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  “She told me to take the money if I needed it,” she whispered, giving herself permission, carrying the cumbersome piece of luggage back to the living room. Still, undoing the clasps felt wrong, a little like stealing or opening someone else’s mail. In all the years Ray had been leaving packages, suitcases, Lee had never opened the first one. But this week was different. Inside the traveling bag, the clothes and shoes were jumbled, smelling faintly of tobacco and perfume, Arpege, exactly as if Ray herself were locked away among her things. In the inside elastic side pocket was the money, wrapped in two rubber bands. Lee counted: $535. Next to the money was a plastic bag half full of dried gray-green leaves. She opened the bag to sniff, knowing immediately what it was, despite never having smelled it before—marijuana. In among the dusty slivers of grass were rolling papers, the same thin, filmy sheets that their grandfather Giddy James had used to make his home-made cigarettes when she and Ray were children.

  Chapter 4

  The heart has need of some deceit,

  to make the pistons rise and fall.

  Countee Cullen, “Only the Polished Skeleton”

  Sunday. Lee left Charles asleep and took herself and the girls to eleven o’clock Mass. Over the years, she’d tried to make an arrangement with her husband, that she’d sleep in on Saturday and he could do the same, but instead he went fishing with Brother, leaving the house at 5:00, the same time he left for work. “Sunday is my day off from doing anything,” he claimed, not dressing until 12:30, just in time to leave for his parents’ house and the Bettlemains’ Sunday dinner.

  It was hard for Lee to get herself and Cassie and Lill ready for church. For the girls, there were black patent-leather shoes, tiny white gloves, dress-up dresses, and a disk of white lace bobby-pinned to their crowns. The gloves kept getting lost and the lace slipped to one side in their slick blonde hair, or fell off altogether. For herself there were hose, high heels, her one suit—a black and white herringbone check, her going-away outfit from her wedding, now a little tight in the waist—and a pill-box hat with black lace halfway down her face.

  She wished Charles would go to church with her, wished they could be one of those families who walked down the middle aisle to the front pews. The King family with their eleven children were a procession and filled up two rows. Lee always sat in the back, partly because Cassie and Lill wiggled and kicked, but also because a sign, “Married to a Non-Catholic,” felt attached to her shoulders.

  “Don’t force the issue,” Father Kennedy had said in Confession, “it will only harden his heart against you and against our mother, the Church. A conversion comes from God, from love, not from a wife a-begging and a-being at the altar every time the doors open.”

  It was good advice.

  After all, when they married, Charles had been generous, had agreed to everything, signed the consent papers to let the children be raised Catholic—signed without reading them—like Catholicism was some kind of costume that could be put on or taken off at will. For Lee, Charles’s parents were shadows; they and the town of Strickland seemed to exist only for the telling. “My folks have a plumbing shop down in south Georgia,” he’d said when they first met. “I’m the onliest one in my family to go to college.”

  There was a log-cabin, school-of-hard-knocks sound to it that went along with Charles’s wide shoulders and shaggy golden hair. He was kind and soft-spoken, never butting in to express his opinion, so different from the men in her family who talked over each other as though what they said was all that mattered. Charles’s blond Viking breadth and height delighted the dark convent girl who knew nothing of boys except what she’d read in books. He was a Georgia freshman on a football scholarship dating a Mount De Sales senior, giving her his varsity jacket and high-school class ring, which she wore with a great wad of dirty adhesive tape that hung down in the palm of her hand. At Christmas, the ring was replaced with a small diamond solitaire, and they married a week after Lee graduated. Two-thirds of her senior class made it to the altar before the summer was out, and for a girl to have done differently in the 1950s meant she was plain or wanted to be a nun, or was on the margins in some way.

  They married even though Charles had flunked most of the spring-quarter courses, had lost his scholarship, and would have to sit out a season on academic probation. Not a potential star, his teachers were not pressured to give him passing marks, and when he failed there were no remedial classes or tutors through the summer to raise his scores.

