What a combination. “What time is it?”
“Was that vespers?” said Candy. “Maybe six o’clock.”
“Six o’clock! We’ve been here over six hours?”
Dragging me outside the abbey and lowering her voice, Candy said, “Gina did something to herself.”
“Oh, God, what?”
“Shh! She—I can’t explain. Shel, she doesn’t have any eyebrows left!”
“Oh.” I laughed quietly. “Don’t worry. She does that sometimes when she’s nervous.”
“I don’t know if you heard me,” said Candy, “but she doesn’t have any eyebrows left.”
I prodded her down the steps to the parking lot. “So? She’ll draw them on with a pencil. They’ll grow back.”
“Why does she do that?”
“Nerves, I told you.”
“But she’s in an abbey!”
“What does that tell you?”
We crossed the parking lot to my car, where Gina, looking bloated from hot sleeping, now sat on the black-striped hood perspiring.
“Where have you been?” said Gina. “Are we going? Because I’m absolutely at the end of my rope.” And so she was. Her eyebrows were gone. Her eyelashes too. Gone. Her blue eyes looked raw and stark.
“Why’d you do that?”
She blanched, turning away from Candy. “I don’t want to talk about it. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
I didn’t know where the time had gone.
Candy said we weren’t going yet. It was late; we had to eat; we would stay the night at least. I instantly agreed. Not so Gina. She wouldn’t come inside until someone told her when, “in the name of hell,” we were leaving. This is crazy, she kept saying. We have to go. Did you forget we’re driving cross country? Did you forget I have to get to Eddie? Is there a phone here? I have to call him. Did you forget about your mother? Did you forget about Harvard? That we still have to drive back? Did you forget we’re in flippin’ Iowa, and not the middle of Iowa, but easternmost Iowa, we aren’t even halfway done!
How was that possible, I thought. On the one hand, Maryland and Aunt Flo seemed like a day away. On the other . . .
“When’s the next service?” I asked.
“Compline at seven-thirty,” Candy replied. “But why don’t you wait for the vigil at three-thirty in the morning? You might like that better.” She smiled. “They sing beautifully. Psalm 77. I call to remembrance my song in the night. I think you’d like it. Come, you. While we wait for vigil, let’s go have dinner.”
“They go to service in the middle of the night?” I said as I followed her.
“It’s not the middle of the night for them,” she replied. “It’s the beginning of their day. They rise early, go to bed early. Like farmers.”
“You mean like the Kirkebys?” Gina shot.
Candy slow blinked at her. “Yes, just like them.”
I pulled Candy’s arm, detaching her from Gina’s glare. “Why do they get up so early?”
“I thought you listened to Psalm 130. Because they wait and watch for the Lord,” she replied. “Yes, more than those who watch for morning.”
I must have stopped hearing anything after My soul waits . . .
“Did you finish your business with your dad?” I asked as we made our way inside. What was I asking? Did you give your father what you took from Erv? Or perhaps my emphasis was more on the finish, instead of business. Perhaps I was hoping she’d say yes. Sure, Shel, haven’t seen Pop in years, but a few hours with him, my business is finished, and I’m good to go.
“Yes,” she replied, like the enigma she was. “But I’m not done. And he wanted to meet you.”
“Why does that terrify me?”
“No, no. Don’t worry.” She squeezed my arm and laughed. “He is so gentle. You should never be afraid of him. Besides,” she added, warmly batting her long lashes and brown eyes at me, “it’s good for us to hide here for a couple of days. Erv is looking for us on I-80, in Nebraska, maybe Colorado by now. He’s like you, with his timelines and miles. He’s calculating.”
“I’m not calculating,” I said. “I’m cautious.”
She chuckled quietly. “I know. It’s been three days since St. Louis. By the time we leave here, he’ll be looking for us in California. That’s good for us.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But you know what would be even better?”
