The Novice

Christina Askounis

 

IT WAS Catherine’s last night. Lawson suggested they have dinner at her favorite restaurant, a resolutely untrendy bistro where the aged waiters knew them both by name. “Since it’s your last night,” he’d said, conscious of the theatrical cast the words seemed to give the evening. Still, it was no more than the truth. Catherine, who tonight looked so lovely, so finished in her black sleeveless dress—Catherine was leaving him. Not the right way to put it, of course. But ever since that long-ago afternoon when she had been eleven and he twenty-eight—only twenty eight!—scarcely older than she was now—he had felt she did belong to him in a way, that they belonged to each other, and now she was going, never to return. Lawson, who possessed an inner gauge that registered any subterranean leakage of sentimentality or self-pity, moved quickly to seal the fault. She had made her decision, incomprehensible as it might be to him; that was all there was to it. His eyes wandered over the flowing handwritten script on the menu. He read French well enough (menu French, his dead mother reminded him), but the restaurant’s refusal to include an English translation on the facing page made him feel suddenly peevish.

He looked up. “Did you say something?”

Catherine smiled at him over the candle flame. “A murmur of pleasure,” she said.

“You must have everything you like best.”

“‘The condemned woman ate a hearty meal’?” She laughed. “Lawson.”

Her voice speaking his name.

 

“What should I call you?” Catherine had asked the day they met as they left the lawyers’ offices. She wore a navy blue coat and a curiously old-fashioned hat with a grosgrain band. He’d been surprised by how young she seemed, how unlike the girl children of his colleagues at the bank, with their stylish clothes and loud, confident voices. He supposed it had something to do with having grown up in other countries. In the office she had sat listlessly in a big chair, her pallor startling against the red leather, holding a grimy stuffed animal of indeterminate species, feet dangling, the very picture of woe.

As they walked to the elevator he saw the coat had been outgrown, exposing bird-bone wrists and the chalky knobs of her knees. Her braids—he wondered who had tied them for her, before she left, and if he would be up to the job—had loosened, dark curling wisps wild to make their escape. The bows were untied, and somehow the limp ribbons struck him as unbearably sad. “I don’t like to call people uncle when they’re not,” she had added quickly as the doors closed. “Do you?” Her eyes—a wary blue—flashed a glance and looked away.

“No,” he answered, unnerved by a sense that the child possessed some preternatural knowledge of his past, in which many such “uncles” had made appearances. There was no way she could know, of course; it was not possible. They crossed the lobby and stepped outside into the blazing blue and gold autumn day. A brisk wind whipped the flags over the building’s entrance and caught her hat, sending it flying down the sidewalk. They chased after it in classic comic fashion, but without laughter, like characters in a silent film, nearly pouncing on it only to have the wind snatch it away. When it flew into the street he was ready to propose that they give up the chase but made one last try, aware of appearing slightly ridiculous as he held up one hand, signaling drivers to
wait—and then of how much he needed not to fail her. Finally he retrieved it and made his way back, where he was rewarded by the first of her smiles. Her teeth were a bit crooked, one in the front overlapping its neighbor. The insignificant flaw—like her freckles—added interest to her face, but he supposed she would need braces; all of them had braces these days, didn’t they?

“I think it would be fine,” he said as they walked on, “if you call me Lawson.”

“Lawson,” she repeated, her brow puckering.

“It was my mother’s maiden name,” he said. Too late, it occurred to him that she might not know what the term meant. Would she ask? Ought he to explain? He would enjoy explaining things to her, he realized suddenly—perhaps too much. “What could my mother have been thinking, giving a defenseless baby a name like that?” he asked, hoping to make her smile again. “It sounds like a butler, doesn’t it?”

In the pause that followed he saw her weigh her answer, politeness balanced against honesty in the scales.

“It kind of does,” she said. And then, as if to make up for it, took his hand when they stepped off the curb.

