Mariette in Ecstasy (2 page)

GOD THE MOST HIGH

 

Supreme Being and Creator

 

of Heaven and Earth and

 

OUR LADY THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

 

Mediatrix and Queen

 

of the Court of Heaven

 

Kindly Request Your Presence at the Spiritual

 

Wedding of Their Son

 

JESUS

 

Our Lord and Redeemer

 

to

 

MARIETTE BAPTISTE

 

When She Asks to Be Received

 

into the Sisters of the Crucifixion

 

on Wednesday, August 15th, 1906
,

 

the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption into Heaven
.

 

Mixt. Café au lait and a hunk of black bread that Sister Ange soaks in her great coffee bowl before she toothlessly chews. Sister Saint-Denis squashes her left forefinger down on the white tablecloth and sucks the dark crumbs from it.

And then work.

White sunlight and a wide green hayfield that languidly undulates under the wind. Eight sisters in gray habits surge through high timothy grass that suddenly folds against the ringing blades of their scythes. Mother Céline stoops and shocks the hay with twine and sun-pinked hands.

Four novices stand taciturnly at a great scullery table plucking tan feathers from twenty wild quail shot by a Catholic men’s club just yesterday. Horseflies are alighting and tasting the skins, or tracing signatures in the hot air.

Sister Marguerite is in the scriptorium at a twelve-person library table, squinting at a text and then scratching a pen across a coarse sheet of paper as she translates into English
The Constitution of the Second Order of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in Accordance with the Common Observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict
. She tries a sentence to herself and writes, “When there is nothing else which we ought to be doing, it is our sweet obligation to pray.”

Extern Sister Anne is still huffing breathlessly in the campanile as she grins up at the pigeons shuffling along the rafters and frantically jerking their heads toward her. She gets a handful of sweet-corn kernels from her gray habit’s pocket and scatters them on the flooring, and the pigeons heavily flap down and trundle around her sandals. She then reads the time on her late husband’s railway watch and grabs the chime pulls with hard brutal hands, heartily summoning her sisters to the hour of Terce and High Mass.

White cottages and a shaggy dog tucking its nose in four parts of a juniper hedge and then trotting on. Chimes for High Mass are ringing at a great distance and a girl is eating toast on a milking stool outside the general store. She glances up the road, sucking jam from her thumb, and gets to her knees on the green porch.

Mariette Baptiste is in solemn procession to the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in her mother’s wedding trousseau of white Holland cloth and watered silk. Trailing the postulant on horseback or phaetons and carriages are girlfriends and high school classmates and villagers.

Dr. Baptiste is not present.

She has hoped for an hour’s peace and contemplation on the way to the church, but she is blessed or praised or spoken to by a hundred people and she is given pink and white nasturtiums wrapped in a flute of parlor wallpaper. She thanks the people by smiling or touching their wrists or fleetingly laying her hand on a baby’s head.

—Were you happy to have so much attention?

—Well, no. I had been hoping to present myself to the sisters with Christ’s own plainness and humility.

—But you got instead a pageant.

—Yes.

—And you thought your sisters were passing harsh judgment?

—Even then.

While she and her grand company enter the public side of the church and she walks up the white runner to the prie-dieu, she thinks the sisters are passing harsh judgment and that she must seem too spoiled and rich and vain to take their holy vows; but she kneels and peeks behind the great oak grille to her right and sees that the sisters praying there in the oratory have given no sign of dislike or disillusionment and only the slightest hints of having even acknowledged her presence.

Mass of the Solemnity of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Mother Saint-Raphaël is sitting in choir just above her five novices, her frowning pink face all puckers and creases, and she stands with the others when their freshly shaved priest haltingly walks from his sacristy for the holy sacrifice of the Mass. At the introit she stares at the too-pretty postulant and is surprised to see that she’s weeping with happiness. And she is pleased, too, that this Mariette gives such active and rapt attention to the readings and preface and consecration, kneeling heedfully upright, perceiving each meaning and connotation, tenderly following the holy chalice as it is raised up and presented.
She’s twenty pages of a book; she’s half an hour of teaching
.

