The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  THE DIVINE ECONOMY

  OF SALVATION

  Priscila Uppal

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  for my mother

  wherever she may be

  &

  for Christopher

  without doubt

  For thee, who, mindful of th’ unhonour’d dead,

  Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

  If chance, by lonely contemplation led,

  Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,—

  —THOMAS GRAY,

  “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

  Contents

  AUTUMN

  Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17

  WINTER

  Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26 | Chapter 27 | Chapter 28 | Chapter 29 | Chapter 30 | Chapter 31 | Chapter32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  THE DIVINE ECONOMY

  OF SALVATION

  ∼ AUTUMN ∼

  Wearing a smile or frown

  God’s face is always there.

  It is up to you

  if you take your wintry restlessness into the town.

  —P. K. PAGE, “Autumn”

  My name was Angela H. then. You may remember me. We went to school together at St. X. School for Girls. I had long brown hair, cut at the waist in a single straight swipe, and I used to wear a tiny silver chain with a faux-gold locket in the shape of a heart, a picture of my mother inside. We knew each other. We all did. By name or by deed. Or at least I thought so at the time. I’ve had plenty of time here, plenty of time to think about the past and what we did know, or thought we knew, about what we, what I, have done. The air is thick as the stone walls with memories, with ghosts of us. I do not think it sacrilegious to speak so about ghosts. Jesus Christ is a ghost, the Holy Spirit is a ghost, the Bible tells us. I imagine God too, omnipresent and without form, is a ghost haunting my night. A wind in this darkness. I have food and water, a bed and paper. This is all I need.

  You may remember a few of the girls began a group, The Sisterhood, and we snuck out of our dormitory rooms to meet. You and I, we were invited to join. We met in the dark of the hallway, our movements anxious, almost animal, feeling our way to Room 313, Rachel’s room, the girl with the shoulder-length blonde curls and light-green eyes, the one we wanted so to impress, the one we believed was the strongest. I can still smell the sweet perspiration, girls’ clean preadolescent sweat. It is different from the sweat here, a grown woman’s sweat we try to hide by doing the wash early in the morning after pacing in our rooms, restless, alone. The hard sweat of layers of clothing, the heavy habits if we choose to wear them, the blankets we pile on top of our bodies to keep us covered at night. Or the cold, blank sweat of the nightmares many of us have. Before I moved in here, I never would have thought so many nightmares should fill a place of God. Prince of Peace. But I guess we did know. We lived one of our own at St. X. School for Girls. Our sheets were washed then too. The stains of sin, Sister Marguerite would have said, her large chest pounding like a needle on a sewing machine. No one ever found out what happened in Room 313. That’s the part that disturbs me most in the middle of the night in this tiny basement room, a single window the height and width of one of the bricks at ground level. I watch feet go by, have come to identify the different boarders and visitors by the kinds of shoes or boots they wear. By the noises they make treading on the grounds. How our footsteps changed. No one confessed, you know. The crosses that hung over blackboards and bulletin boards in the classrooms and the adjoining church were oblivious to our crime, and the nuns only punished us for the ordinary sins of daily living, the banal trespasses of girlhood. No one confessed, until now. If you choose to remain hidden, I will not expose you. But I must confess. It’s time. Don’t turn away. We held hands once in the dark. You may remember me.

  SISTER BERNADETTE CAME BY to see me this morning with a package. I nodded when she entered, from where I was kneeling on the white square-tiled floor, reciting my morning prayers in white cotton pyjamas, the late autumn air crisp after having left the window open a crack in the night. She smiled, laid the brown wrapped box in the middle of my already-made bed, and shut the door gently, her sneakers echoing softly down the empty basement hall. I had known she was coming because of those shoes; the left one squeaks on the tiled floor. The package held little interest for me, as I assumed it was from my sister, my real sister, Christine, who married a lawyer and has two sons. I washed my hair and ate my breakfast without opening it, compelled to get out, to see the changing leaves of the maple trees on the front lawn. Their thin, flat bodies, forced to fall for the coming winter, have always attracted me. After it has rained, if you hold a leaf tightly, sometimes the colours run onto your hands.

  Before returning to my room I went upstairs to the second floor of the convent to help Sister Irene with her pills. She has been in and out of the hospital, back and forth, the last three years. There was discussion about giving her a room on the first floor, so that stairs wouldn’t be a problem when she needed to go back again, but she’s settled in her room now and the next trip, we know, will be her last. The doctors can do no more, and they insist she’d probably rather die here, though she has few friends among the other Sisters, the ones left. So many she had known when she first entered this convent, back in the years of World War II, have already died, passed on to where they believe themselves to go. With the onset of her sickness, Sister Irene turned rude and ill-mannered, rushing into rooms without knocking, yelling at a Sister for the tiniest inconvenience she might have caused, muttering under her breath every time she saw a Sister leave the main entrance, implying they were involved in something sinful. In the early stages, most refused to walk by her room, avoided her in the dining hall when she still took her meals there, pretended to have other engagements when she’d try to talk to them in the recreation room. With her time drawing nearer to an end, however, some Sisters have taken it upon themselves to light candles in her name, recite a specific prayer in her favour before bed, or drop off a treat, a bag of butterscotch candies perhaps, which she likes to suck. A few requested Father B. say a weekly Mass for her health. Still, most avoid her room, refusing to pass directly under the archway between her death and our lives.

