“Oh, Protestant too plain and Catholic too tight,” he said, with a grin that made me blush. “Have you tried the Episcopal Church? A blend that might suit you. There’s a parish right here in Northampton. They have Eucharist at least once a month. Try it, then go talk to their priest, to explore more. Let me know how it goes.” He rose and extended his hand. God, he was handsome.
“Thanks,” I said, excited that he’d said “priest.” This Episcopal Church had priests. How could there be a church that looked Catholic but wasn’t? I tried it; their meal was open to all baptized Christians; I qualified. Public kneeling was a first for me. I loved the feel of it. Episcopalians stuck out their cupped hands, not their tongues. Maybe here there was a chance for women who weren’t statues to be up front. I was confirmed in my senior year of college by Bishop Robert M. Hatch, who put his hands on my head and invoked the Holy Spirit. I felt small and big at once. How much the blessing of a bishop would come to signify in my life I could not know. At least I didn’t develop another crush.
My mother I’m sure was relieved, but it was Dad who was impressed by the confirmation liturgy.
“This was beautiful, Lynda,” he said. (He called me my full name when he was seriously impressed or seriously angry.) “Not sure about all the fancy robes, but the Communion all together at the altar was nice.”
“That’s what I like too Dad,” I said. “A little more dressed up than Presbyterians.”
“Our dour Scotch blood,” he said.
“Scottish, Dad, Scottish.”
“I grew up in the Episcopal Church, you know,” Mom said. “Daddy and I were married at St. Bartholomew’s in New York. This service seemed a little too fancy and Catholic for me.” Years later, by the time I was married with children, Dad chose to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church himself. I got the oddest, proudest queasy feeling that he was following me into this church.
College gave me a diploma but no requisite diamond ring. I wasn’t ready to “settle down” so I spent the summer in Spain with families in Madrid and Santander. In Spain I inhaled religion—Catholicism on steroids, but I soaked it up. The statue lady came alive. The people worshipped a woman—a woman praised as if she were God, a woman held in high holy esteem, a woman beloved. The Señora in Santander called her family to prayers daily with loud clapping, her hands like small enfleshed shofars. And always we hailed Mary. She after all did precede Jesus! I still pray the Hail Mary in Spanish, the way I learned it.
Make no mistake, patriarchy was alive and well in Spain. The women ran things at home and were emotionally dominant, but the men ran the world—and sex. I attracted the attentions of a few married men, whom I rebuffed, in bad Spanish with a flattered ego, explaining that, in las USA, women didn’t do such things, which meant that I was too scared to do such things.
Paco, the older son in my Madrid family, invited me to go to a bullfight. I feigned disapproval. Toro, toro, toro, ven, ven, guapa, he teased, waving his arms and an imaginary cape before me. I went. I was quickly drawn into the heat of the crowd. Olé sounded like hosanna. Would I have yelled “Crucify him” in the crowd that turned on Jesus, their hero? A bullfight is no barnyard event. The crowd swayed and moaned and roared as one. My God, this experience was lustful, just like religious mystics wrote about their ecstasies. Great God Almighty, I’m having a public orgasm. Please God let me have one in private, too.
In Spain I smelled holiness, dark and musty in cathedrals. I tasted the blood of ritual sacrifice—raw and unhygienic, like and unlike the sacramental meal I craved. I’d read Cervantes’s classic Don Quijote, but now its spirit was in my bones despite the fact that I could not decide if I was Don Quijote, foolishly stabbing at windmills and filled with indignation at the ills of the world he believed was transformable, or the squat lumphead peasant, Sancho Panza, loyal to the end and scared to quivering about going against just about anything.
•
The Episcopal Church had promise, but the ordination of women was like one of Quijote’s windmills. I felt spiritually enlarged being part of the 80-million-member Anglican Communion. The 2.2-million-member Episcopal Church had a governance of checks and balances, much like the US government, so power wasn’t concentrated in a central authority. It was not a dogmatized institution, yet it had a hierarchical structure and an all-male priesthood. Women could be ordained deacons but not priests. Deacons were canonically restricted to a ministry of service to church and world—which very nearly fit women’s traditional social roles.
Why, I wondered, was Eucharist the purview of men only? It was clearly a meal in which God acted like a woman—feeding a gathering around a dining table. I noted that the altar guild, ladies all, set up and cleaned up after the meal presided over by a man. I clung to my love of this meal I felt sure was somehow mine—while writing in my diary about sex and spinster fear and Bill Brakeman.
“Bill Brakeman is such a dear handsome man, don’t you think?” my mother, who had taken Bill to lunch while I was in Spain, cooed. Yes, I did think Bill was dear and handsome and I did love him. We’d had this Lindy Hop pattern to our relationship for years, swinging away from each other, nearly losing grasp, then crashing back together so hard I’d feel crushed and pull away again, because of some inner unidentifiable hesitation I didn’t understand. Letting go of the security of understanding, I became engaged to Bill. We were a ringed “item” now, quite normal. Under a Danforth fellowship, I taught Spanish at Smith for a year while Bill finished up at RPI. We married in June 1961. My overjoyed mother orchestrated a voluptuous outsized celebration at their Darien home. I wore a plain white unembellished wedding dress.
Now we were married. We could do it. It was our sexually legal debut—and we couldn’t do it. My vagina set up its own “No Admittance” sign. I cried, over-apologized, and together we downed a whole bottle of champagne. The next morning while waiting for our flight to Bermuda I called my mother. It’s true, I did.
“Mom,” I whispered, cupping my hand over the phone receiver.
“Darling, how are you two lovebirds?” she asked.
“We’re not lovebirds,” I said.
“What?” she said. “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”
“We couldn’t do it,” I hissed into the phone.
“You mean . . .” she said.
“Yes, I’m not normal.”
“Of course you are darling. Just relax. I remember when Daddy and I were married he was so nervous he poured a whole bottle of champagne down the sink by mistake and ordered a poached egg on toast for dinner in a fancy hotel . . .”
“Okay bye. Have to run catch the plane. Bye.” I hung up before she could say one word more.
I told Bill who said, “Thank God we didn’t waste our champagne.” We laughed hysterically at Mom’s perverse consolation, which nevertheless worked to relax us, so by the time we got to Bermuda we did it. I’d worry about orgasms and any other aspirations later. For now more school. You’d think I’d know who I was by now. My mother did. Bill and I moved into a one-room apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan where I attended Columbia University to earn a master’s in Spanish while Bill, degreed as an electronics engineer, commuted from New York to Connecticut for his job with an engineering company. My mother selected and installed the drapes for our new apartment. We looked completely normal.
I didn’t go to church but I visited some sanctuaries and stared at the magnificent altars at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and at Riverside Church. I didn’t talk to God. I just sat still and knew: an emotional distance had begun to creep into our marriage. We were both introverts, both oldest children, both had dads we loved who drank too much, and both of us were more motivated to succeed alone than together, yet we wanted to be together. We just didn’t know how to talk to each other about our fears, resentments, longings, needs, worries, much of anything, but when we drank together we shared freely—up to a point. What we’d