by Gail Godwin
“So we won’t be thrown to the lions,” Chloe had ventured once, but Agnes, a stickler for playing fair, did not laugh. “He’s trying, darling,” she’d said. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.” And then with a flash of her mischief: “Because, frankly, I don’t see what choice we have.”
Et resurrexit tertia die secundum Scripturas. On the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures.
Here was the thing Chloe dearly yearned to get her mind around.
For the first disciples, Agnes had told her, the Crucifixion of their teacher was not the end, and that’s why the whole thing called Christianity had started. They told stories of the empty tomb, of his appearances to friends and even to some strangers, of him showing the awful wounds to Thomas the Doubter. These stories couldn’t be proved as historical fact, but they were there in your mind, Agnes said.
However, she went on, they also talked of how their loving teacher was now freed from the limits of human frailties so he could be present to them at all times and in all places.
“If more people,” Agnes said in the diner, “could only rise to that level where they understand that resurrection is just not the same thing as resuscitation, we wouldn’t have all this literal-minded quibbling about what ‘did or didn’t happen.’”
If Chloe could only get to that level in her mind, then she might have Agnes, her own loving teacher, with her again.
She didn’t want to imagine her mother rising from her grave. (Even though the grave was down east in the sunbaked Memorial Gardens of Barlow, surrounded by the veterans’ flags and plastic flowers on strangers’ graves. Uncle Henry had wanted Agnes buried in the family plot in shady Riverside Cemetery, within walking distance from the Vick house, but Rex Wright, as husband, had prevailed.) And she certainly didn’t want her mother resuscitated, like in those horror stories where the person came back, but with some ghastly alteration.
What Chloe did want, now that Agnes could no longer live with her, was for Agnes to live in her and through her. And there were signs of this starting to happen, if only Chloe could be faithful and silent and hold on to what she felt she knew.
Sometimes people bonded together and had a shared secret—or made one up, like the Red Nun oblates she was so tired of hearing about. As far as she’d been able to figure out, the oblates’ secret hadn’t done anyone much good.
But sometimes a real secret slowly made itself known to you alone. This was harder and lonelier, but if you kept faith with it and let it live inside you, it made you stronger.
The first signs of how this could happen—of her secret starting to live through her—had begun during Chloe’s drawing of the ninth-grade girls, destined for the updated class bulletin board. This contribution was to have enhanced them both, Chloe because she was the artist and Tildy because she was the best friend of the artist and had come up with the idea.
Well, more or less. Maud—whom Tildy chose to refer to as “our president”—had asked Chloe to contribute “something artistic so it won’t look like everybody else’s bulletin board.” And Tildy, as though Maud had never spoken, had pushed Chloe forward, saying, “You go give it a bit of pizzazz.” And then Mother Malloy had invited all the members of the class to think of ways to make the bulletin board uniquely theirs.
But it had been Tildy who’d had the brainstorm of the class portrait. “You have this amazing knack. You make people look exactly like themselves—beyond exactly, sometimes. It will be a masterpiece. Everyone will just be bowled over.”
And Chloe had gone along without a qualm. Certainly it was something she could do. As always, she looked forward to seeing what would rise out of the paper once she started to draw. And this would be more of a challenge because fifteen people—sixteen, counting Mother Malloy—would be rising out of the paper. First-quality materials were forthcoming, along with Uncle Henry’s drawing board and stool, carried reverently up the stairs to the “artist’s” room. Everyone awaited the masterpiece.
First she had sketched out her composition, putting the tallest girls in the back row. Maud was one of the tallest girls in the class—Tildy said she had shot up over the summer—but Maud would not stay in the back row. She positioned herself sideways, at the right side of the group, at the very edge of the pictorial space, almost as if she were getting ready to walk out of it. She was the only one in the picture whose whole body could be seen. The standing girls (and Mother Malloy) in the back row and the standing girls in the middle row were visible from the waist up only. The five girls in the front row, including Chloe herself, were kneeling, so you couldn’t see their legs. Only an occasional saddle shoe or loafer and white sock peeked out.
