She lacked Tonto’s nice beaded headband, but Betsy lent her rhinestone barrettes to hold her hair out of her face. It was only thanks to the DeMelos and their television set that Edith was familiar with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, as well as with Winky Dink, Shirley Temple, Roy Rogers, and Howdy Doody, not to mention the soap operas Search for Tomorrowand As the World Turns. Aunty Grace let the children watch TV after school as much as they wanted. She often joined them, curling her stockinged feet under her on the big sectional couch and sipping something amber from a big white mug. Edith’s parents didn’t approve of television. They would say things like “Only an imbecile would watch such nonsense.” Edith didn’t think Mrs. DeMelo was an imbecile. She was nice and she never yelled.
The big girls dressed her for church in Betsy’s last year’s Sunday best: a turquoise-and-orange plaid taffeta dress with knife-edge pleats and a little bolero jacket.
“I don’t think the orange looks too good with your red hair, but there’s lots of turquoise,” commented Betsy. Her hair, like Mary’s, was golden. “Lots of criminals have red hair, did you know that?” she asked. Betsy, who was nine,was a treasure house of astonishing information that she was eager to share. The two blond sisters tucked Edith’s freshly subdued locks under a round straw hat with a white grosgrain ribbon and slipped her feet into a pair of socks with lace edging and shiny patent leather Mary Janes. The shoes were a little too big.
“I’ll stuff Kleenex in the toes,” Mary said, pulling out a wad of tissues from the box on the dresser. Edith remembered, with a small inward cringe, the time she and Mary and Betsy stuffed Kleenex under their blouses to make boobies. All three girls wore stiff lace-trimmed crinolines under their skirts,which stuck out like ballerina tutus, so wide that they brushed the doorframe as they exited.
All the little boys—Daniel, James, and even tiny Baby Peter, wore navy-blue bow ties with white polka dots that matched the tie that Mr. DeMelo wore. These were the kind of bow ties that were sewn onto an elastic neckband so you didn’t need to bother with tying or untying. Beautiful Aunty Grace had Mr. DeMelo zip up her pale-blue crepe dress while she perched a tiny pink hat, festooned with a single fake rose, precariously atop her heavy golden chignon. A wayward lock was already slipping loose from the tortoiseshell hairpins to dangle down her long white neck. As she held Baby Peter in her left arm, she applied lipstick with her right. When she was ready, she gently herded the rest of the children out the door and into the nine-seater Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon. She reminded her brood: “Don’t fight on Sunday, sweethearts, you all know where you’re supposed to sit.” As the humans arranged themselves in the car, two ravens flew overhead; their resonant musical clonk echoed in the pale sky. Three-year-old James croaked back at them from the front seat, where he sat between Mr. DeMelo, at the wheel, and Mary, who, at ten, was the eldest DeMelo offspring. Aunty Grace held Baby Peter and sat with eight-year-old Betsy in the middle seat. Daniel and Edith were in the way back.
As the station wagon backed carefully out onto Buck Hill Road, Daniel inserted a forefinger deep in his nose, extracted a sizable pale-green booger, and silently, delicately placed it on Betsy’s straw hat. Edith, feeling a gag and a giggle coming at the same time, made a noise somewhere between a snort and a cough.
“Cover your mouth, dear,” said Aunty Grace, without turning around. And Edith did, using her right hand, while with her left she tilted her genuine Italian Leghorn hat over her eye so she couldn’t see the offending snot. The hat was one of several in graduated sizes that Aunty Grace had brought back from the pilgrimage she took to Rome with her rosary group last fall.
***
After a ten-minute drive, the little troupe disembarked at the Church of the Holy Innocents. Holy Innocents, an old, mossy stone church, stood on Route 169, perhaps a quarter mile from the crossroads at the center of town where the snowy-white Congregational Church presided over Whitby Green. Edith’s Granny Gladys, who grew up in Whitby, said they built Holy Innocents when she was a little girl, when the first Catholics—Poles and Italians and Portuguese—started moving to Whitby. “Before that there wasn’t a soul in Whitby whose name ended in a vowel,” she’d told Edith, adding to clarify, “like DeMel-O.” And Granny ought to know, as her ancestors had founded the town three hundred years ago.
In the church’s drafty entry hall, Edith watched carefully as Aunty Grace, Mary, and Betsy dipped their fingers in the stone basin of holy water by the door and then curtsied and crossed themselves at the end of the pew before sitting. She did her best imitation of their movements, though she was sure that everyone could tell she wasn’t doing it properly. If she leaned against the back of the pew, her legs stuck straight out, so she perched close to the front edge, bent her knees and daintily crossed her ankles. Her patent-leather-clad feet dangled well above the floor. They were even above the kneeler on which Mary and Betsy were now kneeling with their hands clasped and their heads piously bowed. She subdued her crinoline with difficulty so that her dress lay flat across her knees and her underpants didn’t show. She was seated between Aunty Grace and Daniel, which was perfect for the daring plan she had in mind. Aunty Grace was preoccupied with minding the little boys and also with whatever it was that kept her always a little dreamy, so Edith was pretty sure that she wouldn’t notice anything. As for Daniel, he owed her a favor for overlooking the booger in the car. Besides, even if he did see what she was doing, he had a mischievous heart and would admire her daring. Edith leafed through the missal she had taken from the rack on the back of the pew in front of her, looking for the part the priest would preach from today. The little book was covered in soft blue dimpled fake leather and the pages were as thin as onion skins. On the right side the words were black and strange—Latin, she’d been told. It was what Jesus spoke, and the priest here spoke it too. On the left-hand page, the words, a pale red, were English, though sometimes a rather strange English.
The priest, Father Bernard, was a tiny man, who almost disappeared behind the altar. Edith wondered if his feet touched the ground when he sat in his enormous carved chair. He was French Canadian and had a splendid accent. Edith listened to him carefully so that she could copy it when she pretended to be French. He read:
And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding our of the throne of God and of the lamb. In the midst of the street of it and oneither side of the river was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit of every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations…
Edith had no trouble picturing the crystal river going down the middle of the street, or the king and the lamb sitting together cozily on the throne, but when she tried to picture the twelve kinds of fruit—cherries, apples, peaches, oranges, pears, bananas, blueberries, strawberries—she lost count. Father Bernard went on to tell them a story of some unborn twins who were still inside their mother’s tummy. Edith knew that uteruswas the proper word for where unborn babies are.
“At first they had plenty of room in the womb to play and sleep and do whatever it is unborn babies like to do, but then they kept growing and growing until it became terribly crowded, stuffy, and uncomfortable in there,” the priest explained. One twin (Father Bernard specified that it was the boy, of course) was ready to move on.
“Then the little boy said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here! There’s no room to move! This is no place for us anymore!’ but his twin sister refused. She was very afraid. ‘But we’ve always been here!’ she wailed. ‘No, no, no, I’m too afraid to go! I don’t believe . . . I don’t believe in life after birth!’” The little priest whimpered pathetically, sounding just like Marcus when he didn’t want to go to bed.
As the congregation tittered appreciatively, Edith swiftly slipped the missal in one smooth, unaccented motion under her jacket. She could feel her heart pound and her stomach flip over, but she knew she still looked perfectly calm from the outside. A few breaths later, she picked up the missal that was in front of Aunty Grace, who was rummaging around in her voluminous
