by Ron Hansen
—Were you happy to have so much attention?
—Well, no. I had been hoping to present myself to the sisters with Christ’s own plainness and humility.
—But you got instead a pageant.
—Yes.
—And you thought your sisters were passing harsh judgment?
—Even then.
While she and her grand company enter the public side of the church and she walks up the white runner to the prie-dieu, she thinks the sisters are passing harsh judgment and that she must seem too spoiled and rich and vain to take their holy vows; but she kneels and peeks behind the great oak grille to her right and sees that the sisters praying there in the oratory have given no sign of dislike or disillusionment and only the slightest hints of having even acknowledged her presence.
Mass of the Solemnity of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Mother Saint-Raphaël is sitting in choir just above her five novices, her frowning pink face all puckers and creases, and she stands with the others when their freshly shaved priest haltingly walks from his sacristy for the holy sacrifice of the Mass. At the introit she stares at the too-pretty postulant and is surprised to see that she’s weeping with happiness. And she is pleased, too, that this Mariette gives such active and rapt attention to the readings and preface and consecration, kneeling heedfully upright, perceiving each meaning and connotation, tenderly following the holy chalice as it is raised up and presented. She’s twenty pages of a book; she’s half an hour of teaching.
Sister Honoré gestures a pause and then floats her right hand again as she guides the sisters through the “Pange Lingua,” tilting a little to hear the girl who’s asked to join them. She gets another hint of the new postulant’s song, hearing a fair soprano who tightens her throat on the higher notes and slightly mispronounces the Latin c, but seems more practiced than half the novices. She briefly glances at Mariette as she turns another page of the score, and then thinks unwillingly of Sister Alexine, a girl from Strasbourg to whom she taught English, who was expelled from the Motherhouse just before solemn vows because she’d tattooed the Sacred Heart on her heart with purple ink and a hairpin. The choirmistress hushes the contraltos with her hand.
Sister Philomène is again besieged with such distracting thoughts and temptations and disloyalties that she prays before she knows she is praying and she kneels before she knows why. Whereas their new postulant seems such a picture of meekness and holiness and awe as she walks up to receive the Host, that Sister Philomène makes it her Communion prayer that God in His patience and kindness would one day choose to give her, His worst sinner, the grace to be just like Mariette Baptiste.
And then when the High Mass is done, the old priest turns and tentatively eases himself down to the railing again in order to say to the church, “Who asks to be received into the grace and blessings of the religious life as handmaid of the Lord?”
She feels their stares like heat. The postulant stands up from her white-flowered prie-dieu and says, “Mariette Baptiste.”
“Will she now come forward?”
She kneels at the railing as Père Marriott heavily lays his hands on her head and prays to himself in a hoarse whisper before announcing to the public, “Here is Mariette Baptiste whom God has called to Himself. She is putting away the things of this world, giving up her earthly pleasures, perishing out of season. Say adieu to Mariette, whom you have called your niece, your cousin, your friend, your classmate, your confidant. Say adieu to the girl you knew but did not know, the girl you have loved but not as soon nor as much nor as well as her Creator has loved her; the soul that is turning now from Satan’s pomps and empty promises and toward Christ’s service and true promise of eternal life. She is the child born into a sinful world but on this great day she is dying into the holy life of the Sisters of the Crucifixion, and the intercessions of Our Lady of Sorrows, the care of the Christian saints and martyrs, the wisdom and comfort of the Holy Ghost, and the everlasting peace of Our Lord.”
Everyone in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows then walks up to Mariette and kisses her or tenderly pats her hands or asks for remembrance in her prayers. And she sees her father standing in misery by the first station, where Christ was condemned, his forearms crossed over his hot suit and vest, his eyes as red as noise. She goes to him in order to say goodbye, but Dr. Baptiste hurriedly walks away and ducks outside into heat. She turns to the high altar and hears the choir singing the “Te Deum” and sees the old priest inviting her forward with both hands, and she realizes that he has opened the green marble Communion railing. She passes through with joy, without glancing back, genuflecting to Christ in the tabernacle and going to the hidden door of the grille that Mother Céline is holding ajar.
