Mariette in Ecstasy (3 page)

“Have you understood Mother’s holy rules, Mariette?”

“I have.”

“You’re quick, you are. Your eyes say so. Have you any questions?”

“When will I be cutting my hair?”

“You’ll keep it as a postulant, just as you’ll keep your own name. You do things right and one day in six months or so, you’ll join us as a novice, and you’ll get your religious name and we’ll all have fun with the scissors. And now this poor old sinner will have to go prepare your feast, and you’ll have to be going to the infirmarian to prove that you’re a virgin.”

She is taken to the infirmary by a sweet, fat, toad-eyed novice named Sister Hermance who trundles ahead of Mariette down a hallway, skimming her knuckles along the white walls, and then slows after a turning until she’s walking next to the postulant. She hides her mouth behind her hand to confide, “Have you begged God to grant you a great thing today?”

Mariette just looks interestedly at her.

“When I joined the order I prayed to go away from home and have home totally forget me. I have been praying since for humiliations and hardships and perfect atonement for my sins. And perhaps, too, consumption and an early death.” She thinks for a second or two and asks, “Is it
too
much, Mariette?”

She shrugs. “I have been praying to be a great saint.”

Sister Hermance peers at her seriously. “Such pride, Mariette! You surprise me.”

She smiles. “I’ll try to be irresistible.”

Sister Hermance goes ahead again. “We will be silent together now.” And at another turning she invites Mariette to go past her into a six-windowed and snow-white infirmary equipped with two empty beds and another in which Sister Saint-Pierre is asleep on her side, a headscarf flattening her frail cloud of white hair.

Sister Aimée is at a scoured porcelain sink, rinsing a tray of silver pipettes and scissors and tweezers with hot water from a teakettle. She fleetingly looks at the postulant, then puts the teakettle in the sink and unpins her gray sleeves over forearms and hands that are orange with freckles. She glimpses Sister Saint-Pierre as she whispers, “She has a stomach complaint. American wine, she says. Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been ill at all this past year?”

“No.”

“Ever?”

“Just as we all are.”

“Your mother died how?”

“Cancer.”

Sister Aimée says, “
Requiescat in pace
,” and considers a two-page medical report that is atop a stack of white pillows and gray woolen blankets. “So you’re Mother Céline’s sister.”

“She’s twenty years older.”

“Amazing.” She frowns at an item and flatly says, “Headaches?”

“Occasionally.”

“Trouble sleeping?”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Are you taking medications?”

“No.”

She turns a page and looks up from the signature. “Dr. Claude Baptiste. Your father?”

“You have to go forty miles for another.”

“Wasn’t it awkward being examined by him?”

“Yes.”

Sister Aimée stares at her, and then she says, “I just got here from Maryland. I haven’t met him.” She reads a sentence and turns to the postulant again. “Will you please show me your nails?”

Mariette holds out her hands and Sister Aimée dents the pink of a nail until it whitens. “You have to get permission to fast from our prioress or from Père Marriott in confession. And of course that is also true for trials and mortifications. Will it be possible for you to work at hard labor?”

“I hope so.”

“Me too,” Sister Aimée says, and she pens a note on a blank line. “Are there foods you don’t eat?”

“No.”

“Are there extremes when you menstruate?”

She shrugs.

The old woman weakly asks for help in French and Sister Aimée hastens to her.

Mariette shies her eyes away as Sister Saint-Pierre is rolled to her back, and she peruses a tall blue-paned cabinet of tiered pills and balsams and ointments. Each has been classified under an adjective: Alexipharmic, Anesthetic, Antipyretic, Cathartic, Emetic, Epispastic, Soporific. Everything else is placed just where it would be in her father’s surgery. She hears Sister Aimée say in French that the new postulant is here, and Mariette turns to see Sister Saint-Pierre sitting up a little and smiling at her with gray teeth. A half-century gardening in hard sun and weather has spiderwebbed her skin with wrinkles.

“
Enchantée, Soeur Saint-Pierre
,” Mariette says. “
Comment allez-vous?
”

“
Malade, mademoiselle. L’estomac
.”

