Authors: LaVyrle Spencer
She said, afterward, with wonder in her voice, entwined with him, still, “Isn’t God wonderful... thinking up such a thing?”
Eddie kissed her forehead and rested his cheek against it. “I think he’s pretty wonderful for giving you up to me.”
“I do, too,” she said, and fit her foot into the snuggliest place on him, and her hand, and one bent knee. “I hope you like sleeping all snuggled up, because I know I’m going to want to be like this a lot. I’ve slept alone too long.” He wriggled deeper and spread his hand wider on her flank. Down the hallway the caramel-colored cat walked silently. At their doorway, it stopped and listened, unseen. Jean said, “Eddie, could I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
It took her a while to work up the courage. “How often... I mean...”
“How often—?” he encouraged.
“Nothing. Just forget it.”
“No, you were going to ask, so ask.”
“Well, how often do men and women—um—do this?”
He laughed heartily and rubbed her bare hip and said, “Ah... my adorable virgin bride.”
“You promised me you wouldn’t laugh at my ignorance.”
“I’m not laughing at you, darling, you just tickle me. You’re so perfectly innocent.”
“All right, then, how often do they?”
He decided to have some fun with her. “Well, let me see—tomorrow is Sunday and once Mass is taken care of, we’ve got the whole day to ourselves, so we could do it, say, thirty, forty times. But then on—”
“Thirty or forty!”
“But then on workdays we’d have to cut that down some. Let’s see... I ring the first bell at seven-thirty. Say we do it at six-thirty a.m., then I could run home before the noon Angelus and squeeze one in then, but at the supper Angelus it’ll be tougher, because the kids will be around then, so we might have to wait till bedtime. Then, after bedtime, why, heck, I’d say we could manage seven, eight times before we fell asleep if we—”
“Oh, Eddie, you’re teasing.” She gave him a punch through the soft bedspread.
“No, no! Look, we got seven more times yet tonight. Will that satisfy you? It better, ’cause, I mean, I’ve got to get
some
sleep. A man can’t live on sex alone.”
“Oh, Eddie, are you always such a tease?”
“When I love a woman, I am. And I sure do love you, my little petunia.” His voice lost a lot of its teasing, got soft and seductive. “I suuure do love you.”
They kissed, and afterward he told her, in the voice of a patient teacher, “We can do it every day if you like. Usually at the beginning, when people first fall in love, they want to do it more than once a day, then after they’re married awhile they do it less often. Maybe a couple times a week, maybe more, maybe less. When women get pregnant they don’t feel much like doing it, then toward the end they’re not allowed to do it at all.”
They thought about that awhile, and she said, “Just think... I could be pregnant right now.”
“And what would you think?”
“I said a Novena asking that it would happen soon.” He reared back and looked down at her, surprised. “You did?” In the dark he could scarcely see a rim of light on her hair.
“Yes, I did. I’d take as many of your babies as I could get.”
“Oh, Jean...” He hauled her up from the crook of his shoulder and kissed her softly, then rubbed a finger over her lips time and again. “I’m so lucky.”
They thought about the children they might have, the ones they already had, and a future of loving them all, working hard for them, and for each other. At the foot of the bed, they felt Sugar jump up and pick her way tentatively up the bedspread.
Eddie’s hand went down and found the cat. “Hi, Sugar, you miss the girls, huh?”
“Hi, Sugar.” Jean’s hand joined his, scratching Sugar’s soft fur. She hadn’t had a cat since she lived on the farm as a girl.
“I like cats,” she said.
The cat started purring. They were getting blissfully sleepy, their thoughts fraying.
Suddenly Jean sat up and threw the covers back. “Oh my gosh, I forgot my prayers.”
She scrambled from the bed, got to her knees and joined her hands, naked as a jaybird, while he grinned to himself in the dark. He didn’t interrupt her, but neither did he join her. He’d had enough prayer for one day during their long wedding ceremony. Besides, what they’d done together seemed like a prayer to him.
