by Ron Hansen
The sisters respond in dull chorus, “And she conceived of the Holy Ghost.”
Père Marriott stands darkly alone on the herringboned brick sidewalk just outside his house with four library books in his hands, praying an Ave Maria and inhaling the heaven smell of fresh snow as he says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
Sister Aimée holds a sponge and a chrome bowl in her hands as she looks at the yard through a chink between the gray blankets. White pillows of snow are there where rough stones used to be. She sees juncos feeding on tossed green peas. And she turns with shock when she hears Mariette say in a trance, “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”
Mother Saint-Raphaël is rapidly writing at her great pecan desk with a green fountain pen, hearing the Angelus being said by two externs in the hall. She halts her pen to pray an Ave Maria and then hides her face in her hands. She hears Sister Zélie say, “And the Word was made flesh.” And she hears Sister Claudine say, “And dwelt amongst us.” And then she prays another Ave Maria and returns to her letter.
Our Lady of Sorrows Convent
Arcadia, New York
Dec. 25th, 1906
Mother Christine
Superior, The Sisters of the Crucifixion
Villa Rossignol
Louvain, Belgium
Most Reverend Mother General:
The blessings and grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be always to our favor and assistance.
I have news of such gravity that I have been almost too grief-stricken to begin. And yet it has befallen me to inform you that our dear Reverend Mother Céline died some time after Lauds on Monday, December 24th, following a brief illness. She had prayed and worked tirelessly under our Holy Rule for fifteen years and she was for an illustrious period our cherished Mother Superior here. We shall miss her so much.
Elected at Chapter to be our new prioress was the present writer, a terrible sinner and the Queen of Heaven’s most worthless servant, whom Our Lord has burdened before with leadership (1891–1902). I rejoice, however, in doing again what I have done my best to do in the past, believing that all is possible with Christ and hoping that I shall always know His holy will.
I have other troubling news as well. We have in our priory here a seventeen-year-old postulant named Mariette Baptiste—sister in blood to our late prioress—who is said to have been given the holy wounds of Christ’s passion on the Cross! I have heard that she’s written fantastic letters that told of her having experienced interior conversations and trances since she asked to be admitted into the Sisters of the Crucifixion, and there are some professed nuns and novices to whom she has given an impression of great saintliness before she was granted the purported stigmata.
I shall refrain from comment on the faithfulness and credibility of their testimonies on Mariette’s behalf, nor need I mention the postulant’s flair for the dramatic and her turbulent psychological state at the time of her dear sister’s illness and premature death. She was under my purview when I was Mistress of Novices so she has not been without scrutiny or merited correction, but I cannot talk freely about her piety and orthodoxy without jeopardizing the precious bonds of intimacy that have been established between the pliant and unformed soul and her formation director. With open mind, however, I shall interview the postulant and our sisters in the priory in order to determine whether Mariette is truly as she seems and whether she possesses the authentic spiritual foundation and exemplary rectitude that God’s grace presupposes.
What must be reported has been reported. Please do convey our solicitudes to Sister Irène and Sister Barbe who are studying theology with you there in our beloved Motherhouse. Please tell all who hold us dear that we are thriving here with abundant prayer and blessings and the practice of heroic virtues. May Our Lady guide our hearts and minds in these trying times.
Yours humbly on behalf of God our Father, to Whom alone be glory and honor forever. Amen.
Sr. Saint-Raphaël
Mother Superior
Tallow candles.
Skin like the moon.
Eye sockets tinged with green. Eyelids lightly fluttering in dream.
The postulant’s mouth is sore and cracked and welted purple by her own teeth.
Sighs and caws to her slow and intricate breathing.
Sister Hermance is hooking and knotting lace as she primly sits on a stool in night watch. She collapses her handiwork in her lap and just stares with poignance at Mariette. She’s about to get up but pauses. She gives it some thought and gets up after all, setting her lace aside and then holding on to Mariette’s left hand like a tender nurse reading a pulse. She tilts her head to fondly inspect Mariette, petting her brow and touching a dark hair away from her cheek. She hesitates for a second and then she unwraps the torn strips of cloth from a hand that is stained as red as a dyer’s.
