The Guineveres (28 page)

“What if they have no files, no records? What if they don't know what to do with the information we give them? Or if it takes them a long time to get back to us? What will we do then?” I asked. The Guineveres set down their forks.

“Vere, don't be a doubting Thomas,” Ginny said. This was a possibility we couldn't allow ourselves to consider. “Aren't you the one always talking about faith?”

“Yeah, Vere. We need you to keep the faith for all of us,” Win said. “If not you, then who? You're like … Bathsheba.”

“Bathsheba was an adulteress. She had an affair with King David, and her bastard child died because of it,” I said.

“She's definitely not Bathsheba,” Gwen said.

“Well, not Bathsheba then,” Win said. She never received high marks in church history, a fact that made her hate it even more. “Maybe Esther or someone.” She picked at her teeth with her tongue.

If I were Esther, I wanted to say, I'd be saving my people, leading The Guineveres out of our exile. I knew I didn't have that kind of power, and besides, Esther was Jewish. We had to rely on the people at the Veterans Administration, I wanted to say. But I'd learned my lesson, not to depend too heavily on anyone. You'll only be let down. Instead I said, “We have to have faith that the VA can help.”

“That's more like it, Esther,” Win said.

The days moved slowly in the convent, turning into nights, then mornings. During Instruction we learned about home economics and grammar and basic mathematics, and we tried to think about how we could best apply these skills toward helping Our Boys once we got out. We learned about the seven mortal sins and abstinence and the Divine Office, and these concepts seemed less useful to us. Sister Fran taught us that we were on Ordinary Time, the time of the liturgical year that falls outside of Lent and Advent, Easter and Christmas, penance and celebration. To us, ordinary meant unimportant, meant idle, meant waiting.

In the classroom, Sister Fran leaned up against the chalkboard when she spoke, and when she pivoted to write “Ordinary
=
Ordinalis
=
Ordo
=
Order” in tidy cursive, a line of chalk dust was etched across her lower back, her other ruler. Win reached over her desk and drew her pencil across Shirley's back, and Shirley reeled backward with a fist, only narrowly missing. “Say
ordinalis,
girls. Say it three times.”

Ordinalis, ordinalis, ordinalis.
Win now flicked tiny flecks of notebook paper into Lottie's hair. Several girls had fallen asleep, their cheeks pressed flush against their desks, their mouths shaped like oysters.

Ordinalis,
Latin for “ordinal,” which refers to the numbered weeks of Ordinary Time. And
ordo, ordo, ordo,
as Sister Fran made us repeat it, is the Latin stem, meaning “order.” Thus, she explained, Ordinary Time reflects the rhythm and order of the church. Vestments worn during this period are green, symbolizing hope and expectant anticipation. “Oh, but it's far from ordinary, girls,” Sister Fran said. “It's a season of miracles, of mystery. Now turn to John, chapter two.”

During mass that Sunday, Father James read from the Gospel about Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana. His lips quivered as he read, and his homily was short, a rehash of one we had heard around Christmas. Afterward, we hung our robes in the vestry, waiting on Father James. We'd been patient up until now, good girls, some might say, but we'd met our limits. Ebbie's postcard had reignited something in us, made us pine for lives where we could be the ones walking around a city fountain, tossing coins inside. The Veterans Administration held the answers for us. We needed a date.

“Ask for proof that he even called. Get the name of the secretary he spoke with,” instructed Ginny before we left her at the convent, still serving out the tail end of her punishment. “Threaten to tell Sister Fran again,” she said. She was holding our postcard from Ebbie. It had already begun to fray at the edges. “Or the archbishop.”

We'd threaten to write to the cardinal on top of that, to the pope, if we must. We paced the room. It was raining outside, but sunny. Lottie Barzetti said that when it rains and shines at the same time it means the devil is getting married, but what did Lottie know? We sharpened our canine teeth with our tongues.

Father James arrived more than half an hour later. Gwen's mouth contorted in ready vitriol. We were going to lay into him—we were—but then we noticed he'd been crying. He settled onto the couch and placed his head in his hands. Tentative and stunned, Gwen and Win sat down beside him; I knelt at his feet.

