Mariette in Ecstasy

by Ron Hansen

  At Holy Communion half the church is huddled up by the front pews and railing to have a glimpse of the postulant in the north choir behind the grille. She is not in her stall, however, but has hidden herself from the public and is getting up from Sister Claudine’s kneeler in the south choir. Tears of shame and penance shiver like hot mercury in her eyes as she finally kneels before Père Marriott, and then there are sighs and talk and great noise from the people until she gets up again and turns away to the oratory without lifting a hand in blessing, and then Père Marriott goes down to his parishoners with the Hosts and a haughty woman squats to reach through the railing and take back her jar of quince marmalade.

  Sexagesima Sunday.

  Six people in old pelt coats are trying to hide from the bitter cold as they scurry toward the church in the predawn darkness. Another four are a half-mile behind them. And horses are splashing through pasture snow in front of full sleighs and toboggans.

  Sister Anne is on the church steps in a gray sweater and galoshes, flirting up fresh snow with a broom and saying nothing even to old friends as she opens the church doors. And Sisters Sabine and Zélie are up on high stepladders inside, just finishing hooking up a great purple theater curtain across the front of the grille as Sister Honoré sings from the Psalter. Some people wait a half hour for the great curtain to part, and then they get up from the pews with irritation and go out into the night again.

  Mass of Saint Andrew Corsini, Bishop.

  Sister Véronique is a half hour late in joining the novices for their weekly art lesson after Nones, and she finds division is invading them just as it has the older professed. Each sits morosely in a high-backed chair with her sketch pad and pencil and adamant opinion about Mariette, and is hot, solitary, taciturn, triste, watchful, high-strung, discontent. Tears flow from Sister Hermance, and Sister Léocadie’s cheeks are as redly blotched as if she’s recently been slapped. And when Mariette walks in from a talk with Père Marriott, Sister Philomène is so overpowered that she rushes up and fleetingly kisses her and temperamentally flees the room, Sister Hermance just behind her.

  Mass of Saint Agatha, Virgin, Martyr.

  Sister Saint-Estèphe is surprised from her sleep when she hears heavy furniture screech across the flooring not too far away. She rushes out into the hallway in just her white nightgown and a gray robe hanging open and she thinks she’ll be joined by others as she hustles down to Mariette’s cell, but Sister Saint-Estèphe is alone there and her left hand rakes back the graying froth of her hair as she fearfully puts her ear to the door.

  She hears flesh smack against a wall. She hears hoarse breathing and heaves and hard, masculine effort. She tries the door latch but can do no more than rattle it.

  Wrestling noises seem to roam the room, and the postulant’s tin basin rings as it’s flung against a ceiling joist. And yet Mariette is silent. Every now and then she pants or whimpers with pain, and then Sister Saint-Estèphe hears a greater noise as she imagines the postulant being hurled onto her palliasse and falling onto the floor.

  Sister Saint-Estèphe hurriedly crosses herself and prays, “Holy Michael defend us in battle, by our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.” She hears hitting sounds in the cell, and she shouts over the increasing noise, “May God rebuke him we humbly pray! And may the prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls!”

  And then there is sudden quiet.

  —And you opened the door?

  —Sister Marthe did. At first I was afraid to touch it. The Devil and all.

  —Sister Marthe heard you yelling?

  —And Sister Saint-Luc. Yes.

  —But it was only you who went inside.

  —Yes, Father. Too scared, the others.

  —Well?

  —She wasn’t bleeding, but her face was horrible. She’d lost every trace of beauty. Oh, I felt so ill for her! She was kneeling there on the floor all bruised and red like he’d hit her a hundred times. And her clothes were half off her like there’d been hounds tearing at them.

  —And you say her window was open?

  —Like it was the hottest day in July.

  —Anyone there could have got out that way, yes?

  —Well, I don’t know.

  —Why did you presume that you heard the Devil inside?

  —She said so.

  —She could have made those noises herself.

