The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (43 page)

On January 9, 1965, I was summoned from the studio to take a phone call from Liliana Hicks, Daddy’s fourth wife. I was shocked by her message: Daddy had suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep. He was only forty-four years old. He had been, Liliana said, “in bad shape for many months”. I didn’t know. He hadn’t kept his promise to visit the monastery, and the only correspondence I had received from him was a birthday note containing a photo of my new half-brother, Bert, who was then only nineteen months old. Liliana told me that Daddy’s last months were spent poring over a scrapbook of his Hollywood days, showing her what he had looked like as a young man
.

A requiem Mass for Daddy was held in Pacoima, California. I was not allowed to leave the monastery to attend—that was the rule then—but when a parent of a Regina Laudis nun dies, the entire Community participates in the Office of the Dead, and they did so for Daddy. This was a special privilege since that offering was for members of the professed Community. It was quite touching
.

I had a great problem integrating what I was feeling about losing my father and what I thought I
should
feel. I couldn’t help but think that he had not earned the right to come back into my life even in death. He was a first-class charlatan, but I did mourn the loss of him—and the loss of the little-girl faith I had in his manly profile. That faith was paper-thin, yes, but beautiful
.

—You’ve sent me tapes of Daddy’s movie appearances. There’s one scene in the movie with Robert Montgomery where Montgomery knocks him out in a fistfight. I had to laugh when I saw it because next to Daddy, Robert Montgomery looked so puny
.

I remembered something Sister Dolores Marie said to me at the time of Grandpa’s passing in 1962. She had referred to his conversion at death as final, something that had ended. I didn’t want to believe that, and now Daddy’s death had revived this dilemma in me
.

Of course, I took my pain to Reverend Mother and immediately felt my relationship with her changing, growing stronger as we talked. She was very sensitive to the difficulty I was having in trying to integrate the experience of death
.

She told me that Daddy did have the right to ask redemption of me. “Anyone can ask for redemptive love”, she said. “As a Benedictine nun you must say, ‘Here I am, I am available.’ Your father must be having quite a struggle now, preparing for his encounter with God. You don’t stop your conversion just because you die. Conversion goes on in many levels of process even after death. Death is the initial conversion in relation to the body, but change continues. You have to trust that your own love and forgiveness will somehow make the way easier for your father
.”

Years later, Liliana confided that, in fact, Daddy had not succumbed to a heart attack. The real details were sadder to hear. In the eighteen months after my entrance, he drank continuously. On Christmas Eve, just two weeks before his death, he had gotten into a fight at a neighborhood bar and landed in jail. Liliana bailed him out, and a doctor prescribed medication. He took a massive dose of the pills and washed them down with the booze. Suicide was listed as the cause of death on his death certificate. Mom was the one Liliana called when she found Daddy dead. Mom rushed to her side and, ever the caregiver, fixed breakfast at 5:00
A.M.
for Liliana and little Bert. Mom hadn’t told me any of this
.

“
Don’t try to evaluate too soon what happened to your father,” Reverend Mother cautioned me, “because he still has many levels of purgation to go through before his life is completed. Death is only the beginning of purgation. We have a paucity of understanding our souls leaving our bodies and moving into another state. The fact is, the soul leaving the body must be purified before it is ready to see God. What has to happen is a mystery—we can’t say that all of a sudden you die, go to Purgatory, and it’s over. So we pray for the souls in Purgatory who are in process of change
.”

My daddy was a man in search of a star, and I had to rely on the mercy of God and trust that my own love and forgiveness would somehow make the way easier for him
.

The adjoining towns of Bethlehem and Woodbury had accepted Reverend Mother Benedict’s offer to end the standoff on Burritt Hill Road. She had proposed that a new road be built that would follow their northern property line and leave the land intact, thus keeping the monastery enclosure unbroken. Further, she had promised that the Community would pay half the costs and provide half of the physical labor that would go into building the two-mile thoroughfare connecting Flanders Road with Route 61, which would bear the name Robert Leather Road.

Eight months into my canonical year—and for the next two years—the Community took on the grueling work of turning a forest into a roadway. In fair weather or foul, we women cleared the land with clippers, shovels and our bare hands to make it ready for the heavy machinery to lay the asphalt
.

All emotions—joy, sadness, fear—were present, as were most of the women, led by Mother Stephen and Father Prokes manning tractors and Reverend Mother swinging an axe. I remember mostly gray, damp days that drew the color out of everything. I remember callused hands, bleeding knees, scuffed toes. And mud. Not only earth and water mud. Mud of dust and sweat, too
.

