"Me too, and not just because of that. I like being around you. I love you.", I told her. I never told Marilyn that enough the first time.
"I love you, too."
"It's just too bad we can't be back at the Hilton for a few hours."
She giggled at that. "I can't believe we did that."
"It'd be even better now, without the, well, you know."
She just rolled her eyes. "Those things are so gross!"
"But necessary."
She nodded, but said, "Yuck!"
"Come to Kegs in a week or two and spend the weekend with me. We'll kick Bradley out and get crazy." I pushed my body against hers. "I really liked sleeping with you, even when we were just sleeping."
"Okay. Maybe every other weekend we can see each other?"
It was my turn to nod in agreement. "You know how we spent our vacation? How would you like to do that over winter break?"
Marilyn eyed me curiously. There was some sound from the other end of the warehouse, so we pulled apart and slipped out a side door, and walked hand in hand slowly around the lot. "What did you have in mind?", she asked.
"Well, I was thinking, I have off most of January. I don't know what your schedule is going to be, but you'll probably have at least a few weeks off. You could come and visit me, and we could go away for a week."
She had an eager look to her face. "Where?"
I shrugged. "Who cares? Anyplace would have to be warmer and sunnier than New York in the winter!"
She gave me a disdainful look. "New York is a great place in the winter!"
"Not if you're wearing a bikini it isn't!" That got a giggle from her. "Do you know how to find a tanning booth or salon?", I asked.
She looked very confused at that. "A tanning salon? Why do I need a tanning salon?"
I wrapped her back in my arms and whispered in her ear, "Because I am going to find you the world's smallest bikini, and you're going to need an all over tan before you can ever wear it."
She blushed fiercely. "Oh my God!"
"It will be so small I will need to shave you, everywhere, before you can wear it!"
"You are evil!" She tugged my hand and we went back to the farmhouse. It was time for lunch.
We goofed off after lunch, and I took a quick nap around two. At three I woke up and Marilyn asked me if I was going to church with her. I shrugged. "Sure, but don't sit next to me. When the lightning comes down through the roof, you don't want to be caught by friendly fire."
"Very funny!"
At three-thirty the entire family showed up. I changed shirts and put on a dress shirt I had brought for the occasion, along with a tie I had tossed into my bag. Back home, when I was growing up, 'Sunday go to meeting clothes' consisted of suits and ties for the guys and dresses for the women. I was very surprised to find that to the average Catholic, simple clean clothes were considered sufficient. In the rural area we ended up living in, that could mean fresh overalls and clean barn boots. My mother would have been scandalized! As it was, simply wearing a tie meant I was fancier than any of the boys.
They went to St. Peter's in two cars, and Marilyn and I drove separately in my car. She simply had on clean jeans and a decent shirt. We sat together in two pews, with Harriet and Big Bob in the back pew, the better to swat unruly heads. I had been to countless masses before, and skipped countless more. It took all my willpower not to whisper to Marilyn my thoughts on the priest's sermon. Over the years it got to the point where Marilyn stopped asking me to attend, because I wouldn't behave. I think that was after one of the priests at her church compared the Holy Week to a baseball game. Of course it could have been after the sermon where an older priest repudiated the Second Vatican Council and called Jews the Christ killers. My mother was a quarter Jewish (maiden name Rosenkrantz - long story, but she was still hard core Lutheran), enough to have gotten her into trouble with the Nazis, and it was all I could do not to stand up in the middle of church and denounce the priest and leave. Marilyn was very worried about me that day.
And don't even get me started on the priestly sex scandals that ultimately broke the church. By the time I stopped going to church with her, I had taken to calling the collection plate the Altar Boy Defense Fund. Marilyn lived long enough to see how all that ended, and it just about killed her.
Marilyn had steadfastly refused to believe there was a problem in the Catholic church. Whenever there was a sex scandal in a Protestant church, maybe once a year at most, she would trot that out to 'prove' we had problems like they did. Never mind that for the better part of two decades the Catholic church had a problem every week! That was just anti-religious people like me publicizing things unfairly.
I had a different take on it. Historically, up until about the time of World War II, the priesthood was a good method for a young man from a lower class immigrant family, a fellow with just about zero chances of getting a decent education or any kind of non-blue collar job. As for the whole celibacy issue, well, the church had long experience with that sort of thing, and as long as everybody was discreet, nobody really cared. Following the war, there was a massive expansion of low cost and state funded higher education and the job market exploded. Suddenly, all those Italian and Irish and Polish kids could get college degrees and good jobs. Meanwhile, the church drifted to the right, and began really pushing the celibacy requirement.
The result was massively predictable! 'Normal', i.e. straight, men no longer had a need to go into the church to get ahead. That left the only candidates for the priesthood the 'non-normal', in other words the gays and pedophiles. Suddenly faced with a massive decline in recruitment, the church drastically lowered standards on who they would let into their ranks. By some accounts, by the Nineties, the majority of Catholic seminary students were non-heterosexual. It's a mathematical certainty, an element of Set Theory, my specialization - If you exclude all members of a subset from the superset, the remaining members of the superset will all be members of other subsets. In other words, if you actively exclude heterosexuals who like grown up women, you are left with homosexuals and heterosexuals who like kids.
There was probably a different explanation, but I was going with my version.
I hadn't thought much about John Paul II, who seemed like a nice enough guy, but was definitely old school, and he could never understand why those pesky Americans got so wrought up over priests diddling little boys. Benedict XVI didn't have much more luck. During his reign the European churches found out their priests were diddling their little boys as well. On the one hand he was much more open about the problem than his predecessor, but on the other hand he was also old school and got caught covering up problems in his own jurisdiction. At least he wasn't personally involved in anything.
Supposedly, his replacement, John Paul III, was going to be the key to fixing the problems. A dark horse candidate, he was a Swiss bishop (not even a cardinal), young and modern, and had an understanding to the problem. Scarcely had his papal coronation been completed, however, when the videotapes came out, videotapes that showed him when he was a monsignor, with another priest sodomizing a teenage boy who was crying and begging them to stop. The boy later committed suicide, and the tapes came out when the other priest was caught with a different boy.