All the fears that had kept him awake that first night she slept under his roof, how she complicated his life in a way he felt helpless to deal with—none of that had turned out to matter, hadn’t even figured into his thoughts again. Instead he worried about whether she was happy, and if he could be enough for her, mother and father when he was neither, and how to keep her safe in a world suddenly rife with danger. He had seen to it that she was protected and looked after, he had enrolled her in the Episcopal boarding school his cousins had attended where the girls wore plaid skirts and crested blazers to chapel every day and played lacrosse and field hockey and went on to major in art history at Bryn Mawr. When a pair of distant relatives had come sniffing around, on the scent of Catherine’s money, a trust he carefully tended through lean and fat years, he had made it clear, so very clear, that they had no claim to her or to anything that belonged to her, and they had slunk away, disappearing down whatever hole they had emerged from. He had made it a point to know each of the young men in a long succession who took her out. But he had never thought to guard against this.

He lay the menu down on the table. She was still perusing hers but glanced up, checking on him. When the waiter returned she hadn’t yet made up her mind.

“You order for me,” she said, and so he did.

“Feeling indecisive?” he asked her after the waiter slid silently away.

“Only about food.”

She smiled—a little sadly, he thought. But perhaps he was only imagining it.

"I suppose they’ll cut your hair?” It was lovely hair, shining and dark, and she was wearing it tonight in a way he especially liked, fashioned into a U-shaped loop in the back. It made him think of old movies set in wartime, girls in hats embracing soldiers on train platforms while the steam from the engine billowed up in clouds around them.

“I’m not enlisting in the marines,” she said.

No, she hadn’t been what he expected, not at all, though now that other child, the one he had imagined, had been so eclipsed by the real Catherine that he could no longer bring her image to mind. “I’m trying to remember what I thought you were going to be like before we met,” he said. “All I knew was that you were eleven.”

“You didn’t know what to do with me at first,” she said. “You kept taking me places and plying me with sweets. Not that I minded.”

“Didn’t we go to Belmont that first afternoon?”

“You can’t have forgotten that! Forty-two dollars—I couldn’t believe my luck. Good old Foofaraw.”

It was true; he hadn’t forgotten. It was part of their story; he had only wanted to hear her recall it, to see the old delight. She was folding the doily under her plate into tiny pleats. “You’ve never talked about what it was like, having me foisted on you. It must have been rough. Especially under the circumstances.”

“The circumstances—and the foisting, I expect—were a good deal rougher on you.”

“But didn’t you resent it—me—even a little? Suddenly having this very sad little person on your hands, more or less permanently? You had absolutely no say.”

“Nor did you. But no, I didn’t resent it—not for a moment. I never made you feel that, I hope?”

“No, never. You were always—well, the way you are now.”

“And how is that?”

“Oh, you know—’’ She drew herself up, straightening invisible lapels and compressing her lips. He saw himself. “Orphan on the doorstep? Slightly unexpected development, but I’m sure we’ll manage.”

“Drink your wine.”

“You made me feel safe,” she said, and he had to look away then, his chest tightening in a way that in recent weeks had become familiar.

Now she was glancing about the restaurant, studying the people at the other tables, the woman in silver, the man with the hopeless toupee. When she was younger he’d had to remind her not to stare. She’d have to give it up where she was going. “Custody of the eyes”—he recalled the phrase from a poorly printed leaflet Catherine had left on his night table. The thing repelled him—the cheap paper, the look of it. It had to have been produced fifty years ago, a batch of a thousand stored in a closet. They’d be handing them out when the century turned again, if they stayed in business that long.

“So tell me what I can expect when I next see you,” he said.

Her face lit up, the way another girl’s might have if he’d mentioned the name of her fiancé. He carefully composed his expression.

“If all goes well and I’m elected to become a novice, there’ll be a service. Everyone’s invited to that—you will come, won’t you, you have to—that’s when I’ll receive my habit and veil and my religious name. It’s a beautiful ceremony. I saw someone clothed as a novice when I was staying at the convent last winter.”

“And if you don’t like it there? What then?”

“I can leave. Any time. Even after make my life vows, years from now. You know that. These are Anglican nuns! It’s not a cult.”

