Then Came Heaven (11 page)

“You, Sister?” His eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“It’s not befitting for a nun, I know, but there’ve been moments when I’ve found myself overcome by... by...”

“Rage?” he supplied.

“Almost. And disillusionment.”

Eddie was flabbergasted that she’d confide such a thing to him, equally as flabbergasted that she harbored such feelings, for in the years he’d known her he’d never seen her any way but serene.

“It’d be a sin to feel rage against God, though,” he said.

“Yes, of course.”

He thought for a moment, then asked, “So who do we feel it against?”

He stood with his back against a door frame while she stood beside the holy-water font, trying to figure it out.

“I don’t know, Mr. Olczak,” she admitted. “I don’t know.”

She realized she was breaking Holy Rule again, and said, “Well... I must get back to the convent.”

________

Sister Regina was about thirty seconds shy of being late for Matins and Lauds. Mother Superior gave her a look of disapproval when she hurried into chapel short of breath from running to the convent from the back door of the church.

Within their own tiny chapel, with its feeling of refuge, she once again felt the angst of the day begin to slip away. Kneeling beside her sisters, in this place where she’d spent so many hours, falling into the familiar routine, she felt a reaffirmation that this was where she belonged. Their sweet soprano voices chanting in unison brought the assurance she so desired. During the Magnificat she felt transported, the Latin words flowing through her like fresh rain through dusty air, clearing and purifying.

During the thirty minutes of meditation, however, in the extreme silence of the airless chapel, all efforts to free her mind of temporal thoughts failed. The conversations with both Sister Dora and Mr. Olczak kept intruding, and by the time she went downstairs for supper she felt like an imposter in her habit. Surely a truly good nun would be able to achieve a union with God that would supersede all worldly thoughts.

But not she. Not she.

At supper Sister Gregory pushed her dish of apple pie aside, then nipped at it all through the meal until she’d eaten it all. Sister Samuel sneezed on everything in sight, and Sister Cecelia told Sister Agnes that she had seen Sister Regina leave the convent without her undersleeves on, and even though she was only going to clean the sacristy, it wasn’t proper.

During community hour Sister Mary Charles, fulfilling her charge, read a chapter from their Constitution. Sister Regina did not know whether it was by chance or by order of their Reverend Mother that tonight’s reading was the chapter on obedience.

Sister Mary Charles read:

Religious should have a great reverence for holy obedience and should strive earnestly to overcome every inclination to self-will.

On all occasions they should conform to the directions of their superior with a prompt, exact, and wholehearted response, and they should never censure the judgments of those who are in authority, believing that the will of God is manifested through them.

Sister Regina realized, upon hearing the rule read aloud, that not only since the death of Krystyna Olczak but for months before that she had broken her vow of obedience time and again. She had broken it by silently railing against the many constraints put upon her by Holy Rule and the Constitution. Even worse, she had begun assessing the methods used by the order to keep the nuns in line, and to consider them akin to brainwashing.

That night in her room, during the hour set aside for reflection, Sister Regina performed the required daily examen. Kneeling beside her bed, with her eyes closed and her hands folded, examining her conscience, she admitted that she had much for which to ask forgiveness, not only of God, but of her superior and her entire religious community as well.

CHAPTER SIX

Irene Pribil awakened on the Monday of her sister’s funeral in the same bedroom the two had shared as girls. It was a big south room with high ceilings and wide white woodwork in a farmhouse that had been built in 1880. The center of the floor was covered with linoleum—pink cabbage roses on a forest of green—that she dust mopped every Saturday during the regular weekly cleaning. Around the linoleum the edge of the floor was painted gray; she repainted it every April. The windows were hung with inexpensive white sheer panels that she helped her mother starch and hang on curtain stretchers every spring and every fall. Outside, east of the house, was the garden she helped her mother plant each spring and harvest each summer. And downstairs in the kitchen was the nickel-plated cast-iron stove, where they canned for weeks and weeks during the hottest part of the year. In the chicken coop beyond the garden was a flock of Plymouth Rock hens she’d raised in the brooder house and fattened all summer, and which she would soon sell to Louis Kulick at his produce in Browerville, earning herself enough cash to buy a few Christmas gifts for her folks and sisters and brothers and their kids. Ahead of her, as far as she could tell, were years and years of nothing but the same.