“If he wasn’t looking for us at all?” She circled the crook of my arm. “Since that’s not possible, Shelby Sloane, with generous endurance of small and large hardships, accept all things.”
“I don’t know why I have to,” I grumbled as we walked behind Gina, who didn’t know where she was going, but still kept trucking angrily down the corridors. “But tell me, do you consider yourself to be a small or large hardship?”
Candy took and kissed my hand. “A very large one,” she said. “Gina! Go right, not left.”
2
Estevan’s Stories
“How long do you intend to stay here?” Gina said challengingly to no one in particular.
“Not long,” Candy replied. “Monks aren’t crazy about our noise. Maybe a couple of days. Gina, when you walk through the cloister, you have to be absolutely silent.”
“Why?”
“You just do, that’s all. Those are the rules of the monastery. The cloister is a sacred enclosure.”
I wanted to shout, I’ll be quiet!
We had come to a small room with tables and benches that was the guests’ refectory. There was a pulpit under the Cross of Christ, and a plaque that read, “O Beata Solitudo.” Candy had known where to go. She had a sure foot leading us through the limestone labyrinths.
“Did you have a look around?” she asked. “Did you find the library?”
“There’s a library?”
“A very large one. I looked for you there. I thought that’s where you went.”
I shook my head.
“How do you know where the library is?” asked Gina.
“Used to spend a lot of time there.”
“Where? At the library?”
Candy laughed, soundlessly. “It’s not your kind of library.”
“Oh.” Gina looked notably relieved. “Because I was gonna say . . .”
“Come, take a look,” said Candy. “While we wait for my father to bring us something to eat.”
“Is that going to be soon?” said Gina. “Because . . .”
“I know, I know—you’re starved. Yes, it’s going to be soon. Come.”
Back through the cloisters we went, and this time, Gina was silent, though huffy. The library was old-fashioned, furnished with shabby wooden tables and chairs. It had some magazines, even newspapers. But when I walked down the rows of shelves, looking at the kinds of books the monks might read, although the words were in English I found the titles unfamiliar and strange. The Rule of St. Benedict in fifty different tomes and styles. St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas More. St. Bonaventura, The Mind’s Road to God. Francis of Assisi’s Little Flowers of Saint Francis. “He didn’t write it,” Candy explained, walking alongside me, touching the spines of the hardbound tomes. “A monk wrote it a hundred years after St. Francis’s death.”
And to that I said, “Who is St. Francis?”
Candy looked at me with bemusement. “If you haven’t read it,” she said, “it’s a must-read, especially in the translation of Raphael Brown. I’ll see if my father can get you a copy.”
There was the Vulgate, a hundred different Psalters, the Books of Common Prayer, all the works by C. S. Lewis (“Hey! I know him!”), two rows of Thomas Merton, a row devoted to someone called G. K. Chesterton, translations of St. Jerome, of Abelard, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. I saw Dante and Milton, St. Augustine’s Confessions and The Orations of St. Athanasius. Also: a complete collection of poems by E. E. Cummings. “One of my dad’s favorites,” Candy said to me.
“Have you got any Sidney Sheldon?” Gina asked. “I’d like to re
ad a few pages of him before I go to sleep.”
“We don’t have him,” Candy said. “Do you want to try Anselm of Canterbury instead?”
“I want to try some dinner,” said Gina. “Can we try that? Then we’ll see about Anselm.”
“This is what you read when you were young?” I asked, my hand on Candy’s forearm, slowing her down so I could stay a little longer, see the books a little longer.
“Some of it. Much of it. And other things, too.” She smiled. “Malachi Martin has quite a discourse on the Buddhists. Gina would appreciate it. And the Jesuits. And the devil.”
Summarily we returned to the refectory. But Estevan wasn’t yet there. We sat at the long dining table, and Gina put her head down and groaned. “When will they feed me?” she wailed. “When will I be fed?”
I turned to Candy. “Does your dad know the trouble you’re in?”
