by Ron Hansen
She listens hard, however, just as she did as a child in the church pew, sitting with Dr. Baptiste on a holy day, smelling his iodine and tweed and Turkish cigarette tobacco, peering beyond the oaken grille at Annie or Sister Catherine or Mother Saint-Raphaël and hearing these same gray sisters in the yearnings and elations of plainsong.
When there’s meditation and a shutting of the Psalters, Mariette looks up at the high west windows. Evangelists are represented in the ox with wings of Luke and the lion with wings of Mark, the high-soaring eagle of John, and Christ’s genealogy in the human figure of Matthew. Opposite them in the upper east windows are Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah; and high above Our Lady’s green marble altar to the south and its beautifully carved limewood Pietà from Germany is the glorious rose window and its iridescent peacock in violet, navy blue, and emerald green, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. She smells linseed oil and hard soap and frankincense and tallow. She is in a great room of thirty-three women, but she has never heard such silence. West from Mariette in the upper choir stalls Sister Ange, who handles the horses and whose mind has become a jumble, is grinning across the oratory and agreeably nodding encouragement, as if their postulant is a child newly toddling forward with a firm hold on her mother’s forefinger. Sister Véronique holds tight to prayer, her full lips forming unspoken words, her half-glasses glinting silver. Sister Marie-Madeleine hunkers over her knees and hides her face in her hands while Sister Catherine hunches over a book just inches from her nose and harriedly hunts another page.
And Mariette thinks, Here you are, and here you’ll stay.
Mariette is still saying prayers of thanksgiving in the oratory when Sister Geneviève kneels heavily next to her and after a Memorare says, “We have a secret place.”
And Mariette is taken up to the campanile, where the hot wind has the pressure of hands. Sister Pauline is skulking up there already and getting on her tiptoes as she tilts out over the railing and says in an itsy voice, “We’re being bad.”
White sheep are in a green pasture, hardly moving, and at a great distance some Sunday farmers in dark galluses and white shirts and ties are slowly walking a blond hayfield and using red handkerchiefs on their high-button shoes. Everything slants up into hillsides of green fir and cedar and the gray-blue haze that slurs the horizon. A peregrine falcon is suspended on the air, hunting some hidden prey, and suddenly twists into a dive of such speed that Mariette loses track of it until the falcon has flared high up into the sky again.
Sister Geneviève is still huffing breathlessly as she shoos pigeons that are discussing their presence and waddling along the rafters. She is a great soft chair of a woman, frank and hearty and jolly, with sun-browned skin that is goose-bumped with pimples, and with gruesome nails that she tears with her teeth. She gives Mariette a sideways glance and asks, “Were you talking with Mother Céline earlier?”
She’s puzzled but says yes.
Sister Pauline turns. “Oh, truly? You’re so lucky!”
Sister Geneviève says, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she.”
“She is.”
“She knows we’re up here. She knows everything. So does Mother Saint-Raphaël. Even what you’re thinking.”
“Especially about boys,” says Sister Pauline.
“We talk about old boyfriends up here,” says Sister Geneviève. “We talk about what we miss. Whiskers. Dancing. Everything.”
Sister Pauline turns again to the railing. “We saw a whole picnic from up here once. We couldn’t tell the girl’s age, but the guy was a soldier. Wearing a tan uniform and those high boots and eating chicken with her on a green plaid blanket. And then kissing. She was nearly underneath him.”
Mariette smiles tauntingly and says, “You don’t suppose it was me, do you?”
Sister Geneviève grins. “You don’t mean it.”
“Was he handsome?”
“She seemed to think so.”
“And tall?”
Sister Geneviève squints inquiringly at Sister Pauline. Sister Pauline seems to presume height, and then she’s positive. Yes.
“Are you sure it was a green picnic blanket?”
“She’s teasing us,” Sister Geneviève says. “You’re just trying to be mysterious, aren’t you, Mariette.”
She shifts her face from theirs and doesn’t say.
“Oh, tell!” Sister Pauline cries.
