The Tricky Part

by Martin Moran

  He grabbed his car keys off the hook next to the mirror and moved past the crucifix toward the door. The dead fronds wiggled as if they were waving goodbye. “Why don’t you change shoes,” he said as he stepped outside.

  That day, during recess, I found my older sister, Chris.

  “What do you think a lady monk would look like?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Like a nun, I guess.”

  “I wonder if she’ll look like Grandma? Or maybe like you or me. Imagine her in an airplane, flying in her habit, belted into her seat like everyone else.”

  My sister smiled. A screechy voice rose from the volleyball court. “Chris . . . come on!”

  “Aunt Marion’s the older sister? Right?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How old?”

  “Dad said she was born around 1900.”

  “So she’s seventy-two.”

  Chris nodded, fixing the barrette in her long blond hair.

  “Six of my life would fit into her one.”

  “Guess so,” Chris said, running back to her game.

  Eighth period, the chalkboard was jammed with geology.

  Mountains have complex internal structures formed by folding, faulting, volcanic activity, igneous intrusion, and metamorphism.

  Between 80 million and 40 million years ago, the LARAMIDE OROGENY raised the Rocky Mountains.

  Tertiary sediments.

  Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata.

  Intrusive igneous rocks.

  Precambrian structures.

  Tectonic plates.

  “Everyone look out the window toward Mount Evans,” Mr. Johnson said as he pointed west.

  It’s warm out, I’ll deliver my papers fast, I thought.

  “What’s the elevation?” Silence. “Who knows?”

  “Fourteen thousand two hundred and . . .” Carol Buell began.

  “Sixty four,” he said, writing the number on the board. “Based on what you read in chapter eleven, what are some of the elements, Mr. Flynn, that might have formed this great mountain, one of the tallest in our state?”

  “Well, umm . . .”

  He always called on people he thought hadn’t read the assignment.

  I stared at the far-off crown of snow on top of Evans. She stays hidden, I thought. A secret life. A picture kept coming into my head: An old, pale nun in a locked closet. Nothing there but a wooden cross, a prayer book, and a candle. What must she know, talking to God all day? What must she see that others wouldn’t? What would she look like come out of the closet, all the way to Denver? I couldn’t get her, my idea of her, out of my mind. I decided that when I finished my paper route, instead of meeting George at the bike trails, I’d go straight to Grandma’s house.

  “Mr. Moran?” I turned from the mountain to find Mr. Johnson’s eyes on me. “Are you with us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you define orogeny for the class.”

  I dropped my bike on Grandma’s manicured lawn and went straight into the house.

  They were in the kitchen. I could hear their voices, then Grandma’s laughter and the tinkling of silver against plates. I put my hand on the swinging door but didn’t push.

  “This one’s from London,” Grandma said.

  There was a response, too quiet to understand, a confidential whisper drifting through the door along with the smell of roast. I moved my ear closer and slid my hand down the white wood. My fingers left a trail of inky prints. I licked the side of my hand, wiped them away, then opened the door a crack.

  Grandma was seated at the table, facing my direction, looking as immaculate as her kitchen. She’d been to the beauty parlor for sure. Her white hair was swept up in neat waves, like a collection of snowdrifts. She wore a silk blouse, a string of pearls. She reached over and pulled her Queen Elizabeth cozy off the teapot. I pushed the door slightly and my great aunt came into view.

  She sat at the head of the table, tiny shoulders hunched, profile to me. She was a lot smaller than Grandma, or seemed to be under her veil and mound of dark drapes. She wore silver glasses. Her face wasn’t as ghostly white as I’d imagined it would be. The flesh of her cheek and hands was pink and seemed to glow amid all the black of her. She was old school, you could see that right off, not like most of the nuns at school who’d begun wearing skirts, showing a bit of calf. Grandma had a lot to say about the liberal changes, the lack of Latin, since Vatican II. “If you want skirts and guitar music you can go see those queer people in the park,” she’d said to me more than once. I wondered if she discussed such things with her sister. Grandma stood and picked up the pot.

