Then Came Heaven (29 page)

Nobody knew what to say. Eyes met eyes all around the table, wives to husbands, husbands to wives. And every single person there thought, 
It’s a man.

Bertha was the first to find her voice. “You don’t mean that, Regina.”

“Yes, Mama, I do.”

“How can you 
do
 this to us?”

I’m not doing anything to you, Mother,
 she thought, but of course she didn’t say it.

Then everybody started babbling at once.

“What will Father Whalen say?”

“Nobody quits the convent.”

“But Jean...”

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph...” (whispered, accompanied by the sign of the cross).

“I knew it. I knew something was wrong when they let her come home for Christmas.”

“It’s that man who brought you home, isn’t it?”

“Some 
man
 brought her home?”

“I’ll never be able to face my friends again.”

“After all that money it cost Grandma Rosella to send you through the convent?”

“Shh, keep your voices down! The kids will hear!”

The comments burbled on and on until Grandma Rosella stopped them by bursting into tears. In the midst of all that patter, without offering a word herself, she put her face into her hands and let loose with a bunch of noisy sobs that shook her skinny shoulders. This woman who claimed her place as the undisputed hub of the family, who was daunted by nothing, who had lived with a drunk for years and coped without his help and never felt sorry for herself for a day; this woman who had faith enough for the entire family, had they not had it for themselves ... this woman was weeping.

Frank got up and went around the table to her. “Ma...” he said, dropping down to one knee with an arm around her shoulders. “It’s not the end of the world, Ma.”

“Oh y... yes, it is. Yes, it is... for me, it is.” The words came out muffled into her hands. Finally she lifted her ravaged face. “That’s all I ever w... wanted was for my little Jean to be a nun, and now what does she d... do but betray me.”

Regina felt a bubble of anger pop inside, but she kept her voice meek. “I’m not betraying you, Grandma.”

“God, then. You’re betraying God. You made a vow to Him.”

“With provisions for renouncing that vow.”

“Are you talking back to me? What’s got into you, talking back to your grandma that way?”

“I’m not talking back to you. I’m trying to make you understand.”

Rosella raised her voice, angry, too. “You go ahead, then, and you tell the rest of them what you told me about why you’re quitting! You see if they believe it any more than I do! It’s a man—that’s what it is! Nuns don’t give up their habits unless there’s a man involved!”

Someone else asked, “Can you still go to heaven if you do this?”

Her mother said, “If there’s a man, Jean, you might as well go ahead and tell us. We’ll find out sooner or later, anyway.”

Her father said, “Now, Mother, give her time.”

“Well, it was a man who drove her home last night!”

“It was?” one of her sisters said, surprised. “Is it him, Jean?”

Someone started reciting an Act of Faith and the hubbub mounted again.

Sister Regina Marie, O.S.B., who usually maintained a mien of composure that the saints themselves would envy, stood up and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Stop it, every one of you! Stop it right this minute!”

Their mouths shut like gopher traps and they stared at her, the soft-spoken nun with the gentle manner, who had finally reached the end of her rope.

She made a ball and socket of her hands and pressed them to her mouth. Inside, her heart was clattering. It had felt fantastic, shouting. Felt so horrid, being misunderstood. Felt so hurtful that they wouldn’t consider her happiness first before their own. That they’d renounce her for her decision without asking with open minds what it was that made her change over the years. Without caring. They wanted her to be perfect for them, their perfect little Sister Regina, their own private conduit to heaven, the one they could mention to their Catholic friends and thereby imply they had an inside track to the golden gates. Oh, that was part of it, she knew. She’d always known, deep in her heart: those families with a professed religious felt a little more smug than others about the here 
and
 the hereafter.

But she wanted her family to be different. She wanted them to say quietly, 
Sit down, Jean, and tell us why you ’re disappointed, and when your feelings started changing, and what happened to change them, and what you want to do with your future, and if you’re sure this is the right thing for you. Let us commiserate with you and talk about your plans.

Instead, they saw this as a disgrace.

