“What sort of material?” I asked.
“Oh, everything from crates for bombs and ammo to mess tables to aircraft parts,” he said, then added wistfully, “and precious little furniture these days, I’m afraid.”
“Hickory,” Roger said. “Sounds like some little Southern backwater.”
Henry only smiled at the insult. “The fastest-growing city in North Carolina,” he said. “Population fourteen thousand and counting. We have a lake and a river and the mountains are right nearby. And industry is booming.”
“It sounds wonderful,” I said, annoyed with Roger. I was glad when the waiter finally returned to take our order. The men ordered filet mignon, but Gina and I both ordered the crab cakes, which got a lot of teasing.
“You can take the girls out of Maryland, but can’t take Maryland out of the girls,” Roger said.
We had yet another round of spytinis when our meals arrived. And wine appeared, although I couldn’t remember any of us ordering the bottle. Conversation between Gina and Roger got a bit louder with each drink consumed, while Henry and I seemed to grow quieter. Gina and Roger argued playfully over sports and the décor in the restaurant and whether or not Baltimore was truly a Southern city. Behind the words, I heard the flirting. Gina was good at it. She’d perfected the coquettish lowering of her eyelids. The smile that lifted only one side of her mouth. The tilt of her head. She was playing with fire, I thought. Henry and I exchanged the occasional commiserative look as we sipped our spytinis. It was odd that in our mutual silence I felt a connection stronger than if we’d been speaking to one another.
I knew I’d had far too much to drink the moment I got to my feet at the end of the evening. I didn’t feel ill, just unsteady, my knees soft as butter. The colors of the room swirled in my vision. The bronze of the ceiling seemed to drip down the walls, and I heard myself giggle, the sound coming from far away. When Henry offered me his arm, I took it gratefully.
Our cab driver wouldn’t let any of us sit in front with him, so all four of us crammed into the backseat. Gina sat on Roger’s lap, and when he rested his hand on the fabric of her dress, high on her thigh, I was relieved to see her calmly brush it away. I sat demurely next to Henry, my own hands folded in my lap, my head in a fog that wasn’t the least bit unpleasant. I’d only had too much to drink once before when Vincent and I attended a party where drinks were handed out like candy. I’d been miserable after that party. I’d thrown up more times than I could count and then crawled into bed, the covers over my head to block out the light. Was I drunk now? I didn’t think so, but I did feel as though, if someone gave me a good pinch, I wouldn’t notice.
I looked down at my folded hands, then over at Henry’s lap where his hands lay flat against his dark trousers. Seven fingers. I wanted to touch his wounded hand in sympathy. I hoped he hadn’t been a child when it happened. How horrid that would have been! More likely, he’d been an adult using some of the equipment in his factory. Child or adult, though, it must have terrorized him. Whatever had happened to him, he’d clearly overcome it. He’d become not only the head of a business, but a man who could negotiate with Uncle Sam, as well.
He lifted his hand, turned it palm side up, and I knew he’d caught me staring. “It happened when I was six years old,” he said, only loud enough for me to hear. “I was playing with my father’s tools, which was strictly forbidden. I couldn’t reach the table saw very well and this was the result.” He rested his hand on his thigh again.
I winced. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Our maid Adora saved my life.”
I felt myself tearing up as I imagined the terror of that little boy. “Thank heavens your maid was there,” I said.
He touched my arm, lightly, gently, and when he spoke again, I heard the smile in his voice. “I bet you’re a very caring nurse,” he said.
As soon as we reached the tourist home, Roger and Gina headed upstairs without even wishing Henry and me a good night. They were laughing, and I watched Roger pull his tie free from his neck and give Gina a playful swat on the bottom with it before the two of them disappeared onto the second story. I heard Gina say, “Oh, no you don’t,” and Roger’s muttered reply. There was some muted conversation I couldn’t understand. Then Gina laughed.
“Go to your own room,” she said. “There’s a good boy.”
