Ritual
Ken Sieben
Had Catherine Keegan been a boy, she knew she would have studied for the priesthood with missionary zeal. Yet even in the lower grades, when every Catholic schoolgirl publicly professes the intention to become a nun, she knew she had no vocation. She could not envision herself teaching nasty little children and living in a convent of fussy women bound to obey a forbidding, overbearing mother superior. She preferred the breezier activities of the rectory, the strong, silent, safe priests whisking about their solemn duties in flowing black cassocks.
Masses, sacraments, choir rehearsals, weddings, funerals, Holy Week and Christmas ceremonies, vigils, retreats, novenas, First Fridays and First Saturdays, processions, Rosary Society, Holy Name Society, Knights of Columbus, CYO, altar boys, missals, statues, candles, vestments, sacred golden vessels, Sunday collections, letters from the bishop, fund-raising drives, bazaars, charity balls: Witnessing all these from inside, from behind the scenes, was what made her work at All Saints so fascinating. It was she who, by typing the announcements, became the first in the parish to know what events were to happen. It was she who, by answering the telephone, dispatched the priests on their missions of spiritual succor.
When Catherine first started working afternoons at the rectory, four curates assisted Monsignor Brennan in managing the affairs of All Saints and caring for its twelve thousand souls. By the mid-nineties only two associate pastors were assigned to the dwindling parish. One, older even than Monsignor and too infirm to do more than say Mass, never gave her a sermon to be typed because he rarely could summon the strength and will to preach. When he did he would try to recall from memory sermons from those first fervent years following ordination. The other, who insisted on being addressed as Father Bill, played the guitar and sported a beard and shoulder-length hair that made him look strikingly like Renaissance depictions of Jesus. He spent most of his time trying to organize activities for the children of the local Puerto Rican families that had come to dominate the section of the city where All Saints Church had stood for more than a century.
Catherine could never understand why Monsignor let them enroll in the school. Why, they were not good Catholics, and half of them did not even speak English. You never saw them in church on Sundays with their families. Few of them know who their fathers were, and Catherine, nobody’s fool, well understood how Puerto Rican men treated their women. Monsignor arranged jobs for mothers who could not afford the tuition, in day-care centers and laundries and all-night bakeries, or as cleaning women for older, wealthier parishioners who still maintained the stately houses along the river.
Monsignor had a kind heart, but Catherine believed he should have taken care of his own kind first. Terrified to walk alone, even in broad daylight, through the savage streets where oversexed boys of twelve and thirteen fought with knives and would not think twice about attacking a defenseless woman, she found it more and more difficult to leave the safety of her house each morning. When she learned that Father Bill had run off with a young novice who was helping him with the girls’ athletic program, the life she had known for her forty-eight years dissolved like a soap bubble, and she chose to retire.
“I regret that you feel you must leave us at this time of crisis, Catherine,” Monsignor Brennan said when she submitted her notice. “I don’t know how the parish will manage without you after all this time.” He hired an unmarried Puerto Rican woman with three children in the school and expected Catherine to spend her final week breaking her in. Fortunately for Catherine, she felt too ill to come to work.
* * *
Joan Martin’s husband moved out three days before Catherine moved in, but Joan insisted there was no connection, that the marriage had been dying for several years. “Even Walter didn’t try to blame it on you, Kate, so don’t blame yourself.” Joan hadn’t told her until they had finished loading Catherine’s meager possessions into Joan’s cavernous 1980-something van. “I’ll just have to get used to it.”
The three of them had met on the Memorial Day between the court-martial of Lieutenant Calley and the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Joan, who got off at two from the optometrist’s office where she worked as a receptionist, was to walk along Smith Street toward the rectory, which Catherine would leave as soon as she typed the correspondence Monsignor had dictated before lunch. They would watch the parade from wherever they met up and then stop someplace quiet for an ice cream soda. But Joan was standing in front of the rectory by the time Catherine left. She was standing right there on the sidewalk, brazen as ever, wearing a flimsy cotton sundress and talking to a stranger.
The parade was already starting to pass by, and the noise from the high school marching band made it difficult for her to make out much beyond Walter’s name. Catherine felt that everyone was staring at them and did not like how Walter kept touching Joan. He would cup his hand over her ear to say something, and then she would look at him, arch her head back, and laugh like a ninny.
