The Whipping Club (25 page)

             
Peter laughed along with Jo at fat Sister Agnes’ preposterous threat, but Ma quickly put the book away. Adrian put his head in her lap, and she rested her hand on his shaven head. All his soft strawberry curls growing this past summer gone. He hated having his head shaved. She sipped her tea, and he concentrated on the lovely warmth in her lap, his calm breathing restored, his anxiety at bay.

             
“Come on,” Ma gently shook him awake. “Your food’s here.”

             
They had all ordered the turkey platters. Ma had asked for an extra helping of garlic mash and cranberry sauce for the lads, and refrained from correcting their horrendous table manners the way Da always would. “Sister Agnes said you boys can’t miss your tea, so we don’t have much time.”

             
They settled down and ate in silence. After their warm apple pie and another round of tea, Ma got up to pay the check. Jo reached into her coat pocket and pulled out two samples of Tinkerbell perfume and handed each of them a vial.

             
“What in God’s name…” Adrian laughed with Peter and threw the tiny bottles back at her.

             
“I’ll remind you of home,” she said, insisting they keep them.

             
“
You’ll
remind me of home, or the smell of the perfume will?” Adrian said, and Jo realized her mistake.

             
“The smell of the perfume will. You know what I meant,” she said, feigning annoyance. “Here, some hard candies as well.”

             
“The big arse eats the candies the minute you chuck me.”

             
Jo looked down.

             
“The teachers ate the toffee bar you bought me when you dumped me back there, right in front of me.”

             
Adrian watched Jo’s face and was pleased to see she was unnerved. She had grown up a bit, too. “Sure, the teachers are worse than the nuns,” he continued.

             
“They’re lay people, yeah. Not much in them, I suppose,” s
he said.
Adrian lifted his shirt as Ma sat back down. “I wanted to show you the strap marks on my back.”

             
Ma gasped.

             
“Sister Agnes has taken to wetting the belt before she flogs us. We hate that fart of a nun, don’t we Peter?”

             
“She has a face’d stop a clock,” Peter said and laughed.

             
“Does the bollocks even know how hungry we are? She sat Peter at a table of bigger boys. I want to squeeze the fat rat’s muscles until she bursts like a water balloon. Before this lunch, he hasn’t had a potato in days, and he’d have his teeth knocked out if he said anything or tried to grab one.” Adrian looked at Jo, quiet and repentant now. He gripped Ma’s hand as she hurried him from the table, out the door and across the street.

             
“You’ll be home soon,” Jo said, running with Peter to catch up to them.

Adrian looked into Jo’s eyes and then kept walking. He wanted to tell her about the hollowness in his stomach with every breath, the damp air teasing his throat. He wanted to lick the water off the air and put it in his belly. He couldn’t bear the swift tapping of mice feet against the wooden plank floor in the dark. One night, he’d dreamed that a mouse had crawled into his stomach and was eating away his insides. His skin felt tight. His eyes burned. All he could think about was food.

             
He turned to his mother. She bent down and hugged him there on the street for a long while. He could feel her nervous body. “You’re probably afraid you’ll get me in trouble if you don’t get me back on time,” he said to her.

             
“It won’t be much longer, Adrian. And I’m not afraid of anything, except maybe Sister Agnes sitting on top of me,” Ma said. She smiled.

             
“Sister Thunder Thighs, yea
h. She’d surely kill you then.”
They all laughed, and Jo skipped ahead and put her hand into Peter’s as they hurried back to Silverbridge.

After their short visit with Adrian, Marian dropped Jo with her gran and drove to the outskirts of Little Jerusalem. She parked and walked into the crowded streets, heading toward the Zion School. Early on, she sometimes felt more like a schoolgirl than a teacher when she played with her youngest charges. She could have chosen St. Mary’s or St. Gregory’s School for Boys over on the North side, but the pay was better here and she wanted a community of children she was unaccustomed to. She longed to travel, and in her innocence, she thought the Zion School was an experience, almost like leaving Ireland behind. She remembered whispering into Ben’s ear that she wanted to explore England or France, that these Zion School rendezvous were getting complicated. Whatever she wanted was what he wanted, he responded. Ben made her feel free, and at the time, this freedom was everything to her.

             
Look where all this freedom had gotten her. It had gotten her into hell, into a life of secrets, however sacrificial.

             
Into a life in which she damaged her son.

             
It was well past four o’clock, and Ben could already be making his way home. Empty pails lining the darkening streets droned out a metallic hum as droplets of rain began to fall. She heard a lonely, soulless sound reverberating inside her like the ding of a ping-pong ball clattering against concrete walls. She walked to the left, down Bloomfield Avenue. She thought about her da. With regret, she knew that if he had been alive, she would not be in this position; he would have found a way to keep her from making a hames of it.

A couple of kids spun bottle caps in the playground of the Zion School. It had been so many years since she’d been here. She walked through the familiar front doors and breathed in the smell of potter’s clay, looked at the watercolors covering the walls of Principal Rosenberg’s office.

             
Ben had not stopped by today, she was told.

             
She hurried down the South Circular Road, anxious to get back to her car before the downpour. She passed Ehrlich’s and then made a left off the busy street. As she stepped off the curb, she happened to look into the deli window and couldn’t believe her eyes.

