The Custodian of Paradise (44 page)

Can you see me lurching through the church? Can you see me on the altar, my back to the congregation, my arms outstretched as I face the tabernacle and the crucifix, seeming to span from sacristy to pulpit as though I am about to enfold the ravaged, cruciform body of Christ, that sinewy, bony body, its head fallen to one side in a posture of sorrowful exhaustion, eyes rolled back in beseechment of the end He knows is near, the blood and water seeping from the lance-pierced side and blood alone from the mocking crown of thorns?

Giving Communion to those kneeling at the altar rail, I had to bend over as though to pat a toddler on the head, fingers fumbling in the cerebum for wafers that to others were the size of quarters but seemed to me like dimes that no matter how delicately I held them between my thumb and forefinger bent into crescents that I dropped onto each quivering, outthrust tongue
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Your mother must either have thought there would be more to being a nun than playing handmaiden to a pair of priests or simply been unable to foresee the effect on herself of the drudgery of it all
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The nuns were our cooks, our housekeepers, our all-but-unseen-by-the-congregation attendants before, during and after Mass
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They did our laundry, sent our uniforms to the dry cleaners, polished until it gleamed every gold-woven strand of our heavy vestments, never speaking unless bidden to by one of us, answering our queries in deferential tones
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They had to stand on footstools while they dressed me for the altar as though I were some statue they were draping, nuns like miniature tailors taking measurements and testing alterations
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My long vestments were too heavy for any one nun to lift to the height of my shoulders, so two of them each took a side and struggled audibly, groaning and stretching with the weight of what might have been a set of curtains lined with lead
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“Dressing Father Thomas,” it was called. The burdensome task was one they shared stories about in private and that distinguished them from other members of their Order. An exacting procedure much talked about among those novices whom you’d think had to master it before qualifying as nuns
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When they had finished dressing us, they stood around us, heads bowed, hands joined, waiting for any final requests or instructions we might have. The old priest would dismiss them with a regal half-wave of one hand. I was thus attended to by women three times my age, and by others your mother’s age
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Your mother helped make the Communion wafers, removed them from the oven on a tray and from the tray with a spatula
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She and the other nuns polished with wax until they gleamed the holy vessels, the cerebum, the chalice, the chasuble, the cruets of water and wine. The dome of the tabernacle
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I saw them when the church was otherwise empty, the char ladies of Our Lord, scrubbing, washing, polishing, the sleeves of their habits rolled up as they crawled and climbed around the altar, leaning out from stepladders
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Can you imagine that, your mother stretching to her utmost from a ladder to remove from the tabernacle some stain or smudge that to the congregation was invisible? Your mother on hands and knees scrubbing from the carpet the stain from a droplet of wine that some altar boy had spilled during Mass?

I remember the smell of detergent in the church, the incongruous sight of metal pails brimful with water on the altar that was swarmed by nuns indecorously posed, on their stomachs, on
their backs, nuns’ rumps everywhere and your mother’s among them. Your mother’s, Miss Fielding
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I prayed for wisdom in all my self-evaluations and I reminded myself that pride was the greatest sin
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Nevertheless, it started. Your mother and I
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I was her confessor
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Your mother did not confess as others did
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Her daemon was doubt
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She doubted her vocation. What she called her “worthiness” to be a nun, her “suitability” for the cloistered life
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She said she was certain of the sincerity of all her vows but one. Given her upbringing, I assumed she meant the vow of poverty. I said something absurd about how there might never come a time when her “renunciation of luxury” was absolute, about how she must offer up to God what to all of us were “deprivations” and which to her might sometimes seem unbearable
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I remember the sigh of impatience from the other side of the screen. I might have been the penitent and she the confessor who had all too many times heard my self-indulgent litany of sins
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I stopped in mid-sentence, a priest deferring to a nun whose novitiate had yet to end. I felt intimidated by her. That sigh, it seemed to me, was the measure of my ignorance of other people’s lives, the lives of those, especially, who took for granted things that I would never know existed
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I waited for her to speak
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“I mean the vow of celibacy,” she said
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I knew the older priest would have stopped her at that point and told her never to speak of such things with anyone but the Mother Superior of her convent. But I said nothing and she seemed to take my silence as encouragement or permission to continue
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“It’s not so much sex,” she said
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I had never heard the word spoken before in my life. I hoped the other nuns waiting to make their confessions had not heard her
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“Lower your voice,” I said, lowering mine
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“It’s children,” she said, “the idea of never having children.”

“Surely you must have thought of this before you made your vows,” I said
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“Yes,” she said. “But I assumed it was the same for the other girls. I assumed it was something that all nuns learned to live with.”

Girls. I thought of the old nun I had seen the day before polishing the feet of the crucifix that was otherwise covered in what might have been a winding sheet, one hand atop the other as she pressed on that pair of feet with all her might—one hand atop the other as the feet of the crucifix were placed one atop the other and fastened by a gleaming spike. The old nun paused from time to time to kiss the feet that she was polishing, not so much, it seemed, in love or tribute—she was begging a pardon for being so presumptuous, so brazen as to touch those feet, even for the purpose of keeping them clean
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Girls. Was that what the younger nuns called each other when no one else could hear them?

