by Ron Hansen
She can’t take her eyes off the sleeping woman—she who has become for Mariette sight and map and motive. Annie. She sees cracked, parched lips and a trace of sour yellow; a forehead as hot, perhaps, as candle wax; frail eyelids that are redly lettered with tiny capillaries; green veins that tree and knot under the skin of her hands.
The prioress achingly turns on her bed and opens her sorrowing eyes. She keeps them on a high windowpane darkly stippled with hailstones and imperfections. Without looking at Mariette, she asks, “Have you been watching me long?”
“I have brought you hot tea.”
She gazes skeptically at the postulant. “Where is Sister Aimée?”
“Elsewhere. Mother Saint-Raphaël sent me. She had me put a medicine in it.”
The prioress tries to rise up, but she sinks back to her original position as Mariette pours an orange tea into the Japanese cup. The prioress asks, “Have you read Sext yet?”
“We are having Méridienne now. We can talk.”
Mother Céline gets a hint of Alexandria senna aroma and seems upset, but she goes ahead and tastes it. She squints her eyes and sits back. “We haven’t talked nearly enough.”
“No.”
“Your letters…have troubled me.”
“You weren’t supposed to read them.”
“I was too curious.” She considers Mariette as she would a sudden noise. “You’re my sister, but I don’t understand you. You aren’t understandable.” She smiles. “You may be a saint. Saints are like that, I think. Elusive. Other. Upsetting.”
“I just am.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” She has blood drying on her fingers. She has a water bowl on the floor with a pinked sponge in it. The prioress sips some more tea and pauses for breath, and then she empties the cup and hands it back to the postulant.
Mariette asks, “Are you hungry?”
“I have not eaten for more than a day.”
“We had soup.”
“I have spewed even that.”
“Is it terrible for you now?”
She shrugs. “I have been ill before. I shall be ill again. We are born with it beside us.” And then the prioress tightly clutches her stomach with her elbows and forearms. Sudden pain misshapes her face, but Mariette stands there impassively and softly prays as she puts her left hand onto her sister’s side.
The prioress shrieks with harrowing pain and slowly rolls away from Mariette’s touch. She stays in one position, just catching her breath, and then, as if she has already permitted too much affection and sympathy, she finally says, “You may go.”
Mariette gets the tray and goes out, but she smiles back at the prioress as she shuts the door.
December. First Sunday of Advent.
Evening recreation. A squat tallow candle is lit. A yellow thumb of flame trembles on a draft. Reverend Mother Céline is just as sick as she was five days ago, with skin as white as the undersheets, and tiny beads of night sweat that finally break and sketch across her forehead. She hears the sand rasp of sandals on the floor and opens her green eyes.
Mariette is there with a pastry bowl of soap and hot water and an ironed towel. She says nothing as she uncovers the prioress and unties the strings of Annie’s nightgown.
The prioress says, “I have become so weak. I hardly belong to myself anymore.”
Mariette reaches down to the prioress’s knees and inchingly draws the nightgown up over her body, skirting her gaze away from her mother superior’s nakedness. She asks, “Was the medicine any help?”
“No.”
Mariette sits on the palliasse and puts the bowl of hot water onto her lap. She soaps her own palms. “Shall we send for Papa?”
“God shall be my doctor,” the prioress says.
Mariette tenderly washes her sister’s hands and arms as a mother would a child’s. She pushes a kitchen sponge underwater and then squeezes it dry and softly pets the soap away. She rinses the sponge and soaps it again and then hesitates. “With your permission?”
Mother Céline turns aside a little and Mariette unseeingly washes the prioress’s knobbed and ribbed back, her indrawn stomach, her insignificant breasts. The prioress says, “When Jesus washed Saint Peter’s feet it was surely a lesson in humility for his apostle, not for himself. We do not like to be done for.”
“Especially you, I think.”
Annie dresses her breasts with the gray wool blanket and says, “You presume too much.”
Mariette just sits there with her palms turned up in her lap. And then she stands up and intricately collects everything she’s brought in. She goes out without a word, only pausing at the sill to make a sign of the cross with holy water.
