by Ron Hansen
She has been given a Holy Bible, a red prayerbook she can slip into her pocket, and an English translation of The Way of Perfection, Saint Teresa of Avila’s handbook for contemplative prayer. She has not been given a pen or ink or paper or so much as a scrap of mirror. She has been given nothing to sit on. Even on this hot summer day she cannot get used to the coldness of the floor.
Sister Hermance scuttles about the cell giving titles to the furnishings and illustrating how they’re used, as if Mariette’s head is filled with feathers. She seems to be playing house in a bossing way as she teaches Mariette how she ought to hang her few things inside the armoire, arranges Mariette’s hairbrush and toothbrush and nail file and scissors, and jams a brick into a door that—against the rules—insists on shutting.
She solely talks to make certain that Mariette understands that she is only to sleep on the palliasse; she is not to sit or pray or weep on it, she is to touch it no sooner than eight at night and get up from it at once when the sisters rise again at two for Matins and Lauds. She tells Mariette that the sisters observe a Great Silence from Compline at night until just after Mixt. She says Mariette ought to try to think of sleep as an illness that the sisters are cured of with the Night Office and again at dawn. She ought, too, to try to empty her head of possessions and the pronouns me and mine. “Everything in this room is ours. Even you, you are ours now.”
“And Christ’s.”
She smiles at Mariette hesitantly just as the Angelus bell slowly rings. Sister Hermance turns in the general direction of the high altar and gets to her knees as she prays, “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”
“And she conceived of the Holy Ghost.”
And then an Ave Maria is said.
Sister Virginie is kneeling with scissors and hyacinths in the garth but she tenderly puts them on the grass as she says to herself, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
Sister Marie-Madeleine holds on to a ripsaw and brushes wood shavings and dust from her gray habit as she privately gives the response, “Be it done unto me according to Thy word.”
In the kitchen the sisters stand by the hot stoves in rolled-up sleeves, their white aprons stained with soups and juices, steam from saucepans wetting their chins. Sister Saint-Léon’s hands are whitely gloved in flour as she prays for the rest, “And the Word was made flesh.”
Cook’s helpers with her respond, “And dwelt amongst us.”
The prioress stands at her desk, her palms held up to her face as though she’s in tears. She says, “Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.” And then she replies in antiphon, “That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.”
Sister Hermance smiles as Mariette recites from girlhood memory, “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”
Sister Hermance holds on to the pine armoire as she wrestles up onto her sandals and steps into the hallway. Seeing that Mariette is not following, she turns and touches her five joined fingertips to her mouth in the handsign for eating.
Wild quail in spiced vinegar are served along with hot bread and green peas and a grand cru wine from the Haut Medoc. And Sister Saint-Michel is in a great tree of a pulpit high above the dining room, just beginning the weeks-long Lectio Divina of Dame Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. She announces, “Chapter Two. The time of the revelations, and Julian’s three petitions.”
“Dame Julian writes: ‘These revelations were shown to a simple and uneducated creature on the eighth of May 1373. Some time earlier she had asked three gifts from God: one, to understand his passion; two, to suffer physically while still a young woman of thirty; and, finally, to have as God’s gift three wounds.’”
Six refectory tables are arranged so that the sisters sit nearly against three walls that are as white as an unwritten page. Effaced and still and interior, the sisters do not talk and do not turn from their food and do not raise their eyes from their dishes as kitchen workers in white aprons hush their way from place to place, setting down saucers of red grapes and browning pears and soft goat cheeses.
Mariette is sitting at the main table between Mother Céline and the mistress of novices, Mother Saint-Raphaël, and she peeks at their hands now and then to ensure she’s doing the things she’s always done in the religious and grammatical way.
Sister Saint-Michel reads: “‘The second petition came to me with much greater urgency. I quite sincerely wanted to be ill to the point of dying, so that I might receive the last rites of Holy Church, in the belief—shared by my friends—that I was in fact dying. There was no earthly comfort I wanted to live for. In this illness I wanted to undergo all those spiritual and physical sufferings I should have were I really dying, and to know, moreover, the terror and assaults of the demons.’”
Half the priory is staring up at the reader with fascination and horror when the prioress says, “Satis.” Enough. And Mariette sees Sister Saint-Michel obediently shut the book as the older sisters immediately put down their forks and iron out their napkins with their palms. They all stand up for Mother Céline’s prayer of thanksgiving and then walk out in silent pairs.
Méridienne. Sister Catherine and Sister Saint-Estèphe are in Empire chairs in the chapter room. A briarwood ship’s clock ticks on the fireplace. Window drapes of Chantilly lace flush and deform on the breeze. Sister Saint-Estèphe’s black veil pleats against a chartreuse head pillow as she sleeps. Sister Catherine’s hands are turned up on her knees. Each withered palm is a pink nest of wrinkles.
Eight professed sisters amble through horsetail grass as high as their thighs. Hundreds of yellow butterflies are scheming through the field and alighting on their gray habits. One sister points to a woodpecker and another shades her eyes but cannot find it. Talk. One sister pokes her teeth with a grass stem. And then the wildest sister rejoices and whirls and flumps down in the horsetail. Even at a distance their rich laughter peals like piano notes.
