Authors: LaVyrle Spencer
Shtt.
Sht.
Shtt.
There was nothing like milking together to dissolve animosity. She sensed that his feelings about all this were different from her mother’s.
“You didn’t have much to say, Daddy.”
“Been thinking.”
“And what did you come up with?”
“That you’re right. Your mother and your grandmother worked on you from the time you were old enough to blow your own nose.”
“But
I
wanted to be a nun, too.”
“Yeah, I know.”
They milked some more. Thought some more. Enjoyed this time of closeness, which was rekindling many loving feelings between them.
After some time Frank said, “I’d like to know more about this man.”
“It would be premature. When and if the time comes, I’ll tell you.”
“Fair enough.”
Frank finished one cow and moved on to another. A cat came out of the shadows and preened her body against Regina’s ankle, turned and did it again and again. She reached down and scratched the sleek black body, ran a cupped hand clear down its length to the tip of its curved tail, and murmured, “Hello, what’s your name?”
“That one’s Midnight,” her father answered. “If you need to come home for a while and live after you quit, it’s all right with me, Jean. I’ll talk to your mother about it, and she’ll come around. You’ll see.”
Regina’s hand stalled halfway down the body of the cat, and she got tears in her eyes. She put her forehead against the hard, warm belly of the cow and sat so for some seconds, idle, thankful, filled with such emotion it felt as if her heart could not contain it.
Finally, she lifted her head and called softly, “I love you, Daddy.”
She could not see him on the other side of the cow, but she heard him clear his throat. Then his milking stool scraped the floor. And though he wasn’t a man who could say it, she felt as loved as she ever had in her life.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Christmas was as forlorn as Eddie expected. The pageantry and music of Midnight Mass, which usually filled him with joy and celebration, only left him melancholy. Not even the majestic pipe organ or the choir raising its
hallelujahs
could lift his doleful spirits. The nuns were present in the front right pew, but there was no Sister Regina to fix upon in an effort to cheer himself. The children fell asleep and when Mass was over he had to contend with two limp bodies all by himself. There was no Krystyna to prop up one of them and guide arms into coat sleeves, to bolster a slumping form and guide it down the aisle into the cold starlit air outside.
Eddie did as Rose suggested, slept at her and Romaine’s house, doubling-up the kids in bed with their cousins and bunking, himself, on their davenport under a patchwork quilt. The worst was filling their stockings without Krystyna. He realized now that she had been the true spirit of Christmas in their family, and that he himself made a poor substitute in that department. The toys he’d bought for their stockings seemed uninspired and lackluster; Krystyna’s had always been inventive and exciting for the girls to find. He hadn’t even thought to buy them a blackboard, in spite of the fact that they played school all the time. It was Rose who put a box of chalk in their stockings and stood a brand-new blackboard close by. It was Rose who gave them some toys for their new cat, Sugar, and remembered that Anne had loved playing marbles last spring and bought a bag of cat’s-eyes for her. She’d made doll clothes for Lucy, and trimmed colorful gingerbread men for each of them, the way Krystyna always had. Grandpa Pribil had built them a doll crib and high chair, and Grandma Pribil had made special bedding for the crib, including a quilt that matched the one on their bed at home. Aunt Irene had embroidered them pillowcases with their names on them, and she’d mixed up a big batch of salt dough and given them a toy rolling pin and cookie cutters so they could make their own play cookies when they played house. Lucy’s favorite doll had grown bald, so Irene and her mother had managed to make it a new wig out of fine yellow yam that had only to be glued on to make the doll pretty again.
But the best gift of all came from their teacher, Sister Regina. She had put together a box of leftover worksheets, ends and scraps of construction paper, a couple of coverless, outdated textbooks, and some very well-used flash cards containing arithmetic tables. Also in the box was a 1948 date-book, with a page for each day of the year, few of them written on; and four partially used receipt books with carbon paper flaps in the front, the kind used by storekeepers to keep a running account of customers’ charges. The uses for the treasures in that box were limited only by the scope of a child’s imagination. Anne and Lucy and their cousins spent most of Christmas Day playing school, store and restaurant, and the truth was they were having so much fun they didn’t miss their mother.
