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  After finding a space in a third-row pew close to the altar, and saying her customary prayer, “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts,” Lee allowed herself to really see. The dark faces and arms beside and in front of her were actually variations of the same white, pink, cream, sallow, ruddy complexions that she saw at St. Anthony’s. The bodies wore similar clothes: sedate dark suits on the men, rustling colorful dresses on the women, white gloves, pill-box and broad-brimmed hats. The hair in the colored congregation seemed greased and straightened, braided and tied, just as hair at St. Anthony’s was rolled and pin-curled, crinkled by permanents, French twisted, or Vitalizied. Noses at St. Jerome’s were certainly flatter, or wider, lips fuller. Lee could imagine how her narrow, slightly hooked nose must appear, how St. Anthony’s noses would seem too thin, too skimpy, the white faces lipless, almost sick.

  In front of Lee, the hair of one old colored woman stuck out in frizzled graying tufts from under a battered fedora. There was an identical old woman at St. Anthony’s; Lee often sat behind her in the next to last pew. The St. Anthony’s woman could have been this colored woman’s twin: the identical gray tufts sneaking out from under an identical hat, only the skin color different.

  It was the same conclusion Lee drew from the nature books she read with her daughters, showing pictures of zebras, giraffes, elephants, duckbill platypuses. God seemed to have been experimenting, creating an endless variation of bodies, limbs, hair, color and size, form and filling. Here at St. Jerome’s were just more examples, more human beings—variations on the same theme.

  Along with those insights and feelings that first Sunday, sitting in St. Jerome’s, Lee felt a little self-important, and then a little vengeful. Part of the feeling came from Father Palmer’s previous sermon, his calls to be high-minded, asking the colored people and the few whites to take the serious path of social justice, and part came from the stricken look that crossed the priest’s face when finally he came from the side door to the center of the altar and she realized that he actually saw her.

  Afterwards, she stopped looking up to the altar unless absolutely sure that David Palmer’s back was to the congregation. Still, she could feel his eyes during Mass coming to rest on her, could feel his glance from the sidelong looks she received from the dark people beside her, could feel a cobweb touch on her lips when she took the host in her mouth from his hands, her eyes tightly shut. In all the Sundays that followed, before St. Jerome’s closed the last Sunday in May, she saw David Palmer only when he was not looking at her.

  Charles did not know that Lee and his daughters were attending the colored church, and apparently the girls didn’t notice the change either, for they never said a word.

  The Bettlemain family despised “niggers” in a general, matter-of-fact, accepted fashion. Lon refused to hire them as plumbers’ helpers, saying they were lazy and dirty. Brother made stupid jokes: “Rub a pickaninny’s head for good luck.” Lee couldn’t believe he was serious. But Brother was like that, a simple replica of Lon, his balding, overweight father, repeating anything he thought was funny: a joke, a jingle from television. For the Bettlemains—except for Willie Mae, unnoticed as a doorstop, and Algebra on the days she picked up the laundry—south of Gordon Street, the colored section of Strickland, might as well have been on the moon.

  Now, as Lee had once divided the week according to the sewing money to meet the house payment, now she divided it in relation to that hour at Mass spent in David Palmer’s presence. Monday morning held a particular sadness, for then it was seven complete twenty-four-hour periods before she would be back at St. Jerome’s. Why did she yearn so? Soon, he would see that she was pregnant, maybe even realize that she’d been pregnant that afternoon, discover just how despicable she was.

  On the last Saturday in November, Lee was two months along, all of her regular clothes too tight in the middle, all of her maternity clothes too big to wear. Today, she resolved, today she’d have to make confession, couldn’t keep putting it off. She’d have to tell Father Kennedy of the pregnancy, tell him how at first she’d wished the baby not dead, just not there. Still, she knew she’d make a “bad” confession, for there was no way of relating the afternoon in the rectory to any one, not to the old priest, not even to God.

