Conflicted attitudes toward God, sin, and hell

Conflicted attitudes toward God, sin, and hell are a defining tension in Eileen’s childhood and later self-understanding. Catholic practice enters her life through her father, while her mother dismisses religious authority and teaches that right and wrong are matters people must decide for themselves. Eileen grows up between those opposed accounts without settling into either: she cannot make herself believe, yet the possibility of divine punishment remains powerful enough to shape what she fears and what she considers possible.

A divided religious upbringing

Eileen and Joanie are sent to church with their father every Sunday. As a child, Joanie treats the service with visible detachment: she reads Nancy Drew, chews gum, refuses to follow the congregation’s movements, and substitutes irreverence for the prayers. Their father appears more concerned with Eileen’s conduct. When she is five, he warns her not to embarrass him on the way into church. The distinction suggests that religious observance is bound up with his judgment of his daughters and his public standing, rather than experienced by them as a shared source of comfort.

Their mother is absent from ordinary Mass. Eileen remembers her attending only her grandfather’s funeral; on Sunday afternoons, while Eileen and Joanie sit through Bible study, their mother stays at home. The contrast is domestic as well as theological: the girls return to a slightly tidier but still disordered house, where their mother reads and drinks vermouth. Church is part of the father’s weekly routine, but it does not organize the mother’s life.

The mother makes her opposition explicit after Aunt Ruth scolds the girls. She rejects the idea that a divine observer rewards good behavior, and instead presents moral choice and personal effort as the grounds on which a person must act. Her advice is delivered as a form of care, but it also removes the reassurance of an external authority watching over the girls. Eileen remembers the moment not as a resolution of religious doubt but as an unsettling inheritance: belief is denied, while responsibility for choosing remains.

Doubt, imitation, and the imagined God

Eileen says she never really understood what it meant to be Catholic. Her father’s faith is expressed through repeated gestures and demands: he crosses himself before meals, looks upward when hopeful or angry, and expects Eileen to pray as though she means it. She responds by pretending to believe, because the performance seems easier than genuine faith, which she does not possess. Religious language is therefore present in the household even when belief is unstable; it can be repeated, demanded, or performed without becoming conviction.

Her private image of God is at once distant and familiar. Eileen imagines a white-haired man in a robe presiding over the world and marking papers in red pencil. The figure combines the scale of divine judgment with the ordinary image of someone evaluating a child’s work. She doubts that such a God would care about her small life, but still entertains the possibility that she might be singled out for something good. The competing ideas—indifference and special purpose—do not resolve into faith. They reveal how hard it is for her to relinquish the hope that some power might notice her.

This uncertainty also sharpens her anger toward her father. Eileen distinguishes his moralism from the deeper injury of feeling that he has no loyalty or pride in her. In her account, his loyalties lie with alcohol and an imagined war against enemies he calls hoodlums and ghosts. The religious household thus offers neither a dependable moral guide nor a secure bond with him. Faith, authority, and affection become difficult for Eileen to separate, yet her memories make clear that religious discipline does not amount to care.

Hell and the limits of despair

The clearest measure of religion’s hold on Eileen appears in her thoughts about death. She does not believe in heaven, but she does believe in hell, and she imagines her father condemning her to it if he discovered her contemplating suicide. At the same time, she says she does not really want to die and is not going to kill herself. Her account holds fear and despair together without treating them as identical: she may not always want to live, but the thought of death is not presented as a settled intention.

The fear of hell belongs to a larger uncertainty about choice. Eileen sees running away as another possibility, one that would require courage, and imagines New York City as an escape from the life she cannot bear to remain in. The city’s promise is temporary and costly in her own assessment, but it offers an alternative to waiting in place. In this moment, the prospect of escape matters less as a religious answer than as a way to imagine agency where neither heaven nor her household has made her feel protected.

Shame and outward performance

At Moorehead, Eileen develops a controlled public expression that she calls her death mask. She studies casts of famous dead men in a library book and practices a calm, resilient face in the mirror, determined not to show how sensitive she is. She describes this composure as a means of keeping the prison’s misery and shame at a distance. The religious conflict of her childhood is not repeated there as a debate about doctrine; instead, the related pressure to conceal vulnerability appears as disciplined performance.

That performance extends into her work. Before visitors arrive, Eileen drinks sweet vermouth and eats mint chocolates, some of them stolen from a drugstore in X-ville. She remains nervous about receiving the imprisoned boys’ mothers even after years of doing it, while her duties require her to direct them to a ledger and the orange plastic chairs in the hallway. In the security checks, she taps the women’s shoulders and hips, imagining that Randy might notice her, though she feels barely visible to him. Her composed face hides fear and longing, but does not remove them.

The same strain appears when a young boy breaks down in front of his mother. Randy stops the mother from handing him a handkerchief, and Eileen tries to keep her own response contained. When upset, she finds an empty room and uses a private physical routine until she feels foolish and ashamed enough to regain control. These scenes place Eileen’s religious uncertainty beside a broader world of imposed rules and practiced restraint. She has inherited competing claims about judgment and personal responsibility, but the habits that most reliably govern her are concealment and endurance. Hell remains credible to her where heaven does not; belief never becomes a refuge, and the effort to appear composed becomes one more way she survives without feeling seen.