CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Los Angeles, 1959

T he dormitory was a nondescript stucco building with long narrow windows set back on one of the arid fields of the San Fernando Valley. It looked as if it had been abandoned. Which was true. Kathleen told me it had once been part of the compound of a private school that pulled out of the Valley for a fancier location. Hard to imagine it as a convent, I thought, as we entered from the north side. Straight ahead was a hall that stretched the length of the building, a hall so long it disappeared into darkness at the end.

“You’ve been here?” I asked Kathleen.

“I stopped by with my mother. Curiosity, I guess.” She held the wheel steady, checking her gas gauge.

“It was definitely a different perspective,” she went on. “I was so busy defying them—a lot more than you, but I know you felt much the same—I never thought of nuns as ordinary women. That silly part of the habit the little kids used to think was attached to their heads?”

I laughed; yes, I remembered. It turned them all into the same woman, some with a few more whiskers on their chins than others.

“Sister Teresa Mary looked pretty conservative at the auction,” she said. “But her order shocked the archdiocese by voting to shed the habit entirely—probably as a way of thumbing their collective noses at Doyle. Wow, when I heard that, I was too curious to stay away. I never heard of a group of nuns doing that before.”

“Neither have I.”

“So I wanted to see how that changed them.”

I smiled. “You wanted to see if they were being treated right—I know you. So what did you find out?”

She pulled into a parking space and yanked on the brake. “No fair sharing test scores; we’ll compare later.”

In silence, we both stared at the building.

“It’s a dump, but it has possibilities,” Kathleen said.

“Welcome,” a tiny woman with short-cropped hair said in a soft voice. She wore a large, shapeless gray sweater. A pair of wire glasses rested on her nose. She looked vaguely familiar. “It may not look like it, but this is our reception room,” she said with a smile. “You’re here to see Sister Teresa Mary, I understand.”

Kathleen nodded, and then said to me, “I’ll leave you here now. Be back in about an hour.”

“You aren’t staying?”

“No, she obviously wants to see you. Anyway, I’ve got some property to look at.” With that, she flashed a bright smile, turned, and left.

The woman in the wire glasses beckoned to me; I followed her as we started down the long narrow hallway. There actually was a conference room, she said, which the nuns expected would prove quite useful; that’s where they could meet with family and visitors. There was a small space that was being refitted as a chapel, which was a great relief, she said, sighing. “We miss our chapel at Saint Ann’s.”

I looked at her sharply. “Do I know you?”

“Of course you do, my dear. I’m Sister Margaret Elizabeth. I was the school librarian.”

I flushed red. “I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be. Nobody recognizes us out of our habits.”

We turned a corner, and I heard a familiar voice.

“Welcome, Jesse.”

I blinked. Away from the auction crowd jamming the school lawn, wearing no veil at all, Sister Teresa Mary looked unnervingly ordinary. She could have been someone’s pleasant grandmother, though she still had the penetrating gaze that saw everything. She stood as erect as ever, but her face was definitely more weathered. She wore what looked like the same blouse and skirt she had on at the auction. And, yes, she had hair. There it was, totally uncovered, salt and pepper in color, slightly curly in texture. The only thing that marked her as a nun was a small crucifix hanging from a chain around her neck. But none of that quite touched on what I was trying to identify.

She reached out her hand and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Jessica,” she said. “You came back.”

“Just for a week,” I said, a touch hastier than I needed to.

“I see. But you came, at least partly to see Saint Ann’s again, right?” She gestured toward a chair. “Please, sit down.”

I did, looking around at the same time. “This is quite a different environment from Saint Ann’s,” I said. I was still trying to put my finger on something about her that had changed.

“Yes, indeed. That’s what got my back up. The bishop thought we would go meekly into exile,” she said. She smiled with clear satisfaction. “We surprised him. We packed up all those serge habits in a big box and sent them to the chancery office. I’d love to have seen his face when they opened it.”

And there it was, what I was searching for: not just an atmosphere of defiance; Sister Teresa Mary was enjoying her act of defiance.

“Was it a hard decision to give up the habit?” I asked.

“Yes—and no. We decided, all of us, as a community—that it was our job to serve God in the way that was right for us.” Her voice was firm, but not in the same way I remembered.

“Can the bishop…Will he try to stop you?”

“I doubt it. We have accepted our move to this new home—no complaints, no entreaties. Now we will shape it.”

“What will you do?” There was no school anymore for this teaching order of nuns. No girls to educate.

She looked at me, a steady, clear-eyed gaze. “We will do neighborhood ministry until we hear what our new official role is.”

“I admire you.”

Her face softened. “You know, when all authority was stripped away, I found strength.”

I could hardly believe I was having this conversation. But I could ask directly: “Sister, I’m wondering why you wanted to see me, after all that happened, and all I did.”

“Definitely not to censor you or offer some magnanimous forgiveness,” she said dryly. “I’m done with that role.”

I blinked.

“I read your Redlands speech. I can’t speak for what you said about the movie industry, but you were right about the Church. Power-hungry bishops? Yes.”

“That’s not what you said when you told me I couldn’t be valedictorian. I never understood why it was a good thing for me to keep quiet about what was true.”

“You know now and you knew then, I had to abide by the bishop’s orders.”

That relentless hammer of obedience—I remembered last night’s movie, The Nun’s Story, and Audrey Hepburn’s struggle with obedience—something she questioned so much she felt forced to leave the sisterhood. “There is a new movie—” I began.

“Yes, I’ve heard of it.”

“I saw it last night.” Still vivid in my mind was the final scene, the camera following the small figure of Audrey Hepburn walking slowly down a long corridor toward the outside world she had renounced years before.

