Missing Sisters -SA (2 page)

Alice couldn’t make out what they were jabbering over, but she could guess some of the trouble. The diocesan bus they’d come in had gone back to Albany. They had one car, but the roads were surely slick with ice. If the whole building burned to the ground, what would they do?

“Boathouse,” said Alice loudly, proving to Naomi and all that she hadn’t been concentrating on the prayers. “Sister, we can hide in the boathouse.”

“Alice, if it’s important enough to be heard, it’s important enough to say correctly.” Even at a juncture of fire and brimstone, nuns couldn’t resist the tart reproof.

“Safe in the
boathouse
.”

Sister Ike’s expression smoothed over: This was a possibility. Alice felt proud. Maybe she wasn’t so holy, maybe she had failing grades in deportment because her speech was zigzaggy, but at least she was helpful.

The swinging doors of the kitchen flew open. From across the room they could see the disaster: The small, localized fire had just bloomed into an inferno. Sister Francis Xavier and Sister John Bosco emerged with little Sister Vincent de Paul between them. Her veil was on fire and the shoulders of her habit were also winged with orange, like tongues of flame at Pentecost.

The girls stared at the sight, which reminded them of the Giotto in the math room, though they couldn’t have named the painter.

Sister Francis Xavier threw Sister Vincent de Paul on the carpet and knocked chairs aside rolling around on top of her. Sister John Bosco saw the girls lined up inside the glass doors as if for a photo and screamed so loudly even Alice got it. “For the love of Christ, get out of here!

There are gas lines in there, are you mad?”

They broke the single-file processional form and tumbled, screaming, out onto the porch.

Slipping, holding hands, plunging, they skidded down the stone steps to the snowdrifts on the lawn. Without stopping for their coats, Sister John Bosco and Sister Francis Xavier followed, dragging Sister Vincent de Paul with them. They didn’t stop till they got to the far edge of the lawn, where the day before the girls had made snowmen.

“Look,” Sister John Bosco had said yesterday to her nuns, “all these snow creatures, look what they are. Not mothers and fathers and children, which I thought was universal. These look like snow orphans and snow nuns.” And it seemed to be true: a polite line of snow orphans, black smiles made of raisins, and behind them a few scattered snow nuns, with crucifixes made of carefully broken twigs pressed into their modest, vaguely shaped fronts. But today, in the blizzard, the snow orphans and nuns were looking swollen and anonymous, their features blurred.

They had all just collected themselves near the stone shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes when the kitchen wing popped like a balloon. Glass shattered into the driveway. The roof was first crowned in flames and then disappeared in a screech just like a car crash; you could hear brakes squeal, metal scrape, giant iron fists punch each other inside out. Even Alice got it, both ears. All the while the snow whitened the day, and odd stabs of lightning and wrongheaded thunder kept up their tricks.

Alice broke the reestablished line to throw herself at Sister Vincent de Paul. The little woman’s face was as black as her habit, with smoke and char, and her eyelashes were crinkled like a bug’s legs. Her eyes were closed, her lips split and bleeding. What was left of her veil seemed to have melted into her head, and the skin of her scalp was red and raising in welts. Alice began to pick the flecks of veil out of her scalp, while she wept. But she was tearing the skin open, so she stopped; and Sister Francis Xavier stopped her, too, with a sharp remark.

They huddled under an apple tree and watched the place burn. It began to seem to be in slow motion. But maybe the rain and snow were being helpful, slowing down the damage?

God’s grace? The girls gazed, partly delighted at the crisis; the nuns seemed lost without little attention bells to rap or sour balls to award to the girls as bribes. But Naomi Matthews suddenly wrenched herself to her knees and cried out, pointing a mittened hand. The fire had arced itself over the main roof beam and descended like the teeth of the devil onto the roof of the chapel.

How could they have been so awful! They had saved themselves, but not the Blessed Sacrament. The sacred Hosts, the Body of Christ—it was too horrible. The girls took this in as fully as the nuns, and as deeply.

The three Sister Franks like a team of Green Berets all leaped up and began to run back to the chapel. Sister John Bosco was shouting wildly at them. She wagged a forbidding finger, but their black flapping skirts and veils pitched on through the snow. For the second time in half an hour Sister John Bosco swore in a most unchurchly fashion. She yelled at the girls that no one should under any circumstances move a muscle, and she headed after her disobedient sisters.

