Absence of Grace

by Ann Warner

  In towns too small to have motels, Clen discovered that asking about a night’s lodging at a gas station or diner always yielded information about someone who had a room they were willing to rent. In a tiny hamlet in Tennessee, that room was in the house of an elderly woman named Mag.

  When Clen asked Mag for suggestions of where to eat, her hostess chuckled. “Not much of that sort of thing hereabouts. But if you won’t turn your nose up at home cooking, I’d be happy to fix us both something.”

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble. Kind of nice to have someone to feed. Not much fun cooking for just myself. You can help if you like.”

  With Mag directing, Clen chased down a chicken and Mag chopped off its head. Grimacing and trying not to sneeze, Clen plucked it, then Mag showed her how to cut it up. By that point, Clen wasn’t altogether certain she’d be able to eat the thing, but she didn’t share the thought with the old woman.

  Mag hauled out an ancient electric frying pan and plunked a cube of butter, a cube of margarine, and a large dollop of shortening into it. She set the heat on low and, while the grease warmed, she dredged the chicken pieces in flour. After she added them to the gently bubbling grease, a delicious smell began to fill the air.

  “Now, we let it cook nice and slow while we sit,” Mag said, pouring two glasses of iced tea and leading the way to a small front porch shaded by white clematis. As she rocked, Mag began to talk. Clen listened, alternately sipping tea and sketching.

  “Started out in Pennsylvania, my family did. Granddad was a farmer but my father was a shopkeeper. After he married my mother, they moved west, looking for better opportunities, I suppose. I was their second child. My mother always had a preference for my older sister, Helen. Real pretty, Helen was. Blonde curls, blue eyes. Delicate looking.”

  Although Mag was short and dumpy with eyes a pale washed-out blue, Clen found her so appealing, it was hard to believe the mother preferred the beautiful sister.

  “One Christmas we both got dolls,” Mag continued. “I’d been wanting a doll for as long as I could remember. And oh my, how I loved that doll. I named her Annie, and I took her everywhere I went. Helen mostly ignored her doll. Didn’t even give her a name, and one day she left it out in the yard. The neighbor’s dog got hold of it. And my, that old dog did go to town. Shook that doll something fierce. When Helen discovered it, she went crying to our mother and Mother made me give Annie to Helen. Helen never even played with her but she wouldn’t let me touch Annie.

  “Never forgot that. Funny how something that happens when you’re six can stick with you your whole life.” Mag stopped talking and Clen’s hand moved quickly, trying to transfer to the page what she was seeing in Mag’s face—an ancient sorrow that was still causing pain even though it happened more than eighty years ago.

  Mag shook herself and stood abruptly. “Time I checked on that chicken.”

  “You need help?”

  “No. No need for you to get up.”

  After a minute Mag returned. “How’s that picture coming along?”

  “Good. If you keep telling me stories, I’ll finish in no time.”

  “Where was I?”

  Clen was too angry with Mag’s mother to answer.

  “Well, let’s see. Suppose I tell you about the cooking. I started cooking when I was twelve, after Mother died in childbirth. Helen was older, but she was useless in the kitchen. At first, there were only six of us, but then Father remarried. That meant more babies. Ended up we added three half brothers and two half sisters. An even dozen for dinner every night.

  “I liked it well enough, cooking for a crowd. Made for a change when I married Lou. Then we only had three children, so I never did cook for a crowd again. Lou was a good eater, though. He always said I was the best cook he ever met. That it was why he married me.” Mag rocked and chuckled, then went silent.

  Looking at the old woman, Clen held her breath.

  “He’s been gone five years now, but sometimes I still forget. Think he’s just in the other room, reading his paper, and when I remember, don’t feel much like eating.” Mag shook her head as if dislodging a pesky fly, then gave Clen a wry look. “Well now. Didn’t mean to get into all that. Nothing ever gets accomplished with whining. My stepmother was fond of saying that. Mostly to those of us weren’t hers, but true for all of that.”

  Mag returned to the kitchen, with Clen following, and removed the chicken from the skillet. Then she poured most of the pan drippings into a jar. “We’ll use this when we make bread tomorrow.”

  She added flour and a mix of milk and cream to the drippings still in the skillet, making a thick gravy that was one of the best things Clen had ever eaten.

  The next day Mag showed her how to bake bread and to cook ribs so they left behind crisp brown bits to flavor the potato dumplings she also taught Clen how to make.

  Clen stayed a week with Mag. When she left, she took with her a fresh-baked loaf of bread, a jar of homemade plum jelly, and notes about how to make the delicious dinners Mag cooked for the two of them. She also carried a book filled with sketches—Mag cooking, the old house in its frame of flowers with two shadowy figures sitting on the porch, the apple tree in the backyard, with its old-fashioned wooden swing hanging from one of the branches.

