Then Came Heaven

by LaVyrle Spencer

  They were all sitting with their chins dropped, staring at the tablecloth. She went on in the sweet seraphim’s voice they had come to expect from her.

  “Grandma asked, how could I not know what the life of a nun was like when I’d been around them my whole life. But there’s a lot you don’t know, a lot you’ll never know about a nun’s life. About the repression of emotion, and the amount of time spent in spiritual activities that might have been better spent on practical work. About living with a houseful of women with personality quirks that sometimes drive you mad, yet you can’t say a word, because if you do, you break Holy Rule. About asking forgiveness for things that don’t seem wrong. About obeying unquestioningly when you don’t believe what you’re doing is the best thing. About giving up your family and not being able to see them but once every five years. And yes, giving up the right to have children of your own when you love children so much and realize that you would have made a good mother, and probably a good wife, too.

  “I made the decision to be a nun when I was eleven. Just think of that—eleven! I hadn’t even grown to my full height yet, or had a say about how I wanted my hair cut, or been to the county fair without Mom and Dad, or paid for a dress with my own money. I hadn’t had a boyfriend yet or a job. How can a child of eleven know what she’s committing herself to when she says she wants to be a nun? Heavens, I was still entranced by their black habits.

  “Mother gave me some old white curtains, remember, Elizabeth?”—she turned to the sister closest to her in age—“and a torn-up sheet, and I made a play habit out of white because there wasn’t enough black cloth around the house. I dressed in it the way other children dress up for Halloween, and I danced around the orchard between the apple trees, and watched the wind catch my veil, and knelt and sang Tantum Ergo one evening after a spring rain when there was a rainbow in the east. At eleven I saw it all as a... a sort of costume drama. Everything at church was dramatic—the candles, the incense, the processions with banners, the beautiful chanting, and us little girls in our new white dresses and veils strewing flower petals for Corpus Christi. What little girl wouldn’t be impressed by that? And the nuns were wrapped up in all of it. Besides that, they were teachers, and I revered them because I wanted to teach.

  “So in our room Elizabeth and I played school, and she was always the student and I was always the teacher, and I’d take the wooden slat out of the bottom of a shade and use it as a pointer and tap the papered walls and pretend there were blackboards there and I was teaching her the alphabet. I wanted to be a teacher, and the only kind of teacher I had ever known wore a habit, so that’s the kind I wanted to be.

  “But I was eleven...” More softly, she repeated, “... eleven.”

  She glanced all around the table. Some faces were lifted, their expressions softening. “And everybody said what a wonderful nun I’d make. I should be a nun. Grandma said so, Mother said so, the nuns at school said so. And what child of eleven isn’t going to believe the people she admires the most? Pretty soon I thought so, too. So I became one... and

  I was happy. For quite a long time, I was happy. So please don’t think I’m blaming you, or that I have regrets. There are no regrets here.” She crossed her wrists over her heart. “None at all.” The gold ring on her left hand glinted in the light and her voluminous sleeve looped down. By now most of the family members around the table were watching her, and she stood in the motionless pose for several seconds before going on.

  “There is so much I like about living in my religious community. There’s the wonderful sense of belonging to this worldwide family that will always be there for me. There’s a sense of purpose to every hour of every day, of doing good, and of changing the world in important ways. When we pray together, especially during Divine Office, realizing that every other priest and nun the world over is offering up the same prayer at the same time—why, I cannot tell you how powerful and rewarding those times are. And I love teaching... some of the children have grown very special to me, and their families, too, and the people of the town who are so good to us at Saint Joseph’s.

  “And, of course, from a much more practical standpoint, there’s tremendous security to living in a convent. All my worldly needs are taken care of—food, clothing, shelter, company, a job, a place to go if I get sick, a home for me in my old age. All of those things you take for granted because you’re married and you have children and you’ve always lived and worked here. You know where you belong. But when I leave my Order I’ll have nothing. Not a home, or a job, or even clothing. Certainly not a savings account, because members of a religious order are allowed to own nothing for themselves.

  “So... when I leave there, I’ll be starting over as a... a displaced person. Maybe now you can understand what an agonizing decision this has been for me.”

  Nobody said a word, so she went on, beseeching them to believe her. “And I haven’t missed the worldly things, honestly I haven’t. But I want... I want...” Her voice had grown tender and yearning. “Most of all I want a friend. Somebody I could talk to about all of this.” She paused and looked from one to the other, then her voice grew plaintive as she asked, “And if that friend were a man, would you forgive me?” She waited, but all remained silent. “Because I do have a friend who’s a man, and yes, he’s the one who drove me home. His wife died last September, and in his sorrow he turned to me. Oh, not physically. We talked, and prayed together, and on occasion wept, because he loved his wife so totally and richly and it seemed so unfair that God had taken her. He has two beautiful children, and I love them and feel such pity for them that... that holding myself apart from them has become a penance for me. I wanted to reach out to them when their mother died, and to their father as well. But this, you see, is forbidden to me. Because it is physical.”