He did know that. It was one of the first questions he had asked in his interview with the Reverend Mother Julian, the superior of the order. She hadn’t been what he expected, either. Tall, for one thing: six-two to his six feet, he judged as they shook hands in the gloomy visitors’ parlor, with a grip as firm and callused as a laborer’s.

“Let’s go outside in the garden, shall we?” she said. “I’ve never cared for this room.”

Outside the June sun was so bright he reached for his sunglasses, hesitated, and left them in his pocket.

She led him down a path between banks of day lilies, their heads bobbing on long green stems. He made polite comments on the beauty of the grounds as she glided alongside him, black-sailed, her hands inside the wide sleeves of her habit. They sat down in the cool dim shade of an arbor. Behind them bees hummed among glossy green leaves and white blossoms.

“I understand you’re less than enthusiastic about Catherine joining us here.” There was no accusation in her tone, but he immediately felt on the defensive.

“It’s entirely up to her,” he said, more gruffly than he intended. “Naturally, I have concerns. I’m afraid she may have no real idea of what she’s getting herself into. I understand the appeal of the thing, I think—I suppose it’s romantic, in a way—”

The reverend mother surprised him with a laugh. “We do get inquiries from women who’ve seen The Nun’s Story once too often. But Catherine doesn’t strike me as the starry-eyed type.”

“No,” he admitted. “No.” He fingered the crease in his trousers.

“Are you a believer yourself, may I ask?”

In what exactly, he started to say, but they both knew what she meant. You could parse it any way you liked, play with definitions and concepts, but in the end it came down to where you placed your bet. Pascal’s wager, wasn’t it? Red or black, something or nothing, yes or no.

“I’m not sure,” he said finally. It seemed a feeble answer, even if it was the truth.

“Does this seem inexplicable, then?”

“Not entirely. I’ve been a member of Saint Thomas’s all my life.”

“And you brought up Catherine in the church.”

“Yes, but—’’

His misgivings hung in the silence between them.

“I can only imagine how difficult it must be for you,” the nun said. “But Catherine does appear to want this very deeply. I’m sure you see that. And we will help her discern whether she has a vocation, whether this is truly a call from God. She won’t be allowed to go forward at each stage unless the chapter elects her to advance.”

"When was the last time you rejected someone?” He was surprised at his own rudeness, but Mother Julian sat as still as ever, her hands folded, palms up, her eyes fixed on a flowering tree just across from them.

“It’s true that we have very few new vocations, Mr. Hunter. But we would close our doors before we would take in someone we were not confident belonged here. There are only fifteen of us; Catherine will make sixteen. We live in very close quarters and spend more time with each other than most families.” The nun shook an insect from her skirt. “What has Catherine told you about how she reached her decision?”

“Not very much.” He hadn’t wanted to hear about it, didn’t want to hear about it now.

“She felt for a long time that she might be called to this life, but she resisted. Most of us do, for the usual reasons. Catherine’s reluctance had mainly to do with you.”

“With me?”

“Well, it’s just the two of you, isn’t it?”

The sympathy in her tone irritated him. “I’ve always known that she’d be leaving—we both have. Just not— Besides, it’s not as if I’m going to be entirely alone. I have—” The phrase “a wide circle of friends” came to him, but it sounded absurd. A breeze parted the leaves over their heads. Lawson looked up into a dazzle of sunlight. A trickle of sweat ran down the inside of his collar. He felt beaten, helpless before the implacable calm of the mother superior.

“She’s giving up too much,” he said finally.

“She is giving up a great deal, yes. But then, love is always costly, isn’t it?” The nun’s gaze was kindly, but when she rested her hand on his, cool and heavy as a marble slab, he fought an impulse to throw it off. As if she felt the current of his hostility, she stood up. The interview was over, the matter settled. “We will do our best for Catherine, Mr. Hunter. I can promise you that.”

 

 

And now the inevitable had arrived, her last night. They had finished their meal, sharing each other’s desserts, and he had downed a second bottle of wine while they carefully avoided talk of the future. That which I greatly feared has come upon me—he’d read that somewhere, couldn’t think where. As they stood to leave, he held onto the back of the chair and then concentrated on walking a straight line toward the door. Outside the night air felt soft with spring; streetlights were ringed with misty haloes. He hailed a cab, fell heavily into the backseat, and gave the driver their address on Park.

