The Guineveres (45 page)

The taxi driver opened my door, and in that instant the castle door swung open, too, as though synchronized. I saw a nun dressed in black, her habit covering her hair. She looked like a penguin I'd once seen at the zoo, but she didn't waddle. Rather, she glided toward us as though wheels were hidden beneath her dress.

“I am Sister Frances, but you may call me Sister Fran,” she said. She enunciated every word, primness straining her voice. Her cheeks sank into her face, and her arched eyebrows made her appear on the verge of indignation. “Welcome to the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration,” she said. She stepped forward, and I stepped back.

Mom didn't move far from the taxi. She held out her arms to embrace me, then kissed each of my cheeks. I realized only then what was happening.

“Don't go,” I said, and it was as if we were praying again atop that bridge, me clinging to my mother's arms, hoping someone could hear me. “Don't leave me here alone,” I said.

“You're never alone,” she said. “I'm right here.” She tapped her index finger on my chest. Her eyes were vacant, deep set. I barely recognized them.

“But I want to be with you,” I said.

“If you love someone you have two choices: hold on to them or let them go,” she said. “But clinging doesn't mean you love them more, and letting go doesn't mean you love them less.” Her skin looked waxy. She put her hand over her head to protect herself from the rain, then reached into the car and handed me my belongings. At that moment I saw what the people who watched Mom preaching barefooted in a fountain must have seen: a frizzy-haired woman with wild, flitting eyes.

I felt Sister Fran's hand bear down on my shoulder like a weight that could drop me to the ground, but then it eased up. I wanted to float away, into the sky, and up to the clouds that were covering up the sun. I'd never been without my mother before, not for a single day that I could remember. “Shall we get out of this rain?” Sister Fran asked. She put her arm around my shoulder and helped me walk inside. “There, there, my girl,” she said. “The joy of God is the innocent.”

The front door swung closed behind us with a click, and we stood in the large foyer. “Let's get you out of these wet clothes,” she said. Sister Tabitha appeared with a box, and she handed me my uniform.

“We'll need to st-st-store your belongings,” Sister Tabitha said.

“For safekeeping,” Sister Fran added. “Dress, shoes, everything you're wearing. Fashion must not be a distraction. And the things girls wear these days!”

“But not my watch,” I said defensively, wrapping my fingers around the only relic of my mother's.

“That, too,” Sister Fran said. “We're on God's Time here at the convent,” she said, then pulled back her robe to reveal her own bare wrists. “See?”

My skin went hot, even though I still shivered from my clothes clinging wet to my body. “But my mom said to wear it. That if I did, nothing bad would ever happen to me. Our family is cursed,” I protested. I crossed my arms in front of me and scrunched my shoulders forward, and when I did, I could hear the low ticking of the watch.

“Superstitious nonsense, my dear,” Sister Fran said, and I began to cry, quietly at first, but then rising in volume.

“Oh, none of that,” she said. Sister Fran looked like a woman who hadn't cried in years, all brittle and dry, white skin hugging bone. “You'll learn, girl. God sent you here for a purpose,” she said.

Standing there in the foyer, wet from the rain, I couldn't even begin to imagine what that purpose might be—that there was a grand design larger than myself, larger than the convent, larger, even, than my mother's curse. It didn't occur to me then that there was meaning in my loneliness. Or that there wasn't. I was just a young girl, after all. Hadn't yet met The Guineveres. Hadn't yet met Our Boys. Hadn't yet been taught about all those saints who understood suffering, who embraced it.

 

Absolution

I helped Gwen sew an elastic band and some extra material into her uniform skirt. Even then, it fit snugly around her stomach, which grew high and round like a small globe beneath her clothing. She swelled with motherhood. Her hair thickened, became shinier and sleeker than it had ever been, and she wore it down, past her shoulders, past the midback length that the Sisters usually made us cut. I don't know if she still rubbed butter into her skin or brushed her hair exactly one hundred strokes every night; we avoided each other in the Wash Room.

