Peter was close enough to throw an apple and hit Francis on the ladder, yet was certain he was concealed by the lush leafing of the tree, certain also that on this moonless night his profound purpose was served: the cultivation of an internal excitement like nothing he had ever known. The excitement came not only when he saw Francis and Katrina together (even if they only talked), but more so when she was wandering through the house and talking to herself, or reading a book as she walked, which, irrationally, excited him most: knowing she was oblivious of him and even of her present moment, seeing her transported as much by a book as he was by her solitary grace.
She came to the window, wrapped in a yellow robe, and with a matching ribbon holding her hair at the back of her neck, and looked out at the night, at Peter, seeing only shadows, and the lights next door, seeing nowhere near as much as Peter could see with his night eyes. She stood by the window and spoke (to him, he tried to believe), said clearly, “For thou alone, like virtue and truth, art best in nakedness. .
“Francis,” she then said.
“Yes, Katrina.”
“Thy virgin’s girdle now untie. .”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
And she undid the cloth rope that bound her robe about her waist, opened the robe and then let it fall, then undid her ribbon so that her hair fell loose on her shoulders, and Peter for the first time saw her perfect nakedness, thinking: this can’t be a dream, this must not be a dream, and then she turned her back to him and presented herself to Francis. The branches of the tree moved and Peter looked down in a fit of fright to see Sarah climbing toward him.
“I’ve been watching you,” she whispered. “What are you looking at?”
“Shhhhh,” said Peter, for Sarah’s whisper rang through the night like the bells of St. Joseph’s Church, and he was sure the naked woman had heard.
But she had not. Katrina pursued her plan, embracing Francis about the knees as he stood on the ladder. Sarah, agile as a monkey, was now beside Peter in the crotch of a branch, and so he could not look at what his eyes wanted so desperately to see. But Sarah could look, staring with her usual inquisition at her brother and the naked Katrina, and so Peter rejoined the vision, watching her take her arms from around Francis’s legs and stare up at him as he came down the ladder, then (Sarah unable to restrain a gasp) seeing him kiss her and embrace her naked body. Sarah climbed down the tree then with greater speed than she had climbed up it. She ran off, not toward home but rather, Peter would later learn, toward the church, to seek out the priest and confess in the parish house what she had seen, confessing not her own sin but Francis’s, as if his sin were her damnation as well as his own.
Peter did not leave the tree and knew Sarah would fault him for this; but he was fearful that this might be his only chance for years to come to witness what it was that people did to each other when they were naked. He saw Katrina unbutton Francis’s shirt, then unbuckle his belt, saw her walk again to the window to show her full self to Peter, lean over and pick up her robe and then spread it on the floor, lie on it on her back as Francis, now naked, stood over her, then knelt astraddle her, then finally leaned his full self forward and on top of her into a prolonged kiss.
And thus did Peter Phelan, age eleven, witness with the eye of an artist-to-be the rubrics of profane love. He knew too, for the first time, a nocturnal emission that was not the involuntary product of his dreams; and when that happened to him he began the careful, soundless climb down from the tree, shamed by his spying and the wetness of his underwear (more afraid now of having to explain that wetness than of having to give good reason for peering at people from a tree), and regretting even as his feet touched the ground that he had not continued to watch until there was nothing more to see. He thought of his brother as a figure of awesome courage and achievement — courting damnation by conquering the body of the most beautiful woman in the world — but he also sensed, even in the callowness of his newborn pubescence, that, however much he admired Francis, he would never be able to forgive him for doing this before his eyes. Never.
Sarah had been watching Peter for two days before she decided to follow him to the apple tree. She had seen the oddness of his behavior, erratic, skulking in places he had no reason to be (such as the back yard, looking over the Daugherty fence), and in time she put it together as Peter’s secret mission. He was, after all, only a child. But what the child led her to was the shock of her life.
In the infinite judicial wisdom of her Little Motherhood, Sarah, now fifteen, called a meeting of the witnesses and the accused in order to define the future. Clearly capital punishment for Francis was what the heavens screamed aloud for; but Sarah was no vessel for that. All she could do was elevate sin to communal knowledge, spoken of openly in the presence of the sinner (sinners, to be sure, for Peter was not without culpability). So she summoned them to the front steps of St. Joseph’s and, wearing the mantilla that the old Spanish nun had given her in school as a prize for her essay on chastity (“the virtue without which even good works are dead”), Sarah defined the terms under which she would allow her brothers to continue living in the same house with her and her mother, and the sainted moron Tommy, and the hapless Chick, and the good sisters, Molly and Julia (who, Sarah knew, had chastity problems of their own, but she chose not to raise them here), and the terms were these: That Francis would confess that he had been living in the occasion of sin by working for Mrs. Daugherty, whose behavior we must somehow reveal without being vulgar. We can never tell our mother that you put your hands on her naked body, how could you do such an awful thing?
“Listen,” Francis said, “don’t knock it till you tried it,” whereupon Sarah ran up the stairs into the church and did not talk to either brother for three days, after which time she raised the issue at the dinner table.
“Mama,” Sarah said to all assembled siblings, “Francis has something to tell you.”
“No I don’t,” Francis said.
“You’ll tell her or I will,” Sarah said.
“I got nothin’ to say,” Francis said.
“Then Peter will tell,” Sarah said.
“Not me,” Peter said.
“Will somebody tell me what this is about?” Kathryn Phelan asked. Her other children, Chick, Julia, Molly, and Tommy, looked bewildered at their mother’s question.
“It’s what Francis is doing,” Sarah said. But she could say no more.
“Sarah doesn’t think I oughta work for Katrina,” Francis said. “I think Sarah oughta mind her own business.”
“Why not work for her?” Kathryn asked.
“There’s more than work going on over there,” Sarah said.
“And what might that mean?”
“Are you going to tell her?” Sarah asked Francis.
Francis stared into Sarah’s eyes, his face crimson, his mouth a line of rage.
“Well?” said Kathryn.
“She put her arms around him,” Sarah said.
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Francis said.
“Why did she do that?”
“She likes the way I work,” Francis said.
“He’s lying,” Sarah said.
“How do you know?” Kathryn asked. “Did you see her do this?”
“Yes, and so did Peter.”
“I don’t know what I saw,” Peter said.
“Don’t lie,” Sarah said.
“Everybody’s a liar but Sarah,” Peter said.
“What were you doing watching over there?” Kathryn asked Sarah.