But then, my mother discovered that my friend Geraldine’s father was a doctor—Dr. Morris Pyne. She was shocked, intrigued. She insisted that I show her where the Pynes lived and drove me to Highgate Avenue to point out the house to her. This was a request so utterly unlike my mother, who rarely left the house except to go shopping and to church, and who rarely evinced any interest in her children’s school friends, I’d thought at first that she could not be serious.

  “Oh, Mom. Why d’you want to know? It’s not that special.”

  “Isn’t it! Highgate Avenue. We’ll see.”

  No one would know about this drive. Just Lula and Violet Rue, seeking out the residence of Dr. Morris Pyne and his family at 11 Highgate Avenue.

  It was as I’d dreaded, the sight of the large spotlessly-white brick house with portico and columns, in a large wooded lot, was offensive to my mother. “So big! Why’d anyone need such a big house! Show-offy like the White House.” Mom’s voice was hurt, embittered, sneering.

  Beside her I shrank in the passenger’s seat. In horror that, unlikely as it was, Mrs. Pyne might drive up beside us to turn into the blacktop driveway, that looped elegantly in front of the house, and recognize one of her daughter’s school friends in the passenger seat of our car.

  I tried to explain to my mother that Geraldine Pyne was one of the nicest girls in sixth grade. She was not a spoiled girl, and you would never guess that she was a “rich” girl. A very thoughtful girl, a quiet girl, who seemed for some reason (God knows why) to like me.

  “She thinks I’m funny. She laughs at things I say, that other people don’t even get. And Mrs. Pyne is—”

  Rudely my mother interrupted: “They look down their noses at us. People like that. Don’t tell me.”

  I had never seen my mother’s face so creased, contorted. At first I thought she must be joking . . .

  “Oh, Mom. They’re nothing like that. You’re wrong.”

  “And what do you know? ‘You’re wrong’—like hell I am.”

  Driving on, furious. I could not think of a thing to say—my mother whose chatter was usually affable and inconsequential, like a kind of background radio noise, was frightening me.

  As we drove in a jerky, circuitous route back home my mother recounted for me in a harsh, hard voice how as a girl she’d cleaned “the God-damned” houses in this neighborhood. Rich people’s houses. She’d had to quit school at sixteen, her family had needed the income. At first she’d cleaned houses with a cousin, who did the negotiating, then it turned out the cousin was cheating her, so she’d worked on her own. Five years. She’d worked six days a week for five years until she met my father and got married and started having babies and taking care of a house of her own, seven days a week. Her voice rose and fell in an angry singsong—

  quit school, sixteen, got married, started having babies. Seven days a week.

  There was a particular sort of bitterness here directed at me. For I was one of the babies. And I’d betrayed her with my careless, insulting friendship among the enemy.

  “In those houses I had to get down on my knees and scrub. Kitchen floors, bathroom floors. I had to clean their filthy tubs and toilets with Dutch cleanser. Toilet brushes, Brillo pads. I had to strip their smelly beds and wash the sheets, towels, underwear and socks. I had to drag their trash containers out to the curb, that were so heavy my arms ached. Sometimes the kids would come home from school before I was finished, and they’d get their bathrooms dirty again, and I would have to clean them again. Sinks I had scrubbed clean, mirrors I had polished, I would have to do again. Piss splattered on the floor. They laughed at me—the boys. God-damned brats. If they even saw me at all.”

  Distracted by these memories my mother was driving erratically. Her eyes brimmed with tears of hurt. None of us—her children—had ever known of this hurt, I was sure—I was sure she’d never told anyone, for by now I would have known.

  “Oh, they thought they were so generous! Sometimes they gave me food to take home, leftovers in the refrigerator they didn’t want, spoiled things, rancid things, garbage—‘Here, take this home please try to remember to return the Tupperware bowl next week.’ I wasn’t supposed to spend more than twenty minutes on lunch. I wasn’t supposed to sit down—they never like to see a cleaning-woman sitting down, that’s offensive to them. Or using one of their God-damned bathrooms. If you have to wash your hands, use a paper towel. Not one of their God-damned towels. Some of the big houses, I’d work all morning, so hungry my head ached. That house! I worked in that house—I remember . . .”

