Purgatory

A Short Story written by Danny Fitzpatrick

Between the ages of four and six Dorinda Lalley subsisted primarily on frozen chicken patties, microwaved, set in the freezer to cool, and served, noon and night, on the same nine inch purple plastic plate. Dorinda was in matters non-dietary a precocious child and had in the third month of this regimen done her parents the courtesy of growing expert enough in the use of knife and fork to slice the fowl herself. There was ketchup, when she wanted it, in the refrigerator door, and a half-gallon of milk which with much care she could uncap and tip into her cup. Dorinda was very happy, and her parents, reassured about the difficulties of raising children, had hurried to have Penelope and Augustus, who had proven far less pliable than their sister. Many evenings saw Dorinda sitting at her place at the midpoint of the kitchen table, eating calmly, smiling, while her mother and father rushed from the stove and the fridge to the younger siblings’ places and back, snatching spoonfuls of dinner in passing.

Two incidents which beset Mrs. Lalley in late September of Dorinda’s seventh year precipitated an abrupt change in her comfortable state of affairs. The first was that one day, having taken the children to the Albright-Knox Gallery, where Dorinda had quietly attempted to sketch the lineaments of a Turner in a small blue notebook and the toddlers had attempted to make off with a petit bronze Degas on an imprudently low pedestal, Mrs. Lalley was afflicted with a sudden spell of dizziness. Though she had seated herself on the nearest available padded bench before a massive Dore, the fit had not subsided, and the children, inspecting the canvas at too close quarters, had elicited complaints, which brought security guards, who insisted ultimately that Mrs. Lalley seek medical attention. She was diagnosed with hypertension, subtext of her mother’s ailing decades, and lay in bed for the better part of the two remaining days of Mr. Lalley’s trip to San Francisco while the children were left under the desultory eye of Ms. Eugenia Paprocki, who spent those golden hours smoking cigarettes on the porch and swept in, wreathed in ash, to restore her heavy order when the rumpus grew too loud.

The second was that during these two days of repose Mrs. Lalley received a visit from Mrs. Paula Mirandola. The two women had met three weeks prior on the floor of the children’s department of the Lewiston Public Library. Mrs. Lalley, at least, had been on the floor, trying to thwart Pen and Gus’s attempts at paving it in board books, when just beyond a copy of The Busy Little Squirrel there appeared a pair of ultramarine kitten heels beneath the fluttering hem of an ankle-length skirt. A hand, creamy and clear-skinned, had appeared—like a Botticelli, Mrs. Lalley thought, just like a Botticelli—and a voice had followed:

“This wouldn’t be one of yours, dear?”

Mrs. Lalley had looked up into Dorinda’s slack, serene gaze and up further into a pair of almond-colored eyes framed in a gauze of golden hair, the whole face on its lovely, curved neck framed by two fluorescent light panels above.

“Oh, yes, yes, thank you,” Mrs. Lalley said, snatching a glue stick from Gus’s hand just before he set it to the back of The Foot Book.

“Think nothing of it, dear. They’re just so very much, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Lalley said, glancing at the neat, smiling brood behind the flowing skirt as she rose and brushed the dust from her knees. “Yes, they certainly are.”

“This one and my Annabel have really taken a shine to each other, and I would so love to get them together again. Let me get your number if you don’t mind.”

The two had subsequently spoken a few times, and once the Mirandolas had taken Dorinda out for a few hours and returned her with a dozen tulips for Mrs. Lalley. When, after her spell at the art museum, Mrs. Lalley had left Mrs. Mirandola’s several calls unanswered, Paula had come knocking, brood in tow. Dorinda had answered the door, and when her mother emerged from her bedroom on the morning of the third day she found her house immaculate according even to her own stringent standards. The children were dressed and in good spirits. The toddlers presented a card of construction paper figured in crayon hearts. Dorinda was eating a chicken patty, neatly piercing each triangular hunk with the fork in her left hand while fingering the beads of a rosary with her right.

