Sometimes, in periods of enormous stress, she thought about the life she had had before coming to Carmel, and about the fact that Reverend Mother had been reluctant to receive her because of it. In the long months when she was discussing her vocation through the grille a couple of times a week, she had sometimes thought that she would have had an easier time being accepted if she’d been a drug addict and felon instead of Susan Titus Alderman, graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Yale Law School, Rhodes Scholar, Harkness Distinguished Fellow in History.
“It’s not the intelligence,” Reverend Mother had said, when she first came to Carmel. “The intelligence is an asset. It’s the ambition. You’re a very ambitious woman.”
“I don’t think I am,” Beata had said at the time, and by now she had decided that she had been telling the truth. She had not been ambitious. The constant struggle had made her tired and annoyed, even though she engaged in it and even though she was good at it. She looked back on all of that as a kind of delirium, implanted in her by a father for whom competition was an end in itself. You played to win no matter what you played. You made sure always to be among the first in any group you might enter. If she had joined a street gang, she would have been the leader of it in six months flat. As it was, she was president of her class twice during her years at Exeter, head of the yearbook committee, star of the Branch-Soule Debating Society, most active member of the Broadside. She was the kind of student schools featured in their recruiting catalogues and highlighted in their alumni newsletters. She was organized, efficient, intelligent, and relentless. And by the time she came to Carmel, she was sick of the whole thing.
No, she thought again, it wasn’t the ambition that was the problem. It was the alienation she felt at the way so many of the men and women who had built this order saw God. She did not want to experience an ecstatic union , not even on St. Teresa’s terms, and St. Teresa was as levelheaded as they came. She didn’t want to be a Bride to anybody’s Bridegroom, not even when the Bridegroom was Jesus Christ himself. The imagery alone made something deep inside her shut right off. It seemed to her that it ought to be possible to approach God as a mind instead of a heart, to approach Him in the clear light of the reasoning He’d endowed human beings with to begin with. Maybe she should have been a Benedictine, or a Dominican. If the Jesuits had admitted women, they might have been her best bet.
This morning, her best bet would be to ditch her habit and escape the monastery, but she knew she wouldn’t do that, and not only because she didn’t want to leave, unhappy as she was at times lately. Along with the need to win, her father had implanted in her the need to take responsibility, so here she was.
Here Reverend Mother was, too, pacing back and forth in front of her desk. Beata came in and bowed as she had been taught to do. Everything at this Carmel was elaborately formal. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t know about a cloister until you were already inside it.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Reverend Mother.”
“What?” Reverend Mother said. “Oh, you mean Drew. I suppose I should feel loss, but I don’t. I’d like to think that was because I was being perfected in my vocation. We’re supposed to be detached from the people and things we knew in the world. But it isn’t that. Drew and I never really got along very well. We haven’t spoken much in years.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. It’s still a loss, though, isn’t it? I’m sorry to be so obtuse, but I don’t have any brother or sisters.”
“I had only Drew. We weren’t even close as children. Never mind. You wanted to see me? Immaculata is getting a little mulish about the amount of time you’re spending away from the desk. And yes, I know it’s hardly your fault, but she is what she is.”
Beata let that go. Immaculata most certainly was what she was, and what she was was a woman who had entered the convent because she’d had no other place to go. Beata had known nuns like that growing up—well, all right, religious sisters—and the breed always made her nervous. There was an undertone of anger and resentment in them that could break out at any time.
Reverend Mother motioned to the chair. Beata sat down. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Beata said, “but it occurred to me that nobody may have told you what’s coming. And you’d have no reason to know. So I thought I’d better warn you.”
“About what? Do you mean what’s coming about Drew?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. I know you don’t listen to the television very often, but you must have heard by now that the police are treating this as a case of murder. And that’s going to mean certain things.”