The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  You do not betray the sanctity of the confessional, either, and he had done that. You do not spend ten years hearing the innermost secrets of a woman rotted with perversion without ever suspecting, without ever noticing that help is desperately needed, either, and he had done that. His contempt for himself was greater, far greater, than his contempt for Sister Maria. He had failed her in life; and then he had failed her in death. How could he not have known? His Bishop had said, “I should think you would have been able to smell her!” He hadn’t been; he hadn’t guessed a thing; he had been her easy dupe, for more than ten years.

  Wearily, he finished it. “She told me—Sister Maria told me—that the . . . that the group of nuns involved had been gathered together, recruited, by Sister Miriam of St. Gertrude’s.”

  “The woman that Bishop Dorien put in charge of revising those translations so that they would be theologically pure,” said the Cardinal wonderingly. “The same woman!”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  “How many copies? How many are involved? How many of our nuns have been corrupted by this Judas?”

  This Judas, thought Father Joseph. It was apt, and it would be the first phrase on every priest’s lips. The Cardinal had not known Sister Miriam, of course, had not experienced her commanding beauty nor the extraordinary presence that was like a garment she put on or took off, just as she chose. But Joseph’s bishop had known her, and had known that her name was Miriam Rose, and had said a little more. He had called her “the Judas Rose.” Judas for her treachery; Rose for her false perfection. Rose with a worm at its heart, a venomous worm; rose with poison tipping its thorns.

  “She is the Judas Rose,” he said aloud.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Bishop Paul said it. He said, ‘We have all been betrayed by that Judas Rose of Dorien’s.’ ”

  “How many?” the Cardinal insisted, urgently, waving his hand with its heavy ring to indicate how little interest he had in Bishop Paul’s flights of fancy. “We need numbers, my son.”

  “Your Eminence, I don’t have any numbers to give you. Sister Maria died before I could question her properly. We tried the most powerful stimulants—I sent for a doctor—but she was gone, it was too late. I know only what I have already told you: Sister Maria said that the copies were sent to sisters ‘all over the world.’ ”

  “All over the world. It could be ten. Or a thousand.”

  “Surely not a thousand, Eminence! Each copy had to be made by hand—can you imagine that? By hand? Because of course the convents keep strict accounting of every hard copy from the comsets and the old copying machines that some of them still use. A sister can’t just go run off a breviary for herself whenever the whim takes her, not on a poverty budget.”

  “Do you mean to say that ‘made by hand’ means written by hand? Actually written out in longhand script?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  The Cardinal was nodding, his mind focused on the problem. He said nothing for a long time, and then he asked, “Did your Sister Maria tell you whether this blasphemy had been sent out into the colonies? To carry its evil beyond this world?”

  “She did not say, and I had no time to ask. She said, ‘For more than forty years I have been sending copies of the Láadan King James to other sisters, all over the world,’ and then she died. She died almost at once, as soon as she had told me . . . I think she had just been waiting to tell me, Your Eminence.”

  “So!” The Cardinal folded his hands together before him. “So, Bishop Dorien’s estimable Sister Miriam betrayed Holy Mother Church, then, and seduced others—perhaps many others—into joining her in that betrayal.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  “Joseph, I beg your pardon for my discourtesy. The term ‘conspiracy’ is indeed the precise term.”

  “Thank you, Your Eminence.”

  “Where is this woman now, Joseph?”

  He swallowed hard; he had been dreading that question. “She died three years ago with her monstrous sins unconfessed, Your Eminence. She died alone, and no priest was called.”

  “No last words.”

  “None. She is gone, and all that she knew is gone with her.”

  She is gone to join the other Judas, at the very center of Hell, Bishop Paul had said. For all eternity.

  “I don’t understand,” declared the Cardinal’s assistant, Father Amos Stabledorn, his voice shaking. “How could such a thing have gone on for so long, right under our noses?”