  Charles had put “Baptist” on the consent form the priest in Atlanta had him sign, but neither Charles nor his family ever went to church. “Lon had a fallin’ out with the preacher,” Claire said, as though that explained everything. Instead, the huge meals that Claire and Willie Mae cooked seemed the Bettlemains’ religious feast, their Sunday rite. Fried chicken and cured ham, or chicken and dumplings and fresh ham—that part of the menu never varied—and three or four vegetables: squash, pole beans, acre peas, corn, fried okra, tomatoes, stewed cabbage; and salads, potato and congealed, and always rice and gravy; and then desserts: coconut cake or chocolate, churned peach or vanilla ice cream, pecan or apple pies. Willie Mae cooked all Saturday and Claire all Sunday morning to have the platters of food on the table at exactly one o’clock—Lon Bettlemain’s requirement.

  Lee grew to crave her mother’s lazy Sunday dinners, always two dishes: kibi, the Lebanese raw-meat dish, the mint and parsley salad, tabouli, and the thin Arabic bread that served as a fork.

  St. Anthony’s was a narrow white plaster building with a red-tiled roof and a tall steeple in front, holding a bell that rang for the Masses at 8:00 and 11:00. Lee and her two daughters waited outside on the small sections of grass until the bell started its deep calls. Inside, the church was wonderfully cool and dark, and the high arched windows of stained glass threw blue and purple shadows over the kneeling people. Lee always sat in the back pew next to the same window, a lead-partitioned stained-glass Christ holding a lamb, his other hand raised in benediction.

  Father Palmer came in from the left side of the altar. In green vestments, embroidered in gold and rust, he stood before the altar, his back toward the congregation. He kept his arms raised until the eleven stokes of the bell ended.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” the priest intoned.

  “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,” responded the servers, whose starched white chasubles crackled over their black cassocks. Lee knew the English translation for the Latin by heart, knew without looking at it in her heavy gold-leaf missal.

  Father Kennedy’s way of saying Mass was to rumble hastily through the prayers, often omitting the homily altogether. He’d read the gospel and say, “Well, that pretty much covers it.” But Father Palmer’s way was slow and dramatic, pronouncing the Latin words distinctly—even with the wire around his front tooth—adding prayers and information. The old priest’s Masses lasted forty-five minutes at the longest, and on good days he could whiz through in thirty. The young priest used up the full hour and often went beyond that time limit. Today, even before the Kyrie, he was stretching the service out with a lecture.

  “Today’s Mass celebrates blessed Martin De Porres, born of a Spanish knight and a Negro woman from Panama,” the priest turned to tell the congregation, his face serious with the information. “De Porres inherited the features and dark complexion of his mother, and for that reason, his father eventually turned Martin out of the house.”

  Lee felt her Mediterranean skin, heavy and warm as brown velvet, settle on her arms and face. She searched the backs of the heads in front of her, looking for hair darker or as dark as her own, but found none. She searched Father Palmer’s face for a reason to bring up coloring, but could see nothing except the energy that possessed him every time he preached. He told of Martin’s joining the Dominican Order as a lay brother and caring for the sick and the slaves brought to Peru from Africa. And all the while, his large hands lifted and fell in rhythmic time with his voice.


  “This black man had a gift for miracles. No formal training and yet he was consulted by the great churchmen of his day. Let us pray for his canonization soon.”

  And later, Father Palmer’s main sermon was twenty minutes long, a tirade against the Planned Parenthood organization recently formed in Atlanta. The priest paced back and forth in front of the altar, and each time he returned to the podium to look at his notes, his voice deepened and threatened, waves that washed over the congregation.

  What do you know about having a baby? Lee thought, listening but not looking up to the shining face that had held her imagination all week. Her abdomen tightened. Against each of Father Palmer’s points about birth control and abortion, she gave him a question: What about women who live in tenements with too many children? Young girls with families that would throw them out? What about women who have been raped?

