If They Knew Yvonne
Part 3
to Andre and Jeb
The campus was not a very large one, but it was large enough so you could avoid seeing someone. I stopped going to the student center for coffee, and we had no classes together; we only saw each other once in a while, usually from a distance, walking between buildings. We exchanged waves and the sort of smile you cut into your face at times like that. The town was small, too, so occasionally I saw her driving around, looking for a parking place or something. Then after a while I wanted to see her, and I started going to the student center again, but she didn't drink coffee there anymore. In a week or so I realized that I didn't really want to see her: I wanted her to be happy, and if I saw her there was nothing I could say to help that.
Soon I was back to the old private vice, though now it didn't seem a vice but an indulgence, not as serious as smoking or even drinking, closer to eating an ice cream sundae before bed every night. That was how I felt about it, like I had eaten two scoops of ice cream with thick hot fudge on it, and after a couple of bites it wasn't good anymore but I finished it anyway, thinking of calories. It was a boring little performance and it didn't seem worth thinking about, one way or the other. But I told it in the confessional, so I could still receive the Eucharist. Then one day in spring I told the number of my sins as though I were telling the date of my birth, my height, and weight, and Father Broussard said quickly and sternly: "Are you sorry for these sins?"
"Yes, Father," I said, but then I knew it was a lie. He was asking me if I had a firm resolve to avoid this sin in the future when I said: "No, Father."
"No what? You can't avoid it?"
"I mean no, Father, I'm not really sorry. I don't even think it's a sin."
"Oh, I see. You don't have the discipline to stop, so you've decided it's not a sin. Just like that, you've countermanded God's law. Do you want absolution?"
"Yes, Father. I want to receive Communion."
"You can't. You're living in mortal sin, and I cannot absolve you while you keep this attitude. I want you to think very seriously--"
But I wasn't listening. I was looking at the crucifix and waiting for his voice to stop so I could leave politely and try to figure out what to do next. Then he stopped talking, and I said: "Yes, Father."
"What?" he said. "What?"
I went quickly through the curtains, out of the confessional, out of the church.
On Sundays I went to Mass but did not receive the Eucharist. I thought I could but I was afraid that as soon as the Host touched my tongue I would suddenly realize I had been wrong, and then I'd be receiving Christ with mortal sin on my soul. Mother didn't receive either. I prayed for her and hoped she'd soon have peace, even if it meant early menopause. By now I agreed with Janet, and I wished she'd write Mother a letter and convince her that she wasn't evil. I thought Mother was probably praying for Janet, who had gone five years without bearing a child.
It was June, school was out, and I did not see Yvonne at all. I was working with a surveying crew, running a hundred-foot chain through my fingers, cutting trails with a machete, eating big lunches from paper bags, and waiting for something to happen. There were two alternatives, and I wasn't phony enough for the first or brave enough for the second: I could start confessing again, the way I used to, or I could ignore the confessional and simply receive Communion. But nothing happened and each Sunday I stayed with Mother in the pew while the others went up to the altar rail.
Then Janet came home. She wrote that Bob had left her, had moved in with his girlfriend--a graduate student--and she and the boys were coming home on the bus. That was the news waiting for me when I got home from work, Mother handing me the letter as I came through the front door, both of them watching me as I read it. Then Daddy cursed, Mother started crying again, and I took a beer out to the front porch. After a while Daddy came out too and we sat without talking and drank beer until Mother called us to supper. Daddy said, "That son of a bitch," and we went inside.
By the time Janet and the boys rode the bus home from Ann Arbor, Mother was worried about something else: the Church, because now Janet was twenty-three years old and getting a divorce and if she ever married again she was out of the Church. Unless Bob died, and Daddy said he didn't care what the Church thought about divorce, but it seemed a good enough reason for him to go up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and shoot Bob Mitchell between the eyes. So while Janet and Paul and Lee were riding south on the Greyhound, Mother was going to daily Mass and praying for some answer to Janet's future.
But Janet had already taken care of that too. When she got off the bus I knew she'd be getting married again some day: she had gained about ten pounds, probably from all that cheap food while Bob went to school, but she had always been on the lean side anyway and now she looked better than I remembered. Her hair was long, about halfway down her back. The boys were five years old now, and I was glad she hadn't had any more, because they seemed to be good little boys and not enough to scare off a man. We took them home--it was a Friday night--and Daddy gave Janet a tall drink of bourbon and everybody talked as though nothing had happened. Then we ate shrimp ‚touff‚e and after supper, when the boys were in bed and the rest of us were in the living room, Janet said by God it was the best meal she had had in five years, and next time she was going to marry a man who liked Louisiana cooking. When she saw the quick look in Mother's eyes, she said: "We didn't get married in the Church, Mama. I just told you we did so you wouldn't worry."
