The Whore's Child (2 page)

One Christmas season—was it her third year at the convent school?—Sister Ursula was summoned to the chamber of Mother Superior, who told her to ready herself for a journey. This was a full week before any of the other students would be permitted to leave for the Christmas holiday, and Sister Ursula was instructed to tell no one of her impending departure. Indeed, Mother Superior seemed flustered, and this gave Sister Ursula heart. During her years of secret, vengeful prayer she’d indulged many fantasies of dramatic liberation, and often imagined her father’s arrival on horseback, his angry pounding at the main gate, his purposeful stride through the courtyard and into the chapel. Perhaps Mother Superior’s anxiety stemmed from the fact that her father was already on his way to effect just such a rescue.

At the appointed hour, Sister Ursula waited, as instructed, by the main gate, beyond which no men save priests were permitted entry, and awaited her father’s arrival. She hoped he would come by a coach or carriage that then would convey them to the village train station, but if necessary she was more than happy to make the journey on foot, so long as she and her father were together. She had better shoes now, though she still hobbled like a cripple. And so when a carriage came into view in the dusty road beyond the iron gate, her heart leapt up—until she recognized it as the one belonging to the convent. Inside sat not her father but Sister Veronique, who had not been kicked in the head by a horse despite three years’ worth of Sister Ursula’s dogged prayers. When the carriage drew to a halt, Sister Ursula understood that her hopes had been led astray by her need and that she was to be banished from the convent, not rescued from it. She did not fear a worse existence than her present one, because a worse existence was not within her powers of imagination. Rather, what frightened her was the possibility that if she was taken from the convent school, her father no longer would know where to find her when the time came. This terrible fear she kept to herself. She and Sister Veronique did not speak a word on the long journey to the city.

Late that evening they arrived at a hospital and were taken to the charity ward, only to learn that Sister Ursula’s mother had expired just after they had left the convent that morning. A nun dressed all in white informed Sister Veronique that it would be far better for the child not to see the deceased, and a look passed between them. All that was left by way of a keepsake was a brittle, curling, scallop-edged photograph, which the white nun gave to Sister Ursula, who had offered no reaction to the news that her mother was dead. Since arriving at the hospital, Sister Ursula had lapsed into a state of paralytic fear that it was her father who had fallen ill there. Instead, it seemed at least one of her prayers had been answered: her father was free.

But where was he? When she summoned the courage to ask, the two nuns exchanged another glance, in which it was plain that the white nun shared Sister Veronique’s belief that she had no father, and Sister Ursula saw, too, that it would be useless for her, a child, to try to convince the white nun otherwise. Her fury supported her during their train ride, but then, when the convent came into view from the carriage, Sister Ursula broke down and began to sob. To her surprise, if not comfort, Sister Veronique placed a rough, callused hand on her shoulder and said softly, “Never mind, child. You will become one of us now.” In response Sister Ursula slid as far away from the old nun as she could and sobbed even harder, knowing it must be true.

“Are we ever going to meet the father?” one student wanted to know. “I mean, she yearns for him, and he gets compared to Christ, but we never see him directly. We’re, like,
told
how to feel about him. If he doesn’t ever show up, I’m going to feel cheated.”

Sister Ursula dutifully noted this criticism, but you had only to look at the old woman to know that the father was not going to show up. Anybody who felt cheated by this could just join the club.

The day after Sister Ursula’s second workshop, my doorbell rang at seven-thirty in the morning. I struggled out of bed, put on a robe and went to the door. Sister Ursula stood on the porch, clearly agitated. The forlorn station wagon idled at the curb with its full cargo of curious, myopic nuns, returning, I guessed, from morning Mass. The yard was strewn with dry, unraked November leaves, several of which had attached themselves to the bottom of Sister Ursula’s flowing habit.

“Must he be in the story? Must he return?” Sister Ursula wanted to know. As badly as she had wanted her father to appear in life, she needed, for some reason, to exclude him from the narrative version.