Father James inhaled a long, audible breath. “My brother. He's dead,” he finally said. We thought he meant another priest at first, a fellow clergyman. We were used to hearing the terms brother and sister in reference to those not really related, except by belief. “He is … was … seven years younger,” Father James said, and we knew he meant his baby brother, his flesh-and-blood brother, the kind of brother with whom he'd grown up, shot marbles, visited fishing holes. “He…” Father James's voice broke in half.

“The War?” we asked.

Father James nodded.

“Did they say his name during the petition?” Win asked, though we weren't sure why this mattered. The list continued to grow. This week it contained at least a dozen names.

Father James shook his head.

“A shame,” said Gwen. Sometimes she spoke in what we called her starlet voice, a voice so soft, so breathy, it seemed you could gather it in your hands and put it in your pocket. She spoke like this when she acted out for us in the Bunk Room the monthly confession she planned to give. “I do declare that I hid my peas in my shoes, dear Father,” she'd say, fanning herself. “And for that I am truly sorry.”

“He went into the service, and I … I went to the seminary,” Father James said. His words were drawn out as if his tongue were swollen. He'd clearly been drinking. “I didn't want to fight. I don't believe in it. I told him to join the seminary, too. It's not a bad life. Better than some. But he wouldn't listen. I told him not to fight. I was older than him. I should have protected him. I should have…”

“There, there,” Gwen said, and she placed her hand on Father James's chest, leaned into him and rested her head on his shoulder. Her eyes drifted back and forth, sweeping across Father James's body. Win and I swapped puzzled glances. If Sister Fran were there, she'd have said, “The Flesh, girls. The Flesh.”

A lot of what we knew about war, in general, we had read in textbooks, back in our Unholy Lives. But nothing we'd learned in those books taught us what to say to Father James, who at this moment slouched forward on the couch in the vestry, hanging his head in grief.

“We're sorry,” Win said.

“What happened?” I asked, but as soon as I asked it, I wished I hadn't. He died in the War, that's all I needed to know.

“He was all the family I had.” Father James, with his face turned downward, with his eyes red-rimmed and puffy, appeared fragile in this moment, so vulnerable, like a little boy. The Guineveres had to remind ourselves that he wasn't
that
old—not much older than Our Boys, in fact. Authority veils itself as age. As wisdom, too. People are so willing to follow those who claim to have answers.

“Everything happens for a reason,” I said.

“He should have joined the seminary, like me. I knew it was coming. The War. I knew we'd be protected here. They couldn't draft us, and we wouldn't have to enlist,” Father James said. “It's not that I don't believe in God—I do. I do. But I wanted … I knew I wouldn't have to fight this way. The home front needs fighters, too.”

“We understand,” Gwen said, and I'm pretty sure she meant this. The Guineveres saw ourselves as the protectors of Our Boys, even though we stood to gain in the process. In a way, I guess you could say that we all understood the costs of freedom, the effort and agony one must sustain to earn it. Gwen nuzzled into Father James again, rubbing her ear against his shoulder as though she had an itch she was trying to scratch. Then she reached for his hands resting in his lap and intertwined her fingers into his. Father James relaxed his body.

“He wouldn't listen. My brother wanted to be a hero, and now … Maybe I'm the cowardly one.” At this point he began to sob.

The Guineveres had never witnessed a grown man crying. Back then, men didn't cry. Now, when I talk to Ginny on the phone, she tells me stories of her son, of how coddled young boys are these days, how they wear their hair long and sleep in their parents' beds and talk about their
feelings
in school, as though their feelings had anything to do with their education. In the convent, however, outward displays of emotion were discouraged as the hysterics of young girls. “Above All, Restraint” could have been the guiding motto of the Sisters. Therefore, paying witness to Father James as he wept, taking such deep breaths we thought he might be choking, unnerved us, as if the universe had turned upside down.

