“Reverend Mother?”
“I’ve set up a series of meetings for you, Katherine, with priests attached to the Mother House in Worcester and with a psychiatrist from Boston College.”
Katherine sat bolt upright in her chair. She thinks I’m crazy . . . like my mother. She thinks I killed my father! Her fingers wrenched around the arms of the chair.
Puzzled at Katherine’s reaction, Mother Superior Felicitas wrinkled her brow and said, “In preparation for your eventual postulancy, Katherine. I think the time has come.”
Katherine’s breath stopped in her throat.
“It’s a requirement made of all young women who wish to become nuns, you know that, so please don’t think that you’re being singled out. We only want to make sure that you will be emotionally prepared. These interviews will be made for your sake, not ours. We are not building any kind of file, as I heard one postulant complain. And of course I wish you to understand that none of this, and particularly not the timing, has anything to do with your mother’s unfortunate situation. Do you understand?”
“You’re saying that I’m being permitted . . . ?” Katherine’s voice was small and disbelieving.
A bell chimed twice beyond the office door and down the halls of the convent. Mother Felicitas checked her digital watch. “You must remind me to tell Sister Jude Thaddeus that her call to matins is a minute and a half early.” She sighed. “Sister Jude Thaddeus is always early. Come, Katherine, walk to the chapel with me.”
Katherine’s position, here as elsewhere, was a little apart from the nuns. She did not believe Mother Superior Felicitas’s assurance that this decision had nothing to do with her mother’s precarious chances in court. Mr. Giovinco had doubtless convinced the nun that Anne Dolan’s case was hopeless, that Katherine’s mother would be found guilty and imprisoned for the rest of her life. Katherine’s eyes were bright as she scanned the bowed black heads of the nuns. Her clasped hands beat violently against her breast as she chanted, “My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”
When she undressed for bed that night, she discovered a small purplish bruise outlined against her flesh.
On the day before the end of the fall term at Boston College, Katherine was once more summoned to the office of Mother Superior Felicitas.
“I have the report of the psychiatrist you saw on Tuesday. As it turns out, he’s a Jesuit priest, though I didn’t know it at the time. It used to be that you—”
“Did I pass?” asked Katherine eagerly. In the hours after school for the last month, Katherine had been conferring with priests and various members of the order sent out from Worcester. She made daily confession and had talked at length with the psychiatrist, with whom she had been terribly ill at ease.
Mother Superior Felicitas smiled indulgently. “It wasn’t a test to pass or fail, Katherine, dear. You’re not proving yourself—I had hoped you’d be over that idea by now. We’re not sitting in judgment over you. We only want to make sure that this is the life best suited for you. There are other realms in which one may devote herself utterly to Christ.”
“I failed,” said Katherine miserably.
“No, no, please don’t think of it that way! I didn’t bring you in here to give you a grade, you know. I only wanted to discuss a few points that were brought out in Father Vane’s report.”
“What?” said Katherine anxiously. “What points, Reverend Mother?”
“Father Vane said that you were troubled by dreams. Is that correct?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that I was troubled. No, I didn’t say that. I just said I had dreams. But they’re not, they’re not—”
“Sexual,” prompted Mother Superior Felicitas.
“No!” cried Katherine, shamed.
“And it wouldn’t matter if they were. A dream of a sexual nature would hardly be sufficient ground to keep you from becoming a nun. You can’t imagine that seventy-five women under one roof—even if they are every one of them Slaves of the Immaculate Conception—can’t get up an erotic dream among them. No, Katherine, it just doesn’t happen that way. The devil has temptations conscious and unconscious, and he never leaves off trying us.”
“But I still don’t have that kind of dream!”
“They are dreams of a worldly nature—dreams of yourself, but a prettier self, though you seem sufficiently handsome to me. In your dreams, Father Vane says, you are ‘pretty, well dressed, surrounded by friends, envied, happy.’ ”
“They’re terrible dreams, Reverend Mother!”