Crows hunt the shade of green corn and pant in the hot sun with open beaks, as if holding prized huckleberries.
A marmalade tomcat is sitting in his haunt by a nesting place in the old sheep’s meadow. Yards away the still woods drowse with insect whine and the chirr of cicadas, and his tail rises and idly settles, his green-yellow eyes become slits.
Mariette is sitting in hot tree shade, chasing gnats with one hand while she pursues another rosary bead and prays for humility. Elegant Sister Saint-Léon is lying back on her elbows in short bluegrass nearby, trying to teach the new postulant a history of the religious order that she already knows. Sister Saint-Léon dries her forehead with a handkerchief she keeps on her wrist with a rubber band and she tells Mariette in French that the Comtesse de Rossignol used her great wealth to organize the Sisters of the Crucifixion nearly two hundred years ago in Dijon. Their Motherhouse is now in Louvain. Even today they are not a large order; hardly three hundred nuns are listed in their directoire des religieuses. She thinks the Sisters of the Crucifixion have been in Belgium and America since the properties of the religious orders were stolen just after that horrible revolution and in the Empire years. And then there were the harsh restrictions of the Waldeck-Rousseau laws in 1901. Thirteen of the sisters here have fled France and arrived in this country since then. And what a purgatory it is for them.
Sister Saint-Luc walks up with a wreath of braided yellow dandelions that she crowns Mariette with as she kneels. Mariette bashfully smiles and asks her, “Comme il faut?”
“Très jolie,” says Sister Saint-Luc. She is a simple and perpetually happy woman with skin as brown as cinnamon and blond hair on her upper lip and chin.
“We have been talking about the history, Luke.”
Sister Saint-Luc says seriously, “I have the secret of how to stay in our order, Marie. Have you any idea what it is?”
Mariette says no.
“You must never ever leave,” she says, and smiles so enormously that Mariette can see she has no chewing teeth.
Sister Saint-Léon sighs. “Saint Luke and I are cousins. We have nothing else in common.”
“I have been her disciple since I was three,” says Sister Saint-Luc. “She has been my penance.” And then she gives the postulant a handwritten note from the prioress. “She says you are expected.”
While the others have another half hour of recreation, Mariette is sent to the prioress’s suite, next to the visitation parlors and the house of the extern sisters. She waits for Mother Céline on a flowered ottoman and takes affectionate stock of a grand office that has plush heavy chairs, a pink velvet sofa with four chintz pillows, two brass floor lamps with tasseled lampshades, and old newspapers from Paris and New York City and Rome draped over bamboo sticks. Everything removed from the scriptorium is here in a high wall of science and economics textbooks, French and English romances and poetry, old treatises on histrionics and phrenology and animal magnetism.
She hears horses pass the convent at a trot. She hears under that four or five stringed instruments being practiced down the hallway. Schubert, she thinks. She gets up and opens The Ethics of Belief and abstractly turns pages until Mother Céline hurries in like a regal woman of property, going over what are apparently a kitchen inventory and some sisters’ notes that she’s just been passed. Without irritation she says, “I have entered the room.”
Mariette smiles uncertainly.
“Curtsy.”
Mariette does.
“We say ‘Benedicite Dominus’ in greeting. The Lord bless you. You’ll say ‘Benedicite,’ and the superior nun will say, ‘Dominus.’ Upon leaving one’s company or classroom, you’ll hear the superior nun pronounce, ‘Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.’ Our help is in the name of the Lord. And you’ll reply, ‘Qui fecit coelum et terram.’ Who made heaven and earth.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother.”
“Sit down, please,” the prioress says, and Mariette complies.
Mother Céline seems a glamorous actress playing a nun, or one of the grand ladies of inheritance that Mariette has seen in paintings of English society. Without her black veil and gray habit, the prioress would seem a genteel and handsome mother of less than forty, blond and lithe and Continental, but tense and initiating, too, with green eyes that seem to strike what they see. She was Annette Baptiste and a junior at Vassar when Mariette was born, Sister Céline and a novice when their mother died, the prioress of Our Lady of Sorrows since Mariette was twelve. She arranges and grooms her papers on the green felt of the desktop and then she briskly sits opposite Mariette and puts her hands on her knees as she asks, “Are you happy?”
“Oh yes.”
She smiles. “We’re happy, too. Every new postulant affirms our own vocations and gives efficacy to our prayers.”
“Everyone has been very nice.”
“We must seem to talk and feast all the time.”
Mariette shakes her head. “I presumed today was an exception.”
“We aren’t meant to pine away and die here. We’re meant to live in the heartening fullness of God. Who is life and love and happiness.”
“I know.”
“We seem to mystify people who are slaves to their pleasures. We often work too hard and rest too little, our food is plain, our days are without variety, we have no possessions nor much privacy, we live uncomfortably with our vows of chastity and obedience; but God is present here and that makes this our heaven on earth. We hope you’ll find the same welcome and peace here that we have, and that you’ll soon develop a genuine and reverent affection for our priory and for your sisters. We pray, too, that soon it will seem you’ve given up very little and, as always with our good God, gained a hundredfold.”
