Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Bridget pulled back the open bedroom door. A woman’s hat was suspended on a hook on the rear side, a pink silk flower perched on the brim, perfectly preserved. She loved the thought of her serious mother wearing it once, perhaps not so serious then. Bridget pulled the hat down, held it out to Nora.

  Nora took hold of it without a word. She said she wanted to go up to her grandmother’s old bedroom, a cubby at the top of a short staircase, to see if her old sewing machine was still there. But Charlie said they’d better not try the stairs.

  “Let’s go now,” he said.

  Nora left the hat on a table in the entryway.

  As they walked back outside, she cried. Bridget watched as her brother Patrick wrapped an arm around Nora’s shoulder. Nora smiled up at him through tears.

  Across the way, a herd of cows stared at them as if they knew something. Until then, Bridget had never thought of a cow as a particularly soulful animal, but she couldn’t get the sight of their brown, puddley eyes out of her mind.

  Her father was able to turn his back and walk off, go to a pub and laugh the night away, point out sights that gave him pleasure. Nora couldn’t do the same. She seemed haunted for the rest of that trip. Bridget wondered if they had been wrong to come. She asked her mother if they should do something. Maybe there was a way to restore the house. Even to sell it would be better than to let it collapse.

  But Nora said, “It’s too far gone. Just leave it, Bridget.”

  She hadn’t mentioned it since.

  —

  Bridget found her mother at the table by the door where the guest book sat. Nora acted busy, smoothing out the book’s already flat pages, capping the cheap pen that leaned up against it.

  “Mom,” Bridget said. “Aren’t you going to talk to your sister?”

  “Of course I will. But I have to talk to everyone. It’s rude not to.”

  “You’re not going to let her stay at the Ramada.”

  “Why not? It’s perfectly fine.”

  “Should I invite her to the house after, to eat?”

  “She’s a nun. They don’t go to things. We’ll see her at the funeral.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Nora’s eyes had left the conversation. Bridget followed them. Her mother’s sister stood alone now, over Patrick’s body. They watched as she laid a hand on his forehead, stroking his hair.

  “What is she doing?” Bridget said.

  Nora shot off in her direction.

  One of the neighborhood ladies asked in a stage whisper, “Oh my, who is that?”

  “I assume she came with the priest,” said Betty Joyce.

  “They’re not salt and pepper shakers,” Eileen Delaney said.

  “Well how else do you explain her?”

  “I don’t think she’s anyone important,” Eileen said. “Nora would have mentioned a nun.”

  A moment later, Nora and her sister stood side by side, saying nothing, staring into the coffin. Everyone in the room—for as much or as little as they knew—grew silent at the sight.

  20

  MOTHER CECILIA SAT at the hotel room window. The second floor was level with the expressway, maybe a hundred feet away. She watched as cars whizzed past.

  Mother Placid had worried about her traveling alone. She told her to stay somewhere nice, spend some time, but Mother Cecilia didn’t think it was proper. She booked the least expensive place she could find. She would only stay the one night, returning to the abbey after the burial. There were things that needed tending.

  When she woke this morning, she was still unsure about whether she should go at all, but Mother Placid insisted, and she knew her better than anyone.

  Just before she left, Mother Placid handed her a brown paper bag.

  “The girls in the kitchen made you a lunch,” she said. “We’ll be thinking of you.”

  As her taxi drove through the abbey gates, Mother Cecilia watched from the back window. They passed the farms that dotted the hills, passed fields of sunflowers and golden corn. Eventually the road spat them out in the center of town. They went by the post office and the antique shops, the old Gulf station and the market. At the traffic light at the corner of Caulder and Bond, the driver slowed to a stop.

  Mother Cecilia was used to going straight on from here, to Mercy Hospital, two miles north. In fifty years, she had rarely gone farther. She accompanied Mother Placid to her doctor’s appointments at Mercy on the first Tuesday of the month. Otherwise, she only came into town to see the dentist or to vote on Election Day. She was vaguely aware of the sign for 91 South to the left of the stoplight, but it had never had a thing to do with her.

  The taxi dropped her at the bus station. She climbed aboard the 7:52 to Boston. For the next several hours, a pair of teenage girls with studs in their faces stared at her. She had almost forgotten the lack of ease that some people, especially young ones, felt around nuns. The average person hardly ever saw a nun in habit anymore. To watch a nun eating a chicken salad sandwich on the bus was an utter sensation.

  It was worse now than it had been. A man in the grocery store had approached two postulants just last week and said, “How can you be a part of that hateful church? What are you hoping to accomplish, being held prisoner up there on the hill?”

  They had lost one of their loveliest young novices in the recent scandal. Her brother was a priest who had tried to sound the alarm years ago and was dismissed for it.

  “How are we supposed to go on, given the church’s mistakes?” she asked Mother Cecilia during their final conversation.

  “We must remember that the church is not God. The church is just men trying to do their best.”

  “I’m talking about—”

  “I know,” Mother Cecilia said. “I don’t have a good answer. I wish I did.”

