Daughters of the Revolution (9 page)

“Carole is a gifted painter, and, more important, her work challenges
consciousness
,” Julia Singer said.

A hand shot up. “If you are interested in black power, Carole, why didn’t you invent an Afro-feminist way of painting, rather than reusing and perverting the traditional, European portrait techniques?”

“The European canon is all I know,” Carole said.

“But how can you love the form if you hate the history?”

“I don’t know. It’s a problem.”

“But you’re part
of
it—the history. Don’t you see? Isn’t it exciting to be among the very first class of girls?”

“Yes,” said Carole.

During the reception, Carole and several accomplices pulled the portraits off the walls and took them into the quadrangle and set them on fire.

Carole later claimed that the fire was part of the project—an investigation of authorship and authority, the ultimate freedom of the creator, ending in “a heap of burning images.” She wrote the required apology, but in it she claimed her work had been “censured.” No one came strongly to her defense. Her mother wrote a letter of apology to
The Goodeman
, offering to pay for any damage. But the damage was done, God’s face blackened, smeared and burned away around one ear.

For years after, Carole worked only on painted heads, sometimes white and sometimes black, always male, always moved to the very edge of the canvas. Each of them was titled
Self-Portrait:
Self-Portrait with Navy Hat, Self-Portrait with Apocalypse, Self-Portrait with Swimming Pool, Self-Portrait with Dog
. The paintings didn’t usually include the promised artifacts—the hat, the apocalypse, the swimming pool, the dog. They were just heads, no necks. They looked like bowling balls, decapitations. They looked as if they had rolled there.

C
hurch was exciting—Father Reiss admitted he’d hit on one of the girls from confirmation class—but EV’s stomach rumbled through it all. Newly confirmed herself, she’d run five miles before breakfast, and thought fiercely of the sandwiches.

She knelt, she stood, she sang and then she finally sat in the midsection of St. Vitus while the minister resigned. Father Reiss was not a crapulous old moralist in a robe—he looked like a movie star. He had an elongated owl’s head, live eyes and red lips. The story of his fall was widely, almost omnisciently known: It had happened one afternoon when his wife knocked on the door to the rector’s office, then opened it to ask Father Reiss whether he minded olives in a sauce on his spaghetti. She found him pressed into the tapestry couch, on top of some girl from Cape Wilde.

EV had been there herself with Father Reiss a year ago, before her confirmation—a willing victim, a seducer. For as long as she could remember (nine?) she’d tried to rub the gloss of innocence
off
in the same way she’d washed her new blue jeans with stones to remove their embarrassing freshness, their starch. “You are such a puppy,” Father Reiss had said in a baby voice. “You have legs like a boy.” His face hung on her, his mouth glittered and EV’s eye drifted. It can be hard to hear a compliment, or even read one on a lover’s lips—and the fever of his passion was ultimately too adult, and boring.

Now Father Reiss held a ballpoint pen in one hand as he read from the apology he’d prepared in the study that was the scene of his crime. He popped the point in and out, in and out, like a pulse.

The congregation listened sympathetically. They’d lost three ministers in three years (one to divorce, one to cancer). Father Reiss possessed a unique, if excessive, charm and had been diplomatic in managing the choir, not like the last one—a music snob who came up from the city and purged the tenors. Father Reiss had been the chaplain at the Goode School until integration and coeducation collided explosively into a new condition called “diversity,” the chapel was turned into an ecumenical cultural center and moral guidance became a function of the Office of Student Health. No one ever complained or missed him, with the exception of one student, Carole Faust, who, in spite of her rage against the patriarchy and the fact that her people were evangelical, had come down every Sunday while at Goode to sing in the choir.

Through some feat of fortitude for which they might have trained all their lives, Father Reiss’s wife and daughter sat in the second pew, buttresses for the sagging soul at the pulpit. At the end of his speech, Father Reiss lifted his beautiful face to confront his accusers. Who had accused him? the congregation
wondered. Had he accused himself? The molested child had defiantly not accused him, had refused.

“Let us pray,” he said.

Everyone but Father Reiss himself knelt down, relieved. His wife and daughter knelt on their velvet hassocks and hung their heads, raising the brows of brown hair that ran across the backs of their mother-daughter cable-stitched cardigans.

The mother had sharper edges and tight cords in her neck. The daughter, who was ten or eleven, looked softer and looser. EV touched the sketchbook in her bag. She’d like to draw these two as they stood or prayed. Would anyone care? (The congregation kept busy kneeling, standing, sitting.)

A bright scent of mothballs hung in the church, and dust from fifty women’s hats drifted in slow motes across the lavender light from the Tiffany window that revealed the last temptation of Christ.

EV knelt on her hassock to pray:
Spare me the shapeless waiting of girls to be confirmed or otherwise awakened
. Sometimes this year she felt so
hot
, nothing but a temptation, even to herself; she glowed, nerve endings clenched with sudden agony or shrill delight.

EV’s sympathies were, of course, all with Father Reiss. She understood lust, deceit, perversity, gluttony, curiosity. He’d gone too far; he’d helped himself. EV admired that. Go too far, get caught and take the others with you into the thick of it, smile into the bright eyes and the lights, say, “Yes, I did it,” force them all to react. Who knew better than Father Reiss how much the parish needed to forgive? These dry souls in their cardigans and hats and blazers hoped—they prayed—that any lapse within their imagination could be cured by a fifty-minute hour of easy worship. (As a precaution, they had Father Reiss in for strong drinks twice a year and stuffed him full of salty hors d’oeuvres.)

