Mariette in Ecstasy (20 page)

Dr. Claude Baptiste is in his Kashmir overcoat as he smokes his fifth cigarette of the morning and walks in the priest’s yard just behind the high walls of the priory. Everywhere the snow seems blue. Eastward there is rain. Tilting his back into a poplar trunk, he follows a gray braid of smoke as it softly breaks against a tree limb and disappears.
Youth
, he thinks.
Trust. Faith. Ambition
. He hears kitchen noise, and then he hears the old priest falter out of his house and ask, “Shall we go then?”

Sister Aimée is hustling down the hallway toward the oratory and hesitating here and there to wait for Mariette, who walks without hurry and with great hurt, one white-bandaged hand touching its way along the high white wall, one hand tendering her left side.

Thirty sisters are lining up for Terce at the oratory doors and are trying not to dishonor the postulant with sudden prying, but Sister Honoré clenches her thick waist in her arms and frankly stares until Mariette hobbles by, and then the choirmistress unblanks her eyes and bluntly taps the castanets twice and the great doors open.

Sister Aimée has not prepared Mariette for the men in the prioress’s suite. Père Marriott is sitting broodingly at the grand pecan desk in a fresh cassock, and he is as absent as an overcoat hung on a chair as he silently turns pages of Sister Marguerite’s handwriting. And her father is there, too, in a pitch-black suit and vest and ankle-high shoes, putting Sister Aimée’s infirmary report in the bookcase, his wreath of dark hair trained with a floral pomade, a half-inch of cigarette seemingly forgotten between his fingers.

Elaborate rains lash at the windowpanes and dulled sunshine sketches reeds on the floor. Mother Saint-Raphaël heavily positions herself against the chintz pillows of the sofa and holds Mariette in a hostile glare as Sister Aimée walks in with a hand towel and china bowl and pitcher, and puts them on a sill.

Warily skirting his eyes from Mariette, Dr. Baptiste sucks hard on the cigarette and kills it in a half-filled water glass while saying, “She’ll have to take off her clothes.”

Everything goes unsaid for a while. Mariette hides her hands in her sleeves and hoards her modesty until she asks, “Are you trying to turn it into a disease?”

Mother Saint-Raphaël says, “We have no competence in these matters. We have been like a household with a hundred opinions about an illness but no certainty. We need the verdict of a doctor. We need to be convinced that there is no natural explanation for these wonderful phenomena. When there is no other alternative, then perhaps we shall call them miraculous.”

“We are only here to see,” Père Marriott assures Mariette. “We shall try to be indifferent and serene, untroubled by whatever facts we turn up and friendly to whatever deductions those facts provide.”

Mariette steps out of one roped sandal and the other and then takes off the stockings that hide her foot bandagings. Père Marriott gets up with difficulty and stands at a flecked and fractured window in order to give her privacy, but Dr. Baptiste washes his hands in the china bowl and skeptically peers at Mariette as she peels the headscarf away from her tangling brown hair. She gazes out at the wings of rain in flight across the horse paddock as she unties the cincture and gets out of her habit, and turns to her father in her nakedness. “
Je vous en prie
,” she says. At your service.

Her father turns the trick card of his smile as he stares at her and dries his palms, then tosses the hand towel aside and walks up to Mariette. She blushes in humiliation as she feels his hand and his right thumb bluntly stroking the rib just beneath her left breast. She hears him say to Sister Aimée and Mother Saint-Raphaël, “You’ll see there is no ‘hand-width laceration.’ Even no scarring.”

Each of them is hushed for a moment and Dr. Baptiste takes Mariette’s left wrist in his hand and stares into her flashing eyes. Without looking away, he says, “Have you scissors, Sister Aimée?”

She gives him a pair and he begins roughly cutting through the hand bandages.

Underneath is blood as thick as a red wax seal. Touching its hardness with great curiosity, her father asks, “Does that hurt?”

She flinches but doesn’t say.

