The Guineveres (24 page)

It was true; I didn't trust Gwen. There was something dangerous in her face. Sometimes she tipped her head back in laughter, then looked sideways toward an invisible camera, just holding the pose, role-playing herself. Other times she'd penetrate me with those magnetic eyes of hers, so pretty and sad and sincere all at once. I wanted to be overtaken. But I sensed something, too, just beneath the surface, wounds too deep to be seen. Maybe it was her stillness when she whispered, “I won't tell a soul,” her tongue coming to rest on her teeth. Maybe it was simply that I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe her so badly. Back then, I'd have made bread out of stones, if she'd asked me. I'd have eaten it, too.

 

Saint Irmina and Saint Adela

FEAST DAY: DECEMBER 24

When Irmina and Adela were young, they liked to play games of the imagination in the shade of the garden's walls. Irmina would help her sister Adela braid branches of the white willow tree into headbands, and they'd prance through the courtyard pretending to be pixies or the dancers they'd seen entertaining the court. These girls were princesses by birth. Their mother had died, and their father, the distant Dagobert, traveled frequently to other villages, founding cloisters and abbeys. It was his life's work. They'd heard the stories of their father, a king who ruled with firmness and piety: When he was a child, he was kidnapped, exiled, and threatened, his throne taken from him unjustly. However, these stories did not reflect the father they knew, a burly and bearded man from whom they wanted nothing but affection.

The girls would pick him flowers from the garden—beautiful bouquets of lilacs and daisies—and they'd place these at the foot of his throne when he'd arrive home from his travels. Their father would smell the bouquets, nod toward his daughters, then tell the officers to have the seamstress make his girls beautiful dresses of the finest silk. In their bedchambers, the girls would practice singing melodies, and they'd serenade their father. He'd nod and tell the officers to ask the cook to bake the girls the finest delicacy.

At age fifteen, Irmina was promised in marriage to Count Herman. She was satisfied enough with this selection, even though a young officer of the court, a boy Irmina had known since childhood, professed his love and begged her to be his bride. Irmina resisted his entreaties, wishing only to please her father by marrying the man he'd selected. Herman, though a bit scrawny and with breath that smelled of pickled herring, wore a beard like her father's, and when they would walk in the garden or dance in the great hall, she could feel the coarseness of it when she pressed her cheek against him, which she did often, just for the experience of it.

Not surprisingly, her father had arranged for no expense to be spared for her wedding. The great hall was decorated with holly and ribbons, and rose petals were scattered across the floor. The servants washed the windows, and light shined through so brilliantly that Irmina and Adela had to shield their eyes when they came to check on the progress of the wedding arrangements at midday.

But three days before the wedding, Adela came running into Irmina's bedchamber with bad news. Count Herman had been pushed off a cliff by the jealous young officer. Adela stood shaking in her gauzy nightclothes as she explained how both men tumbled to their deaths down the rocky precipice and into the choppy waters below. Irmina stayed in bed all day and all night, all day and all night again, scratching her fingernails into the side of her face to see if she could replicate the feeling of her cheek pressed against Herman's.

After a few days, Irmina sought out her father; she wanted to be consoled, wanted him to pull her into his broad chest, stroke her long hair, cradle her like the child she was. She was only fifteen, not so old, after all. She found her father in the stables; he was dressed in his travel cloak, getting ready to head out to yet another village to help establish yet another abbey.

“Can't you stay with me?” Irmina pleaded, her neck craning as she gazed up at him sitting on his white mare. “I need you, Father,” she said. “Please stay.” Dagobert smiled softly through his grizzled beard and told the officer to get the young girl anything she wanted to help her recover from her grief. He galloped off on his horse, and Irmina listened to the clopping of the horse's hooves until they faded.

Irmina turned to the officer. Her heart was bounding about in her throat; her eyes began to seep tears—not for Count Herman or the young officer, but for her own loneliness. “Tell him I want a convent of my own,” she screamed through clenched teeth. She'd never felt more betrayed in her life. “As large as this castle. Larger!”

She hadn't meant it, not really, but when her father returned home a fortnight later, she learned of his plans to build her a convent. She was to become a nun.