“He’s already
in
the story,” I pointed out, cinching my robe tightly at the waist.

“But I never saw him after she died. This is what my story is about.”

“How about a flashback?” I suggested. “You mentioned there was one Christmas holiday . . .”

But she was no longer listening. Her eyes, slate gray, had gone hard. “She died of syphilis.”

I nodded, feeling something harden in me too. Behind me I heard the bathroom door open and close, and I thought I saw Sister Ursula’s gaze flicker for an instant. She might have caught a glimpse of Jane, the woman I was involved with, and I found myself hoping she had.

“My father’s heart was broken.”

“How do you know that, if you never saw him again?”

“He loved her,” she explained. “She was his ruin.”

It was my hatred that drew me deeper into the Church,
began Sister Ursula’s third installment, the words cramped even more tightly on exactly twenty-five pages, and this elicited my now standard comment in the margin. As a writer of opening sentences, Sister Ursula was without peer among my students.

In the months following her mother’s death, an explanation had occurred to Sister Ursula. Her father, most likely, had booked passage to America to search for work. Such journeys, she knew, were fraught with unimaginable peril, and perhaps he now lay at the bottom of the ocean. So it was that she gradually came to accept the inevitability of Sister Veronique’s cruel prophecy. She would become one of those whom she detested. Ironically, this fate was hastened by the prophet’s untimely death when she was kicked by a horse, not in the head as Sister Ursula had prayed, but in the chest, causing severe internal hemorrhaging and creating an opening in the stable. During her long sojourn at the convent, Sister Ursula had learned to prefer the company of animals to that of humans, and so at the age of sixteen, already a large, full woman like her mother, she became herself a bride of Christ.

Sister Ursula’s chronicle of the years following her vows, largely a description of her duties in the stable, featured several brief recollections of the single week she’d spent at home in the city during the Christmas holiday of that first year she entered the convent school. During that holiday she’d seen very little of her mother—a relief, since Sister Ursula dreaded the heat of her mother’s embrace and the cloying stench of her whore’s perfume. Rather, her beloved father took her with him on his rounds, placing her on a convenient bench outside the dark buildings he entered, telling her how long he would be, how high a number she would have to count to before he would return. Only a few times did she have to count higher. “Did you find work, Father?” she asked each time he reappeared. It seemed to Sister Ursula that in buildings as large and dark as the ones he entered, with so many other men entering and exiting, there should have been work in one of them, but there was none. Still, that they were together was joy enough. Her father took her to the wharf to see the boats, to a small carnival where a man her father knew let her ride a pony for free and finally to a bitter cold picnic in the country where they ate warm bread and cheese. At the end of each of these excursions her father promised again that she would not have to remain much longer in the convent school, that another Christmas would find them together.

The installment ended with Sister Ursula taking her final vows in the same chapel that for years had been her refuge from the taunts of children for whom she would always be the whore’s child. There, at the very altar of God, Sister Ursula, like a reluctant bride at an arranged marriage, indulged her fantasy of rescue right up to the last moment. When asked to proclaim her irrevocable devotion to God and the one true Church, she paused and turned toward the side door of the chapel, the one she’d always imagined her father would throw open, and willed her father’s shadow to emerge from the blinding light and scatter these useless women and hateful children before him.

But the door remained shut, the chapel dark except for the flickering of a hundred candles, and so Sister Ursula became a bride.

“Isn’t there a lot of misogyny in this story?” observed a male student who I happened to know was taking a course with the English department’s sole radical feminist, and was therefore alert to all of misogyny’s insidious manifestations. By stating this opinion in the form of a question, perhaps he was indicating that the distrust and even hatred of women evident in Sister Ursula’s memoir might be okay in this instance because the author was, sort of, a woman.

At any rate, he was right to be cautious. What would you expect, a chorus of his female classmates sang out. The whole thing takes place in a girls’ school. There were only two men in the story and one was Jesus, so the statistical sample was bound to be skewed. No, read correctly, Sister Ursula was clearly a feminist.

