You couldn’t blame Vatican II for a radical loss of—what?
Every one of the suitcases on the floor was black. Every one had an oaktag tag tied to its handle with a name printed on it with black felt pen. Every one contained five sets of clean underwear, five pairs of clean black panty hose, two plain white clean cotton nightgowns, one terry-cloth bathrobe, two terry-cloth bath towels, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a scentless stick deodorant, and a spare habit. Sisters these days could have other sorts of personal items—Stephen King novels and miniature cassette players with Beach Boys tapes were big—but no Sister would pack any such thing in a suitcase meant to be unpacked by another Sister. Sister Joan Esther had asked to be in charge of the unpacking. It was a good job for someone who wanted to be left strictly alone. Unfortunately, it was also going to be unutterably boring.
At one side of the foyer was a wide staircase, leading first to a landing and then to the second floor. Mother Mary Bellarmine was standing on the landing with her arms folded across her chest, looking down in disapproval. She had been there since just after Joan Esther had come in—it had to have been coincidence, in spite of the fact that Joan Esther kept feeling that it had been meant—and she was standing there still, not saying hello, not saying anything, just giving off a miasma of poison fog that filled the foyer and made Joan Esther’s lungs feel ready to crack. Of course, Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t really give off a miasma of poison fog. Only the Devil could do that, assuming he existed. Joan Esther no longer found it easy to assume that he existed. She wondered if she ever had.
She counted up the suitcases—seventeen, two short—and then went back out the front door and down the steps to the convent station wagon that had picked her up at the airport. At the time, the station wagon had been driven by Sister Frances Charles, an impossibly cheerful young nun who talked nonstop about the wonderful spiritual healing that was going on in the battered women’s shelter where she worked. Joan Esther had to bite her tongue to keep herself from asking if any healing of the nonspiritual kind was going on, like job training or help with Pennsylvania’s notoriously convoluted human services system. Joan Esther had to bite her tongue a lot these days. It was a gift from God that Frances Charles hadn’t been able to hang around to help after they’d come back to the convent. Frances Charles had breakfast duty. She had parked the station wagon in front of the front door and disappeared.
Joan Esther got the last two suitcases out of the backseat—they’d been shoved down to the floor and partially covered with the car’s lap blanket; that was why she hadn’t seen them—and dragged them back inside where they belonged. Once she was sure she had the whole lot, she could start dragging them up the stairs.
When she got back to the pile, Mother Mary Bellarmine was there, right next to the suitcases, down from her perch. Mother Mary Bellarmine had gone to a modified habit with the rest of them, back in 1975, but she always gave the impression that she was still clothed head to toe in robes. She always gave the impression that she was about to pronounce the death sentence on someone who deserved it. You.
Joan Esther got the list out of her pocket and began to check off oaktag tag names against it. Mother Mary Bellarmine stepped back a little. She had always been a thin woman. Now she looked skeletal. And very, very old.
“Well,” she said, after a while. “You don’t look any different. I thought Alaska would have changed you.”
“Changed me into what?” Joan Esther said, to the suitcases, to the floor. She never looked at Mother Mary Bellarmine if she could help it. “I teach catechism to twelve-year-olds. I teach Catholic doctrine to potential converts. I teach the basics of prenatal nutrition to mothers who are interested. I’m not doing anything much different from what I was doing before I went to Alaska.”
“When you were with me, you were teaching in a seminary,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “And you were in California.”
“I know you like California.”
“You like California,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “You did it to spite me. You did it to make me look bad with Reverend Mother General.”
“I did it to get some peace and quiet.” One of the tags was marked “The Gingerbread Lady.” That would be old Sister Agnecita, who made gingerbread houses for the children’s ward of the hospital in Fairbanks. Joan Esther hoped that none of the Sisters from Canada went in for things like that, because she didn’t know any of the Sisters from Canada. She was just traveling with their luggage, which had turned out to be cheaper to send on ahead in bulk.