Mariette in Ecstasy (11 page)

Compline. She prays without thought. Without emotion. She is a book without words or pictures. She is a night without moon.

Mass of Saint Sylvester, Abbot.

Sleep get up pray pray pray pray pray pray pray
.

Mass of Saint Saturninus, Martyr.

Mariette is slowly walking the great dining hall with a Jeroboam of straw-white wine at dinner, when Mother Saint-Raphaël belatedly arrives, spiking her crooked cane on the floor planks and sitting down with the great weight of old age. She scowls at the five novices and then at Mariette and taps her knuckles on the ironed tablecloth in order to beckon the postulant over.

Mariette cradles the Jeroboam as she obeys, crouching by the refectory table so that Mother Saint-Raphaël can talk confidingly. She whispers, “We two shall dispense with silence.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Mother Céline is ill. You are to take a hot pot of tea to Reverend Mother, and you will please put in it three teaspoons of this wild senna.” She gives Mariette a white slip of paper that she’s rolled and twisted shut at both ends. “She will be purged of her pernicious humors and the great vessels will be emptied.”

“You honor me.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël looks away.

Mariette pauses in the hallway to counterpoise a hot teapot, a Japanese cup and saucer, and tightly vased strawflowers on a tray. She then puts an ear to the prioress’s door and raps twice. She hears the slight rasp of sandals on the floor.

Sister Aimée just open the door just an inch and jealously peeks out at the postulant and the red and orange strawflowers. “She’s sick,” the infirmarian says.

“I have this from Mother Saint-Raphaël. She says Mother Céline should drink some hot tea.”

Sister Aimée sighs impatiently and steps outside to get the tray, saying, “I’ll be sure to put it by her palliasse.”

Mariette pettishly retracts the tray and says, “Mother Saint-Raphaël particularly wanted
me
to give it to the prioress.”

“You only?”

“She was thinking it a penance.”

Sister Aimée simpers and says, “You see, it is just that Mother Superior is sleeping now.”

Mariette smiles insincerely and inches toward the door.

Sister Aimée tries to stop her, hissing, “You are being impossible, Sister!”

“And you are being possessive and invidious!”

“Have it your way,” says Sister Aimée. “Again.” And she’s overwrought with juvenile emotions as she scuttles down the hallway.

Reverend Mother Céline rests on her side on the palliasse as if she could be peering at the tempera painting of Our Mother of Perpetual Help that is hanging on the wall. Wild sleep has tossed aside the gray wool blanket and sheet and twisted her nightgown on her body so that it seems shameless and slatternly. A great gush of blond hair veils her pillow.

Mariette adeptly puts the tray on the sill so there is no more noise than a tap. She sees a sparrow tilt high up in the air and swoop westward out of sight. She then hesitantly turns and stoops over the prioress to assess her illness and pain. She almost feels for the high temperature on Mother Céline’s slightly damp forehead, but instead sits on the infirmarian’s milking stool. She smells the tang of vomit and urine. And yet she is happy and proud to be there. She thinks,
You see how I love you. Even this way. Especially now
.

She can’t take her eyes off the sleeping woman—she who has become for Mariette sight and map and motive. Annie. She sees cracked, parched lips and a trace of sour yellow; a forehead as hot, perhaps, as candle wax; frail eyelids that are redly lettered with tiny capillaries; green veins that tree and knot under the skin of her hands.

The prioress achingly turns on her bed and opens her sorrowing eyes. She keeps them on a high windowpane darkly stippled with hailstones and imperfections. Without looking at Mariette, she asks, “Have you been watching me long?”

“I have brought you hot tea.”

She gazes skeptically at the postulant. “Where is Sister Aimée?”

“Elsewhere. Mother Saint-Raphaël sent me. She had me put a medicine in it.”

The prioress tries to rise up, but she sinks back to her original position as Mariette pours an orange tea into the Japanese cup. The prioress asks, “Have you read Sext yet?”

“We are having Méridienne now. We can talk.”

Mother Céline gets a hint of Alexandria senna aroma and seems upset, but she goes ahead and tastes it. She squints her eyes and sits back. “We haven’t talked nearly enough.”

“No.”

“Your letters…have troubled me.”

“You weren’t supposed to read them.”

