The Divine Economy of Salvation (2 page)

It was at that moment I knew for sure. I swallowed hard, in an effort not to choke. The box open, the only thing left to do was to look. The room took on a yellowish hue, like that of old photographs. I tried to blink it away and rubbed my eyes vigorously, thinking I might be allergic to the scent. An unacknowledged ache forced its pressure against my stomach. For the first time in years, I longed for a companion, someone who would comfort me for no reason except that I asked. For the first time in years, I longed for God to announce Himself, to speak in a language I could understand. As if in a dream, compelled to continue, I unfolded the white tissue. The silver candle holder lay at the bottom of the box like a slender body frozen in the snow.

A knock at the door startles me. I cough, clearing my throat, and throw the tissue paper back over the silver candle holder. I'm not sure how long I've been sitting here in a daze, staring at the offensive object, when Sister Bernadette arrives.

“Come in,” I invite.

Sister Bernadette's white forehead peeks through the doorway. My attention distracted, I had missed the squeak of her left shoe.

“Come in,” I say again.

Sister Bernadette is the youngest nun at the convent and loves to chatter. The two usually don't go together, as the young tend to keep their secrets well-hidden, revealed only to their confessor, one of the resident priests at R. Catholic Church. However, few young women have been admitted here in recent years, so the tide might have shifted in this respect without my knowledge. Regardless, Sister Bernadette is of another ilk. Those who take vows out of optimism, instead of shame. A social brand of nun, who want to save the whales and protect the ecosystem. She is always passing around flyers and petitions, reciting a litany of statistics and studies. Her belief in fact is apparently unshakeable. She keeps meticulous records and files detailing her various projects and photocopies them at the church for Mother Superior's office. Sister Bernadette has been rallying Mother Superior and Father B. to allocate some of the parish's money to ethical mutual funds, citing examples of Sisters in the United States who hold shares in large companies solely so they can disrupt the annual shareholders' meetings and control the morality of businesses. I wonder how Sister Bernadette will possibly survive in this world. Who has protected her for so long? Most of us can't save even one person,
let alone an entire species. She smiles often, though, her braces removed before she came to live here, her teeth perfectly aligned, and her brown eyes are quite pleasing, large and round like amber. Within a week of Sister Bernadette's entrance into the convent, she took over the mail delivery from Sister Maria, whose knees are stricken with arthritis. There is no need for anyone to deliver the mail, but Sister Bernadette claimed it was “such a lovely way to say hello to everyone in the morning.” Mother Superior is amused by her, I gather, though Mother Superior herself is rarely visible in the mornings. She is efficient and incredibly organized. Perhaps because of this, she is rarely social with anyone when it doesn't directly serve a greater purpose. It is rumoured she composes long religious sermons on the deterioration of the laws of the Church, on contemporary evils such as genetic engineering and plastic surgery, and that she packs them up and sends them to her brother in England who looks after her finances. Sister Maria says Mother Superior receives mail from academic religious journals under an androgynous pseudonym, but Sister Maria doesn't read very well, English being her third language. The truth of Sister Maria's claim is difficult to prove. Sister Maria also thinks Mother Superior wishes she had been born a man.

Sister Bernadette, twenty-four years old, tiny-hipped and small-breasted, her face scrubbed clean and makeup free, lowers her head in a mock gesture of guilt.

“With such a large package to deliver this morning, I forgot to give you this little letter,” she says, her left arm extended towards me on the bed.

The candle holder occupying my private thoughts, weighing
heavily upon me, I try not to tremble as I take the letter from her hands. If there is any outward change in my behaviour or appearance, Sister Bernadette doesn't seem to notice. Relieved, I let out a sigh, louder than I mean to, when I see the writing on the envelope. Christine always prints on her envelopes or packages, usually in bright pens or markers: purple, green, yellow, as if the sender were a child. She says she wants to brighten up the convent a little, add some colour. This particular letter is addressed in mustard yellow, and Sister Bernadette recognizes the distinct presentation too.

“From your sister, Christine, right?”

