Mariette in Ecstasy

by Ron Hansen

  Mass of the Seven Holy Founders of the Servites,

  Confessors.

  12 February 1907

  Esteemed Reverend Marriott:

  We the undersigned are of the firmest opinion that our blessed priory is being held hostage to a postulant’s wiles and chicanery! We shall not have our convent contaminated by her! We shall not tolerate the favoritism and particular affection shown her thus far! We believe she possesses not one iota of orthodoxy and we beseech you, for the good of the younger souls here and for the future of our holy Church, to have her presented to a proper tribunal where, our prayers have assured us, her guile and stratagems will be found out. Although we harbor no ill feelings toward our saintly Mother Superior, we do have long memories and know that such as Mariette were quite readily dispatched by those glorious emissaries of God’s will whose venerable portraits now grace the halls of our Motherhouse. We therefore beg of you to conquer the permissiveness and infirmity that is so rampant here and treat this hoax with the thoroughness and gravity it warrants.

  Yours in humility,

  Sr. Monique, Sr. Saint-Estèphe, Sr. Marthe, Sr. Honoré,

  Sr. Marguerite, Sr. Saint-Stanislas, Sr. Félicité, Sr. Aimée

  Ash Wednesday.

  Sister Zélie wanders down the hallway, drawling four fingers along the white wall, and then halting outside Mariette’s cell, just as she knew she would. She hesitates and then goes inside and delights at being there, her callused hands softly touching down on the furniture as she might have rested them on the silken heads of infants. Everything is orderly, neat as a pin. She is pleased to smooth the gray blanket of the palliasse. She tips a water pitcher and is tempted to drink from it but does not. She holds a flutter in her stomach as she opens the armoire and presses her face to Mariette’s habits, inhaling the delicious perfume that exudes from them. Sister Zélie is walking toward the secretary when a sandal catches on a finishing nail that shines from the flooring. She taps the nailhead with her heel and it drops; she kneels in order to pinch the nail, and lifts it without effort from its hole. And then she sees that the floor plank is freed and she furtively tips it up. She crushes her habit sleeve above her elbow and reaches down underneath the flooring to a joist. She pulls out a sheaf of handwritten pages tied up in a red satin ribbon.

  She hears the floor creak and finds Mother Saint-Raphaël frowning into Mariette’s cell from the hallway. Sister Zélie simpers and holds up the papers. “Look.”

  I have been told to receive our hundreds of Sunday visitors in the parlor, but all who speak to me think I am insane. My head empties and I do not know how to reply to them. Surely Mother Superior must be demented to think me fit for such duties. I hold no conversations but those I have with you. I have no interest in people unless I see Jesus in them.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël has forbidden me Communion for six days now. Oh, how I ache for him, and how tortured and sick and desolate I have felt without him! I grieve to imagine how dull and haggard and ugly his Mariette must seem to him now! And yet I should think myself hateful if being deprived of him for these six days had not grossly disfigured me.

  What a cruel mistress I am to complain so much about your absence when I should be wooing you and praising you for your kindnesses and sweet presence. You see, though, that I have become obsessed by you. You are not here with me enough if for one brief moment I have no sense of you. And yet I have only gratitude for the desperation you have caused me, and I loathe the peace in which I lived before I truly knew you.

  —Well, there are hundreds more, as you know.

  —Writing was a kind of prayer for me.

  —Mother Saint-Raphaël was quite displeased. Another postulant may have been sent away.

  —But I won’t be?

  —You have a cult.

  At Matins, Sister Marguerite walks down from the choir with a red book and kneels before Mother Saint-Raphaël for a blessing before going to the green marble altar below Our Lady of Sorrows and reading: “‘The Constitution of the Second Order of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in Accordance with the Common Observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

  “‘Chapter forty-six. Excommunication for faults.

  “‘If our sister is found to be at odds with the Holy Rule, or disobedient to her mother superior’s directions, or otherwise detrimental to our way of perfection, she shall be admonished by her prioress in accordance with the Lord’s injunction. Even then she may not redress her sins; if this be the case, she shall be reproved in public. If, however, there is still no transformation or amendment in her conduct, she shall be subject to excommunication.

