Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (6 page)

Diana tells me Luigi won’t even come to the table any more.

October 9, 1965

Mother Superior puts me in charge of religious instruction on top of everything else. She says: “How could you ever doubt yourself, Eleanor?” I don’t any more, I say. “All that silly talk about sin!” she says. You were right, I say, sin is hardly worth talking about. Nancy and I go out to celebrate together. We drink wine out of the bottle and sing “Reach Out” all the way back to the Convent.

At the Stork Club alone with Luigi
again
at Luigi’s request. “Luigi, he has to confess,” Luigi says. That’s why God made priests, I say. “No,” Luigi says. “Luigi, he cannot confess to a priest. He must confess to you. Luigi is a bad man. Luigi is a fag.” You are not a bad man, Luigi, I tell him. Just a man who loves men. I know of women who love women, I say, and they are not bad women. “The Church, she says it is a sin,” Luigi says. “A
mortal
sin.” He grabs at his heart. “So Luigi he goes to hell, yes?” I ask him what the Church knows of love. “Love of God,” Luigi says. That’s a horse of a different color, I say.

Mother Superior sits me down in her office but she is afraid to say a word. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says. “It’s just that we, the Order, well, we’re rich now. There’s no other way to put it.” I know, I say. We’ve been rich for some time. “We’re not just an Order any more,” Mother Superior says. “We really are the Sisters of Currency now, a well-run business. You deserve the credit and the congratulations for that. Thank God for your God-given instincts for money. Thank God that you’re an O’Kell, a gift from God.”

Christmas at Diana’s with Luigi, G, Becca, and Nancy. G is a plump cherub with the curls to match. Luigi stays to himself, even when we open presents, like he is a guest with no manners who can’t wait to leave.

“He’s queer,” Diana says. We are having a drink at The Plaza. I know, I say. “How do you know?” she says. I tell her I just know, and that I’ve known for a while. “You mean everyone knows except me?
” Diana says. Not everyone, I say. “We can still stay married, can’t we?” Diana wonders. “In the eyes of the Church, I mean.” I tell her she can do whatever she wants.

February 3, 1966

Becca’s first book is a beauty. “All God’s Children,” is the title, and inside there are pictures of the most beautiful children you could ever want to see
.
Imagine
is running some of the pictures with a picture of Becca, and so Diana makes sure the magazine puts on a big party. Becca looks beautiful in a black pants suit with bell bottoms and big lapels, the kind Diana says women should wear now.

No drinking for me today, the day I always think of Will, of how I miss him, crazy as he was, of how I hate Tom for doing what he did to him. St. Patrick’s Day is my day for love
and
for hate.

“You are running the show now,” Mother Superior says. “Have you noticed?” I haven’t really thought about it, I say. “Perhaps it’s time to start thinking about it, my dear,” she says. “I am not a young woman.” You could run the Order for another twenty years, I say. “Over my dead body,” she says.

Nancy and I know everything there is to know about each other. But I am afraid of what I now know about myself.

Spring here at the Convent is miraculous, the light magnificent, the birds symphonic. We walk for hours through the woods. I want to hold Nancy’s hand. I want to stop and press myself up against her against a tree with my lips against hers. I want to have something to confess. But I’m too afraid. I don’t want to ruin the perfect friendship for something less than perfect.

I can’t sleep, thinking of Nancy, and when I do drop off it is to dream of her. We are always together in my dreams, but we are never ever at the Convent. We are never even nuns when I dream, just two souls made one forever.

I find reasons to be with her, to touch her for no reason. I try to leave my hand on her shoulder as I stand behind her. I help her on with her coat. I
hope for rain so that I can hook my hand around her elbow beneath the umbrella that is too small for the both of us.

I don’t know if I can keep
on living like this, without having the one I love.

Hot as a summer’s day today, so we go swimming in the pond deep in the woods. I feel big and white as a great white whale, but Nancy is a dream in her one-piece, her skin dark and sparkly. She slides through the water like a seal, her black hair behind her, a being free of gravity and need.

