Sister Catherine Grace believed that God was a big white man with a beard who sat on clouds and looked after people’s pet kittens—but Sarabess liked her anyway. Sister Catherine Grace couldn’t be more than twenty-two years old—the one time Sarabess had mentioned it, Sister had guessed that John Beresford Tipton was a kind of tea—but she had enthusiasm and energy and, best of all, a big mouth. It was the one thing Sarabess didn’t like about working at St. Elizabeth’s, that the place was so well stocked with nuns. Most of the Orders Sarabess had come into contact with in South America had been hemorrhaging. It figured that this one, where the Sisters still wore habits and everything was so conservative, would have more nuns than they knew what to do with. The problem with conservative nuns was that they didn’t talk, and if they didn’t talk you never found out anything. With Sister Catherine Grace you found out everything, because she hadn’t shut up since she opened her mouth and let out a wail in the delivery room.
Sister Catherine Grace was lettering a poster she was supposed to have finished the night before. Her veil was hoisted behind her shoulders so that it fell over the back of her chair. Sarabess was pretending to go through the files that had been taken out the day before but not put back where they belonged. The first thing she did every morning was return errant paper to its proper bureaucratic place. What Sarabess was really doing was trying not to look in the small wall mirror that sat above the grey metal file cabinet marked “Student Volunteers/Local Missions.” It was ten minutes to nine on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Sarabess Coltrane had just become fifty years old.
The file on the top of the stack said “CCSW/AHCWR,” which meant it had to do with the Catholic Commission on the Status of Women and their Ad Hoc Committee on Women Religious. Sarabess tucked a long lock of greying hair behind her ear and pushed the file to the upper right hand corner of the desk. That was another reason she didn’t want to look into the mirror. She had always worn her hair long, in spite of the fact that it had never looked the way it was supposed to. It lay flat against her skull instead of springing out. Now she wondered if it just looked wrong on a woman as old as she was. Maybe women of fifty looked ludicrous in waist-length hair no matter what their politics. Sarabess shifted in her seat and bit her lip.
“Go back to the beginning,” she said to Catherine Grace. “Now, Joan Esther was in the same convent as Sister Mary Bellarmine—”
“Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Catherine Grace said automatically. “And you don’t say they were in the same convent. You say Joan Esther was a Sister in Mother Mary Bellarmine’s house. Anyway, Mother Mary. Bellarmine has a great house, in California on the water with beach all around it and not a lot of hard work to do—I mean, they run a school but it’s no problem—”
“I thought nuns were supposed to like problems,” Sarabess said. “I thought of it for a while, you know. Becoming a nun. Although I probably would have gone to Maryknoll. I mean, the whole point seemed to be giving service to the poor.”
“Why didn’t you go to Maryknoll?”
“I couldn’t get past all this business of talking about God as ‘He.’ I mean, Maryknoll’s good, but even they can’t get rid of a Pope.”
Catherine Grace finished painting in a stencil of the letter M in red. “Sometimes I wonder why you want to be a Catholic at all,” she said. “You’d be so much more comfortable in a Wicca church or the Movement Internationale or something.”
“I’m reforming the Church from within,” Sarabess said virtuously.
“Whatever. Anyhow. Joan Esther got transferred out to California to teach in a program we have there for immigrants who want to learn English, and as soon as she got out there, Mother Mary Bellarmine started to drive her crazy.”
“How?”
“Well,” Catherine Grace said, “there was the business of the cold. Joan Esther caught cold on a weekend trip up into the hill country in northern California. So she called in sick and took to bed. And Mother Mary Bellarmine let her, but then she called every half hour to make sure Joan Esther was still in bed. Oh. There was the money for the birthday cake, too. Joan Esther has family out in Oregon or something and her brother came down to visit one Sunday and gave her fifty dollars. And she took the fifty dollars and had a birthday cake made for one of her students, this really old woman who had come out of Cambodia with one grandchild and everybody else in her family dead and Joan thought she needed to be cheered up—you see the kind of thing. Mother Mary Bellarmine had a conniption and a half, from what I’ve heard, ranting and raving about how that money rightfully belonged to the Order and it wasn’t Joan Esther’s place to decide what to do with it—”