Terrible Virtue Read Free

loved and themselves young. Here was a real miracle, better than anything the church had dreamed up.
    â€œYou know, Peg,” he said a few nights later as we were putting on our clothes, “this doesn’t make any difference.”
    â€œThis?”
    â€œWhat we do here.”
    I didn’t understand. As far as I was concerned, what we did in that shed made all the difference in the world. Those off-limits nights had turned the body I had barely known into an instrument of awe. The sheer physicality of myself stunned me. How could he think it changed nothing?
    â€œI still want to marry you,” he went on.
    I had to laugh. If I were going to marry, I could imagine marrying for this, but only a fool would not marry because of it.
    OUTSIDE THE DORMITORY, the January darkness had already fallen, but inside lights were bright and radiators hissed and clanked. Unlike the house at the bottom of the hill, Claverack had electricity, central heating, and indoor plumbing. The room simmered with warmth and the aromas of hair pomade, dusting powder, and the candied breath of a dozen chattering girls. It was a Thursday night. Many of us were packing to go home for the weekend. I wasn’t going home. I seldom did. I was going to spend the weekend at my best friend Amelia Stuart’s.
    Miss Fletcher appeared in the doorway. The room went as silent as the night pressing against the windows. Miss Fletcher was the Reverend Dr. Flack’s assistant in charge of female students, the dark angel who summoned girls to the headmaster’s office for the delivery of moral lectures, the meting out of punishments, and, once since I’d been there, the announcement of a dismissal. But I wasn’t worried. Miss Fletcher never came for me. I was too clever for her.
    She stepped into the room and started down the aisle between the rows of beds, past Amelia, past Frannie Sawyer, past Charity Gaines, who did a fake swoon of relief behind Miss Fletcher’s back. She stopped in front of me. I was sure she had made a mistake. Or perhaps she was going to ask me about one of the other girls. I wouldn’t tell her anything. Loyalty is one of my strong suits.
    â€œYou’re wanted in the Reverend Dr. Flack’s office, Miss Higgins.”
    I still wasn’t worried. The worst reprimand Dr. Flack hadever given me was after a bunch of us had sneaked out to a dance. He’d said that I was a born leader and had to be careful where I led.
    I took my coat and followed Miss Fletcher out into the frigid night, across the snowy campus, into the administration building, and down the hall to Dr. Flack’s office.
    Five words were all it took. He spoke them with appropriate solemnity.
    â€œYou are needed at home.”
    NOTHING HAD CHANGED, not the paint flaking off the front of the house, or the reek of yesterday’s boiled cabbage, or the rancid smell of big ideas gone sour. Not the lean man with the shock of wavy red hair, the blue eyes that refused to see the world as it was, and the chiseled nose he might have sculpted for his own tombstone, though he was not the one who was dying. Not the emaciated woman, who looked twice his age, though she was two years younger, and had to stiffen her arm against the wall to keep from collapsing when she coughed.
    â€œI’m sorry.” The sentence came from my mother’s mouth as abjectly as the blood she coughed up.
    I started to say it didn’t matter, but the words stuck in my throat.
    My father put his arm around my mother’s shoulders and looked at her with eyes bleached as pale as his old work shirt. I wanted to gouge them. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”
    Her old self, I wanted to scream. What is that? A woman who doesn’t have to prop herself against the wall when she coughs, but can bring up the blood she spits into her crimson-stained handkerchief without support? A wife who never had a chanceto recover from the last