My dearest Kit, I will send with this letter a piece for you to have and to study. Perhaps [But this word was crossed out.] I have read with great interest the books you have given me, about lost girls who find their way back. With especial interest the one of Alice in behind-the-mirror world, with dictionary also, and much pondering of many remarks. It is frightening, is it not. The poem of the walrus and carpenter is surely among the most terrible in all your language. How is this book given to children? Did it not make you have anxious dreams? When I read I believed I discovered a flaw in it: would it not be impossible for Alice to pass through the mirror? She would I thought only kiss herself there: face to face, hand to hand, breast to breast. How to pass through? Then I saw, no, this is supreme genius of the book: that if Alice passes through her mirror, then Alice from the other side must also pass through; and while we read interesting adventures of Alice in her mirror, at the same time there is another story not told, the adventures of mirror-Alice here, where she does not belong, strange world where clocks run only one way and you cannot always tell red kings from white. A poem could perhaps be written of her adventure?
Well we have kissed at that frontier, my love, haven’t we? We ourselves. I have come into a world where West is away, where freedom does not rhyme with fate, and where alone you can be found. So it is enough, and must be; for unlike Alice I know no way back.
She read it again, and then again in her little room (anonymous, usable for “guests” when Kit wasn’t there, not hers at all in fact except insofar as she was a guest or ghost here). Freedom was volya and fate was dolya, not a word they taught in her classes but one in a poem of his, a comic poem. She thought that Alice didn’t know a way back either, not until her author gave her one.
For a time she studied the lines on the other, typewritten sheet, sounding out the words and recognizing some but unable to untangle their cases and moods and tenses; without a dictionary she soon had to give up. It was apparently about angels: if angel was the same in both languages. Were angels in his world what they were in hers? She couldn’t guess. She thought she could smell him in the paper, the smoke of his cigarettes, the musty room, the card table; she pressed the sheet to her face and breathed it in.
On Sunday they took her to church. Something in her mother’s face when she listed for Kit the times of Sunday Masses made it impossible to refuse or to fight. She went through her clothes to find something to wear and borrowed a hat from Marion, a navy straw that was at least not flowered or fruited. They parked in a big parking lot and went in and took blond pews in their brand-new church, an austerely modern one, raw concrete walls deformed out of any ordinary geometry and pierced irregularly by windows of abstract stained glass. It smelled of nothing, like a waiting room. Her own inward church, she knew, didn’t smell of nothing. Above the altar was suspended a vast bare cross of rusted steel, cruel enough for a sacrifice surely, crueler-seeming to Kit than any painted wooden corpus writhen and bleeding.
They were very early. Clusters of people knelt or sat with heads bowed in the low pews or looked upward as though trying to comprehend the space around them. Marion leaned close to her and nodded toward the side aisle: confessions were being heard. Kit chose to show no comprehension, and having looked that way, she looked away again.
“Hasn’t it been a long time?” Marion whispered to her. “We’d like you to go to Communion with us.” She touched Kit’s arm and, smiling, gently pressed her, go on.
Okay. All right. If she was going to do this.
She went to the pew nearest the minatory little box, blond wood too but unmistakable for anything else, and knelt to Examine her Conscience; and when it was her turn she went in through the purple drape as onto a tiny theater stage, actor with an audience of one.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said. “It has been six months since my last confession. These are my sins.” She heard these formulae as though for the first time, odd as a child’s made-up game. The priest beyond the veil breathed with difficulty, asthmatic or a smoker. She listened for a moment; so did he.
“Actually there’s only one sin I’m aware of,” she said then, reluctantly or as though reluctantly. “I’ve. Well. I’m having an affair with a professor. At my college.”
Breath, altering. “How old are you, child.”
“I’m twenty years old, father.”
“And is this professor a married man?”
She thought. “He’s a widower.”
“And for how long has this affair gone on?”
“For a few months.”
“And has this affair included sexual intercourse? Do you know what’s meant by that?”
“Yes, Father. It did. It does.”
“Did he force himself on you, child? Against your will? Did he threaten you?”
“No, Father.”
“Did you lead him on?”
“Well. I was, you know, there.”
He breathed. She wondered if he would pry for details, and what her mood would lead her to say if he did. He said: “He has done you a great wrong.”
She said nothing.
“He was placed in a position of authority over you and has abused it. He should have nurtured and not done you harm.”
“Yes, Father.”
“He is very much at fault here.”
“Yes, Father. That’s what I think too.”
“And you are very much at fault for having allowed it.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Do you know that if this were to come out, he would be disgraced, maybe fired?”
“It won’t,” she said.
Breath. “You must,” he said, “break off this relationship.”
“Well I don’t think I can.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes. But not of him. I love him.”
“Then of what?”
“I’m afraid the world is going to end.”
He breathed so long and painfully that Kit wondered if he was afraid of it too. He said: “I cannot give you absolution for this sin until you feel repentance. You can repent in fear of God’s anger and judgment, or in sorrow at having offended Him. But you have to repent.”
A low bell sounded; people called to pray. Holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
“Okay,” she said. “Well.”
“Pray to the Virgin, child, for help. She can’t refuse.”
“Okay,” Kit said, with a shrug, moved by her own imaginary dilemma, no way out.
“Now,” the priest said. “For any other sins you may have committed. Make a good act of contrition.”
She did, saying the words with care and attention as she had been taught to do; through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. She left the booth, admitting the next sinner, a bent old man with his hat in his hand. She went to kneel again beside her mother, who had taken out her beads and held them loosely, the trembling stones catching the light of the windows; her face was calm, absorbed, alight even, and her eyes moist. It was four months since Ben had been brought home: exactly four, Kit thought, and realized why she had been taken here. The Mass began. She listened to the prayers and to the responses, changeless as nothing else ever would be, the ones Ben used to make, the bottoms of his sneakers showing as he knelt: Quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus? Why do you push me from you, why do I go on so sorrowfully? When it came time she went up to the rail with her father and mother, and in a tremor of shame and delight and wonder, cloven forever into inside and outside but not alone, not just now, she took the nearly nonexistent bit of food on her tongue, where it melted like snow.
As they went out after the Mass, Marion took her arm and leaned close to her, her face a scowl of disapproval.
“Listen,” she said. “Before you can go back to school. We have got to take you clothes shopping.”