Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen Page A

“And this is?” she asks.
    “Our love for ourselves.”
    Sister Antoinette smiles. “You are a clever girl.”
     
    All Souls’ Day.
     
    Mother Céline is hustling down the hallway toward the visitor’s parlor and halting here and there for Mariette, who walks without hurry and with great trepidation, as if this is punishment.
    Dr. Baptiste is hulking behind the iron grille in a handsome Kashmir overcoat, an inch of Murad cigarette held inside his hand and grayly hazing the room with its reek. “ Bonjour , Annie,” he gaily says. “ Bonjour , Mariette.” He holds his right palm flat to the grille between them, and Mother Céline meets it with her own while Mariette sits down on a green tapestried chair.
    Their father tells them both about the house, his patients, the great canal that is being built on the Isthmus of Panama, a book of tales by O. Henry that he is enjoying, about the Chicago White Sox beating the Chicago Cubs in the third annual World Series, that he is voting for Charles Evans Hughes for governor of New York. Mother Céline kindly acts as if it’s all interesting and highly relevant, but Mariette is silent for half an hour, hardly listening to his words, just the fathering thunder of his voice. She truly loves and misses him but she cannot say it. Even looking up from the floor gives her pain, for he is so frontally there, so forceful and huge and masculine. She remembers his first morning coughs, the hollandaise sauce he’d put on her poached eggs, the iodine odor he filled the dining room with, his whistling, his tenderness, the whiskers that nettled her cheek.
    She hears him ask, “And you, Mariette? Are you liking the convent?”
    “Yes.”
    “You like it well or just a little?”
    Mariette thinks, Every knife in his house has a keen edge. Every question has just one answer. Every fortune, he says, is finally squandered . And so she tells him, “I have found happiness here.”
    “How?”
    “We pray. We study. I have always liked that. And everything is very clean.”
    She hates the hurt she’s put in his face but she can think of nothing more that he would understand. She shies a little from his stare and her father turns to Annie and says, “She used to speak for hours and hours to me.”
    “We have a habit of silence here.”
    Dr. Baptiste gets up and gingerly adjusts his hat on his head. “Are you going to send her to college?”
    “Yes, I think so. If she stays.”
    “ Are you staying?” he asks Mariette.
    But it’s her mother superior who replies, “We have time yet to decide.”
     
    Mass of the Four Crowned Martyrs.
     
    Sister Hermance walks the hallway with Sister Marthe and in hushed tones she says she and Mariette were reading epistles in the scriptorium just before Sext when a horrible cat jumped down from a book stack and spurted this way and that around the room as if he were being chased. And Mariette simply stared at him as if that weren’t surprising at all. And when the horrible thing sprang up onto Mariette’s book and arched his back and hissed at her, Mariette smiled at Sister Hermance and told her not to be frightened, that he was just a hateful demon trying to annoy them. She then got up and opened the scriptorium’s door and harshly commanded him, and the humiliated cat skulked out.
    Sister Marthe frowns scornfully. “Oh, good gracious, Sister Hermance.”
    But she insists, “She has powers.”
     
    Mass of Saint Gertrude, Virgin.
     
    The sisters are having their noon meal of a flavorless green soup of old garden vegetables, quarter-rounds of steamed rye bread, and a good red wine from Saint-Emilion that hasn’t traveled well.
    Sister Saint-Stanislas wipes out her soup bowl with her little finger and sucks hard on it, then scrapes her hand along the stained tablecloth and presses up the rye crumbs and licks them from her palm.
    Sister Zélie has been assigned the Lectio Divina from The Rule of Saint Augustine . She reads: “‘From time to time