Miriam led the chanting of the psalm, and in the open chapel, in the breeze, her voice took on a glassy fragility. When she had concluded, however, the wife from Burkina Faso directed toward me a wide-eyed nod and a gesture of pantomimed ravishment. By the end of the service, a heavy heat had killed the breeze, and an algal odor pressed in from the millpond.
* * *
—
Afterward, Miriam and I followed Jean-Marie past the millpond up a wooded slope, through a gate in a hedgerow, and into a pasture where a clutch of cattle turned toward us in wary expectation. One cow hoisted her front hooves up onto the hindquarters of another, who lurched forward as though piloted by the cow behind. Thwacking haunches with a stick, Jean-Marie coaxed the little herd into motion, sending Miriam and me off to the left and right, our arms spread, to discourage the herd from moving in the wrong direction. Each calf kept close to its mother’s flank and, should she pause, butted her udder and nuzzled up to a teat. After the last cow and calf had been prodded into their new pasture, we set about dragging a great translucent tank in behind them. Flipping a stopcock, Jean-Marie sent a gush of water down the length of a trough. Some of the cows stood around as though waiting to be told what to do next; some began to drink.
* * *
—
At night, Miriam and I made love on the floor, though surely the song of the frogs in the millpond would have been loud enough to drown out the creak of bedsprings.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The following evening, Monday, Miriam had gone to bed early, exhausted from her work in the garden. A couple of hours after she had gone upstairs, I was just putting away the last of the dishes when I heard her footsteps descending the stairs. I turned to ask Miriam if she had been unable to sleep, only to encounter the auburn-haired girl instead.
“Daniel,” she said. I had not heard her speak in the days since I had arrived. “You don’t remember me?” she asked, her English clear, the accent British, and still a second passed before I recognized her.
“Ba—Bernadette?”
“Béatrice. Sister Béatrice. From Leuvray. We met the day you and Miriam drove down from Paris.”
“How stupid of me—” I said.
“I am not in habit. Most people see only the habit.”
“No, but—” How could this face—so evidently the same one I had instantly disliked at Leuvray—still appear so different? Here in soiled overalls, without kerchief or her order’s blue garments, she could have passed as a graduate student, smoking in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning or grading essays on a rented porch.
“Do you like it here?” she asked. Taking a seat astride a bench at the long table, she motioned for me to sit down beside her.
“It is very scenic.”
“I no longer notice the countryside,” she said. She said she had been here a long time, as though she were twice as old as she was—which I took to be her late twenties or early thirties. “When I was a postulant, I thought I was signing on to spend the rest of my life in heaven.”
“And you were wrong about that?”
“We are who we are, Daniel, even in Burgundy. And God knows why we choose what we choose.” I felt my former dislike click back into position.
“Do you have regrets?” I asked.
“Are you asking if I am human? Is it so hard to see a nun as a human being?”
“I’ve never known any nuns.”
“We say that you come to this life for one reason, and stay, if you stay, for another. Have you discussed Miriam’s plans with her?”
Had I? Suddenly it seemed I had not.
“So she has not told you what she is considering?” There was a pause. From across the millpond, frogs chirruped in ragged counterpoint.
“Ah,” said Béatrice.
“New York,” I heard myself say, as though I were answering a question. “I am from New York.”
“Is New York where you came from, or where you live?”
“It is where I live.”
“Ah,” she said again.
“And what does ‘ah’ mean?”
“It is where you live,” she repeated. “And you are returning soon?”
“I’ve already postponed my departure for a month.”
“Are you a believer?” she asked. “In God.”
“I am a psychoanalyst.”
“And a psychoanalyst cannot believe in God?”
“Needn’t believe.”
“Except in psychoanalysis.”
“Anything can be imagined,” I said.
“Imagined,” she repeated. A crispness had spread over her voice, like a feathering of frost. “Can a New York psychoanalyst imagine living in a community such as this?”
“What?” The question hit me square in the solar plexus. So was this what my summons had been about? “I don’t even know what this community is.”
“Certainly, it may have no future,” Béatrice said.
“Does any utopia have a future?”
“There’s nothing utopian about the Nièvre. It is one of the poorest regions in France. There is great need.”
“For backup nuns?”
“The countryside is short on doctors.”
“Is that why Miriam asked me here? To sell me on a life in some kind of imaginary settlement, an unreal—”
“Unreal?” she said abruptly, as though arrested by a thought. “The need is real, whether or not we are.”
“A need for American shrinks? In rural France?”
“You are also a physician.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Forget this, Daniel. I should not be speaking to you.”
“But you are speaking anyway.”
“Because you must know it already….”
“Must know what?”
“You must know…” She paused again. Finally she drew a breath and said, “You are telling me you do not envision a future with Miriam.”
“I was under the impression that her future had already been thoroughly envisioned. By your order.”
“Let me say only that she is considering a change of plans”—another pause—“and that the order supports that decision.”