“You better sit down,” Mother Superior says. “I have made a decision,” she says. “Perhaps my last important decision.” Oh? I say. “
These
,” Mother Superior holds up a sleeve and pulls at her habit. “I am not going to go down in the history of the Order as the Mother Superior who kept us in
these
.” The habits? I say. “I’ve always hated them,” she says. “They are so hot and awful, and they put a distance between us and the people we are supposed to serve.” But don’t they keep away temptation? I ask. Mother Superior looks at me for a long time. “You tell me,” she says.

In her habit, with just her eyes and her nose and her mouth showing, Nancy is angelic, a messenger straight from Heaven. I tell her the news and she refuses to believe me. God’s truth, I say. She tries to throw the habit up off over her head but it gets stuck until she can sidearm it halfway across the room. She stands there in her skivvies and I can see every beautiful curve. “
Ding dong!
” Nancy laughs. “The witch is dead!”

“Brown cow,” Nancy says. We have our new uniforms, the brown dresses that are even uglier than our old habits.
Moo!
I say.

Nancy comes with me to Southampton. We live on the beach today in our bathing suits, and no one would know we are nuns in love. We take a walk along the ocean past the homosexuals and there is Luigi, asleep without a stitch on a blanket with two of his closest friends.

Fireworks snap off above us on the public beach and we say
Oooh!
and
Aaah!
and
Dud!
Little G is so excited he starts to clap his hands and shout
Dad? Dud!
no matter what goes on above us. Luigi has come with Diana, but he looks out to sea while the rest of us bend our necks back to catch every
Boom!
and
Pop!
In the darkness, I pull a big beach towel over our legs. I slide in next to Nancy under the towel until our legs are touching. She leans her shoulder into mine and rests her right hand under the towel on the top of my thigh, where no one can see. She slides her hand under the towel to the highest, softest part of my thigh. In the dark, in the celebration, only Nancy can see that I am crying.

“So that’s what they mean by the mother tongue,” Nancy says.

We have a secret love, a secret life. We are partners now in a way we never could have been before. Mother Superior is all but letting me run the Order, but it’s not something I do alone. Nancy and I are together in all things. We have, in our strange way, the chance for a perfect life.

We leave love notes where they can be found but not lost.

How can
this
be a sin?

Nancy and I go for a long walk past the Convent grounds. On the way back we lock ourselves inside the Chapel. We make love in our brown habits in a room behind the altar, and we swim in sweat on the hard stone floor. There is nothing more erotic than sin.

August 15, 1966

How many children do you have now? I ask Becca. “More than enough,” she says.

We steal away to Diana’s house in Southampton for a long weekend together. On the beach, I hope I am half as radiant as Nancy in the moonlight,
with not even a seagull in sight. We sleep in front of the fire, beneath big beach blankets that dust us with sand left over from summer.

Nancy and I have to laugh when we think of our first taste of the Order, the absolute chaos of that first fall compared to the system we now have in place. When we first arrived everything was all about prayer and penance and our marriage to Jesus Christ. We still give the Sisters-to-be a taste of that old-time religion, but now our time is spent on training, on getting the girls ready to work in the outside world. Nancy is worried that all the craziness out there beyond our walls means our numbers will drop, but I don’t see it. Young women will always need to escape the cares of the world.

Nancy knows exactly what I want in all things, bless her, and she loves to put her arms around all the small details of our life. Our recruits make it through religious boot camp without realizing the order Nancy has imposed on their world from wake-up to lights out. This is the best group we have ever had, we agree, good girls from good families, girls with all the choices in life who choose to do this. I could never have done it without Nancy. If there is a God then she is a gift.

I mix highballs for us after. Nancy says we have nothing to confess. We fall asleep on the couch like puppies.

December 9, 1966

Mother Superior has a stroke. Her left side has gone slack. They take her to the Rusk Institute in the city but no one expects that even Dr. Rusk can do any good. She slobbers now and her speech is a jumble. The doctors tell me a stroke comes when part of your brain is killed and dies forever. It’s not like Mother Superior can run the Order again. That’s up to Nancy and to me.

Mother Superior is dead, thank God. She was so sick she was not going to have much of a life, so I’m glad her suffering has come to an end. She has her place in heaven. She will always have a place in my heart.

In my eulogy, I give Mother Superior credit for all the things I have done for the Order. The expansion. The profitability. The Sisters of Currency. The increase in recruits. I say we are burying a saint, a giant. It’s the least I can do.