“Welcome, Mariette,” the prioress says, and kisses her on each cheek. And then the Sisters of the Crucifixion step down from their places in the choir and one by one greet Mariette with slight embraces and words of encouragement, until she’s touched by a green-eyed troll of a woman who was a truck gardener in the village before she joined the order as an extern at the age of fifty-six.
Sister Agnès grins up at the new postulant as she whispers, “We’ll be saying the Litany of Our Lady now, Mariette. You come get your things.”
“It’s Mar-iette.”
“What did I say?”
“Mare-i-ette, like a horse. It’s Mar-iette, like a flaw.”
“Easy to remember, isn’t it,” Sister Agnès says.
She takes Mariette to the haustus room just next to the refectory and she smiles as she skates her hand over a white fluting of watered silk. “Such a pretty dress.”
“Annie wore it when she asked to enter.”
“Who?”
“Mother Céline. She’s my sister.”
Sister Agnès just smiles.
“Shall I take it off?”
“Yes; of course. And your shoes and stockings. Everything.” Sister Agnès then goes out, saying she’ll return in a Paternoster.
Mariette diffidently takes off her shoes and stockings by tilting onto one foot and then the other, for there is no parlor furniture in the haustus room, only a grand piano, gray stone walls, prettily stained windows, and a great painted Christ on a crucifix. She uneasily gets out of her dress and underthings and she is a girl again, four years old and staring at the Christ in her mother’s room. She touched his pink mouth, the pink rent in his side, and then she touched her own mouth. She touched underneath her skirt.
She kneels on the oak plank floor.
—Was she in ecstasy, Sister Agnès?
—You ask too much of a simple woman.
—Would you please describe what you saw?
Sister Agnès hunches along the hallway skidding a ship’s trunk just ahead of her sandals, then knocks softly on the haustus room’s door and tows the ship’s trunk inside.
Mariette is kneeling on the floor, unclothed and seemingly unconscious as she yields up one hand and then the other just as if she were being nailed like Christ to a tree.
Mariette hears the door gently touching shut and sees Sister Agnès sidling toward her with green eyes shyly on the floor and a great bulk of black clothing held against the wide gate of her hips. “Excuse me,” she says, “but I have duties. Eight hours a day you pray.”
With some embarrassment, Mariette stands up from the floor and hides her nakedness from the extern as Sister Agnès wordlessly takes the new postulant’s dress and crinolines from her and Mariette gets into a black muslin habit that smells richly of potash soap, then steps into some black rope sandals and knots a black rope cincture at her waist. She says without certainty, “Done,” and only then does Sister Agnès peer at her.
“Everything fits?”
She pauses. “You wear no underthings or stockings?”
“We dress simply here in summer. Your feet are too cold?”
She shakes her head.
“Your first winter is the hardest. Chilblains and pneumonia. Even w
ith the furnace on. Externs have it easier there. We live in the old calefactory.”
“Where’s that?”
“Just outside the true priory, next to the visitation parlor. We’re widows, us externs, or we have pasts, or we don’t have educations, so we please God by praying a little less and serving Him a good deal harder.” She peers sideways at the new postulant as she seems to revise what she was prepared to say. “Mariette Baptiste. Your family have French in them? You can speak it?”
“Some.”
“And you can read, too?”
She nods.
“Ho, you’ll be one of the pets then. Especially for the old ones and them that’s just here from Brittany. My job in the convent is, I think you say, blanchisseuse. Which is?”
“Laundress.”
She smiles with odd mirth and hands Mariette a torn and too-often folded sheet of paper dated 1901 and headed, “Trousseau personnel d’une soeur de la crucifixion.” Written in underneath is an inventory of twenty-one items that Mariette translates for the extern as Sister Agnès hunts in the trunk for another habit noir, the hardwood work shoes called sabots, one cotton and one flannel chemise de nuit, and handkerchiefs, old wool stockings, hand-knitted gloves, a great black cape, and a gray bathrobe with a tattered hem and a faint bloodstain on the front. And then Sister Agnès withdraws a black scarf from the trunk and gets on her tiptoes to float it over the girl’s hair, speedily tying it behind Mariette’s ears just as a kitchen witch would, just as Mariette has seen a fruit picker do after having intimacies with a foreman in tree shade.
