The Guineveres (26 page)

We were told God forgives even the gravest of sins. We were told that the only unpardonable sin is losing faith. We were told to say ten Hail Marys and twenty-five Our Fathers. We were told to fast and spend the night reflecting on the nature of our sins. We did what Father James instructed because we were good girls. We were very good girls indeed.

 

Saint Ita

FEAST DAY: JANUARY 15

Saint Ita was known as much for her youthful beauty as for her purity of heart. Her chestnut hair and round hazel eyes attracted the attention of many suitors, and her father, despite knowing her desire to lead a virginal life, promised her to the most noble gentleman who presented himself, hoping to continue the strong line of worthy heirs. Ita resisted; she fasted for three days straight, taking not a morsel of food nor a sip of water. On the third night an angel intervened, appearing to Ita's father in a dream. In the morning he relented, and soon his daughter became a nun.

From that point on, miracles surrounded her. Once, Ita refrained from human fare for months on end, eating only of heavenly food. She'd open her small mouth to the sky, stick out her tongue, and chew what appeared to be air until she claimed she was full. During these months, she kept a healthy glow and sharp attentiveness, suggesting to those around her that she never wanted for sustenance or suffered greatly. On another occasion, she healed a man who had been beheaded for unjust reasons. She held his severed head, oozing a viscous liquid from the neck, and twisted it back onto his limp body until his eyes popped open again. On still another occasion, she brought her own brother-in-law who had been mortally wounded back to life. Upon seeing this miracle, her sister fainted and fell into a state of shock; her eyes remained open, but the woman could not speak, not even to articulate her joy. These acts were no great effort for Ita, no more difficult than dressing in the morning or spraying the garden with the water she'd collected from the well.

Quite frankly, she was
good
at everything. Nearly perfect if, indeed, perfection were an attainable human state. However, perfection alienates. With each miraculous act she performed, it was as though she'd rise, like the thin layer of milk left to warm: separate but a part of the whole. When she'd perform her miracles, the boys at the school she founded—boys who would later become important church leaders—stared at her with wide eyes of wonder. They'd wriggle away when she held them, afraid they'd be turned into toads.

At night, after she prayed, Ita would think of her parents, whose home she'd left all those years ago. She thought of the way her mother washed her in the small lake near their castle. Afterward, she'd float Ita on her back, swishing her gently back and forth in a wavelike motion. With her ears beneath the water, Ita could hear nothing, and this sound of nothingness comforted her somehow. She could see her mother standing above her in the water, looking down with such tenderness. When Ita floated weightlessly, she felt the world could stop, blend colors from the sky and ground, fade away completely, and still she'd be okay.

In these moments, Ita felt a longing, deep inside her, a small pain beneath her ribs. How could she, a woman with tremendous talent, a woman who could resurrect the dead, a woman so kind she once suckled a beetle until it grew as big as a pig, be ruled by the impulses of her body? It was impossible for her to admit that she wanted a child, but she did.

However, she'd taken a vow of chastity, and she certainly couldn't expect an immaculate conception. Even she wasn't capable of such a miracle. She tried to nurture the young boys in her school, but they were wiry and rambunctious, too old by the time they'd arrive at the convent to sit still for a moment of embrace. She thought of her mother—of that floating state—and she prayed at night for a moment, just a moment, in which she could nurse a child, in which she could feel the weight of an infant rest in her arms.

One night, while Ita was dressed in her nightshirt, kneeling before her bed in solemn prayer, she was called by a higher power to stand and cross her arms. Soon, in the crook of her arm, the infant Savior appeared. He was swaddled in a soft, white cloth; wispy hair covered His head, and His breath smelled sweet like buckwheat with honey milk.

Ita bent her head and stared down at the infant Savior, who was looking up at her with clear, innocent eyes that had not yet seen suffering, virgin eyes that had witnessed no pain. She felt the weight and the warmth of His body; she felt air move in and out as He breathed; she felt the rapid beating of His heart on her forearm. She was consumed with a love so powerful, she thought she might combust, explode into a million little pieces that would waft down to the earth like ash.

