by John Crowley
“Sister Mary Philomel,” said Sam gravely. “Seems very qualified, just fine. Taught third grade for years in Cincinnati or somewhere. Sounds fine.”
“Well I’d like to meet her,” Winnie said. “At least.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “She says she can start tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow! Well but Sam …”
“Sooner the better. Get this show on the road.”
He reached down for the Sunday paper lying in tents around his chair. Winnie contained her objections. Hildy slipped from the sofa and faded from the room—lots to do, if school was really starting tomorrow—and Winnie soon went out too. Joe Boyd stayed for the end of The Big Picture.
“Dad, were you in the Army or the Air Force?”
“Both.”
“No, which?”
“Both. I was in the Army Air Corps, before it was a separate arm. As they say.”
Joe Boyd mulled, pondering his own choice, fly or ride. The show was over: tanks crawled unstoppably forward in ranks; men marched; planes in vigilant formation soared above. When Joe Boyd too left the room, Pierce was alone with his uncle.
“Shut that off, will you, Pierce.”
Sam Oliphant possessed within his household an unquestionable kind of authority that he did not ponder, not how he came by it nor whether he should exercise it. He was subject to infrequent bitter moods, which he thought he had a right to; he could be rageful sometimes and easily exasperated, as though unable to reconcile himself to the fact that after the disaster that had befallen him, and after the efforts he had made not to be crushed by it, he should still be subject to the daily irritations and dissatisfactions of physical life. The rest of the family tried to make up for it, and Sam got his way and his comforts around the house without difficulty most of the time. But still he thought of himself as good-natured and forthcoming, on the whole, and it would have grieved him to know that his nephew found it impossible to remain alone in the same room with him for more than a few minutes.
Pierce found the funnies at his uncle’s feet and stretched out on the floor with them. Sam shook the sheets of the front section. Pierce squirmed uncomfortably, flipped the colored pages. Peter Pain (a cucumber-green demon not in the Dictionary) bound a sufferer’s head with iron bands, pounded plugs into his nostrils: rout him with Ben-Gay. Sam glanced at Pierce over the tops of his glasses.
Pierce rose; sighed; felt Sam’s look but did not return it; and without offensive haste, as though he had nothing particular to do elsewhere but no real interest in staying in this room either, he left.
It had grown colder; beyond the window that Hildy looked out of, and the one Pierce looked out of, wind was snatching colored leaves from the trees, reminding Hildy of calendar pages rapidly blown away in a movie scene. Upstairs in the big house, Winnie sought in the closets for the store of schoolbooks she had sent away for months before, standard texts for the children’s grades this year, which she had hidden so that the kids wouldn’t have read them all before school started.
FOUR
Sister Mary Philomel’s guardian angel awoke her before dawn, as she had asked it specially to do: her eyes opened at 4:24 (according to the luminous hands of the minute wristwatch propped on her bedside table, a gift from her father on the occasion of her final vows). She lay unmoving on the narrow bed and silently spoke the Magnificat. She would have got up to kneel, but she wanted not to disturb the sisters beyond the white curtains on either side of her, nurses who needed every second of the sleep they got.
When the dormitory began to bustle and the curtains first on this side then on that to move slightly with the movements of the sisters beyond, Sister Mary Philomel got up, and knelt on the tile floor (so much colder somehow than the wooden floors of the convent in Washington) to ask for help and strength and wisdom in the new task to which she had been called. And she did feel something like strength flow into her, like the light growing stronger in the window beyond her bed.
She found when she went to sit on the toilet that her menstrual flow had ceased, which was gratifying; she could take a shower today, as she had been unable to do for the previous days, and cleanse cleanse cleanse. The dank shower stall even felt less penitential than usual today, though the water smelled, as always, faintly sulfurous; completely natural, Sisters, mountain springs, said Sister Mary Eglantine, but it wasn’t Sister Mary Philomel alone who thought of pollution, mine tailings, the coal cars that passed endlessly along the tracks beyond the hospital grounds.