“Why so? None of these things is in itself terrible. Christ’s legions are not uniformly ugly, slovenly, diseased, morose, and friendless. I would hope not!”
“These dreams bother me so much,” admitted Katherine slowly.
“Why? Father Vane writes that you are ‘haunted’ by them. I wish that my dreams were half so pleasant as yours seem to be.”
“But the girl who’s in my dreams—that’s not how I want to be, Reverend Mother! I want to be a nun. Maybe I didn’t always know it, but now I’m sure that that’s the only way that I could be satisfied with my life, if I devoted myself entirely to Christ, and God, and the Church.”
“And so says Father Vane. You needn’t worry about the dreams. It’s natural that when you have determined to forsake the material world, your subconscious rebels. It is human nature to rebel; it is spiritual nature for you to try to overcome that rebellious flesh. Oh, I’ve seen this countless times, Katherine, the dreams needn’t worry you. They pass, and they are forgotten. Ultimately, desire will rot like flesh itself.”
On Christmas Eve Katherine was driven to the Middlesex County Jail in East Cambridge. A week previous, Mother Superior Felicitas had spoken to her in the long walk from chapel back to the dormitory: “For the laity, holidays are often more a bane than a blessing, and for those in prison, a holiday is a doubly onerous time. We are committed to delivering packages to the unfortunate on Christmas Day, but there is no reason you cannot spend it with your mother.”
“Oh no, Reverend Mother! I’d much rather work here on Christmas. Thanksgiving was so wonderful, I—”
“But your mother! Think of your mother alone on Christmas Day!”
“I’ll spend Christmas Eve with her,” said Katherine, “but please: I want to dedicate Christmas itself to the poor.”
“Your mother is—” began Mother Superior Felicitas, but then thought better. “All right, Katherine. You are so much a part of us already, I confess it wouldn’t seem right not to have you around on so joyous a day.”
This speech made up for the evil of the promised visit to her mother.
In a corner of the visiting room of the jail was a dreary little lopsided tree, scantily decorated. Katherine regarded it pensively as she waited for Anne Dolan to appear. It had been early autumn when she saw her mother last.
During her confinement Anne Dolan appeared to have aged several years. She looked gray and decrepit; her voice was low and she had developed a cough that interrupted her speech and made her lose her train of thought.
Impulsively, Katherine hurried forward and kissed her mother on the cheek.
“Kathy, Kathy, I’m so glad you’ve come!” smiled Anne Dolan. “ ’Cause you know, I won’t be here much longer.”
“Ma,” Katherine demanded, “what do you mean? What—”
Anne Dolan slipped waveringly into a red vinyl chair near a hissing radiator. Katherine pulled another chair close.
“After the trial and all, we’ll be back home, we’ll—” Anne Dolan coughed and extracted a wadded square of tissue from her uniform. She dabbed it at her mouth and glanced out the window. “Sometimes I get so tired. It’s the food here, they put something in the food that makes you tired all the time.”
“That’s a pretty blouse, Ma.”
“Oh, Ka
thy, I know what I look like.” She touched her hand to her hair, readjusting a loose wave. “They won’t let me dye it here, and it’s starting to look bad. They had a beauty parlor at Bridgewater because they said it made you feel better if you looked nice. Here they don’t care what you feel like. I used to have a mirror in my room, but I threw it on the floor and told the matron it fell off the shelf. I got tired of looking at myself getting older every day.” She plucked at the puffed sleeves of the white blouse that billowed over her shrunken frame. “I’m losing weight too, that’s not the food, the food’s okay, I guess, it’s the worry. I know it’s the worry that’s causing me to lose weight.”
“Ma . . .”
Anne gazed vacantly round her, and her eyes alighted on the tree in the corner.
“Oh, Kathy, look at the tree! It is Christmas! Somebody said it was, but I didn’t believe it—how could it be Christmas in a place like this? I remember last Christmas, don’t you? When we were all together. Last Christmas, I don’t think I had ever even been in a jail before. When Jim and I took our honeymoon in Washington, we had a guided tour of the FBI building, and your father shook hands with J. Edgar Hoover, but that wasn’t really a jail, not like this one is . . .”