  Father Kennedy had often advised Lee not to make confession every Saturday, that her sins were too few, too trivial—bland curses, impatience—hardly worth taking up his time. But lately, on his Saturday evening visits, he had taken to scolding: “I didn’t mean for you to give up the confessional altogether, my girl. Soon, you’ll be forced to do Easter duty, and Confession once a year is not nearly enough.”

  She promised him to go that very next Saturday but teased, “Patrick, you’re never satisfied. You’d think being part of this integration business would be enough reparation for all my sins, and I wouldn’t even need Confession.”

  She was glad Charles was off fishing with Brother, so she could speak plainly to the old priest. Lately, her husband’s presence in a room, awake or asleep, filled her with a sad kindness.

  “Why are you involved in this integration business anyway, love, this political charade?” Father Kennedy asked.

  It was a question she’d expected from the priest earlier. Where were the other questions he might have asked? She had thought Father Kennedy would pounce immediately, interrogate her about her car being outside the new rectory for four hours. She’d made up several versions of plausible stories. The best one was that Father Palmer had been unconscious and she’d been afraid to leave him. But the lie wasn’t needed. Was it possible that Father Kennedy hadn’t seen her car? If so, where was he for an entire Monday afternoon? She scrutinized the old priest’s grizzled, weathered face when he wasn’t looking, screened his voice for inflections, for innuendo, but found nothing except, now, this question. “Why are you going to Mass at St. Jerome’s?”

  “It’s the thing to do,” Lee answered.

  “Because everyone’s doing it?”

  “Ha! A lot you know. There were only eight white people at St. Jerome’s last week, and sometimes not even that. It’s terrible the way the parish won’t cooperate, and when you think of how we’ve treated the coloreds all those years.”

  “I thought you said the Lebanese in Atlanta were fair, had grocery stores in the colored sections? That your dad paid coloreds as much as whites and had some of the first colored foremen on his buildings.”

  “I don’t mean my family. I mean collectively. What whites have done to coloreds over the years, the discrimination, collectively.”

  “Ah, I see, collectively.” Father Kennedy drew his lips to the side, chewed on his overhanging mustache, looked up at the dining-room ceiling. “Watch out, young lady, for whatever you take on collectively.”

  What could the old priest know? Lee asked for the hundredth time as she knelt, waiting her turn, the last in line for Confession. The muffled voices of the other penitents filtered through the red velvet curtains on either side of the narrow box in which Father Kennedy sat. The tiny red light above the curtains clicked off and on, activated by the kneeler inside. Lee looked through the shadows of stained-glass light striated across the empty pews, up to the large wooden crucifix and white corpus hanging above the altar, barely visible in the late afternoon. Except for the red lamp on the altar and the small votive candles on the sides illuminating the statues, all was wrapped in winter’s early dark.

  Once again Lee turned the pages of her prayerbook to the section marked, “Guidance to Making a Good Confession,” to the questions on the sixth and ninth commandments, on impure actions: “Have you committed an immodest act?” A “bad confession” was not telling every single sin, not detailing every immodest act.

  The image of David Palmer rose, seen through half-open eyes, the hair on his body in fanning lines across his chest. He was kneeling above her, his fingers opening her; he was pushing into her. His hands ran down her thighs with tiny forward motions, again and again.
“You have beautiful legs, Lee.” And after what seemed a long time, after he was completely inside, his mouth close against her ear, “You have a beautiful name—Lee, Lee.”

  She pulled herself out of the memory, for to think of any part of that afternoon was to relive it again and again, an exotic flower opening and closing: his hands, the taste of his skin, the sinewy whiteness of his legs and back as he left the room to get the glasses of wine.

