard she could heal the wounded, cure the sick. And sure enough, the only contagion Alice offered was that of the Holy Spirit. Women brought their colicky babes, who cooed in Alice's arms. The blind who touched her hardened skin witnessed blue skies, the sandy dirt beneath their feet. The maimed—they walked, they skipped, they ran, they danced. Alice could cure anyone. Except herself.

And yet her bridegroom continued to appear to her in visions. He was more like a father now. Old. “My child, I shall never forsake you,” He said, pulling her head to His chest.

Limb by limb, Alice's body became paralyzed. She could feel herself fading away, a ghost. Her skin hardened like the bark of a tree. Engorged lumps grew from the sides of her face and down the stretches of her arms and legs. Those seeking miracles stared at her monstrous physique, certain they had met a witch instead of a holy woman. Some turned away in horror. Only her tongue was spared the disease. And with this tongue she often shouted in ecstasy, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” The other Sisters could hear her cry from their windows as they slept on their comfortable cots, their faces hot in the darkness.

Soon Alice lived in permanent darkness. Blindness had stricken her. “Oh, Father, stay with me,” she cried. “Don't leave.” She didn't know day from night, up from down, suffering from joy. Even her visions began to fade. She thought she felt the touch of hands. Strangers, her bridegroom, her Father, all hungry. For faith. For miracles. For more. But she had nothing left to give. She laid herself down on her cot and waited for her final reward, as a good wife would, as a faithful daughter might. She died at sunrise.

 

Eternity

Gwen swore to us nothing untoward transpired with Father James after we'd left the vestry. What choice did we have but to believe her? The Guineveres didn't keep secrets from one another. “We just talked,” she said that night as we stood in front of the sinks in the Wash Room before Lights Out, averting our eyes from each other's reflections in the mirror. “All very innocent,” she declared. She brushed her long blond hair with precision—one hundred strokes from the crown of her head to her roots—then admired her reflection in the mirror, pouting her lips and tweezing her eyebrows with pinched fingers. “Can't two adults have a conversation?”