Baptism

It rains the morning of Palm Sunday.

Efrem says, “It was so beautiful last year. You should have seen it last year and now... Just look at this.” He gestures to the dark grey skies.

“Maybe the first Palm Sunday was like this?” Aaron Weaver says with a smile.

“Aaron,” Efrem addresses Isaac’s father as Isaac comes out of his bedroom, ready for church, “there is nothing in any Gospel account about umbrellas. Which,” he added, turning to Isaac, “I hope you brought.”

Isaac shakes his around and Efrem says, “Don’t open that thing in the house.”

“Superstitious?” Aaron suggests, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s your bad luck, not mine,” Efrem tells the older man.

Jinny says, “I am so gladwe’re not going to Saint Antonin’s,” when they get to her house. “You know they’re still having the outdoor procession?”

“In all this?” Efrem looks out of his window disapprovingly.

Jinny nods. “They’ll go around the block, through the school, march across the playground singing every verse of All Glory Laud And Honor.”

“I respect it,” Efrem says. “And yet…”

Even Cecile is going to church today. She has not stinted in her attention to an immaculate outfit and Efrem says, “You’re dressed up like a Baptist,” when she comes to the car.

“When I was a little girl, Mama took us to this one place. I think I used to be a Baptist,” she said, “But I’m not sure.”

And so they drive on to Mc.Cleiss.

The priest comes to them in the crowded north transept and says, “This is your lucky day,” before telling more than asking them to be in the Palm Procession that will move around the church since the weather’s so bad and they can’t march outside.

“What the fuck is so lucky about that?” Cecile whispers to Jinny who says, “God, Cile! We’re in a church!”

It is the longest Mass Isaac has ever endured, though he hates to call it enduring. He thinks how beautiful the church is, all hung in red, the red carnations blooming all over the gold altar, the palm branches, the marching. The choir yelling from the choir loft, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” during the Passion chills him. Falling to his knees at the death of Jesus is amazing. The only complaint: why must they stand through such a long story?

Coming out of church in the strangest spirits that are high and low all at once, Isaac has a feeling that everythingis going to happen this week, and no clue what everything could possibly mean.

Sunday night Virginia O’Muil draws herself a hot bath full of suds and sits in it a long time. There is one candle in this big beautiful bathroom. In a few months she will be Mrs. Weaver, imagine that! Though it is difficult to imagine anything else. She thinks of the Weaver bathroom a mile or so away. It has potential long unemployed with two men living in the house, but potential all the same. It is a big bathroom, bigger than this one, with its little white octagonal tiles and a lion foot clawed tub. Jinny wonders what it would be like to be in one of those.

“Shit,” she lets out the curse in a long groan, not because she feels badly, just because she feels that something is about to happen. She cannot say how she feels about Isaac’s decision to get baptized, to become her good Catholic husband. She is thinking the word is something that’s not quite jealousy, but she doesn’t know what to call it.

“Sink my head,” Jinny murmurs. “I need to sink my head,” she is going deeper under the water, her hair like Ophelia’s, thick and heavy and wet, spread out while her head sinks in. She is getting sleepy, and the golden light of the candles on her closed eyelids makes her wonder what it would be like to be found beautiful and drowning in a river, like a living dead Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Then she jerks her head up, and the water splashes. The weight of her hair pulls her head back.

“That’s just it. Sink my head... sink my head... That’s just what I need.”

As she climbs out of the tub and turbans her hair, and then wraps the pink housecoat about her large body, Virginia O’Muil mutters, “Why don’t they wait till we’re old enough to get it?”

In her bedroom she is naked except for the turban. She loves to be naked. She loves her unskinny body, her generous thighs, her hips, the spread of breasts large and firm all at once. She loves her little navel in the bowl of her stomach. She has oiled all of herself and filed the dead skin from her feet, lotioned them. She’s powdered between her thighs and put on the jasmine perfume that is for her own pleasure. Now off with the turban, sitting on the bed, taking a brush through her hair thick and dark red like rust in its wetness

There is tapping on the window.

She puts on her housecoat and lets Isaac in.

He falls into the window and wraps his arms about her and kisses her deeply, looking intense and a little maniacal in his square, black rimmed glasses.

“I love you,” he tells her. “I came by to say that before I drift off to sleep and have nightmares about class tomorrow.”

