In This Small Spot Read online

  As Mickey and the others took their places in the stalls indicated by Sister Rosaria, there were some covert glances from the other nuns. Outright curiosity was unmonastic – a term all of the postulants would become familiar with over the days and weeks to come – but for most of the nuns, this was their first glance at the incoming postulants, “our first chance to size them up.” They knew from experience that fewer than half any incoming cohort of postulants typically made it to final vows, though no one said that to the postulants. “Well,” the nuns would have said pragmatically, “it is a hard life, and not all are suited.”

  Looking through the grille separating the nuns’ stalls from the public sanctuary, Mickey remembered how many hours she had spent in those pews wondering where she was being led. Now at last, on this side of the grate, she wondered if she would be up to the journey.

  Chapter 2

  “Alice? Where are you?” Mickey dropped her keys and overstuffed briefcase in the Stickley chair beside the door.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” Alice called out, offering a cheek for Mickey’s kiss, but keeping her eye on the sauce she was stirring. “This should be just about ready…”

  “Ummm, smells wonderful,” Mickey sniffed as she got dishes out of the cupboard.

  Mickey set the table as the last bits of the cooking ritual were concluded. She smiled as Alice carefully spooned the sauce over a large bowl of pasta.

  “Not that I’m complaining,” Mickey said as she uncorked a bottle of wine, “but you must be tired. Why did you go to so much trouble?”

  “Because I know you,” Alice smiled. “If I didn’t cook, we would be eating Cheerios.”

  Mickey laughed. “You’re right.” She poured two classes of wine and brought them to the table while Alice carried the bowl of pasta.

  “How was your day?” Mickey asked as she stabbed at her salad.

  Alice gave her a wry look over the top of her glasses. “Today was our field trip to the Natural History Museum. They had a reproduction of some large meat-eating dinosaur, complete with sound effects.” She took a bite of her pasta. “One roar and we had forty second-graders screaming and running in different directions.” Mickey tried not to laugh. “By the time we caught them, they had all started crying.” Mickey couldn’t hold it in anymore, and Alice laughed with her, shaking her head. “It was a disaster. We’ll probably get calls from every parent tomorrow asking why their kid had nightmares about dinosaurs.” She took a sip of wine, then asked, “So how was your day?”

  Mickey swallowed before answering. “Mrs. Wallace died today. Her family was with her. It was time. I’m so glad she finally felt like she could let go.” Mickey paused to take a drink from her water glass. “Had to do a biopsy on Danielle Wilson’s leg today. We’ll probably have to remove it.” She stared down at her plate, pushing the pasta around with her fork. “Her dog got hit and killed by a car yesterday. She’s only ten.” Her voice trailed off.

  Alice reached out and took Mickey’s hand. Mickey stared down at their intertwined fingers, her eyes filling.

  “I really love you,” she said, looking up into Alice’s gentle, dark eyes.

  “I know.” Alice smiled, kissing Mickey’s hand. “Do you want to go to the shelter tonight and see if we can find Danielle a puppy?”

  Mickey brushed a tear from her cheek. “Could we? I already asked her parents if they’d mind.”

  “Are you going to sneak it in to her in the hospital?” Alice asked, though she already knew the answer.

  Mickey grinned. “Of course.”

  Chapter 3

  Four-thirty a.m.

  Sister Rosaria’s small silver bell tinkled in the darkness. Mickey groaned, but was instantly awake, old training kicking in automatically. Sitting on the side of her bed, she could hear the other postulants stirring. A large round tower room on the third floor, two stories above Mother Theodora’s office, the dormitory was furnished with a dozen beds set at intervals around the circular wall – “but we haven’t had that many postulants for decades,” Sister Rosaria had told them. With one shared bathroom, Mickey was grateful they were only five, though she knew that was a luxury the rest of the community didn’t enjoy. Hanging curtains separated the beds and provided privacy. In the low light from the wall sconces, the postulants silently dressed and made their beds. Mickey still had difficulty getting her short white veil properly positioned, as there were no mirrors.

