But this wasn’t exactly devotional reflection. “God created all things, including Mary conceived without sin, so then Mary gave birth to God,” Father Mike said, interrupting Jeremy’s reveries. “Think about it.”
At communion, Jeremy noticed that girl, Tabitha Scales, sitting three-quarters of the way down the church, her head in her hands. His first thought was that Mrs. Scales must be downstairs prostrate before the refrigerator again. The girl looked wiped; after a few minutes he realized it was because she hadn’t italicized her face with eyeliner and the like. She looked younger, more sodden, more confused. Though Jeremy wasn’t above admiring from a safe distance the tender limbs and bruised-gazelle expression of her brother, Kirk, he also wasn’t blind to Tabitha’s porcelain features. Her improbable gravity.
He was packing up his guitar after mass when Tabitha approached him.
“Jeremy? You know if Father Sheehy’s around?”
“Father Mike? You can go back to the sacristy and see.”
“I can’t go there.” Her head was down.
“You want me to find him?”
“Please?”
He went back, but Father Mike had ducked out, late for his morning coffee-and-doughnuts with Jack Reeves and Turk Schaeffer. Sister Alice Coyne, busy folding up vestments, sported an expression on her face that said volumes about the nature of the feast day, the fallacies in the sermon, the drawbacks to an all-male priesthood, and her own commitment to stick it out and make the whole damn faith work anyway, sooner or later, as God was her witness. Jeremy hated to interrupt, for an expression like that was, he felt, the backbone of the Church. But so too was interrupting that expression when someone needed help, and Tabitha had seemed needy. “Sister Alice,” he murmured. “S.O.S.”
She took one look at Tabitha and dismissed Jeremy with a flip of her hand. “I’ll lockup,” she said.
Mrs. Katje Doorneweerd met him at the grade school door and said, “We’re not going out at recess, Jeremy; the winds are too strong. Almost gale force, some cold front moving down across the Great Lakes.” Jeremy sighed. This meant he’d have to attempt remedial work with the slow kids while the others, who badly needed exercise, shrieked through Simon Says in the same room. So he was initially glad when the school secretary called him to the office to take a phone call, until he realized the only call he could imagine was the one he was dreading: It would be from Sean, and it would be bad.
It wasn’t Sean. It was a creaky old voice that was talking away before he got there. He listened until an interruption and he said, “Is that Mother Clare du Plessix?”
“It is she,” said Mother Clare. “Do you think you can come?”
The wind; the rain; Sister Maria Goretti’s cold had become pneumonia; the chapel roof leaking, and something about tarpaulins; and Sister Alice Coyne wasn’t available at the parish offices of Our Lady’s. Would Jeremy come, and bring some of those nice boys?
There was no way to decline, although Jeremy wouldn’t think of coercing Sean Riley up onto any roof, gale wind or no. Mrs. Doorneweerd said, “I didn’t even know there were any old nuns out that way; talk about your secret cults. Well, Wednesdays are the worst for indoor recess, and today’s a lost cause anyway, so you might as well go. Though it does seem to me you’ve been a little less committed than last year. Word to the wise.”
Sure, thought Jeremy. I’m angling to be fired, so my best strategy is befriending a coven of pickled nuns?
Marty Rothbard was available if not quite willing, and Jeremy swung by and picked him up at his apartment. They made it out to the convent within the hour. Dressed in a yellow raincoat that was so old that the plastic had cracked, Sister Jeanne d’Arc was working out front. She was trying to clear several decades’ worth of dead leaves by poking a broom handle into the rainspout. In the mounting wind she didn’t hear them approach, but she wasn’t startled when they appeared beside her.
“The Cavalry arrives,” she said. “What a mess it is up there. Mother Clare du Plessix has had physically to restrain Sister Clothilde from climbing that stepladder in the choir loft. Sister Clothilde, we fear, might not be appreciated by the roof beams. You boys are to the person a good deal slimmer, and stronger to boot.”
“We’re certainly not roofers,” said Jeremy.