The infant Savior wriggled in His blanket, then freed His hand and reached toward Ita. She bent her head closer to His face, and He squeezed her nose with His fat baby fingers. Ita held Him closer, overcome with the urge to protect Him, with the desire to keep Him from the suffering she knew He would face. It's terrible to be a mother, Ita thought—to know suffering exists and to feel powerless to stop it. A wave of sadness surged through Ita's body, and she began to sing a lullaby that she composed as she went along:
Infant Jesus, at my breast, Nothing in this world is true, save, oh Tiny Nursling, You.
The baby's eyes grew heavy as she sang. His lids drooped, then fluttered for a moment as He struggled to stay awake. Ita lay back in her bed, the infant Savior resting on her chest. He suckled her breast, and she was surprised to find she was producing milk. It hurt at first, the way His gentle sucking tugged at her nipples, but then she got used to it, and she felt sleepy, so sleepy. She drifted off, and when she awoke a few hours later, He was gone. Her chest felt warm where He'd been resting. He'd left her with a longing so deep, so real, it seemed she had never lived a single day without Him at her bosom. But she'd taken vows, and she couldn't turn back now. For all of Ita's miracles, this much is true: Until she died, she'd feel that pain, recognizable even in her sleep, the tug of her breasts, the throbbing of her glands begging for a mouth to fill.

 

Ordinary Time

Ginny returned to us a few weeks later, looking scrawnier than ever, pale and shrunken. The Guineveres thought she'd been sent away. Where, exactly, we did not presume to know, and when we asked Sister Tabitha in the cafeteria she simply said, “Sh-sh-she's being well cared for, girls.” However, Ginny reported to us that she'd been in the convent the entire time. She had served her JUG on the third floor, in a room overlooking the courtyard. “They called it the Penance Room,” she explained, though we'd never heard of it before. The third floor was off-limits to us, an empty floor the Sisters used for storage, from what we gathered, and so we rarely thought of it, never imagined that Ginny had been with us all along. From the Penance Room, Ginny reported, she'd watched the priests arrive the day after Christmas, and she'd worried about the rest of The Guineveres, if we'd gotten in trouble on her account. The old priests huddled together outside like a flock of fat, golden geese. Father James uneasily wrung his hands.

“I thought about opening the window and hollering down ‘Judas!' or something,” Ginny said. “But I figured I was in enough trouble already.” We were sitting in the cafeteria, our plates filled with remnants of buttered noodles and field peas more aptly described as brown slurry. “You going to eat that?” Ginny asked me, pointing to my roll. I shook my head, and she reached for it.

If nothing else, Ginny was hungry. Very hungry. The Sisters had put her on a cleansing diet of some sort, forcing her to eat only broth and water. She was required to follow a regimen of vitamin intake, and every night Sister Connie watched her swallow horse pills to help her sleep. Sister Fran and Sister Tabitha both visited her frequently, assigning her readings from the Bible, which she was asked to reflect upon.

“I told them exactly what they wanted to hear. I was so sorry. I'd never do it again. Please forgive me.” Ginny rolled her eyes midbite, then resumed her chewing. “I'd have repented my name just to get out of there.”

“Not your name!” The Guineveres said.

“Of course not,” Ginny replied.

After the first week or so, she'd been tasked with awful daily chores: scrubbing, bleaching, dusting. One day she was asked to wash all the windows on the third floor. Sister Tabitha had left her with two buckets of water. “One is s-s-soapy and the other clear. S-s-soap with one hand and wipe with the other,” Sister Tabitha said, demonstrating. “Idle hands, troubled heart, my dear.” The windows were caked with winter grime, and this part Ginny described in arduous detail: how the dirt stained her fingers, and how the water began to smell fishy, like one of the priests. After a while, when she'd dip the sponge in the bucket full of water, it'd come out dirty, no matter how hard she wrung it.

At this point, Ginny went to look for Sister Tabitha, intending to ask her to swap out the buckets with clean soap and water. She walked down the hallway, then down another, checking for signs of the Sister. She found rooms lined with boxes with girls' names scrawled on the side in marker. “I found the one marked with my name, and I looked inside, quickly. I didn't want to get caught. Just my old clothes, mostly. Stuff that would hardly fit me anymore. Depressing.” We'd almost forgotten about the belongings that had arrived with us.