I nod cheerfully for Sister Bernadette's benefit. My sister's letters and visits rarely make me happy. We see differently. Even discussions about the weather leave us on opposite sides of a fence. The first time she came to visit me here, she walked into my room and gasped. “Couldn't you ask for a nicer room, one with a little more light? What will you do in the winter? Did they give you this room because you're new? Is there really nothing left? How about this floor, it's going to be impossible in the cold. You'll get sick. You'll never get any fresh air from that window,” she ranted.

“Who sent you the package?” Sister Bernadette asks as she rocks toe to heel, the white sneakers peeking from underneath her habit. Months earlier, I had made a mental note to ask her if she wanted me to take hers to Sister Humilita for hemming; Sister Humilita mends the habits and orders new ones when she decides they need replacing. Sister Bernadette's are all an inch too long, but I forgot to mention it, and I almost wish she'd trip to detract attention from my package. She waits for me to show it to her.

Do you know who has come for you?

“An old . . . an old friend.”

“A gift?” she asks with excitement.

There is no use hiding objects. The Sisters find out sooner or later if there are any new items in your room, even if your room is in the basement. Purchases are noted, gifts from friends and family brought out for others to see, especially during the holidays. They are considered tokens of love and goodwill. Blessings that should be acknowledged. Books are frequently shared, as well as any item deemed to have communal benefits, like bread makers or coffee percolators, sewing machines, board games or decks of cards, large packages of baked goods or canned preserves. When Sister Katherine's brother sent her an electric typewriter, she immediately offered it up for the church's use. This is proper procedure. Only thoughts can be concealed, and I've hidden my share. Enough for two, enough for this innocent Sister Bernadette. I remove the box from the bed, the weight resting on my forearms, and she approaches me eagerly.

“It's a little heavy,” I tell her. “You'll have to lift the tissue paper.”

Her fingers move delicately, as if she realizes the solemnity of the gift. If initially I wanted to hide the candle holder, now, equally desperately, I want someone to touch it, leave fingerprints on it. Prove the object is made of matter. That it won't disappear or crumble when taken out into the light.

She takes it out of the box, relieving my burden, cradling the silver in her arms like a baby, her eyebrows arched in appreciation. A strong rain pounds against the windowpane. The afternoon has
grown dark under the threat of a storm. Normally there should be snow this time of year, but rain and autumn have won out. My window leaks and the drops come down, some caught by a coffee mug kept for that purpose on the inner ledge. I shiver, anticipating another cool night.

“It's beau-ti-ful,” Sister Bernadette hums.

That it is. I often thought so back then, before everything else began. I had coveted that very silver candle holder or one exactly like it twenty-five years ago. It spoke of another world, with its crafted austere elegance, sitting attentively on Rachel M.'s bookshelf. It was a gift from her father, purchased on a downtown street in Rio de Janeiro, where he'd vacationed. He had brought her back silver necklaces and chocolates, thin cotton dresses and wooden-faced black dolls with haunting orange circles around their eyes, but she asked for the candle holder. Made of real silver and quite valuable, her father told her to be careful with it. The features are the same as I remember: a square base with four squat legs, its body vertically converging to the mouth where a candlestick would be inserted. There is a wick melted onto the silver. At the four bottom corners are black burned etchings, intriguing but foreign, strokes in a language I don't know how to read: a loop swallowing itself, a type of cross with two horizontal arms, a star with a jagged edge, and an oval like the outline of an eyeball. When polished, the candle holder's shell reflects like a mirror. In the dark, lit by a single wax candle, it dominates the room, the light contained but threatening to break. The days at St. X. School for Girls were like that shell. The nights were like that light.

I could lie and tell you I've never thought of those days until the arrival of the silver candle holder, but I won't. I've thought of my time at St. X. School for Girls every single day, and if a day does pass and it occurs to me that I haven't thought about it, then for the next couple of days I'll be haunted by little else. The gift is no surprise, but a sign I have been waiting for these twenty years in this small convent in Ottawa. At least I can bless the fact that it has finally come.

