He shrugged. It was up for grabs. Who knew what she’d really had in mind? It was certainly possible she had just wanted an innocent date. After all, how could she have come up with such an elaborate plot when she had no way of knowing he would come back to the movie or ask her out after the show?
On the other hand, once he did return to the Stratford and asked her out, she had the entire length of the movie to make her plans for New Year’s Eve. He’d put a judgment on that matter on the back burner for the moment.
“Everybody goes out to parties on New Year’s Eve,” she continued. “I didn’t think you’d want to do that. Besides, as long as we had this date that it seemed like I’d been waiting for most of my life, I wanted you all to myself. There didn’t seem to be any better place than home.
“I swear, Rid, I would have invited you over even if my parents had been home. They would have let us alone. But since they were going to a party, it seemed just perfect.” She hesitated. “The very last thing in the world I wanted to happen was what happened . . . you do believe that, don’t you. Rid?”
Again he shrugged. What had happened he had tried to put out of his mind. As time passed and particularly with the relationship that had grown with Charlie Hogan, Groendal had been quite successful in suppressing the memory. Now she was dusting off an old recollection that he preferred keeping buried.
He felt himself begin to flush. He tried to check his embarrassment. But the more he tried, the more he was conscious of the reddening that betrayed his emotion.
“I’ve thought it over many, many times. It was the whole thing, don’t you think, Rid? The holiday. New Year’s Eve, and the heat of the house. But most of all the liquor. Getting out that Scotch was one of the dumbest stunts I ever pulled. That’s what really did it, Rid: the Scotch . . . Rid, you’re not saying anything.”
“I guess you’re right. It probably was the Scotch.”
She moved slightly. His hand touched her breast which was delicately outlined beneath her thin coat. He moved his hand away.
They were silent a while. She shivered and moved closer. He did not move away. After all, it was cold and she was just trying to stay warm.
“So, what are you going to do about school?” Jane asked. “I mean, in a week or so you would have graduated from college. Isn’t it kind of strange not to go back after Easter? When you’re about to graduate?”
He didn’t answer immediately. What was the use of fooling with it? “I’m not going back, Jane. I’m not going to be a priest. Things have changed. I can’t explain it to you. Things have just changed.” Most times, he had found, confession was good for the soul and the psyche. But, having confessed his radically changed status to Jane, he felt not one bit better.
“You’re not going back to the seminary! Not ever?” Jane pulled herself away and sat facing him from farther along the bench. She clearly had been taken by surprise.
“I’m not going back,” he affirmed.
Happy, she slid back across the bench and snuggled beneath his arm. “Then things can be different for us, Rid. One of our problems before—our main problem, really—was that we had no time. Now we can back away and do it right. We can go on dates. Go to a show. Go for a ride. Go on a picnic. We can get to know each other. We can forget what happened and start all over.”
“No, we can’t Jane.” He said it softly.
She felt a flash of panic. “What do you mean, we can’t? What happened was a mistake—something neither of us was responsible for. It just happened. It was a special, tender holiday. We had too much to drink. It was an act of love!”
“It was an act of passion.”
“Passion is love!” She moved away, facing him.
“Passion is an irrational, animal act”
“I was in love!”
“I wasn’t.”
“So,” she had now become quite angry, “that’s the type you are, after all! Just get your kicks with a girl and then leave her!”
“Jane, that’s not the way it was. That’s not the way it is. You know better than that.”
“What makes it any different?”
“You said it yourself. It was an accident. We didn’t know what we were getting into . . . at least I didn’t”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Bringing out the Scotch and having good-sized belts of it on a nearly empty stomach wasn’t my idea.”
“You mean to suggest that I planned the whole thing!”
“No, that’s not what I mean!” Now he was becoming angry. “Just that it was not all my idea. Or all my fault. It wasn’t an act of love.” (God, how he hated talking about this!) “If we must face what happened squarely, we were just getting to know each other when you brought out the liquor.
“We got intoxicated, to put it bluntly. We were no longer rational. We were animals. And we did what irrational animals do: We got carried away by our emotions. It’s silly to say we were in love. We were just getting to know each other. It’s silly to say it was an act of love. It was an act of drunkenness. That’s all it was.”
“That’s all it was, was it? Then what’s this?” In a few rapid motions that seemed rehearsed, she flung open her coat and raised her blouse, exposing bare midriff.
Groendal was stunned. “Jane! What are you doing? Cover yourself! People can see!” He looked around quickly; not only was no one watching, he could see no one in sight. Nevertheless, what she was doing seemed shameful. “Pull your blouse down!”
“Not until you look! Long and hard!”
He forced himself to look. If anything, she seemed to have put on a little weight. “Well?”
“It’s just beginning to show!”
“Show? Show what?”
“That I’m in the family way!”
“You’re what?”
“Pregnant!”
The word hit him a stunning blow. He had no reply.
“Yes, pregnant!” she repeated.
“How—”
“How else? What you did to me!”
“How do you know?”
“I haven’t had a period in almost four months.”
That meant little to him. Oh, he certainly knew of pregnancies. He had some vague ideas of how that was accomplished. Such information, in the seminary curriculum, was postponed until the final courses in moral theology. Good Catholic parents scarcely ever discussed such things either with their children or each other. In effect, Groendal, in his ignorance of conception, was somewhere between delivery by the stork and the flood of sexual information that would inundate society in just a few more years.
“I mean,” Groendal amended, “how do you know it was me? How do you know I’m the father?”
Jane’s eyes widened. She struck at him. Instinctively, he blocked the blow. First, his body was still too sore to endure another onslaught. Second, he was not as willing to accept penance for this sin. This was an affair in which they both had participated.
“It’s a reasonable question,” he insisted.
“Didn’t you see the blood? On you? On me? On the floor? It took me hours to clean that carpet! You took my virginity!”
Another new concept. He knew that women who had never had intercourse were considered virgins. Among others, he had the Blessed Virgin Mary to thank for that information. But how one “took” virginity was another question. Whatever was involved finally seemed to explain the blood that he’d found on himself and about which he’d had all those nightmares.
Ridley said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He felt overwhelmed, as if he were being backed into an inescapable corner.
“Well?” Jane challenged.
“Well, what?”
“What do you intend to do about this?”
Again he was silent. He could think of no practical answer. The idea that he might pray for her occurred to him. But it seemed less than sufficient, so he didn’t mention it.