Between bands, Joan told her he had been walking about half a block behind her all the way down Smith Street and caught up to her when she stopped to wait for Catherine. He started talking to her as if they were old friends, insisting they had met in high school. He had played basketball for Amboy and remembered her as a cheerleader for All Saints. Joan said she did not recall, but that did not stop him.
“I used to be jealous of you guys in the Catholic school,” Walter said, “because you got so many extra holidays.”
“Really?” answered Joan. “We were jealous of you because you didn’t have to wear uniforms, weren’t we, Catherine?”
“Well, I certainly was never jealous of anyone in public school, I can assure you of that,” Catherine stated, smoothing pleated black skirt over narrow hips in unconscious recollection of the blue jumper and white blouse with the Peter Pan collar.
Walter did not seem put off by Catherine’s tone. “And you guys always got the good summer jobs because you finished up earlier in June than we did. You have to admit that, Joan.”
“Well, why didn’t you transfer to All Saints then?”
“Simple--I wasn’t Catholic.”
“Isn’t Martin an Irish name?” asked Catherine.
Walter looked at her blandly. “Yes, actually my father was Irish, but my mother’s from a long line of WASPs. I was raised in the Episcopal Church.”
So Joan knew right from the start what she was getting into, and she should have had the sense to excuse herself and walk immediately into the rectory where she would have been safe instead of staying right where everyone could see her talking to the devil’s disciple.
Joan seemed undisturbed by the revelation. “You know, I think I remember you now. You were really the star for Amboy, weren’t you?”
“Not exactly. We had a strong team my last two years. There was no single star.”
“What position did you play?”
“Center.”
“Sure, I remember now. You scored twenty-five points against us and won the game on a buzzer shot, right?”
“Hey, what a memory. You’re appealing to my ego. That was the best game I ever played.”
Catherine tapped her right foot on the sidewalk to signal disapproval, but Joan would not be stopped. “Did you go on to play basketball in college?”
Walter smiled boyishly. “Well, I played on the freshman team at Rutgers for a season, but I realized that a 6’5” center wasn’t going to get very far.”
Catherine saw her chance. “So you didn’t finish college then?”
“Yes, I did. In fact, I just graduated two weeks ago.”
“How exciting,” said Joan. “I wish I could have gone to college.”
Walter smiled. “Now it’s my turn to ask. Why didn’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I guess we didn’t have enough money.”
Catherine interrupted to correct an error. “That’s not true, Joan. I told you I would have paid your tuition.”
“Well, I guess the truth is that I’m not very ambitious. What did you major in, Walter?”
“Business administration, but I’ve been working as a programmer part-time for the past three years, and I start my first regular job tomorrow.”
“Do you mean with computers?”
“Yep, that’s where the future is in this country, and I’m in on the ground floor. I plan to stay with this brokerage firm in New York for five years and then start my own service company.”
“That sounds exciting. I mean, nobody I know knows a thing about computers.”
Catherine could see the admiration in Joan’s eyes. After the parade was over and Joan invited Walter to tag along with them, Catherine said the sun had given her a headache, and she would rather just go home by herself. Naturally, she reported to their father that Joan was at an ice cream parlor with a Protestant, but he did not seem troubled. Instead, he turned on her, as he often did when she tried to act responsibly about Joan’s upbringing. “For the love of God, at least maybe now I won’t have two old maids on my hands. You’re twenty-five years old, and you haven’t had a date since high school. Why donít you get out of that rectory and into the real world?”
* * *
After Catherine moved in, Joan was too unhappy to be pleasant company. So Carolyn could keep her own room, Catherine slept with Joan as she did when they were girls, though the king-sized bed allowed them enough space that they would not actually touch. She thought that Joan would confide in her, that it would be like when she was a high school senior, wise in her knowledge of what boys wanted, and Joan was in the seventh grade, eager to learn about life, but Joan kept everything bottled up. She never volunteered a word about Walter, except to report the slow progress of the divorce proceedings or, later, the arrival of a much-needed alimony check. Joan’s feelings about the breakup of her marriage remained as unknown to Catherine as the origin of the universe.