And so Mrs. Lalley had returned to the Church of Rome, hers by upbringing and baptism, neglected many years yet found beneath the cobwebs of disuse to have taken on a luster and elegance which she could not recall from the nights of flickering prayer in the nursery and the white ceremony of her first Communion. For that, the Church, was Mrs. Mirandola’s secret, a secret she freely shared at the first request.

Mr. Lalley had from first youth repudiated all religion. Arriving home, however, to find his wife and three children praying a quiet rosary around a candle and a white statue of the Virgin, he had been unable to deny the calm which had apparently come to reign in his absence. By mid-October he was accompanying his family to St. Julian’s, a diminutive, barn-like structure in a field outside Lewiston where the Latin Mass was celebrated and the Mirandolas took up the whole pew across the aisle from the Lalleys, Mr. Mirandola in a dark suit of modish cut  and his wife beneath her mantilla. The community were as hospitable and downright helpful in general as Mrs. Mirandola was, and after a few short weeks of standing and kneeling and sitting in silence as the rest of the parish made their solemn Roman responses, the Lalleys had come so far as to be invited to the St. Julian’s All Saints pageant.

There remained, nonetheless, the matter of Halloween, a festival of grave and ancient importance to Theodora Lalley. She broached the subject with Mrs. Mirandola one Sunday as they both walked, still veiled, around the left side of the church on the edge of a shaggy pasture, occasionally golden at that season but grey beneath an overcast that threatened the first real incident of winter.

“Is it, well, is it ok to, to take the kids out trick or treating?”

“Well, dear, I think in the first place it’s best always to ask not whether this or that’s ok but whether it’s really good, but I do think as long as you’re in a good family friendly neighborhood it does the children a service to let them get out in the community. Builds confidence knocking on the door like that. As long as everyone’s costume is appropriate.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

“Why don’t you take them to our neighborhood? You can park at our house and we can all go together.”

“As long as that’s ok with you.”

“Well, certainly.”

All was settled, then, except for costumes. Monsters were anathema—not that Dorinda was much interested in ghosts, vampires, or spooks generally, but Augustus had come to love the shaggy horror of werewolves. In tearful rage he had abandoned his lunatic dreams in favor of the hook and peg and beard of the pirate, only to relapse into despair on finding this, too, was beyond the pale. At length he consented to don an alligator’s scales. Pen would go as a sheep. And Dorinda, out of the depth of her customary silence, at last expressed a desire to play a clown, which seemed unobjectionable.

Taken together, nothing related up to this point would have caused Dorinda any distress. Yet the coincidence of Mrs. Lalley’s intemperate blood pressure and her reversion in faith had also the consequence of altering the Lalley family accords as to nutrition. There had been small changes at first. Chips had been replaced with grapes, crackers with apples, white with wheat. Yet the chicken patty had remained inviolate. That is, until Halloween, when the family menu underwent its final and most drastic alteration.

“They’ll be eating candy anyway, and that’s bad enough, Mrs. Lalley said. Got to balance it out for tonight, and tomorrow on All Saints we’re going healthy all the way. No more balance.”

The day’s compromises were not simply dietary. Having found that all the clown costumes at the local Halloween shop were of the murderous variety, with blood-benighted harlequin garb and plastic knives and white-faced, bulb-nosed, rotten-toothed masks, Mrs. Lalley had at length inquired with a semi-retired opera costumier, who had among the rest of the wreckage of his life’s work a suit crafted for an all-female production of Pagliacci. A deal was struck, and Dorinda found herself wallowing in folds of black and white satin as her mother applied paint to her face.

“Why is it so big, Momma?”

“Oh, don’t worry, you’ll grow into it.”

“But why is it so big?”

“It belonged to a very important lady.”

