Mariette in Ecstasy (7 page)

“Oh dear,” Sister Monique says.

Sister Sabine says desperately, “She’s told me often in prayer that I do her proud.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël smiles and pats her hand.

Alkali water and powdered sodium carbonate are slopped across the kitchen flooring, and a scullery brush that’s hard as a horse comb scrubs lard and grease and hard clear stains from the dark brown planks.

Sister Zélie is on all fours with the new postulant when she notices that the harsh ripsaw noise of Mariette’s own hard scouring has ceased. She looks to her left and sees the shut-eyed girl kneeling upright on her fingertips and softly praying into the room’s emptiness. Sister Zélie watches until Mariette pauses and raises her knees to release her hands and goes back to her work again.

Sister Saint-Léon walks in with dishes and an iron saucepan of knives and walks out again. The extern knocks the floor with the wooden handle of her scrub brush and Mariette looks up. Sister Zélie signs,
Why, under, knees, hands?

So, not, sin, against, purity
.

You, always, pray, so?

The pretty girl hesitates and shows her agreement.
Since, was, child
.

Sister Zélie signs,
Easy, purity, here
. She grins.
Too tired
.

September. Mass of Saint Serapia, Virgin, Martyr.

The skies haze with heat and Mariette and Sister Marie-Madeleine are backing along a green hayfield, snagging down the high grass with dull scythes. Sweat rises on their hands like pinheads. A hide of chaff and dust finds the wetness in their habits. And in the turbulence of hot and brutal effort, Sister Marie-Madeleine huffs and shrieks like a mother in labor pains. And then Sister Marie-Madeleine turns and puts down her scythe as if she’s just been called. Mariette stalls in her work and watches as Sister Marie-Madeleine hurries to Mother Céline, half an acre away. She jealously sees them talk, and then sees Sister Marie-Madeleine shroud her face in her hands. She keens and jerks with sobs. Mother Céline holds the nun in her arms and Mariette looks away.

Within a few minutes, Sister Marie-Madeleine is beside Mariette in the green hayfield again.

“Your father?” Mariette asks, and immediately hates her thoughtlessness and childish curiosity.

Sister Marie-Madeleine says, “She recited to me from the psalms. ‘Although they
go
forth weeping, carrying the seed to be sown, they shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves.’” And then Sister Marie-Madeleine goes back to work, attacking the high grass with her scythe.

Compline. Sister Emmanuelle retreats a half-step in her stall so she can peer behind Sister Antoinette and discreetly adore the new postulant in her simple night-black habit and scarf. She’s as soft and kind as silk. She’s as pretty as affection. Even now, so soon, she prays the psalms distinctly, as if the habit of silence has taught her to cherish speech. And she seems so shrewd, so pure, so prescient. Sister Emmanuelle thinks,
She is who I was meant to be
.

And then the sisters turn and walk out in silence, and Sister Emmanuelle thrills as she hesitates just enough so that Mariette passes by. And then she quickly presses her left hand into the postulant’s. Mariette walks ahead and hides her surprise as she secretly glimpses her hand and the gift of Sister Emmanuelle’s starched cambric handkerchief with its six-winged seraphim holding a plumed letter
M
gorgeously stitched into it in hours of needlepoint. She gives the seamstress an assessing glance and then Sister Emmanuelle flushes pink as the girl shyly smiles.

Mass of the Most Holy Name of Mary.

Sisters Marthe, Sabine, Saint-Michel, and Claudine stoop among high green cornstalks in husking gloves, adroitly twisting and yanking the sweet-corn ears and tossing them against a tin bangboard on a horse-pulled wagon. Sister Marthe yells out, “Here’s one the size of a cubit!” And then there’s no sound but that of cornstalks rustling against human movement, and the squeak and tear and tin noise of the harvest.

Mass of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Evening recreation. Sisters Anne, Virginie, and Marie-Madeleine stand waist-deep in brittle blond cattails by the pond, solemnly watching their bamboo fishing poles and the stick floats that bob and twirl on the stinking water. Henri Marriott walks up and speaks French to Sister Monique. She raises a tin bucket and the old priest stares inside, asking, “
Comment appelez-vous ces poissons en anglaise?
”

“Lunkers,” says Sister Marie-Madeleine, and the sisters titter.

She can see a hundred fireflies out her window. Each is a red dot, then a line, like a pen of red ink crossing a
t
. She goes on writing for half an hour and then stacks the pages before folding them inside a white envelope on which she prints “Confessional Matter.” She carries it to the prioress’s suite on the way to Compline and hurriedly puts it in the mail slot.

Extracts of an Inquiry into Certain Wonderful Events at the Priory of Our Lady of Sorrows, Having to Do with Mariette Baptiste, a Youthful Postulant Here, as Carried Out by Reverend Henri Marriott for the Sisters of the Crucifixion, and Faithfully Recorded by Sister Marguerite in the Winter Months of This Year of Our Lord, 1907
.

—We are talking now with Sister Philomène.

—Yes, Father.

—And you are how old?

—Twenty-five.

—And you have been here…?

—Three years now. I entered just after my college graduation.

—How were you christened?

—Janet Keating.

—Sister Marguerite is just taking down what we say.

—I see that.

—You should know that she is, for these purposes, no more than a hearing and writing machine. She has promised on pain of excommunication not to whisper a word of these proceedings.

—We know each other well, Father.

—Of course. And you know Mariette just as well?

—Even better.

—How is that?

—She is my friend.

—Have you a particular affection toward her?

—We have rules against that here.

—But were you to meet another sister in the hallway, I presume you’d be a tad happier if that sister turned out to be Mariette?

—I have been very happy here. Even before she came.