  —You ought to just live in this cloister for one night, Father. You’d know the Devil’s up to his mischief. You can hear sisters pacing, crying out in their sleep. Everyone’s on edge.

  —We thank you, Sister.

  —She’s got me so spooked now!

  —Of course.

  —We never had wildness like that here before.

  Mass of Saint Dorothy, Virgin, Martyr.

  Père Marriott is holding confessions during meditation and is hunting a page in his breviary when he hears a sister hastily kneel behind the iron grille. Even before he blesses her, though, he hears her talking. “Oh, I am so afraid,” she whispers, and he thinks it’s Sister Zélie, then Sister Saint-Stanislas. “We’re in league together. She said it was just going to be a theatrical, but it’s gotten out of hand. And now she knows that I’ll tell and she’ll hurt me.”

  Every sentence slightly changes in tone, as if she were trying to disguise her sultry voice. Sister Geneviève? Sister Claudine? “You’re talking about Mariette?”

  “She stole things from the infirmary. Chemicals and instruments. When she was taking care of Mother Céline. And she’s good at science. She got it from her father. Everything else is from the Devil.”

  “You are saying this has all been a prank?”

  “Worse that that, a cruel deception.”

  She’s poisonous. She’s fabricating. She stinks with jealousy and hate. And yet Marriott finds himself asking her, “Does Mariette have a reason?”

  “Attention at first. She was just bored. But now she wants to be thought a great saint so she can have her way and get back at us.”

  He thinks how Mariette smiles as he blesses her. And he sees her pretty form as she kneels at his prie-dieu and softly prays the fifty-first psalm. She turns and blushes and puts the book as it was.

  His hands are cold; his inner ear rings; his face, he knows, is white. Marriott tilts on the hard bench and gives influence to his breathing until his faintness passes. “Shall we talk about you now, Sister?” he asks. “Are you here to confess?”

  She hisses, “She’s in your dreams, isn’t she, priest. Oh, how you sicken her! You should hear the tales she tells. She hates all of us, but especially you. Every day she’s been here is a lie.”

  In his shock he doesn’t think to ascertain who it is until he hears her stand up, and when he touches the purple silk curtain aside he sees that the confessional is empty and she is back in the priory.

  Mass of Saint Apollonia, Virgin, Martyr.

  Examination of conscience and Compline. Everyone tries not to stare at the postulant as she prays. And then the sisters walk two by two from the oratory in the Great Silence, singing “Ubi Caritas,” Sister Pauline holding a fluttering candle high against the darkness as they go down the hallways. Mariette steps aside just as Sister Emmanuelle does and both touch their holy water stoups as they pass into their cells.

  Mariette undoes her black headscarf and slides from her sandals and stands on the cold punishment of the floor as she unfastens her habit and sees the gray mist of her breath softly translated into night.

  And sudden as affliction, Sister Honoré is there, holding her in a harrowing stare as she shuts the door and sets down a tallow candle in a dish. She whispers, “You show me your wounds!”

  Mariette retreats a step without speaking and Sister Honoré throws a hand over Mariette’s mouth and tilts her back against the writing desk as she tears at the windings of bloodstained cloth on the postulant’s hands, whi
spering that she’ll put a stop to this foolishness, that she’s sick of Mariette playing the saint when half the convent knows she’s lying.

  Mariette handsigns, Wait, and Sister Honoré halts the throttling as Mariette first frees her hands and then her feet and gets out of the habit before walking undressed inside the ring of golden candlelight.

  —And I saw nothing.

  —She was completely naked?

  —Yes. And yet there was no blood, no wheals or scars or bruises of any kind. She might have been a virgin bride on her wedding night, she seemed so pretty and faultless and embarrassed.

  —You told her what you saw?

  —Yes. And she looked at me with such great pity! And she gave me that sweet, forgiving smile as if it was my religious faith that was in question, as if Christ or the Devil had blinded me and I ought to be ashamed.

  —You weren’t, Sister Honoré?