Mass of Saint Nicholas the Great, Bishop, Confessor.
She hears the prioress’s sickness through the night.
Mass of the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin Mary.
The postulant is sitting with her mother superior in the infirmary, softly reading from the psalms in the company of Sisters Philomène and Hermance. Each is sewing a scroll border on dinner napkins of India cotton. The prioress is sleeping in a freshly laundered and pleated nightgown, her blond hair strewn on the pillow, her hands collected atop a prayerbook and rosary and taut gray wool blanket. Eye-squinting sunshine whitens the room and snows the veils and habits of the novices as Mariette reads: “‘Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak. My soul is sore vexed, but thou, O Lord, how long? Return, O Lord, deliver my soul. O save me for thy mercy’s sake. For in death there is no remembrance of thee, in the grave who shall give thee thanks? I am weary with my groaning; all the night—’”
At that point the infirmary door opens and Dr. Baptiste is there in his English greatcoat with Sister Aimée behind him. His green instrument case is in one hand and his hat in the other and he exudes the flushed red and cold of a hurried horse ride as he looks directly at the sisters and then, with greater interest, at the sick prioress. “She is sleeping?”
Sister Geneviève nods.
Mariette tells her father, “She has a stomach complaint.” And when he smirks, she thinks how dull and idiotic she is whenever she’s in his presence.
Eyeing the prioress, Dr. Baptiste heaves his instrument case onto a side table. Farm mud crumbles from his high boots and messily scatters across the floor planks as he walks. Although he has dressed in European elegance and bathed himself in perfumes of musk and civet, he carries in his clothes from his morning rounds an odor of illness that is still so offensive that Sister Aimée has cupped a palm over her nose and Sister Philomène inches back her chair half a foot. “She has been vomiting?”
“Yes,” Sister Aimée says.
“For how long?”
“Six days,” Sister Aimée says, and Dr. Baptiste theatrically turns to her in haughty shock and disdain. And when she does not wither, but intractably stares back at him, Dr. Baptiste shakes his head and holds his ear just above Mother Céline’s chapped and parted lips to hear the sighs of her breathing. Tilting his nose down, Dr. Baptiste inhales the prioress’s exhalations. “She has been taking guaiacum?”
Sister Aimée glances about interrogatively and says, “We don’t know.”
“She has.” Dr. Baptiste gets up from the prioress and unsnaps the clasp on his case. Underneath the lid is a green velvet drawer holding medicine bottles and jars and silver cups, cannulas, measuring spoons, pestle, and protractor. A second drawer underneath that contains a chrome handsaw, scalpels, scissors, forceps, and a gruesome brace and screw. He gets out an ear trumpet to hear her heart and asks, “Will one of you please find me a wineglass?”
Sister Philomène hurries out.
Dr. Baptiste touches the prioress’s wrist in order to estimate a pulse and her eyes flutter open. “Bonjour, Annie,” he kindly says.
“Who sent for you?” the prioress asks.
“Your predecessor. Mother Saint-Raphaël?”
“C’est seulement la grippe, Papa.”
“
We shall see. Are you in great pain?”
She gives it thought and agrees.
“You have had this pain for some time?”
“Every now and then.”
“With food and without?”
“Either way.”
“With your functions: is there blood present?”
Slowly the prioress nods.
Mariette is giving her father the attention she would give a magician. She has imagined him through childhood as the king of a foreign country, but he has changed into a too-heavy man with a glossy mustache and unhealthy white nails and gray cinders of skin blemishes on his winter-reddened face. She sees him fit his unclean palms along Annie’s jaw, his squat thumbs tendering the underside of her mouth and then delicately touching back her eyelids so the irises can be examined. “You will stick out your tongue please?”
She complies, and her father scratches the gray coating with his nail, taps her upper teeth and incisors, harshly presses the purple gums. He then daintily unties the strings of her nightgown and slides his right hand underneath to Mother Céline’s left armpit. Wretchedly the prioress shuts her eyes as his hand skims down and palms her hurting left breast, slightly lifting and releasing it, nudging his fingers underneath it, and then going over to the other. Squeezing it, the doctor, too, shuts his eyes and says, “Do not be embarrassed.”