  Lately, there were some who came to parlors to discuss their own pasts with priests, terrible stories that Mother Cecilia was not technically allowed to condemn, though she did condemn them. The deeper you came into union with God, the more you came to accept people the way they were. And yet, there were some who could never be accepted or forgiven.

  —

  She went directly to the hotel from South Station, intending to drop her bag and then take a taxi to the wake so that she could get there right at four. But four o’clock arrived, four-thirty. Five. She was terrified to face them. It was a quarter to six before she could summon the courage.

  Now she wondered if she ought to have come at all.

  “We’ll see you at the house after?” Kitty Rafferty said as they parted ways at the wake.

  But Nora hadn’t invited her.

  She told Kitty she needed to get back. She asked the undertaker to call her a taxi. She stood on the curb in the cold, watching the others bundle into cars in groups of three or four.

  You only realized how old you had gotten when in the presence of the people you used to know. When you saw how old they were.

  “Where are your brothers?” she had asked.

  “Dead,” Kitty said. “All of them, dead.”

  “Not Charlie.”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Five years ago. And poor Babs around the same time. She liked you so much. She would have gotten a kick out of seeing you again.”

  Her memory was pulled to a night in Mrs. Quinlan’s crowded kitchen, 1958. The last time she saw any of them. Babs had complained then about Conor’s birth, about how much easier it had been for Nora to bring Patrick into the world. But now, here stood Conor, tall and broad shouldered, a married father of three, a policeman. And there was Patrick, a day away from his grave.

  No one told her the specifics of what happened. Bobby Quinlan half whispered, “Well, he was a drinker. He liked to have a good time. But you’ve probably heard as much from Nora.”

  “No,” she said. “Not really. What was he like?”

  She took note of Bobby’s big white teeth, his shiny bald head. She remembered them.

  “He
meant well,” Bobby said. “Kind of a wild one, though. He kept Nora and Charlie on their toes. He was the life of the party. Millions of girlfriends, so I hear. But he always seemed lonely, somehow. Bit of a black sheep.”

  She wanted to know why her son’s life had been lonely when he was surrounded by all these people. She had thought Patrick would feel a part of their family. But maybe he had known that he was outside of it.

  She had never stopped feeling sadness over Patrick, though at some point, she resigned herself to the fact of not seeing him again, of letting her pain be a part of her.

  If she hadn’t left him, who might he have been? She allowed herself a momentary fantasy, one in which she had not indulged for years. She had taken Patrick with her on that bus to New York, found some way of keeping him. They would have lived together in the small apartment in Queens, his laughter buoying her. A kindly old neighbor would have watched him while she worked each day and when they reunited at day’s end, he would jump straight into her arms. There would be an ease between them. Nothing to hide. They would simply be who they were, waiting for the world to catch up. Eventually, they might have gotten a big, fluffy dog, moved to a little house with a front porch in the suburbs, out on Long Island where Mother Placid was raised.

  This was always where the fantasy gave way. She never would have known Mother Placid, never would have known the abbey. Nothing had just happened to her. She had made a choice and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life. Even coming to America was part of it. If it wasn’t for Nora and Charlie, she would most likely have never left Ireland, never known her place in the world. When she saw Patrick before making final vows, she believed this to be true. And believed too that he would be safe in her sister’s care.

  Looked at another way, she knew that the chance to make that first, most important decision had been taken from her. Nora never asked her if she could have Patrick, she just took him. But when this made her angry, she reminded herself that Nora had only done what she thought was best.

  Mother Cecilia regarded Bobby Quinlan. She had wondered if they all knew the truth by now, but he clearly thought she was nothing more to Patrick than a distant aunt.

  Perhaps she had known how Nora would be. Still angry, still unable to forgive. Mother Cecilia had asked Sister Alma to call and say she was coming. She didn’t want to give Nora the chance to tell her not to. She needed to say good-bye. She had been the only one in the room who loved Patrick when he came into the world. She wanted to be with him now, at the end.

  Despite whatever anger she still felt, she had hoped they might rise above it, that she and Nora might console each other. But Nora’s face showed that it would not be so. All the terrible things they had said at their last meeting. All the things they had done to each other.

  Mother Cecilia was stricken when Nora turned her back and walked away, but still she stood with Kitty and Bobby and Nora’s daughter, catching up on the past. She would just get through it.

  Left alone, she looked over at the casket and found herself pulled to it. Patrick was alone too for the moment, no one standing by. She went to him.

  The last time she saw him, he was still a child. She remembered a fair day at the convent. A blue sky and a gentle wind. A smile on his face.

  The man lying in front of her was someone she wouldn’t have recognized had she passed him in the street.

  All these years, she had imagined a relationship between them. He was still primary to her. But she had only had the thought of him. Now she stood in a crowd of people who had the all of him, and yet maybe they had never loved him enough.

  How I failed you, how I failed you.

  She saw the medal peeking out from beneath the collar of his shirt. The one she had sent him, the one he was given right after he was born. She had always wondered if it ever made its way to him. She was so surprised to see it now that she reached out and touched it, and then her hand moved up into his hair. The black curls were threaded with grey.

  She didn’t realize what she was doing until she felt someone’s presence at her side and turned to see her sister.

