The Tale of the Body Thief (38 page)

“How did it begin for you?” I asked.

“Do you think that’s important?” she asked. “I don’t think you’ll approve of my story if I tell you.”

“I want to know,” I answered.

She’d grown up, the daughter of a Catholic schoolteacher and an accountant in the Bridgeport section of Chicago, and very early on exhibited a great talent for playing the piano. The whole family had sacrificed for her lessons with a famous teacher.

“Self-sacrifice, you see,” she said, smiling faintly again, “even from the beginning. Only it was music then, not medicine.”

But even then, she had been deeply religious, reading the lives of the saints, and dreaming of being a saint—of working in the foreign missions when she grew up. Saint Rose de Lima, the mystic, held a special fascination for her. And so did Saint Martin de Porres, who had worked more in the world. And Saint Rita. She had wanted to work with lepers someday, to find a life of all-consuming and heroic work. She’d built a little oratory behind her house when she was a girl, and there she would kneel for hours before the crucifix, hoping that the wounds of Christ would open in her hands and feet—the stigmata.

“I took these stories very seriously,” she said. “Saints are real to me. The possibility of heroism is real to me.”

“Heroism,” I said. My word. But how very different was my definition of it. I did not interrupt her.

“It seemed that the piano playing was at war with my spiritual soul. I wanted to give up everything for others, and that meant giving up the piano, above all, the piano.”

This saddened me. I had the feeling she had not told this story often, and her voice was very subdued when she spoke.

“But what about the happiness you gave to people when you played?” I asked. “Wasn’t that something of real value?”

“Now, I can say that it was,” she said, her voice dropping even lower, and her words coming with painful slowness. “But then? I wasn’t sure of it. I wasn’t a likely person for such a talent. I didn’t mind being heard; but I didn’t like being seen.” She flushed slightly as she looked at me. “Perhaps if I could have played in a choir loft, or behind a screen it would have been different.”

“I see,” I said. “There are many humans who feel this way, of course.”

“But you don’t, do you?”

I shook my head.

She explained how excruciating it was for her to be dressed in white lace, and made to play before an audience. She did it to please her parents and her teachers. Entering the various competitions was an agony. But almost invariably she won. Her career had become a family enterprise by the time she was sixteen.

“But what about the music itself. Did you enjoy it?”

She thought for a moment. Then: “It was absolute ecstasy,” she answered. “When I played alone … with no one there to watch me, I lost myself in it completely. It was almost like being under the influence of a drug. It was … it was almost erotic. Sometimes melodies would obsess me. They’d run through my head continuously. I lost track of time when I played. I still cannot really listen to music without being swept up and carried away. You don’t see any radio here or tape player. I can’t have those things near me even now.”

“But why deny yourself this?” I looked around. There was no piano in this room either.

She shook her head dismissively. “The effect is too engulfing, don’t you see? I can forget everything else too easily. And nothing is accomplished when this happens. Life is on hold, so to speak.”

“But, Gretchen, is that true?” I asked. “For some of us such intense feelings
are
life! We seek ecstasy. In those moments, we … we transcend all the pain and the pettiness and the struggle. That’s how it was for me when I was alive. That’s how it is for me now.”

She considered this, her face very smooth and relaxed. When she spoke, it was with quiet conviction.

“I want more than that,” she said. “I want something more palpably constructive. But to put it another way, I cannot enjoy such a pleasure when others are hungry or suffering or sick.”

“But the world will always include such misery. And people need music, Gretchen, they need it as much as they need comfort or food.”

“I’m not sure I agree with you. In fact, I’m fairly sure that I don’t. I have to spend my life trying to alleviate misery. Believe me, I have been through all these arguments many times before.”

“Ah, but to choose nursing over music,” I said. “It’s unfathomable to me. Of course nursing is good.” I was too saddened and confused
to continue. “How did you make the actual choice?” I asked. “Didn’t the family try to stop you?”

