by Ron Hansen
She confesses that at Saturday’s recreation she tried to be entertaining by doing unkind imitations of her religion teacher, the choirmistress, and the mistress of novices. Even through the purple curtain she can see Père Marriott secretly grinning while possibly imagining the slow truckling walk of Sister Saint-Denis, Sister Honoré holding her food near her mouth before suddenly attacking it, the tired sighs and pompous, operatic scorn of Mother Saint-Raphaël.
“Each has some authority over you. Each is your teacher in some way, is she not?”
“Each was easy to do.”
“Well, it is a great temptation in communities. You were probably very amusing. Yes, but you must try to think of these imitations as a kind of disobedience. And just imagine how it hurts Jesus to see you making fun of these holy women that He loves so dearly.”
“Yes, Father. I shall.”
“And your other sins?”
She hesitates for a moment, and then tells him, “I have not been getting consolations from the Mass. I have too little faith or fervor. I feel almost forsaken by God. Spiritually dry.”
Père Marriott sighs. “We hear this from the holiest people. Even as far back as Isaiah we read, ‘Truly, you are a hidden God’. Even Jesus at his death cried out, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We have to be patient at times. We must permit God to rest in our presence. We have to believe that our good God not only loves us but is that which is most intimate to us. And if we truly need Him, there He’ll be. We can always rely on that.”
“Merci bien, Père Marriott.”
“Was there anything else?”
She shakes her head.
Père Marriott assigns the postulant the Litany of the Saints as a penance and then blesses her and absolves her of her sins. And when she is going out, he asks, “Are you writing down your thoughts for me, Mariette?”
She turns to him in surprise but doesn’t say.
“Even the prioress has heard about it. Eventually I shall expect to see some pages.”
“Soon perhaps,” she says.
She writes on a half-sheet of paper, “I have to talk to you!” and she puts it by Mother Céline’s water glass at collation. She sees the prioress read it and think about it and hide the note in her gray habit pocket, and then she sees the prioress smile as Sister Saint-Michel serves her.
Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
Evening recreation and milking stools in the haustus room. Sister Hermance is fashioning straw dolls; Sister Léocadie is jotting “All is well” on six postcards she’s yet to address; Sister Philomène is painting a wholly imaginary Bethlehem of high blue mountains and great waterfalls above a green sward that she’s whitely splotched with sheep. Sister Léocadie appraises it and says, “Sister Véronique will hate that.”
“I haven’t finished.”
“She’ll hate it more when you do.”
And then Sister Pauline shyly walks in from the hallway and says, “We’ve written a playlet. From the Bible. Shall we perform it for you?”
Sister Philomène puts down her paintbrush and says, “Yes, please.”
“Which?” asks Sister Léocadie.
Sister Pauline impishly smiles and whispers, “The Song of Songs.”
“Oh, I like that part,” Sister Hermance says.
Sister Pauline gently pulls the haustus room door and Mariette is glamorously there, her great dark mane of hair in massacre like the siren pictures of Sheba. She’s taken her habit and sandals off and shockingly dressed her soft nakedness in a string necklace of white buttons that are meant to seem pearls and red taffeta robe that is like a bloodstain on linen. The sisters hush as she lounges inside and pinches out some candlewicks and lazily yawns and seems to gaze yearningly over their heads to a foreign country.
And then Sister Geneviève stands in the doorway in her habit but without her veil or cincture or rosary, and with a white bathtowel wildly turbaned around her head. She’s penciled in a dark mustache that Sister Pauline giggles at, but Sister Geneviève seems romantically serious and pining as she plays the Bridegroom and recites: “You ravish my heart, my sister, my promised bride, you ravish my heart with a single one of your glances, with a single pearl of your necklace. What spells lie in your love, my sister, my promised bride! How delicious is your love, more delicious than wine! How fragrant your perfumes, more fragrant than all other spices! Your lips, my promised one, distilled wild honey. Honey and milk are under your tongue; and the scent of your garments is like the scent of Lebanon.”