Nobody had said a word since she’d shouted. They were all staring at her as if she’d gone daft. There was so much they didn’t know about a nun’s life. She decided to tell them some of it.

Her voice and stomach were trembling as she began. “I’m sorry I shouted, but that’s something I haven’t been allowed to do for eleven years, shout. There’s a paragraph in our Holy Rule about it.” She scanned the circle of faces. “Can you imagine your life without shouting? Or without touching other human beings? Or without being allowed to have one special friend of your own, or talking to acquaintances you meet on the street? Owning a wristwatch so you can check the time whenever you want, or buying your own bottle of shampoo, or sending a gift to someone when you feel like it? How about writing a letter to your own grandma without someone else reading it? I haven’t even been allowed to do that—did you know that? Every letter a nun writes must be given to her superior unsealed. So I couldn’t write to you over the years and tell you of my growing dissatisfactions. Perhaps if I could have it wouldn’t have gotten to this point where I want so badly to be free.”

They were all sitting with their chins dropped, staring at the tablecloth. She went on in the sweet seraphim’s voice they had come to expect from her.

“Grandma asked, how could I not know what the life of a nun was like when I’d been around them my whole life. But there’s a lot you don’t know, a lot you’ll never know about a nun’s life. About the repression of emotion, and the amount of time spent in spiritual activities that might have been better spent on practical work. About living with a houseful of women with personality quirks that sometimes drive you mad, yet you can’t say a word, because if you do, you break Holy Rule. About asking forgiveness for things that don’t seem wrong. About obeying unquestioningly when you don’t believe what you’re doing is the best thing. About giving up your family and not being able to see them but once every five years. And yes, giving up the right to have children of your own when you love children so much and realize that you would have made a good mother, and probably a good wife, too.

“I made the decision to be a nun when I was eleven. Just think of that—
eleven!
 I hadn’t even grown to my full height yet, or had a say about how I wanted my hair cut, or been to the county fair without Mom and Dad, or paid for a dress with my own money. I hadn’t had a boyfriend yet or a job. How can a child of eleven know what she’s committing herself to when she says she wants to be a nun? Heavens, I was still entranced by their black habits.

“Mother gave me some old white curtains, remember, Elizabeth?”—she turned to the sister closest to her in age—“and a torn-up sheet, and I made a play habit out of white because there wasn’t enough black cloth around the house. I dressed in it the way other children dress up for Halloween, and I danced around the orchard between the apple trees, and watched the wind catch my veil, and knelt and sang 
Tantum Ergo
 one evening after a spring rain when there was a rainbow in the east. At eleven I saw it all as a... a sort of costume drama. Everything at church was dramatic—the candles, the incense, the processions with banners, the beautiful chanting, and us little girls in our new white dresses and veils strewing flower petals for Corpus Christi. What little girl wouldn’t be impressed by that? And the nuns were wrapped up in all of it. Besides that, they were teachers, and I revered them because I wanted to teach.

“So in our room Elizabeth and I played school, and she was always the student and I was always the teacher, and I’d take the wooden slat out of the bottom of a shade and use it as a pointer and tap the papered walls and pretend there were blackboards there and I was teaching her the alphabet. I wanted to be a teacher, and the only kind of teacher I had ever known wore a habit, so that’s the kind I wanted to be.

“But I was eleven...” More softly, she repeated, “... eleven.”

She glanced all around the table. Some faces were lifted, their expressions softening. “And everybody said what a wonderful nun I’d make. I should be a nun. Grandma said so, Mother said so, the nuns at school said so. And what child of eleven isn’t going to believe the people she admires the most? Pretty soon I thought so, too. So I became one... and

I 
was
 happy. For quite a long time, I was happy. So please don’t think I’m blaming you, or that I have regrets. There are no regrets here.” She crossed her wrists over her heart. “None at all.” The gold ring on her left hand glinted in the light and her voluminous sleeve looped down. By now most of the family members around the table were watching her, and she stood in the motionless pose for several seconds before going on.