Pretty soon she finished and climbed back in. He held back the covers for her, and she found her old spot on his shoulder, with her knee once again across his midsection. “Do you kneel down and pray every night?” he asked.
“It’s an old habit, hard to break.”
“Ah.” He understood.
“Eddie?”
“Hm?”
“I’ll need to get a driver’s license, but first I’ll have to
learn to drive. Will you teach me?”
“Of course. Why?”
“So I can take the nuns to St. Cloud or long Prairie when they need their eyes examined, or their teeth filled. Like Krystyna did.”
“Oh. Like Krystyna did.”
“Yes.”
“And maybe we could ask your mother or Krystyna’s mother if they’ve got enough cabbage in the garden that we could make up a big batch of sauerkraut for them like she always did. Oh, Eddie, we loved that sauerkraut so much, and we waited for it every year.”
He smiled and thought what a curious subject to be discussing on his wedding night: sauerkraut for the nuns.
But he understood, there would always be a little touch of Sister Regina left in his wife, Jean. But that was okay with Eddie. After all, it was the nun he’d fallen in love with.
When he was growing woozy he mumbled above her ear, “G’night, Sister.”
But she was already asleep, dreaming of having his babies.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A songwriter once said of hometowns that when you’re young you want to get away and when you’re old you want to go back. Browerville, the setting of this book, is my hometown. I left it at age nine, but I went back to the area when I was in my forties and built a log cabin close enough to town that I could drive past my old house now and then, walk into my old church and school, buy Polish sausage at the meat market, and remember what I now realize was a growing-up that set me off on very much the right foot. I had family love, a safe little town where everybody knew everybody else, and the grounding of church and parochial school where tradition created a strong sense of security.
It’s not so surprising, then, that when I wrote my first book, I set it in Browerville. And perhaps it’s not so surprising that now, as I write my last, I once again return to Browerville.
This story is a work of fiction. But in memory of my mom and dad and the folks who peopled their world and mine when I was little, I have indiscriminately dropped the names of real people into this book. Many of them are now dead; some are not. Not one of them spoke the lines I made
them speak, or knew a nun named Sister Regina, for she did not exist.
But Sister Dora did. And still does. She taught me first and second grades, and I include her as a character with thanks for her send-off that made me love school for the rest of my life. Sister Marl, grades three and four, helped me remember those wonderful school days. She is still a nun today, and a gentle, sweet lady.
My mom was so much like Krystyna. It was she who set hair for pin money, and made all our clothes, and sent my sister and me off to school looking like “Little dolls” (her words). My dad wasn’t the school janitor, but he did make the furniture and cabinets in our yellow brick house, along with our playhouse, and his workshop out back. He did put in a bathroom for my mom, and it was she who painted the cabinets pink. She hung the washer on the light string for us, too.
Our home had an open-door policy and a coffeepot always on the woodstove. Friends didn’t knock. They walked in and poured a cup.
On a cloudy autumn day in 1996 I walked back into St. Joseph’s parochial school to check some detail for this book. It was midmorning. A school day. The building was absolutely deserted, the big doors unlocked, classroom doors thrown open the way doors were left when I was a child. All the kids were next door in the church: it was Grandparents’ Day. I walked over and slipped in, and there they were, performing some pretty little song for their grandpas and grandmas, and I thought how little it had changed. Still a pretty good place to raise kids.
The house where the nuns lived is gone, along with the beautiful altars that were there in the fifties. But the grottoes are still there, and my yellow brick house, too. Though it now houses the Browerville Blade newspaper, the bathroom cupboards are still pink!
It has been fun going back, a trip down memory lane for me, and so too, perhaps, for many of my readers who were raised in little towns like mine, particularly those steeped in the Catholic tradition.
This, then, is my last book. I am retiring, but leaving my many loyal readers with a glimpse of my early life, and with a thank-you for every single copy you bought and every single letter you sent. It has been a grand twenty-one years.
—L.S.
April 22, 1997
Stillwater, Minnesota
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