Irene had gone to country school through the eighth grade, like all the rest of her brothers and sisters. Then, just like they, she had gone to work—in Long Prairie, where she kept house for a family named Milka who owned the dry-goods store. Also like her sisters and brothers, she’d brought home her checks and given them to her parents, doing so without whining about it because it was expected of her.

Krystyna, too, got a job in Long Prairie, operating a mangle at the dry cleaners, and on weekends the two girls always managed to catch a ride home to the farm, and from there go with their brothers to one of the dance halls for a Saturday-night dance.

It was at the Clarissa Ballroom that they met the Olczak boys for the first time. There were so many of them that Irene couldn’t keep all their names straight. But two she remembered: Romaine, because for a while he was sweet on her and gave her her first kiss. And Eddie, because from the first time she ever met him, she was sweet on him and wished more than anything that he 
might
 try to kiss her.

It had never happened.

Eddie had taken one look at Krystyna and gone blind to all others.

Never once, in all the years since, had Irene let Krystyna know how she felt about Eddie. Eddie either.

The job at Milka’s ended when they sold the business and moved to Melrose. It was followed by others, always doing housework, always for meager wages, always returning to the farm on the weekends, until the spring of 1945, when her mother fell off a stepladder while painting the granary, broke her collarbone and suffered a severe concussion. Irene returned to the farm to help out while her mother recovered, and stayed.

She had always intended to leave, preferably by getting married, but with homegrown pork and beef and cream and butter plentiful, and the cooking rich, she had gotten quite fat. There were no young men asking her to the dances on Saturday nights anymore. And since the war ended, women tended to take care of their own homes, so housekeeping jobs were fewer and harder to find. With a limited education, Irene was ill prepared to live on her own and support herself. At home with her folks she had food, shelter, company and love, and she grew complacent with these.

But life there was lonely and steeped in routine. All of her siblings had left and gotten married, and they rather expected Irene to remain where she was, taking care of her parents, providing them with company as they grew older, and with help during the busy times of year.

Once, a couple of years ago, at a wedding dance where she’d gone with her parents, a fellow named Bryce Polavik from over near Philbrook had danced with her and driven her home. He’d even kissed her and asked her out the following Saturday. She had bought some yard goods and sewn herself a brand-new dress, and Krystyna had put a new Toni home permanent in her hair and shared her excitement, and Irene had even bought a new pair of high heels with cut-out toes for the occasion.

But at the end of the night, on the way home from a dance hall called Bink’s, Bryce Polavik had pulled off the road onto a little trail leading into somebody’s woods and had kissed Irene like a sex fiend, and tried to unhook her garters, and unsnap her brassiere. When she stopped him, he became insistent, and zipped down his trousers and forced her to touch his privates, and then he’d used his superior strength to subdue her and touch her between her legs, where nobody had ever touched her. When she’d continued to struggle and fight him off and beg, no, no, please no, it’s a mortal sin, no, please, he had roughly thrust her aside, called her a stupid, fat cunt, and said she should be happy any guy at all would even want to screw somebody like her, and that it was likely the only time she’d ever get the chance, so don’t come begging him when she changed her mind, because he’d never so much as look at her again. Then he backed out of the woods so fast the car lurched into the opposite ditch before he changed gears and tore off down the gravel road at such a breakneck pace he’d scared Irene even worse than earlier when he’d tried to force her to have intercourse. Her parents’ driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, and he skidded to a halt at the end of it, reached across her and threw her door open. When she’d asked, “Aren’t you going to drive me the rest of the way?” he’d said, “Get out, fatso. The walk will do you good. Might wear off a pound or two.”