Sister Honoré gestures a pause and then floats her right hand again as she guides the sisters through the “
Pange Lingua
,” tilting a little to hear the girl who’s asked to join them. She gets another hint of the new postulant’s song, hearing a fair soprano who tightens her throat on the higher notes and slightly mispronounces the Latin
c
, but seems more practiced than half the novices. She briefly glances at Mariette as she turns another page of the score, and then thinks unwillingly of Sister Alexine, a girl from Strasbourg to whom she taught English, who was expelled from the Motherhouse just before solemn vows because she’d tattooed the Sacred Heart on her heart with purple ink and a hairpin. The choirmistress hushes the contraltos with her hand.

Sister Philomène is again besieged with such distracting thoughts and temptations and disloyalties that she prays before she knows she is praying and she kneels before she knows why. Whereas their new postulant seems such a picture of meekness and holiness and awe as she walks up to receive the Host, that Sister Philomène makes it her Communion prayer that God in His patience and kindness would one day choose to give her, His worst sinner, the grace to be just like Mariette Baptiste.

And then when the High Mass is done, the old priest turns and tentatively eases himself down to the railing again in order to say to the church, “Who asks to be received into the grace and blessings of the religious life as handmaid of the Lord?”

She feels their stares like heat. The postulant stands up from her white-flowered prie-dieu and says, “Mariette Baptiste.”

“Will she now come forward?”

She kneels at the railing as Père Marriott heavily lays his hands on her head and prays to himself in a hoarse whisper before announcing to the public, “Here is Mariette Baptiste whom God has called to Himself. She is putting away the things of this world, giving up her earthly pleasures, perishing out of season. Say adieu to Mariette, whom you have called your niece, your cousin, your friend, your classmate, your confidant. Say adieu to the girl you knew but did not know, the girl you have loved but not as soon nor as much nor as well as her Creator has loved her; the soul that is turning now from Satan’s pomps and empty promises and toward Christ’s service and true promise of eternal life. She is the child born into a sinful world but on this great day she is dying into the holy life of the Sisters of the Crucifixion, and the intercessions of Our Lady of Sorrows, the care of the Christian saints and martyrs, the wisdom and comfort of the Holy Ghost, and the everlasting peace of Our Lord.”

Everyone in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows then walks up to Mariette and kisses her or tenderly pats her hands or asks for remembrance in her prayers. And she sees her father standing in misery by the first station, where Christ was condemned, his forearms crossed over his hot suit and vest, his eyes as red as noise. She goes to him in order to say goodbye, but Dr. Baptiste hurriedly walks away and ducks outside into heat. She turns to the high altar and hears the choir singing the “
Te Deum
” and sees the old priest inviting her forward with both hands, and she realizes that he has opened the green marble Communion railing. She passes through with joy, without glancing back, genuflecting to Christ in the tabernacle and going to the hidden door of the grille that Mother Céline is holding ajar.

“Welcome, Mariette,” the prioress says, and kisses her on each cheek. And then the Sisters of the Crucifixion step down from their places in the choir and one by one greet Mariette with slight embraces and words of encouragement, until she’s touched by a green-eyed troll of a woman who was a truck gardener in the village before she joined the order as an extern at the age of fifty-six.

Sister Agnès grins up at the new postulant as she whispers, “We’ll be saying the Litany of Our Lady now, Mariette. You come get your things.”

“It’s Mar-iette.”

“What did I say?”

“Mare-i-ette, like a horse. It’s Mar-iette, like a flaw.”

“Easy to remember, isn’t it,” Sister Agnès says.

She takes Mariette to the haustus room just next to the refectory and she smiles as she skates her hand over a white fluting of watered silk. “Such a pretty dress.”

“Annie wore it when she asked to enter.”

“Who?”

“Mother Céline. She’s my sister.”

Sister Agnès just smiles.

“Shall I take it off?”

“Yes; of course. And your shoes and stockings. Everything.” Sister Agnès then goes out, saying she’ll return in a Paternoster.

