Book of O'Kells: Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell

by Michael Conniff

  October 12, 1967

  No wonder she can talk so easily of sin and damnation. No wonder she can’t leave the Order. I hope they both go straight to hell, her and her little concubine.

  October 16, 1967

  Can’t sleep, can’t think, can’t even cry. My heart is broken into little pieces.

  October 19, 1967

  I want to catch them, to hold them up to the light, to watch them like flies on a windowpane when they don’t know they are being watched. I want to hear what she says to Jane when they are making love, to know the sounds they make when they lose themselves in each other. I want to see them naked. I want to mash their naked bodies against the glass, a slow death by mutilation. I want to watch. I want to watch.

  October 20, 1967

  I call Todd into my office. “Am I going to hell, Mother Superior?” You will if you don’t help me, I say. “Anything, Mother Superior, anything I can do, anything I can do to help you, Mother Superior.” First get up off your knees, I say. I need you to come to me the minute you see something. The minute you see anything. “Oh you bet I will,” Todd says, “you bet I will Mother Superior. You can count on me, Mother Superior. You bet, you bet, you bet.”

  November 1, 1967

  I say Nancy seems different to me, distracted. Jane smiles without looking up. “She just seems so happy,” Jane says.

  November 10, 1967

  “It’s a good job, Mother Superior,” Todd is saying. “I like my job. I want to keep my job.” Then why aren’t you helping me, Todd? “It’s hard to find them, Mother Superior, like I said, like they was hiding.” They are hiding, I say.

  November 15, 1967

  I had Jane’s kind of beauty once, years ago, back when Bucky Harwell was in tow. I know what it’s like to touch her from that time when she was a recruit and I had to comfort her. It’s a beautiful body to the touch, both soft and hard the way only a young body can be. Now Nancy knows every line, every curve of Jane’s body. I can see what Nancy sees in Jane. I can feel it, and I can’t compete. That’s what makes me sick to my stomach.

  November 20, 1967

  “In the chapel is where, in the chapel,” Todd is saying. “Every night, every night. They are so loud, Sister. You’ve never heard such a thing.” Oh yes I have, I say.

  November 22, 1967

  I rub my sleeve against the stained glass until I can see them. I slide open the window so I can hear everything. I watch Nancy’s first caress in the candlelight, the first kiss by Jane, their brown cow dresses dropping in bunches to the stone floor, to our floor, their whispers a hiss across the room before the quick shivering of Nancy’s hand between Jane’s legs, then Jane falling back, backwards onto the altar, her legs a collar around Nancy’s head, Jane yelping like a dog fed late. The stained glass windows steam up with their lust. The air outside is not so cold as my hate.

  November 25, 1967

  Every night I go to the same window to watch them, and every night I wait for the stained glass to steam up before I cry. I want to pull the wings off of flies.

  November 26, 1967

  Jane goes home so Nancy and I have Thanksgiving dinner together at the Convent. She is pale as a ghost and the ghost can barely touch her turkey. I say anyone can see something’s wrong. “Oh?” Nancy says. I don’t tell her what I know. But I feel so much better now because I know what to do. We wish on the wishbone and I win.

  December 3, 1967

  I tell Nancy we can’t be together any more. “I know,” she says. “And you can’t leave. That means I have to go. That’s what’s killing me.”

  December 14, 1967

  I tell Jane I am sending her on a long recruiting trip so she will miss Christmas and New Year’s at the Convent. She bites her lip hard enough to turn it white. “Why?” she wonders. God’s will, I tell her.

  December 16, 1967

  “I seen them crying, Mother,” Todd is telling me. “I seen them both crying. In the, in the place at the bottom of the stairs where no one ever goes ever except for me and for them this one time. They were crying and crying, crying and crying.” I tell Todd he is definitely not going to hell.

  December 20, 1967

  So where do you want to go? I ask Nancy. “Far away,” she says. “It’s too painful to be this close.” I know exactly what you mean, I say.

  January 7, 1968

  I tell Nancy I am sending her as far west and as far north as I can. “Now?” she says. Now and forever after, I tell her. She will be long gone long before her little Sister can come back. For Nancy to complain to me would be to admit everything, and so far she has admitted nothing. Mother Superior has her ways.

  January 18, 1968

  Nancy is gone. I have won. This is what hell must feel like.

  January 30, 1968

  “Send me away, too,” Jane says. I need you here for the greater good, I say.

  February 1, 1968

  I feel much better already now that Jane and Nancy are no more. I have bigger plans for Jane.