“Well, nor are we,” said Sister Jeanne d’Arc, grunting with the force of her broom thrusting, “so it’s a perfect match and no wonder we get on so well.”
She led them inside, straight into the chapel. She pointed out the left portion of the ceiling where the wooden angels looked as if batiked with dark moisture. They’ve gone Indonesian, thought Jeremy.
Mother Clare du Plessix drifted in. “The roof won’t make it through another winter like last year’s. We thought we’d conquered the problem, but perhaps Sister Maria Goretti didn’t have the strength in her forearms to tack down that tarpaulin sufficiently.” Mother Clare’s trust in God’s providence, thought Jeremy, seemed insufficient. “From the window of the third floor dormitory one can see the far corner of the tarp flapping like a sail. In this wind the whole thing is likely to be torn away. You would be so good to have a go at it.”
“Did she tack it down with a hem, or leave it open?” said Marty.
“She?” Mother Clare du Plessix’s frostiness—aha, thought Jeremy. The improper use of a pronoun without its antecedent could not be condoned, even if the roof was about to fall in.
“Sister Maria Goretti,” replied Marty. “Did she fold a flap and tack down two thicknesses? That would prevent the wind catching it. Or help anyway.”
“She’s indisposed with a sad set of lungs and I couldn’t put the question to her. Do you think you can set it to rights if she made a little mistake?”
“I’m a musician and a special ed teacher.” Jeremy shrugged. “Musicians are hopeless, but special ed teachers, now—”
“We’ll do what we can,” said Marty, adding under his breath, “Germy, this is so butch, I think I’m going to come.”
“We’re very glad of that,” said the nun. “Sister Felicity will show you the way. She’s the best with stairs, being equipped with both of her natural hips.”
Sister Felicity led them up the steps to the choir loft. Several choir chairs weighed down with hymnals had been arranged around the ladder to keep it from sliding on the oak flooring. Hardly comforting. Anyone might easily tumble off the top of the ladder, clear the choir loft railing, and land on the stone floor of the chapel, a healthy forty or fifty foot drop. “Mother Mary, keep them safe,” said Sister Felicity.
“Mother Mary, this is scary,” said Jeremy, halfway up.
“Mother Mary, quite contrary,” said Marty from below. “Gee, for a fag your arms are hairy.”
“This is a chapel,” said Jeremy. “You want this ladder to shake with the wrath of God even before we get out the window?”
“You mean God would flounce her wrath around in a chapel? I thought there was such a thing as sanctuary. Believe me, I haven’t felt so reverential in quite a while, what with the view I have of your butt.”
They were out the window then, in a flourish of crosswinds and spikes of rain.
But it was beautiful up there, beautiful and terrible. The roof, more steeply pitched than it seemed from the inside, had been sheathed with an elegant kind of greenish-gold metal shingle, scalloped at the end. It felt soft and warm, even under the cold rain that coursed along it in rivulets. At four-foot intervals the original roofers had provided iron prongs, suitable for resting a heel or a palm. This was convenient for the guys, though Jeremy couldn’t imagine how Sister Maria Goretti had managed in her old-fashioned long skirts and veils.
The tarpaulin was about twelve feet square and, indeed, it hadn’t been tacked down with a hem, nor with much force, apparently; the nails were hammered in only to a half-inch depth, and they were too widely spaced. Marty called over his shoulder, “If I crash through the roof and fly with those artsy-craftsy angels, be sure nobody reads it as a deathbed
conversion.” He took the more treacherous route above the rotten section, clinging to the wrought-iron spikes along the roof ridge when he could. Jeremy, scrambling below, had a sick moment when one of the prong supports snapped under Marty’s weight, but Marty rolled onto his back and grabbed above his head for another, and Jeremy watched the rain splashing into his open, terrified face. How strange that everything, everything, was beautiful, even terror.
