Garden of Lies (8 page)

[38] She couldn’t kiss it. Not even with Sister and the whole class watching, waiting. She

would die first.

And for weeks after that she had not been able to eat cooked meat, either. Just the thought of it

made her feel like throwing up.

Rose, in the cramped darkness of the confessional, imagined now that
she
was that martyr.

Burning, her body roasting slowly beneath her white blouse and pleated navy skirt.
Is that how

my mother felt? Did she suffer horribly?

The burning sensation now felt even worse. Moisture trickled between her breasts, and she

caught a whiff of her own perspiration, a stink like scorched rubber.
Angelina deserved to die,

that’s what Nonnie said. Sinned against God, and He punished her.
Her grandmother’s hateful

words scuttled inside Rose’s head like the mice behind the kitchen wall at night.

No, it can’t be true. I don’t believe it.

But what if it
was
true? Would that make her tainted somehow? Was she marked by her

mother’s sin just like the human race had been by Eve’s?

Yes, she was marked. After what she did last week, well, now she was sure of it.

But how,
how
could she bring herself to confess it? So much worse by far than any sin she’d

ever committed before.

Start with the venial sins first, she told herself. Work up to the mortal sin slowly, that way

maybe it won’t come as such a shock.

The first part she knew she could recite in her sleep. The same sins she’d been confessing since

her First Holy Communion, but with a little variation here and there.

She swallowed hard against the dryness in her throat, and it made a clicking sound in her ears.

“I lied to my grandmother. More than once,” she said.

Inside her head the silence that followed seemed loud as thunder.

Then came Father Donahue’s faint rustling voice, and yes, it
did
sound a bit like it was coming

over a long-distance wire.

“What kind of lies?” he asked kindly, a lighthouse keeper guiding a lost ship through dark

waters.

Rose hesitated. This was the tricky part, where the safe water ended and the rocks began. If she

told Father about
all
the lies she’d [39] told Nonnie since her last confession, she’d be in here

until Easter, two weeks away. No, she’d have to pick just a few.

Rose squeezed her eyes shut, ran a sweaty palm down her pleats. This was the part she hated

most—actually having to
describe
her sins. And how in heaven would she confess her mortal sin?

Did priests even
know
about such things?

She took another deep breath, and let the air out slowly.

“I lied about the book,” she said.

“What book?”

“
Catcher in the Rye,
by J. D. Salinger. I checked it out of the library. But Nonnie said I

couldn’t read it because it was in the
Index
.”

She thought about Molly Quinn, her best friend, calling the
Index of Forbidden Books
the “Shit

List.” A book, Molly explained, didn’t have to be filthy actually to be on the list, it just had to

contain four-letter words. And everyone was always consulting the
Index,
the Sisters
and
the

kids, which made no sense, until one day Molly told her why.

“Go down to the public library,” Molly had said and laughed, flashing a mouthful of metal (she

claimed she could get WABC
and
WNEW on her braces) and hooking her long blond hair behind

her ears. “Go see which books are always checked out.”

Father gave a dry, polite little cough. “And you read this book even though you knew it was

against your grandmother’s wishes?”

“Yes, Father.” Rose sighed.

“You committed two sins then. Failing to honor your grandmother as well as deceiving her.”

“I honestly didn’t see what was so wrong with it! I mean, what Holden Caulfield was trying to

say ... well, it wasn’t about
sex
really—” Rose broke off, horrified.
Holy Mother of God, did I

really say that? Aren’t I in enough hot water as it is without shooting my big mouth off?

Father Donahue cleared his throat. “You must trust in the wisdom of your elders, my child,” he

admonished gently. “And keep in mind that the dictates of the Church are not yours to question.”

“Yes, Father.”

“You may continue.”

[40] “Uh ... that’s all I can remember, Father.” Another lie. But what was the use of

explaining? Father Donahue couldn’t understand what it was like for her at home.