Dr. Baptiste turns to the priest, but he seems to be in prayer, so he hesitantly says to Mother Saint-Raphaël, “And now what I’ll have to do is tear just a bit of this away. Like a child picks a scab.”

“Yes,” she says. “You may proceed.”

“Try water,” Mariette says.

“Excuse me?” he says.

She walks away from him and past Sister Aimée to the china bowl where he’d washed his hands, and she presses hers underwater and holds them there. Tears blur her eyes at the hot sting of pain as the blood feebly unplaits and swims, and then she lifts up her hands again.

Dr. Baptiste goes over and interestedly picks up a hand towel and hastily scrubs her left palm. And he is pleased as he commands the old priest to look.

Père Marriott hunches over her hands in the half light. He urgently finds his brass-rimmed eyeglasses and holds them up and peers at her hands again. The blood and the holes have disappeared.

She tells him, “Christ took back the wounds.”

She expects her father to stare at her with fear and astonishment, but he is, as always, frank and unimpressed, as firm and practical as a clock. “And your feet?” he asks.

“I have no wounds.”

“Even that is miraculous!” Père Marriott says.

Dr. Baptiste smirks at him and then at Mother Saint-Raphaël. “You all have been duped.”

The priest insists, “Explain it to them!”

Mariette flatly says, “What God freely gave me has just as freely been taken away.”

“Christ talks to her,” her father says. “The Devil strikes her when she tries to pray. She is always saying preposterous things; that’s why we don’t get along.”

She turns to Mother Saint-Raphaël and says, “Whatever I told you was true,” but the prioress frowns at her in the fullness of sorrow and says, “You disappoint me, Mariette.”

Sister Aimée folds the hand towels and hurriedly takes away the china bowl.

“Shall I go now?” Dr. Baptiste asks.

Mother Saint-Raphaël’s face is hidden behind her hand when she answers. “Yes, Doctor. Thank you. We have investigated this quite enough.” And then she says, “You stay, Mariette.”

When she and the postulant are alone, Mother Saint-Raphaël shifts a chintz pillow and pats a sofa cushion beside her. She stares impassively at Mariette as she sits. She says, “That was simply political, what I said—that you disappoint me. I personally believe that what you say happened did indeed happen. We could never prove it, of course. Skeptics will always prevail. God gives us just enough to seek Him, and never enough to fully find him. To do more would inhibit our freedom, and our freedom is very dear to God.”

Mariette is trying not to cry, but she can feel her mouth tremble as she asks, “Are you sending me away?”

“Yes. We are.”

“I have always dreamed…”

She is stilled when the prioress touches her knee. Mother Saint-Raphaël tells her, “God sometimes wants our desire for a religious vocation but not the deed itself.” She then gets up with difficulty and gives half her weight to her cane. “I’ll go get Sister Agnès.”

Endless rains make a garden of the window glass, reeds and herbs and periwinkles. Mariette sketches them with a nail as she dismally looks outside, and then she hears the door open and sees Sister Agnès in the hallway. “I’ll just be getting your things,” she says.

Mariette says nothing. She simply waits like an intricate memory as Sister Agnès heavily backs into the room hauling a ship’s trunk along the floor. And then Mariette again gets into Mrs. Baptiste’s wedding gown of white Holland cloth and watered silk.

“You’re still lovely,” Sister Agnès says.

“Thank you.”

Sister Agnès grins at her. “I’m the first to get you girls when you join us, and I’m the one you go to when you’re getting out. Hatched by me; dispatched by me. I’m an important person here.”

“You are.”

“We were talking about it, Sister Zélie and me. You put one over on us.”

Mariette angles her head and snags an ivory comb through her hair. She twinges and holds her hand.

“Are you hurt, dear?”

“Christ let me keep the pain.”

Sister Agnès gazes at her. She thinks without a path. She finally says, “Your father’s in the priest’s house. Waiting.”

“Well, goodbye,” Mariette says.

