Then Came Heaven (15 page)

For once in her life she forgot Holy Rule and hugged the child back.

As abruptly as it began, it ended, and Sister found herself following the children back to the classroom with a new, expansive feeling in her heart, as if someone had pumped its chambers full of the rarefied air of heaven.

What had passed in the flower room quite naturally brought thoughts of the children of her own that she’d given up by becoming a nun. Funny how little she’d thought of it back then. Throughout all the years when she was growing up she had never considered another path in life than that of becoming a nun. Her grandmother had begun putting the notion into her head when she was perhaps seven or eight years old, no older than Anne and Lucy were now. So young an age, in fact, that the idea of marriage and children had never had room to nurture and grow. The nuns who had taught her had furthered the notion of her entering the convent by assuring her that to become a religious was more rewarding, more noble, and more privileged than any other walk of life, and that she should feel very blessed that she’d had the calling to a vocation. God had chosen her.

Anyone
 could be a wife and mother, they intimated, but only the 
Chosen
 could enter a religious vocation.

But look what I’ve given up,
 she thought now.

She got the children into rank and file and led them to church. The bell was ringing as they mounted the steps and entered the vestibule. After taking holy water herself, she stood off to one side and watched as they all followed suit, making the sign of the cross, then folding their hands as they went inside to their customary pew. To her left, Mr. Olczak stopped ringing the bell when he saw his children heading toward him. He could see that Lucy had been crying. She ran the last couple of steps and his face crimped tight—eyes, lips, jaws—as he bent on one knee and scooped her up. Holding her fiercely, he whispered at her ear.

Sister couldn’t hear what they said to each other, nor what he and Anne said as he opened his other arm and included her in the embrace, but she found herself comparing the love that she, as a religious, felt for her God, to the love this father and his children felt for one another, and she was struck by an earth-shattering realization.

They were wrong,
 she thought. 
They were all wrong. These are the Chosen ones. I was the one who left life behind.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Irene Pribil came right to the classroom door to collect Anne and Lucy at four o’clock when school was out. The students were lined up double-file ready to be marched outdoors as Irene arrived. The girls ran to their aunt gladly, and Sister smiled, relieved that they’d be cared for, for she’d been wondering. “It’s so good of you to come for them, Irene.”

“It’s no trouble at all, Sister. They’ve always been my favorites.”

Sister bid the Olczak girls goodbye, then accompanied the rest of her pupils outside, half of them to be excused to walk home, the other half to be marched to their waiting buses.

They clambered on, noisy, disheveled, jostling, shouting in high-pitched voices, “ ’Bye, Sister! ’Bye, Sister! See you tomorrow, Sister!” She watched them go with the relief that four o’clock always brought.

In the quiet after the buses pulled away, Sister Regina idled a while before returning to the building. It was a sunny afternoon and the school grounds were pleasant with thick, manicured grass, branching sidewalks, and geraniums in the grotto where there was a statue of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane. The grotto was set on elevated ground surrounded by rock terraces and aged pine trees. It was approached by natural stone steps. Moss roses and sedum grew among the rocks, spilling onto the path as Sister walked up to make a visit.

Before the statue she dipped down on one knee, looked up into the carved face of Jesus and said, “Watch over the Olczaks, Lord. They need you now.”

Rising, she dusted some pine needles from her black skirts and paused, enjoying her freedom and the spicy smell of the pines whose lowest boughs were so wide they swept the ground. A faint breeze lifted her veil, and the sun felt warm on her shoulders, captured and held by the black cloth of her habit. From the north came the distant 
ka-klunk, ka-klunk
 of a mold making cement blocks at Borgert’s Block Factory. From the east issued the hiss of air hoses as rail cars were disconnected and dropped off at the milk plant. Twin bleats sounded from an air horn as one of the shiny silver milk trucks came in from its farm route and honked for admittance into the plant. Even as Sister listened the sounds from the east ceased, and the town grew quieter. Only the faraway 
ka-klunk, ka-klunk
 continued, reassuring in its familiarity.

