Free At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Page B

the elderly, and then stumble upon the homeliest boy in your school weeping bitterly against his locker.
    I became a nun, she told her class every year until her last, when she could discover in her own explanation no reason to stay one, because a nun’s life is a prayer, and given the breadth of our sorrow, the relentlessness of our difficulties, prayer seemed the only solution.
    Now, watching the traffic and the broad white shoulders of the stone-robed Christ, she began to form her prayer for the girl’s family, for the young husband and the parents and the sister and the brothers, for the soul of the bride herself. “What a sad time to die,” she said and then added because she suddenly saw the cruelty in it (and understood that if she were to keep her faith in God she could not call that cruelty fate), “I’m sure she went right to heaven.”
    She looked at the child. “Tell your family that for me, won’t you? Tell them that God would have taken her right to heaven. I’m sure of it.”

    The girl nodded and whispered, “Yes, Sister,” although for her by then the story of her aunt’s death was no longer true. That it had actually happened was beside the point; it was no longer true as a real event because it had become for her instead a means by which to win the sister’s attention, to secure her love, and once the child recognized this (it happened in that moment when Sister Miriam had leaned down over her desk and taken her hand and said, “Open up those e ’s”), once she recognized that the story of her aunt’s death—not the fact but the story—could do this for her, it became something she could wield, something she could own and offer in a way that no real event would allow. It became pure story.
    â€œWell, she was a nun once, too,” the child added, smiling, feeling as grateful for the detail as if it had come to her through divine inspiration alone, as if she had, brilliantly, made it up in order to catch again and carefully secure Sister Miriam’s complete attention. The nun’s face showed some surprise, some trace of the effort it took her to reimagine the dead bride and the bereft husband (both older, surely, he balding), to replace her sister’s face in its white veil with her own.
    â€œWas she?” she said.
    Behind them the class was growing restless. The sound of small whispering voices moved toward them like a dangerous animal approaching through dry grass. In another minute Sister Miriam would have to look up over the girl’s head and say with her mouth hanging open in the street-tough, arrogant way she had learned as a teenager in Bensonhurst, “Uhh, excuse me? Excuse me, please. Don’t you people have work to do?”
    But for now Sister only watched the child as she spoke in a thrilled and breathless way that in other circumstance would have marked her a liar. “It was a long, long time ago. She got
sick or something, so she couldn’t be a nun anymore. She had to leave.”
    For now, Sister Miriam Joseph, in reimagining the tragedy, found herself turning over and over again each of the confounded hopes, the dashed expectations of this unknown woman’s life: the joy of submission when her vocation struck her as inevitable and clear, the realization of her worst fear when something as mundane, as preordained, as illness forced her to leave religious life; the redemption, some years later, that secular love would have offered: not God and all mankind to serve (this is better) but a husband and perhaps a child or two (this is good)—what is good, only good, at her age perhaps having become far preferable to what was both impossible and better. And then that snatched from her too, four days after she’d been a bride, slept with the man she loved for the first time, begun her life again.
    Sister looked up over the child’s neat brown hair, the pale line of her scalp,