The Carnival at Bray (26 page)

“Hi,” Laura shook Sister Joan's hand limply, ducking her head and looking much like a girl herself.

“Please,” Sister Geneve said, indicating two of the leather chairs, “sit down.”

They took their places around the empty table.

“The purpose of this hearing today is to discuss whether Saint Brigid's is the right place for Margaret as she continues her secondary studies,” Sister Joan said. She opened the file folder and began to read. “Margaret has missed a week of classes, and because all of these absences were cuts, she is not allowed to make up any of the work. As a result, she is failing several of her courses. That is the first issue. The second is Margaret's conduct while absent. It's our understanding that your daughter went, unaccompanied, to Italy with a student from Saint Brendan's. She shared sleeping arrangements with this boy for several nights.” Sister Joan peered over the rim of her bifocals at Maggie.

“Margaret, it may seem unfair to you that we are going to be talking about your conduct
outside
of school when deciding whether to keep you as a student here. But at Saint Brigid's, character is just as important as academics—far more important, actually—and we have to think about what it will mean for the climate of our school if we allow you to remain a student here after some of the choices you've made over the past few days. What message will that be sending the other girls, the underclass girls? Now, Sister Geneve and I are not here to hear your confession—that is the business of yourself, your family, and God. What we
are
here today to do is give you the opportunity to tell your side of the story, to help us
understand why you should remain a student here. To speak plainly, your job today is to convince us that we should not expel you.”

Maggie nodded. Under the table, her mother groped for her hand and held it tightly.

“To be clear, Maggie,” Sister Geneve added softly, “we
want
you to be a Saint Brigid's girl. This is your chance to tell us why you deserve to stay. It's not meant to feel like an inquisition.”

“Okay.”

“Sisters, before we start, I do want to tell you a little bit about our family situation,” Laura began in a quaking voice. “I'm not trying to make excuses or nothing, but I just think maybe if you knew what Maggie's gone through over the past couple months …” She trailed off. Laura was a career bartender, used to getting her way by flirting, sweet-talking, wisecracking, or, when all else failed, handing out a complimentary shot. Here, all of her reliable tricks were powerless. While she looked to the ceiling beams for inspiration, Sister Geneve began picking at a loose thread at the cuff of her sweater and Sister Joan regarded her without expression from between the folds of her wimple. “My little brother died suddenly over the Christmas holidays,” she finally continued. “Maggie was his goddaughter. They were very close. He committed suicide on New Year's Day, back in Chicago. I didn't want Maggie to know—it was so awful—so I told her he'd died of natural causes.”

“Natural causes?” Sister Joan wrote something in Maggie's file.

“Yeah. See, he had a bum heart. A congenital defect. So I thought she'd believe it. I wanted to believe it myself, you know?” Laura paused now to reach into her purse and produce a balled up tissue. She honked into it while Maggie looked away, staring fiercely into the blank, stony face of Saint Anne.

“So, you lied to her?” Sister Geneve's voice had a delicate, neutral quality that didn't need to be judgmental in order to make
its point. Maggie had seen her walk down the hallway before the opening bell and say nothing more than “Good morning,” leaving in her wake a sea of upper-class girls who unrolled their skirts back to the required length of an inch above the knee and went sheepishly off to class.

“I don't know whether that was the right thing to do,” Laura said quickly. Maggie could see the tiny crescents of sweat soaking the cheap material under her mother's armpits. “I don't like lying. I know that lying is a sin. But I wanted to protect my daughter from—I mean, Kevin was Maggie's
hero.
An uncle, a brother, a father and a best friend all wrapped into one. We
all
loved him so much. He was crazy and funny and he read all these books, you know, these big four-hundred-pagers with tiny print … he was just this—
force.

“But like you said, this isn't an inquisition. I did what I did and that's that. The thing is, Kevin gave Maggie those Nirvana tickets. So going to Rome—for her, it was about a lot more than just a stupid concert.” She took a breath. The crescents of sweat were now seeping into full moons beneath her arms.

“My point is, she's a good kid, okay? And she's been through a lot this year. I mean, if you were gonna expel every teenager who did something stupid, who would you have left? Maybe the valedictorian and a couple kids from the chess team?” She tried a laugh, which echoed emptily off the plaster walls of the sparse room.

“I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Lynch,” said Sister Joan. “And you too, Margaret. Grief can be its own temporary form of insanity. How we handle our suffering speaks to our character as well. Margaret, do you have anything you'd like to add?”

Maggie looked up from her lap at the two nuns who sat and waited for her to say something.

“I was wondering,” she began, the words coming out in a rush, “is Eoin up for expulsion, too? Because I heard he was. And it's not his fault. It wasn't even his idea, and—”

“We're not here to discuss his case,” Sister Joan cut her off. “Saint Brendan's is a different school than ours, and we can't comment on their business.” Her thick bifocals made her eyes look like two coffee beans, pupilless, cold. Maggie felt like screaming. She had done this to Eoin. She was poison; she had ruined his life.

