Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

  Sister Mary Margaret showed her the outhouse, and pointed out the public entrance to the main chapel. If Myrthen liked, she could sit that evening — behind the grille that separated the cloistered nuns from the outside world — and listen to them chant the Divine Office. Sister Mary Margaret would herself bring a meal to Myrthen at the cottage before Vespers.

  Left alone in the joyful austerity of the room, Myrthen sank to her knees on the planked floor, crossed herself, and began to pray. But she was too excited by the prospect of living amid these dark-veiled brides in peaceful solitude and contemplation to continue the Rosary. Her mind wandered to Ruth.

  “I can feel you so closely now, Ruthie. I knew I would be able to! All my life I’ve been waiting, and now here I am. It will almost be like we’re together again,” she whispered. “I wonder if they have an organ, and if I’ll be allowed to play.”

  The next morning, Myrthen woke up at five o’clock and attended early Mass. She rejoiced at the sight of those black-and-white figures with their heads bowed in the pews, felt the body of Christ on her tongue as though for the first time. She didn’t touch the breakfast that Sister Mary Margaret brought for her, not wanting to dilute the unleavened memory of the wafer in her mouth. When it was time, she was lead to the speakroom, where she would meet the Mother Prioress.

  A large iron grille bisected the room like a screen on an open window. When the Prioress finally entered from her side of the grille, Myrthen bowed her head and held her hands, palms up, right over left, seeking her blessing. The Prioress gave it, and Myrthen would have kissed her hand were it not for the grille between them. Instead she simply stood.

  “Please, child, sit down.” The Prioress was small and round as she was tall. Her cheeks were squeezed plump by her wimple, which also covered every strand of her hair. It was difficult to guess how old she was, how many years she might have knelt in the choir, how long she’d followed her own path from cell to chapel. There were wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, however, and she used glasses to peer at the piece of paper she held in her hands. Ah, there they were, the liver spots and crêpe-like skin that matched the peacefully deep voice of advancing age.

  The Prioress looked up from the paper she held — Myrthen’s original letter of inquiry — and smiled. “What a blessing it is to have you come and visit us. Have you enjoyed your stay thus far?”

  “Oh yes, very much. It’s beautiful here, really. Sister Mary Margaret has been so gracious, and the nuns … oh, everyone has been very cheerful … I found myself enchanted by the sounds of their voices together last night during prayer. Praise be to God!”

  “Praise be to God, indeed.” The Prioress folded her hands atop the letter in her lap. “Now, Miss Bergmann, as I told you in my letter, the formation of a nun is a lengthy process, starting with our introduction. If that goes well, we will ask that you spend some time to seriously discern if God may be calling you to the religious life — ”

  “Oh, but I’ve already spent so much time! I’m certain that I’ve been called. I’ve known it all my life!”

  The Prioress nodded for a moment, then said, “All right then, why don’t you start by telling me about your life?”

  “What … what would you like to know?”

  “Tell me about when you were a girl. Did you like athletics? Did you join clubs at school? Did you have many friends?”

  “I spent much of my time at home. My father was often ill. He was a coal miner. And my mother … my mother needed my help. And when I wasn’t at home, I spent time at our parish, Saint Michael’s.” She wondered for the first time if her singular devotion was an asset in the eyes of the Prioress. How could it not be?

  “What about your siblings?”

  “I had a twin. Ruth. She died when we were almost six. She was helping our mother carry jars to the cellar and slipped and fell down the stairs.” Myrthen dropped her head.

  “I’m sorry, child. Surely she is with our Lord, in His care.”

  Myrthen nodded. That half-remembered memory left her cold whenever she got too close to it. The crash, the scream. Her mother, crying. It’s not your fault, Father Timothy had said. Everything is God’s will, you must pray.

  After an appropriate pause, the Prioress continued. “What about suitors? Did you have boyfriends? Dates?”

  “Not … boyfriends, exactly.”

