Toward That Which is Beautiful

by Marian O'Shea Wernicke

  Do you need anything when we come? Grandma wants to come, too, so I guess the whole bunch of us will be there. God bless—

  Your loving,

  Mom

  Chapter Eleven

  August 29, 1957

  Entrance Day! Finally it came. Waking in her flowered bedroom that morning with Maggie sprawled in the twin bed across from her, Kate’s first sight was the black trunk piled with black and white clothes. The only splash of color was the pink bottle of Desert Flower Hand Lotion.

  Kate yawned and stretched. Her parents had taken her downtown the night before for dinner and dancing on the Admiral. Under the stars her father had held her close. She could feel his breath on her cheek as he gazed down at her. She hummed along to “Unchained Melody”: “Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much . . .”

  “Katie,” he whispered, “you can always come home. We’ll always have a bed for you.”

  “But Dad, I thought you were happy for me.”

  For once there was no witty remark. Her father just tightened his arm around her waist.

  Sunday afternoon was heavy with an oncoming storm. As the O’Neill’s station wagon pulled away from the curb, Kate looked back and watched the brick house of her childhood recede in the shade of the elm trees lining the street. The storm broke loose as they got on the highway, forcing her father to pull over for a few minutes. He cursed under his breath. Maggie announced that surely this was a sign that they should just turn around and forget the whole convent thing. Nobody said anything after that.

  Finally the station wagon pulled up to the back entrance of the novitiate, and Kate’s family spilled out as her father unloaded the black trunk Kate had packed so carefully with her black and white trousseau. Three other girls from her high school were entering with her, and Kate was relieved to see their faces amid the chattering nervous group of girls. Each new postulant had been assigned a senior novice as a “guardian angel” who would be a guide and confidante for a few weeks until she could get her bearings in this alien world.

  As they all stood around uncertainly in the large entrance hall, Kate saw a tall novice gliding toward her with a smile. She realized it was Joan Schmidt, a girl from Mercy High School who had graduated two years before. Her brother Eddie had been in Kate’s class.

  “Hi, Kate,” she said, putting her arm around Kate’s shoulder. “I’m Sister Gabriela now. Welcome to the novitiate. I’m so glad I get to be your guardian angel.” She greeted Kate’s parents and told them she would give them a little tour while Kate and all the other new postulants went upstairs to the dormitories to change.

  In a daze, Kate followed the other girls up the wide mahogany staircase, its steps worn by the tread of hundreds of girls over the years. They came to a wide hall with dormitories of six beds each on either side. Kate saw her name on the door of St. Joseph’s dormitory and found her cell, the first one on the right, next to the door. Each cell was marked by iron rods from which hung white sheets, now neatly tied back, but which at night were drawn, isolating the girls from each other’s sight, but they were still able to hear the sighs, occasional giggles, and sometimes sobs of each other. A narrow iron bed with a thin white coverlet, a small four-drawer stand with a pitcher and bowl on it, and a single wooden chair were the only furnishings.

  All the other girls were pulling the curtains around their beds, so Kate did, too. Then she changed into her postulant uniform, which had been hung from the iron rod near her bed. As she fastened the snaps of her black cotton blouse, she noticed that her fingers were trembling. Then she pulled on the pleated black wool skirt and black cotton stockings. When she lifted her new black leather oxfords out of the tissue paper, she remembered the little old gray-haired lady in Famous Barr who had admired them.

  “Ooh,” she had trilled, “those look so comfortable. I need a pair just like them.”

  When Kate told her friends the story later she had laughingly admitted that it was the one time all summer when she’d had serious second thoughts about her decision. But now she was excited. She couldn’t wait to go down and show her family how she looked. As she hurried to pull back the curtains and join the other giggling, chattering girls heading downstairs, she realized there was no mirror in her cell. Sister Gabriela was waiting for her, and as she helped Kate fasten on the stiff white collar and cuffs, she smiled.