Sister Agnès grins at her shame and says, “You are Christ’s peasant now.”
She then stands apart from the new postulant and says in a practiced way that their Reverend Mother insists that the sisters have purity and cleanliness uppermost in their daily thoughts. The convent should be spotless, the gardens tended, the air free of stink and smoke and noise. Each is to change her habit every few days and wash herself with soap at night just before Vespers and again upon rising so she will not be infested. She is not to adorn her hair. She is not to tempt the sin of pride with perfumes or rouge or time misspent at the mirror. Especially, she is not to tempt their holy priest with pretty wiles and movements and flattery as Satan may invite a young woman to do. She should expect loneliness and sadness and illness and hard use. She should expect, too, that she will be tempted to have particular affection for some of her sisters. Such affections are not permitted. For Jesus Christ ought to be their grandest passion, just as la sainte volonté de Dieu, God’s holy will, ought to be their only desire.
“Have you understood Mother’s holy rules, Mariette?”
“I have.”
“You’re quick, you are. Your eyes say so. Have you any questions?”
“When will I be cutting my hair?”
“You’ll keep it as a postulant, just as you’ll keep your own name. You do things right and one day in six months or so, you’ll join us as a novice, and you’ll get your religious name and we’ll all have fun with the scissors. And now this poor old sinner will have to go prepare your feast, and you’ll have to be going to the infirmarian to prove that you’re a virgin.”
She is taken to the infirmary by a sweet, fat, toad-eyed novice named Sister Hermance who trundles ahead of Mariette down a hallway, skimming her knuckles along the white walls, and then slows after a turning until she’s walking next to the postulant. She hides her mouth behind her hand to confide, “Have you begged God to grant you a great thing today?”
Mariette just looks interestedly at her.
“When I joined the order I prayed to go away from home and have home totally forget me. I have been praying since for humiliations and hardships and perfect atonement for my sins. And perhaps, too, consumption and an early death.” She thinks for a second or two and asks, “Is it too much, Mariette?”
She shrugs. “I have been praying to be a great saint.”
Sister Hermance peers at her seriously. “Such pride, Mariette! You surprise me.”
She smiles. “I’ll try to be irresistible.”
Sister Hermance goes ahead again. “We will be silent together now.” And at another turning she invites Mariette to go past her into a six-windowed and snow-white infirmary equipped with two empty beds and another in which Sister Saint-Pierre is asleep on her side, a headscarf flattening her frail cloud of white hair.
Sister Aimée is at a scoured porcelain sink, rinsing a tray of silver pipettes and scissors and tweezers with hot water from a teakettle. She fleetingly looks at the postulant, then puts the teakettle in the sink and unpins her gray sleeves over forearms and hands that are orange with freckles. She glimpses Sister Saint-Pierre as she whispers, “She has a stomach complaint. American wine, she says. Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been ill at all this past year?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Just as we all are.”
“Your mother died how?”
“Cancer.”
Sister Aimée says, “Requiescat in pace,” and considers a two-page medical report that is atop a stack of white pillows and gray woolen blankets. “So you’re Mother Céline’s sister.”
“She’s twenty years older.”
“Amazing.” She frowns at an item and flatly says, “Headaches?”
“Occasionally.”
“Trouble sleeping?”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Are you taking medications?”
“No.”
She turns a page and looks up from the signature. “Dr. Claude Baptiste. Your father?”
“You have to go forty miles for another.”
“Wasn’t it awkward being examined by him?”
“Yes.”
Sister Aimée stares at her, and then she says, “I just got here from Maryland. I haven’t met him.” She reads a sentence and turns to the postulant again. “Will you please show me your nails?”
