This time, Reverend Mother General went, her heavy old-fashioned shoes shuffling through the snow like tiny motorboats in an ocean of polluted water. Scholastica watched her for a few moments and then hurried forward, so she would be at the door to open it when Reverend Mother General got there. Of course she wanted to be Mistress of Novices, she thought. Now that it had been offered to her, she wanted it desperately. It was just that she felt a little—guilty.
Alice Marie had been honest enough to tell Reverend Mother about her past, and it had put her out of the running. Scholastica, on the other hand…
Reverend Mother General reached the door. She patted Scholastica on the hand.
“You’ll do very well, Sister. Just wait and see. I know my nuns.”
Reverend Mother General disappeared into the vestibule. Scholastica stared after her, until a gust of wind lifted her skirt and wrapped it around her knees. Then she headed for the vestibule door herself.
Ass, she told herself. Nobody knows and nobody is ever going to know.
[5]
Peg Morrissey Monaghan kept all four of her high-school yearbooks on the shelf next to the television set in her family room. She kept her collection of newspapers there, too, bound in lime green cardboard. Sometimes, when she was alone in the house, she took the yearbooks down and looked at them. She never went near the newspapers. Her junior prom was an occasion she wanted to remember: her election as queen; how well she had looked in powder blue chiffon; how much better Kath had looked in ivory taffeta, even though by then Kath knew she was becoming a nun. An assassination was an event that was best left forgotten, and there were a lot of assassinations in those old copies of the Colchester Tribune. John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Thinking back on what it had been like growing up in the sixties, Peg always found herself envisioning the landscape of war-torn Beirut.
Now it was quarter to one on Ash Wednesday, God only knew how many years after all that had happened, and Peg was stuck in one of her mid-pregnancy funks. Her five older children were safely tucked away in St. Agnes Parochial School. Her four younger ones were in the kitchen, where her husband was making tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. Joe was very good like that. He always came home to make lunch when she was pregnant, and he always took the children off her hands for half an hour and cleaned up when he was done. Except for Friday afternoons, when her sister came over to take the children “out,” it was the only quiet time Peg had.
Peg caught herself staring at the yearbooks and the newspapers and shook her head. It hadn’t been the assassinations she’d been thinking of, of course, it never was, but what had brought all that up again she didn’t know. Maybe she was just having one of her very drifty days. Pregnancy was like that. Peg had once described it to her Bible study group as “just like drowning—all the worst moments of your life pass in front of your eyes, and they make you absolutely euphoric.”
She left the family room and made her way down the hall to the kitchen, listening to Joe belting out a monotonal but very vigorous version of “Lord of the Dance.” At least it was a Catholic song. Sometimes he got started on the music he’d learned growing up in the South, and she could barely believe it. There was one song—“Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life”—that she still refused to believe was not a joke.
She stopped at the kitchen door, dipped her fingers into the Holy Water she kept in a tiny wall font, and crossed herself. Then she slipped in and surveyed the scene. Susan, Charlie, Maria, and Agnes were seated with their backs to her along one of the benches that flanked the refectory table. Joe was standing at the counter next to the sink, chopping onions on a small square cutting board. His hair had started to thin on top. From the back, he looked like he had a tonsure.
“Don’t forget,” Peg said, “if you put too much onion in it, they have gas all afternoon.”
“Do they cry or do they just smell terrible?” Joe said.
“They do both.”
Peg sat down at the table, in the chair they had dragged in from the dining room to accommodate her pregnancy. She was already seven months along and big as a baby whale. Her back ached and her waist had departed for Kathmandu. She leaned over and brushed a crumb of toast from the corner of Charlie’s mouth. Charlie had been raiding the lunch preparations behind his father’s back. Again.
“I think I’m going to call Linda and cancel out of prayer meeting,” she said.
Joe cranked his head around to get a good look at her. “What’s the matter? You tired?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what’s the matter? You love prayer meeting. It gets you out of the house. You go over to the convent later and spend half the night talking to your friend the nun.”