by Meg O'Brien
“The monastery on Highway 1, you mean?”
“Yes, below Rio Road.”
The one beside the hill on which Marti was crucified.
Ted Wright said the site of Marti’s crucifixion seemed to have been chosen deliberately, in keeping with the other ritual aspects of her murder. Is there some connection between that monastery and The Prayer House?
And why do I feel a touch of uneasiness as I follow Sister Pauline inside—despite her friendly welcome?
“Ah, here we are,” she says, pushing through double doors at the center of the wing.
We are in a large reception area with white adobe walls and dark wooden trim around the doors and windows. It is much like the rooms in old Spanish missions I’ve seen throughout California, with the waxy scent of vigil candles carried over hushed air.
“We have lunch here at two,” Sister Pauline says. “That gives us a longer morning to work in the garden, before afternoon prayers.” She pulls a pocket watch from her habit and glances at it. “Helen should be in the kitchen by now. I’ll take you to her, and then why don’t you join us for lunch? We often have visitors from outside, and we like sharing the food from our gardens with them.”
“I’d love that,” I say, my stomach rumbling at the thought. “You don’t maintain silence during mealtimes?”
“Only at dinner. Our lunch hours are for good conversation and planning.”
She takes me down a long hall with floors that gleam the way they always did at Joseph and Mary. There the postulants buffed them once every three months, and I wonder aloud who does that sort of thing here.
“Oh, we all do,” Sister Pauline says. “This is our home, and we’re all very grateful to have it. We’ve taken great pride in keeping it well maintained.”
I take it Sister Pauline is the “host sister,” the one who greets outsiders and does the PR for the place. If so, she’s doing a good job.
We enter a large, gleaming kitchen full of coppery pots and bubbling scents. In the middle of all this, Sister Helen stands at a stove stirring something in a large kettle. A deep, rich aroma of vegetables and herbs drifts across the room, and Sister Helen, to my amazement, is lost in her work, contentedly humming.
As we approach her, I note a slight smile tugging at her lips. I cannot recall ever having seen her look this happy. She is dressed in worn brown pants and a bright pink shirt, and her soft graying hair hangs over her forehead in damp curls.
“Helen?” Sister Pauline says softly, touching her shoulder. Sister Helen turns. Seeing me, her eyes widen slightly. The smile fades.
“You have a visitor,” Sister Pauline says.
“Can’t you see I’m busy, Pauline?” she says sharply. “I don’t have time to talk to anyone.”
Turning back to her pot of soup, she continues stirring. But the humming has ceased, along with, seemingly, her peace of mind. My old teacher turns her back on me, but not before I catch a frown—or is it a look of fear?
“I’m sorry,” Sister Pauline says quietly. “Ms. Northrup said she was a former student. I thought you would want to see her.”
There is no response from Sister Helen, only a further stiffening of her back.
Sister Pauline looks at me and gently draws me away. When we’re outside the kitchen door, she says, “You musn’t mind Helen. She’s had a very difficult time in recent years, and she may not have wanted to be reminded of her old life. I’m sure she’ll come around once she’s had time to think about it. Perhaps after lunch?”
I’m not so sure of that, but I follow Sister Pauline to a large narrow room with long tables that have chairs on either side. A few women sit talking quietly amongst themselves. One wears a white habit; the others are dressed in skirts and blouses. Two are white-haired, while another looks to be in her early thirties.
A crucifix hangs on the wall at one end of the room. At the opposite end is a large portrait of the woman I saw with Sister Helen at Marti’s funeral.
“That woman,” I say, nodding toward the portrait. “Who is she?
“That’s Lydia Greyson, our founder. She reopened and refurbished The Prayer House in the seventies, making a home for many of the women you’ll see here today. Others, such as myself, came later.”
“Is Lydia Greyson a nun?”