A great copper verrière is on the floor. Sister Hermance retrieves a ball sponge from the verrière and wrings it tight before softly daubing at the hand wound. She peers at it and at Mariette. She whispers, “I just have to see.” And then she gently lowers Mariette’s left hand until it is submerged in pink water.
Blood seeps silkily from the hand wound, turning and rumpling underwater until it gradually untangles into nothing more than color.
“I hope you’re not angry,” she says. “We all were wondering. We didn’t think it would be so real.”
She lifts up the postulant’s hand and presses it into her habit as she considers Mariette. “We aren’t amazed. We thought you were different from the first.”
She pets Mariette’s wrist and kisses a knuckle. She whispers, “We are so privileged.” She holds the palm open and kisses it. “You have turned your face from me too often. You have been frightened by my affection.”
With reverence Sister Hermance licks the blood inside the hand wound. “I have tasted you. See?” Tears streak shining paths down her cheeks as she says, “Ever since I first met you, I have loved you more than myself.”
Half a minute later she says, “You know this is true.”
She stares at Mariette’s sleep and whispers, “You have been a sacrament to me.”
Mass of Saint Stephen, the First Martyr.
An hour before sunrise Sister Anne knocks on the priest’s door and he hurriedly opens it, hoisting up a kerosene lamp. “Enter, Sister.”
She hesitates and does.
“Smell,” he says. “The air.”
She skeptically complies. Tobacco smoke and kerosene and maleness, but over it a pretty and otherly scent. With great surprise she asks, “Is it perfume?”
“Yes. What kind?”
She permits herself another step inside and pauses. “Easter lilies?”
Père Marriott smiles and says, “Walk about now, Sister. Find the perfume for me.”
Sister Anne tilts her head and trains her nose on his four-poster bed. She walks up to it and pauses and then lifts up the lid on a floor trunk that hides his dirty things. She squats and interestedly roots among his underwear and boot socks and soutane and then holds a pressed handkerchief up to her nose. She looks up to see Père Marriott smiling.
“Yes,” he says. “Exactly.”
Sister Anne stares at the handkerchief and sees it has been blotted here and there with blood.
While the sisters line up outside the oratory for Prime, the prioress greets them with handsigns and touches and smiles. And then she anxiously looks past the sisters to the hallway.
Mariette is tottering toward them, her hands half-mittened in knitted wool, hiding the hurt in her dressed and sandalless feet by hitting down on only the heels and sides. She seems flushed and surprisingly healthy, but ashamed of the hushed attention of the sisters, and she shies from their fawning and tearful stares as she achieves her place in front of the choir and the great brass bell in the campanile rings.
At Mixt she neither drinks nor eats. Each of the sisters furtively stares at her as she tranquilly sits in post-Communion meditation with her hands immersed
in her habit. Lectio has been halted for the morning, so there is only the Great Silence and the tinks of cutlery, but handsigns are being traded as the sisters lard their hunks of bread or fold and ring their dinner napkins. When the prioress stands, all rise up with her for the blessing, and then Sister Aimée gives Mariette the handsigns, You, infirmary.
Mariette sits impassively at a white-enameled table and stares at a blush-red sun just coming up through trees as thin as hatpins. Sister Aimée sits opposite and holds her hand like a fortune-teller as she takes off the half-mitten and hesitantly touches the hardening scab where only hours ago the nail hole was. She is astonished and then she is silent. Within a tin bowl beside her are soft cotton balls soaking up peroxide. She gets one and squeezes it and roughly abrades the dried blood from Mariette’s palm until she’s sure she’s seen the healing of weeks in just one day. She tries to read Mariette’s face, and then she says, “I’ll have to see your foot.”
“Which?”
The infirmarian looks for a trick and tries, “Your left.”
Mariette unties the dressings and Sister Aimée kneels to find the healing there, too. She pauses and asks, “What are you up to?”
“Up to?”
Sister Aimée’s sleepless eyelids open and shut like dull scissors. “You were supposed to stay put but you sneaked out this morning. Why?”
