True Believers(21)

Harriet closed the window and went back to the bathroom sink. She had already brushed her teeth and washed her face. She never wore any makeup. When she had first entered the convent, they had been forbidden ever to look at themselves in a mirror. For years after the changes that had come with Vatican II, she had found it almost impossible to spend more than half a minute looking at herself in anything at all. Now she looked but did not contemplate. She was a plain, square-faced, square-jawed woman with hair that was almost too thick for her skull. She kept her hair cut short enough so that people could see the turquoise-and-silver earrings she had been given the summer she had spent teaching reading on an Indian reservation in the Southwest. It was the only part of her old life she allowed to be visible around her. The other things—the Equality Now banner from the first women’s rights march in New York City; the pictures of herself at the two large demonstrations in Washington against the Vietnam War; the mimeographed flyer from the time the students had occupied the offices in St. Benedict Hall and she had been one of the few teachers to support them—she kept tucked away in a box in a drawer in her bureau, where nobody would ever think to look for them. She had not given up hope. She knew that capitalism was corrupt and that it would eventually have to fail. She expected to live to see the day when socialism rose triumphantly from the ashes of its Soviet betrayal. She looked forward to the moment when the people of the Third World threw off their lethargy and demanded their rightful share of the fruits of the earth. She could see all these things as clearly as if they were a vision of God Herself—but she now thought she would be very old by the time they came to be.

In her bedroom, she put on a white blouse and a blue wool pantsuit. When she had first taken off the habit, she had favored suits with skirts, but after a while she had no longer been able to stand the panty hose. With the pantsuit she was able to wear trouser socks and sensible clogs. The clogs reminded her of the way the women sounded when WomenChurch held a celebration, or a retreat—all those women together, worshiping God the Mother, God the Goddess, God as Sophia, the essence of wisdom. Oh, it made Father Healy fit to spit when Harriet went off to WomenChurch, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t have any power over her, and the Cardinal Archbishop didn’t seem to want to interfere. For now. Harriet was more than sure that the Cardinal Archbishop would interfere if he knew she was giving support to Catholics for a Free Choice, but he didn’t know, and Harriet wasn’t about to let him find out.

She got her short coat out of the closet in the hall and put it on. Her apartment was on the third floor of the rectory, walled off from the rooms where the priests lived by a set of hastily erected partitions, put up by the archdiocese fifteen years ago, when she had first refused to be banished to the convent. In this front hall there was a grate that hung right over the priests’ recreation room downstairs. Sometimes, when she was in a particularly sticky spot, Harriet crouched there and listened to the priests’ talking among themselves. Sometimes, she even heard things that made a difference. When she was younger, it would have embarrassed her to be this underhanded. Now she knew that that very guilt had been a tool of the patriarchy, one of the methods by which all men kept all women down. The oppressed had not only the right, but the duty to do whatever had to be done to throw off their oppression. Honor and honesty were the hypocrisies of the ruling class.

At the moment, of course, there was nothing to be heard through the grate, any more than there would have been anything to see through her binoculars, if she trained them—as she sometimes did—on the convent’s front parlor window. At this hour of the morning, the nuns would be saying their office and Father Healy would be getting ready for Mass. Father Donovan, the parochial vicar, was off on a month-long course in theology in Rome. Harriet buttoned her coat up to her chin and went out and down the long double flight of stairs. It was cold even in the stairwell. She hated February.

Outside, it was not only cold but dark. The big arc lamps lit up the parking lot, but did nothing for the pathway to Harriet’s entrance door. This was, most certainly deliberate. They thought that if they made her live in fear of her own safety, she would give up and go away. Maybe they were hoping for something more dramatic to happen, for her to be the victim of a mugging or a rape. Whatever they were trying to do, it wasn’t going to work.

She got to the parking lot and went by Marty Kelly’s truck, looking inside as she passed. There was an empty carton from an order of McDonald’s french fries on the floor near the gas pedal. Harriet wondered if Marty ate that sort of thing in front of Bernadette, tempting her to throw her diet to the winds and gobble herself into a diabetic coma. In all likelihood, he just didn’t think. The soup-kitchen van was still parked near the convent’s door, but there was no sign of Mary McAllister. Harriet thought that was just as well. Where had all these people come from—where had all these women come from—who wanted nothing more than to go back to the days of pray, pay, and obey?