The day arrived: May 18th, the day of our First Confession, a day not of light but of darkness, the day of reckoning, one of the Dies Irae, where we must acknowledge our sinfulness, where the red blotches that had marred the souls left perfected at Baptism, would be removed.

What were they thinking of? We were six, seven years old? How could we have sinned?

I was accused of a special sin, but by one accuser only: my mother (from my father, in all our time together, there was not one word of accusation, only the balm of absolute approbation, absolute love). My sin was touching the part of my body that was forbidden, and worse, the inability not to touch it when I had been told that touching it was vile, so vile that it must be kept secret from all the world.

And my mother told me, explicitly, that this was my special sin and that before communion it must be confessed.

I knew that no other child in the church that day had a vileness anywhere approaching mine. This weighed me down — but was I conscious of a kind of Counter-Reformation glamour: the sinner/penitent, penitence possible only because of sin, the old journey to the depths, finished now because I had climbed out of the pit and seen the crucifix: a point on which I could fix my eyes to give me courage to struggle out of the mire of loathsomeness to which my touching had consigned me? But no, that is a wishful looking back. I did not feel glamorous; I felt bad. But I was not a bad child.
I was a very good child. All of us were. We were six years old.

How can we forgive them, why should we forgive them, for teaching us to say, when we had barely learned our ABCs, “Bless me Father for I have sinned...”?

*

The fifty of us were broken up into four lines, one for each confessional. Each confessional had two doors, or velvet curtains, through which the penitent walked, kneeling then in darkness on a hard wooden kneeler, apprehending, but not seeing the screen behind which was a sliding wooden door, behind which Father sat. On the other side of Father would be someone else, some other penitent, somebody one would pretend not to know, pretend not to be trying to hear: in any case, irrelevant. In the sacrament only the essential was allowed: priest, penitent, and of course, hovering above us in a greater darkness: God.

I was lucky that I was put in the line for the young Irish priest who was in our parish only for a year. He had dark curly black hair, a face that was always flushed, a heavy beard that never seemed well-shaved: full, girlish lips, also red, and dark green, sorrowful eyes. He was beautiful, and we all knew it, but it was not something we would have said about a priest.

I opened the wooden door to my side of the confessional and knelt on the hard wooden kneeler. I could smell my own sweat, and residually, the priest’s sweat, different from mine, adult, male. My heart pounded with dread. He slid the screen open. “Bless me father for I have sinned, I committed a sin of impurity with myself.” The words were out in the world: cobalt-colored rings that spun in the air above my head and clanked together as they joined and then transpierced the plastic screen. And then, after that, there was only silence, a silence I found so dreadful I could only imagine the terrible words from the priest that would, any moment fill it up.

Now I can feel only compassion for him. What could he have felt it was right for him to say to a six year old girl who confessed “impurity?” His mortification must have been immense. But was it equal to mine? If I was waiting for some words of enlightenment, none came. Only my penance: three hail Marys. And the injunction to go in peace.

And I did, and I was radiant, walking with my perfectly folded hands to the altar to say my penance. It was as if I had been dipped into a sea of sheerest silver, and walked out into the sunlight, my body brilliant as the sun. Or as if my veins had been shot through with silver light, so that there was nothing in my body that partook of darkness, not the smallest cell. The question must be asked: would that radiance have been possible without the prior sense of defilement? And was it worth it? This source of the ideal of the fire of making that burns off all dross, cuts out all irrelevance, all excess, all that is not crystalline, each tone not exactly true, each carelessness or slippage or smut or smudge, each encroachment on the shining surface of even a speck of matter that has not been shot through.

A dance teacher, trying to show me the proper position for a plie, explained its importance by saying, “you must go down to come up.” We believe that about so much in life, but what would it be like to have grown up with no sense of the necessity for self-abasement? Is contrition possible without self abasement? And is forgiveness possible without contrition? And without the experience of having been forgiven, how would one learn to forgive? And would the world be better without the possibility of radiant purity? Endless forgiveness? Does this require lines of shivering six year olds, believing that they are bad? Then transformed into radiant creatures, ready to take in God? Radiant and ready for what they have been told will be the greatest day of their lives.

*

The night before the great day, my mother and I lay everything out for the morning. My grandmother had made my dress. It was a source of perverse pride, a pride all the more honorable for its pinch of disappointment. I wished I had had a dress whose skirt was magicked with under crinolines, whose amplitude was added to by rows of machine made lace. At the same time, I understood my mother’s contempt for that kind of display: “It’s all right for Italians,” and the superiority of my grandmother’s creation: sprigged organdy with a drop waste: austere, Northern, a hymn to the power, the superiority of restraint.