All the way there, eyes closed, his head lolling against the torn vinyl of the taxi seat, Catherine silent beside him, he breathed in the light scent of her cologne— lily of the valley, it was—thinking: when she’s gone, this will go, too. It would linger for awhile, he supposed, but one day it would be gone. Lately he’d taken to going into her room when she wasn’t there, looking at the objects on her dressing table, the pictures on the wall, studying everything as if for clues. For months she had been winnowing her possessions, although she had been careful to do it when he was not around. Many familiar things had disappeared, leaving the room looking strangely forsaken.

The night doorman greeted them. Lawson thought he saw pity in the man’s sunken black eyes. The elevator ride made him woozy. In his bathroom he splashed cold water on his face and stood gripping the sink. The face in the
mirror seemed to belong to someone else. Someone heavier and drunker, someone whose life was about to be cleaved in two.

“Catherine,” he said aloud. He took a comb from his pocket and with great deliberation put his hair to rights.

His mother hadn’t told him about Catherine, hadn’t mentioned that Catherine’s parents had named her as guardian in their wills, though she had kept a framed picture of them with a much younger Catherine on the piano. Lawson
had met the parents once or twice; he had only a cloudy memory of a handsome couple drinking cocktails on the terrace, both of them amateur archaeologists whose work his mother had sponsored—one of her many baffling and erratic acts of philanthropy. He did not know where Catherine had been on those occasions, or why her parents had entrusted Catherine to his mother’s care in the unlikely event that they both died. His mother never spoke of death at all, not anyone else’s and least of all her own, not even in those last days when he had
nursed her himself, sitting for long hours beside her bed, trying to make sense of the sometimes cryptic things she said, stroking her arm, feeding her ice chips. When she died the sharpness of his grief surprised him; he had expected to feel released, free. He scarcely had time to become accustomed to being on his own, untethered, when the phone call from the lawyers had come. Out of the blue, he would say when telling the story. Just like that, out of the blue.

One day long after, it dawned on him that his mother had simply forgotten her pledge to Catherine’s parents, forgotten the child as she sometimes forgot some treasure she owned (after her death he recovered a small Renoir from the back of her closet). But that was Mother. If she had lived a little longer and been alive when Catherine’s parents met their own deaths on a dig in Syria, if it had been she and not Lawson who had been summoned, she would have gladly taken Catherine in, would have fussed over her and showed her off to her friends, would have hugged the little girl to herself as she had done with him, pressing cheek to cheek, redolent of talcum, reaching into the deep pockets of her silk dressing gown for a cellophane-wrapped toffee, or a powder puff with which to tickle a small nose.

But it hadn’t happened that way. Catherine was his. All right, he’d sent her off to that school. That’s where it must’ve all started, too, with the nuns. But he hadn’t known what else to do. He’d only known what he mustn’t do; Mother had taught him that much. He’d never made a pet of her, never overwhelmed her with affection only to forget about her once she was out of sight. No.

From Saint Hilda’s she’d gone on to Bryn Mawr. She’d talked about moving out when she graduated, about living with two or three classmates on the West Side, but in the end she’d chosen to stay. No sense in moving into some crowded apartment with so much space here: rooms and rooms. They had their own lives; a week might go by when they scarcely saw each other. On the odd evenings when both of them were at home, he laid a fire in the study and they had Chinese delivered from that little place she liked so much and watched Hepburn and Tracy movies.

They’d grown used to each other over the years, to depend on each other—she knowing he would be there when he said he would, first at the door of Saint Hilda’s when chapel was over and the holidays began, and then on station platforms or in his chair in the study, waiting for her return from an evening out—and he relying on her for....

For what, asked the eyes of the man in the mirror.

Oh, for everything. He saw it now.

He walked slowly into the study. She had poured herself a ginger ale and him a cognac, his usual nightcap. She was turned away from him, looking through the glass at the glittering city.