  By five o’clock, all the nuns were in their stalls in Chapel. Above them, the bell rang for Lauds. The organ sounded a single lingering note, and with one voice the entire community began the daily ritual of praise, the ancient Gregorian chant rising in waves to the vaulted ceiling above.

  Mickey and the others were still learning how to keep their place in the Divine Office, the Book of the Hours. “We keep the Office in its full Solemnity,” Sister Rosaria told them. “Most other communities have gone to an abbreviated version.” She paused with a slight sniff. “While that alteration allows more work to get done, we embrace the Office as our opus Dei.”

  Each evening, Sister Rosaria helped them mark their prayer books for the next day, smiling patiently at the postulants’ sighs of exasperation. “But it changes every day!” they exclaimed in frustration. Sister Rosaria nodded. “Of course it does. How boring it would be if we sang the same thing every day. You will learn.” The days were divided into eight hours, though “why do they call it an hour? Some of them are only ten minutes long?” Lauds was the first hour of the day, followed by a short period of silent prayer. Then the bell for Prime was rung, and following Prime the community gathered in the refectory for breakfast.

  Standing at their places as Mother Theodora led them in singing grace, the nuns gave thanks prior to eating. Breakfast was the first time each day when conversation was permitted. During much of the day and all through the night, Silence was observed, to be broken only for urgent matters. The quiet created a more reflective atmosphere. “If you’re talking, you’re not praying,” Sister Rosaria reminded the postulants repeatedly. They quickly found that, even when conversation was tolerated, frivolous babble was not. “Speak only when you have something edifying to say.” ‘Edifying’ was another favorite word of the nuns. Learning to curb their tongues was the first and greatest stumbling block for most of the postulants. “Even words matter here,” Mickey wrote in her first letter to Jamie, “as if they are a resource not to be squandered meaninglessly.”

  Over their first few weeks together, the five postulants got to know one another, sharing bits of their backgrounds – “or more than a bit,” Mickey would have sighed. The other four were all in their twenties. Abigail Morgan was the youngest at twenty-one. She blithely told them, more than once, that she had always known she would be a nun. She chattered endlessly about the various convents she had visited before deciding on St. Bridget’s. “Even my name led me here,” she laughed, although she was never called Abby by the senior nuns who believed nicknames were inappropriate. “She is so twenty-one,” Mickey wrote to Jamie. “I often find myself longing to slap her.”

  One of the biggest surprises for Mickey was how easily irritated she was by little things. She had to force herself again and again to swallow the sarcastic remarks which seemed to jump onto her tongue. She had never considered herself a mean person, but “can’t you ever be quiet?” she snapped at Abigail one afternoon, earning herself a reprimand from Sister Rosaria. Here, with so much focus on self-control and intellectual pursuits, with no workouts, no hours of concentration in the OR, no rushing about from place to place, no outlet for all of her pent-up energy, Mickey felt the meanness gathering under the surface like a boil, getting ready to erupt, “and one of these days, it’s going to blow and all this nastiness is going to escape,” she would have said if she had felt she could say such things aloud. If she had, she would have quickly realized she wasn’t alone.

  Tanya Petersen, a postulant who had come to St. Bridget’s from Minnesota, was normally very quiet and eve
n-tempered. One afternoon as the postulants were on their hands and knees cleaning the marble floor of the main corridor of the cloister, Sister Fiona came by to inspect their work. Sister Fiona was from Ireland, and was very particular about the cleaning of the abbey.

  “Hmmm,” she said, leaning over and swiping a finger over the tiles. “Again, please.”

  “But, Sister,” Tanya protested, “we’ve already scrubbed the floor twice.”

  Sister Fiona simply looked down at her with a questioning expression.

  “Yes, Sister,” Tanya said.

  As Sister Fiona’s black skirts disappeared around the corner, Tanya threw her brush into the bucket, splashing herself and the floor with dirty water. Sputtering and blinking the water out of her eyes, her pale Swedish complexion went a peculiar blotchy pink as she fought to keep from swearing.