“
Je vous plains
.” I’m sorry for you.

Sister Saint-Pierre shrugs and says, “
Tout pour Jesus
.” Everything for Jesus.

Sister Aimée goes back to her medical forms and jots a note, then regards Mariette with great seriousness as she asks, “Will you please take down your hair?”

Mariette unties Sister Agnès’s knot in the scarf, untwists and unplaits the tight chignon at her nape, and shakes her chocolate-brown hair loose.

Sister Aimée walks up to Mariette and says, “Excuse my familiarity,” and fully inspects the new postulant’s hair and skin and teeth. And then she stares out at green spruce trees as she presses her thumbs and fingertips along the girl’s jaw and throat and gently probes both breasts. She says, “We have heat and hot barley tea here in the winter if you get too cold. We also have some herbs and powders and syrups. And that’s all. The idea of having me as a doctor adds to disease a new terror.” She pauses. “We pray you stay healthy.”

“And you, Sister.”

“Thanks.” While Mariette puts her black headscarf on again, Sister Aimée takes up the medical report and tosses it on a desktop. She says, “And now I think Sister Hermance will show you to your cell.”

Mariette hesitates until she sees that Sister Saint-Pierre is again sleeping. She whispers, “Weren’t you going to ask if I’m a virgin?”

Sister Aimée assesses Mariette. “I assume you are?”

Mariette says nothing and then she says, “Yes.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” says Sister Aimée, and she simpers as she puts towels away.

Sister Hermance grins as she greets her again. “I have been trying not to hear,” she says. She’s holding a rosary as she hurries down the hallway.

—She is in love with you. Our Sister Hermance.

—Is it true? Well, yes. I see now. She has a very great heart.

Mariette’s cell is a nine-by-nine room just down the hallway from the oratory, with one eastern window with a bleared and pebbled and watery view of green pasture and flourishing woods that hold a slow river in them as a hand holds a stick. Whitewash has been painted over the plaster walls but the joists and high ceiling planks are shellacked oak and mahogany. A fractured and hoof-scarred tack room door has been nailed to two sawhorses and a palliasse of straw placed on top for the new postulant’s bed, just as in the other rooms. White cotton sheets and a child’s feather pillow are tucked underneath a taut blanket made of gray felt. White paint hides the hundred-year-old wood of a tilting pine armoire that stands as high as she does. Next to Mariette’s palliasse on the floorboards are a tin basin holding a tan block of soap and an ironed towel, and an hourglass, a box of tallow candles, and a great porcelain water jug that is as blue as a patch of noontide sky, she thinks, and the only pretty color in the room. A holy water stoup is next to the doorjamb, and just a few feet above Mariette’s pillow is a hideous Spanish cross and a painted Christ that is all red meat and agony.

She has been given a Holy Bible, a red prayerbook she can slip into her pocket, and an English translation of
The Way of Perfection
, Saint Teresa of Avila’s handbook for contemplative prayer. She has not been given a pen or ink or paper or so much as a scrap of mirror. She has been given nothing to sit on. Even on this hot summer day she cannot get used to the coldness of the floor.

Sister Hermance scuttles about the cell giving titles to the furnishings and illustrating how they’re used, as if Mariette’s head is filled with feathers. She seems to be playing house in a bossing way as she teaches Mariette how she ought to hang her few things inside the armoire, arranges Mariette’s hairbrush and toothbrush and nail file and scissors, and jams a brick into a door that—against the rules—insists on shutting.

She solely talks to make certain that Mariette understands that she is only to
sleep
on the palliasse; she is not to sit or pray or weep on it, she is to touch it no sooner than eight at night and get up from it at once when the sisters rise again at two for Matins and Lauds. She tells Mariette that the sisters observe a Great Silence from Compline at night until just after Mixt. She says Mariette ought to try to think of sleep as an illness that the sisters are cured of with the Night Office and again at dawn. She ought, too, to try to empty her head of possessions and the pronouns
me
and
mine
. “Everything in this room is
ours
. Even you, you are ours now.”