“You’ll miss it,” he said.

“Yes, of course I will.”

“Look here,” he said, “Why couldn’t you have married Henry Gardner?”

“Henry Gardner!” she laughed, touching the hollow of her throat.

“He was all right,” Lawson said, feeling unaccountably defensive on young Gardner’s behalf. In fact he could remember little about him apart from a general impression of good looks and affability, but he seized upon his image now like a drowning man reaching for a piece of wreckage. “Very solid,” he said.

“Oh, very solid,” she agreed, smoothing the fringe on a throw pillow, not meeting his eyes. Was she laughing again?

“One of the others, then. Why not? House in Connecticut, babies. I’d come up and dandle them on my knee, bring ’em presents.”

That had been the expected blow, he realized, the one he had steeled himself against. She would fall in love; she would hurry down the church steps in her white dress, casting one last look over her shoulder at him. This was worse, far worse. Even the mention of babies seemed to have no effect. And she liked them—how many times had she stopped to steal a glance beneath the hood of a pram in the park, exclaiming over this one’s bright eyes, that one’s tiny hands?

“I’m not meant to marry,” she said calmly.

“Oh, don’t go getting nunny on me.”

She ignored this. “Though I do like knowing I could have. That’s vain of me, I suppose.”

“Why shouldn’t you be vain? You’ve got every reason to be.”

“But I don’t want—I don’t want that to be what matters about me. To me.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“I want to forget about myself altogether.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“It’s freedom.”

“Freedom? By God, it certainly doesn’t look like it.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then you’re not doing this because—because of some unhappiness?”

“I’m doing it because I can’t imagine being happy if I don’t.”

 

 

She unlaced his shoes as he lay on top of the bedspread, still wearing his jacket and tie. This was an old ritual, something she had played at when she was little, taking care of him, as if she were the parent and he the child.

“You’re sure you don’t want to get into your pajamas?”

He watched her moving around his room in her stocking feet, lowering the blinds, placing his shoes side by side in the closet.

“No,” he said. “But bring me a couple of aspirin or something, will you?”

She went into his bathroom. He heard her open the medicine cabinet. “You’re getting low on one of your prescriptions,” she called.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

She sat on the edge of the bed while he propped himself on one elbow and took the pills. “I’m sorry,” he said, falling back on the pillow.

“If only you could feel what I feel, just for a moment—” She looked helplessly around, as if the watercolor of Venice or the carafe on the night table might come to her aid. He gave a tired laugh. “Ah, yes—that’s what we all want, isn’t it?” He closed his eyes. The aspirin was stuck in his throat, a slowly dissolving clot.

“I know you think it’s all mumbo-jumbo,” she said. “That’s all right. I mean, I understand.” Now she was twisting the ring on her finger, an amethyst he had given her on her eighteenth birthday. “But nothing I say will make any sense to you.” What would she do with the ring, he wondered.

“S’probably true, but go ahead. If you have pearls to cast, prepare to cast them now.”

He had meant to lighten the moment, to make her laugh. Then, seeing her expression, he rested his hand on hers. The pain of contact surprised him. She drew a deep breath. Praying for the right words, he thought, with a kind of savagery. He felt a blinding impulse to strike out at some unseen enemy.

Still she did not speak. Then she was blinking back tears. “Oh, no no no no,” he said, pushing himself upright.

He could scarcely remember the last time he’d held her like this. She rarely cried, even as a child, recovering quickly from small losses and disappointments— but when true sorrow came, she surrendered to it with an abandon he found both unnerving and enviable.

“Poor old Catbird,” he said.

“I can’t help it—I don’t want to leave you!”