  “‘She shall eat alone, when and how much in accordance with whatever the prioress deems proper. She shall not intone a psalm or antiphon or read a lesson in the oratory until she has been corrected. She shall work alone, dwelling with us in penance and sorrow. Eyes shall not communicate with her, she shall not be accompanied, she shall not be spoken to by hand or voice. She is not to be blessed as she passes, nor is her food to be blessed, nor is she to be blessed in common prayers except in pleas that God shall forgive her trespasses.

  “‘We hold out hope that these punishments may not bring her condemnation but health in mind and body. Ever mindful, however, of Saint Paul who said, “Put away the evil one from among you,” and, “If the faithless one depart, let him depart,” the prioress shall finally determine if our wayward sister shall be sent away permanently. We do these things so that one sheep may not infect our flock with her disease.’”

  Mass of Saint Valentine, Priest and Martyr.

  Sister Aimée strolls behind Mariette as she walks achingly down the hallway in half-mittens and gray wool stockings, a hand holding her side. And then Mariette sees an hourglass and four stacked books just outside her cell, and Sister Zélie folding her black habits into a box. Sisters Sabine and Saint-Michel and Claudine are hauling out her pine armoire and the feet are chattering along the plank floor.

  “Are they taking out everything?” Mariette asks.

  Sister Claudine hesitantly stares and then continues with her tasks.

  Sister Zélie is haphazardly putting white towels into the box while pretending she hasn’t heard. Written in the prioress’s hand and tacked up on the door is a paper scrap that reads: “She is to be delivered over for the destruction of the flesh, that her spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 5:5.”

  Mariette turns to Sister Aimée, but she knowingly walks down the hallway to a four-by-six closet that held priests’ vestments and thuribles and monstrances and homely paintings but is now completely empty save for a holy water stoup and a palliasse rolled up underneath a simple wooden cross.

  “You’ll be staying here,” Sister Aimée says.

  “Why?”

  “Mother Superior orders it.”

  “Why here, I mean? Why not some other place?”

  Sister Aimée frowns at Mariette’s innocence and then she finds the interior door with one hand. Eight tall iron bars firmly clank against an iron lock plate and change the closet into a jail.

  Sister Marthe tiredly walks down the hall in the flooding darkness of first rising and pauses to tap the castanets in her hand before whining, “In the name of God, my sisters, let us rise!” She hears four or five of them reciting, “His holy name be praised!” and she proceeds down the hallway as if she were dully reentering sleep. When she passes Mariette’s jail cell, however, she cannot resist looking in. She is just there in the corner, undressed still and kneeling on the hard floor like the night terror in a child’s closet, her wild brown hair all thrash and storm, her hands hidden behind her back, her stare as serious as torture. She smiles insincerely at Sister Marthe and says, “Benedicite,” and Sister Marthe hurriedly walks on.

  —I have no memories of that.

  —You deny it then?

  —Each tale I hear is a place I haven’t been.

  Mass of the Flight into Egypt.

  Walking in procession, the
sisters go into the tallow-lit refectory for collation, hesitating only to raise their habits slightly and step over Mariette whose penance it is to lie facedown on the dining hall floor, like the shoe-black door to a dark, dank cellar where fruit blooms in the jars.

  And at the first rising she is prostrate on the great red Persian carpet as the sisters walk in pairs from the nave and genuflect just short of her and go up into the choirs for Matins and Lauds. Each one tries not to look, and yet each one sees her. She pulls their eyes like the print on a page. She is the stillness that ends their prayers. She is as present to them as God.

  Mass of Saint Simeon, Bishop, Martyr.

