That melodiously sung greeting, that smile, even the invitation to warm myself in the vestibule, fully as sexless as her clothing, couldn’t have been more innocent. What had prompted the surge of desire in me and, at the same time, an equally strong inhibition I could no more account for than I could for the physics and device which, contained in a single bomb, had destroyed Hiroshima, then three days later Nagasaki, killing almost two hundred thousand human beings in two bursts of light. And what had propelled such physical beauty to renounce its own fleshly fulfillment and embrace a life of denial I had no more understanding of than I do now of the structure and significance of the double helix. What I did know then, with unqualified certainty, was that, having forced my- self to venture out of my father’s house, to which, psychically disabled, I’d retreated and fallen into a deep pit, now having taken on an unde- manding temporary job, I, at that instant, was being called back to life by of all people a nun-to-be.
Without daring to keep my eyes on her, even to get out a mumbled ‘I better be off on my route,’ I extended the packet of mail, being careful to keep the awful yellow-gloved fingers clasped on one end of it. She re- ceived the packet, taking it by the other end in her slender pink fingers. Then I deposited a few small packages on the floor where she had not yet scrubbed. Imagining how Paul of Tarsus must have felt when he could see again, I shouldered my bag, shambled out the door and, after closing it softly, descended the brownstone steps. As I went on my way, I pondered over why a convent was located in a row of houses on a city street. I had, though, gained some comprehension of the puzzling advice Mitch had given me about St. Margaret’s.
Lying in bed that night, unable to fall asleep, my wide-awake inner eye saw the novice down on her knees, not praying with a rosary in her hand, but on the floor of the vestibule holding a scrub brush. Performing that humble chore seemed to enhance her beauty.
Next morning my excitement rose as I approached St. Margaret’s with my burden over my shoulder. I waited on the stoop at the top of the steps for maybe half a minute, holding my breath in expectation, before pushing the button of the doorbell. A full minute passed before the door opened slowly. Feet astride in the frame, filling it in fact, dressed exactly as yesterday’s novice had been, an immense, dough-faced young woman, with brawny forearms and hands the size of a slab of bacon, was posted. Behind her were the pail and scrub brush. She wiped her hands on her apron.
Since I just stood there in stunned disappointment, she finally said, “Here, let me have the mail.” There was no melody in what I heard as a brusque command. Drawing the packet and a few packages out of my bag and extending them to her with my still gloved hand, I felt no apprehension about touching. From this stern-seeming potential mother superior came no invitation to step into the vestibule to warm myself for a few seconds against the near-zero cold that had set in.
The following morning a third novice, as nondescript in appearance as the first and third were striking, halfway between the size of her two holy sisters, was performing the morning chore of scrubbing the floor of the vestibule. We exchanged polite smiles but no words. So the rota- tion went on until Sunday, December 7, an ominous anniversary, on which of course no mail was delivered.
Breaking what had been a family tradition, a ritual, say, maintained even during my period of withdrawal, I announced at the breakfast table on that Sunday that I’d not be attending morning service in the Methodist church, to which congregation our family had belonged, going back that I knew of to my great grandfather. To my bombshell, my father, a member of the Board of Deacons and a financial supporter to the full extent of his tithing, which modest as his earnings were, he scrupulously practiced, reacted by pouring himself a second cup of coffee.
As I’d been expecting, my mother, who sang in the choir, taught a young women’s Bible class, and held some office in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, demanded to be told why. Rather than confront and do battle, which I well knew she was better armed for and would prove stronger in waging than I would— God, not Satan, was all that she feared in the universe— I compounded my sin of resolved-upon absence by offering what I knew, given her rigid code of Christian conduct, she would sniff out to be the additional sin of lying.