  Joseph tried to answer . . . but he was tired. So tired.

  “There wasn’t any reason to suspect anything, Father Amos. Sister Miriam personally supervised her staff of nuns in the revising of the linguists’ translations, to make certain that every trace of heresy, every hint even of impropriety, was removed from them. The materials were approved by her—the nuns who worked under her complained often that she was overly severe, that she was rigid to the point of exaggeration, that she was . . . yes, they said that she was a fanatic, they used that word . . . about stripping the translations of every conceivable taint. Things the other nuns thought too trivial even to consider. When she was at last satisfied, the materials were given her final personal touches and then sent on to Bishop Dorien for his approval and for storage in the databanks. I’ve heard the Bishop comment on how very bad the revisions were as devotional materials; he remarked a number of times on how extraordinary it was that a woman so talented in other ways could have such a tin ear.”

  “We understand that now,” said the Cardinal dryly.

  “Yes, Your Eminence—it’s obvious, now. Her intention was to do just exactly what she did: to make the revised materials so dreadful that they would be filed away and never used. To destroy the Thursday Night Devotional movement by making it so boring that it died of its own tedium.”

  “Which drove the practice back into the Womanhouses of the Lines and isolated it there. That is—that is what it appeared to do.”

  “Yes . . . plans within plans within plans, you see. We could have discovered one level of deception, and never guessed that it had still more within it. Thanks to my poor Sister Maria, we have it all.’

  “So,” said the Cardinal again. “So, these revisions, deliberately distorted by Sister Miriam to be red herrings, went on to Dorien’s desk. Then what happened?”

  “As I said, Your Eminence. They were filed away, and they were willingly forgotten. And so far as any of us knew, the originals—which I have never seen, but which I am told are utter filth, evil beyond imagination—had been confined entirely to the experience of the women of the Lines. Who can scarcely be considered normal women in any case, as you well know. There was no simple way to stamp them out among the linguist women, because not one of the Lines is Catholic, but we thought that this . . . this theological pornography . . . was in absolute quarantine.”

  “And all that time, our Sister Judas was spreading the contagion secretly. Through women like Sister Maria.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence. And we never guessed. There was never a hint. Never!”

  “She will burn in eternal fire, this Judas among nuns,” the Cardinal said. He did not suggest that God have mercy on her soul.

  “Assuredly, Your Eminence. So she will. But that doesn’t help us now, on this Earth, in this galaxy.”

  The Cardinal frowned, and rubbed his hands together, palm to palm, thinking hard. “What else do we know, my son?” he asked. “What other facts do we have?”

  “We have no facts,” said Joseph dully, sagging in his chair. “We know nothing else. Nothing at all.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Uh . . . we know. . . .”

  “You try our patience, Joseph.” The Cardinal’s voice was silky. “Tell us what is known, with no further hysteria.”

  “We know, I am trying to tell you, Your Eminence, we do know, that sixty years ago Father Dorien put Sister Miriam in charge of a project intended to put an end to the Láadan Heresy, also known at that time as the La
nglish Heresy. We know that Sister Miriam served in that post for many years, seemingly with complete faithfulness, until she felt that it could continue without her supervision. At which point she requested and was granted transfer to Washington General Hospital, to finish her life as a public nurse. We know that unless Sister Maria lied, Sister Miriam was actually working against us all that time, or some substantial portion of that time. She was not trying to make the materials into something that would draw women to the Church, but that would be free of feminist contamination. She was deliberately sabotaging that plan. And at the same time she was—somehow, Your Eminence, we do not know how—recruiting nuns to preserve the heresy at the very heart of Holy Mother Church. She went to her death still honored for her work; she took the secret of her life of evil with her to the grave. And if it were not for poor Sister Maria’s terror in the face of death, and her confession to me, we still would not know anything about it!”

  “And that is all we know,” he added defiantly.

  “The sister named no other names, my son? No places, no times?”

