The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  She nodded and knit her brows and gave them proverbs: This life is realized here and now, not later. The ten thousand things and I are of one substance. Mostly she listened and did not say anything. They wanted to tell her, they were hungry to tell.

  On the phone that week, her Master listened to her recite her answers to the koans, her explanation of nonbeing. In his silence, she could feel his impatience. “Very good. It’s time for you to come back now. You’ve had your time wandering in the desert. Now we must resume our important work.”

  “I don’t know if I should come back,” she said, surprising herself.

  His voice grew thin and taut. “Soon you will have to return. Without me, what teaching will you receive?”

  “You aren’t only my teacher. You can’t pretend that’s all we are.” And now you’re not even that, she thought.

  “You are mine. No other teacher will want you, once you have been shaped by my instruction.”

  She was having trouble swallowing. Her mouth was too dry.

  His voice was gentle and imploring again: “Did you know I was married, before I became a sensei?”

  “No.” He had shared almost nothing of his life. Early in her training, he’d said it was better for her to think of him as a disembodied voice: that would make the transmission of the dharma more absolute.

  “Well, I was. We were not very happy together. In fact, we were miserable. We both wanted different things. She wanted a cozy sit-down life. I was restless. I was discovering the Way.”

  “What happened?”

  “We parted. It was no one’s fault. But now I know. It’s only with you that I can be free. We have such important work to do together. We are like two stars circling, attracted by our mutual gravity. You can’t turn that gravity off. Even if the space between us is greater, we continue to orbit each other. And we only have so much time. We must act. We must hurry.”

  That voice! When she had been afraid, grief-stricken, disgraced, his voice had surrounded her, protected her. She couldn’t turn from it. She’d be ruined by it.

  “I will give you a poem,” he said. “A young nun is meditating by the side of the road. A man walks by and calls out to her. He says:

  “You’re young and innocent.

  What will leaving home do for you?

  Throw away your saffron robe.

  Come! Enjoy the flowering woods.

  Sweetness falls from the tall trees.

  Flower pollen whirls all around.

  The beginning of spring is a time of joy.

  Come! Enjoy the flowering woods.

  The treetops are in blossom.

  They call out when the wind shakes them.”

  Five years into her training, her Master begins to let slip threads from his earlier life. He says offhandedly, “I hurt my shoulder playing baseball. I was recruited for college, but I dropped out.” Or: “We can’t let ourselves be constrained by the expectations of others. My family will never understand me, but still I go on, teaching the Way.”

  She gives him details in return. He knows she ran away, but he doesn’t know about Jules or Eddie. He knows her father is dead, but he doesn’t know about sitting by his bedside, listening to days of his rattling breath. He knows about her difficulties with her brother, but he doesn’t know Paul had periodically rescued her when no one else would.

  These threads of story they offer each other are deliberate lures, leading them deeper into danger. She’s trying to win his sympathy but doesn’t realize that she is the one ensnared. When she tries to avoid an unpleasant memory, he is there, telling her not to run away. When she is crushed by guilt and can’t help crying, he is there, stroking her wet face, promising that their relationship is not contingent on her goodness.

  He gives her a small bracelet of Japanese prayer beads, a beautiful chain of dark polished wood with a tassel of red silk. He shows her how to roll the beads in her hand to help her count her nembutsu prayers, and she laughs and says she knows how a rosary works. There are 108 beads, for the 108 afflictions people are said to have that prevent enlightenment. The 108th is made of cloudy glass. If she holds it to the light, she can see a tiny painting of a monk inside.

  She’s fingering the beads, flushed with gratitude at the specialness of the gift, when he says, “I gave beads like these to my previous student. But that student did not have the discipline, the patience required for the Way. I know you will not fail.”

  It’s the first time he has ever mentioned other students. Of course she isn’t the first; she feels stupid for even assuming.

  She studies the other practitioners entering the Zendo with a new watchfulness. Are they being trained, too? Who is the student who existed only in the past? Did she lift the cup to his lips with the same solemn devotion?