“She was, long ago,” Sister Pauline says. “But she left and married, and now she’s a very wealthy woman. For the past twenty years, Lydia has provided this home free of charge to sisters and former sisters whose motherhouses closed. Our contract with her is to maintain the premises and to support ourselves, which we do in a number of ways. Some of the women grow vegetables and bake bread, much like in the abbeys of yesteryear. One sister writes spiritual books that have at times been on bestseller lists. Another—Helen, actually—makes soups, which are bottled and transported to Carmel, Santa Barbara and several small towns south of here, where they sell as specialty items in restaurants and gift stores.”
“Sounds like Valhalla,” I say. “Heaven on earth. But do you follow the same rules and restrictions as when living in a convent?”
She nods, crossing her arms and sliding her hands into her sleeves in a way I remember. “We do have certain rules that go way back to the days before the Ecumenical Council of the sixties. About other things we are much more free. We get to choose the work we do, for instance. And, oddly enough, there seems to be a job that fits each one of us. Something we enjoy doing.” She smiles. “There is a wonderful synchronicity here about those things.”
“Wow. So it really is Valhalla.” But there is a question in my tone.
“Well, it’s true we have our moments,” Sister Pauline says confidentially, as if one girl to the other. “We have close to fifty women here now, and there are days…well, I probably shouldn’t say.” She rolls her eyes and chuckles.
We take seats at a long table next to the other women who have been talking as they wait for lunch. Sister Pauline introduces me to everyone, and one of the older women, Sister Gabriel, says, “You came here to see Helen? Well, good luck. Poor thing—she hasn’t been herself lately.”
“Not for a few months,” another agrees. “Well, maybe it will do her good to see a former student.”
Any former student but me, I think as a bell rings. Tables fill up with other women, both in habits and not. Large crocks of a creamy soup are brought to the tables by women wearing aprons, followed by huge plates of bread with fresh-churned butter. Crisp green salads are passed around.
When we’ve all helped ourselves and begun with soup, I say, “You mentioned that Sister Helen hasn’t been herself?”
The woman who seems to be in her thirties, Louisa, pushes her short brown hair behind an ear and smiles. “She keeps forgetting to put the carrots in her soup. See—there’s none in here today again. For Helen, that’s a major faux pas. She’s wedded to her soups.”
“And did you notice she wasn’t here at all the other day?” someone else says. “Never showed up until midnight.”
Now, that’s interesting. “That’s allowed?” I say.
“Oh, sure,” Louisa says. “It’s not encouraged, but we aren’t prisoners here.”
“Things sure have changed in the Church,” I say.
Sister Gabriel, the older nun, says, “You’re one?”
“One?”
“Of the others. One that’s left.”
“What makes you think that?” I ask, smiling.
“Oh, it leaves a mark, don’t think it doesn’t.” Her tone is sharp, and her eyes, behind thick Coke-bottle glasses, are unreadable.
“What mark do you think it left on me?” I ask.
“Mostly your table manners,” she says briskly. “The way you broke your bread into quarters and buttered each piece as you came to it, and the way you took a little bit of everything that was passed to you—even the beans, which you obviously don’t like, judging by the fact that you’ve barely touched them. Not many people have convent manners these days.”
“You’re quite a detective,” I say, grinning. “But maybe I just took a course from Miss Manners.”
“And maybe not,” she responds, making a huffing sound. “I’m not so old I can’t tell one when I see one.”
“Well, you’re right,” I say, granting her the victory. “But that was long ago. I was eighteen.”
She gives everyone at the table a look that says, See, I knew it.
For long moments we fall silent as everyone enjoys the fresh salad and Sister Helen’s wonderful soup, carrots or no.
Just when I’m about to ask if Sister Helen will be joining us, I see her coming through the door. She glances at us, but takes a seat at the far end of the room. Sister Pauline notices, but doesn’t comment.
“See?” Louisa says. “She doesn’t even sit with us anymore. And Tammy says that when she went to Albertson’s in midvalley for groceries the other day, she couldn’t believe Helen’s list, she had so much chicken on it. She asked Helen later and she said she kept spoiling the soup and having to start over. I tell you, something’s wrong.”