Sister Philomène then rushes in with a brandy glass. Getting it from her, Dr. Baptiste seems at last to give serious thought to Mariette and the novices. “You ought to go now, all of you. She will want the privacy.”
Sister Aimée says uneasily, “One of us must stay. With a man present. Our Rule requires it.”
Dr. Baptiste considers Mariette for an overlong moment as though she’s a half-forgotten language that he is slow in understanding. “She then,” he says.
Sister Aimée sneers in jealousy as she joins Sisters Hermance and Philomène outside and gently shuts the door. Dr. Baptiste hands the brandy glass to his older daughter and asks, “Will you please give me a water specimen?”
She blushes but weakly scooches forward as her father turns away and Mariette rolls the nightgown up to Annie’s waist. Annie reaches the brandy glass down between her thighs and Mariette walks to the infirmary’s chiffonier in order to get a towel from an upper drawer. She hears a trickle and does not turn. She feels his eyes like hands. Enjoying her. She knows their slow travel and caress.
Annie says, “Papa,” and gives him the inch-filled brandy glass as Mariette goes to the prioress with the towel. Dr. Baptiste walks over to one great window and jots some notes in the flooding white sunlight. “Here,” Annie whispers, and holds Mariette’s hand confidingly against her stomach, and Mariette stares with horror and bewilderment as she perceives the hard tumor just under the skin and sees Annie smile. Enthralled.
Evening and an azure light just above the horizon.
Horse and rider just seen on the road.
Sister Geneviève hunches forward in the choir, a book open on her knees, and Sisters Philomène, Pauline, and Hermance huddle around her, joining in saying “pray for us” as she goes through the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Mother most pure, pray for us. Mother most chaste, pray for us. Mother inviolate, pray for us. Mother undefiled, pray for us. Mother most amiable, pray for us. Mother most admirable, pray for us. Mother of good counsel, pray for us—”
Hooves knocking the rough wooden planks of a bridge.
Mariette genuflects upon going into the oratory and gets onto Saint-Pierre’s prie-dieu so she can kneel apart from the four novices. She sees Sister Hermance compassionately stare and she tightly shuts her eyes. She prays for an acquittal. She prays for a simple exchange.
Horse gloss and high black boots. Woods and old crackling tawny leaves sloshing away from shoed hooves. Trees as snug as fencing and here and there a sketch of an English greatcoat, a starched white shirt cuff, a hand in firm grip on the reins.
Second Sunday of Advent.
Sister Aimée walks onto the red Persian carpet at Prime and tells the sisters that Reverend Mother Céline is still sick, that she’s in great pain, that she’s lost fifteen pounds or more, that she may, in fact, have cancer. And the whole priory responds as if the infirmarian has blandly announced a murder. Sister Félicité faints. Throughout Mass and Mixt there are handsigns about the illness. Worry harries the sisters in their work and haunts their prayers at Terce and Sext, and at dinner six or more nuns tremulously weep as Sister Monique goes up in the pulpit with The Rule of Saint Augustine in order to have them hear again: “‘Let your superior show herself an example to all in good deeds; she is to reprimand those who neglect their work, to give courage to those who are disheartened, to support the weak and to be patient with everyone. She should herself observe the norms of the community and so lead others to respect them too. And let her strive to be loved by you rather than to be feared, although both love and respect are necessary.’”
Mass of Saint Lucy, Virgin, Martyr.
Horsetails of gray smoke rise from the candles at Vespers. The December sun goes down in a blood-red light as it slants upwards through the high, stained windows.
At the half-minute pause following the fifth psalm, Mariette hears soft winds outside, hushing like the skirts of a girl rushing up the stairs. She hears Sister Catherine hissing to herself, “Jesu. Mon Seigneur Jesu. Cher Jesu.”