This left only Sister Isaac Jogues and Sister John Vianney with the unconscious Sister Vincent de Paul and eighteen schoolgirls. Naomi Matthews jumped up to run help the nuns save the sacred Hosts, signs of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but Sister Isaac Jogues tackled her and sat on her to save her from a holy scorching. Sister Vincent de Paul was apparently martyr enough for one day. Naomi will never get over
this
disappointment, Alice observed to herself.

Naomi Matthews wanted nothing so dearly as to die for her faith. She could be quite cross when kept from it.

But the main drama was past. Sister Francis of Assisi appeared at the chapel bearing the monstrance, its hammered gold sunrays oddly bright even across all that vacant whiteness. The other Sister Franks carried the Bible and the crucifix from the high altar and the small gold container called the ciborium that the communion Hosts were kept in. Sister John Bosco had gathered up the altar linen, a strange thing to save, the girls all thought, until they saw how she bound up Sister Vincent de Paul’s head in it.

Then they sat in the boathouse, on top of the rowboats and canoes stored upside down for the winter. They sang hymns and prayed for Sister Vincent de Paul, while Sister Ike and Sister Francis de Sales braved the icy roads in the Dodge Dart, and went to get help. The girls had advanced to “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and the nuns to leading calisthenics to keep them all warm, when help arrived.

It was late morning by the time the nuns and the girls left. They didn’t get to see the rest of the retreat center sink to its knees in ashes. Instead they got to ride in a milk truck, with chains fastened all around its tires like loose-fitting fishnet stockings or charm bracelets. The rain and the snow, having divided the day between them, had united at last in ice, which was thickly coating every twig, every fussy little branch-let, with its own diamond shell. The girls were entranced. To Alice it seemed like God’s spit, hardening, jeweling everything; cracking everything too, if the predictions of the milk-truck driver were to be believed. “Keeps on like this, it’ll be known as the ice blizzard of 1968,” he bellowed as he tucked blankets around them.

“Trees’ll be down from here to the Canadian border. You girls’ll tell this all to your grandchildren. How’re you good sisters, nice and toasty now?”

“So kind,” the nuns agreed. “These poor things, a terrible shock.” They tended to bleat when confronted with men who did things like drive trucks. Sister John Bosco, however, looked out over the fields and didn’t say anything. She held Sister Vincent de Paul’s hands between hers, very tightly, and her lips moved with words Alice couldn’t hear.

The road shone like cellophane. Once the milk truck skidded, and they all screamed as if they were on the fourteen-foot roller coaster at the Sacred Heart June fair. Alice sat as near Sister Vincent de Paul as she could, though it was Sister John Boss’s job to carry the worry.

In such dilemmas as this it was important, the nuns knew, to get onto the regular schedule as soon as possible. So the next morning, back home in their usual redbrick convent school on Fifth Avenue in Troy, New York, Sister John Bosco called Alice Colossus for an interview before morning classes. Things such as fires and ice storms never occurred here at home, and Alice, like her companions, was sorry to be home.

“Have you thought anymore about the Harrigans?” said Sister John Bosco. “I have promised them an answer by the end of the week.”

“How is Sister Vincent de Paul?” said Alice.

“You must roll your tongue if you are to be understood, Alice. We’re all very tired of reminding you.” Sister John Bosco did not mean to be cruel, and Alice understood this. It had been a trying weekend. The girls had been on their best behavior, but the retreat center had burned down anyway. It must be hard for Sister John Bosco to keep going.

“How is burned Sister?” Alice tried again, with a great exercising of muscles and a sarcastic lacing of spittle to show her effort. “Don’t she get to come home, too?”

“She is at rest in the hospital,” said Sister John Boss, warily. The blank look, to protect the young from sadness, rose in her face. “Sister Vincent de Paul is well provided for. Classes begin shortly, Alice. You were to be deciding this weekend. The Harrigans are very kind to be considering adopting you. They are good people and won’t be put off by your defects. Have you given it much thought?”

Alice Colossus munched her inner lip. The snow, glorious and dangerous and white up north, had fallen gray and smudgy here, or so you’d think peering out through Sister John Boss’s double casement window. What had Sister Vincent de Paul been saying when the fire broke out?

