The Staircase (7 page)

Mrs. Lacey bought me a pair of Indian moccasins and candy that looked like shelled corn. I protested. "You are my friend," she said. And I stopped protesting, knowing it was enough.

We walked past the Governor's Palace on Central Plaza. At the end of the building was a large grillwork door. Mrs. Lacey knew the prisoner behind that door. She called him Billy the Kid. He came to the grillwork to say hello to her. He was young and sassy. She chatted with him awhile and told him how proud she was of the part he'd taken with the Regulators in the Lincoln County War. "Nobody appreciated what you people did," she told him.

He thanked her. She gave him some candy, and we went on. "He's New Mexico's Jesse James," she said. "He'll escape from prison, don't worry."

"He can't be Billy the Kid," I said, "or we would have heard he was here." Surely the gossipy girls at school would have mentioned it.

"Oh, I call him Billy. He likes it and goes along with it. It enlivens his days."

Once I got her up the hill to Fort Marcy, the miseries would come upon me. The grave site, the whole cemetery, made me uneasy. Not because the dead were there. Not because some of their bones were coming to the surface. But because I wished Mama were here, and I thought of her lonely grave covered over with stones on the prairie. And my spirit would be so spent that I wanted to stand there and howl out my misery like a wolf.

Each day I'd look for her, but so far I hadn't seen Delvina.

"Where is she?" I asked Mrs. Lacey on the third visit to the cemetery.

"She's here."

"But where?"

"She's not ready for you to see her yet. There are really a lot of people here."

"A lot?" I looked around at the deserted fort with its crumbling walls through which the wind whistled. I felt eyes watching me.

"Some are very old gods," she explained patiently, while she lit the lantern in the little stone cubicle next to her son's grave. "Some are ghosts, like Governor Perez. He was beheaded by the Pueblo Indians forty years ago. And some are alive. Like Delvina and Lozen. It's a wonderful place to hide."

I looked into her eyes and saw she was having one of her "moments." So I got on Ben and rode off to the edges of Fort Marcy, where there were cedar and Russian olive trees. The afternoon sun was warm, but this first week in November there was snow on top of the Sangre de Cristos in the east. I saw sheep grazing on distant mesas. I knew dark would come quickly. It was my job to get Mrs. Lacey home before dark.
Already the sun was getting itself ready to drop behind the Jemez Mountains in the west.

I could smell the smoke of the piñon logs, rising in the air from fireplaces in town. Dusk was my worst time for the miseries. I felt my losses stand out sharply inside me. I felt my soul like the landscape around me, its green places all gone, its pain jutting out, exposed and unprotected, like the bare bones in the cemetery. Once back at the academy the hustle and bustle; the chatter of the five girls who boarded, Lucy and Consuello, Winona, Rosalyn, and Elinora; the sounds and smells from the kitchen, where supper was being prepared, would distract me. So I wanted to get back, away from here.

Still, I would wait a bit and give Mrs. Lacey her time. I knew she had prayers to say, that in still another sack she had food for Delvina, that before we departed she must set it out and leave it. So I devoted myself to Ben and the view. But I still felt eyes on me.

THAT FIRST WEEK
at the academy I was so confused I felt like a mule in a mud hut. Every which way I turned I broke some rule.

The convent was like a mirage in the desert. Everything looked calm and inviting and peaceful and elegant. But none of those qualities were there. The nuns never raised their voices, but their sad disapproval was damnation in whispers. Sin was everywhere, in everything I did.

During the week when all the girls were present, to speak at meals was a sin. You had to be quiet, while a nun read from some book of lessons that told about saints undergoing whippings and being eaten by lions, and having their heads cut off to preserve their souls.

To swear was a sin, and of course I'd learned to swear from Uncle William. To eat meat on Friday was a sin. On Friday you ate fish. And all I could think of was Fridays on the Trail, when we were so happy to bag an antelope or a rabbit.

To have pride was a sin. Humility was everything, though all the girls preened and boasted and glowed when they got praise from the nuns. To have impure thoughts was a sin. I'd been having them for two years already. Chastity was the biggest prize of all, the one you fought for every day in a battle with yourself. Some girls prayed to be attacked on the streets on the way home so they could fight off their attacker and be stabbed and die for their chastity.

