Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters (16 page)

I feel like I’m constantly apologizing. I’ll be honest with you—I don’t enjoy it.

Norrie came home from her New York adventure at noon on Christmas Eve, loaded down with presents. She shut herself up in her room to wrap them. Robbie had stayed in New York to spend the holidays with his parents. She seemed happy, except when I crossed her line of sight.

She came downstairs before dinner to put the presents under the tree. I hovered anxiously. She hadn’t spoken to me yet, not really.

“You can stop hovering, Jane,” she said. “I forgive you.”

“You forgive me? For what?”

She threw a silver-wrapped box at my head. I ducked. “If you’re going to have that attitude, I won’t forgive you.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry I splashed your private business all over the Internet.”

“
Thank
you. Jesus.”

“Are you sure you forgive me? Because you don’t sound all that happy with me.”

“I’m not happy with you, but I’ll get over it, because it’s Christmas, and we’re family, and I love you. I forgive you, St. Joan, for taking the whole family up in flames with you.”

“That doesn’t sound very sincere.”

“Fine. I give up.”

I sank into the comfy yellow chair next to the end table with the candy dish on it, and reached for a cinnamon candy. It seemed right that I should feel something burning, even if it was only cinnamon in my mouth. A small fire glowed in the fireplace, and the smell of sugar cookies wafted in from the kitchen. Ginger and Miss Maura had decorated the house with holly and pine garlands and a big wreath on the front door. The mood wasn’t quite festive, though. There was a lot of tension in the air. But at least there was a sense of activity, of things happening.

“Did you get me anything good for Christmas?” Norrie asked.

I got her a blue cardigan sweater. “Yeah, you’ll definitely love it.”

“Always so sure of everything.” She looked me in the eye for the first time since she got back; her anger at me was ebbing. She can be motherly when she’s in the right mood. I usually resent it,
but lots of times her motherliness has kept us from clawing each other’s eyes out.

It was four o’clock—only a couple of hours to kill before the big Christmas Eve party. Daddy-o had gone to the train station to pick up St. John. Sully was out doing last-minute shopping, and Ginger was resting upstairs on the chaise longue in her room. Sassy and Takey came in from the kitchen, where they’d been helping Miss Maura decorate the Christmas cookies. Takey had crumbs on his chin. He started crawling around under the tree, peering at the names on the packages.

He picked up a square box from Norrie and shook it. “Did you get me something in New York?” he asked her.

“Mm-hmm.” She spread out her pile of packages so they wouldn’t be all in one spot under the tree.

“Did Ginger and Daddy-o punish you for running away?” Takey asked.

“They haven’t punished me yet,” Norrie said. “I think they might leave it to Almighty.”

Takey shuddered. You’ve got a reputation in our house, that’s undeniable.

“Poor Norrie,” Takey said. “I hope Almighty doesn’t ruin your Christmas.”

“She won’t,” Norrie said. “No one can ruin Christmas. Don’t you remember
A Christmas Carol
? With Tiny Tim and ‘God bless us, every one’? No matter what Mr. Scrooge did to that Cratchit family, he couldn’t spoil their Christmas.”

I hereby inform you that the Mr. Magoo version of Dickens’s
Christmas Carol
is the official Sullivan Family Favorite Version,
though I have a soft spot for the 1951 Alastair Sim one, and Sassy and Norrie love them all, even the Albert Finney version from the 1970s, which is a musical. I think I once heard you say you find the story insipid.

“So Almighty is like Scrooge?” Takey said it, not me.

I looked up from unwrapping another cinnamon candy. Sassy caught my eye, but Norrie made herself busy at the tree.

“No,” she said. “Almighty is not like Scrooge. She loves Christmas. Remember last year at the pageant when she sang all those Christmas songs?”

Sassy had spent the whole morning getting ready for our pageant skit. We usually practice for weeks ahead of time, but this year’s been so crazy…I suppose you could argue that I had a lot of time on my hands since I didn’t have to go to school for the past month, but I was busy thinking about more important things like good and evil. At the last minute Sassy said she wanted to do the final scene from
The Winter’s Tale
. I objected that it wasn’t Christmasy enough and suggested reenacting a scene from
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
instead. It’s my life’s ambition (so far thwarted) to play Herbie, the elf who wants to be a dentist. But, as you are well aware, Sassy went ahead with the Shakespeare and roped the rest of us into her little scheme. We all know the play because everyone in school reads it in tenth grade. Sassy made the minimal costumes and recruited us to take parts, promising cue cards so we wouldn’t have to memorize our lines. As long as she made it that easy, I was willing to go along. We figured we’d go on last, right before you and Daddy-o do your piano cabaret thing.

She was determined to do
The Winter’s Tale
and she wouldn’t explain why. I sensed she was hiding something. Turns out I was right.

When did this family become such a hive of secrets? The more I try to blast the truth out of them, the more secretive they get.

Your Christmas Eve extravaganza was weak in the jolly department this year, Almighty. There was still the big greeting at the front door, Handel’s
Messiah,
and the gigantic tree in the library; still the contingent of globe-trotting visitors from Africa and Russia and England, etc., in their wonderful clothes with nothing better to do for the holidays. But the Overbecks didn’t show—no Mamie, no Brooks…did that have something to do with the Cotillon? And you wore black velvet instead of red, for Wallace. And when you greeted me with a Christmas kiss you whispered, “You’re next” in my ear. I’m warning you right now: I’m not doing it. If you must have a debutante in the family, better start working on Sassy.

