That hardly sounded pleasurable.
“It isn’t for nothing that some doctors refer to the sexual climax as a ‘paroxysm,’ or that the French call it ‘the little death.’ In the throes of passion, women—and men—make all sorts of strange faces and noises.”
“Mama wasweeping!”
“Apparently that isn’t uncommon.” His father shrugged. “It’s another kind of release, I think. Your mother wept just yesterday when she learned Hélène’s tumors were benign—tears not of pain or grief but relief andjoy.”
Joseph turned away from him, back toward theNoli Me Tangere. He didn’t believe anything his father said. The man had always been a liar.
“I love your mother, Joseph. I would sooner die than hurt her.”
He glared at his father again. “Yet you defy her wishes.”
“HerChurch’swishes that she experience no pleasure whatsoever? Absolutely.”
“You cannot know it is pleasure and not pain she feels when?—”
“A man knows when a woman is responding to him, Joseph. Certainly a doctor does. When she is aroused, a woman’s bodychangesas profoundly as a man’s. There are physical signs. One of them is aptly described by another euphemism for the female climax: ‘to melt.’”
Joseph didn’t have to listen to this obscenity. Yet he feared that if he attempted to move, he might shatter. It wasn’t possible, that something he’dknownfor eighteen long years could be?—
“When I untie the stockings from her wrists, your mother turnstowardme, not away.” His father sat back in his chair and smiled. “You are welcome to confirm all this with her. Although I wouldrecommend bringing smelling-salts. One of you is likely to faint from embarrassment.”
Joseph managed to leave his father’s office without shattering or fainting; but when he reached the empty hall, he stood with his arm braced against the staircase banister for a very long time. His heart was racing and his breaths were labored, as though he’d just escaped a burning building. If this was true—if his father had done such a thing to his mother not because he was a monster who couldn’t control himself but because…
Joseph’s understanding of his father was so deeply rooted in that moment, in what he thought he’d seen. If he’d been wrong about that… Might not Joseph’s own capacity for restraint, for tenderness, be sufficient?—
He was still a Priest, Joseph reminded himself. He still had a dozen sick calls to make. He must conclude this one.
Joseph didn’t have to ask anyone if Hélène was awake now; her excited voice drifted down the stairs. In the upper hall, her words became clear. She was planning her future with her husband. “I think my body was too distracted before. I’m certain I’ll be able to conceive now. It simply wasn’t the right time yet.”
“You just get well first,” Liam told her. “We have all the time in the world.”
CHAPTER 48
So far well; but four days after the operation…a blush of red told the secret…
— Dr. John Brown, “Rab and His Friends” (1859)
Joseph visited his sister again the next day. Hélène was strangely sedate—her wound ached—but she remained cheerful. On his way down the stairs, Joseph caught Tessa on the first landing. He peered toward the entry hall. “Is anyone behind you?”
“No…”
He grasped Tessa’s left hand, the one that did not hold her slumbering daughter. He pulled them up the half-flight of stairs into the empty bedchamber. The curtains were drawn, so only the palest light sifted into the room. Joseph closed the door. Most recently, this had been his grandmother’s bedchamber; but until he left for seminary, and for a week after he returned, it had been his.
“Joseph?” Tessa inquired from the darkness, a lilt of amusement in her voice.
He pulled open the curtains that faced the piazza.
Behind him, still holding her daughter in the crook of her arm, Tessa caressed one of the pillows. “I slept in your bed, my firstChristmas in Charleston.” Her voice was nearly a whisper. “I was certain I could still feel you here—smellyou here. It was agony and ecstasy at once.”
She was making him forget his purpose. In his thoughts, Joseph travelled farther into the past, toward another bed. He’d crawled through this very window, the night he’d seen his mother bound to her bedposts. “Tessa, if I ask you a question, will you promise to tell me the truth?”
“Of course.”
Joseph remained at the window, bracing a hand against the frame. “Even if you think it might offend me?”
“Even then.”