Mariette holds out her hands and Sister Aimée dents the pink of a nail until it whitens. “You have to get permission to fast from our prioress or from Père Marriott in confession. And of course that is also true for trials and mortifications. Will it be possible for you to work at hard labor?”
“I hope so.”
“Me too,” Sister Aimée says, and she pens a note on a blank line. “Are there foods you don’t eat?”
“No.”
“Are there extremes when you menstruate?”
She shrugs.
The old woman weakly asks for help in French and Sister Aimée hastens to her.
Mariette shies her eyes away as Sister Saint-Pierre is rolled to her back, and she peruses a tall blue-paned cabinet of tiered pills and balsams and ointments. Each has been classified under an adjective: Alexipharmic, Anesthetic, Antipyretic, Cathartic, Emetic, Epispastic, Soporific. Everything else is placed just where it would be in her father’s surgery. She hears Sister Aimée say in French that the new postulant is here, and Mariette turns to see Sister Saint-Pierre sitting up a little and smiling at her with gray teeth. A half-century gardening in hard sun and weather has spiderwebbed her skin with wrinkles.
“Enchantée, Soeur Saint-Pierre,” Mariette says. “Comment allez-vous?”
“Malade, mademoiselle. L’estomac.”
“Je vous plains.” I’m sorry for you.
Sister Saint-Pierre shrugs and says, “Tout pour Jesus.” Everything for Jesus.
Sister Aimée goes back to her medical forms and jots a note, then regards Mariette with great seriousness as she asks, “Will you please take down your hair?”
Mariette unties Sister Agnès’s knot in the scarf, untwists and unplaits the tight chignon at her nape, and shakes her chocolate-brown hair loose.
Sister Aimée walks up to Mariette and says, “Excuse my familiarity,” and fully inspects the new postulant’s hair and skin and teeth. And then she stares out at green spruce trees as she presses her thumbs and finger
tips along the girl’s jaw and throat and gently probes both breasts. She says, “We have heat and hot barley tea here in the winter if you get too cold. We also have some herbs and powders and syrups. And that’s all. The idea of having me as a doctor adds to disease a new terror.” She pauses. “We pray you stay healthy.”
“And you, Sister.”
“Thanks.” While Mariette puts her black headscarf on again, Sister Aimée takes up the medical report and tosses it on a desktop. She says, “And now I think Sister Hermance will show you to your cell.”
Mariette hesitates until she sees that Sister Saint-Pierre is again sleeping. She whispers, “Weren’t you going to ask if I’m a virgin?”
Sister Aimée assesses Mariette. “I assume you are?”
Mariette says nothing and then she says, “Yes.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” says Sister Aimée, and she simpers as she puts towels away.
Sister Hermance grins as she greets her again. “I have been trying not to hear,” she says. She’s holding a rosary as she hurries down the hallway.
—She is in love with you. Our Sister Hermance.
—Is it true? Well, yes. I see now. She has a very great heart.
Mariette’s cell is a nine-by-nine room just down the hallway from the oratory, with one eastern window with a bleared and pebbled and watery view of green pasture and flourishing woods that hold a slow river in them as a hand holds a stick. Whitewash has been painted over the plaster walls but the joists and high ceiling planks are shellacked oak and mahogany. A fractured and hoof-scarred tack room door has been nailed to two sawhorses and a palliasse of straw placed on top for the new postulant’s bed, just as in the other rooms. White cotton sheets and a child’s feather pillow are tucked underneath a taut blanket made of gray felt. White paint hides the hundred-year-old wood of a tilting pine armoire that stands as high as she does. Next to Mariette’s palliasse on the floorboards are a tin basin holding a tan block of soap and an ironed towel, and an hourglass, a box of tallow candles, and a great porcelain water jug that is as blue as a patch of noontide sky, she thinks, and the only pretty color in the room. A holy water stoup is next to the doorjamb, and just a few feet above Mariette’s pillow is a hideous Spanish cross and a painted Christ that is all red meat and agony.