“Why can’t we sit up with Mary?” Ethel whined. “I bet it’s warmer up there.”
“Suffering is a way of participating in the passion of Christ,” I snapped. “Aren’t you even listening to the homily?”
We were sitting side by side in Saint Mary Mother of Mercy, a place I never thought I’d find myself, but now felt as though I completely belonged, because everyone belonged. Everyone but my father.
Father Coghlan moved back and forth twenty pews in front of us, swinging a smoking incense ball on a long chain and speaking in Latin. Directly in front of the swinging ball sat the rich of Corning, their names etched in fancy script on brass plates nailed to the side of the pews where they perched on red cloth cushions covering the long, hard benches. Mary sat up front with the Abbotts. She’d begun working for them as a maid after school and on weekends—the Abbotts overlooking the fact she was a Higgins because she could cook. Mary said we needed the money, and we did. But I also thought it was a way to avoid Henry’s memory, which lived in every corner of our tiny house.
It had been four months. Four months of Sundays spent here, in the back pew.
But I didn’t mind sitting here because I didn’t especially like being close to the empty-eyed white marble cherubs flying high over the sanctuary, reminding me of the lifeless cast of my dead brother’s head, which was covered by a cloth in my parent’s bedroom.
I glanced to my left and was comforted by the statue of the Virgin Mary smiling down at me, her hands praying and a light shining around her head. This statue I liked. This statue I tried to sit next to.
“Maggie?” Ethel whispered.
“Shush,” I told her.
“Do you think there’ll be oranges?” she continued.
I kept my attention on the Mass, ignoring her, because following the service there were always oranges. It was the only reason she came with me. I promised her oranges—hers and mine. I was here to feel the power of God. I was here to take in all the light this religion had to offer. I was here for redemption. Ethel was here for the oranges.
I sat up straighter and listened.
“Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;
fiat voluntas tua,
I recognized the words. My stomach growled.
Ethel turned to me with happy, opened eyes. “The bread is coming,” she whispered.
She took a look at my face and quickly turned hers toward the flying cherubs.
Over Christmas, the Abbotts made the suggestion to Mary that we Higginses switch schools and attend St. Mary’s. And so my sisters and I started at the Catholic school, were baptized, confirmed our faith, and here we were, on line for Father Coghlan’s cold, white fingers to place the body of Christ on the tips of our tongues. My brothers also attended St. Mary’s, but they didn’t attend Mass. From the look of the crowd here, it seemed only women needed to be devout; men must be redeemed somehow through us.
The old priest was pleased we were here every Sunday. And every Sunday, he asked after our mother. To which I replied, every Sunday, that she was “quite well,” whether she was, or was not, well. I don’t know why I lied. Or even if it was a lie. I just knew my mother would want it reported this way, and so I did. It seemed not only did women need to be more faithful than men, they also needed to always be well.
This Sunday, Nan had stayed home to help Mother with the house and the boys, as we had a new little Higgins, a fat happy baby named Arlington. Next week it would be Ethel’s turn to stay home and help. They switched off each week. I didn’t take a turn because I was more pious than they were.
* * *
“Well, girls, do you feel the severity of religious discipline beating in your hearts anew this morning?” Father asked when we arrived home.
“Yes, Father,” Ethel said, not catching his tone.
“How about you, Margaret?”
I hung my coat next to Ethel’s, ignoring him.
He sniffed. “I smell oranges . . . or is that conformity?”
Father had never been against organized religion. He had said a hundred times that many people needed it to keep them on the straight and narrow, while others did not. He believed he was one of those who did not. He also believed his wife and children were those who did not. I didn’t know what I believed. I was there to find out. I was a true freethinker.
Ethel and I headed upstairs to change out of our church dresses and into our work dresses. Weekends we spent doing the family’s laundry, since all weekdays were now filled with hill laundry.
“I’ll pin,” I told Ethel, taking a basket of wet clothes to the back door.
Outside, our yard was strung up with so many laundry lines it looked like a very large spider had taken up residence. It was a chilly April afternoon, but sunny. The crisp air cleared my mind, and also allowed me to be away from Father.
I’m not conforming. I’m looking. For what everyone else sees. Everyone but him.
The cold bit at my fingers as I pinned wet rag after wet rag onto the line.
There is order in religion. And acceptance.
I picked up another rag, but dropped it when my fingers were too stiff to keep hold of it. A bit of quick rubbing and breathing brought them back to life while I tried not to think about the wrathy faces of the crowd the day Bob Ingersoll came to town.
So . . . maybe not acceptance. But order. And order is not bad.
I carried on with the pinning. I was on my monthly and not feeling well and wished to be done with this.
The door opened behind me.
“Maggie,” Ethel said, planting a large basket of bed sheets next to my feet. “Mother says to hang these sheets right away.”
“But there’s no room.”
“Mother says to take our clothes down. The hill sheets need to be dried first.”
“But it’s the weekend.”
“Mother says.”
“I’m bleeding! And now I’ll have to wear cold, wet rags to school tomorrow while they sleep in warm, dry beds?” I raged, gesturing toward the hill.
Ethel shrugged and then turned around and disappeared back inside.
I looked down at the long lines of rags and diapers I just hung. “Damn it all to hell!”
I reached up and ripped one off the line. The pins popped into the air and vanished into the grass.
Damn any order that has me forever pinning wet things to a laundry line. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!
And before I knew it, I was ripping everything off the line with pins popping and scattering all over the yard. The church fathers have freedom. The rich on the hill have freedom. My father has freedom. But the only freedom I’m ever going to have is inside my own head. And they can all get the hell out of it!
An hour’s labor undone in the blink of an eye, I plopped, exhausted, onto the cold grass.
My mother appeared from the house with another basket of sheets and surveyed the situation. “Handily done,” she said, “but can you hang them as fast as you can remove them?”
“That’s not going to work. I’m not a child anymore.” The irony of my little fit hit me at the same time I realized how true my words were.
She plucked a pin from the grass and began, picking up speed as she hung. I reached out and recovered two pins, clutching them in my hand, and watched her. But then I climbed to my feet and joined in, grabbing a sheet and racing to the other side of the yard.
“We can get it all up,” she called, breathlessly, hanging as fast as she could now. “Ours and theirs.”
“We can’t.”
“We can!”
I pinned the sheets and diapers closer. And closer.
She did the same. Both of us knowing it would take all day long for it to dry hung like this.
Ethel came out. She watched us running back and forth from the baskets to the lines. “What are you two doing?”
We didn’t answer. We were busy hanging the entire town of Corning’s bedsheets on the line in record time for no good reason I could think of.
Ethel jumped in, grabbing a basket.
“I’ll hang all the menstrual rags on the chicken fence,” she called over her shoulder.
“No!” my mother and I shouted together.
“On the line inside the barn?” she asked.
“Better,” huffed my mother.
We were done within an hour. We collected the baskets and then stood and took in our work. Our yard looked like a hurricane had hit it. My mother’s cheeks were red and her eyes bright. Her body was not bent over in a coughing fit, but standing straight and strong while she inhaled the fresh spring air, with laundry basket on hip.
“Happy Sunday, Margaret Louise,” she said.
Still facing the laundry, she smiled. The first one I’d seen since Henry died. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling too.
Damn her for making laundry fun.