  It was the reverse of the nuns’ caution: that the smallest venial sin could lead to a mortal one. The great sin had led to all sorts of small ones, and now she was going to make a bad confession. There was no way out of it. The unexpected pregnancy and her regrets could be told under “failure to accept the trials and sufferings of this life,” and the lies to Claire about having done church work on that afternoon could be covered by the phrase, “small fibs.” But she knew if she said, “immodest acts,” the old priest would say, “Please explain.” And there were just too many gruesome details: adultery with a priest—a priest that Father Kennedy knew—my god! Adultery while she was pregnant. Still, a good confession might have been possible, especially in the pain of David Palmer’s stinging silence, but hovering over the terrible facts was the knowledge that she wasn’t contrite, not weighed down by guilt, not mourning the loss of her fidelity, not any of those things. On the contrary, on the simple scale of comparing how she’d felt before and how she felt now, she was glad, thankful for the afternoon in the rectory.

  Inside the confessional, everything was bathed in the red light coming through the red velvet curtain. Always, entering the close blood-colored stall made Lee think of Poe’s short story, Masque of the Red Death. But she didn’t think of it today as she started her confession, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” The words were rote, but even as they tumbled out, along with a fumbling in her mind to remember exactly when she’d last made confession, she realized something was wrong, something was missing behind the curtained grill.

  “It’s been two months since my last confession, and I’m pregnant, I’m,” she started, coming closer to whisper through the wire held by a wooden carving into an ornate design of the cross.

  What was the matter? What was the difference? “I’m pregnant, Father,” she whispered again, fully intending to follow the script she prepared with, “and I didn’t want the baby at first.” But the sentence hung in her mind somewhere below her realization that it wasn’t Father Kennedy sitting behind the grill.

  Lee suddenly, precipitously, realized that she didn’t smell the familiar odor of tobacco smoke that always filled Father Kennedy’s confessional, nor did she hear the old priest’s rattled breathing. Also, she didn’t see, shining through the dark screen, the glowing tip of his cigarette. And if there was no cigarette, he should have been getting one out of the pack and striking a match. But there was no movement on the other side of the grill.

  Instead, there was a complete and fearsome stillness, as if someone were holding his breath. Instantly, she knew: Father Palmer sat on the other side of the screen, his face close to it as hers was. She felt, knew, breathed the knowledge in with the red air. Lee held her own breath as long as she could and then gasped and repeated, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and I’m pregnant.”

  The words came without intention, as if someone had picked up a phonograph needle off a record and set it back down again at the beginning. Still, there was only silence from behind the screen.

  She took another breath.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally managed to strangle out. “I have to leave.” She rose from the kneeler, pushed back the red curtain, and walked carefully, holding her arms straight to her sides, out into the darkened church. From behind her came a word, but Lee couldn’t be sure what the word was and if the word was directed to her. And what was the word? “Wait”?

  “Well, well, Jezebel,” Lee whispered under her breath on the drive home, and she thought the phrase again throughout the evening with Charles and the girls, and silently throughout Father Kennedy’s late coffee and explanation that he’d been called to give Extreme Unction to a dying parishioner and had swapped Confession hours with Father Palmer.

  At last, sitting alone in the lamplight in her bedroom, she stroked her stomach in a self-comforting way, its sloping roundness more noticeable in the loose white flannel gown than in her clothes with waistbands.

  For if the afternoon in the rectory ran like a crevasse through Lee Bettlemain’s life, separating her from the life she’d had before, from the person she’d been before, then that evening’s Confession was another splintering and deepening of that chasm. Lee went back over the seconds in the confessional, studying her words as if they’d been spoken by a stranger.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I’m pregnant.” What must David Palmer be thinking? “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I’m pregnant.”

  First, he would have to realize that she thought she was making confession to Father Kennedy, for the old priest always took the odd Saturdays of the month. And second, because of the way she’d said the second time, “I have sinned and I’m pregnant,” and nothing else, he’d think she was confessing to being pregnant as if that in itself were the sin. And if—if that were the sin—then the sin was the afternoon in the rectory, and the result of the sin was the pregnancy—at least it would have to be that explanation in his mind.

  In a convoluted, projecting, egg-timer way, she cooked up what David Palmer’s reaction might have been on the other side of the grill. How he must have startled on hearing her voice, how he must have held his breath—as she had—and leaned closer, possibly even putting his face to the screen.