Ms. Edwina Morreale was by no means an important lady, save in the quantity of satin required to clothe her and the bullhorn power of her voice, which according to Buffalonian legend had once cracked the ice on the Niagara River and launched a premature spring. Wherever Dorinda tried to bunch, gather, and secure fabric it ran like mercury around her shoulders, hips, and ankles. And it smelled of lavender and sweat. And it scratched.

“There, now,” said Mrs. Lalley, stepping out from between her daughter and the mirror. Dorinda stepped back from the white face wondering back at her, then drew nearer, running her index finger along a strand of chestnut hair which had fallen across her cheek and now came away with the paint’s dull luster. She smoothed it up beneath the edge of her Pierrot cap and turned around.

“Come and get something to eat now,” said her mother.

Dorinda followed, with the suit falling in heavy bunches over her wrists and around her ankles and swinging thick and pied at her waist. She climbed with greater than usual difficulty into her chair, a tall, spindle-backed, sturdy affair her grandfather and father had sat in as children, and raising her bottom several times, jerked the silk out from under herself and settled in.

Her mother bore the purple plate to the table. Dorinda’s fork and knife came within an inch of her dinner before she realized it was no chicken patty but a foreign assemblage of green and white and reddish vegetables slick with a sickly yellow dressing.

With slow even breaths she set her knife and fork back down and looked up. Her mother was smiling from across the table, and her hands were gripping the back of the opposite chair so that her knuckles rose up white beneath her skin and subsided into the pink flesh.

“It’s a kale salad,” she said.

Dorinda looked down once more. Whatever it was, it seemed to her faintly alive, with the dressing slipping tenderly along the edges of the leaves which flexed slightly in the glow of the dining room chandelier.

“See, that’s kale, and there’s some red cabbage, and oh, you know, look, there’s even a little carrot in there. You like carrots.”

But Dorinda was shaking her head, slowly at first and then more quickly as the tears began and blurred the alien dish.

“Oh, come now, it’s good for you.”

“I want my chicken patty, I want my chicken patty, I want my chicken patty, where’s my chicken—”

“Now baby we have got to take a break from those things, you know it’s not good just eating frozen food every day.”

“I want my chicken patty, I want my chicken patty,” the refrain rose higher and higher as Dorinda’s legs kicked and set the silk flapping like flags in an angry wind.

Mrs. Lalley brought the flat of her palm down on the table.

“That’s enough!”

She was shaking, and the breath came hard and tremulous through her nostrils. Dorinda sat still with her hands upturned in her lap and her head down and the tears rolling over the whiteness of her face.

“You are gonna sit there, and you are gonna eat every bit of food on that plate, or we are not—do you hear me? not—going out trick or treating tonight, do you understand?”

“Oh, Momma—”

“No! We are not doing this! Eat!”

Three times she had brought her palm down again and now she lifted it and let go the chair back with her other hand and turned and burst through the saloon doors into the kitchen. A black snout and a long green jaw appeared around the foyer wall, and Pen and Augustus peered from their pretended faces with toddlers’ perfect poise between the impish and the innocent. Dorinda wept quietly into her voluminous lap, and dishes clattered in the kitchen. Presently Mr. Lalley appeared, shooing the younger children away before sitting on the corner of the chair across from Dorinda, his legs bearing most of his weight still.

“Oh, Dosey, what am I gonna do with you?”

Her shoulders shook, and she did not look up.

“Could you try one bite for me?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not so bad. I bet you’d like it. You remember the salad we had at Nonna’s. This is better than that even.”

Her head hung, not shaking side to side anymore, but nodding very slightly the way a coin that’s been spun on its edge will lift itself several times, slowly, before collapsing on its face.

Mr. Lalley was looking over his shoulder towards the kitchen, where the clangor of his wife’s tidying continued unabated. He stood.

“Alright, baby, I’ll start getting things ready. You just go ahead and finish that up and then we can get going.”

His head was still turned to the kitchen as he edged around the table.

“Yeah, you just go ahead and finish it up, ok?”