  “You’ll wear this outfit for three weeks,” she said. “Then on the third Sunday, you’ll receive the cape and veil of the postulant.”

  “When do we get the real habit and white veil, like you?”

  “Oh, that’s a whole year away, not until next July 25, the feast of St. James, if you make it that far,” she said with a grin. “Okay, let’s go. Your parents want to see you, and the bell will be ringing in a few minutes for the end of visiting.”

  As Kate came downstairs, she caught sight of her parents and Maggie in the crowd of families waiting in the foyer below. She twirled before them. “Well, how do I look?”

  Then she saw their faces. Her mother’s set smile could not quite hide the pain in her eyes. Her father for once said nothing and looked nervously away. Only Maggie seemed herself, and as they hugged goodbye, she whispered, “Better you than me, kiddo.” Kate felt tears forming, and could not even whisper that last goodbye as the heavy convent door shut behind her family.

  Kate followed the novices into a long line forming in the cloister walk. On her right was a carefully tended square courtyard garden with roses and zinnias and petunias, beside a flagstone path. The afternoon shadows were lengthening across the grass and the ivy-covered walls of the chapel opposite. Then the long line of novices and postulants filed into the chapel, cool after the heat of the August afternoon. As Kate’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, she saw that the chapel was filled with a hundred or so black-veiled nuns, all rising as the organ intoned the music for Vespers, the evening song. Suddenly light flooded the church, and Kate gazed down the long aisle to the gold and white altar that lay at the heart of the convent, the altar of sacrifice.

  Those first weeks in the convent were strange yet exciting. Kate felt as if she were living in a foreign country whose language and customs she was struggling to learn. Each minute of the day, the postulants followed a strict routine in the old monastic tradition of prayer and work. Kate was awakened each morning in the dark at 4:45 a.m. by the irritatingly cheerful voice of her guardian angel Sister Gabriela, the novice assigned to their dorm: “Life is short; death is certain. God alone knows the hour of death.” With this scary thought Kate would be jolted out of some dream and struggle to her feet to bathe her face and hands in the basin of water on her night stand, brush her teeth, and dress quickly, all the while trying to remember the sequence of morning prayers the other sleepy girls were reciting around her. Then it was down to the cloister walk to wait for the little silver bell that Sister Mary Margaret, the postulant mistress, would ring when all were assembled to signal the postulants and novices to file into the chapel for the first hour of the Divine Office, Lauds.

  Silent meditation followed. Kate would begin to meditate on a scene from the Gospel, say the one with Jesus and the woman at the well, and fifteen minutes later would find herself fantasizing about swimming in a lake with her friends from high school.

  After a half hour, Father Finn, the chaplain, came to the altar to say Mass. There were rumors that the Father was a shell-shocked veteran of World War II, and Kate wondered about his story. The only man living among all these women, he became for her a comforting presence, and she was happy to see him on his walks through the grounds, smoking his pipe, his old Irish setter padding stiffly behind him.

  Kate wasn’t used to going to Mass daily, but it soon became her favorite part of the day. When the nuns sang the Gregorian Chant, the singing rose like silver in the echoing chapel. At times high and ethereal, their voices would suddenly sweep low and passionate so that Kate trembled at the intensity. She felt like crying for happiness sometimes and would whispe
r her thanks to the image of the handsome resurrected Christ on the cross above the altar. This was no man of sorrows, suffering and gruesome, but a splendidly dressed bridegroom, and they were all his brides.

  Once when a group of the postulants were scrubbing the floor, they began to laugh about being brides of Christ. JoAnn, older and more cynical than the others, said she felt more like Cinderella at the moment, and Kate snickered and wondered aloud, “Well, does that make Jesus a bigamist?” At this they all laughed helplessly, wiping their tears on their blue-and-white checked aprons until Sister Mary Margaret appeared in the doorway.