She went on to explain. When she was sixteen, her mother took ill, and for months no one could determine the cause of her illness. Her mother was anemic; she ran a constant fever; finally it was obvious she was wasting away. Tests were made, but the doctors could find no explanation. Everyone felt certain that her mother was going to die. The atmosphere of the house had been poisoned with grief and even bitterness.

“I asked God for a miracle,” she said. “I promised I would never touch the piano keys again as long as I lived, if God would only save my mother. I promised I would enter the convent as soon as I was allowed—that I would devote my life to nursing the sick and the dying.”

“And your mother was cured.”

“Yes. Within a month she was completely recovered. She’s alive now. She’s retired, she tutors children after school—in a storefront in a black section of Chicago. She has never been sick since, in any way.”

“And you kept the promise?”

She nodded. “I went into the Missionary Sisters when I was seventeen and they sent me to college.”

“And you kept this promise never to touch the piano again?”

She nodded. There was not a trace of regret in her, nor was there a great longing or need for my understanding or approval. In fact, I knew my sadness was obvious to her, and that, if anything, she felt a little concerned for me.

“Were you happy in the convent?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with a little shrug. “Don’t you see? An ordinary life is impossible for someone like me. I have to be doing something hard. I have to be taking risks. I entered this religious order because their missions were in the most remote and treacherous areas of South America. I can’t tell you how I love those jungles!” Her voice became low and almost urgent. “They can’t be hot enough or dangerous enough for me. There are moments when we’re all overworked and tired, when the hospital’s overcrowded and the sick children are bedded down outside under lean-tos and in hammocks and I feel so alive! I can’t tell you. I stop maybe long enough to wipe the sweat off my face, to wash my hands, to perhaps drink a glass of water. And I think: I’m alive; I’m here. I’m doing what matters.”

Again she smiled. “It’s another kind of intensity,” I said, “something wholly unlike the making of music. I see the crucial difference.”

I thought of David’s words to me about his early life—how he had sought the thrill in danger. She was seeking the thrill in utter self-sacrifice. He had sought the danger of the occult in Brazil. She sought the hard challenge of bringing health to thousands of the nameless, and the eternally poor. This troubled me deeply.

“There’s a vanity in it too, of course,” she said. “Vanity is always the enemy. That’s what troubled me the most about my … my chastity,” she explained, “the pride I felt in it. But you see, even coming back like this to the States was a risk. I was terrified when I got off the plane, when I realized I was here in Georgetown and nothing could stop me from being with a man if I wanted it. I think I went to work at the hospital out of fear. God knows, freedom isn’t simple.”

“This part I understand,” I said. “But your family, how did they respond to this promise you made, to your giving up the music?”

“They didn’t know at the time. I didn’t tell them. I announced my vocation. I stuck to my guns. There was a lot of recrimination. After all, my sisters and brothers had worn secondhand clothes so I could have piano lessons. But this is often the case. Even in a good Catholic family, the news that a daughter wants to be a nun is not always greeted with cheers and accolades.”

“They grieved for your talent,” I said quietly.

“Yes, they did,” she said with a slight lift of her eyebrows. How honest and tranquil she seemed. None of this was said with coldness or hardness. “But I had a vision of something vastly more important than a young woman on a concert stage, rising from the piano bench to collect a bouquet of roses. It was a long time before I told them about the promise.”

“Years later?”

She nodded. “They understood. They saw the miracle. How could they help it? I told them I’d been more fortunate than anyone I knew who had ever gone into the convent. I’d had a clear sign from God. He had resolved all conflicts for all of us.”

“You believe this.”

“Yes. I do,” she said. “But in a way, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. And if anyone should understand, you should.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you speak of religious truths and religious ideas and you know that they matter even if they are only metaphors. This is what I heard in you even when you were delirious.”

I sighed. “Don’t you ever want to play the piano again? Don’t you ever want to find an empty auditorium, perhaps, with a piano on the stage, and just sit down and … ”

“Of course I do. But I can’t do it, and I won’t do it.” Her smile now was truly beautiful.