The funny thing was that singing together proved, once again, to be the proper preparation for any other kind of collaborative effort. The wind was too strong and their fear too great to do much talking, but they understood each other’s expressions and body language, and Jeremy managed to fold the seam of the tarpaulin under and stretch the tarpaulin tight while Marty removed the nails—he could do it with his hand—and then with the hammer drive them in again, right to the head. This wasn’t going to be any kind of permanent improvement, but perhaps the roof would hold until the spring when it could be fixed by someone other than retired nuns or gay cabaret song stylists.
Sister Felicity was praying out loud as they descended the ladder, but she broke off to give them a grin when they were safely on the floor of the choir loft.
“A touch of tea to warm you up, you brave boys.”
“Would love to, but the time—”
“You must. I’d never forgive myself if you came down with pneumonia like Sister Maria Goretti. Tell you what. I’ll let you make it yourselves.”
She brought them to a nook they hadn’t seen before, a space with a bench upholstered in red vinyl. Ecclesiastical cuisine design. Jeremy squeezed in, and Sister Felicity, Mother Clare du Plessix, and Sister Clothilde followed. Marty fussed about making a fabulous pot of tea. “Ta-da,” he said. The tray looked splendid, a yellow napkin folded just so, cookies angled daringly in a glass butter dish, a sprig of rosemary providing just the right color contrast.
“Nuns have no style,” said Sister Clothilde, sighing. “I didn’t think men did either, but I see I’m wrong.” She fingered a crumb of cookie.
“Don’t be maudlin, Sister Clothilde,” said Mother Clare du Plessix, mildly.
They munched and nibbled for a while. The rain on the window crinkled the view of a dead garden, supervised by a supremely indifferent concrete statue of Saint Francis of Assisi. “So,” said Jeremy, “I’m surprised you’re working on a leaking roof on a Holy Day of Obligation.”
Mother Clare du Plessix’s response was automatic. “Obligation before devotion. This home is our responsibility, and we must keep it up as we can.”
“I love this holiday, though,” said Sister Clothilde. “Without the perfection of Mary, there’d have been no suitable vessel for Christ. He couldn’t have been born. We’d all be lost.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Marty. “You’d all be grandmothers. Some of you would be widows. You’d be retired from public office maybe, or having late-in-life professional careers as doctors or lawyers. You’d be managing Hillary’s campaign for the Senate. Or challenging her. You’d have found a way to uncover meaning in your lives.”
“The young are so naive, one forgets sometimes.” Sister Felicity beamed at the boys. “You things imagine that what’s available to you—or to young women of your generation—was also available to us. You can’t see how the world has changed; you have no perspective.”
“People of drive could always find their way,” said Marty. “Look at, um, Emma Goldman. Madame Curie. Um. Lucrezia Borgia. Not to mention Madonna.”
“There are as many different walls to fence one in as there are people in the world,” replied Sister Felicity. “You can have no idea what someone of my generation faced. I was born the seventh of nine children on a farm in New Brunswick, in 1912. After six boys my parents didn’t think the farm could support a child who couldn’t haul milk—I was small and my leg was twisted as it still is. So I was given to a cousin to be raised, and brought to the convent when I was thirteen. No one could afford to feed me. They were hard times, and I was an offering to the Church. I was holy barter. My parents kept the other two boys they had after I was born, and once a year they came to visit me, as long as they were alive.”
“Surely you could have left—”
“At thirteen? You think so? At fifteen, at sixteen, at nineteen? I’d taken vows, I’d been raised to believe that one kept vows. It’s an outdated notion, I know.”
“So you were brainwashed—”
“I found a family,” said Sister Felicity. Her face was empty of rage or regret, because of intense willpower, or was it a natural state? Jeremy couldn’t tell. She went on. “I entered into my formation with a will to know God and serve Him. I was devoted to the notion of service.”
“You were an innocent,” said Marty.
“Some innocent,” said Sister Clothilde. “Did you know Sister Felicity has a doctorate in philosophy from McGill University?”
Sister Felicity looked annoyed at the exposure. “I found my way. And not at the cost of abandoning my vows or my faith. Nor my family.”
“But your family abandoned you.” Marty looked petulant.