So Irene lived on at home, seeking social diversion primarily with Krystyna and Eddie, playing cards at their house, often eating supper there, talking gardening and sewing, loving their children while growing more and more afraid she’d have none of her own. She was the one who went to their house and took care of Krystyna for ten full days after each of the babies had been born. She had bottle-fed and burped them and changed many a dirty diaper. She made clothes for their dolls, taught them how to play jacks, bought them coloring books and took them out to the farm to spend overnights so that Eddie and Krystyna could have occasional nights alone. In spring she showed them where the best spreads of trilliums bloomed in Grandpa and Grandma Pribil’s woods, and broke off fresh bloodroot and showed them how it 
bled
.
 She took them to the barn and showed them the baby kittens, and let them help her cut out sugar cookies and slice rhubarb with a paring knife for the first time, folding their small hands around the knife handle and cautioning them on how to use it. At Halloween she helped Krystyna make their costumes and carve their pumpkins. At Christmas the gifts she bought them were nicer than those she bought for her other nieces and nephews. At bedtime, when she was at their house, they ran to her scrubbed and fresh in plissé pajamas and kissed Auntie Irene goodnight with the avid abandon they gave their own parents.

Only they were not hers.

Irene envied what Krystyna had with Eddie. She envied their beautiful children, their house, their marriage, and his unmistakable love for her. She envied her his easygoing manner, his calm appreciation of all she did, the way he’d walk home from St. Joseph’s at any hour of the day, just to have a cup of coffee with her, then quietly draw her into the front hall away from the others to give her a goodbye kiss before going back to work. She envied Krystyna because Eddie was always doing things for her—improving the house in whatever way she asked, building things for her in his workshop, and for the children, too—their first high chair, doll furniture from Santa, a playhouse outfitted with a miniature table and chairs the perfect size for little bodies. When Krystyna asked him to put up a swing for the girls on one end of the clothesline pole, Eddie did it with a smile, then pushed his children on it, laughing with them. When Krystyna asked for a short white picket fence to surround her garden, he made it without a murmur of complaint, and the two of them painted it together, sitting on the front-porch steps while townspeople walked by and stopped to visit, and Krystyna would say, “Go on in and pour yourself a lemonade.” Or a cup of coffee, or have a doughnut or a cookie, she’d say, because their house was always open, and people wandered in and out of it as if it were a restaurant. When Krystyna asked if Eddie wanted to go to a “hard-time dance,” he put on the foolish costumes she contrived, made of onion sacks, and they went to Clarissa and won first prize, he shyly, she with the vibrance she brought to everything she did.

And once Krystyna had confided to Irene that Eddie had given her a bath. Filled the tub and picked her up and carried her to it and pressed her back until she was lying limp against the porcelain, and soaped her from head to foot and kissed her stomach, which was no longer tight and flat after stretching around two babies, and told her she was perfect. Perfect, mind you, Krystyna had said, when there were stretch marks bright and jagged as lightning running all across her stomach, and she couldn’t fit into the straight dresses she’d worn before Anne was born, and her fingers were often stained and cracked from all the chemicals in the permanents she gave.

Over the years that Irene watched the young married couple together, she grew to love them both even more. Her love for Krystyna was so pure and rewarding it would never have occurred to her to let her sister know she loved Eddie. And her love for Eddie—well, it had grown into a golden glow that filled her like a perfect dawn whenever he was near. In Irene’s eyes he was more than ideal. He was a god.

It was through Krystyna and Eddie that Irene had lived vicariously. Her joy at being with them and the children dulled the dread she carried at the prospect of life as an old maid. As long as they were there, their door and hearts open to her, Irene could escape to them and from the stunning mediocrity of her reality.

But now Krystyna was dead and there would be no more borrowing shoes, and giving each other permanents, and going to dances on Saturday nights. On the odd Wednesday or Sunday afternoon when the changelessness of life on the farm became suffocating, she could not drive into town and visit in Krystyna’s kitchen. Who would she laugh with? Remember her days in Long Prairie with? Tease Mother and Dad with (for Krystyna had been the one who could always make them laugh)? Who would lift her above the drudgery to that plane of companionship she’d never shared with anyone else?