“Gretchen, in a way this is a terrible story,” I said. “Why, as a good Catholic girl couldn’t you have seen your musical talent as a gift from God, a gift not to be wasted?”

“It was from God, I knew it was. But don’t you see? There was a fork in the road; the sacrifice of the piano was the opportunity that God gave me to serve Him in a special way. Lestat, what could the music have meant compared to the act of helping people, hundreds of people?”

I shook my head. “I think the music can be seen as equally important.”

She thought for a long while before she answered. “I couldn’t continue with it,” she said. “Perhaps I used the crisis of my mother’s illness, I don’t know. I had to become a nurse. There was no other way for me. The simple truth is—I cannot live when I am faced with the misery in the world. I cannot justify comfort or pleasure when other people are suffering. I don’t know how anyone can.”

“Surely you don’t think you can change it all, Gretchen.”

“No, but I can spend my life affecting many, many individual lives. That’s what counts.”

This story so upset me that I couldn’t remain seated there. I stood up, stretching my stiff legs, and I went to the window and looked out at the field of snow.

It would have been easy to dismiss it had she been a sorrowful or mentally crippled person, or a person of dire conflict and instability. But nothing seemed farther from the truth. I found her almost unfathomable.

She was as alien to me as my mortal friend Nicolas had been so many, many decades ago, not because she was like him. But because his cynicism and sneering and eternal rebellion had contained an abnegation
of self which I couldn’t really understand. My Nicki—so full of seeming eccentricity and excess, yet deriving satisfaction from what he did only because it pricked others.

Abnegation of self—that was the heart of it.

I turned around. She was merely watching me. I had the distinct feeling again that it didn’t matter much to her what I said. She didn’t require my understanding. In a way, she was one of the strongest people I’d encountered in all my long life.

It was no wonder she took me out of the hospital; another nurse might not have assumed such a burden at all.

“Gretchen,” I asked, “you’re never afraid that your life has been wasted—that sickness and suffering will simply go on long after you’ve left the earth, and what you’ve done will mean nothing in the larger scheme?”

“Lestat,” she said, “it is the larger scheme which means nothing.” Her eyes were wide and clear. “It is the small act which means all. Of course sickness and suffering will continue after I’m gone. But what’s important is that I have done all I can. That’s my triumph, and my vanity. That’s my vocation and my sin of pride. That is my brand of heroism.”

“But, chérie, it works that way only if someone is keeping score—if some Supreme Being will ratify your decision, or you’ll be rewarded for what you’ve done, or at least upheld.”

“No,” she said, choosing her words thoughtfully as she proceeded. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. Think of what I’ve said. I’m telling you something that is obviously new to you. Maybe it’s a religious secret.”

“How so?”

“There are many nights when I lie awake, fully aware that there may be no personal God, and that the suffering of the children I see every day in our hospitals will never be balanced or redeemed. I think of those old arguments—you know, how can God justify the suffering of a child? Dostoevsky asked that question. So did the French writer Albert Camus. We ourselves are always asking it. But it doesn’t ultimately matter.

“God may or may not exist. But misery is real. It is absolutely real, and utterly undeniable. And in that reality lies my commitment—the core of my faith. I have to do something about it!”

“And at the hour of your death, if there is no God … ”

“So be it. I will know that I did what I could. The hour of my death could be now.” She gave a little shrug. “I wouldn’t feel any different.”

“This is why you feel no guilt for our being there in the bed together.”

She considered. “Guilt? I feel happiness when I think of it. Don’t you know what you’ve done for me?” She waited, and slowly her eyes filled with tears. “I came here to meet you, to be with you,” she said, her voice thickening. “And I can go back to the mission now.”

She bowed her head, and slowly, silently regained her calm, her eyes clearing. Then she looked up and spoke again.

“When you spoke of making this child, Claudia … when you spoke of bringing your mother, Gabrielle, into your world … you spoke of reaching for something. Would you call it a transcendence? When I work until I drop in the mission hospital, I transcend. I transcend doubt and something … something perhaps hopeless and black inside myself. I don’t know.”