Whatever difficulties might presently befall the college or its students were unlikely to shock Jo Carr. In South America, at close quarters, she had seen a struggle toward mutual extermination so savage, fueled by such violent hatred between races and classes, that the very phrase “civil war” seemed an ironic euphemism. At the college she did what she could. A mind, as some brain-dead politician had once misquoted a fundraising slogan, was a terrible thing to lose.
Almost every year a kid was referred to the counseling office in whom Jo could detect the first signs of adolescent-onset schizophrenia. She was not qualified to work with its victims — there was a clinical psychologist at the center — but she knew the signs well enough. The too-wide smile, undercut by fear and wonder in the eyes, the futile attempted escapes into non sequitur, all the small signs of demeanor that signaled the beginning of the adventure. The descent of the innocent into half light, half life.
Far better, and one hoped less futile, was to talk to the merely troubled, beset by circumstance. Jo Carr’s clients were mostly young women. Often their problem was some degree of culture shock or homesickness, things that could be dealt with by providing someone to talk to. Other kids had drinking problems, and a surprising number — surprising to Jo, and increasing as far as she could tell — had drug addictions. At times, and in the cases of students who placed a lot of trust in the college as an institution, the problem was pregnancy. The questions these girls had were almost always similar, and Jo’s answers were too. There was no way around it, she thought. She hoped her answers were useful.
A sample question: “Should I tell my parents?”
Jo’s answer would be: “You’ll eventually feel you have to. That usually works out best in the end. If you’re not a minor, you’re not legally bound to get their permission to terminate in a state where abortion itself is legal. Get medical advice from someone you feel you can trust in a state where it’s legal. It’s legal here, for example.”
There was more to it, which she generally omitted from the record. The unrecorded section, in substance, went like this: “Young students at this college are unlikely to be bounced off the household walls for getting pregnant — though life is full of surprises. Tell your mother first, let her break it to Dad. Dad, even if he’s some foursquare right-to-lifing politician, is very likely to help pluck the mote from the apple of his eye. If your parents live separately, if you feel deeply apart from them, if they really aren’t rational people, use your judgment. Consider that if you are not ready and have no resources, the result of bringing a pregnancy to term can bring down on you and on your child more suffering, poverty and unhappiness than you can imagine. If you terminate your pregnancy, you may also feel very guilty and deprived.”
Adoption-wise, moreover: “Keep in mind that this is a college where students like you have been known to sell their fertilized eggs to eugenics-minded strivers. When it comes to facing an anxious, six-foot-one-inch, sculpted, preternaturally intelligent, Anglo angel of a basketball goddess, parents can be readily recruited for your love child. And often — not always — the young dad is an infant phenomenon himself. Keep it in mind.
“This may be the most important decision you ever, ever make,” she would tell them. “Try very hard to get it right.”
Every time, she was tempted to say, against her own good sense and reason, “Pray for guidance.” Of course she never did. She avoided, out of discretion and principle, any suggestion of religion, regardless of the kids’ backgrounds. Any French movie critic, she believed, could bring more influential historicist doctrine to bear on his specialty than she could on advice to troubled youths. Sometimes Jo cried over the kids and their problems. But it was in Texas she did most of her crying. For a while there Jo had subbed as a teacher in a ghetto high school and had got to know a few of the kids. Girls she had counseled there would sometimes fall in love with their books, their curricula, with the process of learning itself, only to have it end for them with pregnancy. Then they would find themselves approaching baby-mamahood unassisted.
At the college, she had learned how to avoid sectarian problems. She had come to despise both the Catholic Church and its archenemies. As for causes unto death, in the montaña she had seen all the passionate intensity she could possibly endure and stay sane.
The conferences usually ended the same way. “Please stay in touch,” Jo would say.
She was in her mid-fifties but looked younger. In dress she tended to fashionable dark suits, short- and tight-skirted in the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century style. Her salary was not so bad, better than that of some adjuncts.
There had been no appointments that miserable day, an icy gray morning that left windshields frosted and sidewalks treacherous. After her morning at the counseling center Jo worked the afternoon shift at Whelan Hospital. Whelan was the one connected with the college and performed abortions, prescribed birth control and often drew pro-life demonstrators.
As she started up the hill toward the hospital the sun broke through. In very little time students were on the college hill in T-shirts, tossing Frisbees. Then the sky turned misty and pale. A warm wind came up the valley. All at once the disorderly day prepared to present as spring. It was the kind of day salted with memories for Jo Carr. Maybe, she thought, for students too, because students arrived lately with recollections so much more complicated and brutal than the old ones.
Jo was just old enough to remember when places like the college played at being the world. Its students went out to rule their cloudy imperium and around the campus no one even locked a door. In days of old the college had presumed to send forth its light, a few homilies, to doomed praying Indians. In its own heart it never knew, and never learned, light or darkness — about either, or how to distinguish one from another. It sent out bookish young men, and eventually women, to save the world by generations. But the college had never really known darkness until they threw away the keys, and the shadows the place had pondered and reported and tried to witch away turned up at its doors.
As a volunteer at the hospital, Jo functioned as a counselor — social worker. Even there she sometimes felt uneasy, a necessity to keep her job, and her dialogue with patients was, by unspoken understanding, scrupulously secular. It was hard for Jo to be secular about pain, however. Might as well call it God’s will as anything else, a process that was futile to interrogate. It was so much less of a burden not to attempt a ministration. How should I know why you got that awful stuff? Offer up your sufferings to the Holy Spirit if that gets you through the night. God takes pride in his providence. People felt better. So all of it gave urgent evidence of something. But what?
An odd thing had happened to Jo only weeks before. She had gone to visit a seven-year-old girl with a fatal, painful cancer. Her mother and father were there. The man was a swamp Yankee kind of guy. He wore a black jacket that might have been provided by a township to go with a job at the dump. He was not young. The mother was narrow-faced, pointy-nosed, small and whipped. The girl you could hardly look at without breaking down, so pale and helpless that it gave resonance to the term “life support.” Suddenly the child’s mother took the notion that her dying daughter should be baptized. In her surprise and confusion Jo thought in a rather panic-stricken way about priests, ministers, any clergy who might be on duty. All at once she heard herself saying, “I can do that.”