“You are saying she will not be accepted, as a novice, or postulant, or whatever you call it?”
“I cannot speak for Miriam. It may be that she has chosen another path. She is considering life in the lay community—”
“This community, you mean.”
“A community composed of members under minor vows, single people and married people. Perhaps there will be children here.”
“Béatrice, what are you saying?”
“Only that Miriam is happy here. And she is happy that you are here.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because she cannot. She will not,” she said with a sudden vehemence. “Fine, Daniel, you are not a religious man. But do you feel no obligation to her?”
“Do only religious people feel obligation?”
Her fine nostrils flared. “Daniel,” she said, and her gaze for the first time fixed mine, her eyes a metal blue, set like rivets. “Is it not possible that a bond has developed between you, a bond you have not noticed? You must believe me that I am not speaking on her behalf. Is it not possible that your plans—your plan to return to the States, her plan to join the order—is it not possible that they have become a means of avoiding that bond?”
“Those plans predate us. They predate our…”
“Relationship. Love affair. Why can’t you call it what it is?”
“Our time. Our borrowed time. It has always been borrowed.”
“My intention has not been to provoke you.”
“I am not provoked. I am curious.”
“I am not speaking to you as a religious. It is
true she is my spiritual charge and my confidante, but she is also my friend. I am only asking you—” She broke off.
“What are you asking me?”
“I suppose I am asking if you love her.”
“You are saying we should break off or get married.”
“I am saying only that she is happy here, happy now.”
“Is there anywhere else one can be happy?”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes, I believe I do, even if you—”
“You believe?”
“That. I believe that. I do not believe in.”
“My belief, Daniel—my belief is that love is indistinguishable from obligation.”
“What about the obligation to fact, to how things are?”
“Daniel, you are a psychologist, or psychiatrist—whatever you are, you cannot be entirely blind. Is it not a problem for you, does it not trouble you that you are the one she chose, you of all people?”
“I happened—”
“You did not happen. You did not just happen. That you, a shrink of all people, could believe, could choose to believe you were just anyone, passing through, some love affair—sweet borrowed time! You did not happen. You were already a psychologist, an analyst, call it what you like. That you could think—after what she has been through—that you could think for even a minute—”
“I do not follow.”
“Daniel, aren’t there rules, regulations, professional standards?”
“Miriam is not my patient—”
“Not yours, Daniel. Of course she was not yours. But after what happened you cannot think you are a neutral choice for her.”
“What do you mean—after what happened?” Her gaze fixed me again. “Béatrice, I don’t understand.”
As though in pain, she pinched the bridge of her nose and held a deep breath. “I thought—I assumed you knew. I would not have—I oughtn’t have mentioned it.”
“You are saying there is something I should have known. And that you cannot tell me what it is.”
“But now I have to, don’t I? Anyway it is not a secret.”
“Except, it seems, to me.”
“She never told you that she spent a year in hospital?”
“What kind of hospital? What for?” But in that moment, before Béatrice said a word, I already knew what kind. I already knew what for.
Béatrice said it had happened three years ago, before they had met. Miriam had returned home to Nevers for the winter holidays. Shortly before she would have returned to Paris to resume her studies, she had tried to kill herself. Or rather, she had killed herself, having taken every precaution to ensure she would not fail. She had even notified the police where to find her body, by calling a non-emergency line at night and leaving a recorded message at the station. After writing to her parents and posting the letter, she bicycled into the countryside, then down a logging road, abandoned and unmarked. At the end of the road she hid her bicycle and walked a distance into the woods. In a clearing Miriam had zipped herself into a sleeping bag and swallowed a quantity of Seconal, three or four times the fatal dose, carefully stirring the drug in a cup of yogurt until it dissolved, ingesting it all, then chasing it down with a half liter of vodka. The mixture would have been sufficient to drop a bull.
“There was no reason,” Béatrice said, “no reason at all why she should not have died. She ought to have. There was no reason.”
What had happened, Béatrice said, was either vanishingly improbable or frankly miraculous and remained, at least to her, unexplained. Miriam would have quickly lost consciousness. Barbiturates work fast and are capable of halting respiration within minutes. But then she threw up, which should not have happened, because Seconal suppresses the vomit reflex. Though she was still rapidly dying, vomiting would have mitigated the dosage somewhat and slowed its effect. She was saved only because a dog, attracted by the odor of vomit, drew the attention of its master to the small human form on the forest floor, zipped in its bag. The dog’s master managed to drag Miriam, still in the sleeping bag, up the logging road to his car on the main route. At the hospital her stomach was pumped and her condition stabilized, though she remained comatose for nearly a week.