“She’s a kidder, Sister P. She’s getting our goat.”
And then Sisters Philomène, Hermance, and Léocadie join them and titter and talk as Mariette smilingly watches. She sees that everything is a subject, but never for long; great hurts are manufactured from slights; giggling is the general music; gossip is encouraged and told and then halfheartedly regretted. Sister Léocadie is a tagalong and an afterthought who seems to be forgetting a sentence even as she gives it her full attention. Sister Philomène is no sound at all, a tall and gentle intellectual with a skewed right eye who trembles frailly up there, like a flame. Sister Hermance seems plainly in awe of the others and wears the constantly surprised and stricken look of a girl who’s just been slapped. “Mother Saint-Raphaël was pretty when she was a girl,” she says. “You can tell by the way she carries herself.”
Sister Geneviève says, “You can tell she was rich, is all. She carries herself like she was carried.”
“Who?” Sister Léocadie asks.
Sister Pauline turns to Mariette. “Just try to stay on her good side.”
“She’ll love Mariette,” Sister Hermance insists.
“Who are we talking about?” Sister Léocadie asks.
Sister Geneviève tells Mariette, “Mother Saint-Raphaël will take you aside someday and teach you about yourself and you’ll turn out to be just like she was.”
“She’s been everybody twice,” Sister Pauline says.
“She has great empathy,” Sister Philomène says.
“She wasn’t me,” Sister Léocadie says.
Sister Geneviève looks at Léocadie for a hard second and the willowy novice withdraws inside herself.
Sister Philomène smiles abashedly at Mariette and says, “You’ll love it here. Truly.”
“You get stale though,” Sister Geneviève says. “You get tired of the routine. We see the same people hour after hour. And you can predict just what they’ll do.”
“Even the finicky way they eat,” says Sister Pauline.
Sister Geneviève continues, “We all begin to talk alike after a while. We have our periods at the same time. You look at some of the older nuns and you can hardly tell them apart. You’re the gossip of the summer. Exciting things just don’t happen here that often.”
“Except in prayer,” Sister Hermance says, and then hears a haughty piety in her tone and pinks in embarrassment.
Mariette looks out from the high window of the campanile to the horse paddock. Externs are there, simply talking. Sister Sabine lies back in blossoms and holds a hand up to block the sun. Sister Zélie is sitting with her knee up to her chin as she tends to a hurt toe. Sister Claudine is kneeling in wild oats and weeds that are tilting and striving under the wind. Here and there Mariette sees nuns on their own, sketching the old printery in the woods, gently toweling the glossy brawn of a chestnut-brown horse’s neck, fishing the dull green pond with a kitchen string and a float, Sister Antoinette worriedly strolling the vineyard and holding the grapes like a half-pound of pearls. Sister Anne is sitting in the garth with Sister Virginie. She opens a railwayman’s watch and gets up to hurry toward the campanile, but Sister Virginie shades her eyes and questions the sexton and she pauses. “Sister Anne’s on her way,” Mariette says.
“We’re having a recital,” Sister Philomène says.
“Shall we go then?”
Sister Pauline hesitates but says at last, “We wanted to touch your hair.”
Mariette blushes and demurs until Sister Geneviève defends their asking by saying, “We’ve just cut ours.” And so Mariette unties her scarf and shakes loose her
chocolate-brown hair and she smiles with them as they tentatively float their hands over it and trail it out fluently on the wind.
Evening. She sets out the tin plates and tin cups for collation, then stands in the kitchen with a hunk of rye bread and soup bowl of cassoulet, and tilts close to the slightly ajar kitchen door in order to hear Sister Saint-Michel read Dame Julian of Norwich.
She hears: “‘When I was halfway through my thirty-first year God sent me an illness which prostrated me for three days and nights. On the fourth night I received the last rites of Holy Church as it was thought I could not survive till day. Since I was still young I thought it a great pity to die—’”
And then Sister Saint-Stanislas interrupts by touching the postulant’s wrist and irritably making the handsigns, Serve, priest.