At the end of each workday, I would stand on the edge of the road that was not yet a road but, like an eager child, stretching into growth. Although it was the dirtiest, hardest, most exhausting slave labor I could ever imagine, it was also a very real experience in corporate collaboration. It offered a new analysis of contemplative life, and I found that exciting, but I knew instinctively that it cut deeper into where the basic issues of the discontent within the Community continued to ferment. It was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back
.

All during the work on the road, the group of nuns at odds on almost every issue became more vocal in their disagreements with Reverend Mother. “Why do we have to have all this land to take care of?” they would demand. “We are not meant to get involved with the world. We came here to pray, to meditate, to be good contemplatives. What does this road have to do with monastic life
?”

Reverend Mother stood firm and insisted that land and monastic life do relate. She fervently believed that, from the very beginning, Saint Benedict intended that each monastery would be a center of holiness where monks could live contained lives, built around the recitation throughout the day and night of the Divine Office, but which also could provide all the other necessities of daily life. Thus, throughout history, each monastery has been a self-contained entity. In chapter 48 of the Rule, Saint Benedict states, “Idleness is the enemy of the soul. The brethren, therefore, must be occupied at stated hours in manual labor . . . for then are they truly monks when they live by the labor of their hands
.”

Envisioning that the monastery would become an abbey one day, Reverend Mother foresaw a place with land and animals, a place of green that by the mid-twenty-first century might be the only conservation land left in our area of Connecticut
.

During the work on Robert Leather Road, on one of those mud-encrusted days when, dog-tired and hungry, I took my usual place in line for supper in the refectory, all at once my attention was taken by the water pitchers on the shelf. They were all lined up with handles facing the same direction and made a sparkling, beautiful tableau. A small thing, I suppose, but I hadn’t noticed it before, and it made me realize that someone had made that effort to make our lives more pleasant
.

I soon began to notice other small things that made our life together more comfortable, a little more serene. From time to time, notes appeared at my place at table—notes of encouragement, with bits of grasses or flowers glued to the paper—from sisters who recognized and perhaps shared what I was feeling and cared enough to offer support. Each time I was confronted with a new grace, I was reminded of my trip on the Dutch barge when I saw my first windmill: “There’s one!
”

During a chant lesson, Mother Columba presented me with a book she had made herself. It was a charming depiction of the chants wherein the notes resembled cartoon figures she named Dot and Po who danced up and down on the staff. It became my constant companion as an uncomplicated and painless guide—as well as a reminder that I had not become invisible, that my good friend still cared about me
.

But no matter how hard I studied the psalms, I still could not master the Latin. I could not grasp the meaning. There were nuns in the Community who could translate the Offices in a snap. I was still relying on the translations printed in the book. I had come to the point of just accepting this because there is something in the music that calls you even if you do not understand the words. The beauty of the melodies and the elan of the rhythm make you peaceful and prayerful. “Singing”, in the words of Saint Augustine, “is praying twice
.”

Then one morning in Prime while we were singing Psalm 17 and we came to the verse
“et eduxit me in latitudinem: salvum me fecit, quoniam voluit me.”
I suddenly knew that this was an important verse. I could feel in my heart that it had meaning for me
.

After the Office, I sought out Mother Columba and asked her what the verse meant. She slowly translated
: “ ‘Et eduxit me in’
means ‘and the Lord has led me into’
; ‘latitudinem‘,
an ‘open space’, a ‘free space’
; ‘salvum me fecit’,
‘and He has given me this salvation’;
‘quoniam voluit me’,
‘because He loved me’. It’s simple, Sister. God sets you free because He loves you.” That was exactly what I had felt when I was singing
.

That was the key that opened the Office to me. I used to hear sisters say, “I love Lauds; if I can get to Lauds my whole day is better” or “Without Compline, I feel I have not ended the day well”, and I would wonder what they meant by that. Now I thought of the scene in
The Miracle Worker
when young Helen Keller realizes the connection between the word she had learned only by rote and the actual thing it represented—water. I could identify with that moment. I knew that if I could stay with it and truly pray the Office, the significance would come through
.

Chanting the Office finally allowed me to comprehend each Hour of the day in answer to the question: Why am I doing this? Why am I sweeping the floor? Why am I lifting rocks? When you come to the Office you have the opportunity to bring to consciousness the fact that you are doing this in praise of God
.

“
Run while ye have the light of life, lest the darkness overtake you” appears in the prologue of the Rule. Reverend Mother often stressed in our meetings together that I should “seize that moment”. It was a message I deeply valued. I remained uncomfortable with elements of monastic life that I found unreasonable, and she once said to me, “I think you should write those things down.” Now seemed an apt time to do some moment-seizing. I sat down and wrote a letter to Reverend Mother, the one person with whom I sensed I was earning a place of respect
.