“I have a headache and an upset stomach,” I whined, hoping the feebleness, with which I couldn’t help declaring such a falsehood, would support the assertion. It didn’t satisfy my mother, a spry little woman, not much more than five feet tall and a hundred pounds. Her strong-mindedness, which was quick to assert itself, more than compensated for her physical slightness. Quite a contrast to my lanky, languid, self-effacing father. Tall, skinny, full of self-doubt and hesitant, I was a mismated blending of my parents’ genes.
When pressed for more particulars, I shrugged my shoulders, shook my head, and retreated into silence. If my father had his doubts and suspicions, the only indication was the raising of his blond eye-brows.
If truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth were to be told (as I had once sworn to tell it and had⎯my mother’s gene at work⎯at a captain’s mast, in which a seaman, a member of the watch I was in charge of, had been shamefully accused of insubordination, by a warrant officer, for whom in my presence he’d refused to fetch a cup of coffee while we were at general quarters under kamikaze attack), I did have some compelling reasons for refusing to attend church.
First and foremost was self-honesty. Going off to war at seventeen as a nominal Christian, I never had examined myself about what as a Methodist I did and didn’t believe. Seeing men burn and drown, imagining thousands of civilians dying and suffering from shells and bombs in whose launching I had been complicit, culminating in the triumphant report of the killing, burning and maiming of hundreds of thousands of innocents in two bursts of light when our enemy was no longer capable of fending us off and defending his homeland—these had bled from my conscience every drop of the faith that had been my birthright. You might call it unconversion.
Then, too, meeting the exotic novice as I’d emerged from deep depression had set me to thinking about intolerance in the religion that, seemingly like a genetic trait, had been embedded in me. Some particular memories had come flashing back as I’d lain in bed, unable to fall asleep, bone-weary as I’d been after my first day of carrying the mailbag.
The first two went far back in my childhood, when I’d been too young to comprehend the significance of what I was hearing from good Methodist guests, husband and wife, at our dinner table one evening. During the1928 presidential election it had been. Republican, Protestant, as were my parents and my forebears, Herbert Hoover, the incumbent, was running against Democratic, Catholic Al Smith. The first remark I remember came from the wife of the visiting couple, a woman named Phyllis, who was a close friend of my mother’s. Why her name and the exact words, half-whispered, on that occasion have remained in the memory sack in my brain all these years, I haven’t the least idea.
“They say, you know, his wife eats her peas from her knife,” her being, of course, the wife of low, common, Catholic, Democratic Al Smith. Were he to be elected, this woman without even proper table manners would occupy the position of First Lady in the land.
I never have been able to call back the exact phrasing of a loud assertion her husband had made at that memorable dinner, but I have held onto the gist of it—the day that fellow takes over as president a telephone line will be connected from the Vatican to the White House and you know who will be running this country. Although so far as I can recall, no response came from either of my parents, the memory of those childishly but viciously prejudicial charges against Al Smith and his wife planted the seed which blossomed into a recognition that my parents, who considered themselves decent folks, and were good Methodist Christians, were also anti-Catholic bigots.
The black flower of prejudice was watered, to carry on the organic metaphor, while I was home on leave just before being shipped to the Pacific. My father having gone off to
work at the arsenal, assuring that the ammunition we’d be using met specifications which made it safe for us to handle and deadly for our enemies to receive, my mother and I pro-longed our breakfast together by having a second cup of tea, her, and coffee, me. For some reason she was glowingly, yes, I’m afraid gloat- ingly telling me about a new friend of hers who had recently joined the Methodists and had become a member of the church I would decline to attend the first Sunday after I’d begun my temporary career as a mailman. This incident is so strikingly absurd, so comically revelatory that I’ve also remembered what was said word for word.
“Teresa was a Catholic, but she became a Christian,” my mother announced.
My impulse was to erupt into laughter. Somehow I managed to suppress it. Yet the part of my brain in which some facts of history, however scattered, were stored, lit up as if a switch had been thrown in a dark attic. I let out a gasped “What! What are you saying?”
“It’s true,” my mother insisted, as if her veracity, not recorded history were at stake. “And she’s given up drinking, smoking and card-playing.”