Through the gauze of her tears Dorinda watched her father’s hand lift her fork and pierce a wrinkled curl of greenery and bear it heavenward. Her tears came harder, and the fork descended twice more and was lain beside the plate again as Mr. Lalley’s step creaked across the wood floors of the foyer. The kitchen sink was running at capacity.

For ten minutes Dorinda’s sobs shook her, and the white paint ran and fell on the folds of her costume like the first heavy dusted drops of rain that fall on parched earth. The sink ran, and her father’s step neared and receded and the kale and cabbage vanished. When only a sliver of carrot remained, the kitchen went silent, and Dorinda imagined her mother drying her hands, twisting the towel around each finger before working it over her palms and her wrists. The saloon doors swung out, and her father returned, and together husband and wife looked down across the table at the plate.

“Well there, ya see, that wasn’t so bad now, was it,” said Mrs. Lalley. She looked at her husband, who gazed fixedly at their daughter.

“Go ahead and eat that last carrot and then we can get going, ok?”

Dorinda looked up to see her father’s head turning toward her mother and then away as his hand pressed up beneath his chin as if to crack his neck and then back as the hand ran through his hair and massaged his neck.

A hand unlike her own, beyond yards of bunched silk, struggled aloft and lifted the fork, which tried three times to spear the carrot sliver and then tenderly worked its way beneath it like arms working to raise a fallen child. Inexorably the orange shard came on toward her lips. A crash came from the region of the living room, and Pen shrieked, and both parents rushed away.

“What happened? Gus! What did you do? You ok, Pen? Gus! Gus!” flowed the voices as if from very far away into the  dining room, where Dorinda sat with the carrot poised before her face, unable to act, feeling as though a miracle had fallen into her cascading lap. Then her father appeared with Pen crying on his shoulder out of the face of her sheep costume. He bent and bit the carrot from the fork, which Dorinda held up before her face for a few moments more.

Mrs. Lalley walked in holding a momentarily limp Augustus, whose green tail swung gently before her thighs.

She drew a long breath through her nostrils and exhaled through pursed lips.

“Alright,” she said. “We ok? We ready? Oh, Dorinda, do you need me to fix your paint?”

Dorinda shook her head.

“Well, let’s go then.”

In the passenger seat of the car Mrs. Lalley stared into the mirror and applied white paint to her face.

“What are you gonna be, Momma?” said Pen.

“A soul in Purgatory.”

Silence prevailed during the remainder of the drive to Lewiston, where the streets crawled with children and the trees swayed in a blustery wind, wild and directionless, like the currents that break from a jutting waterfall. The Mirandolas’ street was calm, with several large families spaced at distant intervals along the sidewalks as though processing in a solemn liturgy. Mrs. Lalley’s knock went unanswered for many seconds. Then the door swung, hesitantly at first, and Mrs. Mirandola’s face appeared around the edge.

“Oh, Theodora, I am so sorry, I meant to call. Annabel’s not feeling well.”

“Oh, no, poor dear. She alright?” Mrs. Lalley said as the looked down the block after her husband and the two younger children. “Is it still ok if we’re parked here?”

“Of course, of course. I am so sorry.”

“It’s nothing. Tell Annabel we’ll say a prayer for her.”

“Thank you. She’ll be fine.”

Mrs. Mirandola had been gazing down the block after Mr. Lalley and the toddlers. She now looked down for a moment into Dorinda’s face, gleaming ghostly in the distant light of other houses, and then back again at Mrs. Lalley.

“Well, good night.”

“Good night,” said Mrs. Lalley.

“God bless you.”

Mrs. Mirandola watched the mother and daughter make their way back to the sidewalk and turn right, all the weight of the costume pooling at the little girl’s wrists and ankles and thighs. She heard Mrs. Lalley say, “Alright, now between every house we’ll say a Hail Mary. You ready? In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with—”

“Poor thing,” said Mrs. Mirandola as she shut the door.

Danny Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings and editor of Joie de Vivre