A week before the anniversary of the Sisters’ arrival, the priest invites the parishioners to the first annual recital and exhibit. “A momentous day for all of us at the St. Margaret Home, the culmination of our mission to educate our students in the arts—”
Whispering from the center church pews. Scoffing.
“In addition, of course,” the priest adds quickly, “in religion and scholarly subjects. One week from today, at seven, we welcome you to celebrate the achievements of our faculty and our students. Theater and dance and music. Paintings and tapestries. We’ll serve refreshments.”
More scoffing and whispering.
The Girls are sweating.
The priest is sweating. “Such scrumptious refreshments,” he says.
Sister Ida turns in her pew and glares at the scoffers and the whisperers. Raises her index finger to her lips and gathers herself for a fierce soprano that comes out as a hoarse whistle. “Ssshhhh … ssshhhh … ssshhhh…”
“Ssshhhh…” Sister Elinor adds her voice. A deep contralto. “Ssshhhh … ssshhhh…”
Silence from the center pews. But the Girls are giddy with adoration for Sister Elinor and Sister Ida who’ve taught them the range of the singing voice, let them play with extremes—screech and growl. For months the Sisters have rehearsed with them, studied and discussed, encouraged each Girl to choose her own area of performance.
Long before the curtain opens, the Girls take position onstage. During their rehearsals they’ve performed music and theater and poetry with joy, confidence, absorbing every new Girl into the recital. Everyone has a part. But now they hope the people of Nordstrand have forgotten about the recital. Hope the curtain will stay closed. The faint hum of an audience, and Sister Ida tugs at the curtain—
—opening it? already?—
No, finding the middle so she can peek through the gap. “We need a little more time.”
Sister Hildegunde rushes backstage, talks to the Sisters, then approaches the Girls. “My parents are excited about your recital. They’ve traveled a long way.” She nods to Sister Elinor.
Sister Elinor cringes. “Good news … we have a small audience tonight.”
“Such a relief.” Sister Ida laughs, but her eyes are angry. “That means fewer palpitations for all of us.”
The Sisters step away, and when the curtain opens, they already sit in the front row with other Sisters, the priest, and two old people the Girls don’t know, applauding and applauding, though nothing has happened yet. The Girls are ashamed, something the Sisters forgot to consider, ashamed to display their bodies onstage for outsiders to judge. Applause again when the recital ends, mild applause that matches their accomplishment.
But it’s not the end of the evening yet. The Sisters pack the uneaten refreshments into baskets and all set out with blankets and with lanterns for a feast on the dike. One Girl starts singing, then others. Two recite poetry. What has been excruciating onstage becomes playful, fluid. Lights and laughter bob toward the moon on their ascent.
Infants are born and Girls leave and new Girls and finches reproduce. Only a few Girls take their babies home with them, and the Sisters try to find families who’ll adopt the rest of the babies. Sadly, there are always more babies than families. When the nursery gets too crowded, the Sisters separate it into two: Little Nursery on the ground floor and Big Nursery on the second floor.
It’s not that easy to accommodate all the finches. The Sisters house them in the peacocks’ aviary; however, the gaps between the bars are too wide, and the Sisters visit the toy factory with drawings of cages, some small, others wide enough for several finches. In Sister Konstanze’s tapestry class, Girls braid long grasses into cocoons for inside the cages, and the Sisters trade finches with the people of Nordstrand for sourdough starter and geraniums, honey and eggs.
Storks build nests on steeples and chimneys while Sister Hildegunde confronts her dragon, mixing earth colors on her board—umber and sienna and ocher—layering and covering until her painting looks so muddy that it can be mistaken for an ancient canvas stashed for centuries in a bell tower. Or in a potato cellar, Sister Hildegunde thinks, and decides to stop painting.
She still teaches art but without passion. Her students believe it’s because they’ve offended Sister’s dragon and are cautious with her, shield her from seeing how bored they are with her art theories. Her confessions, too, are without passion—no spite or doubts—causing others to fear she’s fading altogether.
When the priest asks Sister Elinor for advice, she assures him the Sisters are watching closely.
“Her skin is paler than ever.”
“I know. And she is too thin.”
“She won’t look me in the eye.”
“She is not interested in you.”
His head snaps up.
“Or in me,” she says.
“Oh.”
“She is not interested in herself.”
It’s the priest’s idea to engage Sister Hildegunde in training St. Margaret Girls to become Kindermädchen—nursemaids.
“Once they leave here, there isn’t much for them. But if we qualify them as Kindermädchen it will guarantee good work for them,” he tells her.
She trains her pale eyes on his left shoulder. “More of a chance.”
“True. They’re learning important skills here. They already know how to care for babies. But think of their advantage, Sister Hildegunde—how many mothers-to-be get to practice on so many babies?”
“It is a unique situation. But there is risk in exposing our Girls to so many infants. What if they become enamored with them? What if they want to keep their own?”
“We must be more aware of that.”
“Work together to prevent it.”
He blushes. “We’ll draw up guidelines for a Praktikum. List everything the Girls already do—feeding children and bathing children and keeping children safe—”
“And learning…” Sister folds her hands in prayer. “As part of the Praktikum.”
He leans toward her. Smells incense and turpentine and something else he can’t name. “You mean instruct children in basic learning?”