  Lee could see herself in those situations, the terror of having a child under those circumstances. With a clarity and honesty that made her shiver inside, she knew she’d never faced anything hard. Silent and peculiar as the Bettlemains were, they had put up with her, Charles’s dark, foreign wife, and paid the hospital bills when the children were born. Again, she silently asked the priest: What do you know about having a baby without a husband, without money, without health, without all it takes to have a child? You’re so squeamish you couldn’t even look at your own tooth.

  Finally, stiff-armed, Father Palmer grasped the sides of the podium, shook it, and asked, “Why do we kill our children, our future? Why? Why?” He asked the question over and over, more times than necessary, until Lee wanted to shout back, “Well, why? Why?”

  The priest stopped. And then, in a voice louder and more intense, similar to the great bell outside, he bellowed, “Because we can! Because we can!” He wiped his hand across his forehead as if in pain. The congregation seemed to hold its breath as the priest looked out across the pews, looked up to the choir balcony, and then appeared, blankeyed, to look past the walls of the church into some future that no one could see but himself. “We sacrifice the future of countless innocents, because we can!” he repeated in the same booming timbre, and then softer, “Because we can,” and softer still, “Because we can,” and softer yet, “Because we can.” He paused, took a breath, and went on in a much louder tone. “Like bullies, like playground bullies, who are bigger and smarter, we take advantage of the small, the weak, the nameless, the voiceless.”

  Lee had no answer to this argument. She held Cassie and Lill close on either side, glad of their thin arms under her hands, glad of their bony-kneed legs dangling off the pew, glad of the tiny tangled knot of a baby inside her body.

  At the end of the service, Father Palmer announced a special event in the church on Wednesday night, “a very important meeting.” He repeated the date and time twice, seeming to demand attendance, but he didn’t say why he was calling on all the parish to attend. Lee shook her daughters awake to leave.

  It was her report later to Father Kennedy—his usual Sunday visit—that the young priest actually had three sermons: his saint sermon, his gospel sermon, and at the very end, before the last blessing, when the girls had given up twitching and fallen asleep, just when Lee herself felt she couldn’t endure another word, he had his-attend-the-meeting sermon.

  “He’s crafty all right. Has his reasons, he does,” Father Kennedy said, his Irish brogue thickening as it always did when suggesting some connivance. “It’s no accident that His Eminence is commending this colored man, this De Porres fellow for sainthood.”

  Lee and the old priest sat at the dining-room table and the late autumn sun came in slanted bars of light through the jalousie windows. Charles, pants unbuttoned, legs elevated, lay in the recliner, watching a football game. Cassie and Lill drifted in and out of the house, to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water. After the Bettlemains’ dinner and the return home, a Sunday calm had settled over the afternoon, and Lee was glad for the old priest’s visit. For who else was willing to discuss sermons and saints with her, to talk about David Palmer without suspicion?

  “It’s integration, love, the big thing in the Catholic Church right now—social justice. De Porres, when he’s canonized, is going to be called the Patron Saint of Social Justice. There’s a push from the Pope on down to bring the coloreds in, to stop having two churches.”

  “How do you feel?” Lee asked. There seemed always a difference in the way the old man said, “colored.”

  “A great relief for us priests, let me tell you, not having to say double Masses on Sunday—two at St. Anthony’s and another at St. Jerome’s.”

  Most of the time, Lee forgot St. Jerome’s, the Catholic church for colored people in Strickland existed, except for the Indian and Negro mission collections, when it was pointed out that St. Jerome’s stood to gain, or, when taking Willie Mae Waters home, she caught a glimpse of the gray concrete-block building, its plain glass windows and unpainted walls, down a dirt side street.

  “Years ago in Atlanta, they tried to have two Catholic Women’s Clubs,” Lee said, looking directly into the old priest’s eyes to gauge his reaction. “One for the Lebanese women and one for the Amacanias. My father went crazy, said those hoity-toity women, the Catholic Women’s Club in Druid Hills, were saying we had colored blood.”

