Class Warfare (5 page)

It poured rain today, and a less inspiring day couldn't be imagined.

I didn't do too much else today, and I am glad to have it behind me. Tonight at midnight is supposed to be the end of the world. Isn't it strange that God would tell the Catholics and not the Protestants or Jews? At least I think it was the Catholics he told. Jerry S. is Jewish, and Mother says when he grows up he won't be interested in me for that reason. The whole thing is crazy, if you ask me. Now I shall bring this to an end, as I am darn near exhausted.

Tuesday, January 19th.
I could kill myself. I wish I were dead. I never want to speak to my mother again. I thought anti-Semitism was confined to the Germans. Jerry called to say he couldn't take me out tonight, he had to work in the store, but that he'd see me tomorrow instead. Then Mother made a dirty nasty speech about Jerry being a lousy Jew who wouldn't put himself out for me, while I'd do anything for him. Oh! I could have smacked her. I want to run away. I wish the world
had
ended. I don't want to say anything else.

P.S. We both got over it, I guess.

Friday, January 29th.
Friday—another day, and what a day! I feel gloomy, depressed, and generally miserable. Everything happens at once, and it's not my fault. Somehow my French book is missing, and I can't find it anywhere, and there's a test coming up. Lorna told me I'm not her best friend any more, Isabel is, just because of that horrible party last weekend. Then Jerry said he couldn't take me out tonight, after I told everyone we had a date. Oh, woe is me! He said he might meet me tomorrow night at the bowling alley, but I'm not allowed to go there because of you-know-what. Mother's going to Toronto tomorrow. This morning I wrote a science test. After school we rehearsed the operetta—it's going all right, but Kathy J. is so conceited she makes me sick to my stomach! I went down to the rink after that to watch Jerry play Hockey, but I was too late. This evening I puttered around the house.

Saturday, January 30.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. There. I've finally said it. FUCK.

Et c'est la fin pour quoi sommes ensemble.
And this is the end for which we are together.

Of course, they provide a priest; his name is Father Reagan. She finds that amusing. She thinks: he might have been handsome (Irish movie-priest handsome, Bing Crosby uplifting the multitudes) if love had ever heated him, expanded him; as it is, he looks like a TV dinner, immaculate under cellophane, frozen. His eyes are grey. The walls of Cell 3B-17 are grey. “My daughter,” he says, “my dear child.” It's a beginning, of a kind. Your what? Marie Tyrell says. She has not refused to meet him.

“You may send me away, if you wish.”

“What for?”

There are pictures on the walls, watercolours, women with mad eyes staring past bowls of flowers, unlit candles, pagan icons, through barred and leaded windows. The Unknown seems to be out there, waiting, looking in unseen. Father Reagan is thinking, among other things:
She should have been an artist, it would have given her a useful vocation.
He asks, politely, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” (Bless me Father for I have sinned … No. You're not getting that one out of me, not yet.) He has done this so often, it's his Calling, it should be automatic. Somehow it isn't, quite. The method is automatic, something else is not, cannot be. There are things they don't tell you about, prepare you for, in the Seminary. He wants to say, “Young woman, your soul is in mortal peril.” To say that would be a duty done, the warning properly issued, responsibility discharged:
pray for us in our futility.
But he won't say it; he's sure she'll laugh, blaspheme, and he's probably right. He ministers daily to the dying, the condemned to die, most of them pathetically grateful for his comfort, reproof, penance, absolution, so eager to undo the sad threads of vainglorious lifetimes; it must signify—well, we know what it's
supposed
to signify. He suspects it may mean something else to Marie Tyrell. (One day, years from now, he'll write a book called
The Psychology of the Damned
; it will enjoy a considerable success in liberal Catholic circles; the chapter on Marie Tyrell will be widely praised for its “compassionate objectivity.”) In fact, she reminds him uncomfortably of Bernadette, his sister, before she died. The same proud mouth, unrepentant eyes, the same heresies flickering back there in the mind's hollows, cave-fires he foolishly never found it in his heart to extinguish. Presently, in beneficent middle age, he will resign himself to these failures, these unaccountable lapses of conviction. Now, they're painful. He knows: Good Christ, yes, people really do die young. For all the wicked, prideful reasons. And are not necessarily welcomed into Heaven. It happens in books, magazine fiction; it happens. Father Reagan smiles at Marie Tyrell, nervously; can it be that he's afraid of her? This disobedient orphan? It can be.
These people are dangerous,
he can't help muttering to himself.

