WHY THIS INTEREST IN ME? by Daniel Marshall

I dreamed how pleasant it would be to hold and kiss Carol del Casino. I wanted her -- to be close to her wonderful soft curves and mysterious, sultry quiet, to have her love.

“You girls look at the boys with cow eyes!” Sister Austina’s voice, dripping with sarcasm, excoriated the girls right in our presence. Pin-drop silent, listening, absorbing each word, we waited for what would come next. Austina was not given to bizarre outbreaks or extraordinary punishments, like some sisters; people said that she favored boys.

Joyce Accurso, Ginny Holst, and Carol got highest marks for the girls. Joanne Lanzarone was almost as smart and also pretty; I didn’t know that she cared for younger brothers while her mother worked. Sometimes she teased and laughed. Ginny Holst encouraged me in a quiet, modest way. I thought that they liked me, but longed for Carol. Carol had dimly-lit dance parties at her house. When it became clear that she favored Dennis Card, I was disappointed. Dennis was second in marks but had summers in Port Jefferson—I only got as far as imagining Port Jefferson’s dark and shady woods from pictures that he brought home; I couldn’t imagine the port. Dennis’s mother was Irish and welcoming to his friends; his father, Joe, hard-working and friendly, owned a tiny gas station where my father stopped for gas.

As I grew shyer, more depressed in high school, far each day from familiar persons, values, and things, far from summer vacations, I saw little of Carol. When I saw her occasionally at late Sunday mass, she wore wide-brimmed hats and pastel floral prints that were out of the ordinary in our parish. She was heartbreakingly attractive, if ambitious; I missed Carol that I knew. I don’t know why it was beyond me to call or ring her doorbell; maybe because I assumed that she dated older men on Saturday nights. I heard that after high school she went to nursing school. None of the bright Italian women whom I knew went to college. Eventually Carol married and was divorced. She raised two sons alone.

‘Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her // ‘neath the shade of an old walnut tree // with the flowers in her hair blooming round her. // It was there on the isle of Capri. Carol. On the isle of Capri. The song said what I felt about her. My Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. When the moon hits your eye // like a big-a pizza pie, // that’s amore! When the stars make you drool // just-a like-a pastavazul, that’s amore! The songs of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennet were about Carol for me. Everything about songs, flowers, and romance was Carol.

“I don’t know why you were never interested in Walda Salomon,” my mother said. “I talked with her mother the other day.” I didn’t know why either. I thought that Walda was smart, cute, and attractive. But she was not Carol. My mother didn’t see or talk with Carol’s mother, who lived near our old neighborhood on the other side of the parish. She encouraged me, instead, to date Kathy Dillon, the daughter of a Brooklyn College teacher whom she knew.


* * * * *


Pauline walked to the edge deliberately and looked down. The canyon was wide and deep. Trees in the bottom, scattered up the sides, seemed small. If she were to lose her balance, slip, or misstep, I could not reach her. I felt myself diving, grasping for part of her, my momentum and her weight pulling us toward and over the brink, my fingers hooking the edge, slipping slowly over gravel and sand, steadily, relentlessly, stones cascading over us, my eyes seeking below anything to grab hurtling past or upon which to break our fall. I thought of walking to the edge, bending over it, looking far down through clear morning air to the valley floor and, from sudden reflex, vertigo, distraction, or mischief, stepping or slipping into the air, tottering, hovering, plunging. Recollecting myself, releasing such thoughts, I became mindful that I was two or three leaps from the brink.

I hardly dared speak, fearing that I would startle or distract her. The woods around were quiet. She turned toward me in her brown corduroys, her back to the precipice. I spoke gently, my body alert, almost shivering, restrained, poised to do I knew not what nor how. Pauline seemed another kind of being, rash and unafraid. I wondered whether she courted risk habitually and whether she wanted to die.

The day was beautiful. She spoke cheerfully and succinctly. Birds chirped, and an occasional hawk soared. Earth suffused damp; air felt fresh and clean. Shadows in the valley shrank as the sun climbed. I ached, not moving. Speaking gently, I noticed that I felt terrified not even so much of losing her as of feeling helpless seeing her fall, climbing down to where she lay, broken on rocks below or dying in pain.

In those days, Pauline began to talk of the preferential option for the poor and of going to Nicaragua. She had all the recordings of the Weston Priory monks and introduced me to them.


* * * * *

At the reception, lights were subdued and shaded. A few people hovered by a table of conventional refreshments. There was a sense of impromptu. I knew few in scattered groups that extended into adjacent rooms, creating a hubbub of chatter and movement. Few if any introduced themselves to me; I thought that they must have connections among themselves that took priority. Anticipation was collective. A darkened energy, too. It arose and ended elsewhere. I did not usually circulate among militantly conservative Catholics; these were outspokenly so, but that was not the focus.

When Joan came, she urged me to dance and held me modestly, almost awkwardly, against her slender, angular form. She wore a satiny dress; it did not seem hers. I tried to discern and catch her eye, to look into it; she put her head on my shoulder. Quick, inquisitive, she bore no obvious signs of sexual humiliation or solitary confinement. I strained to think of something to say more than small talk. It was my first time seeing her since the meeting at our House on abortion. She was quiet. I assumed that others might be on her mind and heart. Others who might have visited and written to her at Broward. I’d missed that getting to know her while confined non-cooperating, identifying with and praying for babies threatened with abortion and doing penance for their mothers and doctors. She might be at Broward still, in solitary three more years, had it not been for Jerry Falwell’s Christian radio and television network pressuring the Florida governor to commute her sentence.

Joan was the heroine of this group, linked to them by pro-life newsletters and support lists. It was clear that they were inspired by her, ready for her to return to the peripatetic activism that she’d been waging when sentenced two years before. Their energy was a spring coiled; it was a strangely agitated environment. This was the first open gathering in the New York area that she’d attended since her release. After a while, she drifted from me, talking with others. It was enough, and not enough. I’d felt a connection, but already she was being pulled into a movement—far from God’s women and men and cats and cockroaches at Arthur Sheehan House.