The Jewels of Tessa Kent (5 page)

“So that’s the reason you’re crying like crazy? He put his cock on your stomach? What next?” Mimi demanded.

“I touched it … a lot … I couldn’t stop touching it … he was so hard and he got even harder … and the harder he got, the more I wanted to touch it … and then … and then … he put the tip of it in.”

“
He put it in!
Jesus Christ, Teresa! Didn’t you put up a fight?”

“No … I mean I didn’t tell him not to when he asked me if I was okay, if he could … I wanted to feel it … you know … 
inside
. Just the tip of it. Mimi, just the tip. I had to know how it felt, more than anything. It was so big and I wanted it so much. I was so … it was like being out of my mind, nothing else existed.…” Teresa whispered. “… And then, oh God help me, then, after just a few seconds,
with only the tip in
, oh, Mimi, he came.
Inside me
. Without even moving. He just gave this shudder and made this sighing noise and he came. He didn’t pull out, he didn’t wait!”

“Shit! That’s not rape, that’s pure stupidity. What an asshole! But you’re a virgin, so there’s nothing to worry about. What did he say?”

“He said he was sorry and if I’d wait a little while he’d do it again, only much slower, so I’d enjoy it. Can you imagine? Again.”

“He didn’t know you were a virgin?”

“He never got in far enough to find out. He thought I was eighteen, he thought I’d been around. Oh, Mimi, what am I going to do?” Teresa cried out in anguish.

“Stop that crying, take a hot bath, I’ll give you two of my mother’s tranquilizers and a sleeping pill, and you’ll go to bed and never think about it again.
It didn’t happen
. It was a bad dream. Does he know how to find you?”

“I lied about my name and I said we were from Stamford.”

“With any luck he’ll never see you again and he’d never recognize you anyway without makeup. The whole thing is over. Over. It did not happen. Do you understand? And I don’t want to hear anything about sin, you didn’t know what you were doing, he got you drunk, it wasn’t your fault. Do you understand that, Teresa?”

“I understand what you think, Mimi.
But I know what I did
. I didn’t have to do it, but I did. I sinned. I sinned against God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I sinned against our Heavenly Mother and there’s nothing you can say that will ever change that.”

M
imi, I think I’m pregnant.” Teresa was so pale, almost blue, with panic that Mimi’s heart skipped a beat. Hastily she rose and locked the door to her room.

“You’re a virgin, how could you be? You’re late, that’s all,” she said, taking Teresa’s cold and shaking hands and rubbing them to bring some blood into her fingers.

“I’ve never been late since I got the curse a year ago, and now it’s been three whole weeks since that party. I finally made myself look up sperm in the encyclopedia at school. They swim, did you have any idea that they swim incredibly fast and they can live for a few days inside the vagina?”

“But you’re a virgin! It’s simply impossible!”

“A hymen isn’t a solid barrier—where does the blood come from when you have the curse? Your womb. Remember we read all about it in the book your mother gave you, so she wouldn’t have to tell you the facts of life herself.”

“Shit. Shit. SHIT! No, I won’t believe it. It can’t happen.”

“Mimi, it can. Face it, it has happened,” Teresa said through trembling lips that belied stoic words.

“You’ll have a miscarriage or whatever it’s called. Tonight, tomorrow, you’re only just fourteen, you can’t have a baby,” Mimi babbled in brute fear.

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself,” Teresa said wearily. “I’ve been praying on my knees for hours and hours every night, praying for God to take the baby. It’s His decision, He can stop a pregnancy. I’ve been going to the john at school between every class to see if there was any blood, I’ve been kidding myself that I felt a cramp. The truth is I’m pregnant and I can either tell my mother or I can kill myself, I don’t know which would be worse.”

“Three weeks! That’s all it is.
If
it is. You don’t have to do anything for months and months! Anything could happen!”

“I know. That’s what I’m counting on. It’s too early to have to deal with it. I waited as long as I could to tell you but I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.”