These same girls spoke constantly of the boys school "over the fence," behind ours. And when they spoke of it they giggled and whispered. The fence was built of adobelike material, with a grillwork gate between the properties. By some hapless bit of planning—likely the kind that had made the carpenter forget the staircase in the chapel—there was a grotto with the Virgin in it in the middle of the fence. My first two days at the convent I'd learned that boys from school dropped over the fence and met girls behind the statue of the Virgin. It was a risky business, and only the brave dared it.

In the name of chastity the girls who boarded at the convent, the five besides me, all bathed in their undergarments. I tried it once. All it led to was my chemise and pantalets sticking to me, and I couldn't figure out how to get clean, and then I was left with dripping undergarments.

To covet what somebody else had was a sin. Yet the girls were jealous if someone got a new ribbon or special attention or praise from a nun. And they all discovered Ben, of course. And were already begging for rides on him. Lying was a sin,
but I told Mother Magdalena that Ben had a penchant for kicking strangers who came too close and for tossing off girls he didn't know. Just ask Elinora.

Worst of all, to be angry with God was a sin. And I thought of my daddy, and how he hadn't prayed since he lost his arm in the war.

Of course, to dishonor your parents was very bad. This nearly put me into a state of apoplexy. I was supposed to pray for Daddy every day—to love him, to forgive him for walking off without even saying good-bye.

The nuns told us that we should all keep our hearts open to see if we had a calling. That the highest destiny for a young girl was to become a bride of Christ.

Each May they crowned the Virgin Mary. All the girls hoped to be the one to crown, come May, because they would get to wear a bridal gown and veil. They wanted to practice, because many expected to wed by the time they reached sixteen and to have many babies.

The nuns told us that if the babies died, we mustn't mourn, because we were creating souls for heaven. But if they died before baptism, they would not go to heaven, but to someplace called Limbo. They would never see God.

This bothered me more than bathing in my undergarments. Why should a little baby be suspended forever in someplace called Limbo? Why would God not want to see it?

If they had a cold or cramps, or had to do an onerous chore, they were told to "offer it up" for the "poor souls." I thought they were talking about the poor on the streets until I understood it was the poor souls who were burning for their sins in purgatory. In church the priest was always praying for
the "intestines of the Holy Father" in Rome. I thought the poor man had gout of the stomach until Elinora told me it was
intentions,
not
intestines.

The girls were always sacrificing, giving up sugar in their coffee, meat when they didn't have to, butter or jam on their bread. I, on the other hand, was always hungry. They would give me dirty looks at the table when I took a second helping. I didn't care. I heaped butter on my bread, right in front of them.

Some of the Sisters got up in the middle of the night, got out of cold beds, to go into the chapel and pray. "It's so that God won't be lonely," Elinora explained to me.

I didn't see how God could be lonely. Didn't He have the whole world He created? If He was lonely, why didn't He take some of those babies from Limbo? I didn't understand anything about these people. They set up barricades for themselves, made rules it was impossible to live by, then enjoyed their guilt. I'd understood that Arapaho Indian better.

Didn't God have my mother? How could he be lonely?

How I longed for the straight, simple, clean lines and the uncluttered faith of the Methodist church in Independence. All this talk of blood and martyrdom and eating flesh and agony. It was just too much, is all.

OF COURSE, THERE
were nice things, too. Besides the music. But the music! When Elinora did her solo singing "Panis Angelicus," I thought someone was wringing out my soul. No wonder these girls were always swooning.

Some of their prayers had phrases that gripped me and held me in their jaws, like one of my cats held a mouse. "They
have numbered all my bones" was one phrase. I thought how fitting it was, Christ saying that about himself. Was it blasphemous, I wondered, to feel akin to it at times? To feel that you were so hurt, so exposed, so haunted, that they could number all your bones?

"Blessed be God in His angels and in His saints," they prayed. And I thought, yes, we would say "and His angels" or "with His angels." But the way they said it, though it defied all proper English, was right, I decided. In His angels. And in His saints.