The convent was beautiful, of course, large with arched entries and a gabled roof. Irmina tended to the sick, helped the needy, and walked above the steep slopes of the cliffs across the bay from where she used to live. She refused all visitors. Instead, she spent much time alone in her chambers, her forehead resting on folded hands.

Her sister Adela fared only slightly better. She married the man to whom her father had promised her; there was no love. And then her husband died shortly after their union, leaving her alone again. By this time their father had died, too. Adela, now grown into a beautiful young woman of royal blood, had many suitors, but her heart had grown empty from lack of use. The heart is funny in that way: When it keeps on loving, and loving, and loving what isn't there, it becomes attached to the notion that love is the wait itself, the emptiness of it. She did the only thing she knew to do. She followed her sister's devout example; she founded a monastery with her father's inheritance.

Both sisters—Irmina the virgin, Adela the widow—died alone within the walls of their holy palaces. On their deathbeds they both imagined the old willow tree they used to play under, now dry, sagging with the weight of years and weather. But it would bloom again. It always did. That's what faith teaches us: From hopelessness springs hope. From longing, desire.

 

The Vigil

Sister Fran granted us special permission to serve at the Christmas Eve Midnight Vigil. In fact, she'd come to trust us, a conclusion she arrived at only after Father James reported back to her that we'd served with the faithfulness and ability of even the best altar boys with whom he had worked. “They're but little lambs led back to the flock,” he had told her, declaring us fully reformed from our August transgressions. The Guineveres didn't quite know his reasons for such declarations, but we were grateful and accepted his pronouncement all the same. The other girls fell asleep on Christmas Eve with images of Christmas trees bursting at their bases with gifts, but Sister Fran kept telling us to “keep Christ in Christmas,” by which she meant: We'd probably only receive what we received every year: an apple, an orange, and a pair of wool socks, knitted by the Sisters themselves.

While the other girls slept, we, The Guineveres, the little lambs, climbed that old hill in total darkness, save the singular beam from the flashlight Sister Fran had lent us. We felt pinned in by the night—no moon or stars cast light upon our path—silenced by the quiet, the murkiness of the late hour. The treading of our feet upon gravel made the only sound, and it seemed we were in a dream. Because the clock in the Rec Room was set fast, and because girls at the convent were not allowed such things as watches, we arrived at the church early. In the vestry, we pulled on our cassocks, trying our best not to muss our hair, and then we looked for Father James in his office to get our processional assignments.

We found him there, his forehead glued to his desk, his fingers wrapped around a half-empty bottle of whiskey. The bottle said Sunny Brook, I remember, because that sounded like a nice place, a place where there was no winter. A place where the streams never froze, where clouds never sagged with the gray weight of snow.

“Father James,” we said. One of us put her hands on his shoulder to rouse him. He didn't move, his body dead weight. “Father James,” we said again. We could smell booze when he breathed, and for this reason we knew he was alive.

“What should we do?” one of us asked.

“We've got to wake him,” said Gwen.

“I know how to do it,” Win said. “My mother used to get like this.”

If there was one thing we knew, it was this: Should Father James be found drunk, they'd replace him with another priest, maybe one of those who came in to take our monthly confession. Maybe he'd be the old wizardly-looking priest who smelled like fish or the one with a birthmark that covered the side of his face like a hand. And maybe this new one wouldn't be so inclined to let girls on his altar. It's true, the masses were tedious, the cassocks scratchy, and we sometimes felt the pitiful glances of the parishioners pelt our skin till it was tender. But to ascend that hill alone, our voices floating on empty air, not contained within the walls of the convent, bouncing back from the archways so we could hear ourselves speak—this was a luxury. When we climbed, the muscles on the backs of our thighs strained in unfamiliar ways, and we stretched our arms as far up as they could go, like swimmers, made ourselves as tall as possible. We felt powerful in moments like these, as if we weren't embodied creatures, as if we weren't full of sin and guilt and things unholy. We were The Guineveres, and we could do anything we wanted. Anything at all.

