Barbara Callahan - My Mother's Keeper

“Cathy, my mom said you stopped by on Saturday and seemed upset. And in church yesterday you didn’t wait for me. And today, you look like you’re sick. What’s the matter?”

I looked around to see if any of the kids in my class were near enough to overhear what I had to tell her. A few of the boys were not far away, but they were clowning around, slamming each other with their book bags. Soon they’d be pulled aside by the traffic cop and marched back to school, but to be safe I told Mary Anne that we could talk on the steps of the House of Usher, the empty house that we named after the story we read in class. Its front yard was overrun with weeds and dead wisteria vines clawed their way down from the roof. Its gray stucco walls had a lot of cracks. No kids ever went near that house.

Mary Anne swallowed a couple of times before she said yes, because she knew from the place I picked that what I had to say was really serious. We brushed off the lowest step and used our book bags as cushions. I had kept my secret inside so long that I blurted it out without giving Mary Anne a chance to get ready to hear it. When I said, “My mother’s boyfriend, Bill Gordon, is a murderer,” her eyes got so wide that I thought they’d pop through her thick glasses. She got up off the step and started to walk in circles, holding her stomach as if I had punched her. After a few seconds, she sat down again and said, “Who did he murder?”

“Tim Gordon,”

“The Gordon kids’ father?” she gulped.

“Yes.”

“Did you see him do it?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know he did it?”

“I overheard him tell Father Dennehy in confession.”

“Dear God, you never should have listened! I think it’s a terible sin to listen to someone’s confession,” she said, and made the sign of the cross as if she was trying to protect herself from the devil inside me. “Did you tell anybody else?”

“No.”

“Not even your mother?”

I shook my head.

“I really have to go,” she said.

I grabbed her arm and begged her not to think I listened on purpose, that I had covered my ears but still heard, that I didn’t try to see who left the confessional, that she was my holiest friend and I needed her to tell me if I should confess my sin to Father Dennehy.

Finally she told me she believed me and said that she didn’t know what to tell me, but that she would pray about it.

“I’ll pray to St. Jude,” she whispered as she left the crumbling house.

Praying to St. Jude, who was the patron saint of hopeless cases, didn’t cheer me up, and neither did going into my house and hearing Grandmother tell me that I had to go to choir practice that night and the next for Tim Gordon’s funeral mass on Wednesday.

The first night of practice was terrible. Between hymns everyone kept talking about the Gordon kids, how Madeleine and Augustine hadn’t come to school and how Lawrence, who did, ran out of the classroom crying. The second night I stayed home because I got sick. As soon as Mother came home from work, she noticed that I looked flushed. She took my temperature and gave me some aspirin and told me to forget about homework and go to bed.

“It’s no wonder she’s sick,” Grandmother said. “All those sweets that she eats.”

“I do not,” I snapped.

She ignored my comment and decided my sickness was constipation and I needed milk of magnesia. Mother flashed her an angry look and took me upstairs. She lay down on the bed beside me. She still had that missing-Bill-Gordon look on her face and I wanted to make it disappear. I wanted to tell her to forget him, that he was a murderer, but caught myself. If I told her, she might not believe me and think I was happy he was gone because I just wanted her all to myself. And if she did believe me — because I only lie to Grandmother, not to her — she’d be in the same boat as I was, not sure what to do.

Thankfully, Mother dozed off. I tried to fight off sleep because I always have the same dream when I have a fever and I really hate it. I threw off the covers and sank right into that dream. I am always floating in a big bowl of tomato soup and trying to escape from the little alligator-shaped crackers, but I can’t. They bump into me and poke my stomach with their snouts and I fall out of the soup and land all sloshy on the floor that Grandmother has just mopped. She yells at me and I tell her it was an accident, but that night I changed the words to it a bit.

“It wasn’t a tragic accident,” I hollered over and over.

Mother shook me awake and told me I was having a nightmare. She asked me what wasn’t a tragic accident and I lied and told her I didn’t know.

On Wednesday my fever was gone and I went back to school. Although I told Sister Josephine that I still had a scratchy throat, she put me back into the choir for the ten o’clock Mass. At nine-thirty we lined up and went to the church. Walking up the spiral staircase to the choir loft filled me with dread. From up there, the church looked scary. Shadows in back of the statues of Mary and Joseph made them look like looming giants instead of the “comforters of the afflicted” that they were. Votive candles flickered and looked like little dancing demons. To pull my eyes away from them, I scanned the church and focused on, of all things, the confessional door that I had opened quietly, very quietly on Saturday.

The pews were filling up quickly. Mother had told me that she had to work and wouldn’t be going to the Mass, but I knew that she really didn’t want to see Bill Gordon there, holding his grief to himself or sharing it with somebody else. I saw Grandmother, who went to funerals of people she knew and didn’t know, hurrying up the center aisle, squeezing into a pew almost filled to get the end seat for a good view of the mourners. At dinner, she’d give us a report on things like who cried hardest, who was laughing in the vestibule after Mass, and who didn’t care enough to wear a black coat.

She’d have a special comment for the deportment of Bill Gordon, who might not have acted cousinly enough to suit her.

The organist softly played “Dies Irae,” which meant day of wrath and always made me shiver when I heard it or sang it. As soon as the funeral procession entered the church, the hymn would burst like a fierce heavenly thunder clap, reminding the people there that their day of wrath, their day of judgment, was waiting for them.

The eighth grade always attended funerals of the relatives of schoolmates. I watched as my class filed in through the side door and looked for Mary Anne’s red beret. I saw it and waited for her tug at it, her greeting to me when I was in the loft. She didn’t touch it. Wondering why, I missed the starting note and got poked by the girl next to me.

It was hard to keep on singing when I saw the Gordon kids and their mother genuflect and go into the first pew on the left. The eight-year-old boy hurt me the most. He was small for his age and put his arms around his mother’s waist and wouldn’t let go. She couldn’t kneel to pray until a large man in a black coat that didn’t say Gordon’s Garage gently unlocked the little boy’s arms and set him on his lap where he stayed during the whole Mass. Maybe, I thought, Bill needed an anchor to keep him from jumping up and confessing to all the congregation.

Back in school, I sent a note to Mary Anne asking if something was wrong. She opened it and shook her head no, but she ignored me at lunch and got in line to go home with Bernadette Jones. I knew she was upset at me because of what I’d told her about Bill, making her a part of the sin. It was a terrible mistake to tell her.

I knew it really was a terrible mistake when I saw her mother after school. She waved at Mary Anne and stayed next to the building. I suddenly knew why Mary Anne had been so cold to me. She was embarrassed because she had told her mother, who was waiting to talk to me. She came right up to me and asked me to go with her to the ice cream parlor around the block. I didn’t have time to think up an excuse, so I just went.