The Three Sisters (4 page)

Talk about Our Holy Convent of Clichés, our blue-nosed Mother Superior made Queen Victoria look like a licentious liberal. If this weren’t bad enough, I was surrounded by a bunch of stuffed habits that daily pursued their newfound love for Him. The trouble with angels is that most were content with the way things were. I had gone into the convent hoping that Peter’s penguins were ready to change the world along with me, but instead I found the Lord’s little lemmings were ready to follow every rule they were given. It was then that I realized that a thousand Coitos couldn’t change the Holy Hierarchy. It was a lost cause after all. The Catholic Church was doomed to wither away, living in the past while the rest of the world
moved on.

Though I was unhappier than a bastard on Father’s day, I was not going to give in immediately. There was no question in my mind that I was going to leave the angel factory, but the only question was how. There I was, stuck in a temple full of vestal virgins, and the sexual time bomb inside me was ready to explode. After all, the apostles had been married and had sex, so why
couldn’t I?

I admit I could have just gone to the Mother Superior and requested that I be released. They would have let me go if I had asked. After all, there were other postulants who left while I was there. The Mother Superior never announced when a postulant quit the nunnery. Instead, they just disappeared and were never heard from again, the Catholic version of
the Rapture.

Since nuns were the Brides of Christ, I always wondered whether Jesus had to get a divorce certificate from God the Father every time a nun left the church. If Jesus was dispensing divorce certificates to nuns every day, why did the Church make it so difficult for the rest of the Catholics to get a divorce? Of course, no one ever said Catholicism
was fair.

The fact that once you left the convent you were never allowed to return didn’t concern me at all. K’s comeuppance hadn’t completely tempered my desire to abuse the things others believed in. No, I was going to go out in style or not leave at all. Placed in such a predicament, I racked my brains to discover a means of departure with honor which would leave my presence permanently imprinted upon my
fellow inmates.

I found my opportunity to leave during the solemn ceremony which graduated us postulants into novices. The ceremony was the most important event in the whole of our professional lives, a day in which great decisions were made a reality for the Lord’s loyal penguins. The Mother Superior actually requested that my family provide a “dowry” of $
2000
to Jesus Christ, which they would give to the convent. Obviously, the Mother Superior had never met my father. The day of the ceremony was when I decided to celebrate my good fortune by quitting the convent. Even had I not met Father Landus, my plans would have gone smoothly, but his presence in my plans added the joker to
the pack.

Father Landus replaced Father Dewey in October as the priest appointed to attend to the convent’s divine affairs too important for mere womenfolk to perform. The male chauvinist Church preferred having a man enter a convent to having women hear confession and conduct the services themselves. Father Dewey was a harmless old codger who often fell asleep while listening to our confessions (we had to wake him up to be absolved), in part because he made sure the wine from services was never wasted. Since the wine had been transubstantiated into Christ’s blood, rather than spill His Blood, Father Dewey drank all the wine each night to avoid such a sacrilege.

Father Larry Landus, on the other hand, was a dashing example of manhood. Larry was a Jesuit of the ecumenical persuasion who, like me, had hoped to change the Church from within, but who had also discovered the futility of such a path. He wanted to build bridges not only between Catholicism and other branches of Christianity, but to other religions as well. He thought this was the only way to transform Christianity into a religion that appealed to believers in the twentieth century and keep the Church from shrinking as its members abandoned their faith forever. He was well-read and intelligent, and we had some wonderful discussions
and debates.

Some priests leave the Church because they meet some beautiful example of womanhood, such as myself, and choose her over Him. Others just hang around for the altar boys. Since Larry had no catamitic ambitions, I made sure this time-honored tradition of saving priests from the priesthood was continued by tempting him during our concupiscent conventicles until he could resist no more. We did not wait until the graduating ceremony to explore each other, for unbeknownst to the Church, I turned their chauvinism to my advantage and quenched the desires of my bosom which had been building up inside of me for months. I didn’t have to rely upon my one-finger
exercises anymore.

Immediately upon Larry’s arrival I went to work on him. Within weeks he was giving the
pax
to my trinity of earthly delights. I used to sneak out of my room at night, meet him in some secret tryst, and pray for him with my knees up in the air, as I euphemized it. I had already determined to leave the convent, so even if I got caught, it would have been no great loss to me.

One time, however, our secret rendezvous was almost discovered. I had been pestering him for a week to do it in the confessional with me, and one night he finally acquiesced to my delitescent desires. The box we were in, however, was loose. When we got belly to belly and he started knocking the Holy Ghost out of me, we tipped the confessional booth over, producing a noise that almost woke up the entire convent. Luckily we made it out of the box and turned it up right before my fellow
inmates arrived.

By early December I had Larry under my thumb, and when I revealed to him my plans to leave the convent as soon as possible, he was more than happy to relieve my accidie. We both concluded that if we couldn’t change the Church from the inside, we would just have to continue our work on the outside. Thanks to my encouragement, he lost all interest in the priesthood and wanted to leave with me. I gladly accepted
his offer.