  She is certain the student is another she.

  Over the years she has watched other students attend dokusan, or private meetings. There is diligent Buffy wanting to get her A in Zen, skeptical George looking to hash out some point of doctrine he takes issue with, other former Catholics seeking a confessional, the anxious hoping for reassurance, the treasure hunters wanting Eastern mysteries. And occasionally there were girls like herself who knocked on the door and vanished into the back room. They never stayed long, though. In a month or six months, they were gone, moving on to the next thing in their lives: a yoga class, a juice cleanse, a return to the Orthodox Judaism of their childhoods. Like curious tourists, they stopped for a while and took pictures and moved on.

  She tells herself, I will be the patient one.

  Other students come and go and then stop coming, and she is still there, doggedly persisting. He hasn’t invited other women into his private chambers for some time. Five years in, he kisses her on the neck and rests his head on her shoulder and sighs with contentment. On Buddha’s birthday, called the Flower Festival in Japan, he brings her red flowers from his garden and tucks them into her hair, smiling and serious. “There,” he says. “Beautiful.” Soon, she tells herself, he’ll need her the way she needs him.

  Who knew that all she had to do all those years was disappear?

  In the morning, the buzzer rang: she ran to the door in her bathrobe and accepted a bouquet of white chrysanthemums from a deliveryman. The card said simply, Come by when the flowers bloom in Boston. You are running out of time. She didn’t know how he had gotten her address, but she did know what they meant. In Japan, white flowers were given only at funerals. They were a symbol of death.

  She stood in the doorway and wondered how her life could have possibly arrived at this day, this moment, these flowers in her hands.

  “Have you forgotten about me yet?” Sean asked on the phone that afternoon.

  “No, of course not.” She pulled the phone into bed with her. It was her day off, and after the arrival of the flowers she hadn’t been able to get herself moving. She’d watched the light from the window travel across her floor as though she were a prisoner in a cell.

  “Why don’t you tell me your story, and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “What would you want to tell me?”

  “I’ll start with the old neighborhood. And the kids I played street hockey with. And my family’s church. The priest who went to each family’s house and each of the moms served him tea and brought out the good cookies. It was something, having a holy man over for tea.” He paused. “Where would you begin?”

  “Let me ask you a question. Do you remember this protest that happened in Boston, over ten years ago now, when all the churches were closing—the Communion on the Common? Did you go?”

  “Yes! I remember. I did go. Seemed like every Catholic I knew was there, and that’s a lot of Micks.”

  He laughed, and Nicole clutched the bedspread. “What do you remember?”

  “Let’s see. I remember it had rained the previous night, and with all those people on the grass, it was muddy as hell. I came with my wife, and with Frankie. She would have been about four. We had the stroller.”
<
br />   “What side of the Common were you on?”

  “It was the east side—near Park Street station. I remember because we got pretzels from one of the vendors that’s always there. They were making cross-shaped ones that day.”

  She remembered the funny pretzels. She tried to summon him from her memory, assigning meaning to this turned head or that one. She’d been only a teenager; he was a man, with a wife and child. But still: they’d both been there, bowing on the muddy green of the Common.

  “That day is important. You’re giving me a clue,” Sean said.

  “Maybe—I don’t know.”

  She could hear him thinking. “That was the day you fell in love,” he guessed.

  “Not quite.”

  “You met a nice Catholic boy on the green, and your girlish heart fluttered.”

  “No.”

  “Tell me,” he said. He was getting frustrated. “Or write it down. Write me a letter, and tell me what you can’t say.”

  “I—I don’t know if I can.” I don’t know if I’ll still be lovable to you.

  “Try,” Sean said. “Just try. Write me a letter. Write me your story and tell me where we stand.”

  “We stand about two hundred miles away from each other.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  She looked at the flowers on the mantel. “Don’t you know what a mistake I am?”

  “You’re not. You’re not.”