Mariette diffidently takes off her shoes and stockings by tilting onto one foot and then the other, for there is no parlor furniture in the haustus room, only a grand piano, gray stone walls, prettily stained windows, and a great painted Christ on a crucifix. She uneasily gets out of her dress and underthings and she is a girl again, four years old and staring at the Christ in her mother’s room. She touched his pink mouth, the pink rent in his side, and then she touched her own mouth. She touched underneath her skirt.

She kneels on the oak plank floor.

—Was she in ecstasy, Sister Agnès?

—You ask too much of a simple woman.

—Would you please describe what you saw?

Sister Agnès hunches along the hallway skidding a ship’s trunk just ahead of her sandals, then knocks softly on the haustus room’s door and tows the ship’s trunk inside.

Mariette is kneeling on the floor, unclothed and seemingly unconscious as she yields up one hand and then the other just as if she were being nailed like Christ to a tree.

Mariette hears the door gently touching shut and sees Sister Agnès sidling toward her with green eyes shyly on the floor and a great bulk of black clothing held against the wide gate of her hips. “Excuse me,” she says, “but I have duties. Eight hours a day you pray.”

With some embarrassment, Mariette stands up from the floor and hides her nakedness from the extern as Sister Agnès wordlessly takes the new postulant’s dress and crinolines from her and Mariette gets into a black muslin habit that smells richly of potash soap, then steps into some black rope sandals and knots a black rope cincture at her waist. She says without certainty, “Done,” and only then does Sister Agnès peer at her.

“Everything fits?”

She pauses. “You wear no underthings or stockings?”

“We dress simply here in summer. Your feet are too cold?”

She shakes her head.

“Your first winter is the hardest. Chilblains and pneumonia. Even with the furnace on. Externs have it easier there. We live in the old calefactory.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just outside the true priory, next to the visitation parlor. We’re widows, us externs, or we have pasts, or we don’t have educations, so we please God by praying a little less and serving Him a good deal harder.” She peers sideways at the new postulant as she seems to revise what she was prepared to say. “Mariette Baptiste. Your family have French in them? You can speak it?”

“Some.”

“And you can read, too?”

She nods.

“Ho, you’ll be one of the pets then. Especially for the old ones and them that’s just here from Brittany. My job in the convent is, I think you say,
blanchisseuse
. Which is?”

“Laundress.”

She smiles with odd mirth and hands Mariette a torn and too-often folded sheet of paper dated 1901 and headed, “
Trousseau personnel d’une soeur de la crucifixion
.” Written in underneath is an inventory of twenty-one items that Mariette translates for the extern as Sister Agnès hunts in the trunk for another
habit noir
, the hardwood work shoes called
sabots
, one cotton and one flannel
chemise de nuit
, and handkerchiefs, old wool stockings, hand-knitted gloves, a great black cape, and a gray bathrobe with a tattered hem and a faint bloodstain on the front. And then Sister Agnès withdraws a black scarf from the trunk and gets on her tiptoes to float it over the girl’s hair, speedily tying it behind Mariette’s ears just as a kitchen witch would, just as Mariette has seen a fruit picker do after having intimacies with a foreman in tree shade.

Sister Agnès grins at her shame and says, “You are Christ’s peasant now.”

She then stands apart from the new postulant and says in a practiced way that their Reverend Mother insists that the sisters have purity and cleanliness uppermost in their daily thoughts. The convent should be spotless, the gardens tended, the air free of stink and smoke and noise. Each is to change her habit every few days and wash herself with soap at night just before Vespers and again upon rising so she will not be infested. She is not to adorn her hair. She is not to tempt the sin of pride with perfumes or rouge or time misspent at the mirror. Especially, she is not to tempt their holy priest with pretty wiles and movements and flattery as Satan may invite a young woman to do. She should expect loneliness and sadness and illness and hard use. She should expect, too, that she will be tempted to have particular affection for some of her sisters. Such affections are not permitted. For Jesus Christ ought to be their grandest passion, just as
la sainte volonté de Dieu
, God’s holy will, ought to be their only desire.