When Miriam had recovered bodily, she was moved to a psychiatric facility, where she met daily with a doctor she referred to only as Monsieur le Médecin. While she credited the dog’s master with having saved her from death, it was Monsieur le Médecin she believed had saved her life. What they discussed, however, Béatrice did not know; Béatrice and Miriam had met only afterward, once Miriam had moved to a residential facility where Béatrice was serving as chaplain. Their friendship flourished, and with it Miriam’s renewed interest in the church, so that after she was released, she spent an additional two months at Béatrice’s monastery in Leuvray. Together they reread Miriam’s beloved Simone Weil, and Miriam came to the belief that her suicide attempt and subsequent survival had been in some sense providentially willed, that these events were the first, agonized stages of a true religious vocation.
“And that is what you believed too,” I said.
“I did not know what to believe. I did not know Miriam before the suicide, her attempt, I mean. But what struck me then—as it strikes me now—is the clarity of her resolve. I do not know why she tried to kill herself; she will not discuss that with me. But I wonder at the resolve it took to accomplish her plan, just as I wonder now at her resolve to take her preliminary vows. There is an absence of doubt, and normally we believe that vocation without doubt cannot be true vocation. Still I cannot help but sense in her—no, I cannot help but envy in her—that absolute conviction, and I want to believe that such a conviction is possible, and not just possible, but rare, precious.”
It was late now. Outside, a stillness brooded over the millpond. As she spoke, Béatrice had pressed a short groove into the tabletop with her thumbnail. By the end of her story, more grooves had accumulated at right angles, the pattern expanding outward in a rectilinear spiral, as symmetrical and regular as a Greek motif.
TWENTY-NINE
Over the course of my practice, I have listened to my patients grapple with an array of astonishing disclosures. One patient, an analyst-in-training, was informed in his early thirties that he was the son not of his father but of his uncle. Another patient, in her late twenties, discovered that she was not an only child, as she had always been told, but had an older brother, profoundly retarded, institutionalized upstate since childhood. An older woman discovered that her husband of twenty-nine years had maintained for the last thirty-five an apartment for his male lover.
As stupefying as these revelations are in the moment, most startling is how little they alter the fabric of a patient’s life. It is as though such a disclosure plunges the recipient into a maze of clichés, bewildering and dark, but with a single issue, inevitably depositing him right back where he started in his ordinary life. Once articulated, the familiar phrases (“blindsided!” “out of the blue!”) dissipate their power, and the “world turned upside down” reveals itself to be nothing other than the same old world. Even when cataclysms ensue (divorce, abandonment, flight), they blaze and flare out against the background of a world impassive and unchanged. Every patient, without exception, says, “I am certain that somehow, on some level, I always knew.”
In the early weeks of a treatment, the period when I take extensive notes on the sessions at the end of the working day, how difficult it is to recall the substance and sequence of what a patient has so recently said, in some cases only an hour or two before. The story Béatrice told, however, repeats itself to me unbidden, in perfect faithfulness. What had I learned then, speaking with her? What accounted for the sense I had, as Béatrice was speaking, that the details of her story had only given substance to something already there, a shape or shadow hovering always at the edge of sight? Béatrice had merely directed
my gaze toward it, that motionless figure in a clearing, bundled in its sleeping bag.
* * *
—
Miriam was asleep when I finally climbed the stairs that night, so I undressed in the dark. In my narrow bed, I waited for my eyes to adjust, but the room retained its perfect blackness, though the chirring of insects and the song of a night bird filled our little room. After some hours, Miriam got up and groped out into the hallway. Through the wall separating our room from the WC, I could hear a little torrent of urine, followed by the toilet’s gush. Returning, she kicked the foot of the bed, and with a sleepy “Putain!” she climbed back in. Almost immediately after she settled herself back under the sheet, her breathing roughened and grew regular, and she was asleep again.
What did I think then? That some new knowledge, some new understanding, beckoned to me, pleading its case? Surely I had grasped at once the import of Béatrice’s account: I was not merely someone Miriam had encountered, a dalliance, a summer’s love. Whoever I had been in Miriam’s eyes or against her skin, in the shadows of her soul I must have been a faceless doctor or, rather, a composite of many doctors, the doctors who had the ambiguous honor of having restored her to life. I was for her not myself but a compound ghost: at once an avatar of her past and the doorkeeper to a future—a future she had taken painstaking and unflinching steps to decline.
I listened to Miriam’s breathing. Had this person, had this body asleep beside me, changed? Was it marked now with the seal of some inescapable obligation? If she believed another doctor, or other doctors, had saved her life, was I required to take up that role? Or was that obligation, as Béatrice had suggested, nothing more than the sweet constraint of love itself? Perhaps I thought that whatever obligation may have existed had now been dissolved by Béatrice’s very revelation. Or if not by Béatrice’s revelation, by Miriam’s decision to keep her past hidden. Her religious vocation, if that was the word for it, had not been a revelation, not a fateful encounter with the Love whereof Herbert spoke. It was a bid for rescue, a salvage operation, incomplete and uncertain. What if my unwitting participation had endangered us both?
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