“I brought you a present, Ma.” From the pocket of her coat Katherine pulled a small gilt-edged book encased in a red leather sleeve. “It’s a red-letter testament, with all the prayers in the back. It’s on real parchment, Ma, I thought you might like to have it.”
“Oh, I do want it!” cried Anne Dolan. “It’s the nicest thing I have now, the very nicest thing! I just wish I had something for you . . .”
“Oh, Ma!”
“. . . but I didn’t have the chance to do much shopping this year.” Anne Dolan smiled at her sad, feeble joke.
10
In the hour before the lights of the Hingham convent house were extinguished, Katherine sat in her chamber and opened her diary. She left five blank pages between the last entry of her old life and the first of her new, and to sanctify the separation, she taped to one of the pages a holy card showing the head of the suffering Christ. Blood trickled from the gouging thorns, and His agonized eyes were cast imploringly to Heaven. She wrote the words she had spoken before the bishop that afternoon.
I appeal to the infinite compassion of Almighty God to accept me as his bride and as his humble servant. I ask this with all my heart, with all my humility. I ask almighty God for the benediction of the holy robes. I ask this with all my heart. I ask almighty God to grant me humility, sincerity, and patience as his servant and his slave.
Katherine was a postulant, a new woman, she had nothing whatever to do with Medford Street or her murdered father or her imprisoned mother. The ceremony of Clothing had wiped her clean of her past, and Katherine felt herself free to write of her ecstasy. The Christ of Golgotha had taken Katherine as bride.
She had come to the Hingham convent after Reverend Mother Felicitas decided it would be best for her to perform her postulancy away from the familiar surroundings of the town in which she had grown up. The reverend mother had hoped to delay Katherine’s postulancy ceremony until after her mother’s trial, but the slight cough that Anne Dolan had when Katherine visited her on Christmas Eve proved to be pneumonia. Her lawyer, Mr. Giovinco, found this the perfect excuse to have the trial delayed until the third week in February. Knowing to what extent Katherine would suffer another postponement of her induction, Reverend Mother Felicitas had decided to initiate the process by which Katherine would become a Slave of the Immaculate Conception. And the first step of that process was Katherine’s removal from the Convent of Saint Agnes. “This should be a time of serious meditation,” a dismayed Katherine was told. “You must pray for enlightenment. It is unfortunate, but I fear that your emotional attachments to the nuns in this house could hinder your making a right and true decision. And what is right and true, dear, may not be what you want, or what we want either. You love us, Katherine, and we all love you, but there would simply be no challenge if you were to remain here with us. You must decide, for yourself, how much you love God.”
The thought of leaving the safety and comfort of the Convent of St. Agnes terrified Katherine, and she had wanted to cry out—to beg not to be sent away. But she feared that such an outburst might prejudice the reverend mother against her postulancy.
It was not with an entirely easy mind that Katherine made the trip from Somerville to Hingham, driven by Sister Mary Claire, with Sister Martha, who liked to travel so much that she would go anywhere with anyone, in the back seat. During that ride Katherine resolved that this day would truly be the beginning of her new life: the trepidations and sharp miseries caused by the remnants of her old life would have no place in Hingham.
For three weeks the diary remained at the back of a dresser drawer; it was not so much that she did not wish to record her impressions of the convent—she simply didn’t want to be reminded of what lay behind her. But on the evening of her Clothing, she took the diary out again and transcribed the ecstatic ceremony moment for moment, though she could scarcely imagine there would be a time when she would not remember it was Sister Martha who had rearranged her veil just before she had reentered the sanctuary, or that the bishop wore black rather than brown wingtips.