“Isaac, honey,” she says, “you’re gonna get baptized.”

He looks at her strangely and then says, “Yes, I suppose so.”

“That’s what I need,” Jinny said.

“Since you came to me with this whole Catholic business I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m feeling, and now I think I know.”

Her hand is on her hip. Isaac sits in the window frame looking earnest and beautiful. She wants to have him. No, she realizes, she wants to have him be happy, and since the morning where, after sex he came up with the bright idea to get confirmed as a Catholic, and then declared that they should be celibate until their wedding, having him happy means not having him. Still, she wishes he had sprung that shit on her before and not after the last time they’d fucked.

“What I’ve figured,” Jinny says, “is that you’ve beat me to the punch.”

“Now you’ve lost me, babe.”

“I think I need to be baptized.”

“Wait a minute,” Isaac stopped her. “I knowyou’ve been baptized.”

“I guess I have,” Jinny said.

“And you can’t get baptized again. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“I need to find a way around that, Isaac. I’m pretty sure I need to be baptized the first time. After all, I wasn’t really around for it, was I? Not quite fair really, now that I think of it. I... I feel like you’ve beat me to something, and if you hadn’t beat me I never would have known there was a something and so I’m glad you did, but now I’ve got to do something.”

“Get baptized?”

“Yes,” she said.

“When you’re a baby, your godparents take all the vows for you, and at Confirmation you’re supposed to take them up yourself. But I was thirteen, Isaac. Same year I met you. Same year you had your bar mitzvah. Let’s face it, I wasn’t up to taking any vows. There comes a point when you really have to get baptized, go to that place and believe... in whatever there is to believe. And that’s where I am.”

“That’s where we both are then,” Isaac told her.

After Isaac was gone, Jinny thought, one day I will tell him that this was the reason I had Joe. In my own very misguided way I was looking for a baptism. So instead of doing whatever I have to do now, it was going to Joe that nearly ruined us.

Church was as crowded as it had been for Christmas. Jinny remembered being told that many students stayed her for Easter, and that there were some who didn’t leave until after Holy Thursday mass. Joe had told her this. He said that Holy Thursday was one of the most beautiful masses at Mc.Cleiss University.

Well, Jinny couldn’t remember ever having gone to Holy Thursday Mass at Mc.Cleiss or anywhere else. She didn’t know what to expect as she followed Isaac, who followed Efrem and her sister Anne and Cecile. Jinny looked to her redheaded sister who always seemed to be laughing at a private joke where you were the punchline. Tonight, after Mass, she is going to a convent in Kentucky. Their cousin Jayson is driving her.

There were nearly no seats in the great chapel. Outside of the crowded church, the sky was a little cloudy, so less light came through the stained glass.

Then, amidst all that whispering, all those so called important people talking about what they’d do tonight, all the folks trying to find a chair or a place to stand in darkened Saint Joseph’s Chapel, in the back of this church, they all became quiet, and then bells began to ring. They binged, they dolled. Some were sonorous, some were rapid. And then the organ blasted from the front of the church, all through it, and there was a sound like waves as everyone stood up, opened their programs and began to sing,

Where charity and love prevail

there God is ever found

brought here together by Christ’s love

Are we by love thus bound

They sang all six verses, they quieted when the soprano section of the choir sang alone, voices quavering like the spirits of human voices, high in the choir loft.

Let strife among us be unknown

Let all contention cease

Be his the glory that we seek,

Be ours his holy peace!

The smell of incense tickled Jinny’s nostrils, and she knew that if she could see past heads and around the corner, she would have seen the priests processing in white robes, countless numbers of priests, with gold stoles, to the altar, around the altar, kissing the altar two file, circling on both sides, taking their seats.

After the long mass with the washing of the feet and the hymns singing Jesus through his very last night on earth, and the church becoming quiet, and everyone in Saint Joseph’s Chapel, everyone in the chapel going to their knees as the thurifer rekindled his fire, and white smoke filled up the church, the chanting in Latin began. Everyone together, then the deep voices of the men, to the sopranos of the women, then the choir alone and back and forth while the priests filed through the church, and at the head of them came the servers bearing the trays that bore the body and blood of Jesus Christ to be set, at last, on the altar of repose.