Mariette in Ecstasy (4 page)

Crows hunt the shade of green corn and pant in the hot sun with open beaks, as if holding prized huckleberries.

A marmalade tomcat is sitting in his haunt by a nesting place in the old sheep’s meadow. Yards away the still woods drowse with insect whine and the chirr of cicadas, and his tail rises and idly settles, his green-yellow eyes become slits.

Mariette is sitting in hot tree shade, chasing gnats with one hand while she pursues another rosary bead and prays for humility. Elegant Sister Saint-Léon is lying back on her elbows in short bluegrass nearby, trying to teach the new postulant a history of the religious order that she already knows. Sister Saint-Léon dries her forehead with a handkerchief she keeps on her wrist with a rubber band and she tells Mariette in French that the Comtesse de Rossignol used her great wealth to organize the Sisters of the Crucifixion nearly two hundred years ago in Dijon. Their Motherhouse is now in Louvain. Even today they are not a large order; hardly three hundred nuns are listed in their
directoire des religieuses
. She thinks the Sisters of the Crucifixion have been in Belgium and America since the properties of the religious orders were stolen just after that horrible revolution and in the Empire years. And then there were the harsh restrictions of the Waldeck-Rousseau laws in 1901. Thirteen of the sisters here have fled France and arrived in this country since then. And what a purgatory it is for them.

Sister Saint-Luc walks up with a wreath of braided yellow dandelions that she crowns Mariette with as she kneels. Mariette bashfully smiles and asks her, “
Comme il faut?
”

“
Très jolie
,” says Sister Saint-Luc. She is a simple and perpetually happy woman with skin as brown as cinnamon and blond hair on her upper lip and chin.

“We have been talking about the history, Luke.”

Sister Saint-Luc says seriously, “I have the secret of how to stay in our order, Marie. Have you any idea what it is?”

Mariette says no.

“You must never ever
leave
,” she says, and smiles so enormously that Mariette can see she has no chewing teeth.

Sister Saint-Léon sighs. “Saint Luke and I are cousins. We have nothing else in common.”

“I have been her disciple since I was three,” says Sister Saint-Luc. “She has been my penance.” And then she gives the postulant a handwritten note from the prioress. “She says you are expected.”

While the others have another half hour of recreation, Mariette is sent to the prioress’s suite, next to the visitation parlors and the house of the extern sisters. She waits for Mother Céline on a flowered ottoman and takes affectionate stock of a grand office that has plush heavy chairs, a pink velvet sofa with four chintz pillows, two brass floor lamps with tasseled lampshades, and old newspapers from Paris and New York City and Rome draped over bamboo sticks. Everything removed from the scriptorium is here in a high wall of science and economics textbooks, French and English romances and poetry, old treatises on histrionics and phrenology and animal magnetism.

She hears horses pass the convent at a trot. She hears under that four or five stringed instruments being practiced down the hallway. Schubert, she thinks. She gets up and opens
The Ethics of Belief
and abstractly turns pages until Mother Céline hurries in like a regal woman of property, going over what are apparently a kitchen inventory and some sisters’ notes that she’s just been passed. Without irritation she says, “I have entered the room.”

Mariette smiles uncertainly.

“Curtsy.”

Mariette does.

“We say ‘
Benedicite Dominus
’ in greeting. The Lord bless you. You’ll say ‘
Benedicite
,’ and the superior nun will say, ‘
Dominus
.’ Upon leaving one’s company or classroom, you’ll hear the superior nun pronounce, ‘
Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini
.’ Our help is in the name of the Lord. And you’ll reply, ‘
Qui fecit coelum et terram
.’ Who made heaven and earth.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother.”

“Sit down, please,” the prioress says, and Mariette complies.

Mother Céline seems a glamorous actress playing a nun, or one of the grand ladies of inheritance that Mariette has seen in paintings of English society. Without her black veil and gray habit, the prioress would seem a genteel and handsome mother of less than forty, blond and lithe and Continental, but tense and initiating, too, with green eyes that seem to strike what they see. She was Annette Baptiste and a junior at Vassar when Mariette was born, Sister Céline and a novice when their mother died, the prioress of Our Lady of Sorrows since Mariette was twelve. She arranges and grooms her papers on the green felt of the desktop and then she briskly sits opposite Mariette and puts her hands on her knees as she asks, “Are you happy?”