  After a quick silent breakfast of hot cereal and a roll, the postulants and novices scattered to make their beds and do their chores before class started at eight. Their studies were interrupted at nine to pray Terce, and fifteen minutes later the postulants and novices were all back in class until Sext at noon. After a brief spiritual reading at lunch, Sister rang the bell permitting them to talk freely for the first time all day. Their eager young voices would rise in a great clash of laughter and teasing until Sister tapped the bell, “Sisters, let’s remember to speak in ladylike tones.”

  Kate thought that Sister Mary Margaret’s idea of ladylike came from a Victorian novel, but in general the postulant mistress was friendly and understanding. According to the novices’ gossip, this was Sister’s first year in the newly designed job of postulant mistress. Previously, the whole novitiate had been under the strict reign of Sister Mary Paul, the tall, bent mistress of novices, whose piercing blue eyes struck fear into the heart of every postulant.

  After lunch, which was more what the girls from the country called dinner—a heavy meal of soup and homemade bread, a salad, a main course of roast beef or chicken, vegetables, and some tasty little custard for dessert—the postulants would pour out into the backyard to sit under the trees or walk up into the orchard, happy to be free for a while in the apple-filled air of autumn. Too soon the bell rang for afternoon classes.

  Once a week they would have instructions with Sister in their study hall. Sister Mary Margaret led them through each chapter of the Holy Rule of the Order, which had been handed down from St. Dominic himself. A study period followed, during which Kate often nodded over her algebra assignment, then Vespers in the chapel, and then another hour of recreation, spent sewing in their upstairs community room, or playing pinochle on feast days and Sundays. Kate’s mother played bridge, but pinochle! Kate had never heard of it. Sister Mary Margaret scolded her for not paying attention when she and Kate were partners one night. Kate saw that the nun was deadly serious about the game and decided not to volunteer to be her partner again.

  When the bell rang for Compline, the girls filed into chapel for the last prayer of the day, their chant books heavy in their hands, smothering yawns. The last song was always a hymn to Our Lady, and when the voices of the nuns died away, deep night silence muffled the convent like a blanket of snow.

  Kate hadn’t seen the point of all this silence, having been raised in an Irish family where everyone gabbed on from morning until night. The postulants often played tricks on each other in the darkness of the dormitories, short-sheeting beds and mixing up dresser drawers. They would stuff sheets in their mouths to stifle laughter when the unsuspecting victim discovered the prank and swore softly in the dark.

  Some of the postulants were a few years older than Kate. They had already been to college or had worked, so were more sophisticated than she. Because several girls were in the throes of nicotine withdrawal during their first weeks, Sister Mary Margaret supplied them with hard candy to help them over the hump. Gradually friendships formed as the girls got to know one another. Kate found herself drawn to several of the older girls whose wisecracks undermined the rules and formalities of daily life in the novitiate. The six-inch rule was particularly funny to them all. Signs, neatly lettered, were posted everywhere. The water in the bathtub was not to exceed six inches; the windows could be raised only six inches.

  Kate’s world was shrinking. She lived in a cocoon of women, free to wander around the convent property, up into the orchard or woods, but she saw no other people for days at a time. Kate found herself delighting in watching the nine-year-old altar boys as they brushed back their hair and winked at each other during Father’s daily homily. There was no radio or television, and worst of all for Kate, no daily newspaper. The great world beyond shrank into a dim memory.

  Sometimes her memories returned with vivid poignancy. One Saturday night Kate had gone to bed after a long day of housework (Saturday morning was entirely devoted to major housecleaning), choir practice, and instructions. Finally, starting at eight o’clock, the nuns spent an hour and a half in chapel singing Matins. Sister Mary Margaret told them to offer up these prayers for all the sins that were being committed in the world on a Saturday night. Several postulants grinned knowingly.