  “No?” The Prioress looked at her over the top of her glasses. “Did you have dates?”

  She thought of the night with John on her parents’ couch. “I didn’t have dates, not the traditional way.” Now she was concerned about the flow of information, how it weighed in the Mother’s mind. Was it good or bad for nuns to have been on dates at some point in their lives?

  “I see. Nontraditional dates, then?”

  “Well, yes. One boy would come sit with me and my parents, but I never went out with him anywhere. When I was nineteen years old, we married. Not by choice, mind you. I didn’t want to be married to anyone other than God. But I had to, for the sake of my parents. They wouldn’t hear of me joining a convent. They needed me near. My father was ill, as I said, and my mother. Well, I couldn’t abandon my mother. So I did it, for their sakes. But it’s ended, fortunately.”

  “Has he passed on, then?”

  Myrthen looked down. “No. He’s still living. But it’s being nullified. He’s asked for a divorce, which of course I won’t grant him. It’s being done properly.” She looked up, hubris glinting in her eyes. “I’d have done it as soon as my parents died if I’d had the reason. But finally I did: he committed the sin of adultery. And more than that, he asked for a divorce.”

  “You know, of course, that a divorce is only a civil procedure.”

  Myrthen nodded.

  “So you’ve been granted an annulment of the union?”

  “Well …” Myrthen cleared her throat. “It hasn’t been granted yet.”

  “Have you heard from the marriage tribunal? Where does it stand?”

  “Well … I haven’t actually … begun the process.”

  The Prioress folded up Myrthen’s letter and set it to the side. “My dear, I must speak to you now from the point of view of canon law. Frankly, I’m surprised your pastor would send you all the way here without explaining it to you first.”

  Myrthen leaned forward, a line of sweat beading on her lip. “Whatever do you mean? I haven’t been sent. I didn’t even tell Father Timothy that I was coming.”

  The Prioress nodded. “You would have had to, eventually. All candidates must provide letters of recommendation from their pastors. Nevertheless, that’s not what’s important now,” she said. “There are certain clear signs that entering the religious life is not your vocation.”

  Myrthen held her breath.

  “You were married in the Church.”

  She nodded.

  “It mystifies people, the nature of marriage.” The Prioress twisted the gold band she wore that symbolized her union with God. “In the secular world, it is a contract between a man and a woman. But when two Christians are joined in marriage, it becomes a sacramental contract that is nearly impossible to break.”

  Silence.

  “It’s very rare — very rare — for an annulment to be granted. The circumstances must be extenuating, dear. Far beyond the straying of a spouse. You would have to prove that the marriage was null at the time of the ceremony. It would likely have to go all the way to the Vatican, and it could take years, and even then, your petition would most probably be refused.” She paused for a moment and then looked Myrthen directly in the eyes. “I’m afraid that in the eyes of the Church, you are still married, Mrs.…”

  “Esposito.”

  “The canon law relating to admission to the novitiate clearly states that a spouse — while the marriage lasts — is ineligible. I’m very sorry.”

  “Ineligible?” Myrthen shrieked. “You’re saying he has to die first? I have to wait for him to die?”

  “There, there.” The Prioress looked
genuinely concerned. “Is there any way I can help you? Would you like to stay a few more days in the guest cottage and pray?”

  Myrthen put her face in her hands and began to cry.

  “There are secular Carmelites who live in the world as laypersons but follow Carmelite spirituality, blended with works of the apostolate. Perhaps you could seek out possibilities with them? Serve God and His community as an educator, perhaps, or a health care provider.”

  “No!” Myrthen yanked her hands away from her face and glared at the Prioress. She saw the Prioress’s eyes widen and her back press against the rest of her chair. “No,” she repeated, but more softly. “I don’t want to live as a layperson. I want to be cloistered. I want to … I want to be with the Sisters and belong only to God.”