I still sat with her in the cafeteria, though. What choice did I have? Between slurps of cabbage soup, the other girls shot us awkward glances that indicated I could never belong with them. Even Reggie ignored us, stared straight into her bowl as if divining her own future there. Lottie and Shirley and Nan and Dorrie Sue made efforts to walk the long way to the tray bin after mealtime so as to avoid our table completely. Maybe they thought pregnancy was contagious, that baby germs could somehow manage to crawl up their skirts as well. Sister Fran never called an assembly to talk about Gwen's “condition.” She didn't warn the other girls of the Flesh or lecture about dignity and virtue or make us watch filmstrips upon similar topics. I suppose she thought Gwen's changing appearance could speak for itself. And it did. The other girls kept their distance from both of us.

Gwen and I didn't talk much, either. I guess we didn't know what to say. When I'd sit next to her in the cafeteria, our clinking forks filled the silence between us. On occasion, we'd talk about Win and Ginny and wonder what they were doing now, out in the world. But we didn't talk about Our Boys. We didn't talk about whether the baby would be a boy or a girl or what Gwen would do once the baby was born.

Father James asked me to serve as an altar girl just one more time after that. It was during the Mass of the Healing. This time, Sister Tabitha escorted me—walked me up the hill and back down again when mass was over. She didn't let me out of her sight. She sat on the couch in the vestry while I dressed, pulled the rough robe over my head, then finger-combed my hair when static made it stand on end. I saw The Guineveres' robes hanging in the closet, but I tried not to think about them, tried to think only of service and piety. Sister Fran told us that piety was not just being faithful, but being dutiful. She told us that faith and duty are one and the same. I wondered what happened when someone performed her duty but didn't believe in the reasons behind it. Did that still count as faith? I worried so much about those sorts of things then. I didn't yet realize how useless worry is, how we cling to it in hopes of controlling the outcome, but we can never control the outcome.

One server on the altar is difficult, but not impossible. Before mass, Father James had already set up the processional cross and candle in their rightful places, and he carried his gold-edged Bible during the opening hymn. As I walked behind him, the smoke from the incense urn rose up my nose and burned my eyes. Since the Mass of the Healing wasn't a service day of obligation, the church was only half full. A row of soldiers sat in the pew behind the Drexels; I'd never seen them before. These soldiers, unlike the ones in the Sick Ward, were fully awake and wore uniforms so crisp their shoulders had edges. I wondered if they were home for good or if they had to go back to the War again. I could only guess that these were the sons of the parishioners, or the fathers of the fatherless families that I'd seen. I imagined how happy they must have been to come home, how happy their families must have been, too, despite the fact that nobody looked happy. Everyone stared forward with heavy lids, with blank church faces.

During the homily, Father James preached again of the virtue of miracles. He said if we have faith even as small as a tiny mustard seed, we will have the power to move mountains. He said God has the power to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, feed the hungry, and raise the dead—but only if we hold faith in our hearts. When Father James spoke, he held his vowels just a beat too long. He stumbled as he walked to the pulpit, and then, after his homily, he misplaced his vial of holy oil. I found it next to the tabernacle, then held the jar for him as he dabbed the foreheads of the congregants with a greasy, sloppy thumbprint.

The soldiers strode slowly toward the altar to receive their blessings. Some walked with the help of crutches or canes. One was missing an arm, and his uniform sleeve was folded into a triangle and pinned, like a funeral flag. Others had scars on their faces or burn marks on their hands. Some didn't seem like anything was wrong with them, which probably meant that they had the worst scars of them all, the kind on the inside that take a long time to heal, like My Boy.

When Father James blotted the last person, I whispered to him, “Will you bless me, too, Father?” Father James's face was rosy, and I could see the outline of dye on his hairline from where he recently colored his hair again. He nodded slowly, then dipped his thumb into the jar of oil I was holding and clumsily skimmed my forehead. The oil smelled earthy, like dirt mixed with musk. It tickled my skin as it dribbled toward my eyebrows, then stopped there to rest. After mass, when I returned to the convent, I found Gwen, and I smudged the oil off my forehead and rubbed some onto hers.

“What are you doing?” she complained, and she tried to wipe it away with the back of her palm.

“You can't wipe it off! It's holy oil,” I protested. “From the Mass of the Healing.”

“What do you think I need healing from? This?” she sneered, rubbing her extended stomach, the weight of which made her appear to lean forward. “You can't cure pregnancy,” she said. “At least not around here, you can't.”