The ceremony for becoming a novice was set for late December. Surreptitiously, Larry and I prepared for our departure, but acted as if nothing were planned. The ceremony in question consists of the postulant coming into the chapel wearing bridal clothes (after all, the nun is to be wed to the greatest polygamist of all time, Jesus H. Christ, for not only did He manifest a marked predilection for virgins while He was here on the earth, but even after He ascended into Heaven, He persisted in His parthenophilic preferences); words are said; the postulant exits into a room where she changes into a habit; she comes out; more words are said; and
voilà
, by the grace of God, she becomes
a novice.

Following the prescribed formula, I entered the chapel, listened as Larry read the words written for this occasion, and then solemnly exited to change my clothes and supposedly join the heavenly harem which attended the affairs of Our Chosen Lover. But this was where I broke with tradition. The most pious nun in the whole convent followed me to the room to the side where she would help me with my clothes, but quicker than she could say a Hail Mary, I pulled out and lit a cigarette. She almost had a cardiac arrest right before my eyes. Too afraid God would strike her down for breaking the silence if she screamed in despair at the sight of my sins, my cautious companion resigned herself to fainting. But the clump of her body upon the floor broke the silence, and I knew I had to
get moving.

I was tempted to run out into the chapel just as I was without one pleat, but such a venture could easily have prevented me from leaping over the wall. As I left the side room wearing my wedding clothes, a Roman candle suddenly blew up. No eyes remained upon Father Landus, and given this freedom, he escaped and met me down the hall so we could make our getaway, escaping from the convent like Moses and the Israelites fleeing from Egypt into the
unknown wilderness.

Free at last to do as we wanted, Larry and I toured the land. He and I must have been a sight, a Father and a bride driving down the highway. We made such a scene we decided not to change clothes, and had a great time eating out together, shopping, getting a motel room, dancing, and doing a hundred other things, me in my wedding dress and him still in his monkey suit. The next two months were some of the happiest moments of
my life.

Unfortunately, the bliss that followed our escape wasn’t to last. Only a month after we left the convent, he started talking about protecting me and settling down. I could see his fatherly instincts were getting the best of him. What is it about men? Why can’t they just leave well enough alone and help women to achieve what they are capable of doing? It was two steps forward, and five steps back. After we had been on the road for only two months, he asked me to marry him and bear his children. No way. I was a nun who wanted to have fun, not get a baby in
the bun.

We had great intellectual chemistry, and instead of seeing each other as equals, he started controlling me like my father had. I have learned from experience that whenever a man starts to tell you what you
should
be doing, they don’t reverse course, they just get more controlling as time goes on. Fat chance I was going to get pregnant by some Jesuit who wanted to run my life. I was going my own way, and that was that.

It turns out I made the right choice. Larry married about a year after that, and the rhythm method bestowed upon him nine lovely little Landuses, enough to form his own little softball team. Ah, there but for the Grace
of God.

By March, I was ready to leave him the first chance I got, and I did. Fate has a strange way of drawing people together, and had it not been for a flat tire, the three sisters might never have been. Our travels had brought Larry and me to Appalachia and it was here that I first met Sister Suora. Theodora had always wanted to do something to help others. She lacked for little when she was growing up, and it was because of these altruistic desires that she was in eastern Kentucky helping the poor.

Theodora had led a disgustingly normal childhood. She too had gone to Catholic School, but unlike me, had never been suspended a single time. I don’t know how she did it. She grew up in the countryside near the college her father taught at outside of Philadelphia, and spent her youth communing with nature. Unlike my parents, hers had gone to college and having been thus enlightened, they imparted culture on her from day one. At my house, Elvis, Ed Sullivan and Pabst Blue Ribbon were the extent of our intellectual experiences, but Thea’s parents provided her with all the culture they could. I had struggled to learn on my own the things she took
for granted.

Her parents took her to New York or Philadelphia every few weeks and lavished plays, movies, classical music, and the rest upon her. Being culturally bourgeois, her parents gave her the “safe” classical books, art and music from the past, with perhaps token modern masters thrown in for good measure. True, the knowledge her parents provided was as much for their own gratification (“Isn’t our little daughter intelligent?”) as for her enlightenment, but the constant influx of ideas turned her into one of those contemplative souls who decided to dedicate herself to womankind and the “finer things in life.”

In many ways, she and I were such a contrast; it just had to be a case of opposites attracting. I focused on the future, she on the past. She found consolation in the “bright sadness” of Lent, but I never did. She found the countryside idyllic, but I found it boring. I loved the hustle and bustle of the city, but she wanted to get away to the countryside
to recover.

Despite these differences, we seemed to match each other perfectly. The contrasts drew us together rather than pushed us apart. We were good for each other, and I think I helped her realize some of her talents. She concentrated too much on what other people decided was worthy of attention, instead of depending on her own intuition. Her parents had spoon fed culture to her and she lacked the initiative to strike out on her own.

Whenever she decided to take on some subject or write a paper in college, she would read to excess, trying to understand all the arguments and counterarguments of others, but in the process she would lose sight of the forest for the trees and not be able to do anything original. She would get so bogged down in the details, be so meticulous so as not to miss a single subtle point, that she would never get to the main question. It was up to me to show her the benefits of using
her imagination.

Theodora’s parents had sent her to a top-notch Ivy League school for four years where her love of culture and womankind had grown even more, but like many upper-middle-class daughters, she changed her career plans a dozen times (if she ever had any) while she was in college, and didn’t know what to do when she
got out.