“I was too curious.” She considers Mariette as she would a sudden noise. “You’re my sister, but I don’t understand you. You aren’t understandable.” She smiles. “You may be a saint. Saints are like that, I think. Elusive. Other. Upsetting.”

“I just am.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess.” She has blood drying on her fingers. She has a water bowl on the floor with a pinked sponge in it. The prioress sips some more tea and pauses for breath, and then she empties the cup and hands it back to the postulant.

Mariette asks, “Are you hungry?”

“I have not eaten for more than a day.”

“We had soup.”

“I have spewed even that.”

“Is it terrible for you now?”

She shrugs. “I have been ill before. I shall be ill again. We are born with it beside us.” And then the prioress tightly clutches her stomach with her elbows and forearms. Sudden pain misshapes her face, but Mariette stands there impassively and softly prays as she puts her left hand onto her sister’s side.

The prioress shrieks with harrowing pain and slowly rolls away from Mariette’s touch. She stays in one position, just catching her breath, and then, as if she has already permitted too much affection and sympathy, she finally says, “You may go.”

Mariette gets the tray and goes out, but she smiles back at the prioress as she shuts the door.

December. First Sunday of Advent.

Evening recreation. A squat tallow candle is lit. A yellow thumb of flame trembles on a draft. Reverend Mother Céline is just as sick as she was five days ago, with skin as white as the undersheets, and tiny beads of night sweat that finally break and sketch across her forehead. She hears the sand rasp of sandals on the floor and opens her green eyes.

Mariette is there with a pastry bowl of soap and hot water and an ironed towel. She says nothing as she uncovers the prioress and unties the strings of Annie’s nightgown.

The prioress says, “I have become so weak. I hardly belong to myself anymore.”

Mariette reaches down to the prioress’s knees and inchingly draws the nightgown up over her body, skirting her gaze away from her mother superior’s nakedness. She asks, “Was the medicine any help?”

“No.”

Mariette sits on the palliasse and puts the bowl of hot water onto her lap. She soaps her own palms. “Shall we send for Papa?”

“God shall be my doctor,” the prioress says.

Mariette tenderly washes her sister’s hands and arms as a mother would a child’s. She pushes a kitchen sponge underwater and then squeezes it dry and softly pets the soap away. She rinses the sponge and soaps it again and then hesitates. “With your permission?”

Mother Céline turns aside a little and Mariette unseeingly washes the prioress’s knobbed and ribbed back, her indrawn stomach, her insignificant breasts. The prioress says, “When Jesus washed Saint Peter’s feet it was surely a lesson in humility for his apostle, not for himself. We do not like to be done for.”

“Especially you, I think.”

Annie dresses her breasts with the gray wool blanket and says, “You presume too much.”

Mariette just sits there with her palms turned up in her lap. And then she stands up and intricately collects everything she’s brought in. She goes out without a word, only pausing at the sill to make a sign of the cross with holy water.

Mass of Saint Nicholas the Great, Bishop, Confessor.

She hears the prioress’s sickness through the night.

Mass of the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin Mary.

The postulant is sitting with her mother superior in the infirmary, softly reading from the psalms in the company of Sisters Philomène and Hermance. Each is sewing a scroll border on dinner napkins of India cotton. The prioress is sleeping in a freshly laundered and pleated nightgown, her blond hair strewn on the pillow, her hands collected atop a prayerbook and rosary and taut gray wool blanket. Eye-squinting sunshine whitens the room and snows the veils and habits of the novices as Mariette reads: “‘Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak. My soul is sore vexed, but thou, O Lord, how long? Return, O Lord, deliver my soul. O save me for thy mercy’s sake. For in death there is no remembrance of thee, in the grave who shall give thee thanks? I am weary with my groaning; all the night—’”

At that point the infirmary door opens and Dr. Baptiste is there in his English greatcoat with Sister Aimée behind him. His green instrument case is in one hand and his hat in the other and he exudes the flushed red and cold of a hurried horse ride as he looks directly at the sisters and then, with greater interest, at the sick prioress. “She is sleeping?”

Sister Geneviève nods.

Mariette tells her father, “She has a stomach complaint.” And when he smirks, she thinks how dull and idiotic she is whenever she’s in his presence.