“The Glory of God,” Marie Tyrell says. She is watching the floor, studying it, tracing a mandala of thin lines, cracks in the concrete. “Aren't you going to tell me about the Glory of God?”

What about that?

The assumption evidently is that man is perfectible, or in any event improvable. The Kingdom of Heaven is nothing if not a meritocracy. “What are you doing, storing up Kingdom Credits?” one of her lovers said, when she was being more than usually righteous. Now he's 4,000 miles away, working for a loan company, bringing up children. And Gerard Macklewain, no doubt, is out somewhere getting drunk, inventing his own version of history for the entertainment of his bold companions, talking: “I did love her … It was enough to see, in our own bodies, the configuration of the death we'd come to, each day's depletion,
always less and less of everything, all the time;
it was enough to have that knowledge, if only to turn from it, into her arms, her generous arms …” She summons all her will, to banish the vision. Now it's just Father Reagan here, a composition in grey and black, in this room, this Cell. Interesting that we referred to our group as a “cell.” Interesting that we met, most of the time, in bars, or behind them. God, it's lonely.
To see the world in a grain of sand, eh, Father
…

Father? (Any voice is better than none at all, any answer will redeem the question.) He is sitting on the bed, legs crossed, hands folded in the prescribed manner, eyes uneasy. She is standing, vulnerable.
Hang in there, babe.
No. Historical inevitability decrees that she won't hang in, won't be allowed to. There was a message she still receives, scratched that first time in chalk on a schoolyard wall: MARIE TYRELL GOES DOWN. In a way, it was true enough: you had to do what you could to redeem the bleakness, or push it away. After the dances (St. Anne's gym, reeking sweat and repression, loud hot music, the purposeful rubbing of guilty bodies), after that, who didn't go down? At least she had the strength to lie, not to say: I have committed impurities. Or whatever word they had for what she was doing, those many Saturday nights …

But here, she remembers more than the porridge that she was forced to eat, as a child, the grey viscous stuff in the spoon, the duty to transfer it, at any cost to dignity or digestion, into her mouth. To swallow it. (To spit it out was only a venial sin, as she understood it, but it was nonetheless a sin, one she was all too often caught at.)
Arrrgh.
And the relief, of a sort: thank God that's over with. Father?
Daddy?

Marie Tyrell goes down
.

First confession: I have forgotten everything. The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful, and the other kind, the Stations of the Cross, that endless railway line leading to nowhere, even that, forgotten. It is not true, as they claim, that these things stay with you forever, however fiercely you struggle to reject them. Nothing stays with you forever. Except possibly hatred, which lives on in the details you didn't realize you were noticing: the smell of incense and old varnished wood, the clamminess of steam heat that never entirely defeated the cold … that cold which was above all else the chill of terror, what you couldn't keep from feeling when, around some forbidden corner, you were favoured with your very own, very special, glimpse of mortality. Just one of the little treats the world has for rebellious children—make of it what you will. I made a life of it, after that.

I remember nothing
.

Father Reagan is thinking:
poor lost soul
. Or that is what he is trying to think, but other notions, heretical as any Marie Tyrell ever uttered, keep sneaking in. What, precisely, is he rendering unto Caesar here, in this prison?
There may be many shapes of mystery
… He is not uneducated, for what that's worth. He is not, professional obligations aside, unsympathetic. This woman knows something he doesn't, something he set himself apart from, long ago, exiled to some Siberia of consciousness, past an armed frontier no errant regret would ever presume to cross. We are dealing in finalities, eschatologies, here.