  —Well, I felt awkward and lewd just then, but I’m proud that I have exposed her and changed some people’s minds.

  Mass of Saint Scholastica, Virgin.

  2/10/07

  My Dear Father Marriott:

  Word has reached us here about your involvement in this foolish affair with Mariette Baptiste, whom I know exceedingly well. Have nothing more to do with her. Unsay all you have said. It is useless even to try to unmask her. I have come to know from intimates of hers that what is supposedly happening to Mariette is, as one would suspect, mere hypocrisy and deceit. She is enraptured by the devil and whatever your efforts, they will be to no avail. You should no longer interest yourself in her behalf and advise that mother superior of hers to act in the same manner. You would do well, in fact, to promptly expel her from the priory, for she has no vocation, no purity, no respect for the Church and the sacraments. The high esteem I held Mariette in has now turned to hatred and revulsion. She has a deceived and deceiving soul and will cause irreparable spiritual ruin if she is not shamed and sent away from there. She does not need your assistance, and the Church does not need the ridicule she will open it to. Take it from one who knows her all too well and try not to believe any of these things she says are true. The beauty of her lying is that she herself is so oblivious to it. Were it up to me I would immediately wash my hands of the actress and submit the whole matter to your bishop, and above all I would see to it that she didn’t take Holy Communion.

  Yours sincerely,

  A Worried Priest

  —Have you seen the letter?

  —Yes.

  —Are you troubled by it?

  —No.

  —Have you any idea who may have sent it?

  —The Devil.

  —Simple as that.

  —In this case, yes.

  Mass of the Apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes.

  Whispers of pellet snow on the ice.

  Late morning. A half rim of moon is faint in a mica-blue sky.

  Winter shag blows as a Morgan horse roughs his hoary jaw against a water trough and grandly suffers the zero cold.

  A gray and white cat cautiously steps down from a roof peak and settles against a chimney stack, its paws turned primly underneath its breast.

  Sister Geneviève is in a poor-box overcoat as she totters up from a shack with both hands on a heavy tin pail of coal.

  Sisters Monique, Virginie, and Antoinette are sipping hot barley tea in the infirmary after an hour in the weather trying to repair the screw on a hundred-year-old winepress.

  Window glass over the priest’s sink is hatched and helixed with frost but sunshine is bristling on the shellacked windowsill and on a tarnished spoon, a green tin matchbox, and a stoppered chemist’s phial holding brown flakes of dried blood. Eighth-inch lettering on the glass tube reads American Pharmaceutical.

  Ever so slowly the flakes ooze and redden until the phial holds blood again.

  Mariette walks a toweled broom along a hallway by Sister Virginie’s cell and then kneels below a horrid crucifixion that she hates, Christ’s flesh-painted head like a block of woe, his black hair sleek as enamel and his black beard like ironweed, his round eyes bleary with pity and failure, and his frail form softly breasted and feminine and redly willowed in blood. And yet she prays, as she always does, We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. And just then, she’ll later tell Père Marriott, she is veiled in Christ’s blessing and tenderness, she feels it flow down from her head like holy oil and thrill her skin like terror. Everything she has ever wished for seems to have been, in a hidden way, this. Entire years of her life are instantly there as if she could touch any hour of them, but she now sees Jesus present in her history as she hadn’t before, kindness itself and everlastingly loyal, good father and friend and husband to her, hurting just as she hurt at times, pleased by her tiniest pleasures, wholly loving her common humanness and her essential uniqueness, so that the treacheries and sins and affronts of her past seem hideous to her and whatever good she’s done seems as nothing compared to the shame she feels for her fecklessness and indifference to him. And she is kneeling there in misery and sorrow when she opens her hands like a book and sees an intrusion of blood on both palms, pennies of skin turning redder and slowly rising up in blisters that in two or three minutes tear with the terrible pain of hammered nails, and then the hand flesh jerks with the fierce sudden weight of Christ’s body and she feels the hot burn in both wrists. She feels her feet twisted behind her as both are transfixed with nails and the agony in both soles is as though she’s stood in the rage of orange, glowing embers. She is breathless, she thirsts, she chills with loss of blood, and she hears Sister Dominique from a great distance, asking “Are you ill?” when she feels an iron point rammed hard against her heart and she faints.

