Free Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke Page B

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 congregationwondered. 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, publishthe 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