  Her motionless hands were loosely joined on the table. Her voice landed on her family like rose petals on a lawn.

  “I’ve taken a vow of chastity, so if I say to you that I love this man—and I think I do—you think he’s the reason I’m leaving my vocation. But he came last. All the other reasons came first.”

  One of the children came to the doorway just then and stopped, gazing from one adult face to another. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Another child joined her and said, “How come everybody’s just sitting here? Aren’t you going to do the dishes and play cards?”

  Grandma Potlocki moved first: an easy escape. “Come on, girls,” she said to her daughters, “Carol’s right. Dishes are waiting.”

  ________

  There was no card playing that afternoon. Instead, when the dishes were washed, Sister Regina’s siblings left one by one, taking their families and empty roasters with them. When Grandma left, Regina walked to the car with her. The old woman gave her granddaughter a hard, prolonged hug and said, “I don’t know, Regina. I just don’t know. I think you should make a retreat, make sure you’re doing the right thing. Will you do that for me?”

  “I made one last August, for exactly this reason.”

  “Well, make another one. Promise?”

  Regina sighed. “All right, Grandma, I promise.”

  In the house after everyone had left, Bertha tiptoed around as if there were a dead body laid out in the parlor. She seemed unable to meet Regina’s eyes, said little, and finally disappeared into her bedroom, ostensibly to take a nap, which she’d never done in her life.

  Sister Regina knelt in her room and recited Vespers and Compline, Matins and lauds, and when dusk was falling, went out to the barn, where her father was milking. She had always loved milking time in the barn. Warmed by the animals’ bodies, it was cozy and redolent of hay and bovine. Two dim electric lights spread a tarnished yellow dinge over the animals and the cobwebbed beams overhead. Her father sat between two holsteins, sending rhythmic streams into a frothy pail.

  “Can I help you, Daddy?”

  “Sure. Grab a pail.”

  She found a bucket and milking stool and settled down with her sle
eves rolled up, her skirts forming a hammock, between the warm bulk of two cows who were noisily chewing their cuds. The knack came back immediately, and her arm muscles grew pleasantly hot. Soon she realized she and her father were milking in point/counterpoint as they had when she was young. He created a lead beat and she an afterbeat with their streams of milk.

  Shtt.

  Sht.

  Shtt.

  There was nothing like milking together to dissolve animosity. She sensed that his feelings about all this were different from her mother’s.

  “You didn’t have much to say, Daddy.”

  “Been thinking.”

  “And what did you come up with?”

  “That you’re right. Your mother and your grandmother worked on you from the time you were old enough to blow your own nose.”

  “But I wanted to be a nun, too.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  They milked some more. Thought some more. Enjoyed this time of closeness, which was rekindling many loving feelings between them.

  After some time Frank said, “I’d like to know more about this man.”

  “It would be premature. When and if the time comes, I’ll tell you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Frank finished one cow and moved on to another. A cat came out of the shadows and preened her body against Regina’s ankle, turned and did it again and again. She reached down and scratched the sleek black body, ran a cupped hand clear down its length to the tip of its curved tail, and murmured, “Hello, what’s your name?”

  “That one’s Midnight,” her father answered. “If you need to come home for a while and live after you quit, it’s all right with me, Jean. I’ll talk to your mother about it, and she’ll come around. You’ll see.”

  Regina’s hand stalled halfway down the body of the cat, and she got tears in her eyes. She put her forehead against the hard, warm belly of the cow and sat so for some seconds, idle, thankful, filled with such emotion it felt as if her heart could not contain it.

  Finally, she lifted her head and called softly, “I love you, Daddy.”

  She could not see him on the other side of the cow, but she heard him clear his throat. Then his milking stool scraped the floor. And though he wasn’t a man who could say it, she felt as loved as she ever had in her life.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Christmas was as forlorn as Eddie expected. The pageantry and music of Midnight Mass, which usually filled him with joy and celebration, only left him melancholy. Not even the majestic pipe organ or the choir raising its hallelujahs could lift his doleful spirits. The nuns were present in the front right pew, but there was no Sister Regina to fix upon in an effort to cheer himself. The children fell asleep and when Mass was over he had to contend with two limp bodies all by himself. There was no Krystyna to prop up one of them and guide arms into coat sleeves, to bolster a slumping form and guide it down the aisle into the cold starlit air outside.

