Richards Pretty Peggy-O

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 979-8-3509-9343-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

Reihe: Pretty Peggy-O

A group of college friends gathers for a Confirmation at the St. Paul Cathedral. But something happened among them, years ago, back at college, something each of them remembers differently, and a dead girl haunts their memories and colors the celebration. A girl named Peggy Gyllensen killed herself back in 1977 when they were in college in Northfield. None of them were there when she did, but they all had a hand in it, and her mother appears at the celebration like a ghost. Pretty Peggy-O shows the coming together of old friends at a reunion gone wrong. Everything they once were comes back to them, and their lives, seemingly so stable in middle age, become for a moment radically uncertain in the shadow of the dead girl.

Thomas Richards taught literature at Harvard. His other novels are The End of the Line, Mrs. Sinden and Zero Tolerance. He has also written a long poem, Antigone at Antietam, and a play, The Grace Abounding.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Thomas

Leseproben

3

THIS CALLING HERSELF CHRISTABEL, thought her father, opening the invitation. He thought she would just get over it.

Chrissie could be so stubborn sometimes. Dixon Lyman thought she would by now have had enough of that church of hers. He was sure she had not one ounce of God in her. Where did she get this mania for religion from? His inattention, probably. She was the fourth of his four girls. He had all those fat albums of photos, four inches of Hannah, three of Lilly, two of Ella, and barely an inch of Chrissie. She grew up behind the others, tall when they were small, loud when they were quiet, thin when they were thick. Chrissie Lynne Lyman was the name he gave her. Names were names. You don’t go around wetting them with holy water then pulling them off like some Band-Aid in the shower. And yet that was just what she did, converting at sixteen.

Other girls had a sweet sixteen. Hers was sickening. He and Martha had to sit through it from beginning to end. He remembered the way that priest looked at him when he dropped her off at St. Agnes’s during her catechumen year. As though the car door of hell were opening, expelling some virtuous passenger it’d accidentally swallowed. But that look also said: she would be safe now in the bosom of the church. And bosom was just the word they would use, too. It had a fat, matronly sound that made Dix queasy.

Chrissie was in such an all-fired hurry to be old. That first boy she brought home, what was his name? Linus something. He had bald ankles like an old man’s and walked with a slight rickety stoop. He also had a high nasal twang and, laughing to himself, Dix remembered what Owen called him when he met him. Sinus. Linus had by then decided to go off to seminary. All those priests there had thin mucousy voices that sounded just like sinus infections. Chrissie once took him to a monastery and Owen called the choir, some singing as high as castrati, the Sinuses of the Church.

Funny how Owen saw it all in one word. Sinus.

Dix remembered her bringing Linus in. It had to have been 1971, maybe 1972. All the boys then had long hair. This one had short hair and wore a plaid shirt and checkered pants with pleats. Linus had something of Pat Boone about him, but with small eyes, a weak voice, and a slight cough.

“Hello, sir,” said Linus, extending his hand.

“Well,” said Dix, keeping his hands in his pockets. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

The boy did not hear the frivolity in his voice. He had to have been incapable of it, Dix thought now.

Linus stiffened. “Chrissie has told me all about you, sir.”

Dix guffawed. He thought this polite crap had gone out in the sixties. Even he’d grown his hair out a bit. But this boy looked like he just stepped out of, well, 1959.

“Chrissie,” Dix said, turning to her, “I thought I told you not to go around telling your friends I was fresh out of rehab.”

“Daddy,” she said, remonstrating with him, but it was too late. Her father, she saw, had already made up his mind about the boy.

“Listen, Linus. If you find any bottles lying around, I want you to take them straight to me.”

Chrissie rolled her eyes, but Dix went on.

“Bourbon must be properly disposed of. It’s an AA rule.”

“I would be happy to comply, sir,” said Linus.

“I’ll bet you would. Now, where did you say you were taking her?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“In this family,” he said, slumping his lips in a mock frown, “I’m always the last to know.”

“I’m taking her to—Mass.”