Rose pushed her hair up in back to get some air on her neck. She remembered Nonnie braiding

it for her before school when she was in kindergarten, pulling it back so tight it stretched the skin

across her temples and left her with a headache. But by lunchtime, it would all be sprung loose

anyway, a mass of wiry black curls corkscrewing every which way.

Like a little Gypsy,
Nonnie would mutter, tight-lipped, every morning declaring war on Rose’s

hair. With each painful yank of the hairbrush, Rose couldn’t help being reminded how different

she was from everyone else in the family. A freak, with her olive skin, impossible hair, and huge

black eyes.

Big, too. Not like her sisters, both dainty as Ginny dolls. None of the clothes Marie and Clare

handed down to her fit properly. They strained across her chest and hips, riding up in awful-

looking furrows, making her feel as big as King Kong. But what could she do? It was a sin,

Nonnie said, to waste good clothing because of vanity. Besides, they were too poor to throw

anything away.

Once when no one was home, Rose had peeled off all her clothes and stood in front of the

speckled chifforobe mirror in her bedroom. She knew it was a sin to look at yourself that way;

Sister had said so. But she couldn’t tear her eyes from her dark nakedness. Dark all over, even

where the sunlight never touched her. Her heavy breasts the color of the Old English polish

Nonnie rubbed over the furniture on Saturdays, with nipples big as saucers, so dark they looked

almost blue. And hair. A great coarse black bush of it rising from the mound between her thighs.

Darker and curlier, even, than the hair on her head.

Rose had touched herself there, feeling a dart of ashamed pleasure. Blessed Virgin, where had

all of this come from? Marie and Clare had cornflower-blue eyes, and beautiful wavy hair the

color of ginger ale, like their father’s. Even Nonnie, withered now and freckled with liver spots,

had once been blond and almost pretty in a solid, Germanic way—the proof, however

unbelievable, lay in the brown-tinted photo in a pewter frame perched on the knickknack shelf

over the sofa. Nonnie’s parents, Rose had been told, had come [41] from Genoa, where Teutonic

blood had mingled with the Italian to give Nonnie her fair coloring and pale blue eyes.

Dizzy with a kind of horrified pleasure, Rose had gone on touching herself, exploring the moist

cleft buried beneath the springy black hair, then moving her hands up to cup the weight of her

heavy breasts against her palms, watching her nipples stiffen like two raisins.
Ugly. I’m so ugly.

No one will ever want to marry me, touch me like this.

Nonnie said it was “bad blood” that made her so dark, hinting that it had come from Rose’s

mother. But how could that be? Mama had been fair, with light brown hair, and—judging by an

old winter coat of hers, which Marie wore now—she’d been small-boned, too.

Rose had found an old snapshot of her parents tucked in the back of Nonnie’s photo album.

And it was that picture—not their stiffly posed, artificially tinted wedding portrait—she carried

inside her head. The fuzzy image of a young woman in an old-fashioned dress with boxy

shoulders, leaning against a ship’s rail, her head tilted back to look up at the tall man beside her,

handsome in his sailor’s uniform. Laughing, obviously in love, her gloved hand held up as a

shield against the sunlight, throwing a shadow across her eyes. All you could see was her bright

windblown hair, and the happy slash of her lipsticked mouth.

Bad blood. If I didn’t get it from Mama, then who?

The gloominess of the confessional then seemed to creep in through her pores, filling her with

despair. Like the nightmare she’d often had of falling through a black space full of shooting red

stars, of hands that would reach out to catch her, then evaporate like mist as soon as she tumbled

into them.

Then Rose remembered something. Brian telling her that all that bad-blood and evil-eye stuff

was just an old wives’ tale.

He says I’m good and smart. That he never knew anyone who could do crossword puzzles and

card games as good as me, or could think up things, like when I figured out a way to get free

tickets for my fifth-grade class, even for Sister Perp, to see the Yankees cream the Red Sox.