“And in the arts. Music and painting and weaving. We’ll issue a certificate that qualifies each to take care of an entire family.” She fingers his sleeve just above his wrist.
He tries to exhale.
“I’ll write each a letter of recommendation,” she says eagerly.
“Brilliant!”
“On fancy parchment.”
“Embossed.”
“Too much to do for any Girl,” the Sisters say when Sister Hildegunde presents the plan.
“True,” she agrees. “That’s why our certificate will list what they’ve learned to do. Not what they do every day.”
“What certificate?”
“A certificate to make them more employable. After they complete a Praktikum.”
Three months later the priest writes to priests in other parishes to recommend the new Kindermädchen. “They are qualified to bathe children, feed children, swaddle children, protect children, instruct children in early learning and music and painting. Their skills will benefit the entire family, including cooking, canning, baking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and sewing. They have successfully completed our classes and Praktikum and have earned their certificate as Kindermädchen.”
For the Sisters the youngest Girls evoke their own girlhood. Awkward with new girth, they knock over candlesticks, say, or jugs of water. In the wide corridors they jump rope. When the Sisters forbid it, the Girls jump rope in the cellar of the church.
It’s for them the Sisters pray extra rosaries. Because their bodies are not grown enough to push a child into life.
One Tuesday at vespers, it comes to Sister Hildegunde that St. Margaret deserves more than one painting. A series, she thinks. Like Christ’s fourteen stations of the Kreuzweg that manifest his torment and death on the path to crucifixion and resurrection. St. Margaret certainly won’t need fourteen stations, just a few so that those Girls—children actually—will be motivated by the saint’s courage.
She stretches another canvas, smears the first layer of oils with her palette knife, and paints through the night with loose strokes, hands and mind flying till the violet blue before dawn reveals St. Margaret—pristine and tranquil—standing next to the dead dragon, gown spotless, one translucent foot on the scaly hide, not one gash, bite, wound, cut, slash, tear, or bruise on her.
When she sets the panels side by side, she decides there must be a transition between St. Margaret inside the live dragon and St. Margaret outside the dead dragon. The following night she works on the dragon vomiting up St. Margaret. But it’s all wrong. Too meticulous. Too fussy. By showing everything, she is limiting herself. Why paint each dragon toe and toenail when it is more compelling to suggest the talon? With her palette knife, Sister flies at the dragon—strains, punches, retreats, charges—and in scraping off what confines her, uncovers passion.
Of course the Sisters notice.
How can they not?
Something has come unstuck in Sister Hildegunde, turned luminous. Some say it happened overnight, others that it changed over decades. But they agree that Sister Hildegunde’s strokes have become translucent, raw canvas showing through the colors. With broad sweeps she captures the essence of the bishop’s mansion that must have been ready to claim her from the first day she walked toward it, levitating above the meadow in all its beauty and vulgarity; and she is still walking toward it—from every angle—humbled by how it gives itself to her, afloat on layers of mist, its windows shaped like peacock feathers, iridescent blues and purples, the feather-eye.
That glowing window becomes her signature: it may fill her canvas, appear as a tiny window high in a tree, or at the horizon.
Bishops fly up and settle on the roof. Inspired by half-human cries of peacocks, Sister Hildegunde applies the heads of bishops to the bodies of peacocks.
Poppies the size of pear trees grow around the mansion, giving shade to the Sisters who stroll beneath them while a bone-white little girl carries a baby up the front steps.
Frau Bauer says the red poppy trees remind her of the Black Forest.
“Everything reminds you of the Black Forest,” Sister Hildegunde says.
“Would you trade the painting?”
“For what?”
“For some three-legged milking stools. My son Köbi makes them from a design our ancestors brought from the Black Forest when they came here for a wedding and didn’t leave and—”
“We don’t need milking stools.”
“But they can be used for other activities, like … like weaving and painting and maybe even gardening if you like to sit while pulling weeds and they don’t wobble like most stools if you sit off-balance even if you are drunk—”
“That”—Sister’s pupils drift toward the bridge of her nose— “is not a problem for us.” She closes her pale eyelids and—with an expression of utmost concentration—directs her pupils to reverse their direction.
“I’m sorry, Sister Hildegunde. I didn’t mean you get drunk and I’m sorry if I tired you out—”
“How many milking stools?” Sister opens her eyes and the pupils are in the center again.
“Three?”
“Ten.”
“Oh—”
“For our older children. Even if they fidget, the stools won’t tip over.”
The next painting to sell is that of the bishops on the roof. Several people want it, but the blacksmith is the first to arrive with money. The other buyers ask Sister Hildegunde to make more paintings like that.
“A painting of the bishops hiding behind a chimney.”
“Or of the peacocks shoving the bishops off the roof.”
But Sister will not take assignments. Sister is in a hot rush to capture what comes to her in story-dreams so consuming that she can’t tell if she’s painting in her chapel alcove or in her imagination. Only when finished will she let others see her paintings, and when they tell her how magnificent they are, how transforming, it doesn’t matter to her because she’s already in a swift current toward another story-dream, and it’s the beauty of it that drives her, the not-knowing. To give rise to images that were not there before—she teaches her students—that’s what we must do. Not a serene process, it can’t be, she tells her students, and inspires each Girl to dare enter the swift current of not-knowing toward a vision of her own.