“Oh yes.”

She smiles. “We’re happy, too. Every new postulant affirms our own vocations and gives efficacy to our prayers.”

“Everyone has been very nice.”

“We must seem to talk and feast all the time.”

Mariette shakes her head. “I presumed today was an exception.”

“We aren’t meant to pine away and die here. We’re meant to live in the heartening fullness of God. Who is life and love and happiness.”

“I know.”

“We seem to mystify people who are slaves to their pleasures. We often work too hard and rest too little, our food is plain, our days are without variety, we have no possessions nor much privacy, we live uncomfortably with our vows of chastity and obedience; but God
is
present here and that makes this our heaven on earth. We hope you’ll find the same welcome and peace here that we have, and that you’ll soon develop a genuine and reverent affection for our priory and for your sisters. We pray, too, that soon it will seem you’ve given up very little and, as always with our good God, gained a hundredfold.”

Everything seems practiced, as if she has said just this to a half-dozen other postulants, but Mariette pleasantly listens and says, “Oh, already I feel that! This is paradise!”

Mother Céline smiles but stares discerningly at her sister for half a minute. And she asks, “Are you and Father still on good terms?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a reason why he wasn’t present for the ceremonies?”

Mariette pauses before saying, “Papa is a good man, I think, but he has been against my religious vocation since I first began talking about it. He said he’d given the sisters his first daughter and he thought that was enough.”

The prioress seems to be trying for sympathy, but her stare is tenacious and penetrates like a nail. “That must have been disappointing for you.”

Mariette shrugs. “God isn’t finished with him yet.”

Mother Céline sits back in the assessing way of a jurist. She says, “I have a letter from Father that accuses you of being too high-strung for our convent. And he is troubled by gossip from friends and patients about trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament, and, as he put it, ‘inner wrenchings.’ I have laid all that aside, of course, or you wouldn’t be here, but I would like to hear what you have to say about his qualms and hesitations.”

Mariette suddenly seems slow and dull and oddly abstract, like a wrong sum at the tail end of a child’s arithmetic. She says, “I have forgiven him for them.”

“Was he dishonest in his description?”

“I have no opinion, Reverend Mother.”

“Was he duped then?”

She just stares.

“We won’t be, Mariette. Secrets are impossible here. Your mistress, Mother Saint-Raphaël, will be watching you closely these next few months. You’ll be put to test many times. We have wonderful plans and expectations for you, but you will have to prove worthy of them. Don’t try to be exceptional; simply be a good nun. Saint Ignatius Loyola gives us the right prescription: Work as if everything depended on you, but pray as if everything depended on God.”

“I shall.”

“I’ll take you to the oratory now.”

—Were you surprised by the tone?

—She did seem cold.

—Were you hurt?

—Oh no! I was so pleased to see our dear God using my sister for my own holiness and good. Everything seemed to be saying to me,
She will be a grace for you
.

Mother Céline rises up and holds open the door for the postulant before preceding her down the hallway. She grazes the stone with her knuckles as she says, “We try to walk these halls as silently as the Holy Ghost. And we stay close to the walls here in humility and in graciousness to our sisters who may be talking with God.”

Sisters Honoré, Saint-Denis, Véronique, and Philomène are gaily leaving the haustus room with their violins and viola and bows tucked underneath their arms. Sister Saint-Denis sees the prioress and gravely curtsies, and then the choirmistress and the others do, too.

Mother Céline half raises her hand in blessing and asks, “What was that you were practicing?”

“Franz Schubert,” Sister Honoré says. “‘Death and the Maiden.’ Was it good, Reverend Mother?”

“Oh indeed. Wonderful. You resurrected her.”

Wild, high-strung, deferential laughter follows, and Mother Céline frowningly turns from it.

Troughs of sunlight angle into the oratory like green and blue and pink bolts of cloth grandly flung down from the high, painted windows. Still present are the wood oil smells and habit starch and an incense of styrax and cascarilla bark. Mother Céline and her postulant genuflect together and Mariette’s right knee touches down on a great red Persian carpet that seems as warm as a sleeping cat. She sees faint gyres of dust in the hot upper air.