  Although it was October, the windows were open in the dormitory, as it had been a particularly warm day. Kate heard a car go by with the radio blaring loudly. She tried to identify the song, when a girl’s laughter rose ethereally in the humid night. The car sped off, and the silence of the country echoed in the sudden stillness. She pictured herself in that car. That’s where she belonged, she thought. She was eighteen. What was she doing in bed at ten o’clock on a Saturday night? She tried to sleep, but tears ran down her cheeks, wetting the pillow.

  Most days she was cheerful. She loved her classes, especially English. She had discovered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and would wander out to sit under a tree during Saturday afternoon study period when she should have been working on her algebra, and memorize his poems: “Elect’d Silence sing to me . . .” Hopkins’ struggle to give himself over to the Divine Lover helped her see the way to surrender the world.

  Sundays were Kate’s favorite time. As the external world receded, she felt her internal world expand. Kate remembered the rainy November Sunday she found Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain in the library. She had curled up in a big chair in one of the empty front parlors used only for visitors and was startled several hours later when the bell rang for Sext. Kate was mesmerized by Merton’s early life—the loss of his mother, his travels all over with his artist father. Reading about his years of desperate adolescent loneliness, and his drinking and chasing girls, took her far away from the convent for a few hours, yet brought her closer to an obscure understanding of what was supposed to happen to her. She read in The Seven Storey Mountain of Merton’s delight when he discovered the way of life of the Trappists, and she copied the passage into her notebook: “What wonderful happiness there was, then, in the world. There were still men on this miserable, noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude, who dwelt in forgotten mountain cells, in secluded monasteries, where the news and desires and appetites and conflicts of the world no longer reached them.”

  Yes, Kate thought, this, too, is what she would learn: to give up everything for Christ, to be stripped of her old self in order to be reborn. As she headed to chapel that Sunday afternoon, she knew that her journey had begun in earnest.

  Eleven months later, on July 25, the feast of St. James, Kate awakened to the sound of the novices singing, “Behold the bridegroom cometh.” It was the day she and her classmates would receive the full habit of the Dominican sisters, but with the white veil of a novice instead of the black veil of the professed sisters, those who had taken vows. Drenched in sweat on this summer morning, Kate stripped to her waist and sponged off her body, the water cool and delicious on her skin. She touched her short hair—hair that had been cut yesterday in preparation for the veil she would receive today. Some of the girls had wept to see the long blond and brown waves drift to the floor as old Sister Madeline, the convent barber, wielded her sharp scissors. The nun, bent and worn, clucked and hissed at them to be still, insisting that God would be pleased with the sacrifice of their beauty.

  Kate stood next to her good friend Cookie, and they laughed at
the drama taking place before them. Neither had long hair, so the short cut would not be much different from their usual style. Kate couldn’t wait to receive the habit and finally begin to feel like a real nun.

  After breakfast, the girls gathered in the community room, where they dressed in long white gowns and veils for the ceremony. From somewhere boxes of powder had appeared mysteriously, with names like My Sin, Arpege, and Je Reviens embossed in gold. Kate stood very still in her underwear as her guardian angel, Sister Gabriela, dusted her with the powder; soon she saw clouds of it floating around the room, and the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle rose in the heat.

  “This is so you don’t sweat all over the gown,” Sister Gabriela whispered. “They use these gowns every year, you know, and they have to be sent to the cleaners in town.” Then she slipped the gown over Kate’s head and tied the wide sash tightly around her waist.

  All the postulants had been badly disappointed when they saw their gowns, which were nothing like the wedding gowns they were supposed to suggest. More like angel costumes from a school play, the gowns were made of cheap imitation satin belted at the waist, with wide butterfly sleeves. The tall, thin girls looked fairly graceful, but short, chubby Marilyn Becker looked more like a Kewpie doll. Oh well, they weren’t supposed to be vain anymore, so what did it matter? Finally the long net veil was secured to her hair with bobby pins, and a wreath of real carnations and baby’s breath crowned the veil.

  The heavy, spicy odor of the carnations made Kate think suddenly of her senior prom and how it felt to be dancing with Eddie Macon as he held her too close, his body pressing against her.