The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

foreskin fashioned into her wedding ring. Jane clapped a hand over her mouthwhen she first read this, looked around to see if anyone was watching, shut the book, reshelved it, tried to forget it. Accordingto legend—Stories of the Saints itself seemed half-convinced—Catherine also once sucked pus from a leper’s sores.

There was a word in Stories of the Saints that was new to Jane: kenosis, or emptying out. To become a vessel for God’s will, blank and scrubbed, no sustenance, no desire. The saints were saints because they had the gift of imagining themselves onto the cross, into the suffering that was also salvation. The saints were good at this because the saints were insane. This was a blasphemous thought, but it was also true. Frances of Rome burned her genitals with pork grease before sharing a bed with her husband. Teresa of Avila renounced all her companions, choosing exclusive fellowship with her ecstatic visions. When she prayed, she asked other nuns at the convent to hold her down, to keep her from levitating. And all Jane had managed was to get the shakes on her ten-speed.

“Jane?” Mrs. Bellamy, the head librarian, was standing over her. “We need you up front, checking people out.”

Mrs. Bellamy’s tone was soft, amused. But Jane still felt herself to be in trouble, and worse, in a stupid, trivial trouble,not the important trouble you could get into if you stuck an onion ring from Anderson’s Frozen Custard on your finger andproclaimed it the foreskin of God.

“Sorry,” Jane mumbled, getting to her feet.

Once, Teresa’s prayers summoned an angel, a winsome curly-headed boy. He wielded a golden spear tipped with fire, and he stabbedTeresa again and again with it. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, or the splotchy black-and-white photograph of it reproduced in Stories of the Saints, depicted the scene. The fabric of Teresa’s dress fluttered like a funnel cloud above a mounted cross. A plume of smoke signaledthat Teresa and the angel penetrating her were on the verge of disappearing before Jane’s eyes. Jane imagined the boy angelsquealing with glee each time his blade plunged into Teresa’s flesh, in a rhythm.

 

Jane wanted to see the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in person. Her church was a doll’s house, but Rome was God’s home, where Elizabeth Seton had just been canonized as the first American saint, though Jane’s mother wasn’t impressed. She was “really just a snooty Anglican, stooping to our level,” she said. “Not a real Catholic.” She didn’t believe a word of those stories about Mother Seton curing a girl’s leukemia.

That was the autumn that the red-haired little Manson girl tried to kill the president and the sun was always low in the sky.Jane’s mother warned them about glare—when Jane’s father took the car out in the morning, when Jane biked to the Vines’ house in the late afternoon. Saint Benedict’ssubsidized an annual fall trip to Rome for high school seniors, and to pay her way, Jane had earned more than enough frombabysitting, the cash stored in empty tins from Parkside Candy. Every birthday and Christmas, Jane’s mother gave out thesetins, filled with fancy sweets. They made a satisfying small bwip sound when you squeezed and slid them open. Jane would hand over her sponge candy and saltwater taffy to Brian or Mike orJoe and keep the tins, which had old-fashioned pastel illustrations winding around them: a turn-of-the-century carousel, ladiesin petticoats and big wavy hats dancing the maypole. The tins lived in a couple of hatboxes at the back of her closet thatalso held old birthday cards, her first pair of shoes, her christening dress, the thin garland of honeysuckle and baby’s breathshe wore at her first communion. The objects inside the box, the box itself, were a chronology of her life that she couldhold in her hands, and the antique veneer of the tins enhanced this sense of permanence, like they were heirlooms Jane washanding down to herself, the money inside them the stuff of her future. She felt the most tenderness for her mother when shesat cross-legged in front of this box to count her bills, only to find herself rereading each of the cards, studying the tinyhammocks of her mother’s cursive rs, the special swoop of the J in her Jane, pressing a finger to the dried garland. However careless or cruel her mother could be, this was her own squarish cursive,this was the garland she braided herself, and it was only for Jane, youngest of four, the girl she had waited for. Her motherdrove to Parkside Candy and picked out the tins. Like Jane did, she put in the work.

But when Jane brought her mother the stack of candy tins piled to their hinges with the ones and fives and occasional tens and a single, spectacular twenty, the money collected from the Vines and the Goslanders and the Felmans and all the other neighborhood families whose children Jane had diapered and spoon-fed and bathed and sang to over years, Jane’s mother spent an afternoon in a pique of insult. She took no pride in her daughter’s thrift and work ethic; instead she was affronted by Jane’s secrecy and her presumption of something earned. Her mother litigated the case with Jane’s father.

“Why do you think that money is yours?” her father, once fully briefed, asked Jane. He was wearing his glasses and sittingin his lounger behind a newspaper, like all the cartoon dads in the picture books Jane read to the kids she babysat. “Youtake my money for the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the bed you sleep in. When you have enough money to pay me backfor seventeen years under my roof, whatever is left over, you can have it for your travels.”

“Might be enough for a bus to Rochester,” Jane’s mother said.

“I’ve worked hard for this,” Jane said. “I’ve been saving for a long time.”

“No, but that’s the thing, Jane—the idea that you could save money is absurd.” He turned to the sports section. Jane could see the top of