He stroked her hair as she clung to him. The room seemed to be turning slowly on some axis, carrying them up and away, into space. Just the two of you, the mother superior had said. Yes, just the two. Two little orphans, he thought mawkishly, and then: my God, man, you are drunk. He remembered the moment long past when Catherine had pointed out that they were both orphans, how pleased she seemed by the realization, as if the fate they shared made them kin. She grew quiet in his arms. A thought took hold of him, clearing the alcoholic haze from his brain. It might just be possible to make her stay, and after all, who could blame him? It might even be his duty. She was caught up in all of it now, but sooner or later she would regret her decision, would feel she had lost herself somehow. No point in reasoning with her, of course. But if she were made to feel that she could not go, that he could not after all be abandoned, that she too had a duty.... He saw clearly where his advantage lay. A sense of his power over her rose from his gut and fanned out, a sudden shadow.

She drew back and looked into his eyes, searching his depths. “What is it?” she asked, alarm in her voice.

A chill raced over his scalp. No. He felt a rush of vertigo, as if he had just stepped back from the edge of a great height.

“Nothing.” He loosed her from his embrace, less gently than he intended.

“You mustn’t worry about me, you know. I’ll be fine.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

It was all the reassurance she needed. He saw how much she wanted to believe him, to be free to go, and turned his face from her.

 

He woke in the night, thirsty. The carafe on his bedside table was nearly empty. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and sat there, waiting for his head to stop swimming. Then he reached for his robe at the foot of his bed and went to the kitchen. He poured a glassful of water from the faucet and drank it down, then drank another, the marble tile cool beneath his bare feet. In the window over the sink he caught a fractured glimpse of his reflection and quickly looked away. It was quiet in the apartment. The thick carpets and the heavy draperies that fell from the tall windows and pooled on the floor muffled every sound. When the place was empty, he could bellow and roar without disturbing a soul.

On the way back to his room he turned right down the hallway and paused outside Catherine’s door. She had left it open a crack, her habit. She lay on her back, her hair loose on the pillow. He watched the blanket slowly rise and fall with her breathing. She wore a white cotton gown. The blue ribbon threaded through the neckline had come untied.

For months after her parents’ deaths she’d had nightmares, waking with a panicky cry that rent his sleep and sent him flying to her side, where he sat until she fell asleep again.

“Sing to me,” she had said one night, and he demurred, offering to read to her instead. But she turned pleading eyes on him, as if his singing alone could scatter the demons. Searching his memory for a lullaby he found only the Whiffenpoof Song:

Gentlemen songsters, off on a spree
Damned from here to eternity
Lord have mercy on such as we....

On her dressing table lay a small red leather case. He imagined himself taking the small scissors from its place, lifting a lock of hair from the pillow, cutting it.

Back in his own room, he sat for a long time on the edge of the bed, the curl wrapped invisibly about his finger.

 

 

The grounds of the convent lay covered in snow the evening Lawson returned, six months later, to attend Catherine’s clothing as a novice. The guest mistress, Sister Grace, showed him to a cabin just beyond the garden and busied herself lighting a fire in the woodstove.

“I can do that,” he said.

She glanced at him, sizing him up. “It’s temperamental, this stove,” she answered.

Catherine would be down to escort him to the refectory for the evening meal, the sister informed him. It was a subtle way of reminding him that Catherine had other priorities now, he supposed. In the meantime, the nun added, perhaps he would like to rest from his journey.

Driving west, through the characterless landscape on either side of the interstate, he had found his thoughts drifting to his childhood. He had read somewhere that every time a memory was recalled, a chemical change took place in the brain, so that the very act of recollecting something altered it. If that were so, he thought, perhaps nothing remains of the past but what we make of it.

He lay now on the narrow little bed that sagged slightly beneath his weight, and stared at the simple crucifix on the opposite wall. Not for the first time it occurred to him that a religion which had at its heart an execution was bound to be peculiar in other ways as well. He closed his eyes and saw cars. After a bit, he stood up, wobbling as he walked toward the chair and reached for his overcoat, thrown down in conscious rebellion against the neatness and austerity of the little room. Getting old, he thought, steadying himself. But I’ve always been old.

Outside there was just enough light to see a path that he had spied earlier, leading down to a pond. The wind was blowing snow off the ground. He pulled his coat tightly around him and tugged his hat firmly onto his head. The bare trees were just visible against the sky, draining of light. The pond was frozen. His ears hurt. A half moon rose over the ribbed, pitched roof of the chapel. He took a tentative step onto the thick, cloudy ice. What was under there now? What happened to everything?