  “Looks like it’s just waiting for the next time a little one comes to visit,” Mag said, sounding pensive, when Clen showed her the sketches.

  After leaving Mag, Clen continued driving. Whenever she stopped, she sketched. Some subjects posed for her. Other times she captured a quick study of someone who was unaware—an old man reading his paper at the counter of the local diner, a small boy petting his dog in the park.

  In the small diners where she ate along the way, Clen chatted with cooks and waitresses, collecting recipes and cooking tips although she had no idea why she was doing it.

  Her best days were ones when she didn’t think about the past, as if that quick turn she’d taken a couple of days before had left the past wondering where she’d gone. But it always found her, eventually. And when it did, the bits and pieces she’d managed to avoid thinking about during the years in Atlanta buzzed around her, as relentless and irritating as flies—dive-bombing or sliding into the edge of her vision just when she’d begun to relax.

  She’d been on the road swiping at those memories for five months on the night she found herself in a small Montana town with a monastery. Walking back to the motel after dinner, she passed near the monastery walls and heard the monks chanting. The deep, rich voices wove together in a simple repetitive melody that was so muted and softened that it seemed like something she was dreaming.

  The last note faded into a moment of stillness before the voices began the next chant.

  Shaken, but uncertain why, Clen walked back to that night’s lodging, her thoughts once again turning to the dilemma of where she would spend the winter. There was already snow in the mountains. It meant the cold weather would soon reach the plains, and she didn’t want to be caught by it, her tolerance for cold lessened by years in Atlanta’s warmth.

  The best solution was to head south, perhaps to Colorado Springs for that visit home she kept putting off.

  The time Clen spent at home was every bit as difficult as she expected it might be. Jason and Nancy, who were planning a summer wedding, came to Colorado Springs for Thanksgiving, but for Christmas they went to Nancy’s family in Boulder. That left Clen to carry the burden of her mother’s expectations for the holiday.

  “You need to settle down, Michelle. Is it even safe? Your going from place to place the way you do? Why not stay here. You don’t have to live at home, you know. You could get an apartment.”

  “I’m not ready for that.”

  “Do you know when you will be?”

  “Sorry, I wish I did.” She knew her mother pushed because she was worried, but that didn’t make the relentless questions any easier to tolerate.

  A Christmas ca
rd arrived from Maxine, adding another dollop of guilt. Clen had promised to stay in touch but hadn’t. Her only regular contacts since leaving Atlanta were her parents and the attorney who was handling her divorce. When she told the attorney she’d be in one place for at least four weeks, he promised to finalize everything for her to sign. Initially, Paul had blustered, but in the end he wasn’t contesting.

  When the postman rang the bell right before Christmas and handed over the large envelope, Clen knew what it was without looking at the return address. She took it to her room and pulled out the contents. As she read through the pages, tears began to run down her cheeks. If her mother had been there to ask why she was crying, she would have had to say she didn’t know why. Perhaps she’d been fooling herself about how little she cared for Paul, or maybe she was grieving the loss of what might have been—the stability of loving someone. The possibility of family.

  Clen left Colorado Springs the day after Christmas and spent the winter months wandering the southwest. By the time spring arrived, she was desperate for stability. But despite that, she kept getting up each morning and starting to drive.

  Her future had clarity only in her dreams, but that lucidity always slipped away upon awakening. Then one morning, part of a dream memory remained—a chapel with ornate marble carvings turned rosy by light slanting through colored windows. That image flowing into one of a garden surrounded by walls with robed figures pacing its perimeter in silence. That was all. Or all she could remember.

  Marymead. The chapel part, at least, but she had no idea what it might mean.

  Chapter Five

  1962-1963

  Marymead College - Mead, Kansas

  Clen was in the garden studying for midterms when two nuns wearing long striped aprons and carrying pails and trowels emerged from their wing of the main building. Thomasina was one of the two. The other was the sister in charge of the gardens, Sister Gladys, whom Clen had renamed Gladiolus.

  It wasn’t easy guessing a nun’s age, although gray hair sightings helped, but Gladiolus had a face with a comfortable, lived-in look that meant she had to be years older than Thomasina.

  The nuns didn’t greet her, but Clen assumed they’d seen her sitting behind a large lilac that had partially shed its foliage.

  Gladiolus gestured with her trowel. “I think the yellow tulips will look good here.”

  The two settled on their knees with their backs to Clen and began to dig. Just as Clen was about to clear her throat to make sure they knew she was there, Thomasina spoke. “Did you think it would be easy being a nun?”

  “A free pass, you mean? I think most of us hoped that would be true, but perhaps it’s better we have to struggle so we don’t become arrogant or complacent.”

  “And our sisters. Did you think it would be so difficult to love them?”

  “Indeed. And why not? We’re all human. Even Eustacia, who no doubt would try the patience of the Good Lord himself. But perhaps that’s why she’s lived so long. I’ve often wondered if she really needs that cane or just enjoys having something to shake at people.”