"You didn't?"
"Bob was so mad at Father Broussard he wouldn't try again. He's not a Catholic, you know."
"There's more wrong with him than that," Daddy said.
"So I can still get married in the Church," Janet said. "To somebody else."
"But Janet--"
"Wait," Daddy said. "Wait. You've been praying for days so Janet could stop living with that son of a bitch and still save her soul. Now you got it--right?"
"But--"
"Right?"
"Well," Mother said, "I guess so."
They went to bed about an hour past their usual time, but Janet and I stayed up drinking gin and tonic in the kitchen, with the door closed so we wouldn't keep anybody awake. At first she just talked about how glad she was to be home, even if the first sign of it was the Negroes going to the back of the bus. She loved this hot old sticky night, she said, and the June bugs thumping against the screen and she had forgotten how cigarettes get soft down here in the humid air. Finally she talked about Bob; she didn't think he had ever loved her, he had started playing around their first year up there, and it had gone on for five years more or less; near the end she had even done it too, had a boyfriend, but it didn't help her survive at all, it only made things worse, and now at least she felt clean and tough and she thought that was the first step toward hope.
The stupid thing was she still loved the philandering son of a bitch. That was the only time she cried, when she said that, but she didn't even cry long enough for me to get up and go to her side of the table and hold her: when I was half out of my chair she was already waving me back in it, shaking her head and wiping her eyes, and the tears that had filled them for a moment were gone. Then she cheered up and asked if I'd drive her around tomorrow, down the main street and everything, and I said sure and asked her if she was still a Catholic.
"Don't tell Mother this," she said. "She's confused enough already. I went to Communion every Sunday, except when I was having that stupid affair, and I only felt sinful then because he loved me and I was using him. But before that and after that, I received."
"You can't," I said. "Not while you're married out of the Church."
"Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think the Church is so smart about sex. Bob wouldn't get the marriage blessed, so a priest would have told me to leave him. I loved him, though, and for a long time I thought he loved me, needed me--so I stayed with him and tried to keep peace and bring up my sons. And the Eucharist is the sacrament of love and I needed it very badly those five years and nobody can keep me away."
I got up and took our glasses and made drinks. When I turned from the sink she was watching me.
"Do you still go to confession so much?" she said.
I sat down, avoiding her eyes, then I thought, what the hell, if you can't tell Janet you can't tell anybody. So looking at the screen door and the bugs thumping from the dark outside, I told her how it was in high school and about Yvonne, though I didn't tell her name, and my aborted confession to Father Broussard. She was kind to me, busying herself with cigarettes and her drink while I talked. Then she said: "You're right, Harry. You're absolutely right."
"You really think so?"
"I know this much: too many of those celibates teach sex the way it is for them. They make it introverted, so you come out of their schools believing sex is something between you and yourself, or between you and God. Instead of between you and other people. Like my affair. It wasn't wrong because I was married. Hell, Bob didn't care, in fact he was glad because it gave him more freedom. It was wrong because I hurt the guy." A Yankee word on her tongue, guy, and she said it with that accent from up there among snow and lakes. "If Bob had stayed home and taken a Playboy to the bathroom once in a while I might still have a husband. So if that's a sin, I don't understand sin."
"Well," I said. Then looking at her, I grinned and it kept spreading and turned into a laugh. "You're something, all right," I said. "Old Janet, you're something."
But I still wasn't the renegade Janet was, I wanted absolution from a priest, and next morning while Mother and Daddy were happily teasing us about our hangovers, I decided to get it done. That afternoon I called Father Grassi, then told Janet where I was going, and that I would drive her around town when I got back. Father Grassi answered the door at the rectory; he was wearing a white shirt with his black trousers, a small man with a ruddy face and dark whiskers. I asked if I could speak to him in his office.
"I think so," he said. "Do you come from the Pope?"
"No, Father. I just want to confess."
"So it's you who will be the saint today, not me. Yes, come in."
He led me to his office, put his stole around his neck, and sat in the swivel chair behind his desk; I kneeled beside him on the carpet, and he shielded his face with his hand, as though we were in the confessional and he could not see me. I whispered, "Bless me Father, for I have sinned," my hands clasped at my waist, my head bowed. "My last confession was six weeks ago, but I was refused absolution. By Father Broussard."
"Is that so? You don't look like a very bad young man to me. Are you some kind of criminal?"
"I confessed masturbation, Father."
"Yes? Then what?"
"I told him I didn't think it was a sin."
"I see. Well, poor Father Broussard: I'd be confused too, if you confessed something as a sin and then said you didn't think it was a sin. You should take better care of your priests, my friend."
