Mariette in Ecstasy (13 page)

Moonlessness. Starlessness.

Matins and Lauds of Our Lady’s Office. And then silence.

Harried snow. Creaking trees.

Chill winds flute through the chimney flues. Kitchen smoke flails in the air.

Empty fields shine like white satin sheets.

Hard gusts zing against an iron shovel.

The blood-red leaf of a poison sumac is freed and scutters up against the shiplap on the old printery.

Second rising.

Windowpanes yelp with hard polish and four or five sisters peer outside.

Sister Pauline hovers over a flittering matchstick as she hustles down the darkened hallway, feeding the blue and yellow flame to the hallway’s high, jarred candles.

Sisters Ange and Sabine and Saint-Stanislas huddle between horses in the stall, heating their hands on the horse flanks.

Sister Geneviève pours hot water into a great tin washing bowl and Sister Monique holds her face inside a pale blossom of steam.

Henri Marriott is hunched at the kitchen table in the priest’s house, in round spectacles that shine like half-dollars, hunting letters on his great black typewriter’s keyboard. Each word clacks as loudly as handled dishware but underneath he hears the house door creak wide. “Hello?” he calls, and with difficulty turns around in his chair.

Mariette is there, just inside the door, holding a hand in a hand like a pink teacup and saucer. She falteringly walks toward him and he sees she has no sandals on.

Each foot is torn with injury. Each leaves a red print of blood on the floor.

—I have no memories of that.

—Were you in ecstasy?

—Is it for me to say?

—Please tell us what you remember.

—Midnight Mass. And praying, in the oratory.

—And after that?

—Just being in the infirmary.

—While you were being examined.

—Yes; then.

—When you came to me, have you heard what you said?

She holds out her blood-painted hands like a present and she smiles crazily as she says, “Oh, look at what Jesus has done to me!”

Reverend Mother Saint-Raphaël hammers her walking cane on the floor planks as she hurries down the hallway ahead of Père Marriott who is still in his soot-black wool coat and biretta, an extreme unction kit in his hand.

Four novices and three sisters are jammed at the infirmary door, whispering hearsay as they peek inside. Sister Hermance turns and hints with a cough and the sisters at the doorway shamefully part for the new prioress. She worriedly pauses until their priest has caught up and then she precedes him inside the room, patting her fingertips onto the holy water sponge and making the sign of the cross.

Sister Saint-Denis is high up on a sill, hanging gray privacy blankets over the tall and brilliant windows. With Mariette is Sister Aimée. She has taken off the postulant’s black headscarf and habit and underthings and is folding them carefully inside white butcher’s paper and tying it up with yarn.

The postulant herself is in a white bathrobe and sitting up against four pillows because she gasps for breath if she is flat on her back. Eyes shining with tenderness, hoarsely and hushfully speaking half-sentences, Mariette stares up into nothingness like a teenaged girl newly intrigued with herself, or as if she has finally heard her heart and is being haunted by it. Windings of torn cloth hide palms that are weakly turned up in her lap, a gray blanket tents her feet, and a hand towel is twisted over her brow. Sister Saint-Denis has undone Mariette’s dark brown hair so that it is troublingly disordered against the white pillowcase, but her skin is as radiant and pink with health as if she’d just strolled in from a skate.

Mother Saint-Raphaël asks, “Is she in pain?”

“Especially in her hands,” Sister Aimée says. “The holes are hideous.”

“And her side, too?”

“Everything,” Sister Aimée says.

“Is it possible she’s done this to herself?”

Sister Aimée simply folds a hand towel beside a pillow and pretends she hasn’t heard.

Speaking as she would to a child, the prioress harshly asks the postulant, “Listen to me, Mariette. Is this a true experience? Have you helped it in any way?”

Mariette says nothing.

“She’s in a trance,” Sister Aimée says.

Père Marriott takes a six-foot purple stole from his extreme unction kit and kisses it while softly reciting the Latin prayer that one day God will be pleased to clothe him in the blessed immortality forfeited by humanity’s first parents. Yoking his neck with the stole, he turns and hesitates with embarrassment before saying to the prioress, “We will have to look at her wounds.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël swings toward Sister Saint-Denis as she is getting down from the sill, and she urges her to please bring the stool over for their priest and then go. Sister Saint-Denis humbly obeys but beams at Mariette from the hallway as she shuts the door.

Hunching down on the stool next to the postulant, Père Marriott tilts his ear to hear her whispering sentences he cannot understand. And then he dourly nods to Sister Aimée, who unties the white bathrobe and undoors the left half and turns up a hand towel that is just below Mariette’s full left breast.

She is bleeding enough that Sister Aimée has to touch the wound again with the hand towel for the priest to see a hand-width laceration between the fifth and sixth ribs.

“Is it deep?” the priest asks.

“Christ’s was deeper,” Sister Aimée says.