  Hours later Mother Saint-Raphaël thinks it important that the most worshipful sisters see the postulant as she is and not as she is being imagined, so just after Vespers twelve of them slowly walk one by one through the infirmary and stare down at Mariette in infatuation and fear and relief as she stares up in a trance and seems to smile at their procession, and Sister Aimée permits them to softly touch Mariette’s wrapped hands. Many ask if she is feeling much pain and Sister Aimée replies that the hurt must be excruciating. Each of them who asks for prayers is promised that she’ll be remembered just as soon as Mariette wakes up.

  And when all the sisters have walked through and Sister Aimée has been excused, Mother Saint-Raphaël installs a stool beside the headrail and with no more than a whisper of sound sits down beside Mariette and is as still as a picture for a while, as composed as a book of ritual, disarray’s opposite, her handsome face neutral, her hard sandals flat on the floor, a hand gently inside a hand, intensely watching Mariette as the girl seems to hear harmonies inside her, as she seems to hover outside time. “Mariette?” Mother Saint-Raphaël finally asks. “Are you here now? Are you listening?”

  She sees Mariette’s dark lashes flutter a little, as if she’s breathed over a candle flame. She pets a wisp of sable-brown hair away from the postulant’s forehead and says, “It’s Mother Saint-Raphaël. Your prioress.”

  Silver daggers of light shine in Mariette’s blue irises and her mouth twitches slightly, as if she’s heard and is trying to talk. The prioress is silent, then turns and twists hot water from a washrag and drags it frankly and affectionately over the postulant’s too-white face, just as if she were suddenly blind and learning Mariette with her hands. Eventually Mariette opens her eyes.

  “Was it the same this time?” the prioress asks.

  Mariette thinks. “Yes.”

  “You were dwelling on Christ’s passion.”

  She agrees.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël bestows the washrag to a dish behind her and floats her manly, twisted hands atop her thighs. “Were you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that necessary, do you think?”

  Mariette looks at her carefully, in the half wince of a pianist newly hearing the flaw in one key. “We
find God in stillness and silence.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mother Saint-Raphaël says. “I may have added a nuance I didn’t intend.”

  Mariette hurtfully gets up to a sitting position and holds her wrapped hands just below her heart. She smiles understandingly as she says, “And yet you’re suspicious still, aren’t you.”

  “I have been troubled by God’s motives for this,” the prioress says. “I see no possible reasons for it. Is it so Mariette Baptiste will be praised and esteemed by the pious? Or is it so she shall be humiliated and jeered at by skeptics? Is it to honor religion or to humble science? And what are these horrible wounds, really? A trick of anatomy, a bleeding challenge to medical diagnosis, a brief and baffling injury that hasn’t yet, in six hundred years, changed our theology or our religious practices. Have you any idea how disruptive you’ve been? You are awakening hollow talk and half-formed opinions that have no place in our priory, and I have no idea why God would be doing this to us. To you. I do know that the things the villagers have been giving us have not helped us in our vow of poverty. And all the seeking people who have been showing up have not helped our rule of enclosure. And there are breaches to our vow of obedience whenever you become the topic.”

  She sees that the postulant is staring at her impassively, with a hint, even, of amusement. She says in a sterner way, “I flatter myself that I have been extremely tolerant and patient, thus far. I have done so out of respect for your late sister, and in sympathy for the torment you have in her loss. But I shall not suffer your confusions much longer. And so I pray, Mariette, that if it is in your power to stop this—as I presume it is—that you do indeed stop it.” She pauses and then stands. “And if it is in your power to heal me of the hate and envy I have for you now, please do that as well.”