“Maggie.” Sister Geneve leaned toward her across the table, the string of her unraveling sweater curled around her wrist. “You can't control what happens to your friend. Right now, you need to be fighting for yourself, for
your
future.”

“But—”

Under the table, her mother used the toe of her sensible pump to kick Maggie in the leg.

“Honey,”
she hissed.

“What?”
Maggie glared at Laura and turned back to the nuns.

“I mean, I guess you're going to do whatever you want with me,” she said quietly. “But before last week, I had pretty good grades.”

“That is true,” Sister Geneve nodded firmly. “Maggie is a quiet but diligent student. She writes very movingly about poetry.”

“I love Yeats,” Maggie said. “I thought of that poem you taught us when I was at my uncle's funeral.”

“What poem is that?” asked Sister Joan.

“It's called ‘A Dream of Death.' ” Maggie ran a finger along the wavy lines of wood grain on the surface of the table, the way they spread out and came together in parallel lines, marking age. “He wrote it for this woman he loved, about her being buried in a foreign place, and about her grave being marked with cypress trees.” She paused. “When we were in Italy, on the train going through Tuscany, we saw them—cypress trees. The roads are lined with them, like gates or something.”

“And here's me, thinking all she cared about was music.” Laura smiled, that open, American smile that laid too many cards
on the table, the one that showed the missing molar. There was a silence. Finally, Sister Joan straightened her papers.

“Well, if you don't mind stepping out for a moment, Sister Geneve and I are going to discuss this in private. We'll call you back inside when we've reached a decision.”

“Thank you,” said Laura. They all stood up and shook hands again. “I just want to say again, that, you know, Maggie really is a good kid. Her father left us when she was very young, and ever since then, she's been my little helper, my little woman.” She hung her head. “Sometimes, I think she's more of a grown-up than I am. And—and I think stability is what she needs now. She's already had to start over once.”

“We'll keep that in mind,” Sister Geneve said. “We know Maggie's a good girl.”

Back in the hallway, they sat in an old pew and waited while the nuns conferred.

“Jesus Christ, talk about an interrogation!” Laura fanned herself. “Goddamn nuns think they're so much better than everyone else. Brides of Christ my
ass.”
Maggie sat next to her and chewed her nails. A clock ticked loudly above their heads. Ten minutes later, Sister Geneve opened the door and leaned out.

“Pardon me, ladies? If you could come back into the office.” Maggie and Laura followed Sister Geneve back into the conference room and sat down.

“Maggie, we've taken into consideration your unique circumstances,” began Sister Joan. “Normally, this kind of behavior would warrant an expulsion. But as Christians, we must always practice compassion and forgiveness. And we'd like you to remain a student with us at Saint Brigid's.” Maggie sighed. She felt like an iron weight had just slid from her back. Laura slumped back in her seat, produced the tissue and proceeded to dab beneath her eyes.

“However, this is going to be a conditional reacceptance,” Sister Joan continued. “One, you're going to have to work very
hard to pull up your grades. You can't miss any more school, and you're going to have to do very, very well in all your courses. If you fail any of them at the end of term, we can't reinstate you.”

“Okay,” Maggie said. “I can do that.”

“Good. The second condition is that—and we're going to need your support on this, Mrs. Lynch—we don't think it will send a good message to the community about our girls and our school if you continue to be seen tipping around with that boy. We want you to give us your word that you will end your relationship with Eoin Brennan. You're not to see him anymore while you are enrolled at Saint Brigid's.”

All three of the women turned toward Maggie to observe how this news would settle. She closed her eyes for a moment, willing herself not to cry, but when she opened them, the tears streaked down her face anyway.
Why does my body not know the difference between sadness and rage? Why do I always have to cry when I'm furious? Why do I have to act like a little girl who just got her lunch box stolen instead of standing up for myself and telling them where they can stick their fucking rules?

“Of course!” her mother's bright voice cut across the silence. “You know, I was going to suggest that anyway! They're just too
young.
There's nothing worse than getting involved too deep with someone when you're that
young
—trust me, I would know.” She put a sweaty hand on Maggie's shoulder. “Honey, do you understand what this means? No more phone calls, no more dates, no nothing. Can you promise that?”

Maggie opened her mouth. The saints, Anne and Veronica and Elizabeth and Brigid, stood at attention. She felt their maddening, beatific, stony half smiles, daring her to jump from her seat, point her finger in Sister Joan's wimpled face and say the kinds of things that good girls and saints never said. And she would have done it, except that she felt the infinitesimal weight of Kevin's letter folded up, as it always was, in her jacket pocket.

There will always be time to do the responsible thing.
What did he mean by that—was this that time? What would he say to her now? Where did her loyalties lie—with the dead or the living? In her life, Maggie had loved two men. One was a few blocks away, standing before a review board at Saint Brendan's. And one was now a memory—uncut hair, eyes of burnout blue, seat back in AG BULLT careening down Lake Shore Drive on a bleary summer Saturday morning, cigarette dangling between his fingers and the sun rising blood-orange above Lake Michigan.

And so she made her choice. She heard herself speaking as if possessed, as stony and passionless as the statues in the corner:

“I promise.”