While she dressed—with special care this morning—she repeated the Magnificat. My soul magnifies the Lord. She thought of the long way up to the Hazelton house on the hill. She had not yet been able to find the materials, the little workbooks and readers and flashcards and teacher’s guides, that she had used in Washington when she had taught there; she had prayed hard that she might be shown where in the hospital or its outbuildings they had been put, but she had not been shown. The wooden statue of St.Wenceslaus—the only object in her partition besides the crucifix and the dresser—stood still with his face turned to the wall, having been no help at all despite Sister’s specific requests, no help with her school materials or with her stomach either. Well he could just stand there a little longer.
In the halls the nuns moved together toward the chapel, hands within their sleeves and veils drawn over, turtle-private, snail-self-sufficient, though cheerful looks were exchanged. They took their places in the little chapel, and Sister Mary Eglantine led them in a Litany while they awaited the priest:
Queen of the Angels.
Pray for us.
Mountain of Mercy.
Pray for us.
Cave of adamant.
Pray for us.
Temple of Ivory.
Pray for us.
Wisdom of Egypt.
Pray for us.
Gates of the Moon.
Pray for us.
The tiny chapel with its miniature appointments always reminded Sister Mary Philomel of the little castles and throne-rooms of old art, jeweled closets where the Virgin or the saints just fit, elbow almost out the arched window, foot touching the doorstep. But no matter where, here or St. Peter’s, the mystery proceeded identically, soothing and rhythmic, like a bandage rapidly and firmly wrapped. Incarnation Passion Resurrection Ascension. Hoc est enim Corpus Meum. Sister Mary Philomel took the food on her tongue, sweet water filled her mouth, and she nearly fell asleep again.
At breakfast downstairs though, faced with her earthly cereal, she was once again unable. She took a few infinitesimal bites, willing herself to be cheerful and brisk, but she could do no more. Heck. And with the long long morning ahead too. She cleaned up her dishes, hoping the wasted Wheaties would not be noticed. The saintliest Mother Superior in the history of their Order had been granted the gift of inedia: she didn’t eat, or need to eat, for three months, or was it years. And since she didn’t eat she didn’t, you know, and she ceased to have her menstrual flow as well, which right there would be a blessing. Sister Mary Philomel doubted that her own inability to eat breakfast was a gift of grace. It was too queasy a feeling, too cold in her innards.
She went out of the kitchen the back way, where one of the kitchen sisters was punching out Communion wafers with a sort of waffle iron to send over to the church; the white rounds with their embossed letters (IHS) were stacked up in piles, reminding Sister Mary Philomel of her father’s celluloid poker chips, beautiful rounds colored and white which she had used to play with. Strange the things you think of. She could remember the taste of those poker chips.
There was no time to look further for the cardboard boxes that contained her old profession. She hurried up the back stairs, never hurry, Sisters, and down the central hall of the hospital to the dormitory stairs. In the hall, lying odd as a dragon’s corpse or an executioner’s mask and axe on this tile floor, against this light veneered paneling, was the Old Chest: a great worm-holed beeswax-blackened carved chest from the Old World. It had come over with the fi
rst sisters, one of the things parceled out among the branches of the Order like the shares of an old immigrant’s useless inheritance, to be dragged through woods and over water, never forget. Among the sisters it was said that anything lost was in the Old Chest, which was a joke since the key or keys had long been lost, and its dozen drawers and doors would not open; the sisters used it for nothing but to put a great vase of flowers on, always fresh, rising from it as from a grave. Sister Mary Philomel stopped her hurry to smell them.
No luck again in the bathroom either.
In her partition, she noticed that Wenceslaus had turned a shy and hopeful half-turn away from the wall where she had stood him. Oh no you don’t, Sister Mary Philomel thought, not if that’s the best you can do. She took the saint firmly by the shoulders and turned him back again.