Second confession: there won't be one.

There isn't much he can do; if there were, he might for some perversely undoctrinal reason decline to do it. She is looking at him now, alert, contained, adamant.
Libera me domine
… This is mechanical. Useless. If she won't bend, he can't compel her. Or absolve. Peace, this time, will be withheld. Father Reagan gets up. “You won't reconsider?”

Marie Tyrell goes down
.

“I will not,” she says.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

The struggle is just beginning.

“Repeat ten times.”

 

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

The struggle is just beginning.

 

The struggle has just begun.

… last night I dreamed I was thrown out of the University of New Jerusalem for reading aloud standing up in the brown-brick high-rise library, & in the same dream we were always getting off a train to welcome ourselves officially to wherever we were (& it was always some version of New Jerusalem, all brown brick and coastal fog, blast furnaces on the horizon); but at the last you refused to get off the train to welcome anybody, you were being untypically firm about that, so I said Fuck You & went off alone, & rode up & down the hills of New Jerusalem in a 1952 Austin Princess convertible looking for love & a place to live, which I didn't find. That was when I went into the Library & got thrown out, I was reading about the military-industrial complex, & crying, & you kept coming in to interrupt me, you said you were ashamed of me & my childishness, as you called it. You'd caught up to me by then, I don't remember how. Hopelessness has its own perfection, you said. The library was hung with flags celebrating athletic events, & the librarian was a snaggle-toothed bitch who looked like my mother & carried a golden key on a chain. She said, Why don't you sit still & read Spinoza like a lady, but I wasn't listening to her, I was looking around for you because you weren't there any more, & then she threw me out, she was waving her golden key & screaming, dancing around & yelling Soul Sister, Soul Sister. I rolled down a long grassy hill, through a lot of broken glass & tin cans & used condoms, to the Ganges River, I know it was the Ganges because there was a sign on the bank saying so, & it was full of naked men who looked like you, singing Hare Krishna over and over again. New Jerusalem was on the other side, it looked like Sudbury, Ontario, & there was a railway trestle I had to walk across with my eyes closed, holding your hand. The telephone rang & I got up to answer it, & when I found you again we were still in New Jerusalem, only this time it looked like Calgary, & you'd shaved your head, you said you were joining the Order. I said that was unnecessary, you'd always been a part of it. We were driving down a long flat street in the Austin, & a woman on the radio was talking passionately about scabies. We passed a row of brown-brick houses with For Rent signs in the windows but we didn't stop, because we knew no one was about to rent anything to the likes of us. We were searching for the railway station because there was a train we'd just got off & had to get back to, but we couldn't find it because the only map was in the library & we'd already been thrown out of there. We went around the corner & there was the librarian, hitchhiking, she wouldn't get into the car when we stopped for her. She said she had no authorization to accept rides from strangers. You said, The sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night, & I started to laugh, & then you called me a closet reactionary, & spat in the ashtray. I was humiliated but said nothing, I was too proud. The librarian gave you her golden key, & you kissed it & put it in the ignition & drove away with her, chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. I don't remember what I did then, but when I got to the railway station you were there, & she wasn't, & there was a delegation from the U.N. officially welcoming us to New Jerusalem: they were all women & all colours, & they spoke in sentences. Everyone was drinking beer. You stood close beside me & made a short pithy speech about the need for protective tolerance in post-industrial society, & everyone clapped & cheered. I wept, for the joy of it. You were even handsome in your uniform, your hair gleaming blond & waxed, your eyes alert for danger. There is always danger, always, you said, & I believed you. The librarian drove up in the Austin & made a speech about smoking in approved areas only, please. She looked very old & sallow, & everyone observed a moment of silence, for her sake. Some people lit cigarettes, furtively, & I wanted one but didn't have the nerve. Then the train was leaving & I was on it, but you weren't, & the last thing I saw before the telephone rang was a row of brown-brick houses with For Rent signs in the windows, & a street that seemed to go to the end of the world, & you in your uniform, crying, walking slowly somewhere else …