Saints for All Occasions Read online

  “There are things I regret deeply, Mother,” she said. “I’ve hurt people I love. But I try to get on with it. I try to keep my feelings at bay.”

  “Why?” Mother Lucy Joseph said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean let yourself feel something. Don’t be afraid.”

  In the car on the way home, Theresa told Cathy everything. About Walter and the dances and the nuns at Saint Mary’s. About Nora and Charlie. About Patrick. Theresa felt afterward as if someone had filled her body with air where it had once been made of lead. She felt as if she might float out the window and up up up into the sky.

  —

  Theresa and Cathy returned to the abbey for a weekend every other month or so, keeping to their routine. They always slept in Saint Lawrence, always took their nightly drive to the gas station to get a bottle of Coca-Cola, to remind themselves that they were free.

  It was on Theresa’s fifth visit that she finally asked Mother Lucy Joseph what she had been wondering. The nuns created such peace for their guests, but did they feel it themselves? Was such a thing even possible?

  They were washing gardening tools in a metal basin filled with warm, soapy water. Wiping rakes and hoes and shovels down with motor oil. In the barn behind them, a John Deere tractor sat surrounded by wheelbarrows, tarps, milk crates.

  “The orientation of all we do is to remember that it’s in the direction of something bigger,” the nun said. “On the outside, you feel taken up by this peaceful energy. Once inside, you realize you have to create it. If you’re frustrated, you can’t just go off. I’m interested to know, my dear, why do you ask?”

  Theresa said she was only curious.

  The nuns invited Theresa and Cathy to come and stay for the month of July, when school would be over for the year.

  12

  CATHY AND ARTHUR were engaged in early June. He gave her a ring with a tiny diamond in it, and she wore it everywhere, tilting her hand this way and that, admiring how the stone sparkled in the sun. Theresa worried that Cathy wouldn’t want to go to the abbey now. But on the first of July, off they went.

  As soon as they reached the gates, Cathy took her ring off and placed it in the glove box.

  “For safekeeping,” she said.

  Sister Ava greeted them in Latin and then immediately squealed, “Congratulations! Have you chosen your wedding dress yet?”

  Two weeks passed in blissful occupation, the two of them caught up in the nuns’ daily rituals. Then, as planned, Roger and Arthur came for a visit. For the first time since leaving New York, the girls curled their hair and powdered their faces. Cathy put her ring back on.

  The nuns gave them the weekend off. The four of them spent the days swimming in the nearby lake, browsing in antique shops they could never afford. Theresa enjoyed herself, but she didn’t feel well. Her head ached, her stomach was a jumble.

  On Sunday night, the couples split off. She and Roger had dinner and drove until they found a quiet road beside a stream. The evening light was fading to darkness as they walked, hand in hand. He kissed her, ran his palm along her back, and lower, to her bottom, leaving it there, a question mark. She had the strongest urge to ask him to make love to her, though she didn’t say so. She couldn’t explain why to herself, but she kept thinking it would be her last chance.

  She cried as they said good-bye at the gates. He wiped a tear from her cheek and kissed her, saying, “Silly girl, we’ll see each other soon.”

  She looked past him, to the image of the Miraculous Medal, forged in iron. It was then that she understood. She had assumed the Virgin Mother was guiding her to Patrick. But now she saw that the medal had been drawing her here.

  Theresa was quieter than usual over the next few days. She worried that Cathy might find her behavior strange, but her friend was distant too. She didn’t seem to notice. One night, Theresa couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning, she got out of bed and went to the bathroom window, looking over at the building where the nuns lay sleeping. A single light was on on the third floor. She saw a flash of black pass through it. Here, in this place, through these women, Theresa had felt the pure presence of God in a way she hadn’t since she was a child. She wondered if her devotion was real, something she could sustain for the rest of her life. Or if one day the spell would be broken and she would see that she had only been seeking an escape.

