Captain! It’s so good to see you! She invited me to sit on her floral sofa, covered in transparent plastic that squeaked whenever I shifted my weight. Already waiting for me on the coffee table were a pot of Chinese tea and a plate of French ladyfingers. Have a ladyfinger, she urged, pressing the treats on me. I knew the brand, the exact company that manufactured the petit écolier biscuits of my childhood. No one could make a guilty pleasure like the French. Ladyfingers had been my mother’s favorite, given to her by my father as a lure, although she used the word “gift” when she mentioned it to me in my teenage years. I had enough consciousness to realize what a priest bearing ladyfingers to a child meant, for my mother was nothing but a child at thirteen when my father came wooing. In some cultures today or in the past, thirteen was good enough for mattress, marriage, and motherhood, or perhaps just two out of three on some occasions, but not in contemporary France or our homeland. Not that I did not understand my father, who at the time he fathered me was a few years older than I was now with a ladyfinger melting in my mouth. A girl at thirteen — I admit to having thoughts on occasion about particularly mature American girls, some of whom at thirteen were more developed than college girls in our homeland. But these were thoughts, not deeds. We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.
Have another ladyfinger, the crapulent major’s widow urged, picking one up and leaning forward to thrust it in my face. She would have forced that sweet digit between my lips with maternal urgency but I intercepted her hand, taking the ladyfinger for myself. They’re delicious, absolutely delicious, I said. Let me just have a sip of tea first. At this, the good lady burst into tears. What’s the matter? I said. Those are the exact words he’d say, she said, which made me nervous, as if the crapulent major was even now manipulating me from behind the curtain separating the theater of life from the backstage of the afterlife.
I miss him so much! she cried. I squeaked my way across the plastic expanse between us and patted her on the shoulder as she wept. I could not help but see the crapulent major as I last encountered him in person if not in spirit, on his back with the third eye in his forehead, his other eyes open and blank. If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God. I did not need to confess to a God I did not believe in, but I did need to appease the soul of a ghost whose face even now gazed at me from the altar on the side table. There in full cadet uniform was the young crapulent major, photographed at that phase before his first chin even dreamed of grandfathering a third chin, dark eyes staring at me as I comforted his widow. All he had to eat in the afterlife was a navel orange frosted with mold, a dusty can of Spam, and a roll of Lifesavers, arrayed in front of his photograph and illuminated by the incongruous, blinking Christmas lights she had hung on the altar’s edge. Inequality ruled even in the afterlife, where the descendants of the rich feted them with heaping platters of fresh fruit, bottles of champagne, and cans of pâté. Genuinely devoted descendants burned paper offerings that included not only the usual cutouts of cars and homes, but also Playboy centerfolds. The hot body of a pliant woman was what a man wanted in the cold, long afterlife, and I swore to the crapulent major I would make him an offering of the fantastic, pneumatic Miss June.
To his widow, I said, I promised your husband that if the need ever arose I would do my utmost to take care of you and your children. Everything else I told her was the truth, my supposed accident in the Philippines and my reward, half of it in the envelope I pressed on her. She resisted gracefully but when I said, Think of the children, she gave in. There was nothing after that but to surrender to her demand that I see the children. They were in the bedroom, asleep as all children should be. They’re my joy, she whispered as we gazed down on the twins. They’re keeping me alive in these difficult days, Captain. Thinking about them I don’t think about myself so much, or my dear, beloved husband. I said, They’re beautiful, which may or may not have been a lie. They were not beautiful to me, but they were beautiful to her. I admit to not being an aficionado of children, having been one and having found my cohort and myself generally despicable. Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle. But these children, just a year old, were still unconscious of their guilt. In their sleeping, alien faces I could see them as the naked and easily frightened new immigrants they were, so recently exiled into our world.
The only advantage I had over these twins was that I had had a father in my childhood to teach me about guilt, and they would not. My father taught classes for the children of the diocese, which my mother forced me to attend. In his schoolroom I learned my Bible and the history of my divine Father, the story of my Gallic forefathers, and the catechism of the Catholic Church. At that time, when my years could be counted on the fingers of two hands, I was naive and ignorant of the fact that this father in his black cassock, this holy man who sweated in his unnatural garb to save us from our tropical sins, was also my father. When I did know, it recast everything I learned from him, beginning with this most basic tenet of our faith, drilled into our young platoon of Catholics by the father as he walked before our class, reading our lips as we collectively droned the answer:
Q. What is the sin called that we inherit from our first parents?
A. The sin that we inherit from our first parents is called Original Sin.
For me, the truly important Question that had always preoccupied me was related to this Original Sin, for it concerned my father’s identity. I was eleven when I learned the Answer, my knowledge triggered by an incident on the dusty grounds of the church after Sunday school, a territory where we children reenacted on one another many a biblical atrocity. As we watched the father’s imported bulldog thrust away at a whining female companion in the shade of a eucalyptus tree, his tongue hanging, the pink balloon of his enormous scrotum swinging back and forth with hypnotic rhythm, one of my more knowledgeable classmates offered a supplement to this lesson in sex education. A dog and a bitch, that’s natural, he said. But him — and here he turned scornful eyes and finger on me — he’s like what happens when a cat and a dog do that. Everyone’s attention turned to me. I stood there as if on a boat drifting away from the shore where they all waited, seeing myself through the eyes of others as a creature neither dog nor cat, neither human nor animal.
A dog and a cat, this little comedian said to me. A dog and a cat—
When I punched him in the nose, the comedian bled but was silent, shocked, his eyes momentarily crossed as he tried to see the damage. When I punched him again in the nose, the blood gushed, and this time the comedian cried out loudly. I punched him again, working my way from ears to cheeks to solar plexus and then to the hunched shoulders that he drew up around his head to protect himself when he fell to the ground and I fell on top of him. Our peers gathered around us, yelling, screaming, and laughing as I continued to pummel him until my knuckles stung. Not a single one of these witnesses offered to intervene on behalf of the comedian, who finally stopped me when his sobs began sounding like the strangled laughter of someone hearing the best joke ever told. When I stood up, the yelling, screaming, and laughing subsided, and in the adorable faces of those little monsters I could see fear, if not respect. I walked home in confusion, wondering what, exactly, I had learned, unable to put it into words. My mind had no room for anything but the obscene picture of a dog mounting a cat, her animal face replaced by that of no one else but my mother, an image so upsetting that when I arrived home and saw her I burst into tears and confessed everything that had transpired that afternoon.