The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (38 page)

—
In so doing, Reverend Mother gave me another early sign that, although formed in the strictest classical way, she could make space for the new generation to exist in comfort. My relationship with Winnie has only grown over the years, and, in fact, she and Mother Benedict became very close friends, too
.

Our mutual friend Merv Kaufman, of the Kaufman and Hart Oscar party in New York, had one hell of a time arranging a visit. Whenever he called, Mother Mary Aline mistook him for a reporter who had been making annoying requests for an interview and put him off with her firm “Miss Hart is not available.” His letters were likewise suspect, and it wasn’t until Dolores confirmed his credentials as a friend that permission to visit was granted.

They had a parlor in Saint Anthony’s, and Merv was surprised when Dolores announced she had just been assigned, for personal spiritual reading, the entertainment section of the Sunday
New York Times
. Reverend Mother Benedict had become convinced that the instrument for receiving the Word of God was tuned to past experiences.

“At the end of our visit,” Merv recalled, “I asked her if I could send her anything. ‘What do you mean?’ she wondered. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘is there anything you want, anything you
need
?’ Dolores furtively peeked over each shoulder and then leaned in close to the grille and whispered softly, ‘A vodka martini—very dry.’ ”

A postulant is not a member of the professed Community. Although I came in daily contact with the mothers, sometimes worked alongside them, we didn’t speak to one another, and that made me uneasy. We postulants and novices had our own common room, where we sat together and talked—but only about our work. If little or nothing happened to me on a particular day, I didn’t contribute anything. I just listened
.

My uneasiness was compounded by the fact that Reverend Mother, a Francophile of the first water, and the very French Mother Mary Aline tried to outdo each other in being monastic. The difference between them, or so it seemed to me, was that Mother Mary Aline was constantly trying to
show
what being monastic meant while Reverend Mother was truly and effortlessly monastic whether she was leading a discussion of the Rule or arranging flowers in the chapel. I thought Mother Mary Aline was a bit of an act
.

Whenever we came into contact, there was something about her demeanor that I took as jealousy. She whipped me with caustic looks. I thought I understood the reason, since she had wanted to be an actress when she was younger
.

—She did remind me a little of Hermione Gingold
.

Mother Mary Aline once accused me of doing something improper. I had not done it, and I told her so. She said I was not to argue with her. “When I tell you that you did something wrong, you did it!
”

I replied with all the cool resentment of Bette Davis, “And I am telling you that I did not do it, and you don’t tell me I did it when I did not
.”

She pointed to the floor. “Get down on your knees right now, you impudent American
.”

I got down on my knees and glared. She said I was a worm. I said that made me the greatest thing according to the Rule, a true daughter of Saint Benedict! She swept out of the room
.

—Was this resolved?

   
That night I found a piece of chocolate on my pillow with a note saying that no argument must ever go unresolved beyond the setting of the sun. Many versions of this scene, however, were repeated over the years—right up to Mother Mary Aline’s death
.

Within a very short time my skin broke out badly. It was probably the change in diet—but I couldn’t rule out all that chocolate Mother Mary Aline was leaving on my pillow. Before, I was careful not to eat chocolate, and I stayed away from all fat. Here I had no choice; I had to eat whatever was put in front of me. I wrote Mom to send Clearasil. She did, along with some moisturizing creams that I was permitted to use. Reverend Mother was sensible about anything one needed to maintain a healthy body
.

Mother Columba, however, was frantic and wanted a doctor to look at me. She was afraid that, should I not make it in the monastery and return to Hollywood, everyone there would think they had ruined me. Concern for my acne was now, surprisingly, the only personal focus of our relationship. I thought we had grown very close. It was a mystery why she drifted away from me after I entered. She had been assigned to tutor me in Latin, but other than that, it was as if I had become invisible to her
.

As fall approached I found there was no heat in the cells, only a single electric heater in the hallway. When I returned from Matins in the middle of the night, I had to sit on the thing to get warm before I got back into bed. It seemed I was always battling sore throats, and the sinus attacks that had started in New York raged at times
.

I became very thin and drawn. As there was some concern that I was on the verge of anemia, I was permitted additional meat in my diet. The regular diet for the Benedictine Order is vegetarian, but postulants were allowed meat twice a week
.

The garden obedience was often the toughest time. Some of the work, such as lifting and moving large rocks and boulders to prepare the ground for planting, was a major struggle for me. I think New England must grow rocks. I wasn’t very strong, but I was stubborn. I vowed to keep up with the pace set by Mother Stephen if it killed me
.

“Hard work”, Mother Abbess David verified, “was the order of the day because we had to subsist. We were a foundation; food was short, and we existed on what we got out of the land or what someone gave us. If someone gave us a sack of potatoes it was cause for a big celebration.

“I remember when I worked in the garden doing rocks. All that lifting was backbreaking, and I was always thinking of ways to do the job with the least exertion. Once I rigged up a long plank and rolled the rocks and boulders rather than lift them. Mother Stephen said that was not work. I could maybe have argued about it, but I didn’t usually. I just stood back. It wasn’t building me up as an independent person; it was building me up as a slave.

“For Mother Stephen, the hardest way was the best way, the monastic way. The work should cost your body something. Women have certain limitations, but I don’t think Mother Stephen ever experienced one herself. She was raised on a Minnesota farm, and she was trained as a child to work hard. In a day when there wasn’t much consideration given to what a woman could do on the land, nothing was too much for her.”