Well, Maud was class president, so maybe there was a kind of protocol in having her standing to the side like that. Tildy hadn’t complained when she saw the composition ready to receive its details.
But then other things started appearing.
“Oh my God, that’s priceless!” Tildy had screamed that Sunday night, when Gilda Gomez’s cheeks suddenly puffed out below her little pig eyes and her dainty, fat hands pushed up the lamb collar of her pink coat. Without really trying, Chloe had “got” Gilda, her clownish coddling of herself in a cold country. It had just appeared on the page.
After Madeline had taken Tildy home that Sunday night, and Uncle Henry remained below to play Bach, Chloe had climbed back on the drawing stool to work some more on morose Marta Andreu in her purple shawl. Suddenly another image of the Cuban girl swam up from the paper: a young Madonna with cast-down eyes, stunned by a secret sorrow. Feeling flush with her clairvoyant powers, Chloe had gone on to “do” the two Dutch girls in their matching chesterfield coats and blunt blond hair, only Beatrix’s had that twirled-up strand she constantly fiddled with, and her slightly smarmy expectancy contrasted with Hansje’s face, so interestingly at war with itself.
But after she was in bed, her mother’s old room lit only by the orange glow of a streetlamp through the drawn curtains, something totally new and uncomfortable thought itself into Chloe’s mind. That was exactly the way it had felt: as though a wiser consciousness had been gently waiting for the opportunity to insert itself into hers in order to show the possible repercussions from her “masterpiece.”
For a start, what would Gilda Gomez feel if she were to see herself portrayed so “pricelessly” as a swelling pig in pink, comically hugging her furs to herself in an alien climate? What would each girl feel when she confronted herself in Chloe’s group portrait? Despite Tildy’s snooty theory about some girls “just being background” for certain others, didn’t each and every one of them privately regard herself as the centerpiece?
What a Dumbo I have been, Chloe had realized after that first bedtime infusion from the wiser mind. I must have been brainwashed by Tildy’s plan. And though Chloe continued to dabble at the picture, she no longer expected to make it public. What had she been thinking? Realistically, there was no chance their teacher would ever have let it go up on the bulletin board. What a disaster, if I had walked into class with this thing rolled up under my arm and “modestly” presented it for Mother Malloy’s approval!
Tildy had been furious, of course. “What do you mean you’re not going on with it? Are you crazy? It’s already there. You couldn’t stop now if you tried. You’ve even done us. You’ve colored in my beaver coat. You have Dorothy Yount wiping her eye exactly the way she does, and you’ve caught that furtive sideways look that Becky Meyer gets when she’s trying to be remote. It’s the best thing you’ve ever done!”
“Whatever it is, it needs to stay private.”
“That is just stupid!”
“It would have been a lot stupider if we had shown this to Mother Malloy. She would have thought much less of us.”
“I don’t see why. You have revealed the secret sides of some of these people, what makes them them!”
“Has it ever occurred to you that ‘these people’ might not want their secret sides, as seen by somebody els
e, posted on the bulletin board?”
Tildy had given Chloe a long, searching look.
“Did your uncle say something?” she demanded. “Who has been influencing you?”
My mother, I think, Chloe could have answered. She might even have taken it a step further. It wouldn’t be hard to convince Tildy’s dramatic imagination that Agnes as spirit had been regularly “haunting” her old room at night to infuse wisdom and fair play into her daughter: this would have become Chloe and Tildy’s secret; it would have made them closer.
But it would have diminished the lonelier secret, and Chloe preferred to keep faith with that.
And even this choice—to keep her secret a secret—might be one more infusion from Agnes, who herself, at Chloe’s age, in refusing to join the oblates, had rejected the easier bonds of a shared secret.
