Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,8

middle-aged man and woman, no doubt with friends and jobs and club memberships, they could’ve been anyone you passed on the sidewalk. But the things they did to her—you can’t imagine human beings capable of such depravity. Horrible things, things you don’t even want to think about. God help that poor girl.

Okay. Now you see why I get so worried. Pardon the interruption. I’ve set my mind to tell you this story, so I’ll get back to it now.

“Oxymoron.”

Do you know what that means? Sister Mary Margaret taught it to us. It’s when you put two contradictory words or ideas together for literary effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “sweet pain.” One phrase that I always considered to be an especially good example of an oxymoron, and one that was popular back in 1970, is “free love.”

Could there be two more contradictory words? When has love ever been free? When did it ever come without a cost?

When my parents drove me down to Baton Rouge for the interview at Sacred Heart Academy, I was sick at heart with hurt and loss. I’d spent most of the weekend crying in bed, not eating meals and refusing to speak to my parents. My mother wept outside my door and wondered where they had gone wrong. My father slammed around the house cursing the blacks and perverts and hippie Jews who had destroyed the morals and decency in the country. If the integration of Zachary public schools had first made them think of sending me away to a private boarding school, then catching me on the floor of the living room with Tim Prejean convinced them that this was the only smart thing to do. They only wanted what was best for me, after all. Locked in my bedroom, hearing them talk this through, I became halfway convinced myself that what they said was true, and that what Tim and I had done was indeed sinful, and that the best recourse for everyone was separation.

I sat in the back of the car, looking out the side window at the bare trees and winter fields blurring past. My parents sat up front, exchanging barely a dozen words between them during the one-hour drive to Baton Rouge. The air from the heater was warm and stale, heavy with our compounded shame, anger, and guilt.

In the principal’s office at Sacred Heart we all sat in a semicircle in front of Sister Evelyn’s desk. You can imagine the scene: a cross on the wall, a framed portrait of the pope, a painting of Jesus pointing at his glowing heart. My father leaned forward with his hands on the knees of his trousers, trying to appear gentlemanly and sincere. My mother sat upright with her ankles crossed primly below her chair, wearing old-fashioned black shoes and an ugly furry gray wool dress with oversized buttons, an outfit that she somehow thought looked Catholic.

You remember how much your grandfather distrusted the Catholics. To him, Catholics were almost as bad as Jews. But in the interview with Sister Evelyn, I saw my father’s eyes take on that same crafty, guilty look he got whenever he was bargaining with the manager of the feed store or wrangling for handouts from the Farm Bureau. He spoke about how they had always wanted to provide me, their only daughter, with a good moral education, and what an excellent reputation Sacred Heart Academy had, not only in the field of morality but also in the field of academics, and how although we were not ourselves of the Catholic persuasion, we nevertheless had always held a great respect for priests and nuns and people like that, and anyway we were all Christians under the skin, weren’t we? My mother nodded and agreed with whatever he said, adding, outlandishly, that she always wished that she could have gone to a Catholic school herself. Lies, of course, all of them. But my parents couldn’t very well come out and say the truth, which was, “We’re here because we hate the coloreds and we caught our daughter having sex on the living room floor with a trailer boy.”

After they had finished speaking, Sister Evelyn turned to me. “And why do you want to come to Sacred Heart, Laura?”

I hadn’t expected the question. It wasn’t something my parents had expected, either. They watched me anxiously from their chairs, my father’s jawbone flexing beneath the skin of his rough cheeks, my mother’s face fixed into a crooked, tense smile. Sister