The Guineveres (11 page)

Sister Fran read from Psalms about the power of miracles, her voice echoing off the high rafters, inflected with such gravity that we looked upward to see if we could actually see them, her words, hanging from the ceiling like hooked meat. Father James followed this up with a Gospel reading about Jesus healing a blind man. When he spoke, his eyelashes fluttered in a way Gwen often described as “boyishly charming,” and if he hadn't been a priest, we might have agreed. During his homily, Father James stood behind the pulpit, clinging to the edges of it with white-knuckled hands to steady himself.

“Girls!” he said in an impassioned voice, as a general might say “Charge!” to his commanding company. “This week, one of the young soldiers in the convalescent wing awoke from his comatose slumber. This boy who doctors predicted would never walk or talk again. This boy who was far from home, who served his country, who was grievously injured in the War. This boy over whom we prayed—over whom I prayed. This boy who was beyond hope, all hope for hope. We prayed. We asked God for a miracle. He awoke.” Father James paused here, either for dramatic effect or to take a breath. His face was red, and he breathed heavily, as though he'd just climbed some stairs. He surveyed the chapel, the bored girls who sat on pews before him. Perhaps we looked in need of a pep talk. “There are no coincidences, girls, only miracles. Always miracles. You must simply look for them. You must trust that they'll happen.”

Father James went on about the War, about the War Effort, about our part in it, et cetera, et cetera, but we heard nothing else of it. Gwen nearly fell asleep. Win's stomach rumbled. Ginny and I squeezed our hands together, tighter than we did during the Lord's Prayer.

Then, after chapel, in the cafeteria, as we awaited our turn for warm beet salad and creamed onions, the Bunsen burner caught fire. Sister Margaret ran for an extinguisher. The spray contained the flames from spreading, but lunch was ruined, a foamy wet mess. Instead, we were served a frozen ziti casserole, a meal option usually reserved as a Friday reward after a week when no girl received a JUG.

“A miracle!” Ginny exclaimed, scrunching her freckled nose. She forked three layers of ziti and took a bite.

“There are no coincidences,” Win said, ballooning her cheeks with pasta. We were always on the verge of hunger at the convent, so when we were served something we liked, we ate as much of it as we could.

Coincidence or not, during Morning Roll the next day, Sister Fran misplaced her whistle. Instead of the shrill, high-pitched zip, she resorted to clapping her hands together for an alarm. By Morning Instruction she had located it, but the whistle-less wake-up call, followed by a whistle-free breakfast, seemed luxurious to us. And, as Win noted, it didn't at all impact our ability to form perfectly straight single-file lines.

Three days later during Morning Instruction, another coincidence: A particularly fierce storm caused a power outage. We heard a clap of thunder, then complete darkness. Nobody moved from her desk, where we had been bent over our Bibles reading about Ruth and Naomi. Sister Fran was quick to light candles, but the smoke alarm sounded. She was visibly flustered. In an unusual move, she dismissed us early to the Rec Room, just in time for the power to hum back to life.

In the Sick Ward later that day it was Ginny who first pointed out that maybe miracles really
do
happen, and maybe Father James was right, and maybe The Guineveres had overlooked the obvious in our most pitiful of states. “There are four boys left in the Sick Ward,” she said. “There are four of us.”

“And?” Win said.

“Maybe they'll wake up if we pray for them,” she said, helping Gwen tie on her apron, which clearly hadn't been washed since last week. It was stiff with dirt and dried water.

“If we're to believe Father James,” Win added.

“They'll wake up for
us,
” Ginny said. She took a thirsty gulp from one of the old folks' water glasses, and moisture clung to the soft hairs of her upper lip. “And then…”

“And then we'll go home with them. As their nurses. Like Ebbie did,” Gwen said, finishing Ginny's line of reasoning.

“It's our way out,” Ginny said. “It's our only way out.”

We stood in silence for a moment, taking in this idea. We bit the insides of our cheeks. We nodded our heads, thinking.

“But none of us is eighteen,” I said after a while.

“That doesn't matter. Think about it. The War. Sister Connie herself said there is a great need for nurses right now, and we're
practically
nurses,” Ginny said. “Plus, they let Ebbie go.”