“Simply for Mass and Holy Communion.”
Sister Aimée stares at her with honest interest and then she stands. “You truly amaze me.”
“I have work to do,” Mariette says.
She tries to smile at the postulant as she asks, “Then why are you still here?”
Mariette is sent after Terce to the haustus room, where she helps Sisters Agnès and Emmanuelle waterproof the sisters’ cloaks with paintbrushes and a tin pail of hot linseed oil and litharge. Whenever Mariette looks up, she sees Sister Emmanuelle simpering at her, and there are times when Mariette flattens cloth on the floor or shakes a paintbrush inside the tin pail that Sister Emmanuelle pretends inadvertence in order to touch her honored hands. Sister Agnès, though, is prattling on as if nothing at all has changed, telling them that good housekeepers put one day between washing and ironing if they want to prolong their lives, that half a cup of vinegar in the kettle water will make an old goose cook up just as quick as a gosling, and that blood will be subtracted from fabrics if you rub in some pepsin first and then steep them in lukewarm water.
Sister Emmanuelle upbraids the laundress by saying, “You are being uncouth, Sister Agnès.”
“Am I? How?”
“Talking of bloodstains! Here! Now!”
“Please don’t,” says Mariette. And just then Sister Félicité is at the haustus room’s door, reporting that the postulant is expected at the priest’s house.
“Ho, get used to it, dearie,” Sister Agnès says. “You’re going to be the topic here. We’ll be sniffing after you like hounds.”
In the priest’s house, four books are on the kitchen table, a dish towel hides his typewriter, the teakettle warbles and trills on the iron stove until Père Marriott hoists it off. “We are having English tea,” he says. “You’ll have to take milk with it; that’s the English part.” Looking over his shoulder, he says, “You may sit.”
She does. She inhales and her faintness passes. She touches the books and tilts her head to read their spines. Each is in French: Annales de médicine universelle, Autobiographie d’une hystérique possédée, book two of Esprit des saintes illustres, and one volume of La stigmatisation, l’etase divine, les miracles de Lourdes, response aux libres penseurs.
The priest slides a tarnished spoon and frail teacup and saucer toward Mariette before sighing and falling into a hard wooden chair. With horror he says, “I have forgotten the sugar!”
“Oh, don’t get it for me.”
“Sister Dominique has favored us with a bowl of kiss pudding. Have you heard of that, kiss pudding?”
“Coconut sprinkled on top?”
“Exactly! Like snowflakes.”
She smiles and sips just a bit of her orange pekoe tea.
“Well,” the priest says. “Isn’t this pleasant?”
“Yes.”
He clinks his spoon around his teacup and then stains his folded napkin tan with it. She can see a freakish reflection of him in the shine of his spoon’s silver bowl. Wood in the stove is whistling. Père Marriott finally says, “Your health is fine?”
She smiles. “Except for the holes in my hands and feet.”
He blushes and then shades into humorlessness, broodingly turning his teacup with his thumbs. “I have some more questions I’ll have to ask you.”
Mariette says nothing. She holds the hurt in her hands like a kitten.
“Surely you were expecting that.”
“Everything has been a great surprise to me.”
“Yes,” he says, and grins uneasily, showing gray teeth that are slightly twisted and crossed. “Well, let me begin there, Mariette. You see, I hunted these books in the scriptorium and when I took them out I heard from Sister Marguerite that she’s seen you reading these same four books. She quite frankly finds that perplexing. I have an explanation but I would prefer, of course, to hear yours.”
“I have had forebodings about it.”
“You have had premonitions?”
“I heard his voice.”
Père Marriott stares at her for a moment and moves on. “Well, yes. Was there anything, uh, physical?”
“Itching and burning in my hands and feet.”
“And then quite suddenly the bleeding?”
“Yes.” She thinks of her father bluntly talking of human biology as the dinner plates were cleared. She remembers how his hard white shirt cuffs would often be brownly spotted with some patient’s blood.
“You aren’t taking your tea, Mariette.”
“I haven’t been drinking much lately.”