And then she flinches and looks down at her hands. She tries to rub the hot sting from one palm with her thumb but the hurt persists like hate inked on a page. Eventually the sisters rise and slowly pass by Mariette as she sits there for a half hour more, hoarding the pain. She hears something skittering along a joist. She hears the red lanterns on the high altar sigh as flames trickily consume them. And then she hears Sister Emmanuelle hesitantly settle beside her and whisper, “Are you praying for our prioress?”
She looks up and simply says, “Yes,” and the seamstress pats her approvingly on the wrist.
Third Sunday of Advent.
Mariette twists scissors through heavy black paper in order to snip out a silhouette of Wise Men and a manger that she pastes onto a folded white card. High above the manger, she pastes one of Sister Hermance’s gold stars, and then she writes inside, “Joyeux Noël, Papa!” She pauses and thinks, but no further phrases come, and so she puts the card as it is inside an envelope.
Mass of Saint Lazarus, Disciple.
Twenty minutes into Mixt, Mother Saint-Raphaël opens the great door to the dining hall and grins as she announces, “She has gotten better.”
And Mother Céline is abruptly there in her habit and veil, the skull beneath her skin plainly visible, getting support from Sister Aimée as she walks falteringly to her place. Sisters rise up to kiss her cheek and hands or just to cheer and applaud her, and the prioress briefly smiles. She seems twice her age as she greets the sisters with a half wave and then hesitantly sits.
Sister Saint-Léon’s gray eyes shine with tears of joy as she kneels next to Mother Céline and asks, “Oh, are you truly improved?”
“Yes,” she says. “Christ be praised.”
Ember Day. Mass of Saint Liberatus, Martyr.
In her dream Mariette is pregnant and her great breasts ache with milk, but she holds the infant Christ to them and he smiles as he feeds on her. And then she hears a dish crash to the floor and she thinks he was in a toddler’s chair and she was a girl in a housedress but she doesn’t know why the dish crashed and she worries and she wakes. She listens, but all is silence.
Twenty minutes before the second rising, Sister Philomène gets up from her kneeler in the oratory and goes down the hallway toward the house of the externs to wake up Sister Claudine. She softly passes the prioress’s suite before she notices the door ajar and that she can just see a hand on the floor. She pushes inside and finds Mother Céline fallen there. The prioress tiredly smiles up at the novice and says, “Please, help me.”
Mariette is still in her nightgown and her chocolate-brown hair is wild
as she gets a black habit from her great pine armoire. Her cell is so cold with December that she can see her breath in the air. She hears two taps on her door and opens it.
Sister Philomène is standing there. She gives the handsigns, Come, prioress. And Mariette sees that Sister Philomène’s hands are red with blood.
Everyone in the priory is permitted five minutes with Mother Céline in the heated infirmary, but some of the professed nuns have tarried for half an hour or more, so Mariette is forced to go in with Sisters Hermance, Geneviève, Léocadie, and Pauline when the last visitation is held just before Compline. She finds the prioress sitting up in a gray habit and black shawl, in an Adirondack chair hauled in from the yard. Commercial papers are shuffled up under her folded hands, and on a side table are Dr. Baptiste’s prescriptions of Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, a flavored medicine for teething babies that he knows is basically morphine. In accordance with the rules and customs of the order, a plain wood coffin has been hastily carpentered by Sister Marie-Madeleine and then put on sawhorses in the room to inspire contemplation and a Christian acceptance of death. Mother Céline sleepily rambles so she won’t have to hear Sister Geneviève’s praise or witness Sisters Hermance and Pauline weeping freely at her feet.
Mariette jealously looks at the novices as Annie tells them that Sister Antoinette reports she’ll be shipping communion wines to upstate parishes by April. She tells them the priory is a major beneficiary of a Catholic woman’s estate. She says she hopes Mother Saint-Raphaël will agree to be their prioress again, she is so good at paperwork. She says she’s impatient for God to take her, she thinks it’s like having all the glorious smells of a Christmas feast but having the tastes withheld. And then the chimes ring for Compline and the prioress holds up her hand for the blessing, “Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.”