Chapter One I am named for virgins. Four, actually: three saints and another woman whose canonization has stalled. Saint Emiliana, aunt to a pope, died in the sixth century, never having left her father''s house. Saint Emily de Vialar didn''t leave her father''s house until she was thirty-five, when she received a large inheritance from her grandfather, which she promptly put to use founding an order of nuns. Saint Emily de Rodat devoted her life to teaching poor children and caring for what her biographers unfailingly call "unfortunate women." And when the Blessed Emily Bicchieri (beatified in 1769, she, like me, is still awaiting promotion to full sainthood) learned that Dad was planning a big wedding for her, she said no: no , take all that money and build me a convent, please. Which he did and which she entered and there she died, forty years later. On her birthday.

A virgin. So it''s really no surprise, then, that tradition holds Emily is the patron saint of single women. And no surprise, an Emily, I''m single. And maybe it''s no surprise that in the fiftieth year of my life, thirty-four years after leaving my father''s house, ten years into a career of teaching children who were, on the whole, quite fortunate, I did something I had never, ever done before. I kissed a boy. When I die, a bell will ring. Mrs. Ramirez told me this over coffee, after mass.

Mrs. Ramirez, half my height, twice my age. She also told me that she was part Gypsy. That she could see the future. That if I gave her twenty-five dollars she would tell me my fortune, and Father-she was referring to the visiting priest, young, who''d somehow used the Gospel of the prodigal son to spark a homily against MTV, despite the fact that the average age of the congregation (excluding me) was roughly 105, and that we all stood about as much chance of falling prey to music videos as dogs do to being bewitched by Mozart-anyway, Mrs. Ramirez said Father wouldn''t disapprove of my visiting with her, paying her, because what she does isn''t black magic, but white magic, and Jesus Himself sometimes sits with her in the room, and wouldn''t I like to meet Jesus? Jesus. Met him , I told her. Mrs.

Ramirez sipped at her coffee, crinkling her face into the cup. He was awfully nice , I went on, because I was sick of Mrs. Ramirez buttonholing me every Sunday with her sales pitch, and I was even more sick of the fact that death was always part of the pitch. She was forever telling me what would happen when I died. An eclipse, a torrential rain, a dog would bark. And now, a bell. Why couldn''t it ever be sunny and 70, and me inside the pretty hospital, slipping away to the peaceful hum of impotent machines? Besides, what more do I need to know? I asked her. You already told me, a bell will ring.

Mrs. Ramirez lowered her coffee, looked around, looked at me, and spoke. For twenty-five dollars , she said, I tell you when. The good news: to know my life in full, you need not consult Mrs. Ramirez. Rather, simply sit with me the day one of my students brought a corpse to class and made his classmates laugh. I''m exaggerating, but not much, and not about the laughter. They laughed: that''s what riled me the most.

Not that half of them had come into class late-including the young man then giving his oral report-nor that all of them, the girls especially, would take our admonition to "dress up" for Friday''s special mass as license to dress like novice sex workers, nor even that that morning, of all mornings, I was being observed by the department chair. It was the laughter, which started the way it always did, as nervous giggles, before devolving into loud, bright barks. Laughter, even though this was high school, Catholic high school, and even though my bunch were frequently well behaved. I always thought that if they could have heard just how much they sounded like puppies when they laughed, they would have stopped-but I might have been wrong about that. I was, and am, wrong about a lot of things, especially what fashions, be they cultural or intellectual, students enjoy. The department chair, Father Martin Dimanche, often reminded me of this, but what did he know? He was sixty or seventy (it was unclear, and he answered with a joke whenever I asked). He also had a crush on me, or I on him; that was murky, too. I remember thinking that if I were ever to pay Mrs.

Ramirez anything, it would be to find out the answer to high school''s eternal question: does he like me? I don''t know, not in this memory. I only know the contents of Martin''s eyes, which were deep and gray and clear. I tried not to look at him, for obvious reasons, but also because he was sitting directly in front of the source of all this trouble, a bookcase. Or rather, the contents of the bookcase: a vintage, complete-but-for-Volume-XIII 1913 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia . Donated to the school the previous summer by an elderly widower, rejected by the library as out of date and rescued by me, who pointed out that just about everything important in Catholicism had already happened by 1913, with the exception of Vatican II (and Lord knows-an idiom I''m licensed for, thanks-there seemed to be less and less reason of late to study that). In September, I had set my seniors the task of doing oral reports, based on topics they found in the encyclopedia. In part because I wanted the books put to use, in part because I wanted them to use books . Ours was a supposedly rigorous, college prep program, but there were students who would graduate, I knew, without ever having physically visited a library and done research with the aid of those clothbound, paper-and-ink thingies that the librarians had taken care to arrange so neatly on the shelves.

Books: my students tucked their little chins into their chests and looked up at me, eyes angry and sad that I would corrupt them this way. Google was their new God. Books were foolish, impractical things. Maybe that was what drove the laughter: books were inherently laughable, just the notion of them. Or maybe it was me, Ms. Hamilton, or Mrs. Hamilton, as many of them called me in moments of weakness, so desperate was their innate desire to marry me off. And yet, I''d done that-marry-once, twice, and the third time was no charm, either.

I never took any of my husbands'' names. I took and kept my father''s name, Hamilton, because he didn''t offer anything else. I''ve never liked it. A long time ago, I looked into changing my middle and last name to-true, I live in California-"The Great," which would have been exactly that, but I didn''t have the money, and then decided it was more satisfying to resent the fact that women who got married could change their names to their husband''s for free whereas the rest of us independent females had to fork it over to The Man if we wanted to liberate ourselves. By now the kids had stopped laughing, and rightly so, because the boy''s oral report had turned dark indeed. There are things a teacher does not do in a high school theology class. (Beyond the obvious, I mean-flirt, drink, smoke, leer, fart.) One skims lightly, for example, through the story of the wedding feast at Cana, during which Jesus changes some jugs of water into wine when the party starts running low on alcohol: "Sir," the headwaiter tells the groom, sotto voce, after sampling the new mystery wine, "usually you serve the good wine first and save the bad for last, since by then everyone''s blotto.

But here you''re serving the good wine well after anyone''s in a condition to notice." (Don''t trust my translation? Then take it from King James: "Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.") Either way, this tells kids two things they don''t need to know: first, drink enough wine and it doesn''t matter what it tastes like; and second, there''s such a thing as good jug wine. For not entirely unrelated reasons, one also does not discuss the Book of Revelations, especially not with freshmen. One avoids the topic of exorcism. And one skips the story of Onan, unless one has something new to say on the subject. (Which would be what, exactly?) And in matters of church history, one tries to move as quickly as possible through the saeculum obscurum , the church''s "Dark Century," the tenth century, when a series of vile, venal popes perpetrated such acts as would cause historians years later to coin the altogether unpleasant word pornocracy . This is not a word one wants to chalk on the board and explain.

Neither is the name of the pope, Formosus, whose death roughly marks the start of this fetid period. But the church, or at least teaching a course focused on it, is so rarely about what one wants. And so it came to pass that the beginning of the end of my life-or at least that life-commenced with a handsome young man discoursing on a beleaguered old man, Formosus. Formosus: that was whom this young rapscallion, young Edgar (not even Catholic, parents just sent him to Catholic school for the discipline, when they were the ones who needed scolding: "Edgar"?) had chosen for his report. Edgar-who was eighteen, looked nineteen, acted seventeen, especially around anyone who paid the slightest sort of attention to him-somehow went straight to Volume VI of the rescued encyclopedia, Fathers to Gregory. And out of all the topics he could ha.