“And Christ’s.”

She smiles at Mariette hesitantly just as the Angelus bell slowly rings. Sister Hermance turns in the general direction of the high altar and gets to her knees as she prays, “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”

“And she conceived of the Holy Ghost.”

And then an Ave Maria is said.

Sister Virginie is kneeling with scissors and hyacinths in the garth but she tenderly puts them on the grass as she says to herself, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

Sister Marie-Madeleine holds on to a ripsaw and brushes wood shavings and dust from her gray habit as she privately gives the response, “Be it done unto me according to Thy word.”

In the kitchen the sisters stand by the hot stoves in rolled-up sleeves, their white aprons stained with soups and juices, steam from saucepans wetting their chins. Sister Saint-Léon’s hands are whitely gloved in flour as she prays for the rest, “And the Word was made flesh.”

Cook’s helpers with her respond, “And dwelt amongst us.”

The prioress stands at her desk, her palms held up to her face as though she’s in tears. She says, “Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.” And then she replies in antiphon, “That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.”

Sister Hermance smiles as Mariette recites from girlhood memory, “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

Sister Hermance holds on to the pine armoire as she wrestles up onto her sandals and steps into the hallway. Seeing that Mariette is not following, she turns and touches her five joined fingertips to her mouth in the handsign for eating.

Wild quail in spiced vinegar are served along with hot bread and green peas and a
grand cru
wine from the Haut Medoc. And Sister Saint-Michel is in a great tree of a pulpit high above the dining room, just beginning the weeks-long
Lectio Divina
of Dame Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations of Divine Love
. She announces, “Chapter Two. The time of the revelations, and Julian’s three petitions.”

“Dame Julian writes: ‘These revelations were shown to a simple and uneducated creature on the eighth of May 1373. Some time earlier she had asked three gifts from God: one, to understand his passion; two, to suffer physically while still a young woman of thirty; and, finally, to have as God’s gift three wounds.’”

Six refectory tables are arranged so that the sisters sit nearly against three walls that are as white as an unwritten page. Effaced and still and interior, the sisters do not talk and do not turn from their food and do not raise their eyes from their dishes as kitchen workers in white aprons hush their way from place to place, setting down saucers of red grapes and browning pears and soft goat cheeses.

Mariette is sitting at the main table between Mother Céline and the mistress of novices, Mother Saint-Raphaël, and she peeks at their hands now and then to ensure she’s doing the things she’s always done in the religious and grammatical way.

Sister Saint-Michel reads: “‘The second petition came to me with much greater urgency. I quite sincerely wanted to be ill to the point of dying, so that I might receive the last rites of Holy Church, in the belief—shared by my friends—that I was in fact dying. There was no earthly comfort I wanted to live for. In this illness I wanted to undergo all those spiritual and physical sufferings I should have were I really dying, and to know, moreover, the terror and assaults of the demons.’”

Half the priory is staring up at the reader with fascination and horror when the prioress says, “
Satis
.” Enough. And Mariette sees Sister Saint-Michel obediently shut the book as the older sisters immediately put down their forks and iron out their napkins with their palms. They all stand up for Mother Céline’s prayer of thanksgiving and then walk out in silent pairs.

Méridienne. Sister Catherine and Sister Saint-Estèphe are in Empire chairs in the chapter room. A briarwood ship’s clock ticks on the fireplace. Window drapes of Chantilly lace flush and deform on the breeze. Sister Saint-Estèphe’s black veil pleats against a chartreuse head pillow as she sleeps. Sister Catherine’s hands are turned up on her knees. Each withered palm is a pink nest of wrinkles.

Eight professed sisters amble through horsetail grass as high as their thighs. Hundreds of yellow butterflies are scheming through the field and alighting on their gray habits. One sister points to a woodpecker and another shades her eyes but cannot find it. Talk. One sister pokes her teeth with a grass stem. And then the wildest sister rejoices and whirls and flumps down in the horsetail. Even at a distance their rich laughter peals like piano notes.