The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (35 page)

“Cynthia, that's very beautiful.”

“I feel bad telling you these things, but there is so much in the world that I've always wondered about, so much I don't even know about.”

“You can ask me anything. Anything you want. I'll do whatever I can to help you.”

Carolyn kept that promise in her heart, and after a year of meeting with Cynthia, she also began touching her—to introduce her to the affection of adult friends. First touching her on the hand, then the arm, and twice she reached out and almost, almost touched her on the face. Finally, Carolyn grabbed her friend's hand and raised it to her face, closed her eyes, and let her warm, soft fingers brush against her cheeks, across her eyes, over her forehead.

“It's all right to touch people,” Carolyn said. “Friends can touch each other, it's a way to express how you feel, Cynthia. It's no different from touching the light that comes in through your window.”

Back in her office, Carolyn pored over books about cloistered nuns. She pulled fifty articles off the Internet that dealt with girls who had gone from strict family homes and directly into convents. Then she confided in her own husband, a man with a heart that equaled hers. She told him all she wanted to do was to give Cynthia a glimpse of the world. She wanted to give her a choice, a choice she knew Cynthia had never had.

“Come here,” her husband beckoned, holding out his arms, toward his beautiful wife.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“I think you have to do what you have always done. You have to follow your heart. It seems as if your heart has landed this time on Sister Cynthia's sleeve.”

“She can be who she wants, but she seems to be searching. There's something she wants to tell me, and she asks me questions about unbelievable things like flying in airplanes and computers. My God, honey, she's never even touched a computer.”

“That's not so bad, you know,” he smiled. “She's had a pretty simple life, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been just as fulfilling as yours, does it?”

“That's what scares me,” Carolyn told him. “I don't want to change her, just show her, that's all. She should know.”

“Then show her,” he said. “Show her whatever you want.”

Carolyn took a chance with the newspaper articles, and when Cynthia told her immediately about her mother and her family and how she was simply sent one day to the convent when she was twelve years old, Carolyn knew that she had struck gold. She would find her way into the heart of this woman, who had worked her way into Carolyn's own heart.

That first day when the articles about the walkers appeared in the newspaper, Carolyn, with all her years of training and expertise, almost blew it by shouting out, “Cynthia, what's your heart's desire? What do you dream about behind those doors and in the dark of the night?”

For sure, Carolyn and Cynthia were as opposite on the surface as two women can be: Cynthia in her plain clothes and self-cut hair with no makeup and barely a smile to hint at any emotions, Carolyn with the gorgeous hazel eyes and a runner's lean body, who had traveled the world and loved and been loved by quite a list of fellow humans.

But Carolyn, as wise as she was wonderful, knew women shared many things. She knew that Cynthia could dream and that she could love. She knew that even in a life so secluded and cautious, anything could happen. She knew that absolutely nothing could suppress a longing for touch and desire and that need to find out, to just find out what would happen if only, if only . . .

Carolyn was just as struck by the women walkers as was Sister Cynthia. For years she had been recommending a particular exercise to her clients: to place whatever it is they felt they needed to get rid of into a bag and throw it off the highest bridge they could find. She was a great believer in the therapeutic value of performing some significant act to signal that a person had changed their life and moved into a new place. Although she knew absolutely nothing about the women in Wisconsin, Carolyn was certain that in a way, she also knew everything about them. She had already made dozens of copies of the newspaper stories to share with her clients.

After Cynthia read the first article, she asked Carolyn at their next meeting if there were new stories about the women, and then it was impossible for Carolyn to suppress a smile.

“What's so funny?” Cynthia asked.

“I had a feeling you'd like this story, and I'm glad I was right. That's all.”

“I'm so curious about them, what they are doing, where they are staying. It's been in my mind since we talked yesterday. Well, honestly, this morning when I was supposed to be praying, that's all I could think of, just them.”

“Praying for me doesn't always have to be saying words. I think that when I have a wonderful thought about someone or feel them inside of my heart, that's just as much of a prayer.”

“I feel the same way.”

“It's a beautiful thing to think of someone you love and to wish them well and to imagine positive and perfect things for them.”

“I've never thought of things like that before, and most of the time I'm alone or with just a handful of other people, and we rarely talk.”

Carolyn knew there was a fine line between friendship and her work as a therapist. So, she had to stop then, take in a breath, and force herself to relax. She had already imagined hundreds of times what Cynthia's life must have been like. What it had been like for a little girl to grow up without a mother, without someone to hold her tight against the world? She had to be careful, so careful.

She had to hold back her barely controllable desire to lift Cynthia off the ground and hold her like a baby. In fact, some days Carolyn could barely stop herself from kidnapping Cynthia and moving her into the guest room, hiring out a sex surrogate, and then taking a year-long sabbatical to show Cynthia the world, the entire world.

Finding the right words was always such a crucial endeavor for Carolyn that she had developed a unique way of slowly raising her hands from her sides, to her stomach, and then outward, just a few degrees at a time, until they were up to her eyes and her hands were open. By this time, whoever she was working with would be concentrating on her hands and not realizing that Carolyn had been searching for the perfect words.

“Listen,” she said softly, raising her hand first to her waist. “There is nothing wrong with wanting something different from what we have, with thinking and wondering about what something might feel like, with trying out that desire. That's why we are here, Cynthia, that's why God gave us all these choices and places to see and people to meet and love.”