  “I baptize you in the name of Sister Fiona,” Mickey intoned in a deep voice, tossing Tanya a clean rag to wipe her face. In a moment, all five were giggling uncontrollably.

  Wendy Barnes was the second oldest postulant at twenty-eight. She had taught in a Catholic school in Philadelphia with nuns whose order she had entered and left after three years, saying, “I needed an order with more discipline.” Indeed, she seemed to embrace their new routine with scrupulous adherence to detail and discipline, leaving the others often feeling hopelessly undisciplined.

  “I guess she likes rules,” Mickey shrugged to Jessica Thomas, the last postulant in this year’s group. Jessica was “round. It’s the only word I can think of to describe her,” Mickey wrote to Jamie. “Her body is round, her face is round, her eyes always look big and frightened and round behind her round glasses, even her mouth when she sings looks like those tacky porcelain angels Mom had on the mantel when we were growing up.” But Jessica’s roundness extended to her personality. She was unflappable, rolling with whatever came her way. She knew a little bit about everything, and was always ready with a response if asked, even if she never volunteered an answer. Mickey quickly came to respect the intellect behind Jessica’s perpetually hesitant façade, adding, “She’s probably the most intelligent one in the group.”

  Mickey remained vague about her background. It had never occurred to her that her relationship with Mother Theodora might be unique or unusual, but none of the others had such a connection. Jessica’s family had known of the abbey for years, coming from a nearby town for Christmas and Easter since she was a child. The others had had most of their correspondence with Sister Ignatius, the nun in charge of answering aspirants’ letters, helping them through the entrance process, as she had Mickey when at last Mickey had decided to enter. And, though her letters were full of advice and encouragement, Sister Ignatius also used that contact to size up the suitability of the aspirants. “This one will do,” or “I have some reservations about this one; she seems better suited to an active order,” she reported to the Council as they decided whom to admit. “They asked me to wait a year,” Abigail told the others, “Finish my degree. But I begged them to let me come now. I didn’t want to be put off.”

  Mickey had no idea if Mother had influenced the Council to accept her, but sensed that her relationship with Mother, if known, would set her apart from the other postulants even more than her age and profession. “I worked in a hospital,” was all Mickey had said when asked what she did prior to entering St. Bridget’s. Let’s hope that’s all that ever has to be said of that, she thought.

  Following breakfast was the hour of Terce and then Mass. Father Andrew was the priest assigned to St. Bridget’s from St. Dominic’s, the monks’ abbey near Palmyra. Mickey guessed him to be in his mid-fifties, his salt and pepper hair cropped short with a tonsure. As he sang the Mass in Latin, his beautiful baritone provided counterpoint to the nuns’ voices as they alternated responses. Sometimes, Mickey got so caught up in listening that she forgot to sing. A soft clearing of the throat from Sister Rosaria snapped her back to attention as she scrambled to find her place. Invariably, a sigh would follow from Sister Rosaria’s direction.

  After Mass another bell signaled one of two work periods built into the day. Bells for everything. In those first days, “I felt lost,” Mickey would recall later, trying to remember what came next, but gradually, she began to recognize the voices of the different bells: Lauds, Prime, breakfast, Terce, Mass, work, Sext, lunch – and she began to feel the flow of the days.

  ╬ ╬ ╬

  “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Simil quoque cum beatis videamus…”

  “Where charity and love are, there God is. Just as the saints see –”

  “No!” came a sharp rebuke from Sister Stephen.

  Work for the postulants was divided between classes and helping in various parts of the abbey. The postulants’ classes initially focused on Latin – “which should still be taught in schools,” Sister Stephen often lamented. “It would make our work so much easier.”

  Sister Stephen was a stern teacher, holding the postulants to strict pronunciation and grammar. To Tanya now, she said, “‘Beatis’ is the object of the preposition ‘cum’, and ‘videamus’ is first person plural, ‘we see’, not ‘they see’.”

