by Mark Salzman
After six years of training and a feeling of steady progress toward God, she made Solemn Profession—vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience that could be revoked only through special dispensation from the Vatican. Solemn Profession was the Carmelites’ only public ritual; on that occasion the nuns removed the screen between the chapel and the choir and became visible to the congregation. On the day of her ceremony, Sister John saw only one familiar face in the chapel: Sister Priscilla had made the trip from Ohio to wish her well. They were allowed to visit with each other in the parlor for the rest of the day, separated by the grille, but able to speak and hold hands through the bars. Her former teacher departed with the words, “You’ll be in my prayers always, Sister John,” and then the reality of the transformation sank in: Helen was no longer waiting for her life to begin. The great journey was under way.
After Solemn Profession, however, rites of passage in the spiritual life suddenly thinned out. For seven years she watched as the cloister got smaller and the silence got bigger. She was a bride of Christ, but still had not met her Spouse, and the farther she traveled inward without finding Him, the more aware she became of His absence.
I am like a desert owl,
like an owl among the ruins.
I lie awake and moan,
like a lone sparrow on the roof.
The Hour concluded with a sigh. The Sisters filed out of choir in order of seniority, with the oldest Sister at the front of the line and the youngest taking up the rear. Sister John kept pace with the veil in front of her, thinking, I’ve been walking behind Sister Angelica for thirteen years. Only our deaths will change the order. Or if one of us leaves.
More and more often she found herself thinking of the novices and postulants who had decided that they did not, after all, have genuine vocations. She also thought of the two professed Sisters she had known who had asked to be released from vows. One of them, after twenty-five years of service to God, had fallen in love with a priest. After exhaustive correspondence with the Holy See and the Vatican and a year of painful waiting, dispensation was withheld in her case and she was told to pray. In the end, she left the community disappointed and bitter, her soul in a state of mortal sin.
Sister John also found herself thinking of Sister Agatha, who had gone to God, but who surely had deserved a better death. Intractable pain had robbed this gentlest of nuns of the opportunity to review her life at its end and surrender with a peaceful heart.
These were dangerous thoughts, Sister John knew, but she also knew that if she had any doubts about her vocation, this was the time to deal with them. A woman could leave the convent in her early thirties and still have time for marriage and children, but every day she postponed the decision, the window of opportunity got smaller.
It was during this period of spiritual aridity that she learned why cloistered nuns laughed so much. In a place where one was never allowed to forget the urgency, difficulty, and seriousness of one’s mission, sneezes became pratfalls. Truly funny moments could be savored for weeks, and some were cherished to the point that Sisters only had to look at each other a certain way to invoke their memory. One afternoon the mailman delivered a letter addressed, in a child’s innocent handwriting, to “St. Joseph’s Disgraced Carmelites.” Mother Mary Joseph nearly had to declare a cell day—a day off—because it seemed that no one was going to be able to stop laughing in time for choir. On another day, Sister Angelica, who had spilled some dishwashing liquid on the toaster and shorted it out, stood up during Faults and announced gravely, “I wish to proclaim myself for wasting Joy and blowing a fuse.”
Sister John entertained herself with these memories as she waited in her cell for the call to Vespers, then got up to use the bathroom. Another Sister with the same idea approached from the opposite direction. A moment of awkwardness ensued. Wanting to practice humility, Sister John pulled back to allow the other nun to use the bathroom first, but this younger Sister’s humility would not allow it, and the struggle began.
The two nuns stood with eyes downcast, signing politely with their hands:
Excuse me.
You first.
No, you. Please.
Just standing there forever! Was that not a fault against poverty, since both nuns were wasting time that could have been used for prayer? Sister John felt as if she had wandered onstage during a performance of the Passion Play, only to realize that she had forgotten all of her lines. She yielded and stepped into the bathroom first, but when she came back out, the novice was gone. Mother Mary Joseph was standing in her place.
Please, you come, she signed. She led the way to the kitchen, closed the door behind them, and asked Sister John to sit down.
“What is it, Mother?”
“We have a visitor at the Turn asking to speak to you.”
The Turn was a small, revolving window that allowed the nuns to receive mail and exchange gifts without being seen. Sister John thought she had never seen Mother Mary Joseph look so serious. “Is it bad news?” she asked, her heart pounding.
The prioress shook her head. “It’s your mother.”
Sister John looked at the pots and ladles hanging over the stove, at the mixing bowls filled with dough and covered with damp cloths, and at the magnets on the refrigerator holding recipe cards, and thought: I never saw my mother in a kitchen. “What should I do?” she asked, feeling numb.
“Did you have any idea that she would be coming?”
“No.”
The executor of Sister John’s grandparents’ estate, a family friend, had written some time ago with the news that he’d tracked down an address for Sister John’s mother. She lived in San Diego, only two hours’ drive from the Carmel of St. Joseph, and had an unfamiliar last name: Barnard. At first Sister John had resisted the urge to contact her, partly out of resentment, but also thinking it might reopen the wounds of her childhood and make life at the cloister even harder. Eventually, however, curiosity won out. She wrote a letter explaining who she was and where she lived, emphasizing that she was cloistered and dedicated to prayer and forgiveness, then watched the Turn at mail time every day for weeks, hoping for a response. None had come.
