by John Moss
“Why doesn’t the nun have a name?”
“Oh, she does, but somehow the story seems more authentic if her name is generic. Her name was Sister Mary Joseph. When Sister Marie Celeste died, Sister Mary took to wearing a pale-blue habit, quite unlike the black prescribed by her order. Even after she left the church, she called herself Mary Joseph, and continued to wear a modified blue habit. Her original name was Katherine Morrison, if memory serves. She became known as the Blue Nun.”
“You said she was excommunicated. It all ends in disgrace?” Miranda was anxious for more, torn between wanting every possible detail and wanting to get on with the plot.
“The Church was not amused. There was too much about this folk saint that made them uneasy. On the one hand, they like adding saints to the canon; on the other, a saint too familiar — who speaks directly to the people with the voice of the Holy Mother, and directly to God — was, as you can imagine, unsettling.
“The priests for whom she had been housekeeper became her most dogged believers, second only to the Blue Nun in their devotion. When they altered the celebration of Mass to admit the adoration of Marie Celeste into prescribed ritual, however, the Church was incensed. This entire edifice, as I’ve said, was transformed into a shrine with a hierarchy of its own, featuring Marie Celeste as the principal object of veneration, even before Mary, and certainly before the Holy Male Trinity. Echoes of the voice rang through the revised liturgy, and women were celebrated and sexuality was removed from its burden of wickedness, set free from the pseudo-castrato divinations of a celibate priesthood.”
“Excellent,” observed Morgan, although it as unclear whether he was referring to Church reform or the speaker’s charismatic eloquence.
“Thank you,” said Alexander Pope, in no doubt about where the credit belonged. “Nothing inspires like righteousness. But then, in my story, things change. The two priests in the confessional, confessing their sins to the nun, itself a heresy the Church authorities had missed, admitted sickness of the soul so profound it could no longer be contained. Their obsessive adoration of Saint Marie Celeste was impeded, it seemed, by keeping secret a terrible crime.
“Their confessor in turn kept their secret, but demanded such awesome penance that others were appalled. The two priests, side by side, worked polishing the stone floors to a deep lustre, scrubbing the woodwork night and day, cleaning night soil from the latrines that had been erected to accommodate pilgrims, and when they were not engaged in menial and sordid activities such as these, they were to be found in postures of abject obeisance before a statuary image of Sister Marie Celeste.”
“The priests confessed to sexual abuse,” Morgan concluded.
“Of Sister Marie!” said Miranda, annoyed at the interruption, appalled at the suggestion.
“Think about it,” Morgan continued, not in the least nonplussed to be commandeering Pope’s narrative. “Beneath all the religious trappings, it is a fairly straightforward story.”
He’s right, she thought. Everything fits. She turned to Alexander Pope, addressing him almost formally, as if he might assist their investigation in progress. “The nun would never have relinquished her power,” she said. “The secrets of the confessional were safe enough. It must have been the priests, themselves, who broke. It is one thing to molest an unschooled farm girl, another to have abused a saint.”
“No, they did not break,” said Alexander. “They were broken. Rumours and gossip did them in. The more voraciously the two priests atoned for their sins through public humiliation, the more lurid their crimes became in the imagination of pilgrims and the Church alike. Civil authorities seemed indifferent.”
It was Miranda, not Morgan, who interjected to suggest perhaps Pope was straying from his documentary sources.
“Not at all,” he declared. “I would place more faith in a zealot’s diary, the correspondence of spinsters, an old nun’s memory, than in the so-called objectivity of, say, a police report. Objectivity obscures the truth, based on the illusion that reason is a suitable criterion for assessing experience, and it is not. The Church, demanding three miracles for sainthood: that is the reduction of wonder to empirical evidence, as if proof were an adequate measure of anything beyond science.”
“And science, as we all know,” said Morgan, “deals in chimerical absolutes.”
“Well said,” said Pope.
“I’m only agreeing,” said Morgan.
“As I said,” said Pope. “Well said.”
“What happened?” Miranda demanded. “It was a dark and stormy night… Then what?”
“On the evening of April 23rd, 1893, the two priests expired before a hundred witnesses, yet no one could say for sure how they died. Some said it was seizures, and some said they had consumed poison in the Eucharist wine — a nasty twist on the sacrament of transubstantiation. Some said their breath was sucked out of them by winds blowing from the sacristy as they emerged with the Host, and some said they were strangled.”
“By whom?” Miranda asked with urgency, as if some revelation were at hand.
“No one seemed to know — no one saw what happened,” he said, deflating her excitement. “Perhaps in their collective hysteria the witnesses were blinded.”
“I think it was the Blue Nun,” said Miranda. “She poisoned the wine. She had access, motive, and an obvious capacity for the most bizarre of ironies.”
“Motive?” Morgan asked.
“She alone knew what the priests had done.”
“The priests themselves granted her the authority of the confessional,” said Pope.
“To gather their sins, perhaps, but not the ability to absolve them. And even if they didn’t fess up,” said Miranda, “the Blue Nun would have known. I mean, what else would have led a young woman like Lorraine to madness, however inspired?”
“Madness!” Pope exclaimed, surprised at the turn his story was taking.