  Mickey, who had taken Latin – “a million years ago” – had a shaky leg up on the other four, but still struggled to turn it into the living language of the Office. As beautiful as the plainchant was, it meant much more when she understood what she was singing, but she, along with the others, was intimidated by Sister Stephen who “must be a hundred years old,” Abigail had whispered during one of their first classes.

  “Not quite,” Sister Stephen said drily as Abigail quailed at being overheard. “Fortunately, my hearing still works fine. But when you can ask me in Latin, I’ll tell you how old I am. For now, back to Aquinas.”

  As much as Mickey found herself enjoying the challenge of learning Latin, their other class, Church history, was another matter. She and Mother Theodora had talked at length about how to distinguish one’s faith in God from one’s feelings about the Church and some of the things it had committed or permitted in the past.

  “How do you reconcile yourself with that?” Mickey had asked in frustration during one of their early conversations.

  Mother Theodora thought for a while. “I assume you were born in the United States?” Mickey nodded. “Why do you stay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the United States government has committed unimaginable atrocities against the native people who occupied this land before us. It sanctioned Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination against blacks, and still sanctions discrimination against homosexuals today. Why don’t you leave? How do you reconcile yourself with being a citizen of a country that could do those things?”

  “Believe me,” said Mickey ruefully, “I’ve thought about moving to Canada more than once.”

  Mother smiled. “Neither of us can change the history of the world we are a part of. And as angry and ashamed as we may be by aspects of those histories, what we can offer now is a commitment to work for justice and to see that those atrocities are never allowed to happen again.”

  “What about your vows?” Mickey challenged.

  “What about them?”

  “Don’t your vows mean you’re supposed to consider the Church infallible?”

  Mother shook her head. “No vow can compel us to accept anything we truly feel is against our conscience. I am bound to a certain level of obedience to my superiors,” she said, “but I feel a greater obligation to work to right the wrongs that have been committed in the name of righteousness.”

  After months of reflection and prayer on that conversation, Mickey had decided that she would not allow her philosophic disagreement with the Church’s politics and history to dissuade her from testing her vocation. What was testing her vocation was Sister Renatta, the nun who taught Church history. Part of Mickey’s irritation was triggered by Sister Renatta herself. She was very thin, with hollowed-out cheeks and large eyes, made even larger
when framed by her wimple and veil. Her face often bore an expression akin to a trance as her eyes would fill with tears in response to some vision only she could see. She looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of one of the illuminated medieval texts in the library, and she spoke in bland platitudes that gave Mickey the distinct impression that she could easily have been quoting from a twelfth century manuscript. Mickey doubted that Sister Renatta had ever questioned anything in her life, placidly doing and believing as she was told. Mickey thought perhaps she was alone in her impatience with Sister Renatta until one morning when Sister Renatta had kept them past her allotted time, pretending she hadn’t noticed Sister Stephen pacing impatiently at the back of the classroom while she breathlessly concluded her lesson on the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Mickey heard Sister Stephen mutter to Sister Rosaria, “One foot already in heaven, that one.”

  Chapter 4

  Spring came in a rush of color as flowers and trees and bushes within the high stone walls of the abbey gardens all burst into bloom at once. The nuns, even those who weren’t gardeners, reveled in the color as they wandered the enclosure during Recreation. Selected cuttings were used to bring spare bits of color into the Chapel and the common room. “We don’t want to be garish,” Sister Rosaria said, as Mickey smiled at the thought of the nuns being garish. But, “in a sea of black and white, more than a little color can seem like too much,” Sister Rosaria insisted seriously, with a reproving glance in Mickey’s direction.

  As the weather warmed, the postulants and five novices – three first years and two second years, wearing their black habits with short white veils – were recruited to help on the abbey’s farm. The abbey kept a small dairy herd, chickens and a few requisite barn cats to keep the mouse population under control. The cats were all spayed or neutered, courtesy of the local veterinarian who cared for the occasional sick cow or helped with difficult births. In addition to the animals, the abbey raised hay to feed the cows through the winter months and kept an apple and peach orchard plus a large vegetable garden. A total of a hundred acres was enclosed within the abbey’s outer fences.