She would be different, renounce faith and family, publish
the secrets, sleep with the enemy. Ha! She’d break some serious rule, then wait—as Father Reiss waited now—to see what would happen.

EV rubbed her hands together to warm them, then pulled out her sketchbook, her charcoal pencil. She drew mother and daughter Reiss—Jeanne and Ruby—their bland, oblivious backs, the shoulder blades under the cardigans just visible, like folded wings. She began an intricate rendering of the cardigans’ cable pattern, then finished it off quickly with a pattern of
x
’s and
o
’s. The abrasive scratch on paper was magnified slightly by the cavern of the nave; she might have been rubbing a scabbed knee. She turned the page and drew Father Reiss at the pulpit, his difficult face. She drew the ball of tissue in his hand, the hand that held the tissue. (Had he been crying? The wimp!) But she caught something there. She recalled dry legs, her itchy jumper, Father Reiss’s cool, damp hands; she excelled at hands.

The Episcopal town blinked up at Father Reiss, embarrassed and hoping for the best. In his shoes, EV would have no mercy, would demand that they hear her confession to the end. She would regale them with her crimes, insist on being set upon a rack and flayed—and then forgiven. Wasn’t that what religion was for? “Punish me! Tickle me!” she’d begged when she was a little girl.

A sudden burst of drama from the organ—the recessional. Father Reiss’s nuclear family exploded from the pew with a sudden ferocious energy that reminded EV of Mei-Mei hot-waxing her eyebrows in the bathroom. She drew wax over her brow, pressed a cloth against the arch and ripped the hairs away. Zip, zip!

“Doesn’t it hurt?” EV asked, impressed.

“Like hell,” said Mei-Mei.

EV put away her sketchbook and pencil and followed the
others through the flung-open doors, where the congregation usually paused to shake Father Reiss’s hand on the porch, though he did not appear now. She went immediately around to the parish house for the snack. She loved the careful way the altar guild made the sandwiches, the same way every time, according to an ancient recipe: They cut circles of white bread with a jam jar, spread butter on one side, then laid on damp slivers of boiled chicken, or peeled cucumbers soaked in salted water.

Old Mrs. Fiske stood at the long trestle table with a sandwich in a napkin in her hand. She was nearly blind behind her punishing black glasses; she smiled blindly at EV. “Wasn’t he just great?” she said. “I think it’s marvelous when a man stands up and says, ‘I was wrong!’ I wish we weren’t losing him. Awful business. Is that EV Hellman?”

EV admitted it.

“Of course you are,” said Mrs. Fiske. “Where is your beautiful mother, dear?”

“At home.” Mei-Mei hardly ever went to St. Vitus on Sunday mornings; she stayed home and read Sylvia Plath or John Updike or Philip Roth in bed. But she made EV go. She said, “A soul not inoculated in compulsory religion is open to any infection.”

“What about you?” EV asked.

“Already rotten to the core.”

At one end of the long refreshment table, the altar guild poured coffee from a silver urn into pale blue cups and saucers. At the other end, they poured tea. The altar guild divided everyone up that way—“Coffee or tea?”—as if preferences were extremes, like
black and white
or
boys and girls
.

The choir hung their robes. Jeanne and Ruby Reiss made a silvery trace through the parish house, spoke to no one and walked out again. Father Reiss never appeared at all. Why should he absorb their compassion? What were sandwiches to him on a day like this? EV herself ate five; they were small.

She walked out back of the rectory, alongside the cemetery, and saw him bent over the stone wall, plucking dandelions from between the stones. “Father Reiss,” she said, “I wanted to say good-bye.”

He turned and his hand went out, an automatic gesture. His lips—and the deep declivities on either side of his nose—were chapped and raw-looking. She had only wanted, really, to touch him. She dug into her Danish school bag, pulled out the sketchbook and tore off the drawing of Jeanne and Ruby. Father Reiss looked down at the paper in his hand. “A drawing! Thank you, EV; I will enjoy it,” he said.

“It’s your wife and daughter.”

He looked down. “Of course it is.”

“I just wanted to say, you don’t have to worry. I’ll never tell.”

His face mobilized, remained bright.

“Hold on one minute, dear.”

He jogged around the rectory and returned with a ten-speed bicycle. “I’d like you to have this,” he said.

“Why?” EV took the bike by the handlebars, which were curved downward, like a ram’s horns. “Just kidding,” she said.

Father Reiss pressed his index finger neatly into the declivity above his upper lip—the philtrum, it was called—to suggest silence and complicity, and bent slightly toward her. “It’s hot,” he said.

“Cool,” said EV.

He watched her go, then looked down at the drawing in his hand, a competent portrait of a woman and a girl. It showed him some fact of his wife and daughter he couldn’t have seen with his own eyes: the literal, even somewhat impersonal stamp of reproduction, the essentially businesslike nature of existence. It made his teeth chatter. He walked along the wall to the rectory,
pulling dandelions—the irritation produced by the weed mitigated by the satisfaction of pulling it—from the interstices in the granite until he came to the heavy front door of the rector’s residence, nothing so simple or natural as “his house.” He did not get to have a house of his own, though he sometimes dreamed he had one, or sketched architectural ideas on the backs of his sermons in progress. Now—although nothing mattered in the airless, hollow universe—maybe he could.