  February 3, 1968

  Jane knows nothing of Nancy and me. She has no idea that I know about Nancy and her. I go to Jane’s room and her door is open a crack. She is face down on the bed, her shoulders heaving. I sit down beside her to knuckle her neck, to knead her shoulders and her arms and then the low scoop of her back, the meat at the very top of her thighs. I slide her legs apart just so. I slither my hands high up along the inside of her thighs. She reaches back and rings her arms around my neck. “Thank you, Mother Superior,” she says. “Call me Eleanor,” I say. Now that the wings are off I will force her to fly.

  March 2, 1968

  The board of governors wants answers. “They’re antsy,” Charles Evans tells me sotto voce. “They don’t exactly blame you for the nuns leaving, or the recruits, but they wonder why it all started when you took over. They want to know what you’re going to do about it.” Prayer? I say. “Very funny,” he says. “Hardy-har. But it’s not funny, Eleanor. The board is very unhappy.”

  March 9, 1968

  Jane lights up like a firefly whenever Nancy comes on the line. I see her laugh and jabber into the phone. Her tears explode when they hit the blotter.

  March 20, 1968

  I’m giving you the recruits, I say to Jane. “Why?” she wonders. I tell her I’m too long in the tooth, I’ve lost touch. I go on the road, they tune me out. I might as well be their mother. You’re young, I tell Jane. You’re one of them. You understand them. And the board will like you. “I have no idea what to do,” Jane says. Neither did I, I say, and just look at me.

  March 24, 1968

  I spend time with Jane each day, more time every day, to go over the recruits and just to talk. Jane touches you when she talks. When she touches me I tingle. Then I make sure to touch her back.

  March 27, 1968

  Charles Evans calls. “A warning,” he says. “The board is on the warpath over the recruits, or the lack thereof.” It’s all been taken care of, I say.

  April 16, 1968

  Martin Luther King was shot dead coming out of a cheap motel room. There are riots in all the cities. The real world is coming apart at the seams.

  May 1, 1968

  Jane is starting to fly without wings. She is already ramping up our recruits. Nancy is no longer the only thing on her mind.

  May 13, 1968

  Jane and I have drinks in my room almost every night now. Tonight she crossed her legs over mine and she didn’t mind as I left my hands on her soft thighs. I practice touching her, her arms and her elbows, her back and her hips, even the underneath part of her breasts furthest from the nipple. I always stay close to her so that she can touch me back.

  June 28, 1968

  Bobby Kennedy was shot dead in California. The whole world has gone mad.

  June 29, 1968

  Jane makes a recruiting trip, criss-crossing the country, going everywhere, but coming nowhere near Nancy in the Northwest.

  July 21, 1968

  Jane
and I drink to the incoming recruits and I watch her get drunk. I walk her to her room and she holds me tight, like a child afraid of the dark. “I love you, Mother Superior,” she says. “You been so good to me.” Call me Eleanor, I say.

  July 27, 1968

  Jane’s first presentation to the board. She lights up, like she’s been doing it her whole life. She stands by a map and sticks pinpricks into cities where she has been. Our numbers spike up everywhere, bless her, except in the Northwest, where I won’t let her go. “Sister Jane is too young,” the Bishop tells me over a cocktail. “But I like that girl. We need more of her kind.”

  August 9, 1968

  I invite Jane to Southampton for a reunion of sorts, without dear Will, without the wretched Tom. Becca brings her camera to take pictures of Diana and G for a spread in Imagine about managing your life with children. Luigi is spending every waking moment on the beach with his new homosexual friends, but when he comes back to the house he seems different, happy, as if he no longer needs to fight what he feels. He is sweet with G, chasing him behind the hedges, babbling in Italian, then building their dream house together on the porch with blocks. Jane skims along the water, skipping in the soft sand as the waves break against her feet and wash back into the sea.

  August 10, 1968

  Becca tells me that thanks to her camera she is as happy as she has ever been. “I look through the camera,” Becca says, “and what I see is me.”

  August 11, 1968

  Time for Jane and me to go back to the Convent to prepare for the arrival of the young girls with faith. Little G runs and jumps and hugs Jane at the neck, hanging like a crab. Becca and Diana give her kisses and Jane kisses them back. Jane drives all the way back. I can’t take my eyes off of her. “What?” she wonders.

  September 2, 1968

  The recruits have landed full force at the Convent and Jane is an ordained hero in the Order. She takes our message and turns it around so that God still makes sense in a world where God is dead. She convinces the recruits that to be a nun is to believe in something higher, something better and deeper, to drop in and to drop out all at once. The young girls swallow it whole.

  September 12, 1968

  Jane and I celebrate the successful indoctrination with champagne. “It’s really brainwashing, isn’t it?” Jane says. Absolutely, I say. I get her so drunk I have to help her into bed. I strip her clothes off and lay her naked under the covers. “Don’t go,” Jane says. I am not going anywhere. I slide my hands under the covers and wedge her legs apart. I slide both her knees up until they make a tent with the blanket, and then I run my fingers under the tent and inside of her. “Mmmmmm,” Jane mumbles. I slide my head under the tent. I know that I have won but I won’t celebrate just yet.