  The Prioress pulled a tissue from some hidden compartment in her habit and waved it, a white flag, through one of the big squares in the grille. Myrthen reached up to take it, and the Mother let it go before their fingers could touch. “The law is clear, child. As long as your spouse is still living, and unless you are able to nullify it, you will remain married in the eyes of God.”

  Myrthen blew her nose and tucked the soiled tissue into her own pocket. She stood up to leave.

  As long as your spouse is still living.

  She lifted her chin. She would find a way. She wouldn’t stand and be fired at by canon law.

  “Thank you for your time, Reverend Mother,” said Myrthen. “May the Lord bless you.”

  “And may He bless you, Mrs. Esposito.”

  After Myrthen had closed the door behind her, the Prioress sank down heavily into her wooden chair. It was a shame, really. There were fewer and fewer girls every year who expressed a sincere interest in beginning the process of formation. She slipped Myrthen’s letter back into its envelope. She would take it to her filing cabinet in the rectory. But she didn’t imagine she would be hearing from Myrthen Esposito again; at almost thirty-four, the girl was nearing the upper limit of the age requirement, and unless something happened very soon, her eligibility would expire before her marriage did. The Prioress put the letter into her pocket. A shame, but perhaps it was just as well.

  There was something rather unsettling about her.

  November 11, 1944

  Alta Pulaski covered her husband and son’s dinner of halushki and rogale with a dishtowel and set it on the kitchen table with a note: Gone up the hill for a bit. Walter was at work underground, and thirteen-year-old Abel — who was already as tall as a man and ready to be one — was going rabbit hunting with his friends. She tied a green woolen scarf around her pinned hair, still short while other women had started to let theirs grow longer to contrast with the war rationing and the somber mood of the day. Gathering up her metal paint box and an empty Ball jar, Alta set off on her quarter-mile hike.

  All the way up she thought of her painting. She’d started it already, rendering individual leaves on dampened paper — red and yellow sassafras, scarlet-orange hornbeam, bright yellow witch hazel, rust and crimson oaks — translating the scents and colors into textures. Dry brush, stippling, a dash of salt from her kitchen, a scratch of veins into wet paint with a bobby pin pulled from against her temple. To make it seem more real, Alta used water from the mountain brook near her secluded perch. Used dry leaves from the ground for blotting.

  Her mind had long forgotten those girlhood fantasies of the forest beyond the southern coalfields of West Virginia. Instead, she focused on the trees.

  She was so absorbed in creative thought that the sounds around her — the crunch of leaves, the prattle of the creek — blended into a cool-white rush of noise. It lulled her into that part of herself that was neither dutiful wife nor artist, but essential to both. Preoccupied as she was, she didn’t notice the heavy footsteps that stopped a maple tree shadow’s length behind her.

  John Esposito trudged up the mountain, his mind occupied by the burden of bachelorhood, and with a rocking chair slung across his shoulders. Going home to Myrthen wasn’t like going home at all, so he had decided to find someplace else to call his own — a place where he could escape and paint and, possibly soon, a place where he could live.

  His uncle, long dead now, had built a double-barrel shotgun shack out of white pine on a hill in Whisper Hollow, shortly after the Eighteenth Amendment forbade the sale of liquor. The same uncle had happily abandoned his pickax and crept into the forest, making a three-stage still out of sheets of copper, putting up corn mash, and running whiskey until he died. For a long time, the cabin and its add-on porch stunk of moonshine, but the years and the wind had blown that nearly all away. Now it suited John just fine.

  It loomed in the near distance. John looked up, checking his path, and there, just in front of him, sat a woman on a maple stump.

  Alta’s back was to him, lithe and strong and bent over her paper. A tray of paint lay on the ground next to her. John held his breath and watched her dip her brush into the jar of mountain water and scrub it into the picture emerging on her lap.

  She looked familiar, but without being able to see her face, he didn’t know why. Her long arms and neck, the elegant and sure way she moved, the graceful stillness she possessed was vaguely reminiscent. He’d seen women like her lounging in bistro chairs at outdoor cafés or strolling along the Thames and the Seine and the streets of Montmartre in the evenings. But he’d seen none of them hunched over a stretch of paper, imitating life in art the way he, himself, would.