“Even Mary’s mother, who was barren, had Mary by the Holy Spirit,” she said. The Virgin Birth. The birth of the Virgin
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“And Mary, who never knew Joseph—“Joseph, the archetypal cuckold. Cuckolded by an archangel, a dead-of-night visitation upon the Virgin while she slept
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A fluttering of life within her womb, Life Spontaneous, like the first flicker of light in the dark cave of eternity, the moment of creation in the void
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“Joseph, my husband, I am with child.” Joseph was told by the Lord that he must not doubt the fidelity of his wife who, though he had never “known” her, was with child
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“You know it is prideful to compare yourself with Mary,” I said. “Mary’s greatest virtue is humility. Your doubts and yearnings are your God-sent imperfections. At the same time as you seek perfection you must expect to fail, to fall short of Those to whom you owe the gift of your vocation.”

However unusual it may have been for a young nun to speak of such things to a young priest instead of her Mother Superior
,
there was, I suspected, nothing unusual about your mother’s doubts and desires
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Never to know a man. Never to have a child. Celibacy. The burdensome urges of the clergy. The nagging nuisance of biology
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I think your mother would have gone elsewhere with her doubts had I not begun admitting to my own
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I one day admitted, while I was in the midst of my customary chastisement, that I did not entirely believe what I was saying, that my conviction was perfunctory, habitual, that I was merely aping my own older, unyielding confessor who I said counselled me not as an equal or even as a young priest who one day would be his equal, but as a child
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Your mother sighed as audibly as she had the first time she confessed to me, but this was a sigh not of exasperation but relief, release
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An almost erotic sigh, it seemed to me, as if she had suddenly, unexpectedly reached some point she had despaired of ever reaching
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And so began a long charade
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A young nun discovers in a young priest a kindred spirit. The two carry out, under the pretext of confession, a kind of courtship, though they speak of nothing but their vocational misgivings. They speak of the burden of celibacy as if each of them, in their former lives, had been in love, had left, unconsummated, romances to which they are now fighting the temptation to return: each implies they have a lover whom they hope is waiting for them, yet are ashamed of this hope and each takes solace in the other’s shame
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Most crucial to the charade is that they express no attraction to each other but only to these nebulous, never-named lovers who by now may have forgotten them
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A platonic Pyramus and Thisbe, in love with each other’s voices but unable to touch
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I began to drink. I paid a church-going drunk to buy whisky for me and bring it to the rectory at night
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I drank myself to sleep
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It would be said of me, when I left the Church, that I had lost my Faith, as if I had misplaced it. That I had been tempted into faithlessness and paganism. Untrue
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The vow of celibacy began to seem as burdensome to me as it did to your mother, with whom, in my imagination, I shared my bed each night
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One Saturday afternoon in winter when it was almost dark, your mother came to make her confession
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We had for months been going through the motions of the ritual, so it would not have surprised me when she said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned” except that she said it with such fervour
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When I asked her what her sins were, I expected her to speak informally as always of the various ways in which she was unsuited for the Sisterhood
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“Father, I have decided to leave the convent,” she said
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I had been drinking, so much that I doubted what I’d heard and said nothing, though my heart was pounding
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“I am leaving the convent, Father,” she said
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“And I am leaving the priesthood,” I said
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She inhaled as if through clenched teeth, as if she had been stabbed
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“For you,” I said, “to be with you.”

“Oh my God—“

“I would rather spend my life with you—“

“May God forgive us—“

“I am in love with you.”

“My God. I thought—I would have to leave without you, Father. I came to say goodbye. God forgive me, I have made you lose your Faith. Before I came to you, you had no doubts—I have infected you with mine.”

“No,” I said. “You are right that I had no doubts. Nor do I have any now. I have not lost my Faith. But I must forsake my vocation. For you. Susan.”

“I too am in love with you,” she said
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I should have known it was—if not a lie, what?—she was drawn into my dream, but not for long
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“Will you marry me?” I said
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She whispered, “Yes.”

Love. Protestations of love between a nun and a priest, a proposal of marriage whispered through the screen of a confessional. A nun and a priest. How drearily farcical it seems from the distance of decades
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We planned it all over the next few days. She would leave the convent and a month later I would leave the priesthood. There would be no avoiding a scandal, but we would be inviting one far worse than it had to be if we were to leave the Church at the same time
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I declined when the older priest and then the bishop urged me to take a six-month retreat for reflection and prayer
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I left the rectory with my one suitcase, in which was a chalice that I had found in the basement of the rectory, a deconsecrated vessel that I reconsecrated and from which I still drank as faithfully as do you from your flask
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We were still believers, but we knew we could not be married by the Church. The one holy, apostolic Church, marriage to which we had thrown over for marriage to each other
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We would be married in a civil ceremony but not in unseemly haste
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Knowing that her family would look about as favourably on her choice of a husband as they had upon her choice of a vocation, she thought it best that we marry without their knowledge and inform them when it would be too late for them to intervene
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A close friend of your mother allowed us to stay for a few days in her family’s cottage on Cape Cod. It was to be a kind of advance honeymoon
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This was in the winter, the dead of the off-season when the cape was deserted but for us
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We lived as any two young soon-to-be-married lovers would have
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As if we were already married
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By day, in spite of the cold, we walked for miles over the sand dunes and along the beaches of the cape, not minding the wind though it blew constantly onshore
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I sheltered your mother from it sometimes. She with her back to me and I with mine to the wind, we stood motionless for minutes
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She leaned back against my chest, her hands on my arms that were under hers, my forearms pressing her against me
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