  “Oh, but I am, sweetheart. I am.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care. Don’t you know I’m a mistake, too?”

  The women were getting unruly. Now the sharp looks, the hisses and whispers that filled the meditation sessions, seemed deliberate. Nicole half-closed her eyes, tried to settle. On Fridays she was working late at Nordstrom, sorting inventory and flagging new items for the weekend sales; then on Saturday morning she had to hurry uptown to make the session, still blurry with sleep. She wanted to pay Paul back for the deposit money as soon as she could. It made her uneasy, these favors hanging over her head.

  At the end of the meditation session, Jeannie bowed low to the roshi, blocking his exit from the door. “Excuse me, Morimoto-sensei. May I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  Others busied themselves with their mats, but quietly. Listening in.

  “Why is Nicole in our class?”

  Tying the laces of her sneakers, Nicole started.

  “Why do you ask?” the roshi said politely.

  “She’s studied for many years. She’s much more advanced than us. Why is she studying with us?”

  The roshi said calmly, “I do not teach women in the private setting that more advanced study requires. Shakyamuni Buddha said, ‘In whatever religion women are ordained, that religion will not last long. As families that have more women than men are easily destroyed by robbers, as a plentiful rice field once infested by rice worms will not long remain, even so the true dharma will not last long.’”

  “But—women can be ordained. They can study at an advanced level.”

  “That is true, yes. But there have been cases of misconduct in mixed-gender teaching, and it is better to avoid these situations. A woman who wants to be ordained must find her own teaching lineage, through a convent perhaps. And,” he added regretfully, “It is more difficult for women to make the sacrifices of family and home that are required.”

  He bowed; she bowed; he left. The rest of them resumed rolling their mats. Nicole bent over her shoes, her face burning. As soon as the laces were tied, she hurried out of the room. But downstairs in the lobby, when she paused just to take a long breath, Jeannie tapped her on the shoulder. Maxine and Lucille were there, too.

  “I thought I might get an answer like that,” Jeannie said. “And I knew you weren’t going to ask. But I just wanted to know.”

  Nicole shrugged and tried to smile. It was embarrassing. Like having your mother call the basketball coach to ask why you weren’t picked for the team. “It’s not that simple.”

  “No, it’s not. But we wanted to ask you something. Would you be our teacher? We think you’d be perfect.”

  “But I’m not ordained. Or registered as a sensei. I’m not anything.”

  “That doesn’t bother me.”

  She stared into their trusting faces. Something was growing in her chest, making it hard to speak. She wanted to grab their hands. Let’s get out of here.

  But that wouldn’t be very teacherly. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath. “All right. You’d better come with me.”

  THE THREE JEWELS

  I want to know the reason you broke your family’s heart, Jocelyn said at their next meeting. They were in Jocelyn’s apartment, folding laundry. Nicole liked being helpful while she talked, and she had lots of sweater-folding experience.

  Where were we. I was seventeen, she said, and you know better than to take a seventeen-year-old’s word for how something happened. One day I was a Catholic, and then one day I knelt and took refuge in the Three Jewels. I thought it would be like a spell, like transubstantiation. You know, when the wafer and the wine become the body and the blood.

  Did you transform? Jocelyn asked.

  I don’t know. No one saw me except some statues. Does what you whisper in a dark room with no witness have any weight? If a Catholic girl converts in an empty museum, does it make a sound?

  Come on, Jocelyn said. I want to know what makes a person do such a thing.

  Well . . . there were the churches that closed. My mother. And the cats, all those cats that died. I guess it started with the cats.

  A virus was going through the town’s strays, herpes or feline AIDS, something like that. You’d be walking down a quiet lane and see a limp, furry shape stretched out in the road. Sometimes there’d be kittens there, still huddled in the cooling warmth of the body. They’d gaze up at you with their glinting, witchy eyes.