“Don't wake him yet,” said Gwen. She began to open his desk drawers, searching for something. In his bottom drawer, she found a telephone directory, a recognizable sage green, several inches thick. She handed it to Win.

“What do you want me to do with this?” Win asked. “Smack him with it?”

“Hide it,” Gwen said.

“Hide it? Where?”

“Anywhere,” Gwen snapped. Then she gently plucked the Sunny Brook from Father James's grip, undoing his fingers like little latches. She hitched up her robe, tucked the bottle inside the waist of her skirt, then dropped the robe again and cinched her belt tighter. “Okay, you may proceed.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What does it look like I'm doing?”

“Thou shalt not steal,” I said.

“Thou shalt not be a bore,” she said.

Win tucked the telephone book into the front of her waistband, then filled a glass from the pitcher of water on Father James's bureau. She proceeded to pour it slowly over his head. “I baptize you in the name of the mother, and the daughter, and the holy spiritess,” she joked. Father James rattled his head on the desk, and Win slapped him a few times on his rouged cheeks, leaving finger marks. “Father James,” she said. “Father James, you need to wake up.”

Father James raised his head and saw us standing around him. He licked his lips shiny again and blinked his eyes. They were bloodshot, unfocused, red as if he'd been crying.

“Father James,” Ginny said, “the Midnight Vigil will be starting soon.” Ginny fingered the inside of her sleeve, which I knew meant she was checking for her Lucky Talisman.

“We need our assignments,” I said. “Is your sermon ready?”

“I can't do it,” Father James said. His words came out garbled, as if he were speaking underwater. “I can't do it,” he said again. He rested his elbows on the desk and covered his eyes with his hands. “Do you know what it's like, girls?” he said without lifting his head. “Do you know what it's like, girls, to feel you'll never know the answers? To have to act strong when you are not?” He grunted, or maybe he just cleared his throat.

We stood there for a moment, looking at our feet. Our shoes were identical, but worn out in different places: Ginny's at the front, Win's at the sides, Gwen's in the back from where she often stepped on the heels so she could dangle her shoes from her toe, pretended she was wearing a slip-on.

“Yes, we do know what it's like,” one of us said. “We know exactly what it's like.” Father James removed his hand from his face. Crow's-feet appeared at the edges of his eyes.

Win retrieved another glass of water, and I placed my hand on his shoulder. He took a few sips from the glass, and we sat in a half circle until one of us said, “Sometimes we don't know the answers, and we must go on all the same.” And another of us said, “Because the only unpardonable sin is losing faith.” We had paid attention during Morning Instruction.

“So it is,” Father James said. “So it is.”

It was a blessing that the Midnight Vigil is said in darkness, the church lit only by candlelight. By candlelight, the parishioners could not see Father James's ruddy face or his bleary eyes. They did not notice that Father James's black hair looked disheveled, as if he had just gotten out of bed, or that his nose was runny and his cheeks were streaked with dried tears.

By candlelight, nobody's attention was drawn to the protruding bottle that Gwen balanced in the waistband of her skirt, or to the blocky bulk beneath Win's shirt, covered by their robes. But I could see it. I could see it in the way they moved slowly, their arms held close to their bodies.

Back then, back when I was just a girl, I believed the world was black and white. There were the good and the bad. The faithful and the unfaithful. The sighted and the blind. There was inside the convent and outside. Those who left and those left behind. The world was split in twos, like Noah's Ark, paired off. I know better than that now, and I don't think back on those days as ones of ignorance. Instead, I admire my younger self as a girl who held an infinite amount of hope that we'd make the right choices.

After mass, we didn't see Father James again that night. He never came into the vestry to hang his garments, and his office was empty when we walked by it on our way out the door. It was past one o'clock, far beyond our usual bedtime, but The Guineveres were not tired, were not ready to go back to the Bunk Room and lie on our beds staring up to the dark. Instead, we sat at the top of the hill, the gravel pinching our skin. The moon was high in the sky now, muted behind translucent clouds, but bright enough so we could see the outline of the enormous convent. We felt so small beneath the weight of the building. The moon was a million miles away, the stars even farther. It was Christmas.