  September 13, 1968

  I pour Jane another screwdriver, tall and stiff the way she likes it. It takes almost nothing to get her drunk, like a high school kid who goes blotto in two shakes. I like sex with Jane when she’s drunk, when I’m not. I like to be sober when she lets go. I like to watch.

  September 14, 1968

  Jane still doesn’t know that I know about her and Nancy. Nor does Nancy know about me and Jane. To know nothing is a good thing.

  October 1, 1968

  “Rumors,” Charles Evans says. “Ungodly rumors.” We are at “21” again but neither one of us is drinking. I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, I say. “I’m sure you do,” he says. “Eleanor! You’re a nun, for Chrissakes, and you’ve got the libido of a teenage girl.” It’s the Cushing in me, I say. “God help us all,” Charles Evans says.

  October 10, 1968

  Jane starts to sob the minute she closes the door to my office. “There’s something I’ve got to know,” she says. “About Nancy.” I say Nancy asked to leave and I asked her to stay. “I feel like the minute Nancy turned her back—” You ended up with me? I say. “Nancy says she might leave the Order,” Jane says, “and it’s my fault. I just feel awful, horrible about the whole thing.” It’s not your problem, I say.

  October 20, 1968

  “The ungodly precludes the holy,” the Bishop says after the board meeting. I say I don’t follow. “I know you don’t,” he says.

  October 21, 1968

  I stay over for breakfast in the city with Charles Evans at his request after the board meeting. You want the truth? I say. The truth is a man can do whatever he damn well pleases, make a complete horse’s ass out of himself in every way, and the world will still protect him. Look at you, Charles! But let a woman step outside the lines and you want to squash her like a bug. “‘Step outside the lines?’ Is that what you call sleeping with a girl young enough to be your daughter? A nun sleeping with a nun?”

  November 9, 1968

  I brush Jane’s hair every night before we go to bed. I like to count the strokes the way the devout count Hail Marys. Lust can be a kind of religion.

  November 15, 1968

  “I know what you’re doing,” Nancy tells me over the phone. “It’s so obvious.” Come again? I say. I thought you wanted to get away from here, from me. “You know better,” Nancy says.

  November 25, 1968

  Thanksgiving Day. Nancy calls for Jane, not for me. I watch tears slide down Jane’s cheeks as she listens to Nancy without saying a word. “I never knew about you and Nancy,” Jane tells me later. “If I had known, I never would have.” There was no need for you to know, I say. All of that was over long ago, finito, end of story. “It’s not the end for me,” Jane says.

  December 9, 1968

  “The Church may be deaf and dumb,” the Bishop says, “but we have not yet gone blind.” I don’t follow. “If you keep on with this young Sister, the board will have your neck,” the Bishop says. “Do you follow that?”

  December 12, 1968

  The Bishop calls Jane for a meeting and she’s scared to death. He’s going to warn you, I say. “About what?” About sin. About me. “How does he know?” I say it’s the shepherd’s job to know his sheep.

  December 13, 1968

  I am watching Jane go to hell. She is sniffling all the time now from a cold and her crying. When I brush her hair it’s dry, nothing but split ends and static. All the life has gone out of her body. All the life has gone out of her life.

  December 21, 1969

  Well? “He was very nice to me,” Jane says. “Very kind.” And what did he ask you? “He asked me about the recruits. I told him things are getting better and better. That was all. He said he always wanted me to feel like I could come to him.” Don’t you dare, I say.

  December 23, 1968

  Jane decides she will have Christmas with her family, without me. She leaves me a note without saying goodbye.

  December 25, 1968

  I spend Christmas Day at Diana’s apartment in New York with Becca and Diana, with Luigi and G. The city is alive with Christmas, the lights on Park Avenue, the skaters at Rock Center—the ring-ring-ring of the Salvation Army Santas—but I am in my own world, alone, a nun in plainclothes no longer in love or even in lust.

  December 28, 1968

  I go to Southampton to be by myself by the ocean. I decide that I have won and there’s no reason not to keep on winning. The board and the Bishop can’t stop me. I will be a bad girl because I see no reason not to be.

  January 2, 1969

  Jane is back and she asks to speak with me immediately. “I love being a Sister,” Jane says. “But I love you more.” What about Nancy? “Nancy?” Jane says.

  January 13, 1969

  “I have begged the Bishop to give you another chance,” Charles Evans says. “I told him to look at everything you’ve done for the Order, the financing, the new hospitals, the overall growth, your importance to Wall Street.” He agreed? “I persuaded him with a very large check.” And? “And I’m looking at my bank statement. He cashed the check.”