I opened my eyes: his hand was still in place on his cheek, and he was looking straight ahead, over his desk at the bookshelf against the wall.
"I guess so," I said. "And now I'm bothering you."
"Oh no: you're no trouble. The only disappointment is you weren't sent by the Pope. But since that's the way it is, then we may just as well talk about sins. We had in the seminary a book of moral theology and in that book, my friend, it was written that masturbation was worse than rape, because at least rape was the carrying out of a natural instinct. What about that?"
"Do you believe that, Father?"
"Do you?"
"No, Father."
"Neither do I. I burned the book when I left the seminary, but not only for that reason. The book also said, among other things, let the buyer beware. So you tell me about sin and we'll educate each other."
"I went to the Brothers' school."
"Ah, yes. Nice fellows, those Brothers."
"Yes, Father. But I think they concentrated too much on the body. One's own body, I mean. And back then I believed it all, and one day I even wanted to mutilate myself. Then last fall I had a girl."
"What does that mean, you had a girl? You mean you were lovers?"
"Yes, Father. But I shouldn't have had a girl, because I believed my semen was the most important part of sex, so the first time I made love with her I was waiting for it, like my soul was listening for it--you see? Because I wouldn't know how I felt about her until I knew how I felt about ejaculating with her."
"And how did you feel? Did you want to mutilate yourself with a can opener, or maybe something worse?"
"I was happy, Father."
"Yes."
"So after that we were lovers. Or she was, but I wasn't. I was just happy because I could ejaculate without hating myself, so I was still masturbating, you see, but with her--does that make sense?"
"Oh yes, my friend. I've known that since I left the seminary. Always there is too much talk of self-abuse. You see, even the term is a bad one. Have you finished your confession?"
"I want to confess about the girl again, because when I confessed it before it wasn't right. I made love to her without loving her and the last time I made love to her I told some boys about it."
"Yes. Anything else?"
"No, Father."
"Good. There is a line in St. John that I like very much. It is Christ praying to the Father and He says: 'I do not pray that You take them out of the world, but that You keep them from evil.' Do you understand that?"
"I think so, Father."
"Then for your penance, say alleluia three times."
Next afternoon Janet and I took her boys crabbing. We had an ice chest of beer and we set it under the small pavilion at the center of the wharf, then I put out six crab lines, tying them to the guard rail. I remembered the summer before she got married Janet and I had gone crabbing, then cooked them for the family: we had a large pot of water on the stove and when the water was boiling I held the gunny sack of live crabs over it and they came falling out, splashing into the water; they worked their claws, moved sluggishly, then died. And Janet had said: I keep waiting for them to scream.
It was a hot day, up in the nineties. Someone was water-skiing on the lake, which was saltwater and connected by canal to the Gulf, but we had the wharf to ourselves, and we drank beer in the shade while Paul and Lee did the crabbing. They lost the first couple, so I left the pavilion and squatted at the next line. The boys flanked me, lying on their bellies and looking down where the line went into the dark water; they had their shirts off, and their hot tan shoulders and arms brushed my legs. I gently pulled the line up until we saw a crab just below the surface, swimming and nibbling at the chunk of ham.
"Okay, Lee. Put the net down in the water, then bring it up under him so you don't knock him away."
He lowered the pole and scooped the net slowly under the crab.
"I got him!"
"That's it. You just have to go slow, that's all."
He stood and lifted the net and laid it on the wharf.
"Look how big," Paul said.
"He's a good one," I said. "Put him in the sack."
But they crouched over the net, watching the crab push his claws through.
"Poor little crab," Lee said. "You're going to die."
"Does it hurt 'em, Harry?" Paul said.
"I don't know."
"It'd hurt me," he said.
"I guess it does, for a second or two."
"How long's a second?" Lee said.
I pinched his arm.
"About like that."
"That's not too long," he said.
"No. Put him in the sack now, and catch some more."
I went back to my beer on the bench. Paul was still crouching over the crab, poking a finger at its back. Then Lee held open the gunny sack and Paul turned the net over and shook it and the crab fell in.
"Goodbye, big crab," he said.
"Goodbye, poor crab," Lee said.
They went to another line. For a couple of hours, talking to Janet, I watched them and listened to their bare feet on the wharf and their voices as they told each crab goodbye. Sometimes one of them would stop and look across the water and pull at his pecker, and I remembered that day hot as this one when I was sixteen and I wanted to cut mine off. I reached deep under the ice and got a cold beer for Janet and I thought of Yvonne sitting at that kitchen table at three in the morning, tired, her lipstick worn off, her eyes fixed on a space between the people in the room. Then I looked at the boys lying on their bellies and reaching down for another crab, and I hoped they would grow well, those strong little bodies, those kind hearts.