“We shall not draw comparisons, please,” Mother Saint-Raphaël corrects. She is standing behind them, her hands in her sleeves, and honoring their rule for custody of the eyes by holding her stare on the floor.

Père Marriott asks, “Sister Aimée. Would you be kind enough to describe the injuries?”

She states, “We see she has a jagged wound just above the fifth costal cartilage. I haven’t measured it but I’d estimate it to be four inches long and a quarter-inch deep, just past the subcutaneous tissue, but she imagines she feels it interfering whenever she inhales. She’s bleeding, but not inordinately, hardly three ounces so far. We see some peculiarities here, too. We’d expect to see reddening, erosion, or an inflammatory reaction in the zone of skin around the tear. We don’t.”

“And why is that?”

“I have no idea.”

The priest returns the hand towel and hides Mariette’s nakedness. And then, having for the first time felt her heat, he looks up at Sister Aimée with horror and surprise and again puts his hand to the white bathrobe and then to the postulant’s neck. “She’s so hot!”

“She has a temperature. We’d expect that.”

“Have you taken her pulse, Sister?”

“Erratic. We counted one hundred eighty beats per minute at one time, a hundred and ten the next, and then as slow as sixty. Even dreaming could do that, though.”

“She’s in no danger then?”

“She’s excited, that’s all.” She draws away the gray blanket and gingerly begins unbandaging the postulant’s feet and hands.

—You were aware of us then.

—I heard Sister Aimée. And it hurt when you touched his wounds.

—His.

—Embodied by me, but not mine.

Each is slightly greater than the size of a penny or just about the injury a timber spike would make if hammered hard and cleanly into human flesh. Each is approximately in the same place, just inside the first bone of the hand and angling down through the furrow in the palm to a slight gap where the first finger joins the wrist. Each foot wound is between the first and second metatarsal and through the high dorsal ridge to the instep, as if Mariette’s knees had been brought up and her soles held flush to a flat surface before spikes had been pounded through each foot.

Weeping from the holes is a pinkish serum and blood that the priest channels into a phial until he has half an inch. He puts it into his cassock pocket, then firmly presses the skin around Mariette’s hand wounds while peering up at the postulant to see if she’ll wince at the pain. She gives no sign that he’s even there.

“She’s bleeding so little, really,” Père Marriott says. “Don’t you find that odd?”

“I have no training for this,” Sister Aimée says. And when she sees him still looking at her, she tries, “In India, I hear, there are some people who can stop their bleeding just by thinking about it.” She opens a wooden case of medicines and asks, “Shall I dress her wounds?”

Wiping his reddened fingertips with his handkerchief, the old priest thinks about their options and says experimentally, “Yes, do.”

But when Sister Aimée squeezes a zinc ointment onto the postulant’s hand, she hears Mariette scream with such horror and pain that she withholds the medicine and looks for further information from their priest. “Shall we let her be?” she asks.

“We seem to have no choice,” he says, and withdraws his head from under his stole.

Mother Saint-Raphaël is facing an instrument tray and faintly ticking the chrome-bright points of the forceps and scissors there as she thinks. And when she turns to instruct the infirmarian she is again fierce and formidable, saying Sister Aimée is to stay with the postulant until they pray Nones; she’ll assign other sisters to be with Mariette from then on. When Mariette is herself again, she may join the sisters in their refectory and choir, but she shall be accompanied wherever else she goes. And no one is to speak or write of this to those outside the priory. She tells Sister Aimée, “We do this, we keep watch, for Mariette’s own protection. She is weak now. She is in distress. And she has hurt herself; just that.”

Sister Agnès talks about Mariette to Sister Ange across the high-railed fence of the horse paddock. She hears the Angelus bell begin ringing but the extern just keeps talking over the campanile’s noise.

Sister Saint-Denis, Honoré, Saint-Estèphe, and Monique have been in high temper about the postulant while polishing the chapter room’s dark wooden pieces with flaxseed oil and red flannel. Hearing the Angelus bell too late, Sister Saint-Denis hurriedly crosses herself, and there is a flint of hurt in her eye as she offers, “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”

The sisters respond in dull chorus, “And she conceived of the Holy Ghost.”

Père Marriott stands darkly alone on the herringboned brick sidewalk just outside his house with four library books in his hands, praying an Ave Maria and inhaling the heaven smell of fresh snow as he says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

Sister Aimée holds a sponge and a chrome bowl in her hands as she looks at the yard through a chink between the gray blankets. White pillows of snow are there where rough stones used to be. She sees juncos feeding on tossed green peas. And she turns with shock when she hears Mariette say in a trance, “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”

Mother Saint-Raphaël is rapidly writing at her great pecan desk with a green fountain pen, hearing the Angelus being said by two externs in the hall. She halts her pen to pray an Ave Maria and then hides her face in her hands. She hears Sister Zélie say, “And the Word was made flesh.” And she hears Sister Claudine say, “And dwelt amongst us.” And then she prays another Ave Maria and returns to her letter.