  “Don’t go to any more trouble, Jo, dear,” Marion said as she smiled and held out her cup and saucer. I liked hearing Grandma’s nickname—short for Josephine. Grown-ups used it, and it fit somehow. Jo, the boss. Marion stirred sugar into her tea, her crooked fingers clutching the spoon. She looked like she’d dropped from another time, totally out of place next to the multislice platinum toaster. I wondered what someone who knew nothing of nuns would make of the old lady in the costume, stirring powder into her brew. I felt I was peeking into a fairy tale, The Old Saint and the Society Woman.

  I knocked softly.

  “Grandma?”

  “Yes?”

  I stepped in. Marion placed her cup in its saucer and sprang effortlessly to her feet. Because she stooped slightly, the large cross around her neck dangled over the dark, flat front of her. With one hand she stopped, then pressed the silver crucifix over her belly as she stared at me through thick lenses.

  “This is Marty junior,” Grandma said as she stood and cleared some dishes to the sink.

  “Of course,” said Marion, her gaze steady. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” I held tight to the door, wondering how much and from whom.

  “Well, come in, for heaven’s sake. Say your hellos,” said Grandma.

  I clomped across the polished floor. I couldn’t see but felt the look Grandma shot toward my feet. She would notice; she was finicky about such things. She’d expressed her horror at my bell-bottom jeans more than once.

  “Why are you wearing those Frankenstein boots?” she asked.

  I shrugged. Marion reached out and took both my hands.

  “How are you?”

  I didn’t hear her question so much as experience it—three words sailing across space and settling into the center of me. I mumbled a response—something polite.

  “You look like your father,” she said.

  I lowered my head and looked at the tangle of our fingers. Her hands were soft and clean. I should have washed, I thought. I had the black print of the world’s news all over me. She wore a ring that held, in a small silver circle, the letters PX.

  “Can you sit a minute?” she asked.

  Her eyes, moist and hazel-colored, beamed at me from behind her spectacles as if I was seeing her through a magnifying glass while she studied me under a microscope. Her gaze, like her words, entered. Warm.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She let go of my hands and reached down to lift her habit. As she sat, a breeze brushed by me, smelling of cotton and soap.

  “You’ve got a paper business, your grandmother said.”

  “I deliver the Post.” I took a seat across from her. “I cover Kearny and Krameria.”

  “Pennies in your pocket.”

  “Ninety dollars a month.”

  “Good Lord!” She tucked a wisp of white hair back under her veil. “You’ll pay your own way to Notre Dame.”

  “First I want to get a minibike,” I blurted, which startled me because I hadn’t told a soul my plan, except George. She looked confused and I figured that maybe they’d been invented since she’d been closed in. “It’s like a small motorcycle.”

  “No son of mine,” Grandma interjected, turning off the faucet and drying her hands. “Those things are for police and hoodlums.”

  “I’m sure he’ll do what’s best for him,” Marion said, picking up her t
ea.

  Grandma walked over and squeezed the back of my neck. “Don’t keep your great aunt too long, Mr. Bell-bottoms. She just got off a plane. And Monsignor Mulcahey’s coming to dinner.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Marion.

  “Yes, I know. You’re always fine,” Grandma said as she sailed out the door.

  Marion’s eyes seemed full of delight. “You’d better grab one before I eat them all,” she said, sliding a plate of Grandma’s butter cookies in my direction.

  “Did you come on a 747?” I took a cookie.

  “A what?”

  “One of those huge planes?”

  “What I saw of it, yes, it was very large. Lots and lots of people. Honestly, I had my eyes closed most of the trip, saying my Rosary—the Glorious Mysteries.”

  “Were you nervous?”

  “Well, yes, a little. The Lord’s Will be done, of course, but . . .” She shrugged and chuckled, then slid a piece of cookie into her mouth. I spied a few teeth, small and yellowed. “Have you flown?”