I heard her shut her bedroom door, then Roger’s heavy, defeated footsteps in the hall, and I was relieved Gina was taking her flirting no further. She would have hated herself in the morning.
When I brought my attention back to the living room, the pictures on the walls grew fuzzy and I had to grab the edge of an end table to keep from toppling over.
“You’re unwell,” Henry said, taking my arm to steady me.
“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m just not used to … to those spytinis.” I giggled at the name all over again. “Just a bit dizzy. I think I’ll go up.”
“Of course,” he said.
I started for the stairs, and when I lifted my foot to climb the first step, I tripped, nearly wrenching my arm as I grabbed the railing to stop my fall.
“Whoa,” Henry said, rushing to my side. “Let me help you.”
I felt his arm around me, his hand tight against my waist. I didn’t object. I needed the help.
We climbed the stairs together and he walked me into my room. I couldn’t wait to reach my bed. I meant to simply sit down on the edge of the mattress, but my body had other ideas and I lay back, my head against the pillow, my eyes shut. The room spun, but it was a gentle spinning, almost as if I were in a dream, and when Henry leaned down and rested his lips against mine, I didn’t turn my face away. What on earth was I doing?
“I can’t.” My voice sounded like it came from another room. It echoed in my head. “I’m engaged.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…” His voice faded away, and once more, I felt his lips press against mine, and the room twirled as if I were on a merry-go-round. Was I pushing him away or pulling him closer? Was his tongue teasing my lips apart or was my mouth inviting him in? Everything was happening so quickly. I knew I should resist him, yet I was not. Instead, I felt my body give in. Not a big deal, the voice in my head said. Let it happen. Get it over with. I felt the pressure of him pushing inside me. Then a sharp pain. The sensation of sandpaper scraping me raw as his body rocked above me. I both knew and didn’t know what was happening and I pushed reality away. I was suddenly back in Gina’s bedroom. You need a little whiskey in your Pepsi for your nerves, Gina said. I held on to the image of her handing me the glass. Everything was pink. Her pink and white striped curtains and pink ruffled bed skirt. Ruffles, I thought, my mind full of cotton. Ruffles. Gina. Whiskey. Pink.
He stood up. I opened my eyes to see his unfamiliar features. His brown hair jutted in tufts from his head. What was his name?
“Oh,” he said. “You should have told me you were a virgin.”
I watched him lift the lamp from the dresser and hold it above the triangle of bedspread between my parted thighs, my nylons down around my calves. I sat up quickly, the walls of the room tumbling around me, and saw the small red stain on the blue bedspread. A sickening dizziness took hold of me and with it a terrible shame.
“Oh no,” I said. Bile teased the back of my throat,
He didn’t seem to know what to say. “Are you all right?” he asked after a moment. He began pulling on his pants.
I scrambled beneath the covers of the bed, wanting to get away from his sight, my cheeks hot with embarrassment. “I just want to go to sleep,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut.
I knew he stood there a while longer, watching me. Maybe trying to come up with more to say. All I could think about was how I would scrub the bedspread the moment I woke up in the morning. I would make it very, very clean.
* * *
Although my eyes were closed, I felt sunlight wash over the bed the following morning where I lay curled in a fetal position, t
asting bile and alcohol at the back of my throat. My head felt cleaved in two. I didn’t dare move or I would be sick.
The night before came back to me in a rush and I kept my eyes squeezed tightly closed in regret. What had I done? I’d made love—no, I’d had sex—with a stranger. Oh, to be able to take it all back! The drinking, the allowing him into my room, the kissing, the intimate moments that should never have been given to him.
Vincent. I felt a tear run from my eye across the bridge of my nose. In the hallway outside the room, I heard voices and I lay still, very still, until I heard footsteps descend the stairs and had the sense that I was alone on the second story. Then I let it out. The tears. The regret. The terrible grinding guilt. I lay there for the longest time, waiting for the men downstairs to leave the house. I didn’t ever want to see Henry Kraft again.
