Whit
Whit stood outside the abbot’s office on the first day of spring, clutching a note that had been placed in his hands by Brother Bede, the abbot’s diminutive secretary. He’d passed it to Whit just before the office of terce, whispering, “The abbot wishes to see you immediately after choir.”
Whit had folded it up with a hot, tremulous feeling in his stomach. After prayers were over, he’d followed Bede through the transept of the church to Dom Anthony’s office. Though he’d tried to read Bede’s face when they reached the door, scanning the impossibly small forehead and the pea-size green eyes, he could see nothing telling in them.
“The abbot will call for you in a moment,” Bede told him, and ambled away, the hem of his robe dragging on the hall carpet.
Now he waited, the kind of waiting that is crusted over with false calm but underneath tosses around violently.
He heard a sharp, serrated buzzing and walked to the window in the corridor. One of the monks was taking down a dead crape myrtle with a chain saw. Had he been summoned because of Jessie? Because Father Sebastian had read his notebook that night he’d come to his cottage?
When Dom Anthony opened the door, he nodded once, his Irish face stern and chafed cherry pink across his cheeks. Whit gave him a little bow before stepping inside.
There was a painting behind the abbot’s desk that Whit loved—an annunciation in which Mary is so shocked by Gabriel’s news of her impending motherhood that she drops the book she’s reading. It spills from her hand, which hangs suspended in the air. Her lips are parted, her eyes shocked and deerlike. Whit glanced up at the picture, seeing for the first time the look of complete dread on her face. He felt sorry for her suddenly. Bearing God. It was too much to ask.
Dom Anthony sat down behind the mahogany desk, but Whit went on standing. Waiting. He felt regretful, sorry it would end like this. He wondered how he could go back out there. To Rambo movies and Boy George on the radio. To Tammy Faye Bakker’s streaked face on television. How could he go back to all that greed and consumption? The stock market had crashed last October, plunged five hundred points—he’d read it in the papers—and it hadn’t even fazed him. If he returned to the world, he’d have to think about the economy, about starting up his law practice again.
Through the window on his right, he glimpsed a wedge of sapphire sky, and it made him think of the rookery, the egrets filling the trees, and the white flames their feathers made on the branches. He thought how much he would miss that.
“It is not too soon,” Dom Anthony was saying, “to schedule your ceremony for solemn vows.” The old man began riffling the pages of a desk calendar. “I was thinking of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist on June twenty-fourth, or there’s St. Barnabas on the eleventh.”
“Solemn vows?” Whit repeated. He’d been so sure he was about to be asked to leave. He’d braced himself for the humiliation of that. He said it a second time. “Solemn vows?”
Dom Anthony squinted up at him. “Yes, Brother Thomas. It’s time to be thinking about making your petition.” Exasperation tugged on his voice, the tone of a teacher with an absentminded pupil. He picked up a pencil, holding it loosely, letting it rap on the desk like a drumstick. “Now. As for the ceremony. You’re allowed to invite whomever you want. Are your parents living?”
“I don’t know,” said Whit.
Dom Anthony laid down the pencil and folded his hands together. “You don’t know? You don’t know if your parents are dead or alive?”
“Yes, of course I know that,” Whit said. “My mother is alive. What I meant is that—” He looked at the annunciation, aware of the abbot watching him.
He’d been on the verge of saying he didn’t know if he could take the vows, then stopped himself. He thought of Thomas Merton’s prayer that he’d printed on a little blue card and kept taped to the mirror over his sink: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.”
“Reverend Father,” he began, “I don’t know about solemn vows. I’m not sure anymore about taking them.”
Dom Anthony pushed back his chair and stood with painful slowness. He stared a moment at the junior monk, sighing. “Have you been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer again?” he asked.
“No, Reverend Father.”
The abbot had forbidden him to read any more of the Protestant theologian’s writing after he’d found a certain unresolvable quotation of Bonhoeffer’s copied into Whit’s notebook: “Before and with God we live without God.” Whit had liked the searing honesty of that. It had seemed to capture the paradox he was always carrying around inside.
Dom Anthony walked around the desk and laid his hand on Whit’s shoulder. “I’m glad to hear you’ve set him aside. You’re particularly sensitive to doubt, so it’s best not to feed it. Especially now that you’ve come to the point of taking vows. It’s a dark night of testing that we’ve all gone through—you’re not alone in that. You will be vowing to spend the rest of your life here, to die here, to own nothing at all, to be perfectly celibate, and to give yourself over to obedience. No one does this lightly, but we do it just the same. We do it because the desire of our heart is God.” The abbot smiled at him. “You will come through your dark night, Brother Thomas. Think of the disciple for whom you’re named. Why do you think I chose that name for you? He doubted, didn’t he? But in the end he overcame it with his faith, and you will, too.”
Dom Anthony returned to his chair as if it were all settled—the dark night, doubt, faith—all of it properly dissected, reassembled, and put in its proper place. Whit wanted to tell him that he should’ve taken the name Jonah, that he’d been swallowed into the abbey, that he’d been traveling in the dark, luminous belly of this place from the moment he’d arrived, but now he would be spit back into that other life. Phil, Oprah, Sally. Madonna’s fishnet hose. Revenge of the Nerds movies. Out there where normal people, even bank tellers, used the words “totally awesome” to describe the most banal things.
He heard the chain saw again, more distantly this time. He felt it in his chest. Dom Anthony was brooding over the calendar. Whit noticed the tufts of pale hair on his knuckles. Over his head Mary’s book was perpetually tumbling.
What had he really been doing here?
What if his being here wasn’t about making peace with a God who was both here and not here but more about finding some kind of immunity from life? What if he’d mixed up enlightenment with asylum?
What if holiness had more to do with seizing his life out there?
The abbot had said he should take his vows because the desire of his heart was for God, and he did want God, but—he knew now—he wanted Jessie more.
He couldn’t dismiss that. Neither his body nor his heart would let him, but neither would his soul. It was trying to tell him something. He was certain of it. One thing he’d learned from being here was how incessantly the soul tried to speak up, and usually in maddeningly cryptic ways—in his dreams, in the jumble of impressions and feelings he got when alone in the marsh, and occasionally in the symptoms in his body, that way he’d broken out in hives the time he was taken off rookery duty and made to help in the Net House. Nowhere, though, did the soul speak more insistently than through desire. Sometimes the heart wanted what the soul demanded.
“I think the Nativity of John the Baptist would be best,” Dom Anthony said.
“I’m sorry, Reverend Father. I can’t set the date now.” Whit lifted his chin. He crossed his arms over his chest and planted his feet in that wide, commanding stance he’d always used in court during his closing summations. A court reporter had compared him once to Napoleon standing on a ship bow, dug in for battle. “I can’t because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to take my vows. I don’t know if the desire of my heart is God.”
The room filled with silence, a perfect silence. It pressed heavily in his ears, popping on his drums as if he were descending from the clouds in an airplane. Dom Anthony walked to the window and stood with his back to Whit.
Minutes passed before he finally turned around. “You are to give yourself over to the dark night, then. You are to stay there as long as it takes you to find your faith and come to your decision. May God be with you.” He raised his hand in dismissal.
Walking to his cottage, Whit thought of the countless small things on the island he would miss. The alligators cruising the creeks submerged except for the great humps of their eyes. The oysters in their shells at night, how they opened when no one was looking. But mostly the egrets lifting out of the marsh carrying the light on their backs.