The Book of Shadows (3 page)

Enfin,
every detail of my physical being embarrassed me. My stomach was in a constant state of upset, so scared was I that someone would tease me, or even talk to me. The nuns and girls had the power to mortify me with a single word, uttered innocently or not. I lived in a state of abject discomfort…physical, social, and emotional discomfort. I wanted to disappear, dissolve into imagined worlds, the worlds of which I read.

The nuns at C——knew where their charges were headed: back into the bourgeois homes from which they'd come—having left one as Daughter, they'd enter another as Wife. And so the requisite skills were taught them. “Parlor skills.” I had no aptitude for such. I hated those long hours engaged in inane handicrafts: the spinning and whittling of little masterpieces destined to gather dust in drawing rooms; the making of fabric-covered buttons intended to bedazzle a maiden aunt or adorn the waistcoat of a younger brother…. We were schooled in the mending of lace, taught to paint mini-portraits on ovals of ivory with single-bristle brushes (the worst!), and shown how to tie off needlepoint knots so that the back of a canvas was as tidy as the front. Never in my life have I felt more keenly the passage of time, its utter
waste
.

I managed to turn my scholastic success to my advantage; it seemed a matter of my sanity! I petitioned for and was granted time away from those handicrafts to study independently. It was tacitly held that I would have no use for such skills; what parlor talents I'd acquire would never be put to practice, for the wars of my life would not be waged in parlors. I'd need no such arsenal to back my efforts at securing a husband or subordinating a servant.

And so on those afternoons when all the girls strove to acquire the arts requisite to their success as ladies, I wandered the gardens alone. In dire weather I took refuge in the Mother Superior's rooms, at a tiny table inlaid with roseate marble.

I read while the others darned and sketched and sang. In time, I came to long for books physically—the ink-scent of a new book, the musk of an ancient tome. I would finger the threads of the sewn bindings; and how luckless I felt if a favorite book did not have gilt-edged pages. These works transported me; and the leather-bound pages forged a shield behind which I hid.

Such friends I made: Mrs. Radcliffe and the Scotsman for romance. Their novels were read by the light of pilfered candles in my pantry-room, or slipped between the leaves of some more suitable work. They were scandalous, not the proper pastime of a girl…. Ah, yes…It was in the works of those two novelists that I lost myself, wholly and happily. What a world they conjured, filled with love affairs, sly mistresses, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely country houses, post-riders slayed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page; there were dark forests, mountain vistas, palpitating hearts, vows, sobs, tears, kisses, skiffs in the moonlight, nightingales in thickets, and gentlemen brave and virtuous as God. In my dreams I was the chatelaine in the low-waisted gown whiling away her days with her dainty elbows at rest upon the casement, chin in hand, attendant upon the white-plumed rider who'd gallop toward her across a windswept moor. Sometimes, too, I was the white-plumed rider. (Of course, I didn't know a skiff from a barge and I'd never set foot upon a moor, windswept or otherwise, but that mattered not at all.)

I had Browning for beauty, Shakespeare for the lot of life. I committed whole soliloquies to memory, treating stands of trees and inquisitive squirrels to my theatrics. I favored Hamlet's indecisiveness, Prospero's pained anger, and Lear's loneliness. I attempted Lady Macbeth's crazed strength, but I could never quite achieve it.

Quieter hours were passed with Pliny and Plutarch. (Nothing rivals the romance of a fallen empire—the intrigues of statesmen and debauched emperors, daggers drawn from cloaks, and poisons tipped from rings into gem-encrusted goblets….)…It was Ovid and me. Horace and Homer. Plautus, Pythagoras…any philosopher I could get my hands on. I read everything. One long weekend, I recall, I even read a collection of papal bulls!

…And through all the reading, I held to a false belief: that this was living. I know now that books are but ashes to the fire that is life. Still, I do not regret a single moment spent reading, not a one. I am thankful for the diversion the written word afforded. I don't know what I would have done otherwise, for my life was horrid. Horrid and unlivable. Yet I lived it, I survived. Granted: I do not speak of cramped quarters, consumptive girls sleeping four to a bed, or meals of chestnut gruel…. No; I speak of things far less common than that, and far, far stranger.