She sighed. Time to return to the schoolroom.

Inside the building all the classroom doors were open, pressed back against the walls, and she smiled in at Sister Dora as she passed the first- and second-grade room. The building was blessedly quiet. The water fountain had been left running and she leaned to take a cold drink, leaned very low, to the level of a first-grader, savoring water so icy that it hurt her teeth. Good as it was, she turned the fountain off, remembering her vow of poverty and that wasting even water was a sin.

In her own room the shades and windows were at half-mast, letting the low afternoon sun fold across the sills. At the front end of each row of desks a small pile of refuse waited, whisked there by the students—one from each row—who got down on hands and knees and ran a side-broom between the desk runners at the end of each day to save Mr. Olczak the trouble of doing so.

This was Sister Regina’s favorite time of day. With the children gone, the room became her own. She went to the blackboard, rolled back her sleeve and began erasing when Mr. Olczak said from the doorway, “Afternoon, Sister.” Her heart leaped but her outward demeanor reflected only placidity as she turned and found him standing in the doorway holding a dust mop.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Olczak.”

“How did my girls do today?” Beside him a rolling bucket held an assortment of cleaning supplies slung on its sides.

“It was a day of mixed emotions, I’m afraid.”

“What happened?” He came in and began running the wide mop around the perimeter of the room, spreading the smell of dusting oil.

“This morning Lucy had a bad spell and wanted to go back home, but Anne brought her to me and we had a quiet talk away from the other children. Both of them seemed much calmer afterward.”

He turned a comer and went along the back of the room. “If you want to know the truth, I worry about Anne more than I do about Lucy. She might seem like the stronger one, but underneath it all I think she’ll miss her mother more than the little one.”

“I guess it’s natural, since she’s known her longer and has more memories built up.”

Eddie stopped in the far comer, the length of the room from Sister Regina. He stacked his hands on the end of the mop handle and planted his feet comfortably. “I’ll tell you, Sister, I’m sure glad they have you. I could’ve used somebody to talk to this morning myself.”

She knew she should not encourage personal talk, so offered a small smile instead and sat down at her desk.

He went around the third side of the room, then down one aisle and stopped at the rear again. Leaning over, he scraped something off the hardwood floor with his fingernail, then straightened and seemed to pause before saying what was on his mind. “Irene came in this morning,” he told her. “She sort of... well, she sort of took over for Krystyna, if you know what I mean.”

Sister merely nodded.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he hurried on. “I was glad to have her get the girls ready for school, but she... well she...”

Sister waited.

Eddie worried the tip of the mop handle with a thumb. “I kind of resented her being there, invading Krystyna’s territory.”

In her lifetime no adult man had ever confided in Sister this way. It was wholly unexpected, his choosing her as a confidante, and she felt somewhat rattled by his openness. Holy Rule was wildly waving its arms for her attention, but she ignored it. After all, his children were her students: what he had to say affected them, did it not?

“That’s perfectly understandable.”

“I guess that was pretty selfish of me, wasn’t it?”

Their eyes met across the classroom. “I wouldn’t worry about selfishness for a while if I were you, Mr. Olczak. Irene meant well, but she understands how hard it is for you right now.”

“She knew where everything was—you know what I mean?—like where Krystyna kept things, and all of a sudden I had this feeling like ... like she was trying to 
be
 
Krystyna. I didn’t... well, I didn’t like that very much.” Sister nodded again.

“Same thing the day Krystyna died,” Eddie went on. “The women came in before I even got home and they cleaned up everything as if she was only in the other room, things I wish they would have left alone, the last things she touched. I wanted to storm in the kitchen and say 
'Get out! Leave the coffeepot where she had it! And put back every bobby pin and crumb she left on the cabinet, and the dish towel just the way she folded it and the grocery list leaning against the canisters and her empty coffee cup in the sink!’ ”
 He grew visibly blue, his voice quiet as trickling water. “But they moved it all. They brought in their cake pans and their roasters and pushed things aside to put out food and I never did see how Krystyna had left the kitchen that day. I know they meant well, but they shouldn’t have done that. They should have waited.”

