Mariette in Ecstasy (9 page)

—Even so we French.

—Have you been in this country long?

—With the great indulgence and grace of God, I have been in this priory for forty-seven years. Forty-seven. Yes, and you are so kind to look surprised! Well, I have come to tell you, Father, that this year, or at least these past few months, whenever that holy girl joined us here, have been the most magnificent in my religious life. We are being showered with blessings. And she is the cause. Mariette.

She is working in the priest’s sacristy after Terce, washing a great wall of leaded window glass with vinegar as Sister Catherine polishes a golden ciborium and paten and pyx and Père Marriott’s own chalice, with its agates and emeralds and sapphires.

Sister Catherine is so hunched she can hardly see ahead and her frail yellow fingers are awry on her hands like hinges hammered from a door. And yet she touches the vessels with tenderness and joy and is humming the “
Tantum Ergo
” to herself as she scours the intricate sunrays of the holy monstrance.

Wringing a sponge, Mariette flinches with sudden pain and bewilderingly heeds her hands.

“Have you hurt yourself?” Sister Catherine asks.

She grins at the aged woman and says, “What a great favor Christ shall be giving me!” And then she soothes her reddened palms with short tastes of her tongue.

—She didn’t explain.

—She didn’t need to, did she.

—Go on, please.

She and Mariette are strolling in the chestnut grove at Mèridienne. Tan leaves thrash from their sandals. A high tree branch suddenly breaks and shatters its way to the ground. Sister Catherine talks about being homesick for France. She talks affectionately about Edouard, her older brother, who is twenty years dead now, but who once painted wonderfully, in the manner of Jules Breton.

And Mariette tells Sister Catherine about the prioress as she was before she entered the convent. “Each night Annie would join me in my upstairs room for hours at a time! We prayed together, we talked about Christ’s great affection for all humanity, and how I should have an intense horror for sin. With Annie I first found myself before Jesus crucified. Oh, to see it, Sister Catherine! Such blood flowed from his hands and head! And he was having such trouble breathing! We watched in tears, Annie and I, and she told me, ‘Look, Mariette, and learn how one loves.’ And she said, ‘Jesus has given himself wholly to you. Will you give yourself wholly to him?’ Yes, I told her; yes and yes a hundred times. And then Annie tenderly petted my hair and told me to be consoled because my sorrow had killed Christ’s pain.”

—She seemed sensible to you?

—Oh yes; always.

—She gave you the impression that Christ was actually there in her upstairs room?

—She did not make it seem imaginary.

—I have here a letter from Mariette. Shall I read it to you?

—With her permission.

—We have it. She has dated it October 23rd. “Dear Père Marriott,” she writes. “Is it possible that I still live, or have I perished all unaware? Of my happiness please speak to me—I have no memory of it. I have only the horrible pain of seeking Jesus and hearing no reply, of having been turned away and repulsed. And yet I think of Christ incessantly, with heartache and terrible yearning, but it is now all so different. What desolations and aridity I now endure in my Masses and my prayers! I do not seem to like them anymore. Hours in the oratory now seem so long and tedious. Each of my meditations is a torture in which everything that was once so tenderly given to me is now teasingly withheld. And yet I persist. I have not shortened my prayers nor softened my penances, no, in spite of it all I mean to increase them in the hope that this hell on earth will pass. Oh, what have I come to? The sheer insanity of love has never been worse than this.” Well, I’ll stop there.

—She is passionate. She is perhaps too proud. She is
not
hysterical.

Mass of Saint Raphael, Archangel.

Sister Geneviève hesitates before she begins her dinner reading from
The Imitation of Christ
, and then Mariette stands and she smiles as Sister Hermance chimes a full water glass with her fork. Everyone turns.

“With Michael and Gabriel,” Mariette states, “Saint Raphael is one of just three archangels talked about in the Holy Bible. His name in Hebrew means ‘God has healed.’ Archangel Raphael was the one who told the boy Tobias that he could cure his father’s blindness with a fish’s gall, and he is associated with the healing waters at the Sheep Pool in Jerusalem, featured in the fifth chapter of John. We honor today the healing powers of our own Mother Saint-Raphaël, knowing that the great archangel speaks through her whenever she forms or corrects us.”

