Love and Glory

Chapter Seven

Guze and Billy Murphy and I were kneeling in a rear pew in Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church at 7:20 on a Saturday night. There were short lines at each confessional.

“The French priest is in the booth on the left,” Billy whispered. “He can’t understand English. He just gives you three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys no matter what you tell him.”

“You never had nothing to tell him, Billy,” Guze said.

The smell of candle wax lingered in the chill silence of the church. An elderly man and woman knelt before us, saying penance. I wondered what they had left to confess.

“What if he’s not in that booth,” I said. “The other guy is brutal.”

A young woman with a kerchief over her head walked up from the altar. Her heels clicked in the silent church. Her hands were clasped in front of her. She looked down at them as she walked. On either side of the altar there were banks of candles flickering in red jars. Above the altar arch the Lamb of God looked sweetly down and cherubim were poised in holy ecstasy along the rim of the arch. I could feel the infinite reach of sanctity stretching back along hushed passages of time, in living connection with Dickensian England and the France of Charlemagne, with Bethlehem and Eden. Church had surely felt this way to Shakespeare, to Columbus, to Niccolo Machiavelli; clear and cool and breathless with the memory of ancient sacrifice; the sloe-eyed virgin holding her child; the sacred heart, crimson in the middle of the martyred breast; frozen in statuary that seemed coeval with the events memorialized.

It was my turn in the booth. Kneeling in the confessional, I murmured the familiar formula, my throat narrow with embarrassment. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was a month ago and these are my sins.” There was a small velvet drape across the window between me and my confessor, and I could only sense the presence on the other side as it shifted slightly, and its breath whistled faintly in its nose. “... and I had intercourse.”

“How many times?”

“Once, Father.”

“Say t’ree Hail Mary and t’ree Our Father and make good act of contrition,” the presence said, and began to murmur in Latin the prayer I said in English. Our lowered voices murmured in unison. He finished before I did. Priests always did. I took my time on the prayer so I wouldn’t seem to take it lightly. Then it was over and I was in a pew kneeling to say my penance, relief tingling along the edges of my body. My hands were damp. But I was safe. I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. How could those few red rushing moments be worth an eternity of damnation? What a fool I had been, and yet, in the whispering cool church with its flickering candles burning for the dead, I knew that I would do it again. I knew that if I got the chance, that rage would sweep over me and I would plunge ahead though the pit gaped sulphurously beneath us. I tried to think of God, of the Virgin. The feeling kept its claim on my soul even as I prayed. Could I be forgiven for something I knew I’d do again? Jennifer. I’d like her to know I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I wished I knew her well enough to tell her. She’d look at me so interested, so fully concentrated on what I was saying, and I knew she’d think it was good. It wasn’t just the feeling, it was the pleasure of being one of those who had and I knew she’d think that was nice and she’d laugh when I told her about it and color the way she did when she laughed.

The vaulted ceiling of the church darkened toward the peak and you couldn’t see where the arching rafters met beneath them. I still knelt alone in the pew toward the front of the church and smiled. Jennifer would like it. I couldn’t wait to tell her, if only I knew her better.

She’d laugh about hell. I knew she wasn’t Catholic. I’d barely talked to her, yet I paid such close attention to her, to everything she said and did in my presence, to everything I heard, to everything I imagined about her, that I felt sure of her as if I knew her best of all. I knew she wouldn’t disapprove of me screwing some townie. I knew she’d be delighted.

And I thought about her in the limpid stillness of the dim church while I knelt, and I thought of Barb on her back with her legs apart and as I felt the surge of desire in my belly, I tried to think of the Virgin. For a moment Jennifer and Barb and the Holy Mother all blended in my imagination and for a moment my passion was multiple and two-thirds holy.

Oh my God, I said, Oh dear God make her love me. Then I stood and walked, trembly and thick with passion, from the silent church.