Free Thomas M. Disch by The Priest Page A

grotesque.

7
    It was a miracle that she was still alive.
    For a while she just lay there on the bed blissfully unaware of anything but her gratitude at having been spared. By rights she should be dead. There was the empty pill bottle weighing down her suicide note on the table by the bed, the almost empty water glass beside it. If she were a painter she would have painted them as a still life, and it would have been more beautiful than any painting of a vase of flowers, for the sunlight seemed fairly to explode from them. They were chandeliers of sheer joy.
    She was alive. Thank you, sweet Jesus.
    She pulled herself out of the bed and knelt beside it and said a formal prayer of thanks, a Hail Mary to balance the Hail Mary she’d said in her last moments of consciousness after taking the pills. Then she had begged only Mary’s forgiveness for her terrible sin, and Mary had answered the prayer with the gift of her whole life.
    Yet, in a way, hadn’t it also been the Virgin who had got her into the pickle she was in?
    No sooner had she framed the ungrateful question than the light in the room seemed to dim, and the pill bottle and the water glass beside it shrank into their ordinary geometric shapes and ceased to transmit the message of redemption and hope that briefly had seemed to glow from them like the neon gas inside a bulb.
    She knew that heaven worked like that, that you could see it only in glimpses, like a beam of sunlight darting out from clouds and then disappearing the moment you saw it. There was never time to point it out even to someone right beside you. It was there and then it was gone, but while it was there you knew that you were in touch with something out of the ordinary.
    God had touched you.
    Now it was gone, and she was in the same situation that had made her want to kill herself… how long ago? Her alarm clock said ninethirty, and she’d taken the pills at two in the morning, after Greg had hung up.
    The marriage was off. Greg had said things that could never be forgiven.
    Worse than that, he’d forced her to say things she couldn’t believe she’d said. He’d tried to make her choose between the Church and marrying him. And it all had to do with what the old priest had said two nights ago at St.
    Bernardine’s parish hall about the Virgin Mary and contraception. Greg had said all the Church’s teachings were just a way of getting people trapped into marriage and breeding lots of babies, so there’d be more and more Catholics.
    He’d said he’d never wanted her to have the baby, that they were both too young to be saddled with being parents. And in a way she could agree. She was seventeen, he was twenty-four: They were too young, in some ways. It would have interfered with Greg’s continuing at the U, where he was getting a degree in business administration, and it would make it difficult if not impossible for Alison to graduate from high school.
    But if they had really been too young, she wouldn’t have become pregnant. As Father Cogling had told her privately, in the confessional, the pregnancy was God’s way of showing her what He wanted. It had been just the same when the Angel had come to Mary to tell her she would bear the babyJesus.
    Not exactly the same, of course, since Jesus had been conceived without sin—without even sex, according to the Church—while the baby inside of Alison was the result of a mortal sin. But it was the same in terms of her having to accept what God had shown he wanted: a new soul. And what Alison and Greg wanted for themselves didn’t matter that much by comparison.
    At first Greg had gone along with that idea, but the night after the instruction class where he’d got so sarcastic with Father Cogling, he’d come around to the trailer after Alison’s mom had gone off to her night job at the hospital. He was already drunk at eight o’clock, and he had proceeded to get more drunk, and he’d insisted on arguing with her like they were having some