—You needn’t hide honest feelings from me, Sister Philomène. Your own holiness and obedience are not being discussed here.

—She is my particular friend.

—Well said.

Mass of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Sister Philomène and Mariette are working with Sister Agnès in the laundry. Weak rain is easing down the cellar windowpanes, and two frail light bulbs hang from green electrical cords woven through the joists overhead. Sister Agnès is at an ironing board while Mariette and Sister Philomène crank rinsed corporals through old hand mangles.

Warm water that smells like grapefruits is sheeting grayly on the rollers as it presses from the wet linen.

Sister Philomène has a prayerbook open on a white cupboard that holds boxes of soap and starches, and she’s whispering a novena to Saint Joseph as she turns a green iron wheel. She shows greater effort and then stares with astonishment at the rollers, seeing her white habit somehow caught up in them and rumplingly squeezing through.

Sister Philomène bashfully tugs her habit out before grinning forgivingly at Mariette.

Weeks later Sister Philomène is sitting in formation class with the four other novices while Mother Saint-Raphaël first upbraids them for their tepid essays on spirituality and then invites the postulant to read from an exam that Sister Saint-Denis has just corrected. Each of them hates Mariette as she stands there prettily, shyly, with shaking hands, and reads:

“We know from Church teaching that the soul has no true pleasure but in love. And we know from our experience that extreme bliss can only come from extreme passion. When we unite these ideas, we see how important it is for God to be away from us and be the one we pine for but cannot have, for desiring God invigorates us. Desiring him, but never fully having him, we cannot grow tired or slack. We know the joy of his ‘hereness’ now and then, but were his distance and indifference all we had, it would still be sufficient if we sought and cherished it.

“Even for the complete and immediate possession of his heart, I would not have passive tranquillity. And so I prize my hours of penance and rapture as the greatest blessings that were ever mine, and I would rather be condemned to know him no more than to know him without feeling the ardor and fervor that his presence inspires.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël stops her there and gives Mariette permission to sit with the novices as she takes up the theme of Christ’s passion versus theirs. Sister Geneviève is giggling at something Sister Pauline has said, but Sister Philomène leans toward the postulant and whispers, “Will you please let me read that for meditation?”

Mariette smiles and hastily writes slantwise on her exam before she passes it. Sister Philomène reads, “I knew you’d understand,” and hides it inside her textbook.

—And you became friendly?

—Yes.

—You knew little about her till then?

—We have no histories here. We try to live wholly in the present, just as God does.

—Yes?

—We talked about our childhoods. She dressed her dolls as Jesus and Mary, just as I did. She played in a habit just like the one that her sister Annie wore. She whipped herself with knotted apron strings. She rebuked temptations against chastity by lying naked on thorns.

—She seems to me quite ordinary.

—Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?

In November. Sister Philomène has shoved the six great refectory tables against the walls so the floorboards can be scrubbed, and Mariette is with her on her hands and knees, scouring the wood with sand and powdered lime and a pig bristle brush.

Water shines on a floor darkened to a sienna brown and Mariette’s black habit and scarf are mirrored as she works.

She is barefoot and her skirt is pinned up as high as her thighs in order to protect the habit’s cloth from stain. Faint brown hairs stir on her calves as she moves. Her heels and toes are pink with callus.

She stops scouring with a shocked expression and she hesitantly rises up until she’s kneeling there with her hands joined in prayer. Her wet blue eyes are overawed as she stares ahead at a wall and she seems to be listening to something just above her, as a girl might listen to the cooing of pigeons.

Shutting her eyes, she talks voicelessly, with great passion, and opens her hands as priests do at the
pax vobiscum
. And then she swoons as though she’s lost herself and has become only her clothes.

—Was she in ecstasy?

—She said so.

—And what else did she tell you?

—She said, “Where was I?” And then she seemed to be recollected and she said Christ had talked to her.

—About what?

—She said she couldn’t tell me. She’d been told to hide His words in her heart.

—And it’s your opinion that she was speaking the truth.

—Oh yes. I think she’s a saint.

Ember Day. Mass of Saint Januarius, Bishop, and
His Companions, Martyrs.

Sister Saint-Estèphe wakes up after an hour’s sleep and after a great deal of restlessness goes to the chandlery. She heats paraffin wax and stearic acid in a saucepan and then stirs in a hot mixture of bayberry wax and a purple dye. She prays the joyful mysteries of the rosary while scouring her candle molds, then carries the saucepan to an iron trivet on the windowsill and, just after midnight, walks down to the dim oratory to adore Our Lady of Sorrows. She’s just getting used to the church’s darkness when she hears the hush of a habit, and she’s surprised to see their postulant kneeling in her stall.

She handsigns,
Each night, here?

Yes
.

Sleep, when?

Don’t
.

Mass of Our Lady of Ransom.

Chapter and Compline. Every sister in choir is affectionately following Reverend Mother Céline as she fluently strolls up and down the oratory, first giving a short report of international events, and then talking about Sister Antoinette’s worries for the late-September grape harvest, and going over their next week’s assignments in the winery, grange, hallways, scullery, laundry, milking barn, or orchard. She then gets a church basket of handwritten notes from Sister Catherine. “We shall now pray for our petitioners.”

Each petition is gradually unfolded and read aloud to the sisters in order to request their intercession for the health of a child with impetigo, for a farmer whose faith has left him, for a hot-blooded girl who’s run away, for a mechanic who’s lost half a foot in a steam-powered thresher, for an ill, tired, and friendless widow who’s asking God to please let her die. When she has read them all, Mother Céline lowers her head and raises her folded hands to her mouth as though forbidding her own speech. And Mariette thinks,
I have been here forty days and she hasn’t talked to me since the first
.