  I tried to protest: the Pynes had not been living in the white brick house so long ago. They had only moved in a few years ago. It had to be other people she was thinking of. Mrs. Pyne was a polite, kind, wonderful woman, not a snob, not cruel—

  Bitterly my mother interrupted: “You! Stupid child! What do you know? You know nothing.”

  I had never heard my mother speak in such a way. It was as if another woman were in her place, savage and inconsolable.

  We were slowing now in front of another, even grander house, at 38 Highgate—a Victorian mansion behind a six-foot wrought iron fence with a warning sign at the gate—PRIVATE. DELIVERIES TO THE REAR.

  “And this house—I’ve been in this house, too. And your father has not.”

  Not sure what this meant I said nothing.

  “D’you know who lives here?”

  Yes, I did. I thought that I did. But I played dumb, I said no. I did not want to incur any more of my mother’s wrath.

  “Your father never knew. I never told him. That I was a house maid on Highgate Avenue. That my parents forced me to work. Forced me to quit school. And one of the houses I cleaned was ‘Tommy’ Kerrigan’s—this house. Maybe ‘Tommy’ doesn’t live here any longer—maybe he’s retired and living in Florida. Maybe he’s dead—the bastard! When he was mayor of South Niagara, and married to a woman named Eileen—his second wife, or his third. She was the one who hired me and paid me but ‘Tommy’ was on the scene sometimes in the morning when I came to work. Just getting out of the bathroom, getting dressed—filthy pig. Once, he dared to ask me if I would clip his toenails! Saw the look in my face and laughed. ‘It’s all right, Lula, my feet are clean. Come look.’ Mrs. Kerrigan never knew how her husband behaved with the help—the female help. If she knew, she pretended she didn’t. All of those rich men’s wives learn how to pretend. Or they’re out on their asses like the female help. She paid me below the minimum wage. She paid me in dollar bills. I had to polish the God-damned silver—the Kerrigans were always having dinner parties. Had to breathe in stinking pink silver polish that made me sick to my stomach. Terrible bleach I had to use, that almost made me faint. And ‘Tommy’s’ side of the bed—shit stains. I’d hoped to God he had not done it on purpose. But I was grateful for work, I was just too young to know better. The black maids would work for less money than we could so after a while, there weren’t any white girls working on Highgate. I doubt there’s any ‘white help’ in South Niagara today. Your father never knew any of this. He lived in his own cloud of—whatever it was—wanting to believe what he wanted to believe. Most men are like that. Jerome doesn’t know to this day that I ever set eyes on Tommy Kerrigan up close. He doesn’t know that I was on my knees in this God-damned house, or in any of these houses. He’d seemed to think that I had no life before I met him—he never asked about it. He’d never have wanted to touch me—if he knew . . .”

  We were out of the neighborhood now. My mother was driving less erratically. Her fury was abating, her voice quavered with something like shame. I could think of nothing to say, my brain had gone blank and it would be difficult for me to remember afterward what my mother had said, and why she had said it; what humiliating truths she’d uttered as I sat stiff beside her in the passenger’s seat of the car not daring to look at her.

  It was the most intense time between my mother and me. Yet, I would remember imperfectly.

  By the time we returned to Black Rock Street my mother appeared tired. I hadn’t realized that she’d been crying. Her waxy-pale face was damp with tears which she wiped away with a tissue. She’d had a change of heart. She was sorry now, I understood. Cautioning me not to tell anyone what she’d told me—“They wouldn’t understand, they would think badly of me. And your father—he would be disgusted with me.”

  I wanted to protest No. We love you, Mom. But the words would not come.

  “Promise! Promise you won’t tell anyone, Violet. Not even Katie. Just—no one.”

  Quickly I promised yes. My hand on the door handle of the car, desperate to escape.

  The Secret II

  AND ANOTHER SECRET PASSED BETWEEN LULA KERRIGAN and her daughter Violet Rue.

  Watching TV in the wake of the Hadrian Johnson death, which was forbidden—if Mom knew about it.

