She lived a typical childhood. Her mother modeled for magazines, on runways, and in stores. Her other mother packaged Tastykakes and Swell Bubble Gum at their factories in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father sold Cadillacs at his dealership in Rome, New York, and dealt Studebakers from Miami to Cuba. Her other father, an engineer at Westinghouse, attended Ku Klux Klan meetings in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Four parents fostered clothes, cars, desserts, and racism.
Nuns at a Philadelphia orphanage, and a children’s shelter fostered her, the baby daughter. That daughter was me.
Springfield, 1962
A Friday evening rendered a piercing of freezing winds and slanting snow that assaulted my emotions as my mother and I arrived at St. Francis of Assisi in Springfield for our week’s confession. She sucked one last drag of her cigarette. Snuffed it out in the car’s ashtray. The ashes, still lit, reminded me of the embers of hell. The place where she told me I would burn if I “Didn’t change my ways.” According to her, I had sinned.
Streetlights illuminated our push through the blowing snow of the parking lot. The sidewalk led us past the wrought-iron fence enshrining the statue of St. Francis. He shivered in a snowdrift next to a birdbath, while crystallized epaulets deepened on his shoulders, giving him a shrugging air. One outstretched hand cupped two stone birds. The three shivered cold in frozen repose.
Salt pocked the ice on the steps of the grey-stone church like sins on a soul. Ascending behind Mother, my gloveless hand recoiled from the cold railing snaking up the stairs. My breath shot frosty death requests. Please strike me dead before going inside. Strike Pat dead at the bowling alley before I get home, so I never see him again. Please, God, spare me.
The wind curved its hands around my back and legs. Thrust me through the tall archway of half-opened doors. Through the wedge of yellow light, I stepped into the narthex, the incense, a momentary interstice between the secular and the sacred. Where the sinners entered, and the sinless left.
Dipping our fingers into the walled font of icy holy water, we blessed ourselves. Walked down the center aisle. Wet boots cursed the marble floor until we reached an empty pew and genuflected. Knelt on the naked oak kneelers. Mother bent her head down to her fists. I couldn’t pray. Couldn’t breathe.
Instead, I focused on the curly, black hair of the man kneeling in front of me, then his shoulders. I followed a wide whale of corduroy on his brown jacket. Another row, another, down and lost in the darkness of a fold. My eyes deflected to the green marble altar. “IHS” gilded its front. A large, gold crucifix restrained its starched, white runner. I heard shuffling. Shifted my view toward a gray-haired, Italian woman as she worry-waddled up the aisle. Shaped like a soup pot and wearing all black, an ankle-length coat and veiled hat. She had laced a sin-worn rosary through the fingers of one hand. Held a black purse in the other. Half-genuflecting, she entered a pew across the aisle as her wake seasoned the wafting incense with a bouquet garni of garlic and mothballs. I wondered what she could confess at her age.
I thought of my own confession. How I would word my plea for help from the priest. The Catholic orphanage arranged my adoption. Couldn’t I ask him to contact the nuns and have my adoption canceled? Anxiety’s phantom hands squeezed my throat. I worried I would vomit on myself, or worse, throw up on that corduroy jacket. Or in the confessional.
I counted on Father’s code of silence, following a cant of prayers and absolution. No name, no face, no self. Into his palms I would place my dust. The priest would discard it by rubbing his hands together like a praying mantis. As each priest did during Sunday sermons when proselytizing on empathy, morality, and divine service. Hell-firing motes of dust into the rays of red sunlight radiating from the stained-glass windows of the Stations-of-the-Cross. When bored with his blather, I followed the deviate path of one particle of dust until it evanesced into shadow. Like my guardian angel in my bedroom at night.
I centered on the intermediaries who interceded on a sinner’s behalf because the impure could not pray to Christ. The statues pedestaled themselves to the right of the altar. Those saints forever marbled in piousness. Rectitude upon each face. Their cold, white Sunday best now warmed by the soft gold of Friday-evening candlelight. The statue of St. Joseph cradled a child in his left arm, a sheaf of lilies in his right. His eyes focused on mine bidding me to stay calm as he pulled the child closer to his chest.
Another St. Francis in the corner, more comfortable than his twin outside, fixated his eyes on me. As he pressed a crucifix to his chest, he nodded for me to go ahead. You are ready to confess. You are stronger than the mortar that binds the stones in this church. The priest will understand. You are not the guilty one.
At the left side altar, adorned with a vase of white spider mums, stood the Blessed Virgin Mary, “Most perfect Mother.” From her extended fingertips wept a crystal rosary. It refracted the colors of venial and mortal sins in the souls of her children. Looking toward me, she spoke: My son is with you always. He loves you as much as I do. Your prayers to me are never in vain. A familiar snake writhed underneath her crushing foot.
How many times had I prayed to her statue on the chest near my bed? Prayed as she crushed Satan’s head. Prayed as the Sisters said. For the sick, the helpless and the needy. And I prayed to her with fervency every night for me. Four rosaries because three hadn’t worked, then five. Bare knees on wood floor, black beads in fingers. “Hail, Mary…. Hail, Mary…. Hail Mary….”