“Madness,” she reiterated.
“You are cynical, Detective.”
“And you?” said Morgan. “Surely you’re not a believer.”
“Of course I am,” said Alexander Pope. “In the story, not necessarily in manifestations of the divine. But if you can’t believe in stories, how will you ever get to the truth?”
Miranda briefly contemplated the difference between what is true and the truth, then took possession of the narrative as if she were a textual critic. “Here was a young woman, somewhat simple-minded, you said, uneducated, for sure, and quite pretty. Living alone with two men, two celibates representing an institution darkly obsessed with sex — men sick with sex because sex is deemed by their faith a sickness and they were men. Do you think they could have resisted? Thousands in the history of the priesthood have not.” She looked into the eyes of the other two in rapid succession, then down at the stone floor. “What disgusts me is that they not only shared the girl’s body, but they must have absolved each other of guilt, rationalizing to God their shameless brutality with the same facile religiosity they would have used to seduce their victim.
“People remarked on her changed condition,” Miranda continued. The story was now hers. “She became increasingly morose; her only relief from her sorrows was prayer. And she prayed to the same God who in her own simple cosmology sanctioned her abuse in the beds of his profligate priests.
“Little wonder she broke. Like a rag doll in a wringer. Of course she saw Mary. Mary was the only one in that heavenly host who wasn’t abusing her. And of course she fell mute. She had no words to describe her spiritual fusion with the Virgin Mother. Psychologists today might describe her behaviour as a hysterical response. I think it was the most natural response in the world, given her circumstances.”
“And the nun,” said Morgan. “What about her? The nun and the voice. Was that exploitation?”
“I would say the Blue Nun recognized rape in the girl’s eyes from the first moment she appeared. A survivor of sexual assault will usually know when it has happened to another.” She gl
anced at Morgan for reassurance. “I would say she recognized herself in the young woman’s pain and salvation. The two are inseparable — sorrow and salvation — as the Virgin bore witness. Sister Mary Joseph merged her own story, the abuses that led to her own retreat from the world, with Lorraine Eliott’s. Together they became Sister Marie Celeste and the voice came to life.”
“Why would Mary Joseph do that? Eliminate the priests?” asked Pope. “I would think she had everything to lose.”
“Because she could,” said Miranda. “It’s as simple as that. It was within her power. The three Marys — Mary Joseph, Marie Celeste, and the Virgin Mary — had seized control of the Church, at least in this small outpost of St. Peter’s ponderous empire.”
“The provincial coroner’s report described their passing as ‘Death by Misadventure.’ That struck me as an understatement,” said Alexander Pope.
“It simply means no one was prepared to lay charges,” said Morgan.
Alexander continued his story. “The priests were posthumously reviled, and the rumour was officially sanctioned that they had taken their own lives under the influence of Satan. Church authorities lost no time in seizing control of the renegade outpost. They plastered over the walls, cleaned out anything smacking of idolatry, and declared the people’s saint a fraud, a disgrace, a blasphemy to contemplate.”
“But people went on believing, didn’t they, even to the present day?” said Miranda. “Sister Mary Joseph was cast out, and when nothing else quelled the devotion of Marie Celeste’s followers, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was declared never to have existed, and its bond with its congregants was annulled like a bad marriage.”
“Exactly. The Blue Nun disappeared, but eventually she was found in Toronto, doing good works in a small mission off Jarvis Street for the benefit of prostitutes and battered women.”
“You two tell a good story,” said Morgan. “I wonder how much came from the tellers and how much from the tale.”
“Observe,” responded Alexander Pope with a sweep of his arm to take in the lustrous frescoes revealing the life of Saint Marie Celeste.
“Yes,” said Miranda. “Nothing is in doubt but ourselves!”
chapter eleven
Wychwood Park
“I’ve heard of her,” said Rachel Naismith as they drove west on Dupont, then turned up Spadina. “There’s Catherine Tekakwitha in Quebec and Marie Celeste in Ontario. I didn’t grow up Catholic, but almost everybody who wasn’t black in our neighbourhood did. Black people were Baptist, white people were Catholic. That was the order of the world, neatly divided. You’d hear stories about the Huron saint and that girl from Georgian Bay — the Beausoleil Virgin. I don’t think, from what I heard, either were virgins, except in the spiritual sense. Inviolate innocents. That’s plural for ‘innocent,’ with a ‘t.’ Not innocence with a ‘c.’ Innocence is a renewable commodity for Catholics. I think I always envied them that.”
“Inviolate innocence. Sounds very floral and colourful. And instead you became a cop,” said Miranda.
“I did,” she responded with a gleeful lilt in her voice. “I lost interest in innocence ’bout the same time I discovered boys.”
“Boys?” Miranda queried, trying not to sound overly inquisitive.
“I like boys, girl! I always have.”
Miranda had no idea whether Rachel also liked girls. Since they had spent the night together, they accepted the affection between them as a feature of their relationship, which neither was prepared to risk losing. Their intimacy was open, and perhaps it was the openness that kept it from seeming overtly sexual. They were comfortable with each other. Ironically, Miranda thought, in the same way she was comfortable with Morgan. Except Morgan was more complex. Or she was more complex with Morgan. And sometimes she and Morgan were uncomfortable.