  Watching local TV news and seeing Hadrian Johnson’s mother and older brother interviewed. Faces stricken with grief. Dark-skinned faces, and eyes exactly like ours. Hearing words of grief that were our words, we might someday utter. There was Mrs. Johnson clutching a tissue against her eyes, as Mom might have done. A middle-aged woman stooped in pain, shaking her head in bewilderment. Why? Why would anyone want to hurt Hadrian, who was so kind to everyone? Who loved so many people?

  I began crying too. I was often crying these days. Tears brimmed close against the surface of my eyes, the slightest provocation made them spill over. He is really gone. A boy is really dead. They killed him. It is real. A taste like copper pennies in my mouth, that made me gag.

  My mother strode into the room and switched off the TV. She was angry, disbelieving—“I told you, no TV. Didn’t I tell you!” She would have slapped me except I shrank away in time.

  Continuing fiercely: “Don’t you know, for God’s sake—they’re just doing that for TV. To get attention, to make people feel sorry for them. So that, if they sue . . .”

  My mother’s voice trailed off as if, for the first time, she heard what she was saying.

  I tried to protest: What if one of us had been killed? Beaten to death with a baseball bat? Wouldn’t she feel sorry? Wouldn’t she cry?

  “Baseball bat? What—baseball bat?”

  Mom blinked at me, confused. It came to me in a rush—no one knew about Jerr’s baseball bat. The murder weapon had never been found.

  Mom said, stammering, “That—that would never happen to you. Not to one of us. No . . .”

  Retreating then to the kitchen. Where I heard a drawer being opened, and shut. A cupboard door opened, and shut. With a pounding heart I followed my mother, scarcely knowing what I was going to say. “It was Jerr and Lionel, Mom. I saw them with the baseball bat. They were trying to wash it in the garage, then they took it away to bury it. They are the ones—the police are looking for.” But Mom stood with her back to me, at the sink running water hard. She was furious, trembling. She did not turn to me. She gave no sign of having heard me or of having the faintest idea that I had followed her into the kitchen. On the wall the avocado-colored plastic phone began to ring but my mother had no more intention of answering it than I did.

  Final Confession

  THE GIRL WHO NEVER CRIED. NEVER COMPLAINED.

  Not a little baby to be scorned by my father and brothers, or petted and fussed over by my mother and sisters.

  But now I cried easily. I cried often. I cried so that my eyes leaked tears before I actually began to cry, like a leaky faucet. My skin was sensitive as sunburned skin registering pain when something brushed lightly against it. My eyelids were reddened, inflamed and swollen and itchy as if bitten by mosquitoes.

  At home, and at school. At school, and at home.

  Saturday morning at St. Matthew’s where Mom brought Katie and me so that we would take communion with her the next morning at mass—Just the three of us.

  Already the older Kerrigan children were drifting away from the Church. Skipping mass impervious to our mother’s pleas and threats since Daddy showed no interest in church attendance, only a vague respect for religion—the Church, though not particularly God or Jesus Christ. (Daddy would have laughed in embarrassment if anyone were to ask him point-blank if he believed in either.)

  In the church on Saturday morning Father Greavy heard confessions from 9:00 A.M. until noon. Inside the cage-like confessional with its grille like a small window screen the priest sat, you could see just the shadowy profile, you were not supposed to see him. He would hear your abashed whispered confession but he was not supposed to see you.

  In hearing confessions the priest takes the place of Christ. It is the power of Christ to forgive sins, but only if the sinner is genuinely repentant.

  I did not know if it was a sin, that I had told no one about my brothers and the baseball bat. I had promised my brothers to keep their secret without knowing what the secret was. They had demanded it of me, and I had said Yes. I promise.

  From the catechism I knew that there were sins of omission. These were the most difficult sins to contemplate for they did not, in fact, exist; not acts but the absence of acts.

  In the confessional that smelled of something acrid and melancholy like old clothes I knelt, dry-mouthed. Always my mouth went dry in this confined space. There was nothing in my young life so unnerving to me, so awkward, as confession. Whispering Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession.