  Deliberating from here, from the outside, seemed pointless now. She knew that there was only one way to know. She felt elated. She couldn’t sleep for thinking of how excited she was to tell them what she had decided.

  A few hours later, she and Cathy dashed through fat raindrops to get to breakfast, the collars of their jackets pulled up over their heads to protect their hair.

  Theresa said, “I want to join. I want to stay for good.”

  She held her breath, waiting for Cathy’s reply. She thought her friend might try to talk her out of it. She almost hoped she would.

  But Cathy stopped, stood still, as if she no longer noticed the weather. She took both of Theresa’s hands in her own.

  “So do I,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else since the start of summer. Longer, maybe. Oh, Theresa. How will I ever explain it to him?”

  —

  Finally then, Theresa wrote to her grandmother. She begged forgiveness for not writing sooner. She told her she had been teaching in New York, visiting the nuns with some frequency, and that she was living with them now.

  Her grandmother wrote back, Your father and I don’t understand. What on earth are you doing there?

  As postulants, they wore a plain black dress, a white veil. They learned to speak Latin and chant the psalms. They were to read The Rule of Saint Benedict every day, until they had committed all one hundred pages to memory. This part, Theresa enjoyed. It felt like going back to school.

  They were to relinquish all worldly possessions. This too was easy enough for her. She had already left everything she knew behind, not once, but twice. She thought of Cathy’s home. Her books and her small black-and-white television. Her darling cat, who had gone to live with her parents. The man she had planned to marry. If Cathy could do it, then so could she.

  They learned quickly how vast the distance was between being a visitor to the convent and becoming nuns themselves. There was no longer any escape, no more drives to the gas station to catch their breath.

  Their lives were constructed entirely of rules. There had been times in her life when Theresa felt as if she was under someone else’s control—Nora’s, mostly—but she had a knack for finding ways around that. Now the entire goal was for her own desires to be expunged. Her free will relinquished.

  Postulants were not to share their worries with one another, to chat, to idle. Speaking to outsiders without permission was forbidden, as was unnecessary laughter. (Was laughter ever strictly necessary? she wondered.) Her letters had to be given to a superior, unsealed, before they could be mailed.

  Ora et labora. Prayer and work. That was all that her life would be here.

  Theresa discovered that the nuns walked slowly, hands tucked, eyes lowered, not because they chose to, but because it was mandated. They weren’t to rush or to run. This made her want to dash around the property with arms outstretched.

  Every infraction was punished severely. If you were a second late, you were made to kneel and kiss the floor. She thought of the factory back in Ireland, where her pay was docked if she came in more than three minutes past the hour. She had found the policy overly strict at the time. Now Theresa saw that those three minutes were a gift. They accounted for being human.

  She no longer even had Cathy anymore, not in the way she once did. They could exchange only the rare whispered conversation in passing.

  When Cathy came down with the flu and had to stay in bed for a week, Theresa thought to bring her a hot lemonade. A few hours later, she was called to the abbess’s office.

  “Is it true that you entered another nun’s cell?”
/>
  “Excuse me, Mother?”

  “One of your fellow postulants saw you and reported you. You know particular friendships are forbidden.”

  “Particular friendships, Mother?”

  “You will have to be punished.”

  She was embarrassed by how quickly the tears came when she was rebuked for some mistake or another, which she was, nearly every day. The only person who had ever spoken harshly to her before was Nora, and then there was love in it, an almost amused resignation. Not so here.

  Inside the dormitory, the small bedrooms were drafty and bare. The building was silent but for the occasional muffled cry of a girl in the night. The sound made her think of Saint Mary’s, of the time when Patrick was only hers, though she hadn’t wanted him then. She chastised herself for this now. It seemed a person never had the information she needed at the moment it would help her most. She prayed for him first thing each morning and last thing every night before bed. Somehow being here, the intensity of the quiet, put him at the forefront of her thoughts as he hadn’t been since the night she left him.