The nuns of Our Lady of the Way Hospital (“Our Lady in the way,” Warren had first innocently called it; now all the Oliphants did, among themselves) were an Austrian order, established in the seventeenth century in the Czech lands of the Hapsburg Empire, which had just then been newly reconverted to the Catholic faith. Theirs was a teaching order from the first, entrusted by the Emperor with the care of the infants of Bohemian noble houses, many of them recently Protestant. (Pierce and the Oliphant children would commit to memory a fairy-tale version of this history as part of their lessons.) The order’s full name was the Pacific Order of the Most Holy Infant, and they professed a special devotion to that manifestation of Jesus celebrated in Prague, gratiosa Jesula pragensis, a pretty child dressed in miniature crown and royal robes. In the tart-smelling entrance hall of the hospital, the Infant of Prague stood on a pedestal beneath a bell jar in his lace and silk (“like a collection doll,” said Hildy); and beyond Him, His Mother.
The mission of the Infantines was still what it had been, to establish the Faith in Protestant lands, though they no longer proselytized, and had mostly turned to Works instead at the suggestion of Our Lady (communicated to that nineteenth-century Mother Superior now in the toils of the beatification process). Still it might have been the old Imperial connection that drew them to Bondieu, for the first inhabitants of the tidy rows of houses built by Good Luck Coal and Coke had been (along with the mountain men drawn from all over the county) a band of Bohemian miners, recruited by company agents in the coalfields of Pennsylvania. It was for these men and their families (called variously Dutchmen or Polacks by the others) that a priest had first been sent to Bondieu, who with the help of the men had built the clapboard church in the holler, Blessed Sacrament, the odd one out among the seven churches of the town.
Pierce would sometimes in later years have a hard time accounting for his childhood circumstances, to himself and others: the extremes were too disparate, nuns and hillbillies, and his own and the Oliphants’ presence among them too anomalous. On Sundays from their hilltop they could hear the loudspeakers of the Full Gospel Church of God in Christ, which broadcast its service (songs and hectoring and indeterminate cries and moaning) to all the town. The volume was too high, the accents too strong, the theology too extreme for the children to understand more than a few words: still, Hildy wondered if listening weren’t a violation of the rule that forbade Catholics to attend the church services of others.
“Anyway what right do they have to make everybody else listen?”
Pierce thought that what could be done was to get a helicopter, and equip it with a big loudspeaker at the end of a long wire; then on an overcast day (one of those days, say, when high-piled volumes of cloud fill the sky, parting now and then to let religious beams of sunlight fan out over the earth) fly the copter out from some hidden place, then up above the clouds, high up where its engine couldn’t be heard. Then the loudspeaker, dangling far down, could suddenly announce itself as the voice of God speaking, and tell everybody to be Catholics.
“They’d believe that,” Joe Boyd said. “Oh sure.”
“Anyway,” Hildy said, “it wouldn’t be the same if you fooled them into it.”
Pierce didn’t see it that way. It seemed to him that once gathered into the one true flock, by whatever means, they could then come gradually to see the obvious rightness of its doctrines; in the meantime they wouldn’t be in danger of dying outside the Church. It would have to be a helicopter, because helicopters can hover in one place. A job for the Invisibles.
“Anyway,” Hildy said, “if God wanted that he could do it himself, and he doesn’t, so he doesn’t want to.” Hildy thought it was silly to imagine God as a sort of busybody continually interfering in the quotidian: the natural order of rules and their consequences had been set up at the beginning, and they functioned now by themselves, accessible to any thinking person of good will. Mary might appear to children here and there with messages, for reasons of her own, but God didn’t bother with those sorts of miracles. What Hildy most appreciated about God the Father was his clear if impersonal realism. It’s what she most appreciated in her own father too.
Living far from institutional checks, Sam Oliphant had grown heterodox, Pelagian; unwittingly he fell into the heretical doctrine of two churches, one for children and the ignorant, in which all the stories were true as given, unquestionable; and another for the smart, who knew better. Like an eighteenth-century deist, Sam took it that his ground of faith was simply the conclusions of reason, and every layer of liturgy or dogma or ritual compliance laid over that ground was made acceptable, if not actually justifiable, by the initial irreducible sensibleness. You met all your varied obligations in the big church to the letter, but you believed only what reason agreed to; in fact if reason demanded it, then it was dogma. The world itself was the product of reason, of evolution progressing, making sense, of people getting smarter and seeing the sense the world made. The sense the world made was truth; God had made it, and His Church wasn’t going to contradict it. Like fraternity secrets or team mascots, the absurdities of faith didn’t bother Sam, because this was his side, they were his absurdities.