  Alta put down her brush and straightened up. Then she angled her face to the wind and — he imagined — closed her eyes. Pulling her shoulder blades back like a butterfly flexing its wings, she moved her head from side to side. Then Alta untied the scarf from underneath her chin, balled it, and wiped it across her brow.

  Recognition stretched into knowing. Within that infinite moment that she tossed the sweaty scarf onto the ground and picked up her brush, he knew his life would be forever changed.

  Eyes still on her back, John let the chair slide slowly down one shoulder and drop to the ground. The thump it made blew behind him on the wind, and Alta showed no sign that she’d heard it — she bent back over her painting and appeared from behind to be completely absorbed in her work. John didn’t want to disturb her, nor did he want to leave, so he eased himself down into the chair and leaned back to watch.

  A cool breeze blew into his face, lingering like a kiss, and he relaxed into the rocking chair. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw the figure of Alta, still bent forward, her hand moving with the tiny strokes of her brush. Seeing her brought him an inexplicable comfort. He tried it again. Closing his eyes against the breeze, longer this time, he allowed himself to breathe, listening to the faint rush of the stream in the distance, the leaves. Then he opened them, and there she was, still, again. He smiled. When he closed his eyes once more, he kept them closed even longer, rocking and listening and absorbing and enjoying and relaxing until everything he’d been carrying — both on his shoulders and in his mind — tumbled down onto the downy, leaf-covered mountain and left him to fall into a deep and peaceful sleep.

  When he awoke, smacking away the stickiness in his mouth and opening first one eye and then the other, he blinked quickly, remembering what his eyes sought upon opening, and saw the tree stump on which she’d been sitting. But she wasn’t there. No! He sat up straight, toward the edge of the seat, gripping the arms of the rocking chair. There was the impulse to run after her, but his sleep-washed mind was slow to decide in which direction. Then, from his right, he heard her voice:

  “You sound like a bear when you sleep.”

  She was sitting with her legs crossed and her palms pressed onto the ground behind her, her head tilted to one side in a reflective way. “I heard this terrible roar and turned around. I thought it was a bear. But it was just a man, asleep in a rocking chair in the middle of the woods.”

  She was beautiful.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Well, I’ve b
een watching you for about six minutes,” she said, looking at her watch. “No telling how long you were out before that.”

  “I tend to fall asleep quickly.”

  “And snore like an animal.”

  “Will that bother you?”

  Her eyes widened and her eyebrows lifted. A second passed, and she let them slide back down into place, biting her lower lip to hide a smile. “No.”

  They looked at each other like that for a long moment, strangers locked in recognition, approaching this immediate familiarity from opposite directions. The wind blew at them, cooler now, and she turned her head toward it, tucking a short piece of her light brown hair behind her ear. Finally he spoke.

  “I know you,” he said.

  She smiled again. “Yes,” she said. “You do.”

  Leaning forward off her hands, she dusted them together and extended the right one toward him. “I’m Alta,” she said. “How do you do?” He leaned toward her from the edge of the chair and slid his hand against hers.

  “I know,” he said. “And I’m John.”

  A slow smile. “I know.”

  Finally, she let his hand go and looked up the hill toward the abandoned cabin, the direction in which he’d been going. “That cabin yours now?”

  He nodded.

  “That chair will be nice on the porch. Faces the sunset. Are you moving in?”

  “In a sense,” he said. “I’m a painter, too.” It was the first time he’d ever called himself one aloud, although he’d been doing it for two decades. Because his painting had forever been a secret, he kept his stash of drawings and paintings in a flat box beneath his bed. Neither his father nor his wife had seen any purpose in such an idle distraction. Myrthen was given to heavy sighs whenever he spread out his oil paints across the kitchen table to work.