5
I sat in the pew of the unfamiliar church, waiting my turn in the confessional. I knew all the priests at St. Leo’s. Worse, they knew me. And of course they knew Vincent. I couldn’t possibly tell one of them what I had done. I was having a hard enough time admitting it to myself. So I’d taken the bus to a church on the other side of Baltimore where I knew no one and no one knew me. I’d thought of skipping confession altogether this week, since my shame over what happened in Washington was so great I couldn’t bear to speak about it out loud. But then I wouldn’t be able to receive communion at mass tomorrow and my mother would know something had happened. She would guess I was carrying a terrible sin inside me, and she would be right.
That night with Henry Kraft was all I could think about, and each time it filled my mind, I felt the same nausea I’d fought all that morning. Gina had thought I was simply hungover as I retched and cried in the bathroom of the tourist home. I’d been quiet on the train back to Baltimore, my head resting against the grimy window, my eyes shut but my mind on fire. Gina asked me point-blank if something had happened with Henry and I lied to her. “Of course not,” I said. So now I could add lying to my list of sins. One more thing to confess.
I was in desperate need of absolution as I sat there in the unfamiliar church. When it was my turn, I stepped inside the confessional and knelt down in the darkness. I could hear the muffled words of the priest as he spoke to the person on the other side of his cubicle, his voice nearly drowned out by the pounding of my heart.
The priest slid open the window between us and through the screen I saw his blurry features. Thin gray hair. Glasses. A hand on his chin as he leaned his head close to the screen.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” I said. “My last confession was two weeks ago and these are my sins.” My voice quivered and I took in a breath. “I argued with my mother over some housework I didn’t want to do,” I began. “I told a lie to my best friend. And I had premarital sex with someone.”
The priest was momentarily silent. “Are you engaged to this someone?” he asked.
“No, father. I’m engaged to someone else.” I filled with self-disgust as the words left my mouth.
“This is a very serious sin,” the priest said. “To have relations outside of marriage is a mortal sin of the gravest degree. You’ve compounded that sin by betraying your fiancé.”
“Yes.” I swallowed. “I know.”
“How many times did this happen?”
“Just once.”
“Was it with a man or a woman?”
I was shocked by the question. “A man, father.” I suddenly remembered the way I’d allowed Henry to kiss me. I squeezed my eyes shut at the memory. “I drank too much and—”
“You drank too much?” His voice had grown loud, almost booming, and I shrank away from the screen. I was certain he could be heard outside the confessional. “That too is a sin,” he said. “You must confess all your sins. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, father. I wasn’t thinking about—”
“Did you engage in any acts with this man other than intercourse?”
I was confused. “We … I went out to dinner with him,” I stammered.
“During the sex act,” he snapped impatiently. “Did you engage in oral sex or other acts of depravity?”
“No, father.”
“You have ruined yourself for your future husband,” he said with a disappointed-sounding sigh. “He expected and deserved a pure and innocent bride and you have destroyed that for him.”
My eyes burned. “I know, father.” Please, I thought. Please stop telling me what I already know. Just give me my penance and let me go.
“For your penance, spend twenty minutes today at the altar of Our Lady,” he said. “Recite ten Hail Marys and six Our Fathers while you think about Our Lady’s purity and virtue. Pray the rosary daily for a week and attend mass three times this week. And finally, confess what you’ve done to your fiancé.”
My eyes widened in shock. “Father, I can’t do that,” I said. “I can do everything else, but not that. It will only hurt him and I don’t want to hurt him.”
“You should have thought of that before you had relations with another man,” he said with unmasked disgust. “You can’t go into a marriage with this grievous transgression between you. Your fiancé needs to know the sort of girl you really are before he marries you.”
I hung my head, humiliated. I knew that, for the first time in my life, I would not be able to carry out the penance I’d been given. I wouldn’t hurt Vincent with this. I knew how he felt about chastity. It would be the end of us. I wished then that I had gone to one of the priests at St. Leo’s. Someone who knew me well and knew I wasn’t the terrible person this priest was making me out to be.
