The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  Here the women believe in rumour, give it the respect it deserves. I hear that Sister Sarah and Sister Josie have one recurring argument: Sister Sarah enjoys attending the weddings held at the church, and Sister Josie enjoys attending the funerals. Sister Josie says it’s her duty to mourn the dead, and Sister Sarah responds by saying it’s her duty to bless the living. They both like to bring flowers. I hear Sister Ursula did her medical residency with a man she fell in love with and who rejected her. She spent three years in his service, tunnelling into his heart, until he shocked her by marrying a patient she herself had tended. I hear Father B. spends much time with a young prostitute who comes to evening Mass on Tuesdays before she goes out to work. It is believed this young girl is his niece and the rest of his family has no idea of her whereabouts—another runaway on the city streets. Are these things real? Are they the facts? I suppose it all depends on whose story makes sense to you. Sister Josie and Sister Sarah can be caught sitting in their respective pews for weddings and funerals, but do they fight about it? Sister Ursula avoids speaking about her residency, only says she left because she couldn’t stand their rules. Father B. has provided clothing, food, and medication for the prostitute who shields her face with her hair and calls him Uncle when she greets him. Who knows whether she has chosen the name for him because he is kind or because he is related by blood? Does it matter?

  I’m sure I could find out more about Kim if I probed deeper, if I asked the right people. If, perhaps, I followed up with the police who kept her for the day. But talking to the Sisters, I collect rumour. I collect mystery. Sister Katherine says Kim’s parents were originally contacted and demanded that Kim not return to their home in her condition. They insisted they no longer had a daughter. Sister Maria says it is good Kim is not younger than she is, because we would be forced to hand her over to Children’s Aid, and the foster parents who take on teenagers do it for the free money and labour, not out of love or charity. Sister Humilita suspects Kim’s father may have been the one to bring Kim into such a state, which is why he threw her out. Mother Superior believes the unborn child’s father has come searching for Kim, because there was a twenty-year-old Korean man hanging around the back of the church last Sunday, dousing himself periodically with the holy water. But why Mother Superior should believe the father is Korean doesn’t matter. Something has happened. Is noticed. Is told. The rumours encircle Kim without her knowledge. She is the newest reason for faith. And I find myself mesmerized by Kim’s skinny body and the way life grows despite its confined surroundings. I try to envision how large the child is, if it has fingers yet or knees. How it breathes underwater. A rumour. The Lord works in mysterious ways. She bears our mystery.

  Esperanza was a mystery at St. X. School for Girls. We knew little about her thoughts or feelings; she kept her opinions to herself and rarely revealed anything about her past. But Rachel loved spreading rumours. We knew Sister Gabrielle, the nun who acted as school secretary, kept a flask of gin in the top drawer of her desk. We knew Mother Superior’s family tree traced her ancestry back to royalty during the age of Mary, Queen of Scots. We knew Patricia took medication to stop her from falling down and having fits, and Olivia, a girl in the grade below us, wet her bed weekly and was told to light a candle each time and pray for the Virgin Mary to keep her sheets clean. Esperanza cleaned her sheets, but it was the girl who slept in the room beside hers who confessed the secret. Not Esperanza. Esperanza knew the value of silence. Despite all the rumours circulating about the torrid affairs and sinful practices of Esperanza (that she met the gardener in the shed on Fridays, or that she put arsenic on the toilet seats hoping it would seep through our delicate skin and give her one less body to fuss over, or that she and Mother Superior were mortal enemies because of an incident that involved the iron gate surrounding the school, a bar of soap, and a letter, the contents of which we could never uncover), Esperanza’s real life was hidden from us. Never once had a rumour involving Mr. M. passed through the lips of the girls. I wasn’t going to start one. There was no mystery in that. There was only truth. And I would be implicated; I had watched and done nothing. I didn’t want to be responsible for the truth.

  So I kept the secret sealed, only opening it in the privacy of my room to fantasize about when I’d find myself in front of a man, kneeling between his legs, kisses against my hair, my ears, my neck. The scene I’d witnessed both attracted and repelled me. Esperanza in control, and Mr. M. at her mercy. His pants open, his belt like a limp snake. I was angry at Mr. M., not for his deceit, but for his choosing Esperanza. Waiting for her. For her to bring him salvation. The nights I spent holding on to my secret were long and lonely.

  WE ARE TRAPPED BETWEEN our responsibility to the past and the demands of the present. This is a summary of Mother Superior’s argument on this afternoon as we are gathered in the cafeteria, our conference room for the day. The fishy smell of the cod we’ve had for lunch lingers over our long tables, designed like picnic tables but made of fibreglass instead of wood. The bustle and chatter of lunch-time after our morning prayers brings a certain excitement for us. Although prayers are usually recited quickly (Sisters pray faster than anyone else), as the words of the prayers are not as important as the meditation that prayers provide, today we executed them even more quickly than usual. Father B. and Father G., the younger priest who has taken on some of Father B.’s duties and tries to provide a bridge for the younger parishioners, encouraging them not to think of church as an antiquated place run by the old-fashioned or the harsh and bitter, are also here, seated near where Mother Superior, flushed with the power of her own oratory, clings to a series of notepads and presses the Pause button on the videocassette machine whenever she wants to make a point without the distraction of moving images.