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Sister Philomène says, but no one pays her the slightest attention.
Sister Geneviève walks in.
Mariette turns to the tall windows and widens her arms as she says in the bride’s part: “Awake, O north wind, come, wind of the south! Breathe over my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my Beloved come into his garden, let him taste its precious fruits.”
Sister Philomène is nudged with gusto by Sister Hermance, but she doesn’t give back the tiniest glance. She thinks how Hermance will be big-eyed; she’ll make a great O of her mouth. “Wink, wink,” Sister Philomène says.
Mariette wearily and despairingly lies down but holds her hands in prayer underneath her chin, and there is a pause until Sister Pauline narrates: “She sleeps, but her heart keeps vigil. And then she hears her Beloved knocking.”
Sister Geneviève exaggerates a manly register in order to say: “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled, for my manly head is damp with dew, my manly locks with the drops of the night.”
Mariette pretends sweet temptation as she sits up and puts a hand to her breast and shakenly recites: “I have taken off my tunic, shall I then put it on? I have washed my feet, shall I then soil them?”
“Oh, go ahead,” says Sister Léocadie. “Just let him in and get on with it.”
Sister Philomène holds her hands to her ears, but Sister Hermance squeals with joy.
Mariette gets up as she says: “My Beloved thrust his hand through the opening, and my heart pounded within me, and I trembled and grew faint when he spoke.” She pretends to pause at a door and peeks out. Sister Geneviève is opposite her. Mariette recites: “I rose up to open to my Beloved, with my hands dripping myrrh, pure myrrh dripping off my fingers and upon the handle of the bolt.” She hesitates, and Sister Geneviève ever so slowly withdraws and turns. Mariette then recites: “When at last I opened to my Beloved, he had departed and disappeared! My soul failed at his flight.” She scurries right and then left while saying: “I sought him but I did not find him, I called to him but he did not answer me.” And she then hides behind her hands. “The gatekeepers discovered me as they made their rounds in the City. They beat me, they hurt me, they took away my habit, they who guard the City ramparts.”
“How frustrating!” says Sister Léocadie.
While Sister Geneviève goes out the door, Mariette directly addresses her audience, saying: “Oh please, I adjure you, my dearest sisters, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you should ever find my Beloved, what shall you tell him…? That I am sick with love.”
And then she gets to her knees below Christ on the crucifix, and one by one the novices get to their knees, too.
Mass of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Evening. Compline. And then Conference.
Each sister keeps to her seat in the choir pews and concentrates on her just-touching knees or the pink and spotted backs of her hands as she recollects her sins. Foot marries foot in the night’s flooding cold.
Wind, and a sigh in the rusting trees just outside the high windows.
Sister Saint-Léon fixes significant effort on pleating a sleeve with fierce pinches.
Sister Agnès tears at a cuticle with her nails. She then irritatedly uses her teeth and sees Mother Saint-Raphaël scowl.
Mariette looks up at the tallow candles overhead. She can hear the wicks hiss as they slowly burn down; she can see a red
ash detach itself and float up in a twist of gray smoke. In the tropics, she’s heard, there are parrots that are as bright blue as some parts of a flame.
Sister Saint-Pierre coughs and coughs again.
Sister Geneviève heaves her great weight onto one thigh and then gets heavily down on her kneeler. She kisses her rosary’s crucifix and pats her forehead and shoulders with a sign of the cross as she says, “Dear God, I humbly ask Your pardon for my sins against You and Your holy Church. And I also beg forgiveness of you, my sisters, for I accuse myself of having committed these wrongs: I have walked too loudly in our hallways and kitchen and have made far too much noise in shutting our doors.”
She bows her head as she awaits the judgment of the sisters, but she hears only silence until Sister Dominique agrees by saying, “She has been most conspicuous this past week,” and some of the sisters giggle.
Eyes tightly shut, Reverend Mother Céline stands at the oaken grille and softly gives praise to the Holy Spirit, touching her joined knuckles with her mouth. She accepts the silence for half a minute and says, “Will someone else help our sister?”