  Walking nowhere in particular, Sisters Anne, Claudine, and Sabine talk solemnly about their own imperfections and slosh through fresh snow past the stiff, whitened cattails of the marsh and the white paws of the firs, and past the old printery sunk to its sills in snow and weed wrack and wind spew and ruin. And when they sit it’s on a stone bench in the cemetery, in the company of forty-one names, including the first Sister Geneviève, a prioress, and another Sister Saint-Michel, born in Amiens, France. Sister Sabine is drawing houses with a stick when she gets the feeling they’re being watched, and she turns to see that the postulant is just beside Mother Céline’s fresh grave and starkly black against the white stage of the snow and the green curtain of pine woods, but glamorously alone and forlorn like a pretty girl about to sing, and with all the sisters listening.

  “Don’t look,” Sister Sabine says, but they do, and Mariette lifts her hands as if she’s written on the palms. Each turns away.

  Mass of Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, Confessor.

  Mariette in ecstasy.

  She’s been seated on an ottoman in the chapter room in the Great Silence following Compline, and she’s poised there while Sister Philomène and Hermance recruit Sisters Geneviève and Léocadie to confirm their witness. Each approaches Mariette reverently and sits with perfect faith and attention, trying to share in the Christ she is seeing as she stares at a spot just above their heads.

  “Where are you?” Sister Philomène whispers.

  “Sitting in choir,” she says, “with the Psalter.”

  “And is Jesus there?”

  “Yes.”

  Sister Léocadie asks, “Oh, what does he look like?”

  “Handsome,” she says.

  Sister Hermance hushes her voice while insisting, “You have to tell us what’s happening!”

  “Christ takes the book,” Mariette says, “and sings the psalms in Hebrew, in the high tenor of the cantors, just as he did in his childhood.”

  She gets up. She walks over to a tallow candle. She pinches out the flame. She goes to another and extinguishes that one, too. Everywhere around her there is darkness. She tells them, “He holds my hand in his and we two walk down the hallway to his house inside ours. Which is his heart.”

  Sister Philomène turns and sees Mother Saint-Raphaël halted at the door. She worriedly prepares to stand and curtsy, but she sees the prioress bless herself and interestedly sit down in the bleakness farthest away from the postulant.

  “What else?” Sister Léocadie asks.

  Mariette thinks for a little while and says, “We are alone. We touch each other, but he withdraws. ‘You are unclean,’ he says, and I am ashamed because I see that it’s true. Every sin I have committed is written in ink on my skin. Christ tells me to undress. And then he gently washes me with his hands. With holy water from great earthen jugs heated by the sun.”

  She pauses. She peers toward Mother Saint-Raphaël as if she’s just learned that she’s there.

  Sister Geneviève flatly says, “We’re in suspense, Mariette.”

  She continues, “We hear a hubbub and noise outside, as in an Eastern bazaar. Hands reach through the windows. Hopeless people walk in and then immediately walk out, as if the house is empty. What sorrow we both feel for them, but it’s as if they can’t see or hear us. We talk of a great many things, of affliction and faith and the full love of God. Everything he says is put so simply. Every word penetrates me as softly as water entering a sponge. Weeks seem to pass, and yet only a half hour goes by. I know from hearing the choir singing the verses and responsories for Lauds. And he tells me what a great pleasure it is for his father to hear that. All our trying to please him pleases him, Jesus says.”

  She kneels just in front of the frowning prioress, her half-mittened hands nestled against her habit. She smiles. “And he gives me food as I have never eaten. And fine wine from a jeweled chalice. When he tells me to sleep, I do so at once, and he holds me. And I share in him as if he’s inside me. And he is.”

  Mother Saint-Raphaël firmly purses her mouth and harshly slaps Mariette’s face. And then she gets up and goes out.

  Mass of Saint John of the Cross.

  Collation. A flame trembles in the palm of a used-up candle beside Sister Véronique as she reads the Lectio Divina of Saint Ignatius of Antioch’s “Epistle to the Romans.” And the prioress is drinking plain hot water as she peers across the nighted refectory at Mariette.

  She seems hooded and dour and disoriented as she sits with her hands inside her sleeves, not eating, not hearing, hardly there at all. Everything seems dire to the postulant. Every choice seems taken from her. And then Mariette seems to perceive a call and she looks up into the darkness as she slips into another ecstasy, her healed hands rising up from her lap as if she’s lifting an offertory, and then freezing there, high above the dining table, as if she’s turned to wood.