Dix paused and looked him over anew. This was even worse than he thought. “They got singalong there?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Don’t think Chrissie knows any of those tunes. They on the radio?”

“Uh, no, sir.”

“Too bad. I got Lotte Lenya singing Brecht and Weill. All my girls know Mack the Knife,” he said, singing, nearly tonelessly,

And the shark has, mighty teeth dear,

and he wears them, in his mouth.

He paused. “You know that one?”

“A little, sir.”

“The song ends with a rape.”

“Pardon me?”

Again Dix sang:

Und die minderjahrige Witwe,

Deren Namen jeder weiss,

Wachte auf und war geschändet,

Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

“Were you in the war, sir?” asked Linus timidly, trying to be conversational.

“I was in a nice camp with some Germans.”

Linus stole a look at Chrissie. He thought the Lymans had been American for generations.

“What my father means to say,” Chrissie tried to explain, “is that he was part of a psychiatric team. They interrogated prisoners.”

“Tell the truth, Chrissie,” Dix said. “We tortured them.”

“Daddy.”

“Gently, though,” he added, with a smile.

Chrissie stole a look back at Linus. It was clear he had never seen anything like this before, even though, she well knew, her father was like this all the time.

In the car afterwards, she told Dix later, he asked her about him.

“Was he drunk, Chrissie?”

“No,” she told him. “He’s always like that.”

“I’m not sure you should give him his bottles.”

“He doesn’t have any, Linus.”

“Have you checked?”

“He doesn’t drink any more. He hasn’t for five years.”

“I’m not so sure. He smelled.”

“That was formaldehyde. He’s a pathologist.”

“You know what he said to me on the way out? ‘Get me a piece of that body of Christ. I’ll take it down to the lab. Run some tests.’”

Linus was a conventional enough boy that this, to him, sounded like sacrilege.

“You know,” he began hesitantly, not wanting to pry but trying to find higher ground, “it’s okay not to obey your father sometimes. Christ said, ‘Do you suppose that I came to bring peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division.’”

“Linus,” she remonstrated with him. “He was kidding.”

“Really?”

“He only takes things seriously if someone says something he couldn’t have thought of.”

“Then what does he do?”

“He sort of stops and looks at you. He can actually become very pleasant, almost happy.”

“About what?”

“About—thinking. I don’t think he likes that most people don’t think much.”

“I consider myself very thoughtful,” said Linus, and she knew, that ended that line of conversation then and there. Linus Therestes would never understand her father.

But that did not mean, she told her father later, that he couldn’t understand her, though Dix sincerely doubted it.

Unfortunately that was only the beginning. Linus started taking her everywhere. Dix never knew the world was so full of Catholic cubbyholes. They dropped out of sight to pray and do other things, who knew what, but there was always so much paraphernalia that went along with it. Souvenirs, he supposed. Chrissie came home and left them on her dresser. When she was in the shower he sometimes went in and looked them over. Little cards of saints with Day-Glo halos on them. Necklaces made of shoestring, with a kind of ID card on each end. And rosaries. Some of them were actually pretty nice, with beads of polished brass. Chrissie said the nuns wore them around their necks sometimes. She didn’t. When she prayed she wrapped it around her fist like she was going to punch him with brass knuckles. He wished she could do it outside the house but that didn’t seem to be the deal. She was always trying to talk to God, even though the whole thing seemed pretty one-sided to him. Chrissie was always wondering what God wanted her to do in any given situation. Couldn’t she just dope it out for herself?

Then one day she came home and said she was going to convert. He listened to her, then afterwards he went into his bedroom and cried.

He and Martha had to go to the ceremony. They meant it to be majestic, but it felt like an execution to him. Coming in, the priests were all grouped around her, lightly, brushing against her with their robes and touching her from time to time, as though they were taking a prisoner to the gas chamber. The ceremony was a two-for-one. He saw the way the priests glared at him, because Chrissie was such a blabbermouth that they all knew he was the one who originally refused to have her baptized. They wheeled in a baptismal font the size of a birdbath and flicked her forehead with a few drops. Then it was time for the big ceremony, because being Christian was only the half of it. You...