  For Lee knew, knew beyond her ability to know, that Father David Palmer believed she was pregnant with his child, and her nerves, even her teeth, felt green-apple sharp with the realization. Whereas before she could thank him, could bless him for his passion and his skilled lovemaking, could even in lucid moments understand his rejection—after all he was a priest who had broken his vow of celibacy—now the confined energy of the weeks of waiting for some sign from him swelled up into self-pity. The same pride that kept her from calling the rectory, and from ever again asking Ralph about the priest’s whereabouts, made her bless this mysterious outcome, made her rejoice in this turning. Let him taste confusion, she thought.

  Chapter 8

  The days are long, but the years are short.

  The Happiness Project, Grechen Rubin

  December’s shopping, buying, and wrapping presents passed swiftly into its final climactic day, and Lee found that she needn’t have worried about her daughters’ dolls and toys on lay away. Ray sent a $200 money order, a crinkled piece of stiff paper with faded printing as though it had spent days in the bottom of a purse. Lee paid for the lay away and bought expensive gifts for Charles and his family, and for her parents in Atlanta. The quick, empty purchases of soft sweaters and scarves, perfume and aftershave lotion were very different from her careful, frugal making and selecting of previous years. But finally, with Charles and the girls asleep, with everything wrapped and under the tree, with the falling of the short dry pine needles making a faint patter on the crisp bright packages, she closed the front door and went to midnight Mass alone.

  St. Jerome’s church was filled with silver-papered pots of crimson poinsettias. The brilliant red plants sat on the window sills and a solid bank of the Christmas flowers stood on raised tiers behind the altar. The voices of St. Jerome’s choir and congregation were deeper, richer than at St. Anthony’s and flowed like a dark-chocolate coating over the hymns and Christmas carols. At the end of Mass, the church’s overhead lights were turned off and all that showed on the altar were the steady flames of tall white tapers and twinkling red votive lights. Drained of every energy except the need to be with David Palmer, Lee stood in the dark, holding hands with the people beside her. “Silent night, holy night,” the dark voices sang, and Lee, sleep and desire calling in the incense-perfumed air, could have floa
ted away on the beautiful carol.

  January’s rain-sodden routine was a relief after all the Christmas hurry. The pecans and leaves were completely gone from under the trees now, but Lee continued to look searchingly across the grounds, down the school walkways, hoping. Still, she never saw Father Palmer except on Sundays. Ray, in pity or something close to it, followed the money order with a card every week and a twenty-dollar bill. They were maudlin greetings, saying, in flowery script, sappy things Ray would never have said in person: “There’s nothing like a sister.” With the extra money, Lee hired Willie Mae for an afternoon a week and slipped $5 instead of $3 into her folded hands. Whatever the money bought the black woman, it bought freedom for Lee: an afternoon to sew new maternity clothes, to shop, and one afternoon a month to play bridge with Claire and her friends. Also, ten dollars a week went into the savings account.

  Lee’s father had sent his usual $100 bill in a Christmas card signed “Mom & Dad,” and although Atlanta was only a five-hour drive away on US 41, it was almost as if the city and Abram and Darcy didn’t exist. Her father called every other month to report on where he was working, what building was coming along, and her question, “How’s Mom?”—and his answer: “Your mom’s the same”—covered a lot of territory. His tone sent Lee walking mentally through the silent pink-gray halls of her parents’ colonial home in Druid Hills. In a bedroom of mauve satin and rosewood, she could see her mother’s curiously youthful face asleep, smell the bourbon.

  Better to be in a mess—Lee had taken to calling her life “a mess”—better to wonder and worry, to yearn for what you can’t have. Anything was better than an alcoholic stupor.

  In reality, the mess was not so bad. Paradoxically, the pregnancy, which had made her miserable just months before, which had been a liability that she vowed to keep hidden from Charles and the Bettlemains as long as possible, now was a real child in her body, a treasure, a strength, even a weapon.