  Lee could still see her father flapping his thick arms like a great dark buzzard, blustering, hear her mother’s slurred reply, “Who in the hell in their right mind, Abram, wants to be in the Catholic Women’s Club anyway? Or to be a Catholic woman for that matter?”

  “That’s not the point, Darcy, you just don’t get it,” her father had complained.

  Father Kennedy wiped the coffee from his yellow-gray whiskers with the back of his hand and lit another cigarette. “About birth control, well, Father Palmer’s on shaky ground there.” He glanced over at Charles, who now was asleep. Abstract discussion was the rule of Lee’s and Father Kennedy’s conversations outside the confessional. “People do pretty much as always, which is about as good as they can. His Eminence is still a very young priest, you know. Still thinks he’s a-going to change the world.”

  “How old is he?” Lee kept her voice level and traced a design in the yellow plastic table cloth with her fingernail, promising herself to paint them tonight with clear polish. Monday’s appointment to take Father Palmer to the dentist lay like a sliver of betrayal in every word she spoke to the elderly priest.

  “About forty, I figure. He came to his vocation late, love, after college and the military—a delayed vocation, we call it. Not like us Irish lads—in the seminary since I was fifteen.”

  Lee wanted to ask other questions, find out exactly how old David Palmer was: What school? Which service? How long had he been a priest? What did he do when he wasn’t saying Mass or picking up pecans? Instead, she asked Father Kennedy if he wanted more coffee.

  No, he covered his cup with his hand. “Abortion, of course, is a different kettle of fish altogether, choosing death instead of life. Closing the door on another human being—no matter how the little troublemaker got started. Incest, rape, it doesn’t matter—have to give everyone an equal chance.”

  “Being a bully?”

  “What?”

  “It’s what Father Palmer said this morning. Because we’re bigger and smarter, we can kill someone who is smaller and weaker. We’re bullies.”

  The old priest took a deep drag on his cigarette, seeming to try and pull the smoke down into his toes. “Well, I guess that’s as good a way of putting it as any. You don’t see Margaret Sanger doing away with rich people, now do you, just because they’re using up most of the world’s substance? Wouldn’t do much good either, would it? Tycoons have a way of fighting back, don’t they?” He chuckled. “Still, it’s education what makes the difference, love, between us and the Third World countries. Educated countries, same all over the world, even Catholic Ireland, seventeen live births per thousand a year. Those are the figures—hard and true. Education’s
the thing.”

  Abruptly, seeming to decide in a second that the visit was over, Father Kennedy rose, smeared ashes on his chest in an effort to flick them off, and made for the door to leave. Lee followed outside onto the carport. Neither of them looked at Charles asleep in the chair as they passed.

  “It’s about time you’re thinking of going back to school yourself, love, isn’t it? Lilith will be four soon, right?”

  Lee didn’t answer. She brushed white flecks from the hunched shoulders of the old priest’s black cassock as he walked in front of her.

  “Drive safe,” she called. In the late afternoon light, the huge red and yellow Buick rolled slowly out into the street and followed the curb away.

  Coming back into the living room, Lee stood gazing down on Charles’s complacent, sleeping face, a thin film of oil and sweat in the folds under his eyes. She called out sharply, louder than she intended. “Are you going to snore the rest of the day away? You promised to mow the backyard!”

  Charles, fumbling, sat up, his skin flushed, his eyes red. “I will,” he said, and rubbed the top of his head, disordering the strands of blond hair that appeared fewer each day. He looked to the television and seemed to stop himself from saying, “As soon as the game is over.” For it was over, the two announcers making end-of-the-game comments.

  Slowly, after groping under the recliner for his shoes and going into the kitchen for a cold beer, he pulled the short rope of the lawn mower into a roar and cut four strips of grass, starting at the azaleas and moving inward. When the mower ran out of gas, two-thirds of the yard was still full of red-tipped sour weed, higher than Lill’s head.