Free At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Page A

HYPOCRISY on the one cleared board.
    Maryanne loved her immediately, as did six or seven of the other little girls in the class, but unlike them her love did not imply emulation. While the other little girls told themselves I will be a nun, I will be a nun, as Sister leaned over them at their desks, brushing their arms with her robes, placing her long, thin hand with its single gold band on their desks, Maryanne whispered instead, “I have the saddest thing in the world to tell you.”
    Her intention was not to emulate but to charm, to be admitted into the young woman’s life as no other student or friend or other nun had ever been, to become for Sister Miriam Joseph the very wonder that the nun was for her.
    Sister took the thin fountain pen from the girl’s hand—the first lesson of the year had been, had always been, in penmanship—capped it and placed it in the small well on the desk. She took her hand, eyes and only slightly raised heads following them, and led her to the corner between the window and
the desk. She crouched down before the child. Maryanne could see the way the starched white crown of her habit bit into her forehead, pressing against her brows, and later would see when Sister pushed it back with her thumbs how the edge of it had turned her dark skin red. “What is it, little one?” she whispered. There was gold in her dark irises.
    Maryanne told the story as only a child would: “My aunt got married this summer and four days later she died,” but it was story enough to make Sister Miriam Joseph put a hand to her heart. “Ah,” she said as if she had indeed felt some pain. “I’m so sorry.” Her own sister, more beautiful than she, had been married that summer as well and so it was natural that she imagined a slim young bride in a white dress and lace mantilla, white lace covering the backs of her hands.
    â€œWas it an accident?” the nun asked and Maryanne shook her head. She could only repeat what she had been told. “Something burst inside her.”
    Sister Miriam touched the child’s arm and looked to her right, to the black perforations of the radiator cover that ran the length of the wall under the window, and then across the black sill to the hedge and the lawn and the white statue of Christ with his robed arms extended toward the traffic and his back to the school.
    Some months from now, she will tell her class why she entered the convent. On their desks in front of them they will have their catechisms opened to the chapter on Holy Orders, to a two-panel illustration, one of a woman serving her family their dinner—“This is good” printed beneath—and the other of a nun receiving Communion from a priest: “This is better.” She disliked the illustration and in order to offset it told her class every year that as a little girl she had liked parties and playing with dolls and pretending to be a bride. In high school she’d gone to eleven different proms and on the night before
she left for the convent she kissed her current boyfriend goodbye and told him, “That’s it for me. It’s been fun.” She loved her family—three brothers and two sisters, Italian and Irish, everybody close—and became a nun not because she thought this was good but this is better (her long finger on the open page) but because despite her own happiness and good fortune she was aware of the fact that the world was littered with pain, unbearable pain, pain that took so many forms it seemed impossible to stop. Cure polio, she said, her class of astonished fourth-graders gazing up openmouthed as her voice grew louder, and you’ve got cancer. Cure cancer and a plane crashes. Feed the hungry—she might have gone on were it not for their small, astonished faces—and an earthquake topples their city. Spend an hour every day, your high-school lunch hour, for instance, visiting the sick, comforting