Everyone is still.
Sister Geneviève looks up and says, “Having heard these accusations, my sisters, I beg that you give me a penance.”
The prioress gives it some thought and says, “Sister Geneviève, you are assigned the task of waking us up from our sleep for the next few days, that your noise may be put to holy purpose.”
Sister Geneviève gets up from the kneeler and sits, slinging herself against the pew back so heavily that the nails squawk in the wood.
And then the sisters give themselves to their own recollections again.
Sister Sabine scratches her shin until it pinks.
Sister Dominique kneels in order to confess halfheartedness and tedium in her late-night meditations on the Five Precious Wounds.
Sister Saint-Léon, Sister Dominique’s associate in the kitchen, says to her, “Every moment this evening, I too, have discovered a hundred defects in my own religious devotions. In your penance, Sister Dominique, please do commend me to Our Lord Jesus, that our shared sins and worthlessness shall not be cause for His just condemnation.”
“And so,” Sister Dominique acidly says, “you have undervalued even my sins. Even in my confession you selfishly turned our attentions toward Sister Saint-Léon.”
She is about to say more but Mother Céline tells her, “You may sit, Sister Dominique.”
She does, and five minutes pass.
Sister Catherine sleeps.
Sister Marie-Madeleine skates her right palm along the pew railing and interestedly presses her thumb on a nailhead.
Sister Pauline and Sister Saint-Stanislas trade snickers at hearing the patter of a kitten in full gallop down the hallway.
Mariette then tilts forward onto her own kneeler, kisses her crucifix, and crosses herself. “Dear God, I humbly ask your pardon for my sins against you and your holy Church. And I also beg forgiveness of you, my sisters, for I accuse myself of having committed these wrongs: I have given my eyes great liberty and sought to have my sister join me in foolishness and girlish play.”
Sister Saint-Denis asks, “And have you spoken when you should not speak?”
Mariette says, “I have accused myself only of being a great hindrance to prayer.”
Sister Félicité is sitting in jury one row behind Mariette. She says, “While I have enjoyed our sister’s humor, she is, at times, distracting.”
Sister Ange is scratching up the wax on the railing wood as she says, “She is a daily temptation to intimacies and particular attachments.”
Sister Saint-Pierre coughs again and again and then she daintily spits into a dinner napkin that she’s been keeping under her sleeve.
Sister Saint-Luc is tapping her prayerbook as she now and then hums.
“She’s provoked me,” Sister Marguerite says, but she does not further explain herself.
A gray-and-white-patched cat is up on the joists overhead, staring down with hazel eyes and slowly lashing its tail.
The prioress asks, “Will someone else help our sister on her way to Christian perfection?”
Mother Saint-Raphaël is as aslant as a roof, her affliction and huff only slightly hidden underneath her hand. She sighs grandly and says, “Our postulant has been too proud. She has been a princess of vanities. She has sought our admiration and attention in a hundred ways since she has joined our convent. She hopes we will praise her for being pretty and fetching and young. She is slack in her work and lax in her conscience. She has been a temptation to the novices and a pet to all the professed sisters. Ever since I have been her mistress, she has been a snare and a worldliness to me and a terrible impediment to the peace and interests of the Holy Spirit.”
Hearing her own passion and antipathy, Mother Saint-Raphaël pauses and adds, “I know that I myself have been guilty of these faults and a hundred others, for which I, too, humbly ask God’s pardon.”
Even the professed nuns are sitting there in astonishment.
Sister Geneviève angles back in order to gaze at Mother Saint-Raphaël.
Mariette is being hunted with the hawking eyes of the others.
The prioress says nothing for a minute and then asks, “Will someone else help Mademoiselle Baptiste on the hard path toward her simple vows?”
Mariette hears only quiet.
Embarrassed and distressed, Mariette raises up a little and says in a trembling voice, “Having heard these accusations, my sisters, I beg that you give me a penance.”