  Clen muffled a laugh. She and Eustacia had already had several run-ins, and Clen had thought the same thing about the irascible nun.

  “And what about Angelica? One of the girls called her Sister Demonica.”

  Gladiolus chuckled. “Oh my. A girl who sees clearly.”

  Clen held her breath, knowing it was too late to let them know she was there.

  “Yes. Clen McClendon, the unofficial leader of our rebels. Well, actually, the entire class has been causing me no end of difficulty. They’re all so...determined to change Marymead. And when I’m not just trying to hold up our side, I must admit they have a point.”

  “There are too many rules, you know.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you keep the trellis on the south quad in excellent repair.”

  “Well, we don’t want anyone to hurt themselves.”

  The two laughed softly together then dug silently for several minutes.

  “Do you know what I think as I work in the garden?” Gladiolus said. “That we are all God’s gardens. Some weedy and overgrown, like Angelica, and some full of prickly cactus, like Eustacia. I see you, my dear, as a spring prairie, filled with silvery grasses and wildflowers of every hue.”

  Thomasina sat back on her heels. “What am I doing here, Glad?”

  “Ah, Thomas. You’re where you’re supposed to be.”

  “Under false pretenses. How can that be right?”

  “Pretenses, perhaps. Isn’t that true of all of us? But not false ones. Remember, the Good Lord calls each of us in a unique way.”

  “You won’t tell Mother Superior what a fraud I am, will you?”

  “My dear, doubting Thomas, of course I won’t. Because you’re not.”

  Thomasina bent over and began digging again, stabbing at the ground with the trowel. “He’s been dead fifteen years. When do I stop missing him?”

  “You loved him deeply, Thomas. Do you really want to forget him?”

  Once again Thomasina sat back on her heels. Her arm came up to brush her face, and the light slanting through the trees made the moisture on her cheek glisten. “It happened so fast. He was...just gone, like quicksilver down a crack I couldn’t even see.”

  “There, there, my dear. You have a good heart, but it’s been broken. It needs time to heal.”

  “It hurts so much.”

  “Shh, I know. I know.” Gladiolus put her arms around Thomasina. “You mustn’t worry, Thomas. Just as the Father cares for the lilies and the sparrows, he’s caring for you and for him.”

  “How I wish I had your confidence.”

  “My dearest one, you may borrow it whenever you wish.”

  When the two nuns finally went inside, Clen jogged off in the opposite direction, carrying her unstudied book and a radical new view of nuns in general, and Thomasina and Gladiolus in particular.

  Clen had been looking forward to the fall retreat as a chance to catch up on both her rest and studies, although she planned to skip the talks by the visiting priest. The seats in the chapel were hard and such talks were usually boring. Unfortunately, Eustacia caught her sneaking out the back door and brandished her cane. Resigned, Clen redirected her steps to the chapel.

  The priest conducting the retreat was middle-aged and bald with a protruding belly and a penetrating voice. “Outside of the marriage bed, French kissing is an abomination in God’s eyes.”

  Clen thought calling it an abomination was a bit extreme. True, the idea of having some guy stick his tongue in her mouth held no appeal, but she knew Maxine was doing it, and it was hard to believe God really cared. As if sensing her thought, Maxine shifted next to her.

  “You young women are the ones designated by God to uphold the sanctity of home and family,” the priest continued.

  If questions were permitted, Clen would have asked what young men were designated to do, and had they been told they weren’t supposed to French kiss until they were married? Most likely not.

  Clen closed her eyes, attempting to doze, but Friar Tuck was just warming up, and his voice kept jarring her awake.

  “The highest calling is to celibacy. Any of you who feel such a calling should consider yourselves among the blessed ones.”

  Enough already. Clen slid out of the pew, holding her stomach as if she were in acute pain and went in search of Thomasina.

  Retreat not only freed them from classes, it also gave the nuns a rest, and most of them spent part of that free time walking the grounds, likely filling the crisp fall air with prayers and the clicking of rosaries. Clen looked around and spotted Thomasina, recognizable because of her height and slender build. She was with a stockier nun. Gladiolus, Clen discovered, when she walked up to the two.

  “Good afternoon, Clen,” Thomasina said. “Out of chapel already?”

  “I skipped out early.”

  “Because?”

  “Father was making my stomach
hurt. What I want to know is how was he chosen?”

  Gladiolus looked on with an interested expression. Thomasina frowned. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because whoever suggested this guy should be permanently struck from the list of ‘suggestors.’’”

  “Oh, and why is that?”

  “Where to start. Well, for one thing he’s got a very loud, grating voice. That seems at odds with the idea of this being a time of peaceful contemplation.”

  “You mean it’s harder to sleep through the talks, don’t you?”

  “Sure. That, too.”

  “Go on.”