  I too have little affection for Sister Irene, though I am compelled to witness the change in her. Since the stroke, she has lost feeling in her legs and in the left side of her face. Her single bed with its twenty-year-old box spring and mattress is her sole domain. I hold her bendable drinking straw to the good side of her mouth when I feed her a liquid meal, her dark lips large and soft from inactivity. They used to be so thin, tight, well-sealed, those lips. Now she tells me things. Or she tries to, mumbling incoherently, her tongue unskilled and numb against her teeth as she struggles to form simple syllables. She grips my arm at the wrist as if she would snap it like a twig in her frustration, but she lacks the strength, tries to attract my attention with her brown eyes, while the wrinkles on her face deepen like etchings in stone. She tells me addresses and telephone numbers, listing them off without including names, and I’ve given up prodding her to remember whom they belong to. She doesn’t seem to care anyway. She just enjoys reciting the numbers themselves over and over as if they are well-loved people. It is almost comforting, except the strong spice-like smell of her keeps me at a distance on the stool beside her, her body leaking, forcing itself to th
e outside. The pills calm her, put her to sleep, her hair thin against her pillow, olive scalp tough as hide. I’ve touched her scalp as she’s slept, pushed my hands against its surface petting her, an attempt to unleash what has become trapped over time. Once, she bolted up, holding her hands in front of her, confused, as if she couldn’t understand who these hands, the skin over the knuckles white and bumpy like curds of milk, belonged to. “Death is backwards!” she cried. “Backwards!” It’s the only thing she’s said to me in the last month resembling a sentence. And I’ve wanted to ask her what she meant, but it seems as she sleeps, her head pressed against the cloth of her pillow, that she will be taking her secrets with her.

  Only in the afternoon, after leaving Sister Irene to her drug-induced peace, did I notice that the address of the convent on the package was typed, and no return address announced itself. I could not decide at first whether to open the package, although besides the unfamiliarity of the typing, there was no reason for my hesitation. We frequently receive packages from elementary schools, the social services department, or from thoughtful parishioners in thanks for our work or time. A particular man or woman may simply have believed I’d helped them personally, beyond my call of duty, and made out a gift to me. I’d just donate the contents to the convent, inform Mother Superior. She might even praise me, I figured.

  Yet deep down I knew. I knew it was no gift I was about to receive. My hands trembling, I was sure my face had lost its colour, though there is no mirror hanging in my room to check such things. I could feel blood leave my cheeks, pump quicker to the heart. I tried to reason I’d exhausted myself with Sister Irene and needed a good nap. Cold, I wrapped the grey wool afghan from my bed around my shoulders. A tiny ceramic hand-painted statue of Mary, a gift from my mother when I received First Communion, which I sometimes hold in the palm of my hand when I think of her, seemed to forsake me from her central place on my dresser. Do you know who has come for you? I heard the season’s wind ask, beating against my low window, a yellow leaf’s face flattened against the glass. I did.

  The box was wrapped first in plain brown packing paper, the kind you can buy in rolls at the post office for a couple of dollars. The stamps were Canadian, standard red maple leaves, totalling $7.35, the postmark illegible. When I shook the package, an object grudgingly slid from side to side, the weight comparable to a medium-sized pot. I tore at the paper with my blunt, bitten fingernails, the bits of packaging on the bed like pieces of bark scraped off a tree. The actual box was made of white cardboard, void of logos, but the type found in department stores, easy to put together, flimsy, the edges folded into wings and taped shut. I checked the door. It doesn’t have a lock, but I made sure it was firmly closed. When it is left ajar, my entire enclosure can be seen if someone happens to walk by, the room being only nine by seven feet. Not that many people come by here. To see others I usually need to seek them out by going upstairs. I am the only one living down in the basement. The room was assigned to me when I entered the convent because renovations were being done to the second and third floors due to weather damage. All the Sisters were grouped together on the first floor until construction was finished, bunking like girls, two or four to a room after years of sleeping in their own quarters. The bunks were all filled up. Besides a bathroom, furnace room, and storage area, there is only one room in the basement suitable for living. I took it. When the other rooms became available, I clung to the excuse that I was accustomed to my space and didn’t need to move. Mother Superior didn’t mind. Better to use the space than leave it vacant. And I honestly felt comfortable in the small room, encased and protected. A single bed, an oak dresser like the kind my father crafted for my mother when I was a child that I found at an antique store, a single folding chair, photographs, a few other mementos, and a large leather tote bag for my sister Christine’s letters are all I own. My room doesn’t even have a closet. Now I wished there were more places to hide.