“Daddy, did you ever baptize anybody?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Well because Sister said that everybody and especially doctors should know how to baptize somebody, in case you find somebody dying who wants to be baptized. Especially doctors.”
“In case I’m about to lose one, huh? I should get them to heaven if I can’t keep ’em on earth.”
“You don’t need a priest or holy water. You just do it.”
“What if you don’t have any water?”
“It has to be mostly water. You could use muddy water.”
“Mostly water! You know your own body is mostly water? Sixty-five percent. A woodchuck is mostly water! Am I allowed to baptize people by hitting them with a woodchuck?”
“Daddy!”
In the fights he liked to pick with his children or with Winnie over religious punctilio (to which he brought a gleeful sophistry), Sam seemed often to be actually addressing someone else, or intending someone else to overhear and be amused, some other version of himself; he said things the child couldn’t be expected to get or even to notice were supposed to be funny. Pierce could sometimes tell when he did it to Warren, so he could assume Sam was doing it to him as well, when he couldn’t tell.
Irony doesn’t come naturally to children; brutal sarcasm (“Now are you satisfied?”) they can recognize and deplore, but—especially in religion—they are dogmatists, not ironists; Sam’s teasing left them in difficulties he seemed not to feel, and mortified. They all caught on to the trick eventually, and made it their own, as they did Sam’s heresy of Two Churches, which came to seem only common sense to them; but it generated within them a kind of double life, lived differently by each of them. It was a harsh training, and Hildy only survived it in the end by reversing the terms, Sam’s terms, which were outward observance ironized by inward demur: Hildy’s outward jokey familiarity would approach contempt, and get her in some hot water with her Order and its superiors, but it expressed an inward allegiance deeper than any w
ords.
Sister Mary Philomel’s was a different deity from Sam’s, more manifold and perplexing, more nearby too.
“Children,” she said to them. “In the little garden in the middle of the hospital, right in the middle of the garden where the pathways cross, there is a birdbath, do you know? And right in the middle of that birdbath there is a silver ball. Isn’t there?”
“Yesster.”
“Now if you look into that silver ball you see that it reflects everything at once, up, down, below, above, near, far. Doesn’t it?”
“Yesster.”
“Yes. You can see the walls curving all around and every window and even yourself sitting there looking in. And when I sit and look into that ball I think, That is what the eye of God is like, looking at everything at once.”
Under Sister Mary Philomel’s tutelage the Oliphant kids and Pierce were enmeshed again in the old net of observances and scruples, and provided again with the ritual objects, scapulars, holy cards, Miraculous Medals, which under Miss Martha they had been without. Now for their parents’ birthdays or for Thanksgiving or Christmas gifts they were each to prepare a Spiritual Bouquet: a cluster of prayers said, Masses heard, Communions taken, rosaries told—even tiny prayers whispered throughout the day, scattered in the bouquet like baby’s-breath, Ejaculations.
“Jesus Mary and Joseph!” said Hildy. “That’s an Ejaculation.”
“Or Oh my God!” said Sam, whom she was instructing in this prayer type, not understanding why he had laughed at her offering of One Thousand Ejaculations.
“You can make Ejaculations all day long,” she said. “Wherever you are.”
“Yes,” said Sam, still laughing. “I see.”
Sister Mary Philomel was their daily instructrix in such pieties; she was the great pythoness of their cult, the guardian of the gate into the land of the dead: it was she who taught them what prayers the Church had determined would, if said at Mass on All Souls’ Day, free a soul from its salutary torments in Purgatory and get it (still sore and trembling) right into Heaven; she who all on her own gathered them up on that November morning, next day after All Saints’, bitter damp day with the smell of coal fires and dung sharp in the air, and got them to church to do the work. Two, four, six souls released by their prayers, and Hildy wanted to stay longer and do more, imagining the grateful dead freed by the prayers of conscientious children like herself worldwide, winging upward by tens and hundreds like autumn blackbirds rising to migrate.