He was no longer looking at Sister. He was staring at the sunlight on the windowsill and battling tears. She could see his Adam’s apple working, and his thumb bent motionless against the mop handle. From outside the 
ka-klunk, ka-klunk
 from the block factory sounded like a heart beating when you put your ear to someone’s chest, and she imagined, for a moment, it was his heart, broken, and it was her ear on his chest searching for a way to heal it.

He sent her a look of appeal and asked, “Shouldn’t they, Sister?”

“Y...” She tried to find her voice, which cracked. “Yes... they should have,” she whispered, quelling the urge to approach and comfort him. Forbidden to do such a thing, she went on in the calmest voice she could muster. “But they simply didn’t think. It’s natural that you should want Krystyna’s place to be inviolate, that you should want to... to move among her memories and find them untouched. All you can do is remember that the women, and Irene as well, only meant to help. Just don’t waste your time feeling guilty about your reaction. I don’t think God would find you uncharitable, Mr. Olczak. I think He would understand what you’re going through.”

She could see the tension ease from his shoulders. His hand loosened and slid lower on the mop handle. He shifted his feet.

“You know what, Sister? There’s never been a time when I talked to you that I didn’t feel better afterwards.” He even managed a little smile for her benefit.

“Yes, well... that’s...” She realized she was treading on forbidden ground and finished lamely, “...that’s good, Mr. Olczak.” In the kneehole of her desk she belatedly rolled down her right sleeve, discovering she had forgotten it all this while. She pulled a stack of fourth-grade spelling papers to the center of her desk and began correcting them as he resumed sweeping the aisles. Up and down, collecting the little stacks that the children had left at the front of the rows, picking up things with a big metal dustpan. After some time, he said, almost as if to himself, “Well, I’m glad the kids did good today anyway.”

The room settled into silence. She ran a red pencil across a row of arithmetic sums, making an occasional check mark, while he emptied her garbage can and began washing the blackboards on the side of the room, then behind her. She recorded the grades in her grade book while the blackboards began drying in gray rainbows. He disappeared into the cloakroom to clean it while she looked up tomorrow’s feast day and found there was none to post on the blackboard. Instead she wrote a new set of spelling words for the fourth-graders, and a simple prayer: 
Holy Mary, mother mild, smile upon this little child. Amen.

She was seated at her desk once again by the time he was finished with everything and pushed his rolling bucket to the doorway. He paused to read what she had written. “That’s nice, Sister. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes, goodbye, Mr. Olczak.”

When he was gone she sat as still as the painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary that hung above the blackboards on the opposite wall. She looked up at the visage of the woman in the blue dress and white penumbra, all the while recognizing the rush of feelings and the stirring of blood caused by the man who’d just left the room. It was the kind of womanly response she had denied herself when she donned this habit. And it was forbidden.

She folded her hands—not a relaxed pairing with the fingers pointed up toward heaven, but a tense gripping with the fingers knit. Lowering her head to her knuckles, she closed her eyes. 
Dear God,
 she prayed, 
help me to remain pure of heart and immaculate of body like your blessed mother. Help me to maintain the vows I’ve taken and to resist these impulses toward worldliness. Let me be content in the life I’ve chosen, so that I may serve You always with pure heart and spirit, in Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

________

Irene was still there when Eddie got home that day. He’d been expecting her to be, of course, since she’d shown up at school, announcing that she’d come for the girls and was taking them home.

When he walked into the house he could smell chicken stewing and coffee brewing. Irene was in the kitchen lifting fluffy white dumplings out of a kettle when he reached the doorway.

She looked at him. He looked at her.

She blushed. He frowned. His displeasure barely showed between his eyes, but she recognized it and felt her stomach quaver.