While Sister Dominique uses wooden paddles to shovel hot bread loaves from the oven, Mariette places a china plate on a teakwood tray and overlays it with green cabbage and an arrangement of tinned sardines. She goes to the great caldron and scoops cassoulet into a soup bowl that she centers on the china plate, then wraps a hot loaf of bread inside a white napkin that she ties into rabbit ears. She sticks a hand inside the indoor well and snags up a yard of twine. Twisting from the wet knot at the end is a trickling bottle of a blond Sauterne.
Sister Saint-Stanislas is standing over the tray, adding a china jar of wildflowers and the holy day silverware. She says in handsigns, Eyes, no, priest.
The priest’s house is empty when Mariette taps on the ajar door and peeks inside, so she takes up books and papers from his dining table and sets out the dinner plates and the Sauterne.
She is pleased then to think of herself as the priest of the house and she walks about it handling the priest’s soiled and cracked and floor-tossed possessions. She turns a kitchen lamp up. She feels the tin cold of an icebox and hears ice water trickling into the pan underneath. She tries a key on his black Blickensderfer typewriter and jumps a little at the noise. She strokes an orange mandolin with green detailing and pigtailed strings, and Dutch clay pipes and tamping nails and a jar of tawny tobacco. His books are French, Greek, and Latin philosophy texts; A Child’s Garden of Verses; exemplary sermons by Pope Gregory XVI; French commentaries on Holy Scripture; books by Augustine, Duns Scotus, and Peter Canisius; fourteen volumes of Thomas Aquinas, but some with uncut pages; green-mildewed novels by Anatole France; The Prisoner of Zenda; a French translation of an Englishman’s journey to Sicily and Malta; Histoire de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche. She kneels on his prie-dieu and touches open his breviary. She recites aloud the first words of the fifty-first psalm, “Miserere mei Deus.” Have mercy on me, O Lord.
And then she hears Père Marriott ask from the doorway, “Latina legere scires?” You know how to read Latin?
She blushes and puts the book as it was. “Vix quicquam,” she says. Little or nothing. She turns and sees the priest with his white collar unsnapped like a horseshoe, a tan suede of dust on his black riding boots.
Marriott stoops over the china plate and smells the tinned sardines. “But you know the idioms,” he says. “You are being too modest, I think.”
—And that is when you told me?
—Yes.
—Just for the record, how did you put it exactly?
“I have had an experience.”
The priest raises up the Sauterne and holds it under a tasseled lampshade to read the appellation. “Yes; it has been a great day for you.”
“Earlier,” she says, and she pauses until her tentative silence causes the old priest to look up. She says, “Jesus spoke to me.” She turns away from him and tries to halt her trembling with a hard embrace. She sees a wasp pulsing at a saucer on the floor and denting a white pearl of cream as it drinks. She says, “Ever since I was thirteen, I have been praying to understand his passion. Everything about it. To have a horrible illness so I could feel the horrors and terrors of death just as Christ did. And to have, too, his true contrition for our sins and his great love for us, his children. And yet each time I prayed to share in his hurt and torment, I have been put off by an interior voice saying my time had not come yet. And then one night I prayed to him about joining the Sisters of the Crucifixion. And oh it was wonderful!” She pauses. “Even now I can’t talk about it. Whenever I have tried to in confession, I haven’t been able to utter a word.”
Henri Marriott smiles insincerely and scratches his hair as he stares at the jar of wildflowers and thinks. She is surprised by his pensive calm. At last he asks, “Was your priest sympathetic?”
She shakes her head no.
“Well then, I shall try to be.” Edging around a dining table chair, Marriott gets tiredly onto it and sits with his heels on a rung. “Hear me, Mariette. You are not the first young nun to tell me such things. Especially now in the infancy of your religious vocation, Satan will be tempting you in a hundred ways. When you see Christ or hear Him, you must be mistrusting and wary, for Christ is a Word that does not give voice to the ear but goes directly into the mind. Jesus does not usually speak; Jesus performs and inspires. Also, He does not make Himself present to our human senses but in the holy desires of the will. Jesus impresses His form upon the soul and fills the heart with joy.”