BY THE END OF
the first week, I learned, too, that of all fifty-one girls at the school, I was the only one not of the True Faith. And that practically all of them were praying for visions.

"Like the Indians have?" I asked Elinora.

She said no, the girls were praying for a vision of the Virgin Mary. "Watch in church," she told me. "Sometimes you will see a girl kneeling there, her eyes all glazed over, not blinking at all, very still and enraptured."

"Does that mean she's having a vision?" I asked.

"No," Elinora said. "That means she's faking it." Elinora was getting bitter because her granduncle, the Bishop, was still not back from his trip, to make a fuss over her. "They all fake it. They lie about seeing the Virgin," she said.

I understood, then. It was like the girls at home in Independence lied about seeing Jesse James.

FRENCH WAS NOT EASY.

For one thing, all the girls were ahead of me. The language spilled off their tongues. Sister Roberta taught French. She was
a very large woman. Yet her weight seemed to be all strength, not flab. She kept fish in large tanks in her classroom, and she could lift and move those tanks of water like they were pillows. She had a sallow-complected round face and a lot of hair above her upper lip. But somewhere in her bulky frame, under all those black clothes and behind that wimple that framed her face, was a young mischievous girl trying to get out. I sensed it by the way she cracked jokes and her eyes twinkled. I liked her on first sight.

The other girls made fun of her and whispered in class. This day they whispered about the novena to Saint Joseph. Tonight was the seventh night for it. Every night for a week now we'd gone to the chapel, and after the usual evening prayers, the priest conducted the novena.

I was getting accustomed to the incense, the Latin, the chanting responses to the prayers. Evening prayers in the chapel were like an oasis in the confusion of the school. First, the day students were gone and there were only a few of us and the nuns. Second, the whole business gave me a sense of peace. Or at least time to study on things and sort them out.

It was the only time I really allowed myself to think about Mama.

Oh, she came to me during the day, especially at the cemetery. I would think, "I'll have to remember to tell Mama this." Or, "Mama won't like this; wait until she finds out."

And then I would remember there would be no more telling her anything. No more waiting until she found out things. She would never again find out. But most painful was the blankness that came after minding that she was gone forever. That was when I wanted to howl like a wolf. I did not
understand
forever
in the same sentence as Mama being gone. So I would push the thought of her from my mind. Until evening services.

Then she came at me. I couldn't hold her off anymore. She came at me with the full force of a dust storm. I was helpless as a tumbleweed in the dust storm she created. She was in my nostrils, with the memory of the lavender she used. She was in my ears, telling me to never help my father unless he asked for help, because he had to feel independent with one arm.

I'd sit there benumbed with her swirling around me in the middle of the smell of incense and the grip of the music. I had held her off all day, and now I was too weary. And it did not matter, because here I could let the tears flow and nobody cared. Some girl was crying all the time, caught in a fit of romantic holiness.

It went together, the mumbo jumbo of the Latin, the nothingness that my mother had become, and the fact that the nuns and the girls expected that there would somehow magically appear, behind the last pew in the chapel, a staircase. Because they prayed to Saint Joseph.

I felt cheated, because I could not believe this. I wished I could. I knew that if I could just believe, I would understand Mama's death, too. And the way my father had left me.

I'd sit there and wish I could believe in something. Maybe just in my father.

FOUR NUNS RAN THE SCHOOL
—Mother Magdalena, Sister Catherine, Sister Hilaria, and Sister Roberta. Sister Roberta ran the infirmary, taught French, nursed the sick, and sometimes helped Ramona in the kitchen. I had to go to the infirmary to
fetch medicine for Mrs. Lacey. It was a small, many-windowed room that caught the light of the morning and the afternoon sun. All around on the wide windowsills, Sister Roberta grew her special plants, and at one end was a potbellied stove to keep them warm. In the infirmary she rolled her long, loose black sleeves up above the elbows. She wore boots because the brick floor was often wet from watering her plants. She tucked her skirts up in and around her belt, so I could see she had legs.