Mariette in Ecstasy (8 page)

Their mother superior then says, “We shall also pray for one of ours who is undergoing great torment.”

Mariette gazes around the oratory. Each nun stares at the prioress in common. Each stares at her separately.

Mass of Saints Isaac Jogues, John de Brebeuf, Charles
Garnier, Anthony Daniel, Gabriel Lallemant, Noel
Chabanel, John de Lalande, and Rene Goupil, Martyrs.

White clouds travel and infest the horizon. Fruit trees shift their feet like hired hands. Sister Marthe is standing on a paint-spotted ladder inside a pear tree so that her wooden
sabots
alone are unhidden until a great branch cracks away and her ripsaw flashes silver in the sun.

Mother Saint-Raphaël is hoeing weeds around a garden bench as Mariette kneels with pruning shears and snips back the wood canes on pink rosebushes. Sister Claudine is fifteen yards away as she heaves and shakes ammonium sulfate onto a tilled flower bed. Every now and then she pauses and stares at the postulant with envy. Why, Mariette cannot understand, for Mother Saint-Raphaël hoes in silence. Even when Mariette chats about trifles and foolishness, she sees the mistress of novices frowning at her, as if trying to find a hidden character behind the girl’s eyes. And Mother Saint-Raphaël only sighs when Mariette talks about religion.

She is surprised, therefore, when she pricks the heel of her hand with a thorn and irritatedly presses up a bead of blood, and Mother Saint-Raphaël interestedly kneels opposite her and holds Mariette’s hand in both her own. “Oh my dear,” she says. “Are you badly hurt?”

“Oh no; just a thorn.”

“Shall I get something for it?”

“I’ll be fine, truly.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël puts spit onto her forefinger and softly caresses the blood from the wound, and there’s such an odd confusion of feelings in the grandmotherly face that Mariette hesitantly wrests her hand away.

Everything changes in Mother Saint-Raphaël then, as if a great door has slammed shut inside her. “Don’t misinterpret simple tenderness,” she says.

Mariette travels between worry and sympathy before she replies in humility, “I have, Mother. I see that now.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël gets up with effort and goes back to work and hoes with a kind of urgency. And when, just before meditation, she walks with Mariette to the tool room, she says, “There’s a great deal about you that troubles me.”

Mass of the Dedication of the Basilica
of Saint Michael the Archangel.

Walking into the oratory for Prime, Sister Léocadie holds her stomach and whispers to Sister Pauline, “I have cramps.” And at the pause before the reading she faints, wrenching and hurting the pew in her slow heavy fall. Every nun stays as she was until Mariette anxiously lays down her Psalter and gets up from her stall.

Sister Léocadie is paper-white and woozily slumped against the pew, but she pulls away in horror when the postulant tries to help her, hissing, “Don’t, Sister! The mistress!”

Mother Saint-Raphaël takes four steps out onto the oratory floor and scowls at Mariette and then Sister Léocadie until the ill novice kneels upright again. Mother Saint-Raphaël then pettishly withdraws to her place in the choir.

Sister Léocadie is punished at Mixt by being ordered to prostrate herself on the floor as if she’s been nailed facedown on a crucifix. The sisters hesitate only to inchingly lift up their skirts before stepping over her. When it is Mariette’s turn, however, Sister Léocadie senses her halting and slowly descending to the floor and joining her on the cross beside her. And Mariette stays like that, simply praying, until Mixt has ended.

—Was anything said, Sister Léocadie?

—Yes; I told Mariette she’d go hungry now. She just answered that she’d had Christ’s body at Mass and that was food enough.

—Was she trying to impress you with her piety?

—I don’t think she thinks about it.

October 2nd. Mass of the Holy Guardian Angels.

Horses shamble lazily up a knoll and browse the grass near their hooves.

The skies are gray as habits and all the greens are darkening with a faint and chilling mist.

Twenty-six nuns are hunching along the grapevines in their
sabots
and jean aprons and dusters, snapping grape bunches from their stems and skidding wide French baskets along or teaming on the handles to tiltingly carry them to the pig wagons on the roadway.

The psalms of Terce and Sext are recited in the vineyard and the sisters pray the Angelus while slouching tiredly in to dinner. Work replaces Méridienne and classes, Nones are read privately by the water tank, and the grapes are crushed just before Vespers, Sisters Aimée, Virginie, Marthe, Félicité, and Mariette tying their habits as high as their thighs and getting up into the great oaken vats to walk and trounce and slop in the oozing grape juice and skins. And then the prioress humbly walks out to them with plush white towels and a copper verrière, and she kneels before the sisters who have trodden the grapes as she gently washes their feet.

Mass of Saint Francis of Assisi, Confessor.

Class. Waving her hand eraser over the blackboard like a fat farmboy in wild hurrah, Sister Saint-Denis gets rid of her drawing of the Great Chain of Being and then tries to think what she can say to use up the five minutes until Sext. Were her habit red and she bearded white, Sister Saint-Denis could play Santa Claus. She merrily smiles at Mariette and asks, “Are you still liking our convent?”

“Oh yes, Sister.”

“We are like the tides here. We come and go. We don’t hurry; we don’t worry; we try not to wrestle too much with our inner torments and petty irritations.”

Shutting her textbook on a pencil, Mariette glances up. “Have there been complaints about me?”

Sister Saint-Denis gives it some thought before saying, “You haven’t been mentioned.” White checks shine in dark eyes rich as plums. “Which is not such a good thing outside, but here in Our Lady of Sorrows is not so very bad.”