“Are you hungry? Would you like some kiss pudding?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Excellent,” he says, and scratches whiskers under his jaw as he thinks. “Wasn’t it surprising that this happened at Christmas?”
“No.”
“Explain, please.”
“We celebrate the Word being made incarnate then.”
“But it is such a joyful day!”
“We give gifts to our family and friends. And these are God’s gifts to me.”
He hooks his spectacles over his ears and hunts his book stack until he finds one that he handles like a connoisseur, admiring its green leather binding and the gossamer feel of its pages. At last he tilts his nose down and stares over his brass wire rims to ask, “Are you acquainted enough with the books you and I have read, Mariette, to say you have acquired the wounds that have been called the stigmata?”
“Agreeing would make me seem grandiose.”
“Even so, you must be quite proud to be in the company of Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Rita, so many other holy people.”
“Everything is his doing. I have nothing to do with it.”
“And yet I still wonder how you feel about it.”
She looks just to the right of him in seeking an answer. She holds her stare on a dulled housefly blundering at a frosted window, but she is all inwardness and certainty. “Worried,” she says. “Humbled. Embarrassed. I truly don’t understand it.”
The priest smiles. “We don’t have to understand what God is doing for God to be able to do it.” Père Marriott deliberately resettles his teacup in the saucer. “You have been given those things which theologians call gratiae gratis datae, or favors freely bestowed by God. We do not earn or warrant them. The Church cannot say that you are saintly because of these injuries any more than she would hazard to say that Sister Saint-Pierre, for example, is unholy because she is without them. In history, you see, these wounds have been found in some very unworthy people. And it is often hard to tell whether these things are not just illusions broug
ht on by abnormal sensibilities and neurosis. You see how it follows? Hmm? Have I made myself understood?”
“Yes.”
“I have so many questions, though.”
“Me too.”
“We know, for example, that Christ’s crucifixion happened in just one way, and yet history tells us that the five wounds appear differently both in size and location in the hundreds of people who have been given them. You have not been given the crown of thorns, for example, nor the forty lashes. And why is that? Is the human personality one component of the mystery? We don’t know. And why are there so many women and so few men? And how is it that the great contemplative orders, the Carthusians, the Trappists, the Benedictines, have practically no examples of the phenomena? The Church and medicine are both silent.”
Sister Anne knocks twice at the door while opening it to slap the priest’s mail onto a Shaker table. She gives Mariette a fraught look and says, “Oh, forgive me,” and the old priest gazes without forgiveness until she finally goes.
“And so,” he says. “I have another question. You are praying hard, so hard, and you are hearing God inside your head perhaps. We’ll say you are in ecstasy. Will you please tell how it is for you at that point?”
Evasively she travels her fingers over four or five water rings that have stained the oaken table. She then stands with her feet flat on the floor and walks without hurt or hindrance to a half-curtained window framing soft white pastures and flesh-pale skies and pinkish trees without hunters in them.
“In prayer I float out of myself. I seek God with a great yearning, like an orphan child pursuing her true mother. I have lost my body; I don’t know where I am or even if I am now human or spirit. A sweet power is drawing me, a great and beautiful force that is effortless but insistent. I flush with excitement and a balm of tenderness seems to flow over me. And when I have gotten to a fullness of joy and peace and tranquillity, then I know I have been possessed by Jesus and have completely lost myself in him. Oh, what a blissful abandonment it is! Everything in my being tells me to stay there. Every thought I have is of his infinite perfection. Every feeling I have is of his kindness and heavenly love. Every dream I have had is realized in him. Hours may pass, but I have no sense of tiredness or pain or needs of any kind. Exquisite contentment enthralls me. I have no use for speech except to praise him. I have no desires except to be held there by him forever. I have a vision of him but I cannot see his face or his form, only an infinite light and goodness. I hear his voice in an interior way, his words have sweetness and charm but no sound, and yet they are more felt and permanent in my soul than if I heard Jesus pronounce them. And there are harder times during prayer when I behold my life as if it were a book of hundreds of pages that faithfully recall all my faults and failings. And then such a great sorrow for my sins takes possession of me that it seems to me I would rather die a horrible death than ever sin against God again.”