  Cathy told Theresa in a stolen moment that her family was devastated. They longed to have her back. They were allowed to visit twice. Her father cried at both parlors. Arthur wrote and wrote. Her mother reported that he came to them and said the nuns had brainwashed her and they ought to call in the police, the president, the FBI. Cathy was surprised by how hurt her parents were. She had three aunts and one great-aunt, all of them nuns. But that was different. None of them were cloistered.

  Theresa’s own father wrote to say she was making the wrong decision. It hurt her deeply until she realized that he knew the cloister meant she would never return home.

  After a year, Theresa and Cathy both joined the novitiate. They were given their habits and their names in a joint ceremony on a sunny afternoon. The mother abbess cut off their hair, placing the long strands in a golden bowl. A party in the Jubilee Barn followed. The one festive day of the year. Cake and ice cream and wildflowers on all the tables. Cathy was to be called Sister Placid, and Theresa, Sister Cecilia. The elders warned them that a year was nothing. That one or both of them would most likely leave in time.

  The canonical year came next, a period of no contact with the outside world. When it ended, Arthur was truly gone. He had married someone else. When Sister Placid’s parents came for the first time after such a long absence, she said, her mother acted as if nothing had changed. She insisted on calling her Cathy and wanted to catch her daughter up on all the news—her sister was pregnant again, seven months along. Mrs. Kennedy had given a tour of the White House and the whole thing was shown on television and her taste was impeccable. Outside, it was 1962. But here, nothing was any different than it was a year or a decade before.

  Sister Placid said her father was no longer crying. Now perhaps, he was angry.

  “All he could talk about was the paint everywhere, how it’s peeling, how it doesn’t look good,” she said.

  A week later, walking to the chapel, Sister Placid saw her father on a ladder painting the barn. The abbess said, “He volunteered to do the whole place for free. Anything to be near you, I suppose.”

  Her own family was so far away that it was impossible to say whether they approved of what she’d done. But her father’s and Gran’s letters were kind from then on, accepting her decision. She didn’t write to Nora. Every letter her grandmother sent mentioned this fact. Her gran insisted that they must talk to each other, and Sister Cecilia realized that Nora hadn’t told the family the truth. Gran thought they had merely had a disagreement.

  Two years at the abbey behind her, and still she often cried for half the day. Mother Lucy Joseph told her this was as it should be, that any girl sailing through with a smile was lying to herself, to them all.

  The outward tranquility did not reflect their inner turmoil. She thought that if they could somehow hear what was inside them all at once, the sound would be thunderous. Her own doubts were a constant stream of voices in her head, all of which boiled down to a single question: Was she in hiding, or was she home?

  Sometimes she thought she must be insane to stay here, when she could be in New York City, looking at a dress in a shop window, riding the subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She thought every night of simply walking out. Down the hall of the dormitory, down the three flights of stairs that led to the front door. They weren’t locked in. She could do as she pleased. Could slip out and hitch a ride to the one bar in town and get drunk and kiss a stranger and be back in bed by dawn. She could even go to the bus station and catch the Greyhound to Boston, where she might pretend the whole thing had been just a whim.

  But she never left. Never even slipped through the abbey gates and walked alone down the darkened road at midnight, as a few of the other novices admitted to doing. She stayed enclosed, even when it felt like drowning in molasses, even when she could not breathe. Beneath the raging doubts was a low, steady voice that said to keep on. She made long lists of things she could not live without—lipstick, gossip, the smell of the ocean. But then she found that she could live without them after all.

  One of Sister Cecilia’s many jobs was to answer letters requesting prayers, and those that had been sent in gratitude for prayers the nuns had already said. This task let her know that it mattered, that they were doing something good here, even when it couldn’t be seen.

  She harkened back to her childhood saints for courage. She had once found such romance in their struggles. She recited from the Rule, the same line again and again. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset.