“Did you see my grandfather's old trunk?” Win asked. Ginny said she hadn't, but then again, she didn't know what it looked like.

Sister Tabitha was nowhere to be seen, so Ginny kept on down the corridor, past the Penance Room, past an alcove that looked identical to the one she'd passed out in, all the way down to the end of the hallway. One of the doors there was peculiar looking, set back from the others, with a small half-circle vent at the top.

“So I opened it,” Ginny said.

“And?” We leaned in. We set down our forks. Sister Fran blew her whistle, which meant we had only ten more minutes. But Ginny took her time; she enjoyed an audience, almost as much as Gwen.

“And,” she said, “it was a stairwell.” We sat back in our seats, disappointed. “But they weren't like our regular stairs. They were narrow and straight. Dark, too, and stale smelling, like dirty laundry. Reminded me of a secret passageway.”

“Probably just a back staircase, for servants or something,” Win said.

“Nuns don't have servants,” Gwen said. “Nuns
are
the servants. Will you get on with it already?”

Ginny slouched in her chair, injured. “Well, I went down them. I had to knock off cobwebs. I could barely see, and I nearly had an asthma attack. I had to stop to catch my breath, and I about passed out. I'm not sure what kept me going, except the grace of God himself.”

“And … did you wind up in some secret room with wood paneling and creepy portraits with moving eyes?” Gwen said. “Did you hear organ music played by a ghost?”

“No. When I got to the bottom, I peeked through the crack. I could see Sister Connie in her nurse's uniform,” she said, her eyes glinty and shining. “Sister Magda, too. I was inside the Sick Ward. The Back Room. The door Sister Connie told us not to open? It doesn't lead to a dungeon.” Ginny smiled. “It leads to Our Boys.”

Back then, while sitting in the cafeteria listening to Ginny relay her story, The Guineveres still believed in a higher purpose. We had to; otherwise we'd have nothing at all. We certainly didn't have friends aside from each other: Lottie and Shirley and Nan and the other Specials, they would barely speak to us, especially since Ginny had been caught drunk in the alcove. To them we were bad influences. Even The Sads and The Poor Girls avoided us during Rec Time, so we usually stewed in the corner alone. Our eighteenth birthdays, still too far in the future to feel real to us, didn't offer much consolation. Besides, where would we go? What would we do? Our only shot at a normal life was with Our Boys.

When Ginny told us about the back stairwell—we called it the Catacombs, after those sacred tunnels beneath Rome—we didn't say a word, didn't have to. By now, The Guineveres could communicate with only quick glances, a secret language. Our hearts rose up in our chests; the buoyancy lifted our postures. What we conveyed to one another through only blinks and the wrinkling of our foreheads was this: We could reach Our Boys anytime we needed them, anytime they needed us. If we took the main stairwell up one flight to the third floor, then we could access the Catacombs down to the Sick Ward, where Our Boys slept. We would not have to risk walking from one end of the convent to the other, wondering if Sister Fran was in her office or Sister Tabitha on her hands and knees, cleaning the foyer that always glistened with wax.

“Of course, we can't be foolish,” said Gwen.

“We must establish some rules,” I said. We were girls accustomed to regimen.

“No drinking when we visit them,” Ginny said. “Look where that got me.”

“Well, you found the Catacombs, didn't you?” Gwen said. “Everything happens for a reason.” One of us was always saying that. One of us was always believing it, too.

“But still,” Ginny said. “I think it's wise.”

“Only at night,” Win said, “at least an hour after Lights Out.”

“And never on Sundays,” I said.

“Why?” Ginny asked.

“Keep the Sabbath holy,” I said.

“True,” they said.

“Never go alone,” someone said. “Only together.”

“Only together,” the rest of us said. Always together. We grasped hands, forming a crisscross of arms.

“But what about your Lucky Talisman?” Win asked. She didn't use the words “human ear” to describe the gruesome object that Ginny had been toting around in her sleeve. “Does it make you feel differently? About Your Boy?”