“We'll be part of the War Effort,” Win said. “We must all do our part.”

“Brilliant,” Gwen said. “And for the record, I don't plan to be a nurse,
for real,
when I get out of here.”

“Yes, we know,” Win said. “A secretary.”

“That's right,” Gwen said. “A secretary.”

And so it was agreed: If we could wake the soldiers through the power of prayer, through the power of sheer will, or anything else we could think of, we'd go home as their nurses, just like Ebbie. Surely Sister Fran would make another exception during times like these—war times—and none of the other girls had received training in the Sick Ward. None of them knew the proper method for changing sheets or disinfecting bedpans or administering pills or monitoring vitals. We'd dedicate ourselves doubly to the cause. We'd learn more. And once out in the world, we'd convince the soldiers' families to let us stay with them forever or we'd run away or we'd find our own parents or … It wouldn't matter; we'd be free. Freedom would give us options to choose our own destiny that had nothing to do with the stone walls of the convent or the Sisters in their somber regalia or the Sick Ward full of bodily fluids we preferred not to name.

“I wonder what my mom would think of me being a nurse,” I said.

“I'm going to visit my dad,” Ginny declared.

“And then what?” Gwen asked. She had no desire to go back home, and she told us so, though she didn't say why. She believed we should stick to our original plan, the one foiled only months prior: find our way to the city and eventually marry executives.

“We have to trust it will happen,” I said. “That's the only way miracles work.”

“It will. I already believe it,” Ginny said. She gestured the sign of the cross for good measure, and so we all did the same.

Win assured us she had expertise in waking people up from deep slumbers. She'd found her mom, after all, passed out on several occasions, and she'd revived her with a few staple tricks. “They can't stay sleeping forever,” she assured us. “Their comas will eventually wear off.”

“Just like Junior,” Gwen said.

“Just like Junior,” we agreed.

For the first time in months, we felt excitement,
real
excitement, as if a hummingbird lived inside our chests. The moment the bell rang, signaling the end of Afternoon Instruction, we raced to the Sick Ward for our service. We crept into the Back Room with its drawn window shades, the muted quiet commanding reverence. We measured the vitals of those sleeping soldiers; we read to them; we watched them for the slightest sign of bodily change. We clasped our hands tight, prayed as hard as we could, clenched our eyes until we got headaches.

We read to them from the Bible in voices so loud that Sister Connie instructed us to hush. When she wasn't looking, we pricked their toes with sewing needles or flicked their faces with our fingers. Upon Win's urging, we dunked their hands simultaneously in two bins of water: one warm and one cold. Win said she'd heard if you did this to a sleeping person, they'd wet their bed, which would surely wake them up. But nothing.

We could hardly contain ourselves when Sister Magda came by for Checks. She sometimes had to remind us that there were other patients in the ward and to circulate our attentions.
The soldiers need us,
we'd reason with her.
They need our prayers.
Maybe that's all we wanted back then—to feel needed. Maybe that's the ordinary angst of teenage girls, the desire to believe their existences are worth something.

What we didn't know yet was how much we'd come to need these boys. We didn't know yet how these wounded soldiers would undo us, or that they would unravel us, one by one. That's the power of prayer, the risk of it, too: You never know how God will answer. At nights in the Bunk Room, before Lights Out and after we swapped out our uniforms for nightgowns, The Guineveres would link our hands together, rest our eyes, and pray for a miracle. For four miracles, in fact. We wanted out. We wanted to find our way back home, wherever that would lead us.

 

All Saints'

Gwen was the first to stake claim to one of the soldiers. It was All Saints' Day, a holy day of obligation, and after mass in the chapel, while the other girls were given Rec Time, The Guineveres were required to serve our daily JUG penance in the Sick Ward. Not that we cared. We were hanging Thanksgiving decorations: figurines of long-limbed pilgrims and Indians; plastic cornucopia we set on the front tables, despite the gripes from the old folks that they took up too much space. Thanksgiving was one of the few secular holidays that Sister Fran acknowledged, Halloween passing by without as much as one jack-o'-lantern.