“I certainly do like Alexander Pope; don’t we both?” said Rachel. “Now, he is a boy you could play with.”
Miranda gave a throaty laugh. “I cannot think of another man who has so completely left the boy in his wake. He’s one of those people who seems to have been born an adult. He speaks to the world from a position of imperious knowledge.”
“He does not. He’s warm and kind and… and lots of other good things.”
“Agreed, he’s a virtual saint, but he’s not snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.”
“You can’t knock him for confidence, Miranda. He’s one of the best in the world at the things he does.”
“I’m not knocking him. I like him as much as you do. More — I know him better. I’m just saying I can’t picture him as a child.”
“He would have been shorter.”
“And a poet?”
“A precocious poet, writing in couplets.”
“And a garden designer. A tiny, perfect little person penning The Rape of the Lock when others his age were keeping their prurience stealthy.”
“Did you ever read that?” Rachel asked. “The Rape of the Lock?”
“I did.”
“Much ado about nothing. I skipped most of the classes.”
“That’s the point, Rachel. It was supposed to be much ado about nothing.”
“Exposing a lost saint to the world. Come on, it’s a little more exciting than squawking rape over a locket of hair.”
“Rape is a measure of loss. Belinda’s innocence is violated.”
“Well, I’d appreciate our Alexander no better. He’s a poet, but with real things, not words.”
“Nothing’s more real than words,” said Miranda. She suspected she actually believed that was true.
“He has a poetic sensibility,” said Rachel, confidently.
“He has,” Miranda agreed. “It’s like apostolic succession. His great-sire’s genes confer upon our present Pope the poetic authority whereby he imbues moribund ruins with life.”
“Did you say ‘whereby’? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say ‘whereby’ in a conversation. What about ‘notwithstanding’?”
“I’ve been hanging around Morgan.”
“He does talk like that, doesn’t he?”
“Sometimes,” said Miranda, immediately feeling as if she had betrayed him. “He reads a lot. He has an eccentric memory. Sometimes he remembers whole paragraphs from some esoteric journal or website, and sometimes he can’t remember what day it is. That makes him interesting. He’s infinitely unpredictable.”
“So, why aren’t you two together?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What about you and me and Alexander Pope. We’d make a good threesome.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You have a raunchy mind, Miranda. I was talking about friendship. We make good company, just the three of us.”
Miranda suspected Rachel’s statement was somehow a judgment of Morgan. She felt uneasy talking about Morgan to Rachel. But she was also wary talking about her to him. Friends could be like that, she thought; your friendships could be mutually exclusive. That was the nice thing about their relationship with Alexander: the three of them created a nice ambiance. Nothing intense, just an aura of comfort. Nothing enduring.
As they drove under the lee of Casa Loma, that extravagant anachronism dedicated to a wealthy dreamer’s long-suffering wife, Miranda glanced over at her friend. There was something wonderfully direct about Rachel, she thought. Driving through the gates of Wychwood Park, a ravine enclave of cultural entrepreneurs and tasteful Edwardian houses, she revised her judgment. By the time the car pulled up in front of the house where her ward, Jill Bray, lived with the housekeeper, who had virtually raised her from an infant, Miranda decided the secret to Rachel lay in her taking life as it comes. Rachel did not simplify the complexity of the world; she simply refused to resolve the ambiguities.
Jill was sitting on the verandah steps with a friend. “Hi, Rachel,” she called. “Hi, Mandy.”
“My name is Miranda. I don’t have nicknames, I’m not the type.” She leaned over and kissed Jill
on the cheek. “Hello, Justine.”
“Hi, Mandy.”
“You can’t call her that,” said Jill to her friend. “I don’t call your mother ‘Mom.’”
“Hello Detective Quin,” said Justine. “And you must be Rachel.”
“How could you tell?” said Rachel.
“Easy,” said Jill. “You’re the one with short hair. Rachel, this is Justine. Justine, this is Rachel. She is a twelfth-generation Canadian”
“Not quite,” said Rachel.
“And Justine is a Canadian ad infinitum,” said Jill.
“Meaning what?” Rachel asked, and immediately answered, “First Nations, of course. You don’t look native to me…. Oh, my God, did I say that? Child, forgive me. You are of course aboriginal, looks are deceiving. Welcome to my world.”
“Actually, I’m a mixture of Swedish and Portuguese.”
“She refuses to be categorized with hyphenated citizenship.”
“My ancestry is the earth itself,” Justine pronounced. “My grandparents are buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Ergo, I am of the earth: a native Canadian.”
“Well, Justine,” said Miranda, “you might find a few authentic First Nations people who would be inclined to find your position presumptuous.”
“Mandy,” said Jill, with a tone of scorn in her voice that only a fifteen-year-old girl can manifest from the depths of her illimitable experience. “Please. Don’t be condescending.”
Rachel looked the two girls over with a mixture of righteousness and envy. They somehow managed to make low-slung jeans and tight, abbreviated tank tops obscenely provocative. “You two aren’t going anywhere dressed like that.”