Eyeing the prioress, Dr. Baptiste heaves his instrument case onto a side table. Farm mud crumbles from his high boots and messily scatters across the floor planks as he walks. Although he has dressed in European elegance and bathed himself in perfumes of musk and civet, he carries in his clothes from his morning rounds an odor of illness that is still so offensive that Sister Aimée has cupped a palm over her nose and Sister Philomène inches back her chair half a foot. “She has been vomiting?”

“Yes,” Sister Aimée says.

“For how long?”

“Six days,” Sister Aimée says, and Dr. Baptiste theatrically turns to her in haughty shock and disdain. And when she does not wither, but intractably stares back at him, Dr. Baptiste shakes his head and holds his ear just above Mother Céline’s chapped and parted lips to hear the sighs of her breathing. Tilting his nose down, Dr. Baptiste inhales the prioress’s exhalations. “She has been taking guaiacum?”

Sister Aimée glances about interrogatively and says, “We don’t know.”

“She has.” Dr. Baptiste gets up from the prioress and unsnaps the clasp on his case. Underneath the lid is a green velvet drawer holding medicine bottles and jars and silver cups, cannulas, measuring spoons, pestle, and protractor. A second drawer underneath that contains a chrome handsaw, scalpels, scissors, forceps, and a gruesome brace and screw. He gets out an ear trumpet to hear her heart and asks, “Will one of you please find me a wineglass?”

Sister Philomène hurries out.

Dr. Baptiste touches the prioress’s wrist in order to estimate a pulse and her eyes flutter open. “
Bonjour
, Annie,” he kindly says.

“Who sent for you?” the prioress asks.

“Your predecessor. Mother Saint-Raphaël?”

“
C’est seulement la grippe, Papa
.”

“We shall see. Are you in great pain?”

She gives it thought and agrees.

“You have had this pain for some time?”

“Every now and then.”

“With food and without?”

“Either way.”

“With your functions: is there blood present?”

Slowly the prioress nods.

Mariette is giving her father the attention she would give a magician. She has imagined him through childhood as the king of a foreign country, but he has changed into a too-heavy man with a glossy mustache and unhealthy white nails and gray cinders of skin blemishes on his winter-reddened face. She sees him fit his unclean palms along Annie’s jaw, his squat thumbs tendering the underside of her mouth and then delicately touching back her eyelids so the irises can be examined. “You will stick out your tongue please?”

She complies, and her father scratches the gray coating with his nail, taps her upper teeth and incisors, harshly presses the purple gums. He then daintily unties the strings of her nightgown and slides his right hand underneath to Mother Céline’s left armpit. Wretchedly the prioress shuts her eyes as his hand skims down and palms her hurting left breast, slightly lifting and releasing it, nudging his fingers underneath it, and then going over to the other. Squeezing it, the doctor, too, shuts his eyes and says, “Do not be embarrassed.”

Sister Philomène then rushes in with a brandy glass. Getting it from her, Dr. Baptiste seems at last to give serious thought to Mariette and the novices. “You ought to go now, all of you. She will want the privacy.”

Sister Aimée says uneasily, “One of us must stay. With a man present. Our Rule requires it.”

Dr. Baptiste considers Mariette for an overlong moment as though she’s a half-forgotten language that he is slow in understanding. “She then,” he says.

Sister Aimée sneers in jealousy as she joins Sisters Hermance and Philomène outside and gently shuts the door. Dr. Baptiste hands the brandy glass to his older daughter and asks, “Will you please give me a water specimen?”

She blushes but weakly scooches forward as her father turns away and Mariette rolls the nightgown up to Annie’s waist. Annie reaches the brandy glass down between her thighs and Mariette walks to the infirmary’s chiffonier in order to get a towel from an upper drawer. She hears a trickle and does not turn. She feels his eyes like hands. Enjoying her. She knows their slow travel and caress.

Annie says, “Papa,” and gives him the inch-filled brandy glass as Mariette goes to the prioress with the towel. Dr. Baptiste walks over to one great window and jots some notes in the flooding white sunlight. “Here,” Annie whispers, and holds Mariette’s hand confidingly against her stomach, and Mariette stares with horror and bewilderment as she perceives the hard tumor just under the skin and sees Annie smile. Enthralled.