  She has been collecting data in order to help us recover from our present financial circumstances, although she veils the economic concerns under the gauze of the moral ills of contemporary society. There are empty beds in the convent. Beds that haven’t been replaced by Sisters dead or gone “over the wall” for decades. The video we are watching, which has been kindly copied by another group of Sisters from the United States who are currently implementing the new procedures, demonstrates, as Mother Superior puts it, the transfer of the spoken Word to the Image. Transubstantiation, she might have said, but that would provoke too much argument, and might be considered blasphemous. But she comes close to it when she speaks of our need to embrace the Image as a new holy vehicle, destined for our use as much as for regular society’s. As it is, a number of Sisters look very nervous as Mother Superior runs through her statistics and graphs, as this new mode of conversion reaches our eyes and ears through the wonders of modern technology. A few turn, periodically, to Father B. and Father G. to gauge their reaction. Sister Josie sits beside Father B., taking notes for him because he left his reading glasses back at the church. Father G., however, doesn’t seem perplexed in the least; he’s enjoying himself, smiling and eating one of the sugar cookies left out for snacking during the meeting as if watching an engrossing movie and not a video entitled How to Advertise the Catholic Life. For Father B., his forehead glistening with sweat, the signals on the screen are clearly pressures on his side.

  “The Sisters of the Order of K., the Sisters of U., and the Sisters of the L. Valley in the United States have made an enormous impact by working together with the full support of their clergy on this advertising campaign. We do not want to be left behind.”

  Mother Superior, in full-habit regalia, is set for war. There is a moral impetuousness about her stance. She defies the crowd to refute her. I’ve rarely seen her back so straight, as if she’s placed a ruler against her spine underneath her clothes. Her movements are quick and sure, practised, and orderly. She takes out her pen, flicks the cap off with her teeth, holds her notebooks up in the air for authority. The lines on her face are hawklike, her wimple a hood. There is a hint of the sinister in the aggressive mode of her attack, but her tone is not co
ndescending. She preaches, and I think of what Sister Maria said about all those packages she receives from academic journals, under androgynous pseudonyms, and the rumour rings true as I watch her. Mother Superior was made to be in front of a crowd, talking as she does. The convent chose her wisely as the leader, and the majority of Sisters listen to her respectfully at our own inclusive meetings. But the company of men is different; whenever men are invited within our walls, it is usually the men who speak. And today a woman stands preaching about the future of Catholicism.

  Mother Superior pauses the machine to examine in detail one of the billboards used during the campaigns. Within the frame are fluffy snow-white clouds in a clear blue sky and a large pink hairless arm protruding downward, extending a large, perfectly unblemished hand. This is, as Mother Superior explains, a recognizable image of the hand of God coming down from the heavens. He holds in His palm a black cellular phone with the green signal light flashing. The caption in bold black letters across the bottom reads, “Is there a call you should be answering?” Underneath the caption is a toll-free telephone number and another caption stating, “Brought to you by your Sisters of the Roman Catholic Church.”

  We are encouraged to take notes, so I flip open a prayer book on my lap and write in the margins, “Advertising is the way of the Future,” quoting Mother Superior herself. I underline the word Future. Beside my marginalia is a section from the book of Ecclesiastes. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after! The word Advertising is right beside the citation: Ecclesiastes 1:11. As I lift my pen, Father G. points to the television screen and is about to speak, but perhaps sensing that Mother Superior is on a roll, he humbly lifts his hand to be acknowledged like a student.

  “Do you believe the Sisters could send us some of the actual advertisements if we requested them?”

  “Oh, yes. Certainly. I can get on that right away, Father.” She turns to Father B. and nods to indicate that she will provide him with copies as well, but he stares blankly at the screen and at his own notebook, which has been divided by a black line into two columns: Pros and Cons. Up to now, I notice, sneaking a glance over Sister Sarah’s shoulders, he’s written nothing on either side, only a doodle resembling a sun with spikes around the globe. Sister Josie has copied down two or three pages of notes for him already. Mother Superior, indicating her earnestness, pauses to write on a yellow Post-It note Father G.’s request.

  “Good. Good.”

  She presses the Forward button. The next billboard features a young woman, her hair tied back in a straight ponytail across her neck, held by a white barrette. Her hair is blonde and shiny, as in the advertisements for shampoo and conditioner that we see in magazines and on the samples that Sister Katherine obtained at the mall. “They were just giving them away. For free!” she said each time she dispensed one of the little packets. “I asked for a box for us Sisters. You should have seen their faces. I told them we use tons of shampoo to keep our hair healthy.” The girl in the picture is beautiful, approximately twenty years of age, probably the same age I was when I entered here, although I wasn’t half as good-looking. “Airbrushed,” I hear Sister Sarah whisper to Sister Maria beside her, and I wonder if it’s sacrilegious to use the technique on a religious ad, whether it’s dishonest. Scattered across the picture’s background are flowers and animals, a red rose and a white rose crossed over one another, a dolphin and a sheep—the former leaping out of the water, the latter jumping over a fence. Written in a vibrant green on top of this collage is: “Are you living the Good Life?”