Cynthia looked off into the sky, thinking about the walkers then, and she said out of all the things that she had often thought about, about all the things that she didn't even know existed, about all the people she had passed on the street without ever actually seeing, there was one thing, one thing that had been stuck in her mind since she was a little girl.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“I'm not used to this, you know, but you have been so kind to me. I can tell that you are a person with a pure heart of gold.”

“I would never hurt you, Cynthia, you know that. People come to me all the time with their secrets and their problems. It's been my gift from God to try and help those people, to lead them toward their own happiness.”

“Sometimes,” whispered Cynthia, “sometimes, I feel so silly, and it's embarrassing to live in a world that you know so little about.”

“It's also wonderful to be so sincere and trusting and accepting of what you have been given, Cynthia. Where we both are, right now, right this minute, there is nothing wrong with that. This is who we are and that's okay with me.”

When Cynthia raised her head, there were tears running down her face and her lower lip was trembling. Carolyn put her arm around Cynthia's shoulders and held her right hand. Then she waited.

“It's such a simple thing, you know, such a simple thing when you consider other lives. But I have thought about this every day since I was nine years old.”

Carolyn listened, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid that if she bent a finger, something in the universe would change direction and stop her friend from opening up her heart.

“The night my mother was so ill ended up being the last time I ever saw her,” Cynthia told her. “My brothers and sisters had decided not to tell me that she was ill. In fact, it was months and months after her death before I even knew that my mother had died. No one told me, no one told me anything.”

Cynthia's mother was strong enough that night in 1969 to do something she had never done before. She came into the kitchen, took Cynthia by the arm and said they were going into the city. Cynthia was startled by the news because the city meant Milwaukee, and it was so far to where they were going.

“To see the dance,” her mother told her. “We are going to see the dance.”

Cynthia had been born with dance in her soul. The sound of a whistling teapot could make her hips sway and her feet tap, and her heart sing. Cynthia danced through the first nine years of her life, singing and humming and jumping off the porch as if she had been lit on fire.

She picked up magazines, just hoping for a glimpse of someone dancing. When her sisters went to the high school dances, she begged them for every detail, for every single piece of information that she could get. “What were they doing? What was the music like? What did you do?” These talks, of course, were small noises in the night because their parents were so strict. They did not even know the girls had dropped out of the windows after supper and skipped through the trees to the waiting cars.

Riding fifty miles to the city, Cynthia remembered how her mother sat straight up in the front seat while her father drove, turning every now and then to look into her eyes. In Milwaukee, it seemed as if her father knew just where to go. He dropped them in front of the Pfister Hotel and then drove away without talking. Inside the building was a small theater. People were everywhere laughing, drinking, touching. Cynthia had never seen so much life swirling in one place, and she had wanted to stay there in the lobby for the rest of her life.

The dance was surely the most remarkable event in Cynthia's life, and thirty years later she could remember every costume, every movement, every expression as if she were describing something that was taking place while she was talking.

“In one of the dances, a modern piece, the women and men were barely dressed and they blended together like a wave—moving and flowing. It was magical to see everything that I had imagined, the movement, the beautiful bodies, the music, so loud and perfect. The men and women, they were so alive. I was mesmerized by every single thing that I saw.”

Cynthia said there was another set where the dancers performed to music from the 1950s. She said when they did the jitterbug, with hips swaying and women being pulled behind their partners' legs and thrown into the air, that several people from the audience jumped up and started dancing. “It was as if they had been taken over by the music and couldn't help themselves. That was the same way I felt, the same way I always feel when I hear music.”

Carolyn cried as Cynthia told the story of that night of dance. Her tears fell into Cynthia's oddly shaped hair and must have rolled into her scalp but Cynthia never said a word. She only talked on, describing the legs and arms of the dancers and how some of the women wore costumes that showed their breasts, but it didn't in any way seem scandalous, just beautiful. She looked once to see that her mother was sitting with her eyes closed.

“We never talked that entire evening. My mother never said one word to me, and then suddenly, like Cinderella, my father appeared at the door. We got in the car and rode home. The next morning my father drove me to the train, and that was the end of that part of my life.”

So it was the dancing, Carolyn told herself, smiling because it was about the last thing she would ever have guessed. Cynthia wanted to dance, and by God, Carolyn was going to help her do it.

“Cynthia,” she said, forming an idea even as she spoke. “Do you want to dance?”

“Oh, very much. I have danced and danced in my mind for many years but to actually do it, to have that chance, oh, can you imagine?”

“I can do more than imagine. I can make it happen for you. Do you want me to, should I do it?”

“Yes, oh please, yes.”

It was easy for Carolyn to get the key to the small recital room, to slip the janitor a twenty-dollar bill and to whisper in the ear of the security guard whose wife happened to be one of her old patients. Easy to call her friend in the art department and find a costume, made from a fabric wispy and thin that might have been used in a 1969 production.

The hard part was not going herself, not standing close in the next room while Sister Cynthia crept up the steps and launched herself into the room with no windows and the soundproof walls. But she did it—she arranged everything, and while Cynthia was walking through the streets that early morning, Carolyn was sitting by her kitchen window gazing out onto the dark and grinning wide with their secret.

Sister Cynthia stepped inside the room so lightly it looked as if she were walking on a bed of soft grass. She moved her hands across the wall until she found the light switch. When she turned it on, her breath disappeared, sucked away into the heavens.

“Oh my,” she said out loud. “This is it, this is it.”