  Everyone stares at Mariette’s trance until the prioress interrupts Sister Véronique’s reading by irritably shouting, “Wake her!”

  Sister Hermance puts down her spoon and tentatively touches Mariette twice.

  “Harder.”

  She gives Mariette a fiercer push but she’s firm as furniture to her hand and Sister Hermance appeals to the prioress with the shine of tears in her eyes.

  The kitchen workers have come out and when Sister Saint-Léon theatrically kneels, five or six sisters join her.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël stands and the hush of her sandals is the only sound as she walks over to the postulant and stares. “Look at me,” the prioress says.

  Mariette is still. She seldom breathes. Even in her eyes there is no travel.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël picks up Mariette’s unused fork and hears the sisters gasp as she tests a tine against Mariette’s cheek.

  She doesn’t flinch.

  Experimentally, the prioress scrawls the fork down Mariette’s neck and hears the silence behind her as she presses harder on the habit until she is holding the fork threateningly against Mariette’s left breast. She thinks about stabbing it to demonstrate her seriousness, but then thinks further and Mother Saint-Raphaël takes the fork away and silently prays for God’s forgiveness as she turns to say the blessing after meals.

  All the sisters then rise up and pray while Mariette stays as she was. All observe the blood dripping from her palms.

  Mother Saint-Raphaël slowly walks to the hallway, but only a half-dozen sisters follow. She turns with great irritation and shouts, “Christ commands you to leave!”

  Hands touch down in the blood covenant as the sisters pass out of the dining hall.

  All through the night the Great Silence is torn.

  Second rising.

  Easy water rustles over stones beneath a Queen Anne’s lace of ice.

  Warmer, and a southerly breeze. Cathedrals of clouds just above the horizon.

  Hurrying sandals in the hallway.

  Choiring and starshine and trickling snow.

  Mass of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, Martyrs.

  Sister Sabine is on her haunches by a Guernsey cow, drilling hot milk into a tin pail. She props her head on the hide and prays to the blurred stain of blood on the back of her hand.

  Sheep whose wool is tan as slush herd against the flitched boards of a fodder shed until Sister Saint-Luc walks out with a great load of cornstalks, a bl
ood cross on her forehead. All follow her to the hurdle.

  Dr. Claude Baptiste is in his Kashmir overcoat as he smokes his fifth cigarette of the morning and walks in the priest’s yard just behind the high walls of the priory. Everywhere the snow seems blue. Eastward there is rain. Tilting his back into a poplar trunk, he follows a gray braid of smoke as it softly breaks against a tree limb and disappears. Youth, he thinks. Trust. Faith. Ambition. He hears kitchen noise, and then he hears the old priest falter out of his house and ask, “Shall we go then?”

  Sister Aimée is hustling down the hallway toward the oratory and hesitating here and there to wait for Mariette, who walks without hurry and with great hurt, one white-bandaged hand touching its way along the high white wall, one hand tendering her left side.

  Thirty sisters are lining up for Terce at the oratory doors and are trying not to dishonor the postulant with sudden prying, but Sister Honoré clenches her thick waist in her arms and frankly stares until Mariette hobbles by, and then the choirmistress unblanks her eyes and bluntly taps the castanets twice and the great doors open.

  Sister Aimée has not prepared Mariette for the men in the prioress’s suite. Père Marriott is sitting broodingly at the grand pecan desk in a fresh cassock, and he is as absent as an overcoat hung on a chair as he silently turns pages of Sister Marguerite’s handwriting. And her father is there, too, in a pitch-black suit and vest and ankle-high shoes, putting Sister Aimée’s infirmary report in the bookcase, his wreath of dark hair trained with a floral pomade, a half-inch of cigarette seemingly forgotten between his fingers.

  Elaborate rains lash at the windowpanes and dulled sunshine sketches reeds on the floor. Mother Saint-Raphaël heavily positions herself against the chintz pillows of the sofa and holds Mariette in a hostile glare as Sister Aimée walks in with a hand towel and china bowl and pitcher, and puts them on a sill.