“What did she look like?”
Mother Emmanuel tried to smile. “I only heard her voice.”
“Did she sound drunk?”
“Not that I could tell.” Mother Emmanuel leaned forward, distancing herself from the cross on the wall just behind her. “Would you like me to ask her to come another time? When you’ve had some chance to prepare?”
Sister John’s mouth felt dry. “I wouldn’t know how to prepare for this. I might as well go see her now.”
She walked into the parlor and sat down in the lone chair on the nuns’ side of the room. A closed curtain hid the metal grille separating the enclosure side from the visitor’s side. She heard the prioress speaking through the Turn, instructing her mother to open the door to her right. The curtain in front of her trembled as someone entered the parlor. They were only a few feet apart now.
What am I going to say to her? How should I be?
She wanted to go through this experience as a nun, secure in faith and in God’s peace, not as a shaky, conflicted daughter, but her feelings were not under her control. She took hold of the curtain and slid it to one side. The visitor’s area of the parlor was furnished with a chair, an end table with a vase of wildflowers on it, and a crucifix. A window looked out toward the driveway, and on its sill dozed a cat that the community’s extern nun had rescued from the pound. The end of its tail twitched.
Her mother sat in the chair, her hands folded stiffly on her lap, a purse on the floor next to her. She wore a cream-colored skirt and blazer, and her shoes matched her suit perfectly. Sister John remembered her mother from old photographs as having brown hair, like her own, but now it was gray and styled in a soft pageboy cut. Professional but friendly. Her mother wore pla
in gold earrings and a simple necklace, all tasteful, but then spoiled the effect with an enamel brooch pin shaped like a seal, balancing a rhinestone heart on its nose.
Sister John recognized her mother’s face, but nothing else fit. Which, she realized, was probably exactly what her mother was thinking, seeing her grown daughter for the first time in the Carmelite habit.
“Praised be Jesus Christ,” she said.
Her mother reached into her purse, pulled out a tissue, and held it on her lap. “Hello, Helen.” Her inflection sounded rehearsed.
Sister John couldn’t think of anything nunlike to say, so she said, “You look a lot better off than I expected.” Her mother smiled, but Sister John didn’t smile back. As the initial surprise wore off, she began feeling angry. “This is certainly a surprise.”
Her mother crushed the tissue into a ball. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why did you? Why didn’t you write first?”
The cat dropped down from the sill and rubbed itself against the visitor’s legs. She reached down to pet it, appearing relieved to have something to do with her hands. “For a long time I thought it would be better if you didn’t hear from me at all.”
“Better?” Sister John asked, her face feeling hot. “Better than what?”
“I was very immature when you were born, Helen. I wasn’t ready to be a parent—I wasn’t even ready to be an adult. I panicked. That’s the only way I can describe it.”
“Twenty-seven years is a long time to be panicked.”
Her mother dabbed at her eyes with the ball of tissue. “It’s more complicated than that. I met someone when you were very small, and I put off telling him about you because I was afraid. I knew he wasn’t ready for kids, and I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t plan on this getting so far out of hand; I thought the right time would come and that we would all be a family together, but I was more of a coward than I thought. Then I got pregnant and our daughter was born, and I was even more afraid. What if he left me then? I had already been a failure as a mother once, I couldn’t do that again. I knew it was wrong, but I felt it was the only way.”
The wall clock hummed. “I have a sister?”
“And a brother.” She took out a fresh tissue. “They’re wonderful people, not like me. Please don’t hold what I’ve done against them.”
“Do they know about me?”
Her mother’s expression hardened. “I’m not excusing what I did. I’m a mother who abandoned her child so she could have a shiny new life. That’s always the person I’ll be, no matter what else I do, and I’m not proud of it. I came here to tell you the truth so that you could finally put me out of your mind. I thought it might give you some closure. It’s not much, but it’s something.”
Now Sister John realized why her mother had come: this was an opportunity to end the relationship once and for all, and to get away with the lie. She was asking her abandoned daughter not only to forgive the deception, but to cooperate with it so that the healthy family wouldn’t be disturbed. Her mother didn’t want any more letters coming to the house, that was the bottom line.
Sister John wondered what the most devastating thing a daughter could say to her mother could possibly be. Something came to mind, a harpoon with a barb at the end so it could never be pulled out, but just as she prepared to drive it into her mother’s heart, she noticed the seal brooch again.
It was such a tasteless piece of jewelry that it made her hesitate. Her mother was a manipulative, selfish monster; everything about her was calculated, from the tone of her voice to the posing with tissues to make herself appear vulnerable, but the pin was a failure no matter how you looked at it.
Failure—the word stopped her cold.