“All right, father,” I said, and I wondered if that lie constituted yet another sin.
6
My damp fingers stuck to the pages of the magazine I was pretending to read as I sat in the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office. I’d always heard that you couldn’t get pregnant the first time you had intercourse. I was a nurse; I knew better. Yet I’d clung to that old wives’ tale as I waited anxiously for my period to come. One week passed, then another. And another. I knew fear and stress could affect your cycle. That’s it, I’d told myself. It’s just stress. But when a full month had passed and I still had no period, I began to face reality. Still, I waited two more weeks before making this appointment, hope getting in the way of reason.
Vincent now had a paying job in Chicago. He’d called to tell me the news a week after my trip to Washington when my guilt was still fresh and new.
“It’s very temporary,” he’d been quick to assure me. “Just two months. I haven’t started it yet, and I won’t start at all if you’re dead set against me taking it, Tess,” he rushed on. “I know I’ve extended and extended our time apart and you’ve been a real angel about that, but please listen, sweetheart. It makes so much sense.”
The Tess of a few weeks earlier would have been too upset to even respond, but the Tess I’d become post–Henry Kraft felt relief that I had a little more time alone. I wasn’t ready to face him.
“What makes sense about it?” I asked.
“It’s in a pediatric practice here,” he said. “One of the doctors is having shoulder surgery and he’ll be out for eight weeks, so I’d be gaining experience in a practice and the money is fantastic. We could—”
“Eight more weeks?” I asked. “That’s pretty close to the wedding.”
He laughed. “I’ll be back months before the wedding,” he said. “And they’re paying for me to take a train home over Christmas, so you and I will have some time together and we can celebrate your graduation. I can’t wait to get my arms around you. I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long, sweetheart. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? I love you more than ever.”
My eyes had stung. Vincent was the one person I used to be able to talk to about anything. The person who loved me best, flaws and all. I now possessed one flaw I didn’t think he’d ever be able to overlook. “I love you, too,” I’d said.
So as I sat there in the obstetrician’s office, I counted the days until he would be home for Christmas. Eight. Two days ago, I’d graduated from my nursing program by the skin of my teeth, so self-absorbed because of what was happening inside my body that I barely made it through my clinicals and exams. My breasts had an unfamiliar tenderness to them, and every morning I fought nausea as I ate the oatmeal my mother made for us both. Mom noticed the change in my mood. I knew she thought I was simply depressed about Vincent’s continued absence and she tried to cheer me up by talking about the fun we’d all have at Christmastime, his family and mine together for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve and our big Christmas meal the next day, rituals we’d celebrated with the Russos all my life. All the while, I watched the calendar obsessively, hoping the missed periods were simply an aberration and they would return shortly. I refused to think about what I would do if I were actually pregnant. I refused to give the idea that power over me. Yet part of me knew the truth, so I looked up the number for an out-of-town obstetrician, a Dr. Wilson, and made an appointment with him. And here I sat, turning the pages of a magazine, staring at the articles without seeing them.
A young red-haired nurse appeared in the doorway of the waiting room and looked down at the folder in her hands. “Mrs. DeMello?” she inquired, and I got to my feet. I was wearing my late grandmother’s wedding band next to my engagement ring, taped in the back so that it fit. I was a married woman for this appointment.
The nurse led me into an examination room and instructed me to undress and sit on the table. I did as I was told. The room was chilly and I shivered beneath the sheet she provided. I didn’t have to wait long before Dr. Wilson burst into the room in a ball of energy.
“Good morning!” he said. He had a jovial look about him. Fat red cheeks, silver glasses, white hair, and a cheerful expression on his face. “Have I seen you before?” he asked, as he lifted the folder from the counter near the sink.
“No, I’m a new patient.” I tried to return his smile. “I think I may be pregnant.” My thumb rubbed against the tape on the back of my grandmother’s wedding band. “I’ve missed two periods.”