In her mind, Rose could hear Bri’s admiring voice—
-Jeez, Rose, who would’ve thought to

write Casey Stengel a letter saying the Yanks could use all the extra prayers they could get after

last season?

[42] “Are you certain, my child?” Father Donahue broke into her thoughts.

She bit down on her lip. Should she tell him? Now?

The hot weight of her sin felt as if it were burning a hole in her stomach.

“I took the name of the Lord in vain once,” she confessed, chickening out at the last moment.

“Only once?”

“Yes, Father.”

She’d lost her temper at bossy Marie—she was always after Rose to tuck her blouse in, stop

slouching,
do
something about that
hair,
and for heaven’s sake,
pick up your half of the room.

Rose had exploded. “If you want the room looking like a goddam army barrack,
you
pick it

up!”

Nonnie, in the kitchen, had overheard.

Rose winced at the memory of being forced to kneel on the kitchen linoleum, saying rosaries

and begging the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and anyone else who would

listen to please forgive her most grievous sin. God, all those hours. The pain shooting up from her

bruised knees. The humiliation. And afterwards, not being able to stand up. But Nonnie would

never see her cry. No, that Rose would not let happen. That would have made her humiliation

unbearable. So, on her hands and knees, she had crawled to the bathroom, locked the door, and

cried her heart out, masking her sobs with the water rushing from the bathtub spigot.

“In nomine patris et filu ...”
Father Donahue launched into the final blessing, gently reminding

her that there were others waiting their turn to confess.

Rose panicked. Her mortal sin, she hadn’t spoken one word of it. Now God would be sure to

punish her!

She took a deep breath, struggling to subdue her panic. The confessional’s mingled odors—

sweat and incense and the Sen-Sens Father chewed—felt stifling, suffocating.

“Father, I fornicated,” she blurted in a hot rush. Father Donahue’s silhouette shifted, loomed.

Now would he have his heart attack? Would that be her punishment, God smiting the priest ...

just as he had her mother?

He coughed, explosively, the sound reverberating in the confined space like thunder.

[43] “My child ... ,” he wheezed.
“Do you know what you’re saying?”

Thank heaven, he was still alive. Rose imagined the expression on his pink aged cherub’s face,

the horror he must be feeling. She so wanted to snatch back her words, erase, blot out her sin.

But it was too late now for that.

“Yes, Father,” she made herself murmur through the clenched knuckles covering her mouth.

Shame flooded through her, but it was an oddly cold shame, making her feel cleansed at the

same time, like the hateful icy showers she had to take when Marie had used up all the hot water,

when Rose would shiver and gasp for breath, but afterwards glow and tingle. Her heart lifted. She

had done it. She had asked God’s forgiveness. Now perhaps the Holy Father would select a mild

punishment—a sprained ankle instead of crippling her in a car wreck, two days of awful flu but

not leukemia.

“Are you absolutely
certain
?” His whispered voice rose to a strained, trembling pitch.

“Yes, Father.”

“Did you commit this ... ,” cough, “...
act
more than once?”

“Only once, Father.” Rose trembled. The sweat pouring off her now felt as if it might swamp

the whole confessional. She had never felt so vulnerable, naked, as if one more shrill word from

Father would stab her to death.

But then Father Donahue began muttering his usual litany in what sounded like a low keening

moan.

Wasn’t he going to ask her any more questions? Scold her at least?

His silhouette through the screen blurred as he made the sign of the cross.

Oh, Lord, thank you, everything was going to be ... well, not so dreadful. She had to lean

forward to hear the Penance he was giving her. Fifteen Hail Marys and thirty Our Fathers. By far,

the most she’d ever gotten. But she wouldn’t mind, not a bit, no matter how long it took her, or

how bruised her knees were at the end.

“Go and sin no more,” he pronounced wearily.

It was over. She’d done it. And she was still alive. Father too.