Three months after that Memorial Day meeting, Joan had almost sent their father to an early grave--God rest his soul, for indeed his fatal heart attack came just a few years later--by eloping with Walter and being married by a judge. Catherine had her suspicions about the haste, though she never shared them with her father, but Joan’s confession of a honeymoon miscarriage proved how well Catherine knew her little sister. Also, while Catherine never claimed personal experience in matters of sex, she understood basic female biology; therefore, the fact the eight years elapsed before the birth of Carolyn and the further fact that Joan never again became pregnant probably meant that she practiced birth control. For seventeen years her sister had been living in a state of mortal sin.
So Catherine’s mission was clear to her: She would try to lead her sister and niece back within the fold. Joan might resent her good intentions as interfering, but Catherine knew her own reward need not be in this world. Still, it would be better if Joan were grateful.
From the time it became apparent that Joan’s faith had lapsed and she was making no effort to raise Carolyn properly, not even sending her to a Catholic school, Catherine fretted over her own failure to instruct the child in her religious duties, though, God knows, she tried for two weeks during that first vacation. A lifelong daily communicant, she dressed up Carolyn and brought her with her to Our Lady of Mercy Church every morning for two weeks despite the steep ten-block climb.
Six-year-old Carolyn loved the extra attention and air of mystery associated with church-going, and Joan must have felt sufficient guilt to encourage her. As soon as she turned seven Catherine wanted her to join the Saturday First Communion preparation class for public school children, but Walter put his foot down. “Going to church is one thing. In fact, you even got me there on Christmas last week, but I will not permit my daughter’s head to be filled with medieval nonsense!”
Joan’s silence was a sin for which Catherine tried to atone. Every Monday evening, after the bright church lights had been darkened following the Miraculous Medal Novena, Catherine would kneel at the marble communion rail, a supplicant, by the five-tiered rack of Oremus special-intention candles and give an altar boy a dollar to defray the cost of lighting one. He would lift the red glass cover of an already lighted candle and, using a waxed taper, transfer the flame to her candle at the moment when she would silently declare her intention, then insert the burning taper into an underslung bed of sand, sending thick, dark smoke curling erratically heavenward and filling the church with the sorrowful smell of extinguished fire. Despite this and all her rosaries and novenas, the tenuous hold she had started to gain on this child crumbled like stale bread.
* * *
Catherine’s first act after moving into her sister’s home was to remind Joan that, under church law, she had never been married. On those grounds, she could be granted an annulment and save herself the expense and humiliation of a divorce. Joan had already rejected that possibility under the advice of her lawyer. “Anyway,” she added, “I want to end the marriage, not pretend it never happened.”
Catherine couldn’t resist the opportunity to instruct. “But there was no sacrament, Joan.”
“But there was twenty-two years, and there was Carolyn. According to you, she was born out of wedlock. Do you want to make her a bastard?”
“I merely want you to see the truth.”
“And lose my alimony and child support.”
“I know nothing of such matters.”
“You know nothing about life, it seems to me.”
Joan walked out of the living room as though to escape responsibility for these last words, but Catherine would not be insulted out of her duty and followed her into the kitchen. “It’s probably true that I know little of the kind of life you chose for yourself, but I know a great deal about the life Our Lord intended for us to live.” Joan stood by the kitchen sink with her hands over her face. Catherine placed her own hand on Joan’s heaving shoulder to comfort her as she often had done during their growing-up years. “Please come to church with me tomorrow to pray for forgiveness.”
“It’s too late for that, Kate,” Joan said, straightening herself up and walking to the stove to light the kettle. “I’ve always tried to please everybody--Daddy, Mommy, you, Walter, Carolyn--but I’ve never felt rewarded for it.”
“You shouldn’t be so concerned with your feelings. Do what you know is right from what you were taught.”
Joan reached for two cups and a jar of instant coffee. “Kate, do you honestly still believe all that stuff we were taught back in grammar school?”
“I have never had any doubt. I’ve kept my faith by praying daily for strength to resist the temptations of this world. Prayer has worked for me, and it can work for you. I know it.”
“Well, then, you pray for me, and we’ll see if it works; but, while we’re waiting, please don’t bring this up again. I don’t want to talk about it or think about it. I’ve too much on my mind as it is.”
“Joan, you must open your heart more than that.”
“No, Kate, I’ve been hurt too much whenever I have opened my heart. I won’t do it again.”
