“You were doing pretty well there until you snuck in that last ‘I don’t know. ’Vegetables, then. So, your brother Richard is a producer of vegetables over at Robinson’s Grocery store and you, his sister, are a producer of secrets here at St. Joseph’s, right?”
“No, Father.”
“But you just told me he worked at Robinson’s.”
Here he looked over the top of Cathy’s head, raised one eyebrow, and flared his nostrils at the rest of the class. The girls giggled restrainedly. Cathy saw herself drop her gaze to her desktop.
Just be still.
“I meant that I don’t have any secrets, Father.”
“No secrets at all?”
“No, Father.”
“My goodness. Life is no fun without secrets, did you know that? I’ll bet everyone in this room has a secret. Even Sister Lumina, there, don’t you, Sister?”
Sister Lumina sat up a little straighter; her slash parted to reveal clenched teeth.
“I had a secret when I was your age,” Father McCoy continued. “I thought everyone did. Shall I tell you my secret?”
He glanced around the room for permission and then continued.
“Whenever my mother served tomatoes, I used to feed them to the dog under the table when she wasn’t looking. Then, when she asked me where they went in such a hurry, I just said they went straight down the hatch, as usual, which was the truth, of course. I didn’t lie, you see, I just didn’t say whose hatch the tomatoes went down. And when my mother asked me if I wanted some more tomatoes, I always said, no thanks, I’d had enough, which was also true, of course. I’m certain my dog did not agree, but what could he do? So you see, that was my secret. But you, Catherine Mugan, you say you have absolutely no secrets at all then?”
Cathy looked back up.
Hold still.
“No, Father.”
“You poor child. What a dull imagination you must have. I suggest you try to acquire at least one secret before you graduate, even if it is only a secret desire to put all of the gifts that God gave you to good use.”
He held out the report card for her to take from his hand. Floating so high above the classroom, Cathy barely heard the remarks.
The same morning that report cards were being handed out at St. Joseph’s Convent School, word went around the neighbourhood that Linda Thompson, the fourteen-year-old who lived across the street from the Mugans, was pregnant. Adele Mugan heard the news at the foot of her own driveway where she was sweeping. Next door, Dot Monroe was preparing to hose down her driveway. She caught Adele’s eye and strolled to the corner of her lawn where the two properties met.
At the end of their conversation, after Dot disappeared around the side of her house to turn on the tap, Adele squinted across the street to the living room windows of the Thompson house and then slowly retreated back to the garage to put away the broom. As she did so, the gossip turned slowly on a spit in her mind, growing darker and beginning to sweat; soon it began to sizzle and hiss over the hot coals of her imagination, embellishing itself, slowly ballooning outwards until it had crowded out everything else.
She came in from the garage and began to clean the kitchen.
“Can you imagine?” she began, clattering cutlery and china as she cleared the counters. “Fourteen-year-old little miss hot pants. Just couldn’t wait. Must have been sleeping all over town. By Jeezus, no kid of mine had better ever get herself pregnant, that’s for darn sure. No siree! I’m not having any little hussy carrying on behind my back, thinking she’s pulling the wool over my eyes, the whole town talking behind my back. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
She piled the dishes noisily into the sink, turned the taps on full blast.
“Little tart,” she said, wringing the dishcloth violently. “Little mincing hussy tart!”
She wiped the counters vigorously, rinsed the dishcloth, and wiped the counters again.
“Over my dead body,” she said, slamming the butter dish down on the shelf in the fridge. “Over my dead body, let me tell you.”
She returned to the sink and carefully piled all of the utensils together beneath the sudsy water. Then her restless hands fell still and her gaze fixed dead ahead through the window on the row of evergreens at the back of the yard.
“There will be no boys in this house until you’re out of high school, missy, do you hear me, or by God, you’ll have me to answer to. Is that understood? This is not the Thompson household.”
At one o’clock every afternoon, Adele stopped cleaning, took off her apron, and went into the dining room to sit down with a cup of tea. She began by sitting among the heavy pieces of mahogany furniture, looking out through the French doors at the birds on the back fence. She studied the habits of the birds carefully, hoping to discern some sign, although she didn’t know what it would be, that the birds had flown north to Ontario from Washington, D.C. It wasn’t impossible, she reasoned, that one of these same birds might have, just the morning before, perhaps, spent time in the President’s Rose Garden. It was possible that one of these plain-looking little brown sparrows had sat outside the President’s window yesterday, been seen by him, maybe even eaten out of his hand, and then flown straight up here to alight in her garden. It might even have brought a molecule of dirt on its claw from one garden to the other. Something to link the two gardens. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, one day, she and the President met and talked about gardens and birds? And he might mention a one-eyed sparrow, or a bird with one yellow leg and one orange one who came to his garden for two or three seasons, and she might suddenly recognize the description of a bird she had watched in her own garden.
The American President’s picture sat in a simple brass frame in a froth of doily lace on the buffet. Beside it, brass bookends pressed a volume of the poetry of Robert Frost. After observing the birds and re-imagining all the possibilities concerning their migrations between various gardens, Adele reached back, picked the picture up, and brought it to the table with her. She held it out at arm’s length, turning it this way and that, examining the different effects of the light upon the President’s expression. The photo was a close-up of him sitting at his desk. She had clipped it out of a magazine the year he was elected. His eyes were uplifted, and he held his chin in his left hand. In her head, Adele heard, with crystal clarity, his peculiarly accented speaking voice.
“How are you today, Adele?”
His office was on the ground floor of the White House, his desk beside French windows that opened out onto the famous Rose Garden. Adele looked through those windows during the afternoons, loving the details—the wicker-backed rocking chair, the blue rug, the naval pictures, him.
She knew the Rose Garden well; it was where she went most often to meet him. It was easy for her to approach from the White House lawns; the security guards knew who she was and left her alone. She was able to slip through the hedge and stroll up one of the paths to sit on a stone bench where she could look in through the double French doors and watch him work. Sometimes the room was crowded with aides, and other times he sat in solitude, sifting through a sheaf of white paper with curled corners. Occasionally he looked out through the small windowpanes; sometimes, if he saw her, he waved. If he was too busy, she went upstairs to have tea with his wife. The First Lady dwelt beneath the snowy white linen tablecloths in a drawer of Adele’s dining room buffet. Every afternoon, Adele reverently lifted out the several glossy magazines that contained her and arranged them in a semicircle on the dining room table. As soon as the magazines were opened to the accustomed spots, the exquisitely beautiful young wife