“We aren’t but just a few of us fit to stay here.”

“Well, you’ve all been very kind,” she says.

“You think so? Even now?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “You let God use you.”

She goes into the oratory and genuflects toward Christ in the tabernacle before unlatching the door in the oaken grille and walking out to the high altar, where she genuflects again. She sees Sister Catherine ironing a Lenten chasuble in the sacristy, but she doesn’t speak. She passes through the Communion railing and in solemn procession walks out of the church of Our Lady of Sorrows, just as she entered it in August.

And then she is bleakly tottering through the churned slush and mud of the village, her hair in torrents, wintry rain like tines on her face, the white Holland cloth soaked through and hedged with stains. She falls to her hands and knees and just stays there until she sees a frightened girl in a seal coat on a house porch with the noon mail in her hands. The girl makes the sign of the cross as she kneels, and Mariette forlornly gets to her feet and goes forward to her father’s house.

Mass of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Confessor.

Mariette puts a houseplant on the sill of a dining room window as children hurry by after school. She sees the children hesitate and stare. She smiles gently but withdraws.

Mass of Saint Francesca of Rome, Widow.

She goes into the rooms upstairs, getting used to them again. She stands in the book and paper chaos of her father’s dark-paneled den. Whiskey is in a square crystal decanter. A tumbler is turned upside down on a handkerchief. She chooses a green chintz chair to sit on, resting her wrists atop antimacassars, her heeled shoes paired as if in a store. She prays until God is there.

Mass of Saint Lucy, Virgin, Martyr. 1912.

She’s in a housedress and washing dishes at the kitchen sink as a high school boy she’s tutoring sits on a stool at a pantry table and tries sentences in his notebook.

She peers outside. The skies are dark. White flakes are fluttering through the trees like torn paper. And yet it is still warm enough that she can hear water trickle under its gray crepe of ice.

She asks him, “Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

She sponges a milk glass. “Whom are you looking for?”

The boy hunches over his handwriting and reads, “
Qui est-ce que vous cherchez?
”

“Excellent. And now: What are you waiting for?”

He hunts his answer. “
Qu’est-ce que vous attendez?
”

“
Très bien
,” Mariette says. And then she holds her hands against her apron as if she’s suddenly in pain. She cringes and hangs there for a long time, and then the hurt subsides.

She hears him get up from his stool. “Are you okay?” he asks.

She blushes when she turns to him. She tells him, “Yes. Of course.”

Mass of Saint Martha, Virgin. 1917.

Dr. Baptiste tilts heavily in his wheelchair in the shaded green yard, his dinner napkin still tucked in his high starched collar, as Mariette walks from the heat of the house with a Japanese tea service on a tray. She puts it on his side table and he pours for himself as she sits in a striped canvas chair. “Would you like some?” he asks.

She smiles and shakes her head no. She takes off her shoes.

“We’ll be having tomatoes soon,” he says.

Wrens are flying in and out of the trees. She shades her eyes as she looks at the great orange sun going down. She looks at its haul of shadows.

“We’ll have tomato Provençale,” he says. “And Creole style. With curry.” Dr. Baptiste hears only silence from her. And then he hears Mariette as she softly whispers the
Nunc Dimittis
of Compline.

Mass of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. 1929.

She stands before an upright floor mirror at forty and skeins hair that is half gray. She pouts her mouth. She esteems her full breasts as she has seen men esteem them. She haunts her milk-white skin with her hands.

Even this I have given you
.

Mass of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle. 1933.

She kneels just inside the church of Our Lady of Sorrows, behind the pews of holy old women half sitting with their rosaries, their heads hooded in black scarves. High Mass has ended. Externs are putting out the candles and vacuuming the carpets. And then there is silence, and she opens to Saint Paul: “We are afflicted in every way possible, but we are not crushed; full of doubts, we never despair. We are persecuted but never abandoned; we are struck down but never destroyed. Continually we carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may also be revealed.”