Free Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell by Michael Conniff Page B

young, I tell Jane. You’re one of them. You understand them. And the board will like you. “I have no idea what to do,” Jane says. Neither did I, I say, and just look at me.
     
March 24, 1968
    I spend time with Jane each day, more time every day, to go over the recruits and just to talk. Jane touches you when she talks. When she touches me I tingle. Then I make sure to touch her back.
     
March 27, 1968
    Charles Evans calls. “A warning,” he says. “The board is on the warpath over the recruits, or the lack thereof.” It’s all been taken care of, I say.
     
    April 16, 1968
    Martin Luther King was shot dead coming out of a cheap motel room. There are riots in all the cities. The real world is coming apart at the seams.
     
    May 1, 1968
    Jane is starting to fly without wings. She is already ramping up our recruits. Nancy is no longer the only thing on her mind.
     
May 13, 1968
    Jane and I have drinks in my room almost every night now. Tonight she crossed her legs over mine and she didn’t mind as I left my hands on her soft thighs. I practice touching her, her arms and her elbows, her back and her hips, even the underneath part of her breasts furthest from the nipple. I always stay close to her so that she can touch me back.
     
June 28, 1968
    Bobby Kennedy was shot dead in California. The whole world has gone mad.
     
    June 29, 1968
    Jane makes a recruiting trip, criss-crossing the country, going everywhere, but coming nowhere near Nancy in the Northwest.
     
July 21, 1968
    Jane and I drink to the incoming recruits and I watch her get drunk. I walk her to her room and she holds me tight, like a child afraid of the dark. “I love you, Mother Superior,” she says. “You been so good to me.” Call me Eleanor, I say.
     
July 27, 1968
    Jane’s first presentation to the board. She lights up, like she’s been doing it her whole life. She stands by a map and sticks pinpricks into cities where she has been. Our numbers spike up everywhere, bless her, except in the Northwest, where I won’t let her go. “Sister Jane is too young,” the Bishop tells me over a cocktail. “But I like that girl. We need more of her kind.”
     
August 9, 1968
    I invite Jane to Southampton for a reunion of sorts, without dear Will, without the wretched Tom. Becca brings her camera to take pictures of Diana and G for a spread in Imagine about managing your life with children. Luigi is spending every waking moment on the beach with his new homosexual friends, but when he comes back to the house he seems different, happy, as if he no longer needs to fight what he feels. He is sweet with G, chasing him behind the hedges, babbling in Italian, then building their dream house together on the porch with blocks. Jane skims along the water, skipping in the soft sand as the waves break against her feet and wash back into the sea.
     
August 10, 1968
    Becca tells me that thanks to her camera she is as happy as she has ever been. “I look through the camera,” Becca says, “and what I see is me.”
     
August 11, 1968
    Time for Jane and me to go back to the Convent to prepare for the arrival of the young girls with faith. Little G runs and jumps and hugs Jane at the neck, hanging like a crab. Becca and Diana give her kisses and Jane kisses them back. Jane drives all the way back. I can’t take my eyes off of her. “What?” she wonders.
     
September 2, 1968
    The recruits have landed full force at the Convent and Jane is an ordained hero in the Order. She takes our message and turns it around so that God still makes sense in a world where God is dead. She convinces the recruits that to be a nun is to believe in something higher, something better and deeper, to drop in and to drop out all at once. The young girls swallow it whole.
     
September 12, 1968
    Jane and I celebrate the successful indoctrination with champagne. “It’s really brainwashing, isn’t it?” Jane says. Absolutely, I say. I get her so drunk I have to help her into bed.