  Of all the outcomes she had imagined to the silence between them, she had never considered this: the two of them, standing together, regarding his body. She looked at Nora, who stared straight ahead. One of life’s contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.

  She lived in a place full of women unencumbered by children. An extraordinary thing, even today. But motherhood was often on her mind. Mothers were the ones who asked for most of the prayers. They were sometimes asked to pray for healthy pregnancies, or for a woman who could not bring a baby into this world no matter how she tried. Other times, they were asked to pray for girls who were going to become mothers far sooner than they ever should have.

  So much of it—what a body could or could not do—was one of God’s confounding mysteries. A child came into the world, always, through a woman. In most cases, this woman would see that child on through life. But not always. Each generation had its version of the story. There would always be girls who had babies they could not keep.

  Nora was the only mother she herself had ever known. She had this in common with Patrick, her son.

  She tried to take Nora’s hand, but Nora pulled away.

  —

  Mother Cecilia knew the night would be long and that she wouldn’t sleep. Every time a toilet flushed in the next room or a can of Coke tumbled from the top of the soda machine to the bottom, she heard it. The bed was covered in sheets as stiff as tissue paper. The space around it was small and dim, lit by a single lamp on the nightstand. The lack of light, she supposed, was meant to obscure the room’s dinginess—the dark, dirty carpet, the stained grey walls.

  She wanted to quiet her mind and focus, but the events of the day and evening kept returning to her. For almost fifty years, she had lived in monastic silence. When she first joined the abbey, it was deafening. But now she found that she had lost the muscles she once had—the ones that gave a person the strength to handle chitchat, traffic jams, the anxiety of calculating the taxi driver’s tip as a harried businessman hovered on the sidewalk, wanting in.

  The abbey was often bustling. A steady stream of visitors came to the door with concerns and grief, asking for their prayers. The guesthouses were always full. Parents brought their children every Christmas to see the crèche made in the seventeenth century. They held retreats for newlyweds and artists, for the aging, for the sick and the bereaved.

  It was not as if the nuns were shut up in some castle with a moat around it. But guests came at set times. They sat on one side of the grille and she on the other and they left when they were told to. It was all entirely predictable. That was the life to which she had grown accustomed. A place where she was regarded with respect, with reverence.

  She had met people who feared nuns, hated them. They couldn’t believe that any sane woman would choose to join a convent. Of course, there were times in her life when she herself had felt this way. She knew Nora believed she had gone to the abbey to escape. She had said as much the last time they spoke. The truth would probably never convince her.

  —

  Eventually, she went to the phone on the nightstand. Mother Cecilia sat on the bed and dialed. It was half an hour until Compline, their final prayers of the day.

  The nuns only talked on the phone when it was absolutely necessary, and never for very long—they talked to doctor’s offices to schedule appointments, and to deliverymen regarding the transport of animals, feed, fertilizer. But she thought this qualified as a time of extreme need.

  The portress answered on the second ring.

  She asked how Mother Cecilia was faring, said they were all thinking of her. She had told them she was going to a funeral. The son of someone close to her, a friend from home.

&
nbsp; “I was hoping Mother Placid might be free,” she said.

  “Of course. I’ll transfer you into the dormitory.”

  Mother Dorothy picked up the phone in the kitchen. She asked Mother Cecilia to hold on while she looked for the abbess.

  She must have left the receiver on the counter. Mother Cecilia could hear plates and silverware tinkling in the background. They’d be making preparations for dinner. Baking the bread, stirring the soup, placing pies on a cooling rack.

  Every meal was of them, by them. The cheese and the butter and the milk and the bread were all made at the abbey. Whatever vegetables and fruit they had were grown in the nuns’ own gardens and orchards. They ate a primarily vegetarian diet, for budgetary reasons. The only things brought in from the outside were some citrus and a bit of fish. Even the pottery they ate off of was hand-thrown and kilned on the premises.

  The nuns still had to have a man there to say Mass, but it was their abbey, make no mistake. The priests rotated through each morning. During the sign of peace, the priest hugged a single nun. She in turn went into the congregation to hug the people.

  When Mother Placid turned seventy-five last year, Mother Katherine made a joke during the Prayers of the Faithful. “For Mother Abbess, on her twenty-fifth birthday, we pray to the Lord,” she said. Shocked and tickled, the rest of them responded, “Lord hear our prayer,” with eyebrows lifted to the ceiling. Mother Abbess looked at the priest saying Mass to make sure he wasn’t outraged, but he merely smiled and shrugged.

  She wondered now when Bishop Dolan would come.

  Contemplatives were not under the jurisdiction of local bishops like most nuns were. They answered directly to the Vatican. Since the abbey’s founding, they had so rarely been bothered that Mother Cecilia tended to forget even that. The abbey was so essentially female. It seemed impossible that they should have to answer to men.

  It was five years now since the first rumblings. One morning, they read in the newspaper that the Vatican had launched an investigation into all the working nuns in America. All nuns except the cloistered. All but them. The bishops said the nuns on the outside had grown too independent, advocating for birth control, homosexuality, women in the priesthood.