The prioress says, “We praise God in song here seven times a day. At two a.m. for Matins and Lauds, and then for the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day: Prime, Terce, Sext, and Nones. We then have Vespers at sunset, and Compline after collation and just before bed. Every week we go through the whole Psalter. Sister Honoré plans to teach you the rudiments of plainchant next week.”

Mother Céline walks forward to the right-hand choir while she tells her sister, “Externs, novices, and postulants are the first to enter. You all kneel in the first rows.” She puts her hand on the second stall in from the upper end. “You’ll be here, Mariette.”

Mariette exultantly walks around to her stall, sitting testingly in it and skidding both hands along its shined rail. She kneels and prays for greater religious fervor and that the joy she feels now will comfort her in the difficult times ahead. And then she feels the prioress kneel beside her and finds only kindness in Annie’s eyes.

She asks Mariette, “Were you called just recently?”

“Early,” she says. “Continually. Ever since my confirmation God has been persuading me.”

Mother Céline fondly touches a hand onto hers and holds it there. “We must thank Our Lord for the honor of inviting both of us to serve Him here.”

“I shall. Every day.”

“Seeing you here is such a pleasure for me.”

Mariette smiles. “I have missed you so much.”

Mother Céline withdraws her hand from her sister’s. “I’ll seem subdued and distant. We’ll hardly ever talk. You’ll think I don’t love you because I won’t show it.” The prioress turns her head and then stands up. “Try to remember that I have many sisters in my family now. Don’t expect too much from me.”

At two p.m. the sisters join them in choir for Nones, but Sister Honoré tells Mariette not to join in the psalms until she has been taught the Latin and the ugly chains of square black notes that sing like the hymns of the seraphim.

She listens hard, however, just as she did as a child in the church pew, sitting with Dr. Baptiste on a holy day, smelling his iodine and tweed and Turkish cigarette tobacco, peering beyond the oaken grille at Annie or Sister Catherine or Mother Saint-Raphaël and hearing these same gray sisters in the yearnings and elations of plainsong.

When there’s meditation and a shutting of the Psalters, Mariette looks up at the high west windows. Evangelists are represented in the ox with wings of Luke and the lion with wings of Mark, the high-soaring eagle of John, and Christ’s genealogy in the human figure of Matthew. Opposite them in the upper east windows are Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah; and high above Our Lady’s green marble altar to the south and its beautifully carved limewood Pietà from Germany is the glorious rose window and its iridescent peacock in violet, navy blue, and emerald green, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. She smells linseed oil and hard soap and frankincense and tallow. She is in a great room of thirty-three women, but she has never heard such silence. West from Mariette in the upper choir stalls Sister Ange, who handles the horses and whose mind has become a jumble, is grinning across the oratory and agreeably nodding encouragement, as if their postulant is a child newly toddling forward with a firm hold on her mother’s forefinger. Sister Véronique holds tight to prayer, her full lips forming unspoken words, her half-glasses glinting silver. Sister Marie-Madeleine hunkers over her knees and hides her face in her hands while Sister Catherine hunches over a book just inches from her nose and harriedly hunts another page.

And Mariette thinks,
Here you are, and here you’ll stay
.

Mariette is still saying prayers of thanksgiving in the oratory when Sister Geneviève kneels heavily next to her and after a Memorare says, “We have a secret place.”

And Mariette is taken up to the campanile, where the hot wind has the pressure of hands. Sister Pauline is skulking up there already and getting on her tiptoes as she tilts out over the railing and says in an itsy voice, “We’re being bad.”

White sheep are in a green pasture, hardly moving, and at a great distance some Sunday farmers in dark galluses and white shirts and ties are slowly walking a blond hayfield and using red handkerchiefs on their high-button shoes. Everything slants up into hillsides of green fir and cedar and the gray-blue haze that slurs the horizon. A peregrine falcon is suspended on the air, hunting some hidden prey, and suddenly twists into a dive of such speed that Mariette loses track of it until the falcon has flared high up into the sky again.