Catherine had written him every week. She was happy, she said. Her conviction that she had come to the right place had only grown. He took a deep breath of the icy air and bent his neck to crane at the sky. The heavy clouds were breaking up, and behind them lay a million stars. He turned up his collar and headed back.

 

 

The next morning he sat in the hard wooden pew, near the aisle, wearing his coat to ward off the chill. The air smelled faintly of incense and cedar. Some of Catherine’s friends from school and college sat beside him. He hadn’t recognized one or two of them at first. When she was younger, Catherine had always seemed to seek out the girls no one else liked, outsiders: the rebellious who, to his eye, at least, made themselves deliberately unattractive, or the timid who hung back, afraid even to approach the charmed circle of popular girls. Now they had all grown up, become self-assured, even lovely. Standing on the chapel steps before the service, they introduced themselves, telling school stories, their laughter rising in clouds of vapor. He was grateful for their presence, filling out the pew. It seemed almost chillier inside than out; the stone walls of the chapel held the cold. How could they afford to heat the place at all, much less maintain it? He wondered if the dowry Catherine would bring to the order had anything to do with the decision to accept her as a novice. It was an uncharitable thought; he brushed it aside.

The sisters filed in, two by two, reminding him of the Madeline books, taking him back to a moment when he was five, sitting next to his mother in her big bed as she read the story to him in French. He in his pajamas and robe (“my little man,” Mother called him) and she in an evening gown or dinner dress of whispery silk, her ring-laden finger pointing out the unfamiliar words. He wasn’t sure how old he’d been when he realized the bedtime ritual had been in part a performance for whatever man happened to be waiting in the living room and who might venture as far as the bedroom door and observe the charming scene.

It’s all right, Mother, he said to her in his head, amazed to find that he meant it, that he forgave her everything. What was any of it compared to the one great thing she had done for him, however unwittingly? Now Catherine was walking up the aisle, dressed unlike the others in a schoolgirl’s black jumper and white blouse. She gave him and her friends a sidelong look as she passed, suppressing a smile. Then she was gone, taking her place in the choir stalls with her sisters. The black habit and white veil she would wear after today lay draped on the altar rail.

He was startled when the nuns began to sing, airy voices from another world. Father Schneider, the frail, white-haired priest Lawson had sat next to at breakfast, intoned the opening words of the liturgy with a surprising command. Lawson followed along, his attention flowing over the familiar words like water over smooth-rubbed stones, now free, now caught swirling in an eddy, then passing on. The old priest lifted the red leather-bound book from the altar, held it up, his hands steady.

“The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Luke....”

Lawson gazed at Catherine. How beautiful she looked, the air seeming to brighten around her.

The gospel reading was about the woman who came to a dinner party where Jesus was a guest and washed his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. Then she had anointed him with ointment from an alabaster flask, which did not go down well with the other disciples, especially Judas, who objected to the waste. Lawson had always been inclined to agree. But perhaps, he thought now, the extravagance was the point. Yes, of course—how could he have missed seeing that? Love was prodigal by nature, the heart wanting nothing so much as to throw itself away on what must one day be relinquished. His gaze drifted to the crucifix over the altar. The painted eyes fixed on him with a gaze that seemed not without compassion.

Father Schneider was explaining something about the alabaster flask. An interesting detail, that flask. In order to open it, to release the costly fragrance, it had to be broken, adding to the expense....

From her seat in the choir stall, Catherine was looking at him with concern. Hadn’t got the hang of that custody of the eyes business yet.

His hand rose to his chest. He waggled his fingers in a little wave, a last secret signal between them.

The pain startled him with its sharpness, as though he’d been struck just once, and fractured. Catherine, the red-robed priest, the figure hanging on the cross blurred into one before he blinked back the tears and saw everything again with unnatural clarity, as if through a corrective lens.

 

Visit Christina Askounis as Artist of the Month for October '07

Issue #47 • Fall 2005