  “No, Your Eminence. She might have intended to, I suppose . . . she died before she could say anything else. With the most frightful suffering still on her face.” The shudder that racked him was almost convulsive; he knew it was ugly to see.

  “You absolved her, Joseph?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then put her death terrors and her pain out of your mind, my son. The Lord will have taken her to Him and banished both terror and pain, long since. Save your sympathy and your grief for Mother Church, who is sorely wounded; Sister Maria’s problems are over now.”

  “Yes, Eminence.”

  “So! You heard her confession; you gave her the last rites; you saw to what needed to be done. And then?”

  “And then I went home, and for the rest of that night I prayed. And when it was far enough into the morning to make it something like a decent hour, I went to Bishop Paul and I . . . I violated the confessional. I told the Bishop every word that Sister Maria had said to me.”

  “Look at me, Joseph.” The old man’s voice was powerful; it was the voice of one long accustomed to dominance. As were his eyes, when Joseph obeyed and met them straight on.

  “My son, consider carefully,” said the Cardinal. “If you had it to do over, would you do it again, just as you did this time? The truth now—do not lie to me, Joseph.”

  He wanted to look away from those eyes, but he found that he couldn’t; he looked helplessly into them and said, “Yes! God forgive me, yes I would. I would do it again. I think I would do it even faster. I would wake the Bishop up instead of waiting for morning.”

  “Why?”

  “To save the Holy Mother Church from this infamy!” He said it proudly; it was a comfort to be able to say something he could be proud of. “I would do it fifty times over, and if I must be condemned to Hell for that, then so be it. I will spend my term in Hell letting Sister Miriam know what she has done.”

  “You are quite sure, Joseph?”

  “I am absolutely sure.” There was no question about the sincerity of his words; he could hear it himself. Now, they knew it all. It was over. Whatever was going to happen would happen, the cardboard cutouts in their glorious robes would do whatever they were going to do, and he would live with it, and die with it. He held his breath, and fought the gorge that rose in his throat, and his eyes clung to the Cardinal’s.

  “My dearest Joseph . . .”

  He clung now to the words as well, glad that they were to be tempered with compassion, glad that there was not going to be fierce condemnation. The silky menace was gone from the Cardinal’s voice.

  “My son,” the Cardinal went on, “if I had been in your place, I can only pray that I would have done just what you did.” He smiled. “Except, as you pointed out, I hope I would have done it even more quickly.”

  Joseph was stunned. Shattered. He could not be hearing what he thought he was hearing. It was a delusion, born of his exhausted body and mind, pushed past its furthest limits. Surely it was a delusion. He stammered, hating himself for stammering, “I am not to be excommunicated?”

  “No, of course not! Your penance will be long and it will be difficult and it will be wearing. But you are not to torment yourself with nonsense.”

  “I thought—”

  “We all know what you must have thought. You thought you would be defrocked and excommunicated.”

  “Yes. At least.”

  “Joseph, when our Beloved Master took up a whip and went into the temple to lay it on the backs of the moneychangers and drive them out into the street, to stop them from defiling His Father’s house, he could scarcely be said to be turning the other cheek. He broke His own commandments—he laid a scourge to the backs of those vermin, he did not offer them the kiss of peace. Jesus of Nazareth, that was! He could have gone in and reasoned with them; he could have compelled them peaceably by the force of his presence; he could have caused them to go blind; he could have done any number of things. He chose to go in and whip the bastards out of the Temple. He knew—as every one of us here knows—that there are times, very special times, when it is right to break even a good and a holy rule. The problem is that we are not Jesus the Christ, and we are terribly likely to be mistaken about what constitutes such a time. You are one of the fortunate ones, Joseph. You were right.”