“If only …” Mimi said, and stopped.

“What?”

“Oh, damn it, Teresa, if only you weren’t such a Catholic! My mom knows a doctor, he’s a perfectly good one—”

“Don’t even say it, Mimi. Never, absolutely never. As bad as I am, that’s the one thing I cannot do. Never.
Ever.
”

“I know,” Mimi sighed deeply. She’d been sure from the beginning of this conversation that if Teresa were really pregnant, she’d never consider abortion, but she’d had to say something, just in case there was a chance that she’d see reason. My God, to ruin her future, to wreck her life over religious conviction! Mimi couldn’t make herself accept it, although she understood that for Teresa there was no other way.

“What are we going to do?” Mimi asked after a long silence.

“Pray. If God decides to stop a pregnancy, that’s His
decision, and not my fault, not anything I’ve done to cause it. I’m allowed to pray, pray and wait. There’s nothing else.”

“If I pray too, will it help, or do only Catholic prayers get through?”

“Pray. ‘Pray without ceasing,’ as Saint Paul recommended.” Teresa tried to smile at her friend, but tears rolled steadily down her cheeks. “You’re such a pagan, it might be good for God to hear from the likes of you.”

Agnes Horvath had not been the youngest in a family of five sisters without absorbing a great stock of female lore. She had never experienced morning sickness when she was pregnant with Teresa, but when she heard, three days in a row, the smothered sounds of vomiting coming from Teresa’s bathroom before her daughter finally appeared, pale and red-eyed, late for breakfast, unable to eat, and mumbling something about stomach flu going around the school, she began to suspect. When Teresa arrived home from school each day, the stomach flu miraculously cured until the next morning, her heart was speared by the truth.

But Teresa was a virgin, to her knowledge. Teresa was absolutely a good girl, to her knowledge. Teresa had never been alone with a boy, to her knowledge. Teresa, to her knowledge, had never yet been kissed.

But Teresa must be pregnant. Teresa her daughter, perfect and adored, for whose future she had lived, was a stranger to her; immoral, unclean, evil, cunning, lying, and damned to Hell Fire for Eternity.

On Friday morning Agnes lay in wait outside Teresa’s bathroom. As the girl emerged, staggering and deathly pale, her mother gripped her by one arm and slapped her with all her strength across her cheek.

“
How could you do this to me!
” she spat, and slapped her again, on the other cheek. “How? How? You filthy slut!”

Teresa burst into tears and would have fallen to the
carpet if Agnes’s clutching hand hadn’t been keeping her upright.

“Oh yes, cry, that’s going to make a difference, that’s going to make you a decent girl again, you fool, you
criminal
little fool. Go to your room. I’ll call Sacred Heart to say you’re sick. Wait for me.”

A minute later she returned to find Teresa huddled in an armchair, sobbing so hard that she was getting hysterical.

“Shut up! If you don’t, I’ll hit you until you do! Do you think you have a right to those tears? I’m the one who should be crying,” Agnes panted in rage. “I’m the one you put aside because your lust was stronger than your love for your mother.”

“No … no … it had nothing to do with you,” Teresa wailed.

“It has
everything
to do with me. You know that lust is a mortal, deadly sin and yet you choose it, just as you chose the influence of Mimi Peterson rather than mine—she must have had a hand in this, how else could you have met a man? But who has watched over you all your life, who has given you everything She could, who managed to find the money to send you to Sacred Heart, who has believed utterly in your future, who has nourished your talent? Look at how you’ve repaid my love.
You are beneath contempt
. I have no words to use for the kind of girl you are. All my pride and love was folly. I never knew you.”

“Mother!” Teresa cried in anguish.

“Don’t call me mother. No daughter of mine could do what you’ve done. Who is he? No, don’t tell me! I don’t want to know any of the vile details, they’d make me sicker than I am. Have you confessed your sin?”

“No.”