“There is so much I like about living in my religious community. There’s the wonderful sense of belonging to this worldwide family that will always be there for me. There’s a sense of purpose to every hour of every day, of doing good, and of changing the world in important ways. When we pray together, especially during Divine Office, realizing that every other priest and nun the world over is offering up the same prayer at the same time—why, I cannot tell you how powerful and rewarding those times are. And I love teaching... some of the children have grown very special to me, and their families, too, and the people of the town who are so good to us at Saint Joseph’s.

“And, of course, from a much more practical standpoint, there’s tremendous security to living in a convent. All my worldly needs are taken care of—food, clothing, shelter, company, a job, a place to go if I get sick, a home for me in my old age. All of those things 
you
 take for granted because you’re married and you have children and you’ve always lived and worked here. You know where you belong. But when I leave my Order I’ll have nothing. Not a home, or a job, or even clothing. Certainly not a savings account, because members of a religious order are allowed to own nothing for themselves.

“So... when I leave there, I’ll be starting over as a... a displaced person. Maybe now you can understand what an agonizing decision this has been for me.”

Nobody said a word, so she went on, beseeching them to believe her. “And I haven’t missed the worldly things, honestly I haven’t. But I want... I want...” Her voice had grown tender and yearning. “Most of all I want a friend. Somebody I could talk to about all of this.” She paused and looked from one to the other, then her voice grew plaintive as she asked, “And if that friend were a man, would you forgive me?” She waited, but all remained silent. “Because I do have a friend who’s a man, and yes, he’s the one who drove me home. His wife died last September, and in his sorrow he turned to me. Oh, not physically. We talked, and prayed together, and on occasion wept, because he loved his wife so totally and richly and it seemed so unfair that God had taken her. He has two beautiful children, and I love them and feel such pity for them that... that holding myself apart from them has become a penance for me. I wanted to reach out to them when their mother died, and to their father as well. But this, you see, is forbidden to me. Because it is physical.”

Her motionless hands were loosely joined on the table. Her voice landed on her family like rose petals on a lawn.

“I’ve taken a vow of chastity, so if I say to you that I love this man—and I think I do—you think he’s the reason I’m leaving my vocation. But he came last. All the other reasons came first.”

One of the children came to the doorway just then and stopped, gazing from one adult face to another. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Another child joined her and said, “How come everybody’s just sitting here? Aren’t you going to do the dishes and play cards?”

Grandma Potlocki moved first: an easy escape. “Come on, girls,” she said to her daughters, “Carol’s right. Dishes are waiting.”

________

There was no card playing that afternoon. Instead, when the dishes were washed, Sister Regina’s siblings left one by one, taking their families and empty roasters with them. When Grandma left, Regina walked to the car with her. The old woman gave her granddaughter a hard, prolonged hug and said, “I don’t know, Regina. I just don’t know. I think you should make a retreat, make sure you’re doing the right thing. Will you do that for me?”

“I made one last August, for exactly this reason.”

“Well, make another one. Promise?”

Regina sighed. “All right, Grandma, I promise.”

In the house after everyone had left, Bertha tiptoed around as if there were a dead body laid out in the parlor. She seemed unable to meet Regina’s eyes, said little, and finally disappeared into her bedroom, ostensibly to take a nap, which she’d never done in her life.

Sister Regina knelt in her room and recited Vespers and Compline, Matins and lauds, and when dusk was falling, went out to the barn, where her father was milking. She had always loved milking time in the barn. Warmed by the animals’ bodies, it was cozy and redolent of hay and bovine. Two dim electric lights spread a tarnished yellow dinge over the animals and the cobwebbed beams overhead. Her father sat between two holsteins, sending rhythmic streams into a frothy pail.

“Can I help you, Daddy?”

“Sure. Grab a pail.”

She found a bucket and milking stool and settled down with her sleeves rolled up, her skirts forming a hammock, between the warm bulk of two cows who were noisily chewing their cuds. The knack came back immediately, and her arm muscles grew pleasantly hot. Soon she realized she and her father were milking in point/counterpoint as they had when she was young. He created a lead beat and she an afterbeat with their streams of milk.