  The relief flooded through him, poured through him, and he thought with horror that he was going to faint, like a woman, right here in the room with the Cardinal and all these dignitaries; he watched them dwindle to tiny figures at the end of a tunnel of swirling black specks and heard their voices fade away; it seemed to be taking an immensely long time. And then he felt the heel of the priest sitting nearest him come down on his own instep, hard. Hard enough to bruise; hard enough to hurt. The sudden blow shocked him out of the shameful swoon, and he was deeply grateful to the other man. On whose face there showed not the slightest trace of what had happened. He would thank him, later, if he had the opportunity.

  “I am grateful, Your Eminence,” he managed to say. He was.

  “We are the ones who must be grateful,” answered the Cardinal. “I don’t know what we are to do now—but at least we know the rot is at our heart. At least we know it exists, and must be dealt with. God be praised, we are no longer ignorant of our peril.”

  Father Boris, a very tall man afflicted with protruding ears that would have been corrected long ago had he not been a priest and thus presumably indifferent to such things, spoke up then for the first time. “What are we going to do about this?” he asked. “Where do we begin?”

  “I don’t know,” the Cardinal said. “I know what we can’t do! We can’t simply announce that every nun involved is ordered to turn herself in to us forthwith, and to bring the blasphemous materials with her to be destroyed. This episode must not become known to all and sundry, my friend. It must not become a matter of common knowledge that such a thing could go on within the Church for sixty years and more undiscovered, spreading no one knows how far. That would make what you quite accurately call a conspiracy look romantic, seductive, appealing, at the very least—and make us like fools. Our poor sisters would fight to become members of the secret cadre, all aquiver with the deliciousness of it . . . it would be the only topic of conversation during recreation.” He made a face. “No, we can’t do that. We’ll have to find these women somehow, one at a time, ferret them out one at a time, compel them to give us other names when we do find them. This is going to take years and years—and how many years depends entirely on how many there are of the traitors.”

  “But I don’t know where we would begin. I don’t see how we would begin. Your Eminence, do you know either of those things?” It was Father Boris again, greatly distressed.

  “Well . . . there are routine things we can do. We’ll check the databanks, find out who Sister Maria sent correspondence to, communications to, over the years. Most of it will turn out to be legitimate conv
ent business, because she will have seen to it that the records of what was not legitimate were destroyed. But there will be something there. She will have forgotten, now and then, to delete every trace. She will have been careless, now and then, as everyone is careless now and then. We can send priests to all the places that she was in contact with, explaining to them what they are to watch for. Any sign of nervousness, of guilt, of excessive strain, of secretiveness. A sister who is said to be a ‘loner’ or to suffer from hysteria. We can watch, and we can listen. For anything at all that is not ordinary. One of them will slip, eventually; it may take a long time, but one of them will slip. And when we have one, and we have the chance to convince her to tell us a few things, it will lead us to the next one.”

  “It will take forever.”

  “That is the advantage of being a church,” the Cardinal said mildly. “We have forever. And it must be done, if it takes forever twice over. We must begin at once. You will go at once, each of you, and prepare a list for me. I need the names of priests you would trust with this task—men who can be relied on. Men who can be tactful. Men with the patience to let a cunning woman betray herself, and not move so soon that she is given time to alert the others. Men who can resist the temptation to flaunt their knowledge and administer punishment. Men with the sort of ear that hears the most minute taint, eyes that see the most nearly invisible contamination, even hidden away in the midst of what seems to be flawless devotion. Men who do not gossip, ever. Do you understand?”

  “You aren’t suggesting that they—” The Cardinal’s assistant cleared his throat, and began again. “Your Eminence, are you suggesting that these women might be practicing their blasphemies?”

  “It would be easy enough,” the Cardinal responded. “Who pays attention to exactly what a silly nun’s lips are mumbling when she is at prayer? Who would know if the words were just a little bit different from those that the other nuns were using? Certainly, it’s quite possible that that is going on. And by this time, of course, those nuns will be feeling safe in their perversions; it’s been such a long time, and no one has ever become suspicious in all these long years.”