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes.

“You were publicly punished for shaming Saint Ann’s when the Ingrid Bergman scandal broke,” I said, choosing my words as carefully as I could. “How could you accept that?”

She looked at me, eyes steady, then reached up and fingered the crucifix. “I knew there had to be some resolution. And I was the logical one to confess.”

“You weren’t guilty of anything.”

“God writes straight with crooked lines.”

“Sister”—how could I say this?— “isn’t that just an easy way to justify an injustice?”

“At that time, my pledge of obedience to the bishop was paramount.” A faint smile flittered across her face. “Audrey Hepburn’s nun spent years putting obedience first, I’m told. Gave it a good try.”

“Are you telling me…” My eyes widened.

“No, Jessica. I’m not leaving my order.” She reached for my hands. “But I no longer feel the need to obey Doyle on all things. I’ve known that since he walked out on us at your graduation, but the closing of Saint Ann’s made me see it plain. My promise of obedience now goes directly to God.” She loosened her grip on my hands, but still held them. “You don’t have to give everything up, you know. Kathleen told me a little about your struggles. Go past what you need to abandon, and concentrate on what matters.”

She was suggesting discarding dogma selectively—deciding that all those rules and prohibitions that had shaped my life were part of a buffet all along, that the guilt and fear of being bad could be tossed, like shrugging off a heavy coat. And somehow that would open a path back into the church.

I couldn’t talk for a moment. And then I was swept with compassion for this aging woman holding herself ramrod-straight. She had been a powerful figure of authority in my life, and she was trying to offer a helping hand. But all the terms we used to describe ourselves had changed too much for that to happen.

“That doesn’t work for me,” I said. “It would make me lonelier than I am.”

“Why?”

“Because it would be replacing one fiction with another. I don’t even know if I believe in God anymore.”

“That must be hard to say.”

I wanted to say, Not anymore. But it would’ve been only partly true.

Sister sighed and pulled herself up even straighter in her chair. “At least drop some of that burden of guilt I hear you carry around,” she said softly.

At that moment, Sister Margaret Elizabeth appeared in the doorway and announced that the nearby parish priest who was to bless the space and offer a Mass in their “new home” had arrived.

“Oh my goodness, that’s wonderful,” Sister Teresa Mary said. She rose with a smile, smoothing down her unfamiliar blue skirt, and turned to me. “Will you join us, Jessica?”

I hesitated. In the silence, I could hear the flapping of a broken venetian blind behind me. I saw the chipped paint on the baseboards. Mostly, I sensed the determination of these women to pull it all together again, to relocate themselves—to build a new familiar.

“I hope you understand I can’t go back—” I began.

“I understand. But you can say goodbye, can’t you?”

A pause. “I guess so,” I said.

The new “chapel” was dispiritingly barren. There were folding chairs, not pews, and the altar seemed constructed of packing boxes covered with old altar linens. But I recognized the tall, graceful silver candlesticks that had adorned the altar at Saint Ann’s.

“How—” I started, turning to Sister Teresa Mary.

“How did we get them out of the old chapel? I stole them,” she said matter-of-factly. “Just hid them under a blanket and tucked them into a suitcase before they did inventory.”

I couldn’t help it—I giggled. Score one for the nuns.

The young priest seemed in a hurry; he glanced once at his watch as a dozen or so nuns quietly filed in, took their seats, and opened their missals. He recited a few prayers and blessed the space with a sign of the cross, then turned to the altar, without presiding over the ritualized ceremony that was the usual way the Church conveyed ownership.

The Mass was also clearly going to be wrapped up in record time. This felt disrespectful to me, but Sister Teresa Mary kept her head bent as she serenely murmured the familiar responses, seemingly undisturbed.

This was the Church stripped of music, incense, and the lengthy rituals that had defined the faith of my youth. Stripped to its underwear, I told myself.

And then—a beat of my heart skipped—I heard a pure, soaring voice lift and swell from the back of the room.

“That’s Sister Mary Francis, our last novice here,” whispered Sister Teresa Mary. “She is very gifted.”

The young nun was singing the “Ave Maria.” Her voice rose, filling the stale air of that pedestrian space with something—what?—that lifted me with it, lifting away everything that hurt, releasing it all for this one moment, leaving me free to feel a sense of both relief and loss. Even the priest seemed to slow down. His hands, rising in what was clearly intended to be a quick blessing of the Eucharist, seemed to tremble and then hold steady until that glorious voice faded away.

I looked around at the small group of women. And, for just that moment, I saw what held Sister Teresa Mary. This shabby room, right here, was the quiet heart of her religion, where belief and loyalty held true—a heart that didn’t obscure with pomp and pageantry, that didn’t rely on control and fear to give it strength.

I felt tears on my cheeks—tears of recognition of what faith could be—and, yes, relief. I could let go of it now. I could let go of it, but respect what it held for Sister Teresa Mary and the other women in this dilapidated excuse for a chapel. I didn’t have to feel thrown out; I could walk away. I could let go of it all now, truly.

I felt a gentle pressure and, looking down, saw Sister Teresa Mary’s hand cup mine. “You’re crying,” she murmured.

I smiled and said, “I’m just saying goodbye.”

Kathleen was waiting in the driveway when I came out of the building, waving to get my attention, pointing to her watch. Sister Teresa Mary and I shook hands quickly.

“Jessica—”

“You’re the last person on earth who calls me by my full first name,” I said.

She smiled. “And I will continue to do so,” she said. “Was this visit helpful for you?”

“Yes, it was.” I hesitated. “And if I am ever back in L.A.—”

“No promises necessary,” she said.

“—I will come again.” I turned and walked quickly to the car.