“Mother,” I urgently went on, unable to fall back on silence, as I ought were I to obey the Fifth Commandment, “you are aware that before there wereMethodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, every Christian was what you’re now calling a non-Christian, that is a Catholic. Why do you think it’s called Mother Church?”
“Well, we don’t call it that,” my mother countered, dismissing the existence of a millennium and a half of the Christian Church, as if it were the lifetime of a fly or mosquito, with a sweep of her hand. “Any- way, you know what I mean.” Then she calmly went on to narrate the conversion of Teresa as if she’d come out from among voodooists.
Yes, I was aware that the crowning reason for my decision not to attend church with my parents was the delivery of mail into the hand of the beautiful young novice in the vestibule of St. Margaret’s two days before. She, I realized, would already have gone to morning pray- ers, and at the time I was supposed to be at the Methodist service would be attending mass, if not inside the convent, then probably at St. Bon- iface’s, just two blocks away.
Still and all, it was mystifying to me that she had chosen to live her life confined within the narrow walls of the Church, renouncing all the outside world had to offer, for meditation, prayer and ritual. Instead of continuing her education, she would be scrubbing floors and performing who knows what other acts of humiliation. The waste, indeed the sacrifice of her beauty was visible in the very clothing she was required to wear while still a novice.
Spirited, vital and sociable to the point where, if it hadn’t been for my imagining an invisible halo around her covered head, she might almost have seemed flirtatious, with a stranger no less suggested. Then how could she divert passion and sexual gratification to the love of a fleshless Father, Mother and Son? How could she abjure love, marriage, motherhood, friendship outside her order by narrowing the breadth and depth of human possibility to the thinness of the wafer that was dipped in blood-colored wine?
Startling myself, suddenly I realized that the recoil from the horror of war, guilt for collective participation in the killing and maiming of countless masses of human beings, and the attendant loss of faith had made my home a refuge, yes a monastery. My parents, a hierarchy of superiors. My routine, canonical hours. The music I was filling my ears with, my mass. The novels I was devoting myself to, my breviary. Until I’d summoned the energy and determination, in short, the will to take the step of delivering Christmas mail, I’d been even more of a re- cluse than the beautiful novice. Exempt from the humiliation of scrub- bing floors, I lacked the comforting recompense of what she had to believe in and, along with her sisterhood, give herself to with all her heart.
The shudder that this recognition produced brought me back to the Sunday morning breakfast table. The bare white cloth I was staring down at made me aware the table had been cleared, my own dishes and flatware, as well as my half-full mug of coffee, taken from under my nose. From the silence I heard I knew that my father had washed, my mother had dried plates, bowls, utensils, cups and saucers and had then retired upstairs to dress for attending service. I was sitting alone. During the remainder of that Sunday, family communion gave way to sterile formality.
Not until Wednesday would the rotation have her back in the vestibule, scrubbing. That morning I climbed the five brownstone steps of St. Margaret’s with the mailbag on my shoulder. Crammed with Christmas cards, and packages, it felt as if it were filled with cobblestones. Almost the instant the tip of my yellow-gloved forefinger left the button of the door bell, the brass knob turned and the door swung inward, suggesting to me that the hand which had done the twisting had not been scrubbing the floor but had been poised to seize the knob. Even before I felt the flutter of wings in my chest, as if my heart were a fledgling testing its wings before daring its first flight, I dismissed such a gratifying possibility as a self-serving illusion. Yet just inside the door stood the lovely novice.
“It’s the postman, the postman,” she sang again, “bringing us Christmas mail.” Light as her voice was, without anything like the power of the soprano singing on our recording of Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War”—ironically that had become my favorite piece of music— and banal as was the melody, to my ear the song of the novice was exquisitely musical.