The clothing ceremony was the most perfect hour of Katherine’s life. The sanctuary was illuminated entirely by candles, the boys’ choir sang celestially from the loft, and six nuns from the Convent of St. Agnes attended upon her. She entered the church in a resplendent bridal gown, which in the course of the ritual was exchanged for the black robes that designated her as a postulant in the order. Her head was shorn and covered with a wimple. When her clothing had been completed, she, carrying a lighted taper, led a procession of the bishop, altar boys, and the six nuns down the aisle of the church.
They crossed Mystic Avenue slowly and moved up the wide flagstone walk to the front doors of the Convent of Saint Luke. Katherine blew out the carefully tended flame and knelt on the shallow granite steps. She bowed her head and spread her arms wide.
In the shimmering twilight, her voice was clear and loud: “Admit me, dear Mother, into this house, for it will be my dwelling place until eternity!” She touched her lips to the cold stone. The great mahogany doors of the convent house scraped open, and Katherine raised herself by degrees. The long white hands of Mother Superior Celestine were extended in greeting and welcome.
“We deliver unto your care a daughter,” intoned the bishop.
“We accept her in God’s eternal love,” replied the mother superior.
Katherine rose. Reverend Mother Celestine took her hand and led her through the doorway. When the mahogany doors were scraped closed and the iron bolt shot into place, Katherine had become a nun.
Sitting in the low-backed wooden chair, Katherine wore a white cotton nightdress with tiny wooden buttons at the collar and cuffs. Her habit hung in the narrow closet across from her low metal cot. Her stiff wimple, leather girdle, and large-beaded rosary were laid neatly across the bureau top; she examined them every few minutes in excitement that they were hers. The black hose and veil were on a hanger on the closet doorknob. Attached to the cream-colored wall next to the single window was an unadorned crucifix, and it was not the one that had hung in her room on Medford Street. The unpatterned white curtains had not yet been drawn, and the window was opened a few inches to admit the cool evening breeze that blew across the marsh. The tide was swiftly flowing out, but there were still pools in which Katherine, by turning her head a little, could catch the reflection of the rising gibbous moon.
As she wrote, she listened with smiling satisfaction to the soft steps sounding in the long corridor of the third floor as the nuns readied themselves for sleep. Occasionally she heard low voices or an aspirate giggle. The sounds were familiar, for she had lived in the convent for several weeks, but for the first time Katherine
felt as if she had the right to take comfort and pleasure from such sounds: no longer was she on the outside, an interloper, a suffered participant in the pleasures of the conventual life. Katherine Dolan was dead—and she was Sister Katherine, Slave of the Immaculate Conception.
I know that for the rest of my life I’ll be just as happy as I am at this very minute. I know that for me, every moment will be a pleasure—just as this moment is a pleasure. The sisters are walking up and down outside in the corridor, and when they pass my door, they think, “That’s the room where Sister is, that’s Sister Katherine’s room.” I’m one of them now. Just one year ago, not even that, nine months ago, at the end of my senior year at ImCon, I would look at Sister Mary Claire and at Sister Jude Thaddeus, and I would think, “They call each other Sister.” They both belonged to God, and they belonged to each other, and they loved each other in God, and it seemed like that was the most wonderful thing in the world, something that I could never experience myself. I didn’t think I was good enough to devote myself to God, I didn’t think I was smart enough. But Sister Mary Claire said that in God’s sight, we’re all stupid and we’re all sinful, and that it’s only here on earth that we have degrees of stupidity and sinfulness. Without the grace of God, we’re all insignificant and we’re all damned. There’s a nun here called Sister Josepha, and I talked to her tonight. She loves the convent too. She said, “When I was a little girl, our priest said that we shouldn’t think about heaven as clouds, and people floating around and playing harps all the time, because that’s not anybody’s idea of a good time, but instead we should think of heaven as being the nicest thing we can think of—whatever that is—and then heaven will be twice as nice as that.” So from now on I’m going to think of heaven as a convent, just like the one here in Hingham, where I have my own room, and a window that looks out on the marshes. There are trees everywhere you look, and everything is quiet and peaceful.
Blood Rubies Page 8