“I
would
like to see more of the mother, though,” one young woman conceded. “It was a major cop-out for her to die before they could get to the hospital.”

“You wanted a deathbed scene?” said another. “Wouldn’t that be sort of melodramatic?”

Here the discussion faltered. Melodrama was a bad thing, almost as bad as misogyny.

“Why was the daughter sent for?” wondered someone else. “If the mother didn’t love her, why send for her?”

“Maybe the father sent for her?”

“Then why wasn’t he there himself?”

“I know I was the one,” interrupted another, “who wanted to see more of the father after the last submission, but now I think I was wrong. All that stuff with her father over the Christmas holiday? It was like we kept hearing what we already knew. And
then
he’s not there at the hospital when the mother dies. I’m confused.” He turned to me. “Aren’t you?”

“Maybe somebody in the hospital contacted the convent,” another student suggested, letting me off the hook.

“For a dying prostitute in a charity ward? How would they even know where the daughter was unless the mother told them?”

Everyone now turned to Sister Ursula, who under this barrage of questions seemed to have slipped into a trance.

“I don’t care,” said another student, one of the loners in the back of the room. “I
like
this story. It feels real.”

The fourth and final installment of Sister Ursula’s story was only six and a half pages long with regular margins, normal fonts and standard double-spacing.

My life as a nun has been one of terrible hatred and bitterness,
it began. I considered writing,
You don’t mean
that,
in the margin, but refrained. Sister Ursula always meant what she said. It was now late November, and she hadn’t veered a centimeter from literal truth since Labor Day. These last, perfunctory pages summarized her remaining years in the convent until the school was partially destroyed by fire. It was then that Sister Ursula came to America. Still a relatively young woman, she nonetheless entertained no thoughts of leaving the order she had always despised. She had become, as Sister Veronique predicted, one of them.

Once, in her late forties, she had returned to Belgium to search for her father, but she had little money and found no trace of him. It was as if, as Sister Veronique had always maintained, the man had never existed. When her funds were exhausted, Sister Ursula gave up and returned to America to live out what remained of her life among the other orphans of her order. This was her first college course, she explained, and she wanted the other students to know that she had enjoyed meeting them and reading their stories, and thanked them for helping her with hers. All of this was contained in the final paragraph of the story, an unconsciously postmodern gesture.

“This last part sort of fizzled out,” one student admitted, clearly pained to say this after its author had thanked her readers for their help. “But it’s one of the best stories we’ve read all semester.”

“I liked it too,” said another, whose voice didn’t fall quite right.

Everyone seemed to understand that there was more to say, but no one knew what it might be. Sister Ursula stopped taking notes and silence descended on the room. For some time I’d been watching a young woman who’d said next to nothing all term, but who wrote long, detailed reports on all the stories. She’d caught my attention now because her eyes were brimming with tears. I sent her an urgent telepathic plea. No. Please don’t.

“But the girl in the story never
got
it,” she protested.

The other students, including Sister Ursula, all turned toward her. “Got what?”

I confess, my own heart was in my throat.

“About the father,” she said. “He was the mother’s pimp, right? Is there another explanation?”

“So,” Sister Ursula said sadly, “I was writing what you call a fictional story after all.”

It was now mid-December, my grades were due, and I was puzzling over what to do about Sister Ursula’s. She had not turned in a final portfolio of revised work to be evaluated, nor had she returned to class after her final workshop, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t erase from my memory the image of the old nun that had haunted me for weeks, of her face coming apart in terrible recognition of the willful lie she’d told herself over a lifetime.

So I’d decided to pay her a visit at the old house where she and five other elderly nuns had been quartered now for nearly a decade in anticipation of their order’s dissolution. I had brought the gift of a Christmas tree ornament, only to discover that they had no tree, unless you counted the nine-inch plastic one on the mantel in the living room. Talk about failures of imagination. In a house inhabited by infirm, elderly women, who did I suppose would have put up and decorated a tree?