  Her mother took in a pregnant queen, who gave birth to sick little premature babies. The kittens lost weight and died one by one, like clockwork, the littlest first, then on down the line, a new still body among the squirming ones each morning. They knew how to purr and knead their tiny claws while sucking on a bottle, and they were just starting to open their eyes, which were the deepest blue Nicole had ever seen, like milky jewels. Lapis. The one thing they didn’t know how to do was keep living.

  The last kitten was too weak to hold up its head. But it kept trying to suckle on her mother’s hand. That was what got her: the trying. It was only a dumb animal, the alleys and dumpsters were full of them, but this one wanted to live, it wanted it desperately.

  She was seventeen; it was early spring. The ground was thawing beneath her and groaned at night, changing shape. When the scandal broke wide and the church closings began, she and her mother watched the news in the mornings before school.

  The Catholic Diocese of Boston, nearly bankrupted by private settlements in sexual abuse suits, was due to close more than sixty of its 357 parishes. The parishes that had named towns and schools and roads would now be split into new allotments, shuffled among other churches. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the Holy Family, the Blessed Sacrament, the Holy Rosary, Our Lady of Pity—all closing. Polish churches, Hispanic churches, powerful Irish churches. In a panicky meeting demanded by the congregation, their priest explained that there was a calculated “sacramental index” of a parish’s vitality, amounting to the year’s baptisms and funerals plus twice the number of weddings. When a pastor was alerted of his church’s closing, he raised a black flag on the church flagpole. The cameras of the local news stations lingered on these flags, whipping in the spring winds.

  She and her mother watched the story unfold: the exterior of a rainy Gothic building, a few gravestones out of focus through the fence, angry protesters circling, a beleaguered priest at a microphone. And the people she knew from photographs on St. Augustine’s bulletin boards: bishops and the powerful Catholics of Boston, angry, woeful, resigned. There was archbishop Bern
ard Law, red-faced and jowled, rheumy eyes squinting. He would be accused of covering up child abuse, one of the highest-ranking church leaders found to be skillfully shuffling predators from parish to parish. There would be letters and documents. There would be suicides. Years later he’d be made a cardinal, receive a special appointment under the Vatican. She’d be clicking through the news and be shocked to see that bulldog face framed in red, arm in arm with the pope.

  Then the camera shifted to the protesters, signs jabbing at the air. The reporters always seemed to interview the craziest speaker they could find: a frizzy-haired woman in a Pats jersey with a rich Boston accent, shouting that the archdiocese was burning good Catholics. How no one even cared any more about the Irish people that made the city. Why weren’t they closing more of those Mexican churches? Where was the respect for the sacred? The church her grandmother, her mother had gotten married in, now closing. It was blasphemy, pure and simple. It’s like losing a part of your body, Boston’s Catholics said.

  Nicole’s mother was busy marking the black-flagged churches on a map of Boston, looking for a pattern. “Look, some of the oldest parishes are closing,” she said, tapping the scattered X’s on the map. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re screwing us over. They’re screwing over good Catholics, Nic. Where’s the justice in that?”

  It took so long for everyone, Nicole included, to believe. It took story after story in the news, the victims growing in number, filling town hall meetings, gymnasiums. Church leaders were caught in cover-ups and taking hush money. It was the first time in my life, she told Jocelyn, that I saw how holy men could lie.

  Once, years later, she’d tried to bring up that time, remind her mother: you were more upset about those churches closing than about what was really going on.

  So was everyone, her mother replied. The one thing was a private matter. The other was that they were razing the city. Making it into something else. A new Boston.

  Nicole didn’t say a word. She nodded and retreated, spent more time lying on the couch reading. She was taking a class called World Religions that was moving slowly across the globe. She’d read with interest about the familiar faiths, examining the questions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sought to answer. She’d dressed up as a nun (shades of childhood) and given a report about life in a medieval convent. But it was the paperback book Understanding Buddhism, with its cover of a line of saffron-robed monks walking beneath a stone Buddha, their faces composed with a kind of quiet joy, that intrigued her.