  Each week my mother brought me with her to St. Matthew’s and to Father Greavy in the confessional. From time to time there were other, younger priests assisting him but my mother always knew which confessional Father Greavy was using, it was impossible not to know, you could overhear the priests’ murmured voices and recognize them even if you could not hear their precise words.

  Each week I was obliged to recite a litany of “sins” to Father Greavy. Fortunately, a list of possibilities was provided at the back of my prayer book, which was a prayer book for young Catholics: disobeying parents, mind wandering during mass, telling lies, uttering profanities, taking the name of the Lord in vain. More obscure and more ominous sins were “impure thoughts”—“impure acts”—from which I recoiled in repugnance, even to consider.

  These were venial sins, minor sins. Mortal sins were something other, the province of adults.

  It was no wonder that my older brothers avoided confession. They had grown too coarse for such examinations of conscience as they had grown too defiant of priestly authority to make themselves small enough to fit into the confessional. Miriam laughed about confession, uneasily; she had not taken communion in months. (For Miriam was engaged. Whatever “impure” behavior was, it seemed unlikely that Miriam could avoid it with her fiancé.)

  Preparing ourselves for the ordeal of confession Katie and I laughed nervously together as we’d have laughed preparing for a physical examination in which all our clothes had to be removed and we had to lie naked and shivering, in a flimsy paper gown, on a table. Because “swearing” was forbidden we dared to murmur forbidden words—hell, damn, God-damn. Provoking each other to astonishing feats—shit, shitty, son of a bitch, God-damn bastard. Fu-uck! We would have been mortified to have been overheard by our brothers or our father whose speech we were echoing, or by our mother who would have been scandalized.

  Each week when I finished my anguished whispering of venial sins, my face burning with embarrassment, Father Greavy would reply with forced patience And is there anything more you have to say, my child?—and I would murmur No, Father.

  As if these trivial sins could be of interest to any adult, still less to God! Yet, Father Greavy was obliged to behave as if this were the case.

  But today, twelve days after Hadrian Johnson’s death, my throat seemed to have closed when Father Greavy asked me the usual question—Is there anything more you have to say. I sat hunched and unmoving, unable to speak. Instead, I began crying.

  There was a startled pause. I was such a big girl, twelve years old, I had not cried in the presence of others for years, not like this. And I was sure that Father Greavy knew who I was, if not by name, that I was one of Jerome Kerrigan’s daughters.

  It was clear, Father Greavy did not like this violation of custom. I could hear him breathing audibly. I could imagine his small damp eyes shifting in their sockets, in alarm and exasperation. But the confessor had no alternative to asking me what was wrong, calling me My dear child.

  And so I told him. Tried to tell him. Sniffling, and choking, and trying to keep my voice lowered so that those who were seated in pews close outside the confessional would not overhear. In a rushed, shaky voice I told him about my brothers coming home late on the night that Hadrian Johnson had been beaten, and what I’d overheard, and seen them doing in the garage, trying to wash a baseball bat—but Father Greavy interrupted me objecting that I had no idea what I was saying. These are serious accusations.

  At once I was silent. My heart was hammering in my chest.

  In a hissing whisper Father Greavy said that my brothers’ lives were at stake. No, no! He did not want to hear more.

  In an instant the peculiar lethargy of the confessional had vanished. The thick-bodied priest, middle-aged, querulous, with thin rat-colored hair, red-stippled fattish nose, a habit of loudly clearing his throat of phlegm like gravel, had been awakened rudely from his doze and was sitting upright squinting sidelong at me through the small grilled window with a hawk’s eyes, alert and sharp.

  Father Greavy wanted no more hysteria about a baseball bat. No more about “Hadrian Johnson” who hadn’t belonged to St. Matthew’s parish. He did not want trouble, if questioned he would claim he’d had no idea who I was. As a confessor he did not wish to know who his penitents were. Nor had he heard the girl’s faltering words clearly.

  It seemed that confession had ended. The priest muttered words of absolution, sent me away with the instruction to recite six Hail Marys, four Our Fathers. In his agitation he’d forgotten the humble words that ended the rite of confession—Pray for me, my child.