Free God Speed the Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Jerome Ross

close to her as another woman might a lover’s hand to her breast. She put it down carefully, removed the cincture, and unfastened the long grey robe. She tried desperately to think herself back in the cell at Ste. Geneviève.
    Not until she had put on the clothes of the other woman did she remove the coif exposing her head in what seemed the ultimate nakedness. She huddled in the corner, sitting on the down-turned bucket, her hands covering her head. Sister Agathe came for her clothes and took them. Only once did Gabrielle look to the others, hearing the snip of the scissors and Rachel’s protest. She remembered what might well have been her own last vanity, her long, dark hair. She yearned for it now as she had not since the first realization that it was gone forever if her vocation was a true one.
    When the others had left—and they went without speaking to her—she came out to where the candle was burning. Another candle lay beside the glass in which it stood on the table. She looked down at the dark skirt which came to just below her knees, at the red silk blouse beneath which she could see the shape of her breasts, at her arms bare from the elbows, then down at the shoes, pumps with silver buckles. She stooped down and removed the shoes, setting them side by side beneath the table. She sat at the table and stared at the flickering candle. When she stared long enough it became a golden cross sometimes wavering in the draft, Christ stumbling on the way to Calvary. She put her arms on the table and her forehead on her arm and closed her eyes. She could see the afterglow of the candle and remembered the patterns and colors she had wrought from the darkness as a child by pressing her eyes tightly closed. She remembered the game she had played with her sister: “I see.” I see lilac blossoms…I see a kitten, his fur all ruffled…He has a thousand eyes…It’s a peacock’s feather…It’s the bottom of the pond where the frogs’ eggs are…It’s God’s eyes everywhere…
    Marc returned. “They are gone,” he said when he had closed the door. “Do you know how far it is to the hospital?”
    She could not speak at first. She shook her head and when he came near and looked at her she covered her head with her hands.
    He crossed the room to the bedframe where his and Rachel’s valise was open, and took from it the blue scarf. He brought it to the novice. She put it around her head and knotted it under her chin.
    “Thank you, monsieur.”
    “My name is Marc—though what it will be tomorrow, God knows.”
    “I am Sister Gabrielle.”
    “Are you hungry…Sister?”
    “No, thank you.”
    “Sleepy?”
    “No.”
    She would not look at him. “Are you afraid?”
    “A little, I think.”
    “Of me?”
    She did not answer directly. “I’ve never been afraid this way before, so I don’t know.”
    He sat down at the table as far from her as possible and turned the chair so that he would not be facing her. He tried to think of things to say that might make his presence easier to her—and hers more real to him. He had known many waking nightmares, but none so unreal as seeing this strange girl in the clothes of the woman he had known as he had known no other woman. He said: “It has been so long since I was not afraid I’ve forgotten what that was like.”
    Gabrielle stared at her hands. They looked large and raw without the sleeves coming down to cover the big-boned wrists, and the nails were dirty. She hid them against her breast, folding her arms.
    “Is it a good hospital?” Marc asked.
    “I don’t know. I don’t seem to know anything now.”
    “Enough. You knew about this place, and to come back and help us when no one else could.”
    “I didn’t know. I prayed.”
    “It is a way of knowing,” Marc said.
    He got up and went to where the hair he had cut from Rachel’s head was lying heaped on his white handkerchief, his only clean one. “There is a ritual in Orthodoxy—in Jewish tradition—in