Mariette says nothing.
“Was it like that for you?”
She is mute.
“You must be wary, Mariette. You must stay out of Satan’s eye and try to be pure and sinless. Comprenez vous?” You understand?
“Oui. Je vous comprends. Merci.”
—And you were given pen and ink.
—That’s right.
—Would you please repeat why?
Marriott smiles as he walks to her from a book-jammed secretary, holding green fountain pen and ink bottle atop some sheaves of fine writing paper. “Each night, or when you have a little time, please talk to me in a journal or letters just as you would in confession. I have found such writing quite helpful for other postulants. And then simply deposit the letters in the prioress’s mail slot. Try to remember to put on your envelopes ‘Confessional Matter’ or Mother Céline will perforce read them.”
—So you were not instructed to lie or pretend?
—Exactly the opposite.
—You were not to make up stories? Or try to be interesting?
—No.
—Everything written to me should have been as solemnly true as the sins that you confess in the sacrament of penance.
—Everything was.
She gets into a plain white nightgown after Compline and kneels girlishly on the floor beside a trembling yellow candle flame. She crouches over a blank page with the priest’s green fountain pen tentatively held above the paper as she thinks. She twists a chocolate-brown spill of hair over her head and stays it there with one hand as she touches the pen’s nib down and then speedily writes, the pen slashing across the page without hesitation or correction.
Every day and in the midst of every kind of disobedience and failing, I have asked Jesus to have pity on me and either take my life entirely or, in his justice and mercy, give me a great deal to suffer in atonement for my own foolishness and the sins of the world. While there have been times when he permitted me to enjoy the greatest consolations, there have been times of darkness and silence, too, when I felt disliked and in disfavor and, with hopelessness and pining and tears, I prayed to Jesus from a place that was very near Hell.
You are my dearest and only father on earth now, Père Marriott, but we do not know each other so well yet that I dare say all that I have seen and heard and understood. Oh how I yearn to give you a place in my heart and confide in you and paint in their radiance all of my secrets and experiences! I have been forbidden, however, to do so. At this time I am only permitted to tell you that Our Lord has promised that I will suffer great pain in the course of my life. Christ has told me that soon he will put my faith to the proof and find out whether I truly love him and whether the offering of my heart which I so often have made to him i
s authentic.
Christ said, “You will grow hard, Mariette. You will find yourself afflicted and empty and tempted, and all your body’s senses will then revolt and become like wolves. Each of the world’s tawdry pleasures will invade your sleep. Your memories will be sad and persistent. Everything that is contrary to God will be in your sight and thinking, and all that is of and from God you’ll no longer feel. I shall not offer comfort at such times, but I shall not cease to understand you. I shall allow Satan to harshly attack your soul, and he will plant a great hatred of prayer in your heart, and a hundred evil thoughts in your mind, and terror of him will never leave you.
“You will have no solace or pity, not even from your superiors. You will be tortured by gross outrages and mistreatment, but no one will believe you. You will be punished and humbled and greatly confused, and Heaven will seem closed to you, God will seem dead and indifferent, you will try to be recollected, but instead be distracted, you will try to pray and your thoughts will fly, you will seek me fruitlessly and without avail for I shall hide in noise and shadows and I shall seem to withdraw when you need me most. Everyone will seem to abandon you. Confession will seem tedious, Communion stale and unprofitable; you will practice each daily exercise of worship and devotion, but all through necessity, as if you stood outside yourself and hated what you’d become. And yet you will believe, Mariette, but as if you did not believe; you will always hope, but as if you did not hope; you will love your Savior, but as if you did not love him, because in this time your true feelings will fail you, you will be tired of life and afraid of death, and you will not even have the relief of being able to weep.”
Part 2
Crickets.
Heat.
Something wriggles in the green stew of algae at the water’s edge.