Yet All Saints' Day, she told us, was her favorite holiday of them all, for it celebrated every saint, known and unknown, and the communion between the faithful living and departed. “The saints surround us, my girls,” she said during Morning Instruction, pointing to the framed photos of saints that hung around the room, “intervening on our behalf. They are in constant communion with us, even if our human eyes can't pay witness.” Sister Fran pointed her index finger toward the ceiling and made lasso motions with it, and as she did this she beamed. Half-cocked eyelids scanned the room, certain we'd see Saint Vitus, who protects against oversleeping. “Isn't that wonderful, girls? To know that we are never alone?” Sister Fran radiated, her translucent skin nearly glowing like a saint's might.

In the week leading up to All Saints' Day, Sister Fran made games of our math problems: “If there are ten thousand and two hundred saints, but only eighty-three percent have feast days, how many other saints are unknown, forgotten, or as-of-yet undiscovered?” or “If Saint Anne had to travel three hundred miles twice a day to find suitable husbands for those who prayed to her, how many miles would she travel over the course of a year?” Saint Anne was one of Gwen's favorite saints. “Saint Anne, Saint Anne, find me a man,” she'd sing in the Wash Room at night as she twirled in her nightgown. For our history lesson, Sister Fran made dittos of bingo cards, each square containing a name. From the front of the room, she called out clues from a hamper that she'd fashioned from a rolling pin and a Crisco can. “Be hopeful you never have to call upon me, for I am the patron saint of dysentery,” she read, trying her best to suppress a grin. She reminded us that there's a saint responsible for every possible area of the human experience, even impolite ones.

Maybe it was this idea that prompted Gwen to argue that The Guineveres should all be responsible for one soldier each, that such a delineation of order would eliminate confusion, should it come to that. “Can you imagine if there were no patron saints? It'd get mightily confusing, don't you think? If we lost something, we couldn't just pray ‘Tony, Tony, turn around.' Instead we'd have a crowd of ten thousand breathing down our necks. We should focus our talents, like the saints did,” she said, further explaining that if we each took responsibility for a soldier, we could provide adequate prayers and attention to each. “Besides, we need to know who will go home with whom.” After we finished setting up the decorations, we followed her to the Back Room with our dust rags in hand. “What if only one wakes up?” Gwen questioned. “What if he only needs one nurse at home? Which of us would go?”

We hadn't considered the logistics, instead imagining that one day they'd all pop awake at the same time, like four Lazaruses simultaneously arising from the dead. We dropped our rags in the soiled linen bin, and we washed our hands at the sink, taking care to scrub beneath our fingernails as Sister Connie instructed.

“She has a reasonable point,” Win said. She dried her hands on her apron, tugged down her skirt.

“Whichever of us gets out first will come back for the others. Right?” Ginny asked.

“Right,” we said.

Gwen, of course, had already picked. “This is my boy,” Gwen said, leading us to one of the soldiers' beds, where she plunked down so hard he bounced twice. It was late afternoon. Sister Connie had left to check on the old folks' supper, and Sister Magda busied herself taking inventory in the storage closet. We could hear her counting in a foreign language. Outside, the day was cloudy, an endless dirty sheeted sky. “I've already decided. You three can fight over the others.” She twisted her body to get closer to her boy; her legs splayed in different directions, but her knees still touched, as Sister Fran instructed. “Your chastity, girls, begins with the knees,” she'd warn.

Gwen had selected the soldier whose clipboard read “No. 63”—the last two digits of that long string of numbers found on his duffel—the boy with the bandaged face. His lips were visible, dry and powdery, and Gwen dabbed at them with a rag she'd dampened with water. Whoever had bandaged him cut eye slits in the shape of half circles and poked smaller holes near his nose that allowed him to breathe. Other than that we couldn't tell what he looked like, save his skin that was tanned on his neck and his hands. Gwen thought there was something romantic about the fact that she couldn't yet see his face, like the Man in the Iron Mask, or Zorro, or the Frog King. “Boys with obscured identities tend to be the most handsome in the end,” she explained. “And the richest.” She ran her fingertips through hair that grew like a fern from the top of his head.