Had she forgotten so soon that she was supposed to love as Christ loved? Her mother wasn’t here to mend fences, she was asking a favor. Sister John thought: If I deny this request, it would only be to hurt my mother, to get revenge, and it would bring pain to her other children. What positive purpose would it serve? I’m a cloistered nun, my half-siblings wouldn’t be able to have much of a relationship with me anyway. Maybe right here—not in choir or in my cell—is where I find out what my vows were all about.
“What are their names?” she asked her mother.
After a pause, “Beth and Ethan.”
“Do you have pictures of them?”
After another pause, her mother searched her purse, took out an unevenly trimmed photograph, and brought it to the grille. She held it sideways and passed it between the bars. Sister John took it back to her chair.
The two siblings stood by the side of a road under a billboard for some kind of tourist attraction. It looked like a hot, overcast day somewhere on the East Coast—the billboard cast no shadow. It read, “Keep yelling, kids! They’ll stop!” Beth, who looked about fifteen, had blond hair and a small frame. She posed with the sign like a game-show hostess, while her younger brother kept his hands tucked in the pockets of his shorts, affecting nonchalance. He had a round face and the same dimpled knees Sister John had had at his age. His brown hair was tousled, as if he had been sleeping in the car just before the picture was taken.
Sister John stared at the picture for a long time. When she passed it back through the grille, she saw that her mother’s hands were shaking. “Knowing their names means I can pray for their health and happiness every day.”
Her mother struggled with the wallet and purse as she put the photograph away. She looked pathetic, not monstrous.
“I’m glad to know the truth. Be at peace now, Mother, and go with God.”
Sister John kept her eyes lowered as she slid the curtain shut. She measured her steps as she left the parlor, and made sure to open and close the door gently. Mother Mary Joseph stood just outside, waiting, but Sister John could not face her just then. She hurried out to the garden, past the roses and the fountain and the ginkgo tree, until she knew she was out of sight. She pulled off her wimple and veil, squatted down against the wall, and buried her face in her hands.
Thirteen years of searching for the deeper meaning of faith and suffering evaporated in an instant. Even then, God remained silent.
1994
Rain from Heaven
MARCH 27
Holy Thursday
The choir stalls kept the most perfect vigil of all: waiting to serve. Emptiness was their gift.
Spring rains, bare altar;
Christ was obedient, accepting even death.
Sister John dropped to her knees at the far end of the choir and began scrubbing toward the altar. Good Friday was only hours away; the community would be making the journey to Calvary along with Christ in that very room, so the job had to be done right.
Floor, water, sponge.
One breath, one stroke:
one more shiny scallop.
Sister John’s vocation had survived the test of her mother’s visit, not because she was able to interpret the event in the light of faith, but because it changed the way she felt about drudgery. Thought generated suffering; industry drowned it out. She threw herself on God’s mercy and lost herself in work, and as her sense of personal ambition withered, so did her doubts.
The line of time turned into a circle; years repeated themselves along with the cycle of liturgy. On the twentieth anniversary of her arrival at the cloister, when she was forty years old, she stood up at recreation and announced that it felt as if she’d been at Carmel for just a few hours. “I entered on the morning of the Triumph of the Cross,” she said, “and here it is, evening of the same day. Saint Teresa was right—all things pass, but God never changes.”
Tired shoulders, half-empty pail.
Sister Angelica wants to scatter rocks
around the altar.
Not on my floor!
She straightened up to find Sister Anne standing in the doorway, watching. The
older nun pointed to the clock on the wall, indicating that half an hour remained until Vespers, then signed, Please, you help me. Sister John nodded, put away her cleaning materials, then joined Sister Anne in the sacristy.
The sacristan lifted an alb and a stole from the vesture drawer in the sacristy and laid them out on a table. She examined them for stains or loose threads, then signed for Sister John to iron them while she prepared the floral arrangements. Making a silent prayer for vocations to the priesthood, Sister John watched the fabric smooth out behind the iron like flour. Next, she put the freshened garments on hangers and carried them over to the double-door storage shelves linking the enclosed part of the monastery to the chapel. After ringing a small bell, she opened the doors and passed the vestments through to Sister Mary Michael.
The extern had some questions for Sister Anne about decorating the sanctuary. Sister John took advantage of this opportunity to sit down and close her eyes. The effort of scrubbing, or perhaps the smell of the floor cleaner, had triggered one of her headaches. Her doctor suspected that these headaches were either migraines or the result of overzealous fasting, and suggested that for Lent she try giving up the idea of giving things up. She took his advice and ate as heartily as the monastic diet would allow, but the headaches still troubled her, so the diagnosis of migraine won out.
When Sister John opened her eyes again, Sister Anne was already stripping the altar of its old linen. Sister John got up and helped center a fresh cloth over the mensa, letting all four sides hang to within an inch of the floor. This style of altar covering, known as a Jacobean cloth, required no extra decoration, but Sister Anne had prepared a special touch for Easter: she had sewn a white satin fall just for this occasion, which she asked Sister John to hold in place while she stepped back to examine it.