“Hush, Louisa,” the older nun says. “Helen’s got a right to her privacy. And that friend of hers just died, you know. She’s probably still grieving.”
Louisa looks at me. “Did you know about that? A horrible thing. Right there in Carmel.”
“Marti Bright, you mean? Yes, I knew. She was a friend of mine, too. Marti and I entered together. At Joseph and Mary, in Santa Rosa. Sister Helen was our sponsor.”
There are several “Ohs” and nods around the table as if a last piece has fallen into place.
“I’m afraid we let her down when we left,” I add.
“But she shouldn’t be upset with you anymore,” Louisa says. “Now that she’s left, herself, I would think she’d understand. The Church was rotten to her, you know.”
“Louisa!”
If I’ve been amazed at the openness and gossipy chatter of Louisa, Sister Gabriel is more like the nuns I used to know, whose job it was to reprimand the younger ones and keep them in line.
“Sorry,” Louisa says, her chin rising, “but it’s true. All those years she gave to the Church, then to wind up on the streets when J&M closed—”
Sister Pauline interrupts in her quiet, gentle voice. “It didn’t happen in precisely that way, Louisa. Perhaps it is your own bitterness you speak of, not Helen’s?”
Louisa’s dark eyes flash. “And why not? They wouldn’t let me take a break from teaching, even when I was in chemo. Wouldn’t even pay for my cure, for that matter!”
“Hush,” Sister Gabriel says sternly. She slides a glance at me. “You must understand, this issue is controversial, and there are many sides to it. Furthermore, there were many laypeople in the Church who came forward to help, within months of the motherhouses closing. They still do—help, that is. If that weren’t so, Louisa wouldn’t be here now. None of us would.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask.
Louisa answers. “She says that because the Church sold this abbey and the property for miles around to Lydia Greyson, virtually gave it to her for a song. Part of the sales agreement was that she would rebuild it—with her own money, of course—and provide a shelter for sisters who had lost their homes.” She sends an angry look to Sister Gabriel. “Or ones who got sick and didn’t have any health insurance, like me.”
Jabbing at her vegetables with a fork, Louisa will not be hushed this time. “You know very well, Gabriel, that when the motherhouses and many of the convents closed, they farmed the sisters out. That’s what it amounted to, anyway, sending them hither and yon, all over the place. Most people don’t know that, even to this day.”
“That was then,” Sister Pauline says quietly. “This is now, Louisa.”
“Try telling that to Helen,” she says darkly. “Things like that can leave a person with a lot of anger. I should know.”
Sister Helen disappears from the dining room after lunch and is nowhere to be found. On the theory that any knowledge at all might help at this point, I let Sister Pauline take me on a tour of the gardens and surrounding grounds. Perhaps, I think, she will say something along the way that will help me to understand what’s going on with Helen.
The grounds are far more extensive than as seen from the road. Behind The Prayer House and its quaint clotheslines we climb a low hill, with plots of vegetables and flowers on either side. Along the edge of the path are herbs, and the soothing fragrance of rosemary drifts my way.
“We have one sister who studies and grows herbs,” Sister Pauline tells me. She breaks a sprig of rosemary from a bush and sniffs it, then hands it to me. “Rather than pay high premiums for HMOs—which aren’t that available in Monterey County at this time, anyway—we’ve learned to use herbs for healing.”
I sniff the rosemary and imagine I can feel my muscles relaxing. Though I often use rosemary-scented bath oils and lotions, I seldom have held the actual herb in my hand. Living here, I think, could bring a person back to the earth, make real a world in which so much is illusion.
A hundred yards or so away, I see Sister Helen walking up an adjoining hill to a cluster of older, dilapidated buildings. She carries a pail in each hand and seems to limp slightly.
Pauline follows my gaze. “She works so hard. Sometimes I worry about her.”
“What are those buildings?” I ask.
“They’re from the original days of The Prayer House, when it was a Carmelite convent,” she says. “Those were outbuildings for smoking meats and shoeing the horses that helped them work the farm.”
