The Age of Reason. Marian Birch
Baby Peter in her left arm, she applied lipstick with her right. When she was ready, she gently herded the rest of the children out the door and into the nine-seater Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon. She reminded her brood: “Don’t fight on Sunday, sweethearts, you all know where you’re supposed to sit.” As the humans arranged themselves in the car, two ravens flew overhead; their resonant musical clonk echoed in the pale sky. Three-year-old James croaked back at them from the front seat, where he sat between Mr. DeMelo, at the wheel, and Mary, who, at ten, was the eldest DeMelo offspring. Aunty Grace held Baby Peter and sat with eight-year-old Betsy in the middle seat. Daniel and Edith were in the way back.
As the station wagon backed carefully out onto Buck Hill Road, Daniel inserted a forefinger deep in his nose, extracted a sizable pale-green booger, and silently, delicately placed it on Betsy’s straw hat. Edith, feeling a gag and a giggle coming at the same time, made a noise somewhere between a snort and a cough.
“Cover your mouth, dear,” said Aunty Grace, without turning around. And Edith did, using her right hand, while with her left she tilted her genuine Italian Leghorn hat over her eye so she couldn’t see the offending snot. The hat was one of several in graduated sizes that Aunty Grace had brought back from the pilgrimage she took to Rome with her rosary group last fall.
***
After a ten-minute drive, the little troupe disembarked at the Church of the Holy Innocents. Holy Innocents, an old, mossy stone church, stood on Route 169, perhaps a quarter mile from the crossroads at the center of town where the snowy-white Congregational Church presided over Whitby Green. Edith’s Granny Gladys, who grew up in Whitby, said they built Holy Innocents when she was a little girl, when the first Catholics—Poles and Italians and Portuguese—started moving to Whitby. “Before that there wasn’t a soul in Whitby whose name ended in a vowel,” she’d told Edith, adding to clarify, “like DeMel-O.” And Granny ought to know, as her ancestors had founded the town three hundred years ago.
In the church’s drafty entry hall, Edith watched carefully as Aunty Grace, Mary, and Betsy dipped their fingers in the stone basin of holy water by the door and then curtsied and crossed themselves at the end of the pew before sitting. She did her best imitation of their movements, though she was sure that everyone could tell she wasn’t doing it properly. If she leaned against the back of the pew, her legs stuck straight out, so she perched close to the front edge, bent her knees and daintily crossed her ankles. Her patent-leather-clad feet dangled well above the floor. They were even above the kneeler on which Mary and Betsy were now kneeling with their hands clasped and their heads piously bowed. She subdued her crinoline with difficulty so that her dress lay flat across her knees and her underpants didn’t show. She was seated between Aunty Grace and Daniel, which was perfect for the daring plan she had in mind. Aunty Grace was preoccupied with minding the little boys and also with whatever it was that kept her always a little dreamy, so Edith was pretty sure that she wouldn’t notice anything. As for Daniel, he owed her a favor for overlooking the booger in the car. Besides, even if he did see what she was doing, he had a mischievous heart and would admire her daring. Edith leafed through the missal she had taken from the rack on the back of the pew in front of her, looking for the part the priest would preach from today. The little book was covered in soft blue dimpled fake leather and the pages were as thin as onion skins. On the right side the words were black and strange—Latin, she’d been told. It was what Jesus spoke, and the priest here spoke it too. On the left-hand page, the words, a pale red, were English, though sometimes a rather strange English.
The priest, Father Bernard, was a tiny man, who almost disappeared behind the altar. Edith wondered if his feet touched the ground when he sat in his enormous carved chair. He was French Canadian and had a splendid accent. Edith listened to him carefully so that she could copy it when she pretended to be French. He read:
And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding our of the throne of God and of the lamb. In the midst of the street of it and oneither side of the river was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit of every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations…
Edith had no trouble picturing the crystal river going down the middle of the street, or the king and the lamb sitting together cozily on the throne, but when she tried to picture the twelve kinds of fruit—cherries, apples, peaches, oranges, pears, bananas, blueberries, strawberries—she lost count. Father Bernard went on to tell them a story of some unborn twins who were still inside their mother’s tummy. Edith knew that uteruswas the proper word for where unborn babies are.
“At first they had plenty of room in the womb to play and sleep and do whatever it is unborn babies like to do, but then they kept growing and growing until it became terribly crowded, stuffy, and uncomfortable in there,” the priest explained. One twin (Father Bernard specified that it was the boy, of course) was ready to move on.
“Then the little boy said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here! There’s no room to move! This is no place for us anymore!’ but his twin sister refused. She was very afraid. ‘But we’ve always been here!’ she wailed. ‘No, no, no, I’m too afraid to go! I don’t believe . . . I don’t believe in life after birth!’” The little priest whimpered pathetically, sounding just like Marcus when he didn’t want to go to bed.
As the congregation tittered appreciatively, Edith swiftly slipped the missal in one smooth, unaccented motion under her jacket. She could feel her heart pound and her stomach flip over, but she knew she still looked perfectly calm from the outside. A few breaths later, she picked up the missal that was in front of Aunty Grace, who was rummaging around in her voluminous purse for Peter’s pacifier. Edith opened it right to the correct page and resumed reading. Since she didn’t look at him, she had no idea if Daniel saw her do this or not. The small purloined book fit snugly against her chest under her jacket.
She didn’t have to walk up to the altar, because she wasn’t expected—wasn’t even allowed—to take Communion. Not only hadn’t she had her First Communion, she hadn’t even been baptized, although her Granny Gladys was dismayed by this. Granny wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but she believed strongly in doing the proper thing. Her own children had all been properly baptized and christened in the Congregational Church, even if they hadn’t spent much time there since. Granny usually took Edith to the Christmas carol service there, but that was all. Edith was not permitted to go to the Catholic catechism class at Ascension College that Catholic kids went to on Thursday afternoons on a special bus. So for her there would be no confirmation, no beautiful white dress, and therefore no taking Communion now or ever. Daniel had just had his First Communion last month at Easter, so he filed past Edith out of the pew behind his mother and sisters to go up to the altar and have the priest put the cracker on his tongue and give him a sip of grape juice. The only walking Edith would have to do with the missal tucked up against her rib cage was on the way out of church after Mass. As the congregants exited the church, Father Bernard did not shake hands with children as he did with the adults. He tousled the boys’ hair and gave the girls a little pat on the shoulder. He couldn’t tousle the girls’ hair because they all wore hats. So Edith could keep her arms folded across her chest to prevent the book from falling down out of her dress to the ground. She interlaced her fingers under the small bulge and assumed what she hoped was a pious expression as they exited.
Edith worried how she would manage when they stopped on the way home at Nipmuck Variety on the Green. Mr. DeMelo gave each child, including Edith, a dime to buy candy. But luckily for her, the DeMelo kids had eyes only for the candy counter, and Mr. and Mrs. DeMelo were busy distributing dimes and supervising. No one was really paying her any mind. She was able to keep one bent forearm supporting her trophy, while with her other hand she picked out two Mary Janes, her favorite amber-colored hard-molasses candy with a soft peanut butter center. They came in a yellow wrapper with a red band, and her mother told her that they would rot her teeth if they didn’t break them first. She laid them down on the counter with her dime.
On the drive home, Daniel tricked James into trading his red all-day sucker for a crummy piece of penny candy. James was only three, not able to calculate relative candy values with accuracy. Daniel always told him that the nonpareil or licorice drop was extra good and the kind