A Dissembler
The Oldsmobile left the grounds of the Sinsinawa Mother House, and turned onto County Z.
Sister Eunice looked out at the countryside. Here, near the Mother House, the farmland was rich and flat. The farms had big houses. New barns. Fences crisp and well-maintained. Her own mother, who had been born on a hilly farm near here, a hard place, beautiful but rocky, had always resented the farmers whose great-grandparents had been lucky enough to claim this land. “Those rich people,” her mother would say. Sister Eunice wondered what they were like now, these prosperous Wisconsin farmers. Were they rich like the Italian rich? Of course not. Rich like the Catholic families of Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston who sent their daughters to study in Florence? Perhaps.
After a moment, she turned from the countryside and looked down at her satchel, a simple leather book bag. In Florence, the bag was considered so plain that even when she wasn’t wearing her habit it marked her as a blue-stocking, an anti-materialist. Her students at the Villa, serious young women who nonetheless aspired to be alla moda, wouldn’t be caught dead with a satchel like this. But last night, at the family gathering after the burial, one of her nieces, the daughter of her second-youngest sister, had gone on and on about how cool and cute the satchel was, how she just had to have one. Sister Eunice had allowed as to how it might look good with blue jeans. Everyone had laughed, but then Nora Eunice had mentioned how Big Nora would have enjoyed that moment, and they all fell silent.
Sister Eunice opened the satchel and took out a book. So this is it, she thought, the best seller of which I am supposedly the author. Warrior, Daughter, Saint: The Story of St. Matilda of Canossa, by Sister Martin de Porres, O.P. She turned the book over in her hands, without opening it. This copy had been loaned to her by Sister Inez, for the day. Sister Inez was the only novice in the Mother House, and a late vocation at that. The girl must be almost thirty. No wonder the Mother Superior was worried about the future. There were still legions of Sinsinawa Dominicans in Catholic schools across the Midwest, but who would replace them?
She had told Sister Inez that she didn’t have a copy of the book with her, alluding, in general terms, to the difficulties of packing for a transatlantic flight. That was all. Sister Inez had run to fetch the book, beaming with pride as she returned. “The Mother Superior lets me keep it, not as a personal possession, of course, it belongs to the community, but... on the shelf in my room.”
“I’ll treat it well,” Sister Eunice had said.
As she took the book from the admiring novice, she had felt a disapproving presence: another novice, the 18-year-old Eunice Larkin, who not far from that spot—hard to tell exactly where, the Mother House had been completely rebuilt—dedicated her body and soul to a life of uncompromising standards.
“You have become a dissembler,” her disappointed younger self had whispered. “Nothing you say, in itself, is untrue, but all your statements conspire, if not to deceive, then to preserve a false belief in the mind of Sister Inez.”
“Well, dear, of course I dissemble,” Sister Eunice had replied, or would have replied, if her accuser had been substantial, anything more than a vague if sudden recollection, a passing chill. “A woman must dissemble if she is to do anything in this world. I could not have survived the war if I had spoken out loud to any man in uniform, nor built a college if I had told every monsignor every detail of our plans. I’m afraid, dear, that you will soon learn to choose, and choose carefully, those to whom you reveal the whole truth.”
The Oldsmobile turned on to Highway 51, and the rich flat land gave way to steep valleys as they approached the Mississippi. Something to do with the glaciers, she remembered, where they went, or didn’t go. The sides of the valleys were all covered now with young trees—not that young, but younger at any rate than herself. She thought again of that first journey, the other way, from Dubuque to Sinsinawa, in her uncle’s Model A. Almost fifty years ago.
“What happened here, Joseph?” she asked.
“What’s that, Sister?”
“When I was young,” she said, “this land was full of farms.”
“I don’t know, Sister. Tractors, I suppose.”
And Joseph explained how you could plow these slopes with a horse, but not a tractor. It would tip over, he added, in case she didn’t get the point.
She thanked Joseph, and looked back down at the book. She had promised Sister Inez an autograph—for the community, of course. That would be another level of falsehood—to autograph a book she had not written.
Unless it turned out that she had, in fact, written it....
Next episode: Privacy in the Wayback Seat
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