“I know.”

She must have noticed the hurt in my voice, so she softened a bit. “Thank you,” she said, and in her breathy voice added, “I now feel Supremely Adored.” She twisted her face, pressed her palms into prayer, and offered her best Holy Constipation look.

When she was about eight months along, Sister Fran moved her to the Penance Room on the third floor. Gwen said she was just fine in the Bunk Room, but Sister Fran insisted, claiming it wasn't good for the other girls to see her in this condition. “Let not one lamb lead the others astray,” Sister Fran told her. “Sometimes we must sacrifice one for the good of many.”

“You'd think I was a leper,” Gwen said as she stripped the sheets from her bed. I helped her gather the contents of her basket, her brush and her notebooks, her pajamas and socks. She handed me Her Boy's ring to return to him, then peeled her glossy magazine cutouts from the wall above her bunk.

“Or a prostitute,” I said.

I didn't see her much after that.

When it was time, they took her to the Sick Ward and sequestered her from the rest of the patients by hanging a bedsheet divider. I wasn't there when Gwen gave birth, but I heard that Sisters Magda and Connie let her hold the baby for a full hour afterward. I'm told she didn't cry when they took the baby away, didn't raise one word in protest. She simply handed the baby girl to Sister Connie, then rolled over and fell asleep. Gwen stayed in the Sick Ward a few more days, until one morning she woke up to find her packed bags at her bedside. She dressed in silence, tied her shoes, combed her long hair, then sat at the edge of the bed, her knees pressed together, her legs crossed only at the bone of the ankle, as we'd been taught to do. When the time came to leave, she didn't ask to say good-bye, didn't ask for anything except for a glass of water, which she drank in small sips, as if she were drinking from the communion chalice. And then, after more than two years, she disappeared from my life. They sent her off into the world of lost Guineveres.

Years later, before Sister Fran died, she told me that she could never locate Gwen's family, not since the day her father had dropped her off at the convent. She tried calling, she tried writing, but nobody responded—the phone rang and rang, and the postman marked her letters undelivered. “It sometimes happens this way,” Sister Fran had said. By then she was a very old woman. Her skin had shriveled to bone, patterned with wrinkles. Her hair thinned to wisps. She wore a headscarf in place of her veil because it was more comfortable as she reclined in bed.

With no other options, Gwen was sent across state to a school for troubled girls. “What else could I do?” Sister Fran asked; age and illness had softened her some. I do believe she acted according to what she thought was right at the time. It was a different world when she ran the convent. Not like it is now.

“I felt badly,” Sister Fran told me, “not that we sent her to the home for troubled girls—she
was
troubled—but that her family never knew where she was.” Sister Fran licked her lips, white from dryness, and she rested her wizened hands on my own; she'd be dead within the year, suffering a stroke before she slipped away in the very Sick Ward where she oversaw the tending of the sick. I felt sorry for Sister Fran. I don't know why. Maybe I shouldn't have, but she'd known pain, too. “My hope for all of my girls is that they return home,” she had told me. “That is the best possible outcome.”

I visited the Sick Ward the day after Gwen's departure. The ward was crowded then, brimming with patients and with noise, despite the fact that nobody was actually speaking. It was the sound of starched blankets against dry skin, of shifting discomfort, of mouths smacking with thirst. Another group of comatose soldiers had arrived, and small cots had been set flat against the walls to accommodate them. Sisters Magda and Connie had to scoot sideways through small spaces to deliver their trays of medicine or to empty bedpans. I instinctively walked toward My Boy's bed, and that's when I saw it: In the corner, near the supply closet, the makeshift birthing room. Sheets shrouded the bed like a tent, or like a tomb.

I heard the baby before I saw it. I moved toward the room where Gwen had given birth, and I tugged back the sheets that hung from two coat stands. There sat a bassinet, white wicker fraying at the edges. Inside it, the baby cried, squirmed like a beetle on its back. At first I could do nothing but stare, stare at her wide gummy mouth, opened to reveal a quivering uvula, stare at her downy skin and her complexion turned red from wailing. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Her fingers tapered to points. She was half My Boy, but not half me.