  The tissue paper inside the package was white and had a faint perfume smell. The strangely familiar scent forced me to take my hands off the box. Lilies. I had accompanied Mother Superior once to the mall to visit the wig lady, a woman who helped the older Sisters, the ones who had lost their hair from too-tight wimples, brush out their wigs. The wig lady wore a similar scent that day, and I ran out of the store without explanation. How could I tell them that the smell made me see blood, blood spilling over the glass counters like fountain water, blood on my hands, my habit, my shoes, on the holiday decorations, blinking in the lights, the store windows, the exits? Blood on the wigs, on the faces of the mannequins, on their Styrofoam lips, and on Mother Superior’s scalp, down her round cheeks as the hairnet was fitted. No, I couldn’t tell them of the sights occasioned by a woman’s perfume. Though it is my belief, if the dead come back to earth, they travel by smell. Lilies.

  It was at that moment I knew for sure. I swallowed hard, in an effort not to choke. The box open, the only thing left to do was to look. The room took on a yellowish hue, like that of old photographs. I tried to blink it away and rubbed my eyes vigorously, thinking I might be allergic to the scent. An unacknowledged ache forced its pressure against my stomach. For the first time in years, I longed for a companion, someone who would comfort me for no reason except that I asked. For the first time in years, I longed for God to announce Himself, to speak in a language I could understand. As if in a dream, compelled to continue, I unfolded the white tissue. The silver candle holder lay at the bottom of the box like a slender body frozen in the snow.

  A knock at the door startles me. I cough, clearing my throat, and throw the tissue paper back over the silver candle holder. I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting here in a daze, staring at the offensive object, when Sister Bernadette arrives.

  “Come in,” I invite.

  Sister Bernadette’s white forehead peeks through the doorway. My attention distracted, I had missed the squeak of her left shoe.

  “Come in,” I say again.

  Sister Bernadette is the youngest nun at the convent and loves to chatter. The two usually don’t go together, as the young tend to keep their secrets well-hidden, revealed only to their confessor, one of the resident priests at R. Catholic Church. However, few young women have been admitted here in recent years, so the tide might have shifted in this respect without my knowledge. Regardless, Sister Bernadette is of another ilk. Those who take vows out of optimism, instead of shame. A social brand of nun, who want to save the whales and protect the ecosystem. She is always passing around flyers and petitions, reciting a litany of statistics and studies. Her belief in fact is apparently unshakeable. She keeps meticulous records and files detailing her various projects and photocopies them at the church for Mother Superior’s office. Sister Bernadette has been rallying Mother Superior and Father B. to allocate some of the parish’s money to ethical mutual funds, citing examples of Sisters in the United States who hold shares in large companies solely so they can disrupt the annual shareholders’ meetings and control the morality of businesses. I wonder how Sister Bernadette will possibly survive in this world. Who has protected her for so long? Most of us can’t save even one person, let alone an entire species. She smiles often, though, her braces removed before she came to live here, her teeth perfectly aligned, and her brown eyes are quite pleasing, large and round like amber. Within a week of Sister Bernadette’s entrance into the convent, she took over the mail delivery from Sister Maria, whose knees are stricken with arthritis. There is no need for anyone to deliver the mail, but Sister Bernadette claimed it was “such a lovely way to say hello to everyone in the morning.” Mother Superior is amused by her, I gather, though Mother Superior herself is rarely visible in the mornings. She is efficient and incredibly organized. Perhaps because of this, she is rarely social with anyone when it doesn’t directly serve a greater purpose. It is rumoured she composes long religious sermons on the deterioration of the laws of the Church, on contemporary evils such as genetic engineering and plastic surgery, and
that she packs them up and sends them to her brother in England who looks after her finances. Sister Maria says Mother Superior receives mail from academic religious journals under an androgynous pseudonym, but Sister Maria doesn’t read very well, English being her third language. The truth of Sister Maria’s claim is difficult to prove. Sister Maria also thinks Mother Superior wishes she had been born a man.

  Sister Bernadette, twenty-four years old, tiny-hipped and small-breasted, her face scrubbed clean and makeup free, lowers her head in a mock gesture of guilt.

  “With such a large package to deliver this morning, I forgot to give you this little letter,” she says, her left arm extended towards me on the bed.

  The candle holder occupying my private thoughts, weighing heavily upon me, I try not to tremble as I take the letter from her hands. If there is any outward change in my behaviour or appearance, Sister Bernadette doesn’t seem to notice. Relieved, I let out a sigh, louder than I mean to, when I see the writing on the envelope. Christine always prints on her envelopes or packages, usually in bright pens or markers: purple, green, yellow, as if the sender were a child. She says she wants to brighten up the convent a little, add some colour. This particular letter is addressed in mustard yellow, and Sister Bernadette recognizes the distinct presentation too.

  “From your sister, Christine, right?”

  I nod cheerfully for Sister Bernadette’s benefit. My sister’s letters and visits rarely make me happy. We see differently. Even discussions about the weather leave us on opposite sides of a fence. The first time she came to visit me here, she walked into my room and gasped. “Couldn’t you ask for a nicer room, one with a little more light? What will you do in the winter? Did they give you this room because you’re new? Is there really nothing left? How about this floor, it’s going to be impossible in the cold. You’ll get sick. You’ll never get any fresh air from that window,” she ranted.