The prioress says, “Mother Saint-Raphaël?”
She is sitting as she was, but now her iron-gray eyes stare at Mariette as she says, “When you next recite your rosary, I would recommend that you ask for some sign that you truly have a religious calling. And please meditate upon the pain and sorrows of Our Lord. Especially His agony in the garden, His scourging at the pillar, His being crowned with a garland of thorns.”
She stands in her white-painted room, seeing no moon, in a sour nightgown that itches, on floor planks that are keen as iron against the skin of her feet. She loses one word of a prayer and then she loses another. She begins again and forgets that she’s begun. She thinks she’s gotten through the Annunciation and so she says to herself, “The second joyful mystery: the Visitation.”
And then she sags against the gray stone sill of the window casing and twists away from the night outside, tenderly holding her sore right breast as if she’s just discovered it.
She skids down the wall until she’s squatting in the night of the room.
Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost.
Compline. She prays without thought. Without emotion. She is a book without words or pictures. She is a night without moon.
Mass of Saint Sylvester, Abbot.
Sleep get up pray pray pray pray pray pray pray.
Mass of Saint Saturninus, Martyr.
Mariette is slowly walking the great dining hall with a Jeroboam of straw-white wine at dinner, when Mother Saint-Raphaël belatedly arrives, spiking her crooked cane on the floor planks and sitting down with the great weight of old age. She scowls at the five novices and then at Mariette and taps her knuckles on the ironed tablecloth in order to beckon the postulant over.
Mariette cradles the Jeroboam as she obeys, crouching by the refectory table so that Mother Saint-Raphaël can talk confidingly. She whispers, “We two shall dispense with silence.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Mother Céline is ill. You are to take a hot pot of tea to Reverend Mother, and you will please put in it three teaspoons of this wild senna.” She gives Mariette a white slip of paper that she’s rolled and twisted shut at both ends. “She will be purged of her pernicious humors and the great vessels will be emptied.”
“You honor me.”
Mother Saint-Raphaël looks away.
Mariette pauses in the hallway to counterpoise a hot teapot, a Japanese cup and saucer, and tightly vased strawf
lowers on a tray. She then puts an ear to the prioress’s door and raps twice. She hears the slight rasp of sandals on the floor.
Sister Aimée just open the door just an inch and jealously peeks out at the postulant and the red and orange strawflowers. “She’s sick,” the infirmarian says.
“I have this from Mother Saint-Raphaël. She says Mother Céline should drink some hot tea.”
Sister Aimée sighs impatiently and steps outside to get the tray, saying, “I’ll be sure to put it by her palliasse.”
Mariette pettishly retracts the tray and says, “Mother Saint-Raphaël particularly wanted me to give it to the prioress.”
“You only?”
“She was thinking it a penance.”
Sister Aimée simpers and says, “You see, it is just that Mother Superior is sleeping now.”
Mariette smiles insincerely and inches toward the door.
Sister Aimée tries to stop her, hissing, “You are being impossible, Sister!”
“And you are being possessive and invidious!”
“Have it your way,” says Sister Aimée. “Again.” And she’s overwrought with juvenile emotions as she scuttles down the hallway.
Reverend Mother Céline rests on her side on the palliasse as if she could be peering at the tempera painting of Our Mother of Perpetual Help that is hanging on the wall. Wild sleep has tossed aside the gray wool blanket and sheet and twisted her nightgown on her body so that it seems shameless and slatternly. A great gush of blond hair veils her pillow.
Mariette adeptly puts the tray on the sill so there is no more noise than a tap. She sees a sparrow tilt high up in the air and swoop westward out of sight. She then hesitantly turns and stoops over the prioress to assess her illness and pain. She almost feels for the high temperature on Mother Céline’s slightly damp forehead, but instead sits on the infirmarian’s milking stool. She smells the tang of vomit and urine. And yet she is happy and proud to be there. She thinks, You see how I love you. Even this way. Especially now.