Mariette then humbly sits and looks askance at the mistress of novices, who is staring ahead into the great room as if she hasn’t heard.

Mass of Saints Chrysanthus and Daria, Martyrs.

Mother Céline cannot sleep, so she handles financial transactions until their first rising when she hears the sexton pass down the hallway to the room of the externs and hears Mariette softly waking them for Matins. And Mother Céline is putting the green account book away when she sees a white envelope fall through the mail slot. She gets it and recognizes the handwriting in the address to their priest.

While she prepares a book of psalms for the first reading, Mother Céline argues with herself about honoring the letter, but she finally opens her sister’s “Confessional Matter” just as she’s done before, and she frowns as she reads the first paragraph, the fourth, and the fifth. She thinks,
She’s impossible. She’s too many people. She’s too many shades and meanings. She’ll only do herself harm
.

She goes to an upper desk drawer and lifts out a flame-red box that once contained a
Missa Romanum
. Eighteen pages are already in it. And now there are two more.

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost.
In honor of Christ the King.

Sister Honoré polishes the fall board on the grand piano and looks out a haustus room window at northern winds and storm clouds in ferment and their postulant happily wading in a purple flow of maple leaves. Mariette stoops and puts her hand down in them and they froth up to her chin like sudden pets. Sisters Pauline and Geneviève join Mariette as Sister Honoré sits on the piano bench. She hears their high giggles and hectic talk as she plays one measure of a Chopin étude and steps on the damper pedal.

November 1st. Feast of All Saints.

Mariette gets into Sister Félicité’s cardigan sweater at Méridienne and joins Sister Antoinette in the winery’s underground cellar, helping her funnel and rack the still-young wines from one oaken barrel to another, and fining the dark lees and tarry sludge from some aging red wines with slowly wandering egg whites. Sister Antoinette then holds a high-shouldered bottle over a frail candle flame as she tenderly pours a
grand cru
vintage into her silver tasting cup. Mariette sniffs it as Sister Antoinette tells her to find there hints of black currants, vanilla, and green cigars.

“Even now it’s growing,” Sister Antoinette says. “Like our love for God.” She holds up the green bottle and points to the dark sediment gradually easing down the side. “And this is?” she asks.

“Our love for ourselves.”

Sister Antoinette smiles. “You
are
a clever girl.”

All Souls’ Day.

Mother Céline is hustling down the hallway toward the visitor’s parlor and halting here and there for Mariette, who walks without hurry and with great trepidation, as if this is punishment.

Dr. Baptiste is hulking behind the iron grille in a handsome Kashmir overcoat, an inch of Murad cigarette held inside his hand and grayly hazing the room with its reek. “
Bonjour
, Annie,” he gaily says. “
Bonjour
, Mariette.” He holds his right palm flat to the grille between them, and Mother Céline meets it with her own while Mariette sits down on a green tapestried chair.

Their father tells them both about the house, his patients, the great canal that is being built on the Isthmus of Panama, a book of tales by O. Henry that he is enjoying, about the Chicago White Sox beating the Chicago Cubs in the third annual World Series, that he is voting for Charles Evans Hughes for governor of New York. Mother Céline kindly acts as if it’s all interesting and highly relevant, but Mariette is silent for half an hour, hardly listening to his words, just the fathering thunder of his voice. She truly loves and misses him but she cannot say it. Even looking up from the floor gives her pain, for he is so frontally there, so forceful and huge and masculine. She remembers his first morning coughs, the hollandaise sauce he’d put on her poached eggs, the iodine odor he filled the dining room with, his whistling, his tenderness, the whiskers that nettled her cheek.

She hears him ask, “And you, Mariette? Are you liking the convent?”

“Yes.”

“You like it well or just a little?”

Mariette thinks,
Every knife in his house has a keen edge. Every question has just one answer. Every fortune, he says, is finally squandered
. And so she tells him, “I have found happiness here.”