As again I wondered where the melody, familiar as it was, came from, suddenly I recognized it—the last lines of a song from the eighteen-nineties my father occasionally would sing, to the tch-tch-ing of my mother over its worldliness. “The Bowery, the Bowery, / They do such strange things in the Bowery, / The Bowery, the Bowery, / I’ll never go there any more.” It had to be the novice had heard the song in her home and had accommodated words of her own to it. Secular as the source of the tune was, her willingness, perhaps desire to sing it for me suggested that, whatever the differences of our heritages, her family and mine must have had some traditions in common. One thing I could be certain of— the place she was in and her coloring declared she could not be the WASP that I was.
Although in preparation I’d had the fingers of my gloved right hand on the packet of mail labeled “St. Margaret’s,’ I withdrew them from the pouch they were in, then unslung the bag and let it fall gently to the floor, clear of the bucket, scrub brush and pool of water close to the inside door. After pretending to have to fumble and fish for mail addressed to the con- vent, with my head down I took time extracting it. Again I extended the packet to her lengthwise, to keep our fingers from even brushing. This time, as she received the mail as circumspectly as I was offering it, I took notice that now she was drying her hands thoroughly on her apron. When she smiled at me, seeing her lips part was like being privileged to watch a pink tulip opening itself in sped-up motion to the morning sun.
Then, bending over my bag, I fumbled out from the bottom the half dozen packages addressed to St. Margaret’s. I wondered whether her name were on any of them. It wasn’t. The game I was playing, devising ways of extending the time to minutes while taking care not to touch, was a delicate one. If she were aware of my ploy, she in no way resisted it.
So it went on every third day—the door always opening as soon as my finger had left the button that rang the bell, her little song always greeting me. Both of us were circumspect in positioning our fingers on the packet of mail I handed her. And I kept those loathsome yellow gloves on. In bed one night during my second week on the job, I couldn’t fall asleep as I pondered her behavior. Was it possible that her cheerful demeanor, her self-composed acceptance concealed a raging civil war within? After all, was I not in a similar trying circumstance with my mother and father, with limited success? Might it be that when the novice had entered the convent she’d left behind forever a lover for whom she still harbored a powerful passion? Aware that, having taken vows of chastity, she was constantly committing sin in her heart, mi
ght she be using the new young mailman as a substitute, someone she could be attracted to, could even wish were attracted to her, without sinning by desiring to love in the flesh?
All at once, lying in my narrow bed, I felt a rush of jealousy, in- sane jealousy, jealousy of someone I’d never laid eyes on, jealousy of someone who might not even exist. Yet if he did, I might well be an agent delivering love letters, perhaps pleas from him to her. Madness, I hissed. In an effort to relieve myself of the torment such a problematic, foolish but very real emotion had provoked, I told myself that were she using me as a vicarious and chaste lover, or even as a pander, she was being compelled by an impulse stronger than giving in to a bit of coque-try could account for, something deeper, a longing, a desire, a need she couldn’t control, perhaps without being aware it was governing her behavior. In one way or another, I concluded, as certainly as entering the convent established the fact that she was determined to give up the flesh for her soul’s sake, at the same time her conduct suggested that she had come to the holy altar with the feelings of a never-to-be fleshly bride.
One morning during the third week in December, I pretended to be rearranging the packets in my bag, after she’d opened the door of the vestibule that led to a hallway. I’d placed the day’s mail on the table. So long did I fuss that she went back to work. Dropping to her knees as gracefully as a ballerina doing a pliè, she plunged her left hand into the soapy water in the bucket, then commenced scrubbing the marble floor so vigorously it seemed she was scouring off the film generated by the traffic and factories of the city, including the arsenal in which my father still was inspecting shell casings, and the filth sin leaves at night. So hard was she bearing down that I imagined she was trying to make the marble floor white as the alabaster her Lord and Savior’s body was often carved in, rubbing determinedly, as if that would highlight the barely visible blood in His veins. Crestfallen, I couldn’t help wondering whether such a dive into activity were intended to be a rebuke of or at least a check on me, for lingering.