  “Just on my bicycle.”

  She laughed again. “Well, it is a miracle. I’m not accustomed to leaving the ground, I must say. When I did travel it was usually by train, or by boat.”

  “Ocean boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never done that either.”

  “I wager you will one day. I traveled across the Pacific to the Philippines, through the South China Sea, when I was in the missions. That was years and years ago. I taught in a girls’ school outside Manila, and in Seattle too, before I was called to the contemplative life.” Marion leaned forward to take another bite of a cookie. Some powdered sugar landed on her chest, like a mess of stars across the night.

  “Is it strange?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “To be here.”

  “It’s a great comfort to see family. To meet you.”

  “I’ve never met someone from a cloister or—” I studied her wrinkled face. It was framed by her veil in the shape of a square. “What are you called?”

  “A cloistered Maryknoll sister.”

  “It must be really quiet there?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you miss people?”

  “There are people. Nineteen of us right now.” She took a sip of tea and looked toward the window. Toward Grandma’s rosebushes. “But you’re alone, praying all day?”

  “We garden and cook and have periods when we speak.”

  “But you’re not allowed out?”

  “Except for medical attention or very special occasions—like this.” She opened both her palms toward me, the way they do in statues, and smiled.

  “But how can you be away from everything like that?” I’m not sure why and I didn’t know if it was right, but I felt I could ask her this thing. She pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her large nose and looked away.

  “It’s a question asked often, dear. My mother asked me the same thing from the beginning. It was painful for her. When she was able to visit, we had to speak through a wrought-iron grill. She often cried. ‘I’m not “cut off,” Mother,’ I would tell her. ‘I am with you.’ We don’t all need to be in the rush of the world, Marty. Sitting quietly in one place, it’s possible to travel the universe . . . to, perhaps, know God.”

  I nodded. Something about her, no, not her, but the idea of her, frightened me. I couldn’t help feeling that there must be something wrong with her, or weird about her, to want to do such a thing. I knew that, in part, I’d ridden my bike here simply to see what a locked-up woman come out of hiding looked like. Sitting with her, she seemed very sane.

  “It’s a radical life, Marty.” She pursed her lips; the way Grandma did sometimes, so that they were in the shape of a heart, moist and red. “God went all the way for me and I wanted to go all the way for him, that’s all. When the call came, I knew it was mine.”

  “The call from the cloister?”

  “Not from but to. A call, you know, to God.”

  “Really?”

  “You were confirmed this year, weren’t you?”

  “Just last month.”

  “Sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

  “I guess,” I said, looking down at my boots. “Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti.”

  “You know the Latin?”

  “Only because the Bishop said it over and over.”

  I remembered well the evening Mass, my confirmation, my grandfather (my sponsor) silent in the pew beside me. “You’ve reached the age of discretion,” the bishop said to me and my sixth-grade classmates. He stood on the altar in his golden robes, seven feet tall with the red miter on his head. “You are soldiers of Christ.” “Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti,” he intoned over and over as he smeared oil on each of our foreheads. He reminded us that we are all inclined to evil and that this—confirmation with holy chrism—was like getting an injection to guard against the devil. As if the devil were measles and confirmation, our vaccine. “Do you reject Satan?” he asked us.

  “I do.”

  “And all his works?”

  “I do.”

  “And all his empty promises?”

  “I do,” we all said, repeating the words spoken for us when we were baptized as infants. Now we were old enough to speak for ourselves, and I had to wonder: What works? What empty promises? I remember when the bishop laid his warm hand on me and smeared his oily thumb across my forehead; I shut my eyes tightly. I wanted, I was ready, to feel something. A rush of heat, a shield of protection, a wave of Holy Ghost—something right and good and powerful entering me. Then I’d understand just how to reject Satan; I’d understand the knots in my stomach, and where to fit in, how to be good. I bowed my head until it touched the pew in front of me, flesh to wood, and asked for help. I felt nothing but the cold varnish against my skull.