“How long did you intend to go without confessing a mortal sin? So that you could repeat it and repeat it? You disgust me! But you’re caught now. We’re going to see Father Brennan this minute. After you confess, we’ll talk to him in his study. He’ll know where to send you.”

“What?”

“You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? There are places for evil, godless, shameful sinners like you, places to stay until the baby is born and adopted.”

“But it’ll be months, months! I can’t just disappear. The Madams of the Sacred Heart, all the family, they’ll know, and they’ll guess why.”

“Teresa, you’ve ruined my life. I’ve lived for you, the person I thought you were, a person who doesn’t exist. But if anyone else ever knows about this
you will have killed me
. I have only one thing left, our position in my family. Can you hear what my sisters would say about you? Do you think four women, even if they are family, will stay silent forever? Are you too stupid to imagine how the stain, the gossip will spread, how your life will become a dirty joke? Pregnant at fourteen! Don’t you see that no decent man will ever have anything to do with you? I’m giving you a second chance, don’t you understand? Not because you deserve it. You deserve nothing but punishment, and you will be punished, Teresa, trust in that.”

“But … why? Why are you giving me a second chance?”

“Because I can’t let my daughter become a neighborhood scandal, a dirty joke. The daughter of whom I was so proud, the girl I raised, never realizing what she really was.”

“I still don’t see how I can vanish and then come back here without people guessing,” Teresa persisted.

“It means all of us moving, as far away as possible, someplace where no one knows us. Your father will have to sacrifice his job and find work in another school. I’ll tell him tonight.”

“He doesn’t know? Only you?”

“It’s not a man’s business to know until he has to,” Agnes said grimly. “Go get dressed for church now, don’t forget your hat. And your rosary.”

*   *   *

“Help me to understand you clearly,” Sandor Horvath said to his wife that night, after she’d told him everything. “You expect me to give up my position and find another job?”

“You have to. There’s no other way. I’ve thought of everything and it’s the only way we can hide what’s happened.”

“And Father Brennan will arrange to send Teresa to this place in Texas to wait for the birth and the child will be adopted by strangers? And then she’ll come home and forget all about it?”

“Adopted by a good Catholic family. We can be sure of that.”

“And you can be sure I refuse!”

“Sandor! You can’t refuse! You can’t let her go away for six or seven months and then come back here. Everybody would be counting on their fingers, everybody would know. We might as well take out an announcement.”

“Agnes, this child is our grandchild. This child may be my grandson.
I will never consent to give up this child
. This is my flesh and blood.”

“We can’t afford to be sentimental. Teresa’s future—”

“I don’t give a damn about her future! I don’t give a damn about your sisters! Or your sacred reputation as mother of the family beauty. What you ask goes against everything I believe in and I simply will not do it. And you can’t do it without my consent.”

Agnes looked at him and realized immediately that nothing she could say would move him now, unless, unless … he’d agree to the plan of last resort that she’d made during the four days she’d spent thinking.

“Sandor, if we moved, if you got another job, somewhere where nobody knows us, I could … bring up the child as … my own. I’m only thirty-three, it would seem perfectly natural.”

“The baby would become our child, Teresa’s brother?” he asked slowly.

“Or sister, but yes, our child, yours and mine.”

“And how would Teresa feel about that?”

“How she feels doesn’t matter. She’s given up any right to be considered. Do you think that the penance Father Brennan gave her wiped away her sin?”

“Did he give her absolution, did she receive the Sacrament of Penance?”

“Yes.”

“Then God has forgiven her. Can you do less? I’ll start inquiries about another position tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Sandor.”

How typically male, Agnes thought in strangled, furious silence. Men thought it was just that easy. Confess and be absolved. Act like a loathsome, lewd, impure whore, destroy your mother’s rightful joy and pride and hope, force your father to give up a position of prestige—and still be forgiven, forgiven because you’ve told the priest what you’d done and said hundreds of rote prayers. No, she could never accept that, not even if it went against all the teachings of the church.