I was going to say, Rest his soul, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want Forster to think I was a ninny. I followed him on the path.
“Doesn’t it seem very noisy outside, all of a sudden?” I said. “We’ve been elsewhere.”
“Yes,” Forster said. “I’m not quite back yet.”
We were at the edge of the park, in the cold. Everything was too vivid, after our time spent guessing how far the man was from anything we knew. The bare quiet was still in our heads. We walked without speaking — I was glad of that. How tinny and insubstantial everything in the shop windows was, how childish. What did anyone need a feather-topped hat for?
In front of my building, Forster said, “Go sit by yourself somewhere, if you can.”
“I wish we’d been there sooner for him,” I said.
“That part makes me furious,” he said. “No one cares about a man like that.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. I was afraid to touch him, with my gloves that had touched the dead man’s feet, but I leaned my head slightly.
A few days later, Dorothy told me she’d been saying prayers for the man’s soul.
“What kind of prayers?” I said.
We were in the corner of a loud and pleasantly crowded living room where a party was going on. Dorothy had a cigarette in her hand. “To beg that he’s taken into heaven. What else can be asked for? And I gave something to the priest at St. Guadeloupe to have him included in their prayers.”
Dorothy, poor as a church mouse, was giving coins for this?
“We all had lots of training young, didn’t we?” I said.
“Actually, I didn’t,” she said. “I just like to go into churches, I have for years. Mostly Catholic ones. Especially late at night, after I’ve been out, I like to go in and see the lit candles. But not only then. And I notice that I tend to pray in my head. Don’t ask me Who’s listening. I don’t have a final opinion.”
All this was a surprise. I wasn’t one of those who thought that praying was demented — my family prayed pretty constantly — but I thought of myself as done with such things. In Philadelphia I’d gone to meetings (and marched too) with workers whose pamphlets said, “Jesus Saves the Slave,” not to mention “Trust in the Lord and Sleep in the Street.” Dorothy must’ve known those lines. She made a living of sorts as a writer and she’d done reporting for radical magazines for years.
“People are at their best when they’re in devotion,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes I just walk from the beach into town with my rosary beads in my pocket. I don’t think it matters if I don’t say the words completely right.”
Is she unbalanced? I thought. And I saw that I wanted her to be. I had an oddly happy feeling at the thought that she might be not right at all for Forster. I knew what this thought meant. (And didn’t I have a husband I loved? I did.) It was my own business what I thought. Not every involuntary wish had to be acted on. Thoughts are free, I thought. This was the refrain of a German song they sang at meetings: No man can deny, Die Gedanken sind frei.
Dorothy was fishing a piece of fruit out of her empty glass of rum punch. It was the made-up, improvised nature of Dorothy’s praying that gave it a semi-crazy taint. And then I was embarrassed to think that. Dorothy was a sensible and highly original person. If she wanted to walk around mentally intoning addresses to pure space, that was her own business, her own liberty.
At the party, someone put on a record of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and Joe came to claim me for a light, not too bouncy fox trot. Forster wasn’t around (he didn’t like parties) and Dorothy found Richard to dance with. She talked while she danced, in that smoky room, with her shining cropped hair showing wispy in the light, and she looked like any of us, nicely in rhythm, set on what she was doing, pretty enough.
Could someone who loved freedom above all believe in a fat, overconstructed, historically corrupt institution like the Catholic Church? Joe and I had several talks about this. Dorothy wasn’t even born a Catholic, but if it was truly and freely in her own individual nature to love the Church, what then? “It’s the illusion in it that gives me the creeps,” Joe said. He meant divinity. Christ’s or anybody’s. Couldn’t you be opposed to submission — I didn’t expect to ever again kneel to pray — but be receptive to what Dorothy liked to call the Unseen? “Not possible, I don’t think,” Joe said. “Name me a religion where people don’t bow their heads.”
I wasn’t keen to think about it, now that I was away from my father’s house. I didn’t need to have an opinion, in the life I had. But I saw how lit up Dorothy was, how charged with bits of liturgy, how stirred and driven, how thirsty. She would start to find us all shallow, if she kept on this way. But we had our own beliefs, our hopes for knocking down the stupidities of the past. “She thinks we’re nothing,” Joe said.
“Don’t be vain about it,” I said. “That is not the problem.” But I was hurt too, that Dorothy could think of leaving us.
Joe and I kept meaning to visit Dorothy’s little house in Staten Island, but we didn’t get there till the height of summer, when Manhattan was an oven and the beach was fresh and astounding. We all ran around in the surf in our bathing costumes, shrieking when the waves hit us. Forster was out fishing when we got there, but Dorothy’s twelve-year-old brother John, who was staying with them, dove fearlessly under the waves and kept teasing his sister by popping up right under where she was. Joe pretended to rescue her by dragging her off. “All the Day family are good swimmers,” she said, kicking and escaping. I didn’t know then that Dorothy was pregnant.
She was perfectly slender in her sleeveless tunic and narrow swimsuit. I was shorter and rounder and felt more exposed and fleshy, though I forgot myself because of the ease everyone else had. We dried ourselves sitting on the porch, eating blackberries from the garden. The house itself was a mess of specimens that Forster had dragged in — skate egg cases, the skulls of small animals, bird’s nests, the shell of a huge turtle — and the kitchen table was piled with pages of a serial romance Dorothy was writing for a newspaper. I envied their lives in that little house.
Forster showed up in time for supper, tanned and wild-haired from the boat and quiet as ever. He had caught a dogfish, which looked like a small shark — Dorothy said no one around there ate them but an Italian neighbor had said Italians thought they were delicious. So Dorothy fried up pieces in butter and we had potatoes and cabbage salad with them. The fish was strong-tasting but not bad. “Oh,” Forster said, “I just had to cut away the venomous part when I filleted it.” I thought he was kidding but he wasn’t.
“Vera, honey bun, don’t be nervous,” Joe said, so I decided not to be. Everyone thought Forster knew what he was doing, and I probably thought so too. They lived on nothing, he and Dorothy, and looked better and healthier than the rest of us.
Dorothy told me the news when we were cleaning up in the kitchen. “Don’t you notice how magnificent I am?” she said. “It’s the end of the second month already. Every morning I give thanks.”
I knew she’d had an abortion when she was younger and had suffered for it. And the man had left her afterward. It wasn’t much of a secret. A novel she’d written about it had actually been published—The Eleventh Virgin, by Dorothy Day — and movie rights had paid for the beach shack, though no one made any such movie. Dorothy was so earnest she didn’t bother to have what would be secrets for anyone else.
“I thought Forster was looking very tickled,” I said. “Now I get it.”
“Forster will get used to the idea,” she said. “He thinks it’s a terrible world and we shouldn’t add to its numbers.”