  “The ads are particularly directed at the youth, the future of the Church. As you can see, these ads comprise aspects of their own culture in order for them to be able to imagine themselves as a part of ours. As the statistics demonstrate . . .”

  Mother Superior turns to smile fondly upon Sister Bernadette. She is the representative demographic. Who cares about recruiting old spinsters and bitter women when you can entice socially conscious bright young teenagers into believing they can change the world, that living inside these walls is living the Good Life? They are do-gooders, and as such, like Sister Bernadette, they make things happen. The only other young woman who’s shown any interest in our convent in the last year is Kim, and she’s desperate with nowhere else to go. This state of affairs makes me think that the responsibilities to the past ought to be discarded for the demands of the present. The thought that I might be part of this past both frightens and thrills me. In the year that Sister Bernadette has been here, after two years as an acolyte before taking her sacred vows, she has outsolicited the other Sisters—except Mother Superior herself, who has thirty-five years of established contacts—in fundraising drives. Sister Bernadette sold the most tickets to our raffle, collected the most donations for the homeless shelter being built in the south end of town, and managed to start up a fund for Catholics who are ill and request alternative medical treatments. She knows the right angles to pull; heartstrings that open purse strings. I take notes. Mother Superior is right; she is the future.

  One of my letters has been returned. Sister Bernadette slipped it under my door this morning, because I did not wish to get up. I’m feeling under the weather, I said. With the stamped and addressed return envelope now back in front of me, I cannot believe it. I had visited the City Archives to filter through the papers from St. X. School for Girls that ended up there after the school went bankrupt. There had been talk before the school filed for bankruptcy about allowing boys into the school, as a way to increase enrolment and revenue. But it was decided that the income generated wouldn’t outweigh the income lost from those parents who desired a same-sex education for their girls. The school was sold to the Catholic school board of the city two years after I left it. The nuns were relocated, the rent being too high to remain there, and new teachers were hired through the school board system. Although the more sensitive material in the files of the school is with the diocese, public archival material, such as school yearbooks, was given to the city. I made do with what was available there.

  Organized by year, the yearbooks were in boxes marked with faded labels. The crest we used to wear on our uniforms was copied on each cover, but the rest of the cover was bland—nothing but a white, blue, or black background and the years it covered. Black-and-white photos of girls from age eleven to sixteen, nuns, and teachers filled the more recent editions. The older yearbooks were more like pamphlets, with a few pages listing various events and transcribed snippets from church services, a Psalm or a quotation from a poet, plus a group photo of the graduating class all dressed in their uniforms, which didn’t change much over the years except that the skirts became slightly shorter. After World War II, instead of a single group photograph there were separate shots of each student and beside each, a name. Checking the yearbooks against some of the school enrolment records, I was able to link names with addresses.

  I told the gentleman who helped me track down the boxes from the archives basement that I was searching out the alumnae of the old school for a reunion. Since the school is now defunct, I said we needed the records in order to make the event happen, and that we planned on holding it at our convent. I told him I realized many of the addresses would be old ones, but it was sometimes surprising the number of people who don’t abandon a place once they’ve put down roots. Perhaps parents, if alive, would forward current information. The post office might be able to track others down. I wore my habit to gain credibility, and it seemed to work. The gentleman, who had a handlebar moustache, quite rare for these times, responded to me with quick attention and an endearing manner. He brought me a cup of coffee and told me not to tell anyone, because they didn’t like food or drink in the archives, then he stopped on his own coffee break to see if I’d made any progress. I wondered if he was Catholic, since my habit hadn’t unnerved him at all. He seemed lonely; there was only one other person on the floor, a city official checking on
some blueprints in another room. Although it’s been a while since a stranger flirted with me, I think he might have been as he brushed against my arm, turning the pages of my own year’s yearbook with me.

  My picture wasn’t in it, because the photographs had been taken the first week of classes. I did, however, find Rachel and Francine and Caroline, as well as other classmates whose names and faces had almost vanished from my memory. It is amazing how you can simply forget another human being if she hasn’t affected your life in any significant way. Yet I was also surprised by the accuracy of my memory; like first love, I had not forgotten a detail of Rachel’s face. Her green eyes held my attention even in the black-and-white photograph in the book, taunting me to take things further. I longed for her, for the girl she was, my only comfort being the proof she and I had lived for a time together. At the outset, I noted down each name and address because the gentleman was looking over my shoulder and I was unwilling to blow my cover for being there. I continued because it occurred to me that even if I had forgotten someone, they might not have forgotten me. How could I tell what knowledge someone else possessed? How could I tell whether someone in a photograph had witnessed a key part of the events on that winter night in Room 313? So I took down all the addresses. The gentleman said he hoped I’d return if I needed anything else. I admired his moustache once again, dark brown with straggling red and white hairs, before I signed out, thankfully giving my first name only, as Sisters do, and left.