“He knows some of it.” Candy paused. “Not all of it. He can’t know all of it. What he knows is bad enough. That I ran away. That one of my mother’s friends is trying to find me.”
To find me. What a euphemism. “Grace?” I said.
“Well, sure.” Candy was sitting across from me. “Who in their right mind would call their child Candy?” She laughed lightly.
Gina lifted her head. “So what do we call you now?”
“How about Candy?”
“Does your dad know your name?”
“Clearly. He calls me by my name.”
I waited. “Does your mom?”
“Ah. Yes. I guess. But she,” said Candy, “calls me Candy.”
We sat. I drummed on the wooden table, my eyes only on my new friend. “Does he want you to stay?” I asked carefully. One question, laden with layers. Does he want you to stay so we can go without you and be free, and my conscience be free also? Does he want you to stay, because what father wouldn’t? Does he know what danger you’re in? Can he help you? Please, can he help you?
“He wishes I could stay, yes.”
And in her reply, years of conflict—in her profound eyes, in her grave face. He wishes I could stay because, for a moment or two when he sees me, he wants to be living a life in which his kid could visit, and he could say, spend as long as you want with me. He knows the pickle I’m in, and he wants to help, beyond the food and the prayers. He wishes he could help me more.
“You act like you’ve been here before, Candy,” said Gina. “I find this odd, to say the least, because I can’t imagine coming here willingly for one minute.”
“You’re funny,” said Candy. “Been here? I lived here till I was almost twelve. My father raised me.”
Gina and I frankly stared, waiting for her to say it was a joke.
“You were raised here?”
“Yes.”
“In a monastery?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t listen to music?”
“Only to the Psalms.”
“And you didn’t read?”
“Voraciously. But only what’s in that library.”
“TV? Radio?”
“Nope.”
Then I was speechless.
“When he was a young man,” Candy told us, “my father, disillusioned with himself, and therefore with the whole world, had been contemplating joining the seminary for two or three years, trying to educate himself, trying to see if he could cut it.”
“Three years to think?” I asked.
Candy nodded, talking slowly. “The fear was great.” She smiled. “Though not as great as Gina’s when she is in this place.”
“I’m not afraid!” Gina exclaimed. “I’m bored, to tell the truth. There’s a difference.” Her hands went up to her eyebrows, but there was nothing left. “Crazy bored,” she whispered to me testily, fingers running over her face. “Not afraid.”
“Same difference,” I said to Gina, and pointed at her before she could speak.
“Yes, well,” said Candy. “The spiritual pressure to make the right decision, to be worthy of living in a place like this when you’re in your twenties is enormous. Because what if they won’t take you? I mean, that’s like God not taking you. Like God saying to you, no, Estevan, I’m afraid you’re not right for us. My father was thinking that if he wasn’t right for God, who is supposed to be more charitable than men, he was doomed.”
“Understandably he dragged his feet,” I said.
“Maybe he just didn’t want to join the seminary,” said Gina. “Did you think of that? He was young. Perhaps he had other things he wanted to be doing.”
“He did a bunch of those things. Which is the reason I’m here. Obviously he had a lot of doubt about what the right thing was. On the one hand was the blinding fear that they wouldn’t take him. On the other was the blinding fear that they would. So like this, between a rock and a hard place, my father spent his sophomore and junior year at U. of lowa in Dubuque. And then as always, these things work out in certain ways. Not how you planned. After much hand-wringing, my father resolved that the monastic life was for him. He had been living here for weeks at a time, meditating, praying, reading. Finally, they accepted him into their Order as a novice.
“It was then that my mother told him she was pregnant. She didn’t have to tell him. She was almost seven months at this point. They hadn’t been together for some time. She had gone to clean other buildings and he had gone searching for other things”—she smiled—“like the Swami. He didn’t know what she wanted him to do. She said she was about to have a child out of wedlock, and had no insurance and no job since the university fired her when she became in no condition to work. She needed to take care of the baby; would he be interested in marrying her? So: in front of him was my mother with me in her belly, and also in front of him was a monk’s life. Both paths offered a choice of living for something other than himself. For a moment it seemed like a way out of the Order. Not a good way, but a way. That’s when my dad realized he didn’t want a way out.
