Angelology(5)

Evangeline looked at the stack of letters with satisfaction. She would post them that very afternoon.

Suddenly something struck her as odd about Mr. Verlaine’s request. She pulled the letter from the

pocket of her skirt and reread the line stating that Mrs. Rockefeller may have briefly corresponded

with the abbess of St. Rose Convent, Mother Innocenta, in the years 1943—1944.

The dates startled Evangeline. Something momentous had occurred at St. Rose in 1944, something

so important to FSPA lore that it would have proved impossible to overlook its significance.

Evangeline walked through the library, past polished oak tables adorned with small reading lamps to

a black metal fireproof door at the far end of the room. Taking a set of keys from her pocket, she

unlocked the archives. Was it possible, she wondered as she pushed the door open, that the events of

1944 were in some way related to Mr. Verlaine’s request?

Considering the amount of information the archives contained, they were given a miserly allotment

of space in the library. Metal shelves lined the narrow room, storage boxes arranged neatly upon

them. The system was simple and organized: Newspaper clippings were filed in the boxes on the left

side of the room; convent correspondence and personal items such as letters, journals, and artwork of

the dead sisters to the right. Each box had been labeled with a year and placed chronologically on a

shelf. The founding year of St. Rose Convent, 1809, began the procession, and the present year of

1999 ended it.

Evangeline knew the composition of the newspaper articles well, as Sister Philomena had assigned

her the laborious task of encapsulating the delicate newsprint in clear acetate. After so many hours of

trimming and taping and filing the clippings in acid-free cardboard boxes, she felt considerable

chagrin at her inability to locate them immediately.

Evangeline recalled with precise and vivid detail the event that had occurred at the beginning of

1944: In the winter months, a fire had destroyed much of the upper floors of the convent. Evangeline

had encapsulated a yellowed photograph of the convent, its roof eaten away by flames, the snowy

courtyard filled with old-fashioned Seagrave fire engines as hundreds of nuns in serge habits—attire

not altogether different from that still worn by Sisters Bernice and Boniface—stood watching their

home burn.

Evangeline had heard stories of the fire from the Elder Sisters. On that cold February day,

hundreds of shivering nuns stood on the snow-covered grounds watching the convent melt away. A

group of foolhardy sisters went back inside the convent, climbing the east-wing staircase—the only

passageway still free of fire—and threw iron bed frames and desks and as many linens as possible

from the fourth-floor windows, trying, no doubt, to salvage their more precious possessions. The

sisters’ collection of fountain pens, secured in a metal box, was thrown to the courtyard. It cracked

upon hitting the frozen ground, sending inkwells flying like grenades. They had shattered upon impact,

exploding in great bursts of colored splotches on the grounds, red, black, and blue bruises bleeding

into the snow. Soon the courtyard was piled high with debris of twisted bed springs, water-soaked

mattresses, broken desks, and smoke-damaged books.

Within minutes of detection, the fire spread through the main wing of the convent, swept through the

sewing room, devouring bolts of black muslin and white cotton, then moved on to the embroidery

room, where it incinerated the folds of needlework and English lace the sisters had been saving to

sell at the Easter Bazaar, and then finally arrived at the art closets filled with rainbows of tissue

paper twisted into jonquils, daffodils, and hundreds of multicolored roses. The laundry room, an

immense sweatshop inhabited by industrial-size wringers and coal-heated hot irons, was completely

engulfed. Jars of bleach exploded, fueling the fire and sending toxic smoke throughout the lower

floors. Fifty fresh-laundered serge habits disappeared in an instant of heat. By the time the blaze had

burned down to a slow, steamy stream of smoke by late afternoon, St. Rose was a mass of charred

wood and sizzling roof tin.

At last Evangeline came upon three boxes marked 1944. Realizing that news of the fire would have

spilled over into the middle months of 1944, Evangeline pulled down all three, stacked them together,

and carried them out of the archives, bumping the door closed with her hip. She strode back to her

cold, dreary office to examine the contents of the boxes.

According to a detailed article clipped from a Poughkeepsie newspaper, the fire had started from

an undetermined quadrant of the convent’s fourth floor and spread through the entire building. A