“Nobody has been influencing me,” Chloe had told Tildy. “I just asked myself how I would feel if I were those other girls.”
“Which other girls?”
“Oh, any of the ones you call ‘background.’”
Stalemated, Tildy had uttered her characteristic “hmff.” But then, rallying, she had demanded, “So what will our great artist contribute to the communal endeavor?”
“I thought maybe a portrait of the school building, a front elevation, poking out of clouds and mist.”
“Well, that will certainly be safe” was Tildy’s scornful response.
ET VERBUM CARO factura est, said Father Lohan, his voice thickening with congestion. And the Word was made flesh.
Here all genuflected.
Et habitavit in nobis. And dwelt among us. “Deo gratias,” chimed a chorus of girls’ voices.
Now they would file out of chapel, row by row, class by class, and walk around the east side of the building and down to the nuns’ burial place in the cedar grove. Father Lohan would cense the grave of Mother Elizabeth Wallingford and then the graves of the other nuns. Chloe knew exactly what was coming next because Agnes had told her all about the girls’ solemn yearly march to the nuns’ cemetery on All Souls’ Day at Mount St. Gabriel’s.
She walked in silent single file down the narrow woodland path with the others, as though she had been doing it for decades.
CHAPTER 14
More Indignities
August 11, 2001, on a rainy, windy morning, immediately following the Mass Feast of St. Clare of Assisi
St. Scholastica Retirement House (formerly the Sanderson estate)
Milton, Massachusetts
LORD, IS THIS another silence like my 1952–53 exile in that serpents’ den on the Battery? You later said that You were with me that whole horrible year Reverend Mother sent me to care for my mother. You were there even in the outermost darkness of my mistrust, You said. I don’t mistrust You now, but I have to take it on faith that You are hearing me, since You won’t let me hear You.
Please, remember in me that I am worth something.
Is it that I talk too much? My retreat master, Father Krafft, kept telling me that joke about the old monk yakking all day long to himself in the garden. A new novice finally gets up the nerve to ask him, “Are you always praying, Father?” “Always! Always!” the old monk tells him. “But don’t you run out of things to say, Father?” “That’s what I keep hoping!” cries the old monk.
Yesterday I overheard Sister Bridget gossiping about me in the kitchen with the home helper, Lanie, who comes to see to Mother Odom’s needs since her stroke.
“Every time I pass the blind nun’s door,” Lanie was saying, “she’s in there talking a blue streak. Is she praying, or what?”
“No,” said Sister Bridget, “she is talking her memoirs into a fancy machine some rich women from her old school bought for her. They are going to publish them and then she will be so swollen with pride the rest of us won’t have breathing space in this house.”
Well, I will keep talking into my fancy machine, but I will give You a rest.
Father Krafft gave me a prayer to say, which I never said much because I liked my conversations with You better. It’s attributed to St. Ambrose, the eloquent bishop of Milan, but I have my doubts. Why would someone who prized words as highly as St. Ambrose compose such a prayer? Nevertheless, in memory of Father Krafft (how I wish I could consult him about Your silence!) I will now say it: Let thy good spirit enter my heart and there be heard without utterance, and without the sound of words speak all truth.
The blind nun will listen for You in the silences of her heart.
Holy Daring: A Noonday Digression
My dear girls, today at St. Scholastica’s retirement house in Milton, we celebrated the Feast of St. Clare of Assisi. I stayed on in the chapel afterward, as it was too rainy and windy for my morning walk, and as I knelt there I was mulling over many things, including the provocative ideal of “holy daring” that our foundress bequeathed to us, along with her compelling concept of “a woman’s freedom in God.”