  Eddie did as Rose suggested, slept at her and Romaine’s house, doubling-up the kids in bed with their cousins and bunking, himself, on their davenport under a patchwork quilt. The worst was filling their stockings without Krystyna. He realized now that she had been the true spirit of Christmas in their family, and that he himself made a poor substitute in that department. The toys he’d bought for their stockings seemed uninspired and lackluster; Krystyna’s had always been inventive and exciting for the girls to find. He hadn’t even thought to buy them a blackboard, in spite of the fact that they played school all the time. It was Rose who put a box of chalk in their stockings and stood a brand-new blackboard close by. It was Rose who gave them some toys for their new cat, Sugar, and remembered that Anne had loved playing marbles last spring and bought a bag of cat’s-eyes for her. She’d made doll clothes for Lucy, and trimmed colorful gingerbread men for each of them, the way Krystyna always had. Grandpa Pribil had built them a doll crib and high chair, and Grandma Pribil had made special bedding for the crib, including a quilt that matched the one on their bed at home. Aunt Irene had embroidered them pillowcases with their names on them, and she’d mixed up a big batch of salt dough and given them a toy rolling pin and cookie cutters so they could make their own play cookies when they played house. Lucy’s favorite doll had grown bald, so Irene and her mother had managed to make it a new wig out of fine yellow yam that had only to be glued on to make the doll pretty again.

  But the best gift of all came from their teacher, Sister Regina. She had put together a box of leftover worksheets, ends and scraps of construction paper, a couple of coverless, outdated textbooks, and some very well-used flash cards containing arithmetic tables. Also in the box was a 1948 date-book, with a page for each day of the year, few of them written on; and four partially used receipt books with carbon paper flaps in the front, the kind used by storekeepers to keep a running account of customers’ charges. The uses for the treasures in that box were limited only by the scope of a child’s imagination. Anne and Lucy and their cousins spent most of Christmas Day playing school, store and restaurant, and the truth was they were having so much fun they didn’t miss their mother.

  Eddie watched them enjoying their day and thought of what a perfect gift Sister Regina had dreamed up for them. Besides costing her no money, it found a second use for scrap materials, and it occupied the children so fully that it provided the much dearer gift of helping them forget their mother’s absence for a while. It was—he realized—exactly the kind of gift that Krystyna would have dreamed up herself.

  The gift, of course, brought Sister Regina to mind. Eddie wondered what kind of Christmas she was having. He pictured her in that ordinary farmhouse, surrounded by her family, and wondered if they gave her gifts, and if so, what kind, for he knew the nuns had to turn over virtually everything they received from an outside source to their superior, to be shared by everybody in the religious community. A dozen times during the Christmas season he’d tried to think of something he could buy for her himself. He’d run lists through his mind: gloves, handkerchiefs, chokecherry jelly, Zagnut bars. But in the end he’d decided it wouldn’t be seemly, so he’d gone into his workshop and cut out a bunch of scrap lumber into squares, triangles, columns—shapes of every kind—for her students to play with during the noon hours of these bitterly cold winter days when they couldn’t play outside. No one would question the propriety of his giving such a gift to her students.

  He wondered when she’d come back to the convent, and preoccupied himself for a long time on Christmas afternoon, stretched out on one of Romaine and Rose’s easy chairs with his eyes closed, imagining himself taking the box of wood blocks to her, and the look on her face when she accepted it.

  It never occurred to him that more and more often lately, such thoughts of Sister Regina were supplanting his lamentation over Krystyna.

  ________

  Sister Regina’s Christmas was odd. Parts of it she enjoyed: making prune coffee cakes with her mother; going to Midnight Mass at St. Peter and Paul’s, where she’d attended as a child; living without the tinkle of bells telling her when to rise, to be at chapel, to be at breakfast; going out to the barn to find her dad at the morning milking; feeding the cats warm milk from sardine cans; watching her nieces and nephews opening gifts; going to her favorite sister’s, Elizabeth’s, for Christmas dinner.

  But there were undertones. Everyone—with the exception of her dad—tiptoed around her, treated her as if she might be carrying some contagious disease they didn’t want to catch. None of them sat easy with her and visited. No one teased her, asked her to help with dishes, or to set a table. Certainly nobody brought up the subject of her leaving her vocation. Ever since that announcement, they treated her like a pariah.

  By the time she left, she was more than ready to go. Her mother hugged her at the kitchen door and tucked a five-dollar bill into her hand. “For everyone at your convent,” she said. Then she took Regina by both cheeks and said, with hurt, tear-filled eyes, “Please make very, very sure you’re doing th
e right thing before you quit.”

  “I will, Mother. That’s why I’m going to Saint Ben’s.”

  St. Benedict’s Convent was situated in the sleepy rural town of St. Joseph, just west of St. Cloud. Her father drove her there and deposited her at the portal she remembered so well. It hadn’t changed since Sister Regina had studied there as a novitiate. The open gate, the dormitory, the Sacred Heart Chapel were as familiar to her as if she’d never left. In that shadowy chapel, dwarfed by its Baroque granite arches and humbled by its stained-glass dome, she spent the next four days at prayer. Hours and hours of prayer, moving among others clad identical to her, slow-moving figures in black who sang Gregorian chants in a steady, sweet soprano drone that seemed to be coming from within the very walls themselves. She took her meals in the refectory, where the words of grace, recited in unison, were as musical as hymn, and slept in a spare cubicle devoid of worldly distractions. She attended Masses celebrated by Benedictine monks, and knelt in contemplative silence, open to her God, inviting Him into her heart and mind, inviting Him to change her will to suit His.