My mother had written a check, which I brought into school in a crisp white envelope, for my First Communion prayer book, the size of a deck of cards, hard and shiny as if it had been shellacked, the virgin on the cover a vision (also pointing to the superiority of restraint) in silver blue against a dove grey background. On the inside of the cover: a little miracle, cut into the stiff cardboard a recess;
a rectangular grotto for a tiny white plastic cross. The check also paid for my First Communion veil, which was provided, somehow by the nuns, who ordered identical ones for each girl child communicant. Preventing a hideous competitiveness in what should have been an almost sacramental accessory — the veil that mimicked their own, the one that marked them as brides of Christ. A sign of the power of the parish in the larger commercial world: there was a store in our Long Island town that devoted its Maytime display to First Communion pocketbooks and gloves. We bought a pair of see-through white gloves with sprigging that rhymed nicely with the organdy of my dress. And a pocketbook, white patent leather, with handles neither too short nor too long for my hands and wrists, and a satisfying gold clasp that shut itself with a finality as unquestionable as the Creed.

I remember waking up that morning, and the quality of the light, opalescent, heatless, with the fragility of the incorporeal. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, as if even words were too fleshly for that day, and might, somehow, mar the perfect purity I longed to perfectly achieve. A sip of water, then my mother’s unfamiliar attentions to my dressing: I was the child of a working mother and had long ago learned to dress myself. I was afraid to walk up the driveway, afraid to absorb the slightest blemish on my white shoes. So my mother pulled the car out of the driveway, and stopped for my father and me. At my insistence, there was silence in the car, and then a silent escort by my parents to our classroom, from which we would process, in a double line, across the street into the church.

Procession. Processing. The verb pronounced with an accent on the second syllable, indicating movement rather than the first, process indicating a patient slow accomplishment. What is the pleasure of walking in a line, to music, behind others dressed identically to oneself, so obviously
of the same cohort or tribe? Do I have to believe it is a species of militarism, the appeal of the proto fascist in us all?

There is a home movie of me processing into the church. My father jumps out of the sea of onlookers when I pass him. Piously, I lower my eyes and shake my finger at him: there will be no vulgar familial communication on this day. In later life, my appetite for obedience will always be mixed by an equally strong impulse to rebel. But on that day, I am completely obedient, and there is nothing I want to do that will mark me as different from my colleagues. Jesus is coming to all of us — there is enough of Him to go around. As we are all perfect, there is no need to excel. It is an economy of plenitude in which no one can be left out, therefore no one need stand out.

*

Did I understand, as I was processing with my classmates, that this was the best part of it all? That the minute I crossed the threshold into the church the experience, having properly said to have begun, could rightly be said to have begun being finished? That the moment that the event went from being exterior (outdoors, brilliant), to being interior (inside the church, dim lit, enclosed) it was already over? And what is the connection between that reality and the fact that, indoors, we were less a spectacle? For I know perfectly well that I was aware at all times that we were being carefully watched; both in my imagination of the event, and in my experience of its actuality, I was watching myself being watched: I had a triple identity, I was the child, walking, kneeling, opening her mouth, I was myself watching that child among other identical children, and I was a member of the observing crowd, moved nearly to tears by the unique, the incomparable sight.

But when the church doors closed and the spring sunshine was occluded, and we were in the light reflected off the grey green walls and the barn like beams of the Gothically vaulted ceiling, another kind of door was shut. I had to fix my entire attention on God: the God in the Host on the altar, the God whom I would take into my body, purified by hunger, by contrition, by the sacramental touch. “O Lord I am not worthy,” that prayer, said just before we would receive, Domine non sum dignus in the Latin of the day, drew me like a magnet; my unworthiness, the incomparable unearned riches of the love of God.

There was still the possibility of failure. I was away from food; but I could faint. There were stories of children, always girls, who did, and had to be carried out and missed receiving. I both envied them the glamour of their ride in some man’s arms, and was terrified that another kind of physical weakness — not from my stomach, but from my blood or brain or whatever controlled uprightness, consciousness — would disallow me from the great moment, the moment for which I had prepared for so long. Or I could trip on the way up to the altar, mortifying myself and my parents. Or I could choke on the host, or my teeth could touch it — this, I knew was considered a sacrilege and in the very process of sanctification I could be involved in sin.

But then the moment came. I did not trip or choke; my hands were folded perfectly and the host slipped, like a silver fish into dark water, onto my tongue and down my throat.

After that, the world was banished from my sight, my mind. I lowered my eyes, concentrating them on the floor or the tips of my pointed, folded fingers. It was an agony to keep my eyes open while I was finding my place in the long pew. I longed only for darkness. For the moment I rehearsed: the screen I made of my two hands, the deeper darkness when I shut the blind of my two eyelids. I was alone with God. I said the prayer that I had memorized. I felt the love, the pity, the piercing, the numbering. I thanked God for coming into my soul, and I thanked God for my parents for making me a Catholic — and then I couldn’t think of very much else. I might have thanked God for being an American or for my school and my extended family, but God knew and I knew that it was pro forma. The important things were that I had made my first communion and that I was my parents’ child — God and I knew my gratitude for those was real.

I had taken God in. My task was to experience the experience of having God within me. But trying to fix my mind on God, who was outside, beyond time, did not help my sick dread, the consciousness that it was being used up, this precious substance I had invested in for so long. Every moment was turning each succeeding moment into the Last of My First Communion.