Clare lived only fifty-nine years (1194-1253). That seems such a short time when you think of all she accomplished. Of course, she had St. Francis as her inspiration and mentor: it was he who, accompanied by his monks, cut off her hair and gave her a rough tunic and sent her off, at age eighteen, to shelter with some Benedictine nuns until he could install her and her “poor ladies” (later known as the Poor Clares) in the monastery he was restoring for them at San Damiano. By twenty-one, she was the mother to her order; two of her sisters and even her mother joined the order. By the end of her life, Clare had founded twenty-two other houses. She was the first woman in the West to write a rule for monastics. Compared with Pope Innocent’s rule, which went into great detail about what the nuns were to wear, and how many grilles and double locks it would take to shield them from womanly temptations, her rule was full of joyful good sense. Wear frugal garments, she instructed, to imitate the poverty of the Holy Child in the manger. When the serving sisters had to leave the convent on business, instead of warning them against looking at strangers and inviting evil, Clare told them “to praise God when they saw beautiful trees, flowers, and bushes, and to praise Him in all the people and creatures they met along the way.” Under her rule, each community elected eight sisters “from the most discerning ones” to provide counsel to the abbess. The shared power was less demanding on the abbess, and the abbess also relinquished some of her power. Clare’s life was a true embodiment of “holy daring” and “a woman’s freedom in God.”
Well, on this rainy day I have been mulling some more on “holy daring” ever since Mass this morning. I wish I could lay my hands on Elizabeth Wallingford’s commentary on the book of Acts, “Charged by the Holy Ghost,” which she wrote during her twenty-ninth year when she was drawing near to her conversion. The text, as you know, is preserved for us in the appendix of Mother Fiona Finney’s chapbook, Adventures with Our Foundress, which I don’t have, and even if I did wouldn’t be able to read—someone would have to read it to me. But let me see if I can recall the apposite points for this little digression.
Luke tells us in the book of Acts that the Apostles’ missionary journeys were determined by the Holy Ghost. We read how the Holy Ghost “forbids” them to preach the word in Asia, when they’d already gone throughout the regions of Phrygia and Galatia. Likewise, they get all the way up to Mysia, which was a major Jewish center in northwest Asia Minor, but when they attempt to cross the frontier into Bithynia the Holy Ghost again says no. Employing the vision of a man begging them to “help us in Macedonia,” the Holy Ghost reroutes them eastward again and across the Aegean and into Macedonia.
All this is right there in the Bible for us to read, but our foundress, when she was still Elizabeth Wallingford, the Anglican spinster in Oxfordshire, was moved to apply her critical intelligence to the book of Acts because she was trying to trace that “pure line” from Peter and Paul to the present-day church. You might say the Holy Ghost was routing her on her spiritual journey. And in writing her commentary, “Charged by the Holy Ghost,” she formu
lated the concept of “holy daring.”
Now, mere “daring” by itself can lead, our foundress writes, to folly and the destruction of one’s mission. What if the Apostles had “dared” to cross the frontier into Bithynia because it was, well, daring? After all, Bithynia was a challenge. It was a great source of wealth to the Roman Empire and therefore was very efficiently run by local governors. In dealing with any threats to public order or accepted institutions, the governors were allowed wide powers of discretion. We know from Pliny’s letters to the emperor Trajan, which were written seventy years after the Apostles’ missions, that Christians were still being punished in Bithynia if successfully denounced.
If the Apostles had dared to cross into Bithynia, it would have been daring, all right, but it might have been their last stop.
Which is where the “holy” part of “holy daring” comes in. Holy daring, our foundress said, lets itself be guided by divine improvisation. And divine improvisation is a matter of being in service to a work larger than yourself and being “of one heart” with the others who “belong together with you” in that work.
I think it would be a wonderful spiritual exercise, the next time you have a rainy day, to take the sixteenth book of Acts (where the Holy Ghost is rerouting them) and the life of Clare of Assisi and the life of our foundress and her “fellow adventurer,” Fiona Finney, and meditate on the ways they accepted the call of service with joyful good sense and in the spirit of holy daring. I know this little meditation has certainly improved my spirits on this very gloomy day in Milton, Massachusetts.