“He still felt responsible for my mother, though. He told me that even when he was young he felt that every time a child was born it meant that God was not yet disappointed in man. So he went to talk to the abbot, who told him that the Lord was deliberately making his path not straight, so that by his faith he would come to stand straight. The abbot asked my father if his decision would be harder or easier if he loved my mother.”
“Good question,” said Gina. Even she had put away her hunger and was listening.
“Yes. My father replied that he did love my mother. It was she who had a fickle heart. My father could not live his life with such constant anguish. But now there was a baby.” Candy sighed. “To make his long story short, my dad didn’t take his vows. He continued to stay here in Melleray, leaving after compline at seven-thirty to go be with my mother, who was living at a local shelter in Dubuque. Two months went by like this, shuttling from life to life—my father uncommenced to the abbey and uncommenced to my mother. In these muddled circumstances, I was born.” Candy smiled. “And then a funny thing happened, Dad said, and that was the strange effect that babies have on adults around them. They reorder everyone’s priorities. Babies come in and sweep the dust into corners and bring out the good china. He named me Grace, because that’s what he said God had given him. My mother hated that name, but he didn’t care. He would bring her and me here to Melleray, and she would sit much like Gina sits now in the refectory, disaffected and grim, while my dad carried me around to show the monks. Eventually he had to make a decision.”
“Well, we know what he chose,” said Gina.
“Yes,” said Candy. “To marry my mother. He said he heard God’s calling. At that point my mother refused to marry him. Apparently she had met a young man from New York who wanted to take her to meet his family. My father dryly asked if she intended to take her baby with her to meet them. She asked him to look after me for a couple of weeks until she returned. She promised to come back and my father promised the abbot the baby would be a temporary thing.”
“Did she,” I asked haltingly, “come back?”
“No.”
I couldn’t speak. I lost my appetite. In my greatest silence, I stared at Candy, my soul crying out, watching her intently, wanting to know how she repaired herself, how she made it out in one piece. She didn’t have Emma. What she had was someone who renamed her Candy.
Gina, who had a mother, and a father, and a sister, and a home in the suburbs with dogs, was the only one to speak. “The man she was with . . .”
“Was not Erv, no. Two or three guys before Erv. She did write, care of the Melleray Abbey, telling my father she was living in Hartford, Philly, Dover, Blacksburg, finally Huntington. She would come for the baby when she could. In the meantime, my father stayed a postulate for two years, then a novice for four, and by that time I was six. He didn’t take his solemn vows until I left him the summer before I turned twelve.”
The room was quiet and absorbed all sound.
Estevan Rio picked that fine moment to show up with bread and butter, hot tea, and a bean, corn, and rice stew, which, he said, he had made himself. He perched down on the bench, next to Candy, while Gina and I ate across from him. I was too nervous to eat voraciously like Gina. I pecked at my food as if I were royalty. The stew was good. Plenty of salt in it.
“So you’re Shelby,” said Estevan, gazing at me. “Grace told me a lot about you.”
With fear, I glanced at him, at her. She smiled.
“She told me you’re going to Harvard. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“On a track scholarship,” Gina put in, her mouth full.
His manner was gentle, but he didn’t smile at anyone. Only when he looked at Grace, did his face soften. Is that what a man who is a monk looks like as he gazes upon his own flesh and blood? I wondered, gaping at him greedily, picking at my food.
“Is there anything you want to ask me, Shelby?” he said. “Or, is there something you want me to ask you?”
“Is there something I should ask you?” I said, looking away in embarrassment, my throat tightening.
“I can see by your face that Grace has been telling you her stories about me,” he said, almost smiling, almost amused.