  —

  The weather that third winter was bitter, bleak. A week before Christmas, a package arrived. It was addressed to Theresa Flynn, the name scratched out and Sister Cecilia Flynn written in below. She tore back the brown paper and saw the wool in a pale shade of violet. Her grandmother had sent a gorgeous sweater she’d spent the whole fall knitting. The postage alone would have cost more than she could afford.

  She lifted the sweater to her face and swore she could smell the kitchen fire back home. It brought to mind a vision of her gran sitting at the table in the firelight, stitching away, humming under her breath. She felt the strongest desire to return to her. That night, she slept with the sweater pressed against her cheek.

  The next morning, the novice mistress took the sweater away.

  “It will go to a more senior nun,” she said. “Saint Benedict regarded private ownership as a vice. He instructed his followers to depend on the monastery for everything. It’s too soon for you to have such a gift.”

  —

  When spring came, the abbey was suddenly beautiful, every tree and flower in bloom. The change in the air made her think of what springtime had meant to her all her life, until now. The possibility of new love. The smell of a handsome stranger’s skin at a dance. Pretty dresses, flirtatious smiles in the street. None of it to be hers ever again.

  Things she might never have noticed before could bring her to joyful tears. A red-throated robin in a tree, a row of purple rhododendron bushes, ten feet tall. But with this joy came fresh doubts. Sometimes she worried that her love for God wasn’t as strong as her love of this place and that eventually that unfortunate truth would force her to go.

  She confessed her feelings to Mother Lucy Joseph when they were working in the garden one morning.

  “I don’t think of God every second of every day,” she said.

  “And what do you think God is?” Mother Lucy Joseph replied. “You’re not spending your days thinking of a man in flowing white robes, is that it? Well, that’s not God anyhow.”

  She was surprised when Mother Lucy Joseph took her hand. “God is here, in the calluses on your fingers from all the work you’ve put in planting so that we can eat.”

  “Did you know from the beginning that I would join?” she asked.

  “I had an inkling on the day we
met.”

  “But you didn’t say anything.”

  Mother Lucy Joseph pulled the brim of her gardening hat close to her forehead. “In my opinion, it’s not for anyone else to tell you what’s inside yourself.”

  She wanted to share her whole story then. To tell Mother Lucy Joseph about Patrick, about Nora. She knew that if she stayed, she would have to confess it eventually. But it had been so long since she felt such warmth. She didn’t want to lose the other woman’s affection.

  Everything she and Nora knew about each other, they learned through relatives in another world. News had to travel from one of them across an ocean, and then back to the other. Their gran kept them informed in vivid detail, hoping for a reconciliation. Gran wrote to her about Patrick, Nora’s beloved boy. And then about the births of another son and a daughter in turn.

  —

  One day, feeding calves with Sister Placid, it struck her that she had stopped thinking of them by their given names. For so long, she wanted to call her friend Cathy, had to stop herself every time. Her own name, Sister Cecilia, felt like something she was wearing and could take off at any moment. But without noticing, this had changed. She was here, she was in it.

  The rules softened some as she proved her dedication. The low, steady voice beneath got louder and louder as her doubts shrank down to a whisper. She knew from what the other nuns said that they might never go away completely. But it was something.

  Still, she did not know if she would stay for good. Some women left after years. Sister Ann had lived at the abbey since she was twenty-seven. She walked out weeping one morning when she was forty. What life would she have now? She seemed so disappointed, and yet she knew somehow that she had to go.

  “How?” Sister Cecilia asked Mother Lucy Joseph.

  “In time, you just know.”

  When someone who had been there far longer than she had went away, all the doubts returned. Longevity was no mark of anything. Things could come apart so fast.

  “But that’s true for everyone,” Mother Lucy Joseph said. “Think of a marriage, husband and wife. The piece of paper, the white wedding dress, they don’t promise anything. A person has to stay there, fight for it, every day.”