She had pointed up to the roof with her spoon. She had said that a cold front and a warm front had met right overhead. Perhaps God and the devil had stood just over the house, in heaven, their toes touching while they stood seething at each other. Perhaps they were waiting to see what decision Alice would make about the Harrigans. They were hissing mad. It was rain on one side and snow on the other. But which was which? And how could you make the right choice? And while you were deciding, fire down below, the ordinary worldly kind, could engulf you.

“Alice,” rapped Sister John Bosco. “You’re drifting again. Don’t freeze me out, Alice; I’ve no time this morning.”

Alice dug her fingers into the waistband of her uniform skirt. She flexed her tongue. She breathed very shallowly and was conscious of the rise and fall of her breastbone against the top fluttery edge of the garment Sister Jake called a camisole and the girls called a tit-bit. From the corridors came the clamor of the first bell. A laden silence, then shrieking: girls being let loose from the dormitory wing to flood forward into the day school. The chatter drowned out whatever clarity of thought Alice had. It was with a certain relief that she answered Sister John Bosco.

“When Sister Vincent de Paul comes back,” she said, “I’ll decide then.” By the opening of Sister John Bosco’s exhausted mouth, to protest or forbid, Alice saw that she had been heard very clearly, and understood.

MY F AIR L ADY

Alice had made a secret bargain with God. A holy contract. Make Sister Vincent de Paul not die, and then I will think about the Harrigans. I can’t care about everybody in the world at once; I’m not like You: I have a smallish heart.
And
I’m stubborn, Alice reminded God. The nuns all say so, and You should know it by now.

But in return God was testing Alice’s nerve. On the one hand, Sister Vincent de Paul, who didn’t return to the Sacred Heart Home for Girls. On the other, the Harrigans. For fifteen years they had waited; neither God’s grace nor the luck of the Irish had allowed Mrs. Harrigan to get pregnant. They’d swallowed their pride at last and gone to the orphanage, but they weren’t in a mood to hang around now.

Sister John Bosco refused their request to see Alice. They wanted to explain why they couldn’t stand the suspense and were moving ahead with Plan B. “Cut it clean, it’s kindest, I won’t have it otherwise,” the nun declared. But Alice happened to be on her way to singing practice—hah! that she could sing and also hah! that her route took her through the front hall—and she just happened to pass the parlor as the Harrigans were leaving.

“Look, it’s little Alice,” said Mr. Harrigan, not meanly. He was hardly taller than Alice, and she flinched to be reminded of her gangly limbs. Mrs. Harrigan smiled. She was a nut case, Alice decided. Her hair was an ad for Breck; her whole head looked sprayed and polished like a chestnut bowling ball. Her breasts really filled out that Maidenform bra, Alice thought a little coolly, a little jealously. “I knew I’d see you again,” Mrs. Harrigan gushed at Alice. She wore gloves and a pleated skirt, and in a furry circlet around her neck a fox bit its own tail. To keep from laughing out loud at its owner? wondered Alice. “Alice,” moaned Mrs. Harrigan, “Alice, we’d have you if you’d have us. Oh, Moss, I feel so awful. But we can’t wait. Oh, Moss, whoever knew motherhood would be so hard?”

“Steady on, Eileen, it hasn’t begun yet,” said Mr. Moss Harrigan. “It’s the girl’s choice, and we come second. Fair enough.” But he grinned at Alice as if he knew his wife was really loopy.

“Alice, move along to where you’re expected,” said Sister John Boss in a voice like tarnish.

“I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Harrigan,” said Alice. She tried to think about the weight of God and Satan in the heavens, and Sister Vincent de Paul getting hurt while the sky hung on hinges above, but could only mutter, “Sorry, I mean very very,” and scurry along.

“We could’ve come to understand her. I was
good
at languages in high school,” said Mrs.

Harrigan to Sister John Boss. “Maybe we just never got through to her.”

“Alice is working on her own agenda, at her own pace,” said the nun soothingly, then more things Alice couldn’t hear. Her last sight of the Harrigans was in the tall, black-flecked mirror as they clucked and bowed to Sister John Bosco. What’s one way of life next to another?

thought Alice. I could have gone away with them and loved it, or hated it. At least here I know what I’m up against.

Still, she felt cheated. It was certainly within almighty God’s almighty godliness to have restored Sister Vincent de Paul in time. Sure, Alice might still have chosen
against
the Harrigans, but at least it’d have been her real choice. God knew she was sacrificing for Sister Vincent de Paul, bribing Him so that the burned nun would get better. Alice didn’t care. If a bribe worked, it worked.