WE MOVED TO OTTAWA
because my mother was ill. The long straight hair my sister Christine and I inherited had thinned upon her scalp to strands of black thread. Her eyes, circled with dry patches and puffy as blisters, were most of the time wan and dazed. She applied lotion to the skin on her face three or four times a day, and she wore rose-tinted glasses to shield her hazel eyes from the sun, the only thing the doctors had ordered that seemed to help. My father loaded us into a rented van, and my mother slumped in the front seat like one of our hastily packed bags. She slept most of the way, her weak groans drowned out by the classical radio station she had requested for the trip. “Ave Maria,” sung by young boys with high girlish voices, propelled us forward through the farmland and small towns with family-run grocery stores and cheap gas stations where we would all get out, except Mother, to stretch our legs and take another look at the map. Three hundred miles of driving that took all afternoon, the exhaust from the van filtering into our noses, my mother coughing, her head and mouth against the glass, my father's foot at intervals solid, then teetering on the pedal, changing our speed.

Christine was excited by the possibility of city life, pointing at the signs announcing the number of miles left, pronouncing the names of the towns we didn't drive through, rocking in the seat beside me, ritualistically eating a single potato chip from her bag each time we reached a new town name. I wanted to be back in my bed, the one my father had made from the trees on our property shortly after I was born. Eventually, my feet fell a couple of inches over the edge of the red oak frame, but I refused to let him build me a new one. I had crawled underneath and etched my initials into the wood. I felt the bed and I were a part of each other, even if I'd outgrown it. We left it for sale like all his other handiwork: rocking chairs and shelves made of oak and pine, birch dressers and maple chests, cabinets and sewing tables. My haven of privacy, where I would lie under the covers reading or daydreaming about when I would be married and have a house of my own, was abandoned like our home. I made a fuss to my father about it, wringing my hands and crying, holding onto the bedposts as if they were part of the family and couldn't possibly be left behind.

“We'll get a new one, Angela.”

“No! I want this one!” I had cried.

Generally a gentle man, my father shocked me, clamping my shoulders in his large arms and pulling me up, my feet dangling above the floor. I was afraid he was going to hit me. My eyes shut, his cracked voice blurted in my ears: “I can make a new one! Don't you understand? I can make you a new one! I can't make you a mother! Do you hear me?”

He dropped me and left the room, slamming my bedroom
door, a few hangers on the doorknob falling to the ground, tinkling. I pushed against the headboard, beating the wood with my fists. The bed, like our home, like our farm property, was going to remain without us. We would go on without the things we had come to rely on, and I knew instinctively that once we left, nothing would be the same. What I didn't know then was that I would never sleep again in a bed that was solely my own.

When we entered the city limits, the highway twisting down into a concrete valley with high-rises and numerous bright street-lights, Christine, ten years of age, four years younger than me, let out a childish squeal, slapping her now empty bag of potato chips across her knees.

“Stop it, Chrissy,” Father silenced her.

Mother, startled, woke up. She shifted her weight on her seat and I could feel it against my knees, the top of her head peeking out of the headrest.

“Joe, I can't see. I can't see,” she panicked, her hands fumbling over the glove compartment in front of her and onto the windshield.

“It's dark, Anna,” my father told her, veering the vehicle to the curb and stopping, covering my mother's shaking hands with his own, eyes searching hers for recognition. “It's night. Only night. See, I'll turn on the light.”

He flicked on the small reading light located on the roof of the van and waited as my mother, the instant tears which had come with her fear drying upon her cheeks, put on her rose-coloured glasses and waited for the shadows to adjust.

“Oh, Joe, your eyes,” she exclaimed. “Your eyes!” And then she slumped back down in her seat, breathing heavily.

My father took longer to recover, unfolding the map again, tracing the route we had taken with a pencil, periodically staring blankly out the windows at the new signs. Cars were passing us, their headlights on, anticipating arrivals, and I wondered how many drivers or passengers knew where they were headed on this night or if there were others like us, finding bearings in a new place.