Everything seems practiced, as if she has said just this to a half-dozen other postulants, but Mariette pleasantly listens and says, “Oh, already I feel that! This is paradise!”
Mother Céline smiles but stares discerningly at her sister for half a minute. And she asks, “Are you and Father still on good terms?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a reason why he wasn’t present for the ceremonies?”
Mariette pauses before saying, “Papa is a good man, I think, but he has been against my religious vocation since I first began talking about it. He said he’d given the sisters his first daughter and he thought that was enough.”
The prioress seems to be trying for sympathy, but her stare is tenacious and penetrates like a nail. “That must have been disappointing for you.”
Mariette shrugs. “God isn’t finished with him yet.”
Mother Céline sits back in the assessing way of a jurist. She says, “I have a letter from Father that accuses you of being too high-strung for our convent. And he is troubled by gossip from friends and patients about trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament, and, as he put it, ‘inner wrenchings.’ I have laid all that aside, of course, or you wouldn’t be here, but I would like to hear what you have to say about his qualms and hesitations.”
Mariette suddenly seems slow and dull and oddly abstract, like a wrong sum at the tail end of a child’s arithmetic. She says, “I have forgiven him for them.”
“Was he dishonest in his description?”
“I have no opinion, Reverend Mother.”
“Was he duped then?”
She just stares.
“We won’t be, Mariette. Secrets are impossible here. Your mistress, Mother Saint-Raphaël, will be watching you closely these next few months. You’ll be put to test many times. We have wonderful plans and expectations for you, but you will have to prove worthy of them. Don’t try to be exceptional; simply be a good nun. Saint Ignatius Loyola gives us the right prescription: Work as if everything depended on you, but pray as if everything depended on God.”
“I shall.”
“I’ll take you to the oratory now.”
—Were you surprised by the tone?
—She did seem cold.
—Were you hurt?
—Oh no! I was so pleased to see our dear God using my sister for my own holiness and good. Everything seemed to be saying to me, She will be a grace for you.
Mother Céline rises up and holds open the door for the postulant before preceding her down the hallway. She grazes the stone with her knuckles as she says, “We try to walk these halls as silently as the Holy Ghost. And we stay close to the walls here in humility and in graciousness to our sisters who may be talking with God.”
Sisters Honoré, Saint-Denis, Véronique, and Philomène are gaily leaving the haustus room with their violins and viola and bows tucked underneath their arms. Sister Saint-Denis sees the prioress and gravely curtsies, and then the choirmistress and the others do, too.
Mother Céline half raises her hand in blessing and asks, “What was that you were practicing?”
“Franz Schubert,” Sister Honoré says. “‘Death and the Maiden.’ Was it good, Reverend Mother?”
“Oh indeed. Wonderful. You resurrected her.”
Wild, high-strung, deferential laughter follows, and Mother Céline frowningly turns from it.
Troughs of sunlight angle into the oratory like green and blue and pink bolts of cloth grandly flung down from the high, painted windows. Still present are the wood oil smells and habit starch and an incense of styrax and cascarilla bark. Mother Céline and her postulant genuflect together and Mariette’s right knee touches down on a great red Persian carpet that seems as warm as a sleeping cat. She sees faint gyres of dust in the hot upper air.
The prioress says, “We praise God in song here seven times a day. At two a.m. for Matins and Lauds, and then for the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day: Prime, Terce, Sext, and Nones. We then have Vespers at sunset, and Compline after collation and just before bed. Every week we go through the whole Psalter. Sister Honoré plans to teach you the rudiments of pl
ainchant next week.”
Mother Céline walks forward to the right-hand choir while she tells her sister, “Externs, novices, and postulants are the first to enter. You all kneel in the first rows.” She puts her hand on the second stall in from the upper end. “You’ll be here, Mariette.”
Mariette exultantly walks around to her stall, sitting testingly in it and skidding both hands along its shined rail. She kneels and prays for greater religious fervor and that the joy she feels now will comfort her in the difficult times ahead. And then she feels the prioress kneel beside her and finds only kindness in Annie’s eyes.
She asks Mariette, “Were you called just recently?”
“Early,” she says. “Continually. Ever since my confirmation God has been persuading me.”
Mother Céline fondly touches a hand onto hers and holds it there. “We must thank Our Lord for the honor of inviting both of us to serve Him here.”
“I shall. Every day.”
“Seeing you here is such a pleasure for me.”
Mariette smiles. “I have missed you so much.”
Mother Céline withdraws her hand from her sister’s. “I’ll seem subdued and distant. We’ll hardly ever talk. You’ll think I don’t love you because I won’t show it.” The prioress turns her head and then stands up. “Try to remember that I have many sisters in my family now. Don’t expect too much from me.”
At two p.m. the sisters join them in choir for Nones, but Sister Honoré tells Mariette not to join in the psalms until she has been taught the Latin and the ugly chains of square black notes that sing like the hymns of the seraphim.