             
I’ll be damned.

             
She watched Ben. A giggling girl sat too close beside him. No food on the table, they sipped their drinks. Little demons raced around Marian’s chest. The heat of her anger nearly cut off her breath, and she began to hyperventilate. Ben was having more than a lunch date, all right, and Max Berger was nowhere to be found. Alarm hissed through her like an overheated radiator. She continued to stare, unnoticed by Ben. Across from him sat a young man and two young women. And they were all laughing now, something Marian hadn’t seen Ben do since…she couldn’t remember when.

             
And were their knees touching?

             
And was that him reaching over to tickle the girl’s waist?

             
Marian marched in, the bell on the door signaling her arrival. Steam rose out of her. She looked straight ahead and went to the deli counter, wondering if her husband had noticed her yet. She ordered a bagel with extra cream cheese. She was shaking, and she could see from the corner of her eye that Ben had gotten out of his seat and was moving toward her.

             
The deli man handed her the bagel, and she walked out onto the street. Ben followed her, and she unwrapped the bagel, staring again through the storefront window at the table of
friends.
No one was laughing anymore.

             
“It’s nothing, Marian,” Ben began, but she didn’t believe him.

             
“You’re sitting here with these people, laughing, while I’m with your
son
, seeing all that he’s suffering. Who are
they,
you bastard? You’re so full of
shit
.”

             
“Marian. I just bumped into them and sat down for a second. I was on my way home.”

             
“Don’t you ever think about coming home. You are home. You and your apron strings.”

             
She had a sudden urge to spit in his face and took one half of the bagel with cream cheese and crammed and twisted it into his mouth. She made sure that the white cream was everywhere, dripping off his suit, and wished she had ordered a soft egg.

             
“I mean it,” she said. “Don’t bother coming home.” She walked away.

             
And he didn’t.

How grand! The lay teacher had chosen him to retrieve her scarf from the dormo. Could that be Rosemary’s lovely voice drifting from Sister Agnes’s room? Adrian tiptoed up the front hall steps, peeked through a tiny opening. His forefinger pulled the wooden door wide enough for his right eye.

             
Yes, it was the lovely Rosemary in the forbidden room, her head straight like a soldier, Sister Agnes circling her.

             
“Do you like the painters, number Two Seventy-Eight?”

             
Rosemary looked mortified. She shook her head no.

             
“Is that why you flaunt yourself at them?” Fat as a bishop, Sister Agnes leered closer, and Adrian wondered if Rosemary could smell what she’d had for her lunch.

             
He wanted to shout out, to tell Sister Agnes to feck off, to leave the poor girl alone.

             
“Do you think the painters came here to paint the building today, or to see the likes of you?”

             
Rosemary said nothing.

             
“Are you wearing one of those padded bras?”

             
“No, Sister. I wouldn’t.”

             
Sister Agnes suddenly lifted Rose
mary’s white blouse in a fury.
She examined the inside of the girl’s bra. Rosemary moved her head slightly to the side, catching Adrian’s eye. She quickly moved her head back to Sister Agnes as if to protect him from the nun’s attention.

             
“You need a proper bra. This won’t do.” She undid Rosemary’s shirt and bra, and then went to her wardrobe, returning with a long beige bandage.

             
Adrian had never seen a bare bosom before, although he’d heard some of the boys talking about them.

             
Sister Agnes began wrapping Rosemary’s breasts in the bandage.

“No breasts were meant to be so large. These are simply the product of an unhealthy union. Your mother made you in sin. Where’s your mother now?”

             
“In hell, Sister.” Rosemary sniffled.

             
Adrian wanted to choke Sister Agnes until her blubber face spurt like a zit, and he creaked opened the door.

             
Before he knew what was happening, Sister Agnes grabbed him and threw him into her room. Landing across the floor, he got to his feet quickly, shocked at how nice the room smelled, like gardenias. The dresser with the oval lace doily held a can of Faberge deodorant and some talc next to the perfume bottle.

             
“What can be done for a sneaky one such as you?” Her cane slapped the backs of his knees. She caned Rosemary across her bottom as well. Foam spewed from Sister’s mouth when Rosemary’s bandage unraveled under her white shirt.

             
“Stop, Sister!” Adrian screamed as she attacked Rosemary, which turned Sister’s wrath back to him, landing him on the floor with a blow to his neck.

             
Rosemary pressed her body on top of him, and he felt her bosom over his face, warm and buoyant, like a floating heaven. He lay beneath her, protected from Sister by Rosemary’s body. Her palms cupped his ears. Too soon, she was dragged off him and told to go and clean herself up.

             
Adrian felt the cane again, and then he was dragged to his feet, ordered to stand at attention. He held in his need to pee, but the more he tried, the more he couldn’t get his mind off his bladder. He focused his thoughts on Rosemary. She had saved him, and if he hadn’t been bold, standing in Sister’s doorway, she would have gotten off easier. There was a burning ache in his groin.

             
Sister Agnes screwed up her nose at him, like the old fat rat she was. “You’re a defect in this society. Now, go to the bath and try to scrub off some of your awful freckles. Do you know why you have so many, my dirty pup? Because God gives the dirtiest among us the most freckles, each freckle representing a sin we’ve committed. You’ve collected quite a lot of those dirty little spots.”