  Marion tapped the table with one finger. “Marty, you’ll know. This is an important time in your life. So much will start happening for you. You listen and you’ll find it, you’ll have a calling, too. A vocation. Something fine.”

  I could smell the roast and see the silver glint of sun on the edge of the toaster and the round shape of Grandma’s cookies on the white plate and the crooked, wrinkled fingers of Marion’s right hand as she reached for her tea, and it seemed as if I was looking at a strange and brilliant segment of my life, a photo of a moment I’d always remember—the moment when I could feel adulthood rising up inside of me like a light. And I could feel how I was neither stranger nor child to this great aunt of mine and that it was something good to be sitting with her.

  “You’re a fine student, Marty. That’s what I hear.”

  “In some things.”

  “What do you enjoy, dear?”

  “English. And Great Books Club. We just read To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  “Is that a good book?”

  “The best I’ve ever read since Johnny Tremain. Or maybe The Call of the Wild. And I like music. I’m taking guitar with Sister Christine.”

  “Music too?”

  I nodded.

  “Like your Great Uncle Ted. He led the boy’s choir at Fordham. He was a Jesuit. Very musical.”

  “Grandma’s brother?”

  “My brother, too. He died some years ago.” Marion brushed her pinky across the white cotton tablecloth, collecting cookie crumbs into a small pile. “What do you dream of being?”

  I shrugged.

  “Irritating old aunt question.” She smiled at me and took up her tea again. “You’ve had some thoughts, I dare say.”

  “Mmmm, a lawyer, maybe. Like grandpa. Or . . . a writer, like dad.”

  “A writer,” she repeated. Her eyes brightened, or they seemed to, and the me that came here to please perked right up.

  “I like to make rhymes!

  When you get in trouble at Christ the King School,

  Sister David Ann makes you sit on a stool.

  You may think you’re someone cool,

  B
ut caught in a corner, you’re just a fool.”

  “That’s just the beginning of a dumb one,” I added, my hands fluttering. “I make ’em up all the time.”

  “It’s good. Do you have a favorite poet?”

  I told her the only one I knew off the top of my head:

  “Robert Frost.”

  “Oh yes, our own Mr. Frost.” Marion closed her eyes:

  “Companionless, unsatisfied, forlorn,

  I sit here in this lonely tower, and look

  Upon the lake below me, and the hills

  That swoon with heat, and see as in a vision

  All my past life unroll itself before me. . . .

  “Before me,” she repeated, and opened her eyes. “It’s slipping away. I memorize my favorites. I recite them sometimes for the sisters, at recreation . . . it’s been too long. Do you know Longfellow?”

  I shook my head. “He doesn’t rhyme.”

  “Not in this poem.”

  “It sounds so sad.”

  Marion laughed. “The poems I like best seem to be the sad ones.” Her gaze went out the window. “A writer,” she repeated. I followed her eyes out toward the thick, green bushes. A few buds, tight and pink, looked ready to burst. Marion seemed to be looking for the sky, for the space, to consider my future.

  “Or a rancher,” I said, my eyes lost in the clouds above the Rockies. The moment it fell out of my mouth, the word, the idea, felt foolish. “I mean . . . I mean a real rancher. I just started learning about animals and what they need and how to take care of them and hay and . . .” I kept my eyes west but I knew she was looking at me now and I felt, I knew, I was testing things. I spoke in a whisper. “I love being away from the city, away from here, from everyone, up where it’s quiet and smells different.” We both remained silent; there was just the drip and sizzle of Grandma’s roast. “I have a friend who has a ranch. He’s turning it into a camp for boys. I went there to help him.” I laid my hands flat on the table and looked at them. “He called and wants me to come again. He thinks I’m a great worker.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “He was one of the counselors at St. Malo. Father Mac’s assistant. He was a seminarian, I think. Now he’s not sure what he’ll do, except for making the ranch a good summer camp.”