Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen Read Free Book Online Page A

sandals, castanets.
     
    Written on a rafter is: “They mortify their bodies with abstinence.” And on the one just after it: “May they renew and strengthen their souls by good actions.”
     
    Electric blue just before sunrise and two white points of light high overhead. The planet Jupiter. The planet Venus.
     
    Guernsey cows trudge toward the milking barn in the English green of timothy grass.
     
    Prime. Warblers, finches, orioles, sparrows, peewees, juncos, robins, blue jays.
     
    Mass of Saint Joachim, Confessor, Husband of
Saint Anne and Father of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
     
    Mixt. Sisters are eating in the Great Silence.
     
    The mistress of novices halts in front of Mariette, whose head is down in prayer. She bluntly raps the wide plank table with the head of her cane and the postulant looks up with surprise. Mother Saint-Raphaël gives her the handsigns, Terce, you, chapter room , and Mariette smiles in agreement as she tractably sips her barley tea.
     
    And she is sitting in afflicted repose on a green tapestried footstool while Mother Saint-Raphaël worriedly scowls at Mariette’s high school essay about her yearning for a religious life. “We teach a plain style of writing,” the mistress of novices says, and shuts the pages inside a manila folder and tosses it onto the floor beside her.
    “I hope I haven’t displeased you, Mother.”
    She smiles. “You haven’t yet, but you will. With your mistress it is inevitable.” Mother Saint-Raphaël sits in a soft Empire chair slightly above the girl and gently touches her white hands together as she says, “I am the former mother superior here.”
    “I know.”
    She smiles again. “Of course.” She tilts her cane against the wall and tells Mariette, “I have arthritis that acts up sometimes.”
    “How horrible!”
    Mother Saint-Raphaël contemplates the postulant for some time before saying she was in Belgium with their mother general when Mariette first interviewed with the prioress, so she’ll now say what she would have then. Which is: “We are here to learn and to love.” The mistress of novices stares at her, and goes on, “Your sisters here chose religious life for many different reasons. Some have a natural disposition for it. Some have had a crisis or trial that made the Divinity profoundly real to them and since then have had an overpowering need for daily communion with God. Still others have felt themselves famished and bereft until an accidental experience with our shared affection and prayers unexpectedly revived in them the possibility of joy. Every reason inspired by God is a good one for joining us here.”
    The girl is following her with flashing eyes and the go-ahead grin of a teacher urging some foolish drudge to try out a faulty idea. Mother Saint-Raphaël asks, “Shall I guess what your own reasons were, Mariette?”
    She smiles but doesn’t say.
    “You grew up with high ambitions in a village where too many girls married young and got pregnant often and aged gruesomely and, after hard use, died. And you thought you were extraordinary. You thought, quite rightly, that it was God who had made you so talented and smart and pretty and ever so much better than the girls who hated you, who never invited you to stay overnight or try on clothes or talk inanities about true love. So you kept to your room and wrote affected poetry and read the books your teachers talked about when you strolled with them in the schoolyard, and you thanked God for your loneliness and intellect, you even thanked Him for your dissatisfactions. You were distressed by attentions and misunderstandings. You were approached by boys and were only baffled. You heard praise and you thought, Is that truly me? Everyone talked grandly about your future but when you thought of it, as you constantly did, you were just as constantly filled with anguish. And, against your will, you began thinking of the sisters here in their priory, of their aloneness and silence and