“How?”

“We pray. We study. I have always liked that. And everything is very clean.”

She hates the hurt she’s put in his face but she can think of nothing more that he would understand. She shies a little from his stare and her father turns to Annie and says, “She used to speak for hours and hours to me.”

“We have a habit of silence here.”

Dr. Baptiste gets up and gingerly adjusts his hat on his head. “Are you going to send her to college?”

“Yes, I think so. If she stays.”

“
Are
you staying?” he asks Mariette.

But it’s her mother superior who replies, “We have time yet to decide.”

Mass of the Four Crowned Martyrs.

Sister Hermance walks the hallway with Sister Marthe and in hushed tones she says she and Mariette were reading epistles in the scriptorium just before Sext when a horrible cat jumped down from a book stack and spurted this way and that around the room as if he were being chased. And Mariette simply stared at him as if that weren’t surprising at all. And when the horrible thing sprang up onto Mariette’s book and arched his back and hissed at her, Mariette smiled at Sister Hermance and told her not to be frightened, that he was just a hateful demon trying to annoy them. She then got up and opened the scriptorium’s door and harshly commanded him, and the humiliated cat skulked out.

Sister Marthe frowns scornfully. “Oh, good gracious, Sister Hermance.”

But she insists, “She has powers.”

Mass of Saint Gertrude, Virgin.

The sisters are having their noon meal of a flavorless green soup of old garden vegetables, quarter-rounds of steamed rye bread, and a good red wine from Saint-Emilion that hasn’t traveled well.

Sister Saint-Stanislas wipes out her soup bowl with her little finger and sucks hard on it, then scrapes her hand along the stained tablecloth and presses up the rye crumbs and licks them from her palm.

Sister Zélie has been assigned the
Lectio Divina
from
The Rule of Saint Augustine
. She reads: “‘From time to time the necessity of keeping order may compel you to use harsh words to the young people who have not yet reached adulthood, in order to keep them in line. In that case you are not required to apologize, even though you yourself consider that you have gone too far. For if you are too humble and submissive in your conduct towards these young people, then your authority, which they should be ready to accept, will be undermined. In such cases you should ask forgiveness from the Lord of all, who knows with what deep affection you love your sisters, even those you might happen to have reproved with undue severity. Do not let your love for one another remain caught up in self-love; rather, such love must be guided by the Spirit.’”

Mariette carries out a tan pitcher from the kitchen and gracefully walks around, topping up water glasses. Sister Saint-Estèphe taps Mariette’s upper arm. She gives the handsigns,
Here, three, months?

Mariette smiles.

Sister Saint-Pierre handsigns,
We, happy
. And Sister Ange agrees.

Mass of Saint Gregory, Wonderworker,
Bishop, Confessor.

Mariette stands in the hallway in front of the confessional, rehearsing her sins behind four other sisters, until she’s finally alone and just outside the door and Sister Virginie cringes out. Mariette takes a breath then and walks inside, taking care to firmly shut the door before getting down on the kneeler before the iron grille and purple silk curtain. She makes the sign of the cross and, as she hears Père Marriott blessing her in Latin, she says in English, “Bless, me, Father, for I have sinned since my last confession, one week ago.”

“Yes?”

“I have been too easily distracted from hearing the
Lectio
.”

“When?”

“At collation yesterday and again at Mixt today.”

The priest says nothing. She smells beeswax on the hand-rest and a hint of horse sweat and hours-old tobacco smoke from his side of the confessional.

She confesses that at Saturday’s recreation she tried to be entertaining by doing unkind imitations of her religion teacher, the choirmistress, and the mistress of novices. Even through the purple curtain she can see Père Marriott secretly grinning while possibly imagining the slow truckling walk of Sister Saint-Denis, Sister Honoré holding her food near her mouth before suddenly attacking it, the tired sighs and pompous, operatic scorn of Mother Saint-Raphaël.

“Each has some authority over you. Each is your teacher in some way, is she not?”