“But sorrow…”
“Pain…”
“…and mortification.”
Their fear of damnation now was so deep and abiding that they became god-fearing Christians. They had seen the gates to the netherworld open up in their own front yard; they had seen it reflected in their mother’s eyes the night she died, and now the mere mention of the place struck them with terror.
At school, they were heedless, undisciplined and inattentive. They talked back to their teachers and got into fights with their classmates; however, they didn’t listen when Prince Beelzebub appeared in their dreams and encouraged them with a melodious voice to lock Magnolia in the attic with Harris. They were tempted, but they never dared to call the goat’s name against any of their schoolmates, and they chased away their old familiars—the swarm of flies and the toad, sent from the netherworld to lure them back to the dark side—with rosaries and novenas. They refused to feed them with their blood and, left to starve, the fiends eventually disappeared. Still, they knew that the Prince of Darkness wouldn’t let them go that easily. They had promised to love, cherish, and obey him for all eternity; they knew he wouldn’t let them go unpunished. They were damned, condemned to burn in Hell forever, unless God, in his infinite mercy, could forgive them. They had to pray every day, go to mass every Sunday, and carry a rosary with them constantly, to be protected.
An extraordinary transformation, you’ll think. The daughters of a murderous witch praying Hail Marys. But you’ll surely remember, dear reader, what it was like to be young and learn that everything we like and enjoy is a sin. You’ll sure remember the embarrassment, the guilt for doing as the body wants. If you’re a woman, the feeling is twice-fold. If you’re a woman, you’re sin itself. If you are a woman, you are less worthy of the pleasures of an afterlife in paradise, and the urge to please God by mortifying the flesh and relinquishing your own desires is thereby much stronger.
Harris’s unmentionable condition was a constant reminder of how perilous it could be to make a pact with the Prince of Darkness.
“He made a terrible mistake in his youth,” Magnolia explained to the girls on their first trip to the butcher. “A folly for which he should do penance, and for which the four of us have to pray to our Holy Mother, the Blessed Virgin, every night of the week, so she will intercede with her son for his forgiveness.”
“When I finally found the courage to confess to my beloved Magnolia about my condition,” Harris said to the girls, climbing the stairs up to the little room in the attic, “after an eight-year-long engagement, she took the news with resignation. That, and not a secret wife, as she had come to suspect, was the reason for my monthly absenteeism.”
“I believe in the power of prayer,” Magnolia had said back then, clinging to the chest of her fiancé. “I will pray every night for your recovery.”
“She cried,” Harris continued, “but she also laughed for all the times she thought I was cheating, when instead your mother and I were scavenging corpses.”
Magnolia had had only one condition before they got married: that Harris would stop eating human flesh.
“I agreed, but under two more: that we would keep a spare room in our home with bars at the door and the windows where I could be restrained during the nights of full moon, so that I wouldn’t be a threat to Magnolia, and that we’d never have children, so the curse would die with me. It was hard for her to say yes to this last request, but still she accepted.”
“It wasn’t what I dreamed,” Magnolia said later to the girls, during one of those moments of vulnerability in which one’s aching truths are shared with the least suspecting over a glass of sherry. “Why would I want to marry a man who once a month turned into a murderous beast? He killed my friend Christina. He killed George and Angus. But he was kind, and I was turning thirty. Had I said no, perhaps I would have not gotten another proposal. And I thought that maybe one day we could have a child if things changed. If a miracle were to happen.”
“I haven’t had the need to taste human flesh in almost ten years,” Harris preened.
“The more we pray to the Virgin,” Magnolia invited the girls to kneel behind her on the hard wooden floor, “the closer Harris is to achieving the Lord’s forgiveness.”
“But if God is all love and kindness,” Victoria asked her sister in a low voice, “why can’t He just fix him? And why do we have to talk to Him through his mother? Why does Magnolia have to pray so much and be so unhappy?”
God must be such a selfish, narcissistic bastard, she thought, if he needed so much begging and mortification to grant such a small favor.
“If He knows it all,” Victoria continued, making sure Magnolia couldn’t hear, “if He’s all-powerful and full of mercy, why cannot he cure Harris? Doesn’t He love his mother? Or is it the Virgin who does not want to help? Magnolia shouldn’t have to live in constant fear. The Devil allowed our mother to perform great acts of magic in exchange for just blood. You want so-and-so to fall sick? It will cost you a pint. You want that person murdered? Give me two pints and one tooth. And it worked.”
“Because He’s righteous,” Rosa responded, smacking her sister on the back of her head. “And praying an hour every day is easier, anyway, and much less painful than letting a fiend drink your blood for fifteen minutes. Once you lose a tooth, you lose it forever. They don’t grow back, stupid.”
“One tooth is worth Harris’s health,” insisted Victoria.
“Perhaps you’d need to give more than one.”
Harris must have done something really bad; something truly unforgivable and offensive; something that required as many prayers are there are grains of sand in the beach to be pardoned.
“Whatever Harris did to deserve his curse,” Rosa wasn’t sure but she had a strong suspicion it had something to do with masturbation, “cannot be half as bad as what we did to please the Little Master and his acolytes during the Sabbath.”
Victoria had to agree. If Harris’s sins hadn’t yet been forgiven, after all those years, would theirs ever be?
They could only pray. And pray they did, every night, the twenty Mysteries of the Rosary, right after dinner. And it killed them; it made them feel guilty and ungrateful; it made them terribly sad, especially on those nights when Harris didn’t pray with them, when if somebody called for him they had to lie and say that he was indisposed and had gone to bed early, when he was actually locked inside the room in the attic; because they could hear him howl; they could hear him curse and stomp on the floor above them; they could hear him call them all a pack of whores; they could hear him swear by all the legions of demons from Hell that he would come down and kill them—it made them feel spoiled, unappreciative, and undeserving, for neither one ever prayed for his absolution but only for their own, so that they, and not Harris, were the ones that would obtain God’s forgiveness.
“We should pray for him at least once, Rosa. Don’t you think?”
“Every night we pray for ourselves is a minute less in purgatory.”
Despite their mediocre marks, Magnolia managed to get the two sisters accepted into Normal School. They returned to Venice every few weeks for a weekend, and for a full two months during summer. The young girl had to work harder during these visits, but she tried to make the best of it. She had few distractions outside her work, and to see her sisters all dolled up, wearing brass jewelry and dressed in the latest fashions, to hear them talking about life in the city, about the traffic, about the movies, made her feel as if she too were living a fabulous life in the City of Angels. The two had eventually found ways to fool Magnolia, and, on Fridays, they sneaked out of the house through the fire exit to go dance the foxtrot at the Alexandria ballroom.
Besides the extra work, a downside to these visits was that our little friend had to suffer the lessons in English grammar and religion that, in her sisters’ opinion, she so urgently needed. Rosa and Victoria were harsher