…I am trying to summon courage here. There are things that must somehow be said. Yet I hesitate. It's not that I grasp for words—the opposite really: I'm afraid that once I start telling this tale I won't be able to stop. No, I know the words will come; it's controlling the rush of recollection that concerns me. But there is a story here to tell, and I have sworn myself to tell it truthfully. To tell it even though the facts are preposterous; they strain credulity and will be, for some readers, beyond belief.

…But please, you must believe me, or I cannot go on. And you, Reader…well, there is a reason you hold this work in hand, no? Perhaps that reason is clear to you now; if not, trust in this tale of mine and all will come clear in time. I promise you that.

…We return to C——.

Long years passed. I remained apart from the others. Apart from life. No one touched me, and I touched no one; no mother's touch, no sister's touch, and certainly no lover's touch. True, I excelled at my studies, and was eventually let to determine my own course of study. So I would retreat into St. Augustine, or lose myself in the labyrinth of Latin grammar…. Books, books, and more books. It was all ash; no fire; and no warmth.

Finally, one morning not long ago, while I was rolling dough in the kitchen, Sister Isadore came to request a moment of my time. We quit the kitchen together. We walked in silence through the gardens near the kitchen, traced with our steps the narrow paths of flagstone; the whole of the garden was bordered by boxhedge, and geometries of box within the garden kept our herbs from overtaking the cellarer's vegetables, kept the tomato stalks from leaning too far into bright batches of begonias, dahlias, fleur-de-lis, oleanders, marigolds, purple ageratum, and gray artemises…. Sister Isadore asked how I was progressing with my studies. Well, said I. Did I enjoy my kitchen chores? Yes, I lied; she said she was glad. Silence ensued, and I broke it, as I knew I ought, by expressing yet again my thanks to the Order for taking me in when I, as a child, had run crying to their door. Sister Isadore bowed deeply to accept my thanks.

“Confirmation is fast approaching,” said she, finally. She stood straight-backed and tall, weaving her long spiderish fingers into a web. I stared up into her colorless eyes, for already I knew a pronouncement was in the offing.

“Yes,” I said. All those younger girls who were set to be confirmed were busy with preparations, as were we in the kitchen. “In July, no?”

“July the sixteenth, to be exact. Mere weeks away. After confirmation, as you know, there is always a…a reordering of the girls.” Sister Isadore fell silent. I understood when finally she said, absently, more to herself than me, “Of course, there's the slight matter of the exam…”

“Yes, Sister,” I said.

“But surely
that
will not trouble
you
at all.” Sister Isadore congratulated me, assured me that this was in my best interest—which meant, of course, What else was to become of me? I'd come from nowhere, and had nowhere to return to. Evidently, she deemed me unworthy of a sacral marriage to Christ. What else was I to do but teach?

Yes, I was to be sent up. To the Upper School. There I would be trained to teach.

My only thought was this: that I would have to live in the dormitory, among the other girls. Sister Isadore confirmed this, and congratulated me again; she added that less would be expected of me in the kitchen, though I was still to serve at mealtime. She looked at me incredulously when I asked if I might remain in my room. No, said she; clearly the cellarer had succeeded in her long campaign to win back her pantry and root cellar. I begged to remain in my room and Sister Isadore grew impatient. In the end, she walked away.

When next the test was administered, in the week preceding confirmation, I sat for it. I had already filed my birth certificate at the office of the superintendent. (Actually, as I have no birth certificate, I presented a letter from Sister Isadore.) The mayor of C——endorsed a certificate of good morals on my behalf, though he knew nothing of me, let alone my morals. I more than passed: I answered every question correctly, thus earning for myself the unframed picture of the Virgin that had long hung in the laundry.

The day of confirmation—16 July—came quickly and passed slowly. At day's end, with the greater part of the girls gone, I was to move into the dormitory.

Twenty girls dressed in white formed a procession that wound through the house and yard toward the chapel. They were slick with perspiration beneath their decorative dresses, lace-fringed confections. We older girls, confirmed in years past, sat shoulder to shoulder in the back of the chapel, among mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers busily fluttering fans before their flushed faces. (No men were allowed within our precincts. They waited at the gates.)