She sighs, shaking her head. “We don’t use the buildings now, but Helen has a compost heap up there. Every day, despite the pain in her joints, she carries scraps from the kitchen—what some people call garbage—up that hill. It provides us with wonderful fertilizer for the gardens.”
I watch my old teacher stumble under the weight of the pails, then set out again. Despite our differences, my heart goes out to her. “If she’s in so much pain, why doesn’t someone help her?” I ask.
Sister Pauline smiles. “Believe me, we’ve tried. Helen, I’m afraid, is quite territorial about her composting. It’s almost as if she has some sort of sin to make up for, a penance to pay. Not that I can think of a single thing Helen might have done that was so terrible she’d have to go through all that.”
I continue to watch as my old teacher circles one of the old outbuildings, to the plot of ground behind it. She has a noticeable limp now, and seems to stumble, then regain her balance. As she disappears, I, too, am wondering what awful thing she could possibly have done to lead her to this.
We reach the top of our own hill, and Sister Pauline points to another one toward the east, several miles away. “That’s the edge of our property,” she says, moving her arm side to side. “From there—to there.”
I am surprised. “That’s an awful lot of acreage,” I say. “Hundreds, it looks like. And property is expensive out here. Your founder is a generous woman to have given you all this.”
“Lydia is wonderful,” she agrees. “Without her…” The soft voice trails off, and for long moments we stand quietly, enjoying the view and the scent of herbs and flowers that surrounds us.
But then a chill wind comes up, and I remember why I am here—because my friend is dead and her child is gone.
What must Marti have found in this place? I wonder. When Justin went missing, did visits here offer her peace and solace? Was she reminded of life at Joseph and Mary, as I am, and did she long to be back there where life was so relatively simple—though neither of us saw that at the time?
Of course, if we’d stayed in, our religious lives wouldn’t have ended all that simply, any more than it did for these women here.
“Sister Pauline,” I say, “I’m curious. There’s Louisa here, who seems bitter about the Church. And I take it Sister Helen is, too. But then there’s Sister Gabriel, who’s more like the nuns I used to know—a stick-to-the-rules type. I don’t know of many religious comm
unities that would take in people with such differing opinions about the Church.”
“That’s probably true, but the big difference here is that we aren’t really a religious community,” she explains. “Lydia planned this as a home for sisters, who, for whatever reason, weren’t able to cope with the changes after Vatican II. There are many who welcomed the new freedom, of course, especially the young, activist sisters who are helping the homeless in the cities, running businesses, investing in the stock market.” She smiles. “They support themselves and their orders in any number of ways, and most are happy to be doing so. Believe it or not, there are even sisters in their eighties and nineties who are thriving and still working, with no wish to retire.”
Her smile fades, and she shakes her head. “Then there are the others…the ones who weren’t able to cope with leaving their convents and going out into the world. Some were ill, and others…well, they needed care, a place to live that was more cloister-like, with fewer of the stresses people experience in the world. The Prayer House was founded by Lydia especially for them.”
With a soft laugh, she adds, “You might say that those of us who came here are more like the cloistered Carmelites who used to live here than the teaching or nursing nuns we at first intended to be. I even imagine sometimes—though only in the dark of the night—that they’ve come back through us. To live again, you know.”
“Sister Pauline!” My eyes widen. “Reincarnation? Isn’t that a bit New Age for a nun?”
“Good heavens, no! It’s more Old Age. Reincarnation was in the Bible, after all, until the third century. It was man who took it out, not God.”
I shake my head. “I must say I’m surprised at the mix of women I’ve found out here. A former nun who rants against the Church, my old teacher, who hums while she makes her soups, like there’s no other job in the world she would rather do, and now—someone who believes she could be a reincarnated Carmelite.”
Sister Pauline laughs. “If you come back here often, which of course you are welcome to do, you’ll find that everyone here has had her own unique experience with both life and the Church. We do our best to honor each person’s beliefs, whatever they are.”