We blinked in the face of his revelation. It was true, I'd later learn, that he'd joined the priesthood to avoid the draft. Did this make him a coward or a con man? A man of morals who let nothing stand between himself and what he believed? Better or worse than a young soldier who carried around with him a human ear? Or men who killed? We weren't sure, but we didn't need to be. In that moment, Father James was more like us, more human and demanding of compassion than we ever could have imagined. We couldn't bring up to him our visit to the Veterans Administration. At least not then, not while he was grieving.

Did Our Boys believe they were fighting for a worthy cause, we wondered as we walked back down the hill, to Sister Fran who was waiting to ensure we hadn't drunk the remnants from the chalices. And what about our parents? Had they thought they were doing something good by leaving us here? Had they thought we'd be better off somehow, enriched by the Sisters and their monastic life? We didn't think so. But how could we know? How could we tell? At lunch The Guineveres picked at our egg salad sandwiches and wondered if Our Boys had ever killed anyone in the War, and if they had, were they worried for their souls?

We were young still, didn't know that some questions should never be asked, that we wouldn't have wanted to know the answers anyway. Years later, Ginny and Win would both report that they'd shudder when people asked them
why
they had lived in a convent as girls. It didn't seem fair that
they
were the ones left answering such questions, they both complained. Sometimes they'd lie and tell whoever had asked that they were considering monastic life for themselves, that it was a trial run that didn't pan out in the end because the food wasn't very good. But their straight-lipped expressions gave them away. You can't rid yourself of that kind of pain completely, no matter how brave you are, or how good, no matter how far down you bury your memories. Memories are like that, like mustard seeds, tiny at first, but eventually the largest tree in all of the garden.

 

Involuntary Doubt

It had been weeks since Ginny had discovered the Catacombs. The Guineveres waited out the Sisters, until they had stopped scrutinizing her so closely, expecting a relapse. We bided our time, growing outwardly devout. We volunteered to wake up early to serve on breakfast duty, and we boiled the oatmeal with the diligence of Saint Juliana ministering to the sick. During Morning Instruction, we studied the hardest, paid the closest attention, raised all four of our hands to answer Sister Fran's questions about Genesis and Exodus and the Flood.

“Adam's rib,” we answered.

“Original sin,” we answered.

“Two of every species,” we answered.

“Moses on the Mount,” we answered.

Correct, four times over.

Later, while Sister Fran taught us biology lessons about the creation of the world, about amoebas and dinosaurs and Adam and Eve, she explained to us the difference between obstinate and involuntary doubt. “Obstinate doubt is the denial of truth, girls, and it's a sin. But involuntary doubt, on the other hand, is hesitation of belief or the anxiety caused by the obscurity of faith. Now when I say that God created the world in seven days, you may find such a magnificent feat nearly impossible through the lens of human rationality, for what human do you know who could accomplish such an extraordinary coup? Anybody? Anybody?”

“My dad is a construction worker, and he worked a lot of overtime,” one of The Delinquents said, and the room burst into laughter.

Sister Fran raised her whistle to her lips, but everyone hushed before she even had time to blow it. “Involuntary doubt speaks to our humanity.”

Lottie was taking such vigorous notes that her glasses slid down to the tip of her nose, and she looked like an old librarian. She raised her hand. “Does that mean, Sister, that doubt is not a sin?”

“Only if it's involuntary, dear. You see, girls, there's room for doubt, even in the faithful.”

I raised my hand, and Sister Fran acknowledged me with a hard blink. “How do you know, Sister? How do you know if your doubt is voluntary or involuntary?”

Sister Fran paused for a moment, thinking. “That's an excellent question, and we shall take it up during tomorrow's instruction. For now, I want to turn to our math lessons. Does anybody here know how to calculate the mean sum of all the hours in forty days and forty nights—the length of the upcoming liturgical season of Lent?” As if on cue, every girl bent over her desk, scratching out calculations in her notebook.

Did The Guineveres begin to doubt? We did. Did we believe it was a sin? We did not. Our doubt was involuntary, brought on by the fear that we'd be stuck at the convent forever, or until we were eighteen, which was practically the same thing to us. We were afraid Father James would let us down, like everyone else. We found it increasingly difficult to imagine our futures, to believe that the VA would have answers.