Eddie watched them enjoying their day and thought of what a perfect gift Sister Regina had dreamed up for them. Besides costing her no money, it found a second use for scrap materials, and it occupied the children so fully that it provided the much dearer gift of helping them forget their mother’s absence for a while. It was—he realized—exactly the kind of gift that Krystyna would have dreamed up herself.
The gift, of course, brought Sister Regina to mind. Eddie wondered what kind of Christmas she was having. He pictured her in that ordinary farmhouse, surrounded by her family, and wondered if they gave her gifts, and if so, what kind, for he knew the nuns had to turn over virtually everything they received from an outside source to their superior, to be shared by everybody in the religious community. A dozen times during the Christmas season he’d tried to think of something he could buy for her himself. He’d run lists through his mind: gloves, handkerchiefs, chokecherry jelly, Zagnut bars. But in the end he’d decided it wouldn’t be seemly, so he’d gone into his workshop and cut out a bunch of scrap lumber into squares, triangles, columns—shapes of every kind—for her students to play with during the noon hours of these bitterly cold winter days when they couldn’t play outside. No one would question the propriety of his giving such a gift to her students.
He wondered when she’d come back to the convent, and preoccupied himself for a long time on Christmas afternoon, stretched out on one of Romaine and Rose’s easy chairs with his eyes closed, imagining himself taking the box of wood blocks to her, and the look on her face when she accepted it.
It never occurred to him that more and more often lately, such thoughts of Sister Regina were supplanting his lamentation over Krystyna.
________
Sister Regina’s Christmas was odd. Parts of it she enjoyed: making prune coffee cakes with her mother; going to Midnight Mass at St. Peter and Paul’s, where she’d attended as a child; living without the tinkle of bells telling her when to rise, to be at chapel, to be at breakfast; going out to the barn to find her dad at the morning milking; feeding the cats warm milk from sardine cans; watching her nieces and nephews opening gifts; going to her favorite sister’s, Elizabeth’s, for Christmas dinner.
But there were undertones. Everyone—with the exception of her dad—tiptoed around her, treated her as if she might be carrying some contagious disease they didn’t want to catch. None of them sat easy with her and visited. No one teased her, asked her to help with dishes, or to set a table. Certainly nobody brought up the subject of her leaving her vocation. Ever since that announcement, they treated her like a pariah.
By the time she left, she was more than ready to go. Her mother hugged her at the kitchen door and tucked a five-dollar bill into her hand. “For everyone at your convent,” she said. Then she took Regina by both cheeks and said, with hurt, tear-filled eyes, “Please make very, very sure you’re doing the right thing before you quit.”
“I will, Mother. That’s why I’m going to Saint Ben’s.”
St. Benedict’s Convent was situated in the sleepy rural town of St. Joseph, just west of St. Cloud. Her father drove her there and deposited her at the portal she remembered so well. It hadn’t changed since Sister Regina had studied there as a novitiate. The open gate, the dormitory, the Sacred Heart Chapel were as familiar to her as if she’d never left. In that shadowy chapel, dwarfed by its Baroque granite arches and humbled by its stained-glass dome, she spent the next four days at prayer. Hours and hours of prayer, moving among others clad identical to her, slow-moving figures in black who sang Gregorian chants in a steady, sweet soprano drone that seemed to be coming from within the very walls themselves. She took her meals in the refectory, where the words of grace, recited in unison, were as musical as hymn, and slept in a spare cubicle devoid of worldly distractions. She attended Masses celebrated by Benedictine monks, and knelt in contemplative silence, open to her God, inviting Him into her heart and mind, inviting Him to change her will to suit His.
But by the end of the fourth day, nothing she heard, felt or sensed, asked that she remain a Benedictine nun. Instead, she emerged from her soul-searching feeling an unquestionable validation of her decision to quit.