Often when I reported for garden duty at ten o’clock, there was no one to give me my assignment, and I would have to stand and wait. I didn’t dare to presume to begin a job on my own. One morning as I stood and waited—and waited—it began to rain. At 11:15 I was still waiting—belligerently—with angry tears joining the raindrops rolling down my cheeks. I don’t know how much of my hurt came from being treated like a nobody. It would be hard for anyone to take, but being someone who had been catered to, fawned over—to have to stand in the rain and wait to be given a grubby job that everyone knew full well I didn’t want was more than just being ignored. My dignity was being peeled away
.

I was repeatedly close to tears during the day, but the only time I cried was during the Office of Sext, which followed the garden obedience. I would be so aggravated that I couldn’t hold back the tears. They splashed down onto my book at the same spot every day, and my antiphonal became unreadable on that page
.

Mother Irene Boothroyd—the Helen Boothroyd whom Dolores had met when they were both guests in Saint Gregory’s—entered a few months after Dolores and occupied the cell next to hers in the novitiate.

Mother Irene remembered hearing Dolores crying herself to sleep night after night. “I empathized, but there was no way to try to comfort her. You couldn’t go into another’s cell, and you didn’t report it to the mistress of novices. The two of us never discussed personal problems even when we were alone waxing floors every Wednesday night.”

Dolores held most of her tears until she was in her cell at night. With no one to share the personal agony she held within her, she began a journal into which she poured all the pain. This journal grew and occupies two large diaries of personal reflections. The entries are chronological, although she sometimes went days, even months, without adding a word. Each one recounts an experience that sounds like the one that would send her packing. The first words she scribbled railed against the loneliness she felt was caused by Mother Placid’s unexpected desertion:

Have I done a foolish and stupid thing? Have I exposed my heart to loving only to be left alone with the coldness of pain?

I felt betrayed by God’s abandonment and by what I couldn’t help but feel was Mother Placid’s as well. A pattern was being formed—of mother figure and child. I heard her as a learner and was comforted by the awareness that she was listening to me; thus, her departure for Jouarre had been a slap in the face
.

During the months before entering Regina Laudis, I lived in a solid interior way with the Lord. My mind and heart were joined with Him. Now all I felt was a loss of that interior place, and this new life within an enclosure of thirty-five women was not all that promising a stand-in. Monastic life was apparently not a matter of relationship
.

But I made no move toward the door. It would be comforting to say that I recognized that pain numbs judgment and was smart enough to put off this decision until I was more in charge of my emotions. But it was simpler than that. I was stubborn. I believed that I was called to take on this place and to follow Christ in His Passion. To be part of that experience—to live through what that means—I held to as my mission. I couldn’t leave because deep down I trusted that God had to be there and that was what mattered. I swore that I would wait as long as I had to
.

In this, she was unknowingly following her confirmation saint, Thérèse of Lisieux, who had also become desolate by the loss of God’s presence. Thérèse took this as grace and trusted that God would permit her one day “to be led out of darkness into light”. She vowed “to eat the bread of sorrow for as long as the Lord wills it” and not to “rise from that table, so filled with bitterness, where poor sinners ate, until the day He appointed.”

Twenty-Three

If I had entered the monastery in the fifties, when unfairness was accepted, not questioned, I probably could not have stayed. But the sixties offered a hint of a freer atmosphere in which the Community might take its first tentative steps toward change and growth
.

“The 1960s”, Mother Abbess David explained, “was a time of ferment in the Community as in all religious communities of that era. Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council with the intention to ‘throw open the window of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in’. The new allowances, of course, ushered in all kinds of changes in dress, language and customs, and all religious communities were affected.

“The pope’s call to follow Divine Providence to ‘a new order of human relations’ was even more critical when it came to contemplatives. It was felt that these communities held to an institutional narrowness that was psychologically unbearable, and because reform was taking place at the same time we were thinking of a permanent monastery building on the hill, every aspect of our lives came under scrutiny.”

I was not fully conscious of most of this when I entered in the midst of Vatican II, but perhaps I could be called a child of the Council—one who would come of age within the
bonum
of her own natural call. Many things that were now spoken of and defended as
new
ideas were things I had long championed
.

Coincidentally, and very significantly, I also found a teacher and a friend in Father Francis Joseph Prokes
.

In 1957, as a newly ordained Jesuit priest, Father Prokes had visited Regina Laudis. He was the brother of Mother Stephen and had been invited to say his first solemn High Mass in the chapel on Trinity Sunday. About the time Dolores entered, Monsignor Lacy, the man who had conducted her interview for the archbishop of Hartford, was encouraging Reverend Mother Benedict to rebuild the makeshift quarters of the monastery.

“Providentially,” Mother Abbess David said, “we were helped by Father Prokes, who was doing his doctoral work at Princeton on the theological dimension of architecture and very much wanted to work with us to develop and design the structures that would take our monastery into the future. This work would become the basis of his dissertation, the underlying principle of which is collaboration.

“Reverend Mother appointed Father Prokes as the Community’s official architect. After obtaining his doctoral degree, he returned to Regina Laudis, and though, as a Jesuit, he couldn’t be the Community’s chaplain, authorization was granted from the Hartford Archdiocese for him to live on the monastery grounds.”