Mother nudged me with her elbow, and we rose. As we passed the front altar, I heard the saints whispering amongst themselves: Look, there she goes. She’s strong. She’ll be okay. I followed my mother down a side isle and stood opposite her in my own line of sinners waiting to enter a confessional booth. I counted. I turned rigid. We both stood fourth in line. She could be in her booth when I confess. She will hear me. No. Not this way. Learning the truth about Pat’s bedroom visits because of my place in line? I’ll move to the end of the row of confessors. No, she will question why. What would I tell her. I need to stay here. Maybe she won’t listen.
The nuns had taught us to pray aloud while waiting our turn while inside a confessional. Our mumbling would muffle audible sins of confessors on the other side of the priest. Has she counted, too? If she has, will she mumble-pray, or will she listen to my confession? Just whisper extra low. Mother hates dust.
My turn arrived. I opened the confessional door and knelt in the dark, vast smallness of the cubicle. Cigarette smoke, clinging to preceding confessors’ clothes, jingled in my head—“When your nerves are shot, Camels set you right.” My brain could never filter all it had amassed, star bursting nonsense when anxiety slammed me. The walls closed in. Elbowed me as if smirking: “So, you think Father will help you?”
I blessed myself, Yes, he’ll help me. My lips chanted prayer-after-prayer while waiting for the priest to finish with a confessor.
“Hey, your mother’s next in line over there.”
Stop talking to me! I couldn’t think about Grace. Instead, I beseeched the saints for more strength. I slid my coat off my shoulders. No air.
“How about those evil thoughts of yours. Those things you plan on doing. You’re not such a good girl.”
Just shut up!
The perforated screen separating me from the priest thumped open. I jumped. His Latin and bad breath penetrated the partition. Through its holes, I could see the sinistral demarcation of Father O’Malley’s head, the head he held up with one hand on the side of his face, the head that leaned over his shoulder toward me from his toll booth where he collected sins from the sinner, Oh the sinner, while he listened to the horror, Oh the horror. Where he meted out the change. Oh, short-changed. He looked bored. The walls of the confessional constricted my body until words spittled from me: “Bless me—Father. For I have sinned. It has been one—week since my—last confession.” I coughed, stalling, “Uh, I cursed. But just twice, Father.”
“Did you use the Lord’s name in vain?”
“No, Father.”
Silence.
“Is there anything else?
“Uh, yes. I was envious of my brother.” What else can I confess? “Oh, and I hated some people.”
“Who?”
Oh, no. I can’t say my parents; “Some girls at school, Father.” Since I just lied, and to a priest, I told the priest that I told a lie.
“What did you lie about?”
Now, I had to make up a new lie; “I, uh, lied to my brother’s friends when they knocked on the door to see if he could come outside and skateboard.”
“What did you say?”
“Uh, I told them he didn’t live here anymore—but he had been mean to me!”
“Go on.”
“Well, I…I don’t remember, um….” Perspiration glued wisps of hair to my neck, and stalling, I invented a litany of lies and venial sins and feared I might repeat myself. I heard my heart thrumming in my head.
Then the priest asked, “Do you have anything else to confess?” I didn’t answer. “Well then, you must be careful to never use the Lord’s name in vain, child. And when someone wrongs us, we must learn to be like Jesus and turn the other cheek—be kind to others. Now, is there anything else?” The priest coughed, “Well?”
“I do have something to tell you, uh, to ask you, Father.”
“Well, go on,” he said.
And I did. My fingers divided the damp clump of dust I held in my left hand. Picking up one speck at a time, I blew each with a whisper through the round perforations in the wooden screen between us. When I had fingered and blown to Father’s side all my flesh and bones, the same that Pat said belonged to him in the dark, in my room, in secrecy, in my guilt, I fell upwards. As though my heavy, skinny knees knelt on waves of my discarded humiliation. Weeks and months and years of turpitudes I had not conjured, yet allowed.
My boneless body rose in the wooden well until I hit my head against the ceiling, making me dizzy. I looked down, down at the kneeler drowning far below. I need to get back. Focus on Father’s advice. What he will do for me. The priest’s voice sluiced through the soggy silence: “Is that all?”
By his tone, I envisioned his head cocked. By his tone, I saw his face frowning as though he might have heard confessions like mine hundreds of times. By his tone, he had.
Is that all? Is that all? He wants to know if that is all? Isn’t that enough? The water retreated like a tsunami exposing the ocean floor. I crashed. Slumped on the kneeler, “Yes, Father.”
“I want to tell you something, Dear. Be careful how you walk when you are around your father. Make sure you don’t look at him suggestively. Don’t wear tight clothing….”
I bent over, clutching my stomach as though he had hammered a six-inch spike into it, and a scream, beginning deep inside my core, spiraled into the Calgary of my mind, tempting me to release a howl. But no, good girls don’t scream in confessionals.
For her memoir, Sharon won First Prize, Non-Fiction at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, Runner-up in the New Millenium Contest, the Annie-Dillard Award for Non-Fiction, and made the Hippocampus Short List. She received her MLA from UPenn, and worked in UPenn’s Critical Writing Program designing and publishing literary journals.