* * *
Catherine has been with Joan for three and a half years now, but she would like to get her own place soon. Carolyn , though a week shy of eighteen and not married, has a two-month-old daughter whose disgusting smells and frequent crying have made Catherine more nervous than she ever was walking the streets of Amboy. Carolyn was always too pretty, too headstrong, too daring and wild, too much like her father. Now her life is ruined, Catherine has reminded herself every day since Carolyn’s shocking pronouncement, without warning but with too much sarcasm, last June. Catherine had been trying to let the girl know how pleased she was for what she was misinterpreting as a new maturity. “I’m very glad to see you’re not wearing one of those awful bikinis on the beach this summer,” she said.
“That’s because I’m four months pregnant, Aunt Catherine. Do you mean you really haven’t noticed?”
So Catherine now has a new occupation for the late afternoon hours after the paper has arrived. She searches the classifieds for a suitable furnished room as well as for some kind of job. Her modest disability pension and the rent from the house in Amboy will cover living expenses, but a little extra income would be useful. She also misses the satisfactions of regular employment. A part-time position in the rectory of one of the local parishes would be best. In her condition, however, she would have to resist the pressure to take on too much responsibility. Perhaps she could be a companion for an elderly lady, as long as she would not be expected to do the housework.
Today is Saturday, the 17th of January, a beautifully clear day. As usual, Catherine slept too late to see the pink morning clouds shading the sun-reddened ocean while the full white moon still hung in the northwestern sky, whitening the glassy waters of the bay, but she appreciates how the weather has been much warmer this winter than usual, so warm that she is considering a bus ride into Riverton to look at a few of the advertised rooms. Joan works Saturdays at the Mall, and Carolyn, who babysits two other children weekdays and gets home instruction in the early evening from three of the high school teachers, does most of her week’s homework in her room. She insists she will earn enough money for college, but Catherine has no idea what she expects to do with her baby. Catherine certainly is not going to take care of anybody’s bastard. The foolish girl has not come to terms with reality yet. Why, just last evening at the dinner table she announced that she expects to be her class valedictorian.
“Are you certain?” Joan asked. “I mean, did the principal tell you?”
“No,” Carolyn answered. “I telephoned Ms. Avocata, my guidance counselor, to find out what my average is. So far, it’s 94.8, and that’s five-tenths of a point ahead of Bob Buhlner. He can’t possibly catch me if I only get 90s this last term, and I’ll get at least 95s, maybe even a 98 in calculus and a 99 in English.”
“Lord save us, they wouldn’t let you make a speech, would they?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t see why not. If I finish with the highest average, that makes me the valedictorian, doesn’t it, Catherine?” Carolyn had stopped addressing her as “Aunt” when the baby was born. “What do you think, Mother?”
“Well, dear, what did Miss Avocata say?”
“It’s Ms. Avocata, Mother. She said I should insist, even if they give me a hard time.”
“Well, I don’t feel up to another battle with the superintendent,” Joan said. “Believe me, it was hard enough to get you home instruction for this year. You should be satisfied.”
“And grateful,” Catherine inserted.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mother. I’ll fight my own battles now. Ms. Avocata said she’d try to find out how the principal feels about it. As soon as I turn eighteen, I’ll start writing letters to everybody on the board, then to the county superintendent and even the Commissions. If the official route doesn’t work, I’ll write to the editor of the Press.
Catherine burped, a recent nervous symptom, and pardoned herself. “Do you really think it wise to seek publicity, Carolyn? I mean, after all!”
Carolyn stood up. She was tall like her father and often rose to her five feet, ten inches to make a point. “After all, what? I earned it, and it’s my right. And I’m going to give a speech that my classmates will never forget, believe me. I want to be remembered for something other than the first girl to get pregnant!”
So Catherine’s last night’s sleep was ruined by nervous indigestion again. Thank God the baby is napping now so she can enjoy a cup of tea before she goes out. As she sits in the little chair at the table by the sunny kitchen window, she sees something that makes her shudder and spill good tea into the saucer. A little colored boy of four or five is getting out of a car nosed in behind the house three doors down. He is followed by another, and then by a girl, not as dark, who looks like a Puerto Rican. My God, Catherine thinks, what are they doing here? She sees them being greeted by a woman she has never seen before, who also, in this bright sunlight, looks suspicious. “Now I know I’ll have to move,” Catherine declares aloud, as though taking a solemn vow. “God bless us and keep us!”