“I have to learn that.”

Sister Saint-Denis says, “Ever since I have grown older, I have forgotten all my hard penances and fasting and have given particular attention to our Redeemer, in whose presence we live. And I have realized how much simpler it is to pray and keep united with God when I see Him as the source and sum of everything I do. When I walk, I owe it to God that I still can. When I sleep, it is with His permission. My breathing, my happiness, even my being a woman—all are His gifts to me. So it is my prime intention that whenever I do these practical things, they will be contemplative acts of praise and thanksgiving repeated over and over again. Even when it seems impossible to believe that some pain or misery is from God, I try to believe it and thank Him for it. You should try such a prayer, Mariette.”

—And she said she’d try?

—She said she didn’t have the patience for it.

—Meaning what?

—Well, I presume she meant she’s too zealous. She meant she’s still infatuated with our sisterhood. Even our worst penances are too easy for her. Hundreds of postulants have been that way at times.

—And so, you do not find her fanatical?

—Christ shines from her. She is Christian perfection. She is lovely in every way.

Mass of Saint Bridget, Widow.

Hard white sunshine heating the frost, and the blue sky high and wide behind iron-gray trees tattered by golden leaves. The hills are tan and rose and magenta. Chimney swifts toss and play in the air. Sister Anne and Sister Agnès heave heavy avalanches of wash onto a gray wool blanket and then go inside for more, and Mariette hangs sweet wet sheets on the clotheslines until she is curtained and roomed by them.

Sister Agnès slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets.

Half an hour passes. Wind tears at their work. Sister Agnès aches from reaching. She blows the sting from her reddened fingers. She watches the postulant as the tilting sheets wrap around her and shape her. She watches the girl as she tenderly releases herself, as though tugging a ghost’s hands away.

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

Mariette goes to the scriptorium with Sister Hermance, Léocadie, and Pauline after Sunday Nones but is intrigued into an hour of talk about mystical theology with Sister Marguerite and cannot get away. She sees the novices try to disappear within the peach sunlight at the great table, reading sixteenth-century books with hard pages that turn with a tearing sound. And underneath that she hears the librarian going on and on about the Desert Fathers.

And then she abandons herself to God’s will and hears Sister Marguerite teaching her, “When Saint John of the Cross prayed before the crucifix, Our Lord is supposed to have asked Him, ‘Dear John, what will you have from Me in return for the service you have done Me?’ Unhesitatingly, that great saint replied that he wanted ‘naught but suffering and to be despised for Your sake.’”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“I, too, have prayed for that.”

Sister Marguerite heatedly stares and says with intensity, “I have been boring you, haven’t I.” She angrily goes to the wooden card catalog and squints at her own handwriting there until the novices get up and hurry out.

“Sister, I’m sorry. I had no intention—”

Sister Marguerite interrupts the postulant by nastily smiling and saying, “We all have intentions, Mariette. Even if we don’t understand them. And you, my dear sweet child, are a flirt.”

Mass of Saint Teresa of Avila, Virgin.

She uses hot pads as she heaves a sloshing tin washtub along a kitchen aisle to the table where Sister Hermance is stacking the saucers and milk bowls from Mixt. “We have no more soap,” Sister Hermance whispers.

Mariette does not speak. She is peering down at the gray waltz of steam and the air bubbles quivering up from the scorched tin bottom. She looks left and ascertains that Sister Hermance is licking a spoon of pastry batter as she counts the soup bowls in the dish cupboard.

Mariette prays for sorrow and contrition as she turns up her black sleeves and pauses. She then sinks her hands into the penance of hot water, pressing them down to the tin until her palms scald. She winces with pain as she prays.

Sister Hermance heavily nudges into her as she gathers up Mariette’s reddened hands. “Enough,” she says. She tenderly blows on Mariette’s palms like a nursemaid and softly pets them with a stick of butter. “Were you thinking of the souls in purgatory?”

Mariette turns away from her. “I just wanted to hurt.”

Mass of Saint Ursula and Companions, Virgins, Martyrs.

Wrens are cheeping wildly and flying from branch to branch in the junipers.

Winter is still just a hint of purple and gold in the hilltop maples. High above them there is a faint sickle moon and twilight skies of indigo blue fading to beryl and green at the treeline.

Sister Dominique strolls in the garth at collation. She hears words from
The Imitation of Christ
. Wisps of smoke unwrap from the stovepipe. She rolls pebbles in her hand.

Workhorses noisily slurp water from a tank and simultaneously pause. Ears twitching, a pregnant mare raises her nose and sniffs the wind in two directions. Her tail flicks and the horses drink again.

Sister Monique. Sister Saint-Léon. Sister Emmanuelle. Walking in the Gethsemani garden. Wincing and smiling at talk of infants.

Star. Another there. And there.

Compline and dismissal.

Mariette gets into her nightgown and kneels on the floor to hastily pen another letter, her hand moving with great speed and urgency across the page.

She puts down her fountain pen and looks over her pages, holding her knees to her chest in a fetal position just outside the yellow sphere of candlelight. The hiss of her prayers is the only sound.

Mass of Saint Mary Salome.

—We’ll speak in French if you like.

—English would be hard for me.

—Sister Marguerite will translate this later. We will start with your name, please.

—Sister Catherine. Earlier I was known as Simone DuBois, from Perpignan. I hardly remember her now. Is there still a Perpignan accent?

—I have not the ear for it. I have been too long in America.