“I mean my chosen family. My sisters.”
“As for me,” said Sister Clothilde, “I was from the proper side of the tracks. A wealthy Ontario merchant family. I was paraded in Montreal society as a great catch for some rising industrialist or politician. We were too prosperous for me to need to be educated. I entered the Order to focus on divine things and to leave that sort of—oh, a kind of faux-royalty, you might call it—behind.”
Mother Clare du Plessix did not reveal her past when eyes turned to her. “We are in the present, we are in our community now, and God provides for us,” she said. “I do fear sometimes that making fun of the religious is one of the last acceptable forms of social intolerance in our modern culture. All religious women are not feminists, at least not by the contemporary definition, but we are all feminists by experience.”
“Hello. You are directed by male bishops and a pope,” said Marty.
“Stone walls do not a cloister make, nor iron bars a cage,” Mother Clare du Plessix insisted. “The regula of our order”— Jeremy saw that she recognized Marty’s incomprehension—“by which I mean the body of rules of daily practice—reminds us what is of value. Daily. Think of it like this: the nutritional significance to a growing child of a daily glass of milk lies far more in the milk than in the glass.”
“I would smash that glass,” said Marty cheerily.
“And lose the milk. I know. Don’t we know this? Where are our young sisters coming along? They want to find milk somewhere else.”
“In their own bosoms.” Marty couldn’t help swiveling his shoulders as if they were padded to Joan Crawford proportions. “How could you live without children, really? Isn’t that what gives life meaning?”
“How could you live without children?” said Sister Clothilde back at him. “Three single men old enough to have toddlers around their knees. What is it you’re finding in life that makes being childless tolerable?”
“Ah well, that’s a different story,” said Jeremy. “Is the rain letting up?”
“We’re gay men, you know,” said Marty. “You must know that, you’re not blind.”
For an instant Jeremy thought that one of the sisters was going to chirrup a remark about happiness, but he saw them all—one by one—accept the public announcement, and Mother Clare du Plessix said, “Of course we’re not blind.”
“It hardly makes a difference—” said Sister Clothilde. “Do you think women who live in community all their lives don’t know about falling in love with persons of their own gender?”
“Well, it’s the hot talk show issue, isn’t it—lesbian nuns.”
“Friends,” said Mother Clare du Plessix, “let us accept that none of us here is either ignorant or stupid, but that all of us value our privacy. Let us keep the conversation to that which concerns all of us—”
Sisters Clothilde and Felicity looked faintly ch
astised; Marty looked as if he wanted to challenge Mother Clare du Plessix’s authority to lay down conversational guidelines. Jeremy said, “We’re more alike than we let on. Look at us. In our own ways. Communities of the same sex. Trying to get on in a world that makes us the butt of jokes. Trying to live together communally, sort of, in a world that prizes individual freedom above all.”
“Trying to live without children,” said Sister Clothilde.
“And some of us close to the end,” said Mother Clare du Plessix. At Jeremy’s expression she said, “Do you think I can’t see Sean’s condition, do you think that the cloistered are also clueless?”
“Why do you think we voted to welcome you back?” said Sister Felicity.
“There are never enough ways to be kind, and this was one that presented itself,” said Sister Clothilde. “Besides, we get bored with only ourselves. Don’t you?”
Mother Clare stood up. She muttered a prayer nearly under her breath and the other sisters answered “Amen.” Before turning, she said, “In youth we accepted a life without children, believing that we would not die alone. But the modern times play a trick on us. God asks of us a final sacrifice. Nuns in our seventies and eighties, we find ourselves bereft of a younger generation, our sisters who would also have been our daughters. Sister Alice Coyne, alone in this neck of the province, cannot possibly fill the bill, however good she is. For gay men”—her pronunciation made it sound more French, gaie—“who are threatened by AIDS, who are dying young and childless too—it is not such a different situation. Perhaps, perhaps God brought us together.”
“I am not going to be a son to any nun,” said Marty. “Rosa Leftkowicz Rothbard of Flatbush would plotz.”