Thus, she came that last afternoon to the daunting oak doorway leading to the office of the prioress, Sister Vincent de Paul. Of Sister Vincent de Paul she knew little, only that she was good beyond all goodness, and wise beyond all wisdom, and that it was from her she must ask permission to seek a dispensation of vows.
Sister Vincent was short on smiles, offering none when Sister Regina entered her bailiwick. She filled her white wimple so fully that her pudgy chin protruded from it in folds. Her wire-rimmed glasses rested on a bulbous nose with rather large nostrils. She sat behind a desk as big as a boxcar in a room whose dark woodwork seemed to leach the light completely out of the air. A statue of Our lady occupied one comer. Books and comfortless wooden chairs took up the rest of the space.
“Come in, Sister Regina,” the prioress said. “Praise be to Jesus.”
“Amen.”
“You’re on a teaching mission in Browerville, if memory serves.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And Mother Agnes advises me that you haven’t been too happy there.”
“No, Sister, I haven’t been.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
She did exactly that, realizing within very few minutes that Sister Vincent was a patient and attentive listener. She sat without fidgeting, her gaze level and unwavering on Sister Regina who, after delineating her reasons, said quietly, “...so I would like your permission to seek a dispensation of vows.”
Sister Regina’s heart was clamoring fearfully as she made the request. The prioress, however, reacted with the same calm thoughtfulness exhibited by Mother Agnes. “I’m sure you’ve asked God for guidance on this.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Prayed, done penance, made a retreat.”
“Two retreats, yes, Sister, and many months of prayers.”
“And you’ve spoken about it with your spiritual advisor.”
“And with my priest. My family also knows.”
“Well, then... your mind seems to be made up.”
“It is.”
“You’re nervous, Sister Regina.”
“Yes, I am.”
“That’s to be expected, I suppose. After all, this will bring a close to a major portion of your life. But let me say that I’ve known a number of nuns who saw fit to leave the Order, and every one of them made a strong ally for us as a layperson. Sometimes those without the habits take a hands-on approach to church work and charity work that we’re not allowed to take, or don’t have the time or funds to take, especially those of us who have a mission to teach as you do. So...” She found a form and passed it across the desk. “...all that remains is for you to fill out the official form, which I’ll pass on to Sister Grace, the president of the congregation, and she’ll send it on to Rome. You realize, of course, that the Holy Father himself will have to sign it?”
“Yes, Sister, I do.”
Filling out the form took so little time it seemed ironic, after the years of study it had taken to become a nun. Several seconds to negate six years of preparation.
Sister Vincent added her signature and centered the form on her ink blotter, then rested her hands beside it and looked up.
“You undoubtedly know that it can take up to six months for a dispensation to come through.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“And during that time, be reminded that you are still bound by your perpetual vows, the same as always.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“One more thing... for obvious reasons it would be best not to disclose the fact that you’re seeking the dispensation.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Very well, then...” Sister Vincent rose, tucking her hands beneath her front scapular.
“May the lord be with you, Sister Regina. And during these next few months, if you ever want to talk, I am here.”
“Thank you. God bless you, Sister.”
“And you.”
The sense of irony continued as Sister Regina found herself leaving the grounds of St. Benedict’s and walking down the street toward the bus depot, carrying her suitcase. How could something that had consumed and structured her life for all these years be brought to an end by so brief an exchange? She had expected to be put through the third degree by the prioress, to have to defend her decision the way a criminal defends himself under inquisition. Instead, the prioress deferred to her decision with the utmost respect and facility. She’d thought the opposition would be much stronger. Instead, there seemed to be an unwritten code at work that said,
We don’t force anyone to stay who doesn’t want to.
________
When her father had dropped her off at St. Ben’s for her four-day retreat, he had volunteered to come and pick her up afterward and drive her to Browerville. She was happy now she’d insisted on taking the bus. It gave her time to ruminate on the imminent changes in her life. Many of those changes, like being turned out penniless, were scary. Others, like being free to perhaps take up a correspondence with Mr. Olczak, filled her with joyful anticipation.