The ceremony progressed with all the pomp and severity a holy house can display on such occasions. Afterward, the double-parlor beneath the dormitory was opened to receive the girls and their female relations. There were hugs and kisses and introductions, invitations to meet here or there during the recess. I stood idly by in a corner for nearly an hour, still as the portraits hanging above me, and having no greater role to play in the day's events than they. Finally, unable to bear that society a moment more, I made my way back to my room. It was dark and dank and undecorated, but it was mine, and I was loathe to leave it. From my tiny trunk, I unpacked a simple shift. I slipped from the kitchen through a back door.

I did not know of my destination until I arrived there: a faraway, neglected grotto. This tiny structure built of stone had long ago fallen into disuse and disrepair: it sat too near the dairy and the fetid perfume of our few cows wafted over it when the wind blew just so. I loved the grotto for its seclusion, for its lichen-covered statues, for the pocked and friable faces of its unknown saints standing sentinel beside the Virgin. There was a rusted stand of wrought iron, intended for votives, which stood on bowed legs, brittle and thin. Sundry ferns, seemingly borne on the air, grew from between the mounded stones. There, in the grotto, I had often spread a shawl on the bench beside the Madonna and sat reading for hours. That day, I sat staring at the Blessed Mother and the idling saints. When I began to pray—rather absently, I confess—my prayers fast dissolved to tears, and for a long while I sat crying for reasons I could not have named.

The day had dawned brightly, the summer sun falling down like bolts of golden cloth, the sky cloudless and perfectly blue. But as I fled the high-pitched din issuing from the double-parlor, as I stole away from the house proper that early afternoon, a bank of low clouds slid in, occluding the sun. The clouds were grayish-green, laden with rain. I heard the rolling groan of still-distant thunder. A warm wind rose up; a lone shutter slapped against the casement, crisply.

The skies were darkening. The air, redolent of rain, of turned earth and decay, was cooling quickly as I hurried on to the grotto.

In time the cloud cover settled squarely overhead, infusing the sky with light the color of a new bruise. The wind grew stronger, till the trees spoke for it with rattling green tongues. Though the thunder rolled ever nearer, there was no sign of lightning.

Already I heard the first of the coaches rumbling away from the convent, bearing down the packed-dirt road that passed not far from the grotto and led from C——; the celebrants would hurry away before the coming rain rendered the road impassable.

I remained.

Then the rain came. First a few drops, falling on the thin canopy like nails on tin. When the rain fell faster, harder, the green covering caved. The grotto sat in a recess of lawn, saucer-like; soon, the rain pooled at my feet.

Not long after, the lightning came. Only then did I rise to leave, and I did so unhurriedly.

I was still some distance from the front door when Sister Isadore swooped down upon me, unseen, like a dark and winged thing. How unlike me to leave her wondering and waiting, worrying. Had I lost my mind, dallying beneath a summer storm? Had I forgot that I was to serve our guests? Ahead of us, beside Sister Claire de Sazilly, Head of the Upper School, stood the cellarer Sister Margarethe (who seemed to exist in the Head's shadow) and Mother Marie-des-Anges, beautiful Mother Marie, who'd always been kind to me and with whom I would converse on those occasions when she'd discover me in her library, lost in thought. It was she who welcomed me to the Upper School; and it was she who pointed out a faraway rainbow, its arc complete.

“Rainbow, indeed,” dismissed the Head, adding, to me, “You'll find that your trunk and whatever else was yours has been delivered to the dormitory. As for your room,” said she, turning to her great and good friend the cellarer, “its restoration to a pantry has already begun.”

“Shelves,” breathed the cellarer, leaning nearer the Head, “remember, Sister, you promised me shelves.”

“And you'll have your shelves,” said Sister Claire. Which assurance caused a smile to spread over the pinched face of the cellarer, whose pink cheeks oozed from the tight white wimple she favored.

In the company of Mother Marie, I made my way to the dormitory. She suggested I change from my wet dress, but I declined. She insisted, kindly, and as I was shivering I did draw from my trunk my second shift. Refusing the Mother Superior's help, I slipped behind a screen of white tulle and shed my soaked clothes like a skin; they lay lifeless on the parquet floor. I did not strip off my stockings, and I donned again my sodden shoes.