Going downstairs to the theater for the Christmas pageant usually lifts my spirits—I love the blue, red, and gold patterns painted on the walls and the silver curtain on the little stage. I love it when Daddy-o recites “’Twas the night before Christmas…” every year. It wouldn’t be Christmas without that. Or without Ginger doing a tipsy “Blue Christmas,” accompanied on the baby grand by St. John.

Then it was time for the annual skit by the Sullivan children. Remember that year Sassy, Norrie, and I sang “Sisters” from
White Christmas
? With the feathers and everything? Everybody loved that. This year our costumes were easy—we just threw sheets over our clothes to make togas for a generic classical feel—except for Takey, who had to wear a wig and white makeup, and Sassy, whose wig looked a lot like your hair, in case you didn’t notice. Considering we pulled it together in one day, I thought we did pretty well. But even though we’d rehearsed, I wasn’t expecting Takey to do that little thing at the end—the thing that had everybody in tears. It was Sassy’s idea—her special stage directions. I had nothing to do with it. And it wasn’t in the original play—I checked.

It was nice of you to try to cheer everybody up afterward with your Christmas cabaret medley—good effort. Not sure it worked, though. Anyway, midnight mass is always good for a laugh, right?

You’ve probably waded through this long explanation thinking,
This is no confession. Jane isn’t repentant at all.
That’s understandable. But now we come to the part where everything changes, the part where I see the error of my ways and vow to mend them.

It happened, of all places, in the cathedral, Christmas Eve, at midnight mass.

Something in
The Winter’s Tale
must have gotten to me, because I stepped inside the cathedral feeling solemn and almost…reverent. Usually I find the Christmas service so superficial, between the lip-glossy girls in their new Christmas jewelry and sweaters fresh out of the box, the priests in their weird medieval
robes, and the cardinal’s chummy chat about his last visit to Rome and His Holiness’s health. Oh, Cardinal, we’re so impressed that you’re friends with the pope. Do you know Beyoncé too?

Then, down at the end of my row, I saw two people, a man and a woman in their thirties, nodding out. At first I wondered if they were asleep—it was midnight after all. But they sloped forward in slow motion, jerking slightly when their heads touched the pew in front of them, and I realized they were junkies. They didn’t look homeless or anything like that—the man needed a haircut but he wasn’t dirty, and the woman’s tweed coat looked new.

What kind of person would get high and go to mass? Maybe they were hoping for an extra-transcendent experience. I kept glancing over at them to double-check, to make sure they weren’t the Ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come in disguise. They woke briefly and smiled at each other with barely opened eyes.

Weren’t they afraid someone would see them? Like, someone from their families? The woman could have gone to St. Maggie’s. Maybe we know some of her relatives. It’s possible.

Seeing those junkies made me gloomy.
I should pay attention to the mass,
I thought, and shut them out. I looked at the stained-glass windows and tried to remember the stories they told. There was St. Brigid of Kildare, the patron saint of good old Bridget to Nowhere. Bridget was probably somewhere in the cathedral with her family. So were Bibi and Tasha and Shea and Brooks…

On a window over the confessional, grouped with Lazarus and the Prodigal Son, was the image of Joan of Arc. She knelt before a glowing angel, receiving a message from God, not
fighting but listening and obeying. Typical Church propaganda. But there on her knees, the way she bent forward…it echoed the nodding of the junkies. It sounds stupid, and I’m embarrassed to admit it—like I said, I was in a somber mood to start with—but I started to cry. I don’t know why I was crying exactly. A lot of stuff was built up inside me and it decided to come out through my eyes.

The soprano singing “Ave Maria” from the balcony didn’t help. All these images flashed through my mind, like watching the highlights reel of your life before you die: Takey’s little gesture at the end of
The Winter’s Tale
, Daddy-o reciting “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” Norrie running up Charles Street in her white debutante dress, Sassy sobbing on her bed, Wallace in his coffin…

…me, half-dressed, getting dragged off the school stage during
Guys and Dolls
, and the hurt look on Bibi’s face…

…and you, Almighty, singing Christmas songs in your black velvet dress. You and Mame and Bibi and me.

The bell tolled midnight. It was officially Christmas Day. Everyone stood to sing “Joy to the World.” It was supposed to be a happy moment. But as I stood there singing in the cathedral where countless weddings and baptisms and funerals had been held—ceremonies for Ginger and Daddy-o and Wallace and all of us—while the junkies smiled dreamily and St. Joan gazed down on me from the stained-glass window…I felt the weight of history bearing down on me. Real history. The kind you can never fully know.

I got the family stories all wrong. I must have. Maybe someday somebody will write the story of my life and get it all wrong,
and it will serve me right. Even I don’t fully understand what I’m thinking or why I do the crazy things I do. How could anyone else?

I was arrogant, Almighty.

As the tears streamed down my face, Sassy took my hand, and my heart swelled big, like the Grinch’s. At that moment I loved everyone in the church, everyone in the city, everyone in the world, even Sister Mary Joseph. Even tyrannical you. St. Augustine said that we can’t understand God any more than a hole on the beach can understand the ocean. I was that hole, tiny, and the smaller I felt the more I filled up with love. I was afraid I’d explode. It hurt. Being filled with love sounds like a good thing, and it is, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

The next morning, I took a shower and scrubbed my neck extra hard. Then I checked the back of my neck with a hand mirror.

The skull-and-crossbones tattoo was gone. Finally.

Weird.

There it is, Almighty. The most contrite confession I could muster. If you read my last blog entry, you’ll see I confessed before you even asked me to. And I mean every word of it.

Your move.

With love and reluctant admiration,

your granddaughter (and a Sullivan to the core),

Jane Dorsey Sullivan