“No.”
“But you do know . . . Forgive me, my friend. You do know that your wife isn’t just ‘upset.’ You do understand that she’s mentally ill?”
He did understand it, but he had never said the words, aloud or to himself, or even permitted himself to squarely think the thought.
“The things she was saying tonight, oh!” The prioress closed her eyes and shook her head a little. “Calling herself a witch. A ‘night witch,’ if you please. Calling herself liar, bad mother, whore. And worse. Telling me, ‘I killed my baby tonight.’ Saying she had, if you please, been violated, sexually, by a horse that had no skin, and that after it was over, she went to the toilet, and looked in, and saw her baby floating in there.” These words came out in a rush as if the prioress could not wait to get them out of her mouth and be done with them. “You’ve never heard talk like that from her?”
“She never . . . She never put it . . . like that.”
“Finally, well, I had enough, I suppose. I’m sitting with her, right beside her. I give her the tea, and I tell her, ‘Now, that’s enough. No more of that talk. And she does calm down. And she looks at me, and she takes my hands in hers. ‘I feel safe here,’ she says. ‘I only feel safe here. I want to stay. I have a vocation, Mother,’ she says. ‘I’m called.’”
My grandfather surprised both of them. He laughed. “That is crazy,” he said. “First of all, she’s married, to me. Second of all, she has a daughter who’s eleven years old. And third, she’s a Jew.”
The prioress wanted to remind him that many women born Jewish had lived out their lives in orders.* He could see it on her face. No doubt there were plenty of nuns who had children, and ex-husbands, too.
“It’s not necessarily crazy,” the prioress said. “But in this instance, I happen to agree with you. She may very well have a vocation. It isn’t for me and you to say if she does or she doesn’t. She can’t stay here, though, not like this. And yet, please, my friend, let’s be honest with each other and with ourselves: She can’t go home, either.”
My grandfather started to protest, but she raised a pale hand. Her palm at the base of each finger was studded with callouses like ivory buttons. My grandfather closed his mouth.
“I’m not a psychiatrist,” the prioress said, “and you are her husband, and so naturally and rightly it must be your decision, and I will defer to it as I must. But I am a trained nurse, I’ll have you know. And I do have experience in these matters. And I can tell you without a nickel’s worth of doubt that your wife needs to be under a doctor’s care. A psychiatrist’s care. Your wife needs to be in a mental hospital, friend, getting medical treatment, while I and all the sisters in this house pray for her recovery.”
A floorboard creaked. The prioress looked up and my grandfather turned to the door. A nun stood in the doorway, small, thin, something mouselike in her long nose and the front teeth that showed in the parting of her lips. She lowered her eyes to the floor when my grandfather looked at her.
“Is she awake, Sister Cyril?”
Sister Cyril nodded. “And she seems . . . happy!” She looked up, a flash of defiance in her voice, and met my grandfather’s gaze.
“Sister Cyril!”
Sister Cyril lowered her head again. “She says she wants to tell him . . . about her vocation.”
The prioress regarded my grandfather, who sat in the chair knowing that he needed to get up and go to his wife and grab her and take her out of this place, unable to proceed any further in his thought or action than that. He didn’t know where to take her. He did not have the faintest idea where a woman like my grandmother could ever possibly belong.
“What do I do?” my grandfather said. “What do I say to her?”
The prioress waved a hand at Sister Cyril. “Sister Cyril, please return to your duty.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You may tell her that her husband will be in shortly to see her.”
The prioress waited until Sister Cyril had retreated from the room and the creaking of the floorboards in the hallway had faded away.
“What do you say to her? Well, friend, not as a matter of policy, but just for the moment,” Mother Mary Joseph said, “I might encourage you to lie.”
*
The small room was all crosshatchings of shadow like a lesson in shading a sphere, an arc of darkness wrapped around a circle of gray with a bright spot a bit off-center. The bright spot was my grandmother; all the light in the sad little room seemed to be radiating from her. She was sitting up in the iron infirmary bed, hands reposed on the bedsheet where it had been folded back over the wool blanket. No makeup. Hair tied back with an unmistakable severity. He had never seen her look more beautiful.
“You really do understand?”
“Yes, darling. Of course.”
“This is the only place I can be safe.”
“I know.”
“I want us all to be safe. I want our daughter to be safe.”
“Yes.”
“It is too dangerous when I am outside of this place.”
“I understand.”
“Yes, you are a soldier. You understand about a calling. One have to make a sacrifice.”
He knew he ought not interpret or take to heart anything she said while in this state. He could almost hear the prioress advising him so. He knew my grandmother was under the delusion that she was about to take orders as a Carmelite novice, and that the sacrifice implied was of worldly ties and not of their daughter, as on some pagan altar, daubed with the blood of a mare. He could not keep the image out of his head, a knife, my mother’s pale throat. He shuddered. “Okay.”
“It’s really okay?”
“Of course.”
She lifted her arms from the bed and he stepped into them. A smell of castile soap. A hint of mothballs.
“You are so good,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stood hunched over, a crick in his neck. Her cheek was wet against his. On a chest of drawers by the bed, next to what he recognized as her copy of the Fioretti, there was a portrait of Jesus Christ. It was a modern litho, rendered with photographic realism, propped up in a metal eight-by-ten frame. Jesus looked like Guy Madison with a beard and Lauren Bacall’s hair. His gaze was leveled at my grandfather. No doubt his expression was meant to be compassionate, but to my grandfather it looked merely pitying. He remembered how, in the war, he had watched an old priest administer last rites to a dying German civilian and been moved by the Latin words and the message of peace he could sense encoded in them. But this pretty-boy Jesus just gave him the creeps. You had your shot, buster, this Jesus seemed to be saying with those smoldering Guy Madison eyes. You lost her.
My grandfather worked himself free of her arms and drew back until he could look her in the face. If her expression had been vacant, the way books led you to expect—“nobody home”—it might have been easier to bear or at least to accept. When something was gone, it was gone. But my grandmother’s eyes were not vacant, they were filled to overflowing. Her face was busy with all the usual traffic in intelligence and feeling. At some level, surely, she must know that all this vocation business was nonsense, impossible, a charade. She must know that tomorrow, next week, after a couple months of rest and soothing chats with a top psychiatrist, it would pass.
“You know this will pass,” she said, stopping his heart. “I see how you are so sad. Jesus sees, too. He will comfort you.”
“No need,” my grandfather said, resisting the urge to address the picture of Jesus. “I’m fine. We’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She laughed. She thought that was adorable. “It doesn’t work that way, silly.”
He couldn’t take any more. She held on to his hand.
“I want to show you something.”
“What’s that?”