The Whore's Child

good things for stories to do. On the other hand, the old nun’s idiom was imperfect, her style stiff and old-fashioned, and the story seemed to be moving forward without exactly getting anywhere. It reminded them of stories they’d heard other elderly people tell, tales that even the tellers eventually managed to forget the point of, narratives that would gradually peter out with the weak insistence that all these events really did happen. “It’s a victim story,” one student recognized. “The character is being acted on by outside forces, but she has no choices, which means there can be no consequences to anything she does. If she doesn’t participate in her own destiny, where’s the story?”
    Not having taken the beginning and intermediate courses, Sister Ursula was much enlightened by these unanticipated critiques, and she took feverish notes on everything that was said. “I liked it, though,” added the student who’d identified it as a victim story. “It’s different.” By which he seemed to mean that Sister Ursula herself was different.
    The old nun stopped by my office the day after, and it was clear she was still mulling the workshop over. “To be so much . . . a victim,” she said, searching for the right words, “it is not good?”
    â€œNo,” I smiled. Not in stories, not in life, I was about to add, until I remembered that Sister Ursula still wasn’t making this distinction, and my doing so would probably confuse her further. “But maybe in the next installment?” I suggested.
    She looked at me hopefully.
    â€œMaybe your character will have some choices of her own as your story continues?” I prodded.
    Sister Ursula considered this possibility for a long time, and I could tell by looking at her that the past wasn’t nearly as flexible as she might have wished.
    She was about to leave when she noticed the photograph of my daughter that I keep on my desk. “Your little girl,” she said, “is a great beauty?”
    â€œYes,” I said, indicating that it was okay to pick up the photo if she wanted to.
    â€œSometimes I see her when I am driving by,” she explained. When I didn’t say anything, she added, “Sometimes I don’t see her anymore?”
    â€œShe and her mother are gone now,” I explained, the sentence feeling syntactically strange, as if English were my second language, too. “They’re living in another state.”
    Sister Ursula nodded uncertainly, as if deliberating whether “state” meant a condition or a place, then said, “She will return to this state?”
    It was my turn to nod. “I hope so, Sister.”
    And so I became a Catholic,
began the second installment of Sister Ursula’s story, and again I scribbled
nice opening
in the left margin before hunkering down. I’d had students like Sister Ursula before, and they’d inspired the strictly enforced twenty-five page limit in all my work-shops. I noted that for this second submission she had narrowed her margins, fiddled with the font, wedging the letters closer together. The spacing didn’t look quite double, maybe 1.7. Venial sins.
    Having had no religious training prior to entering the convent, Sister Ursula was for some time unable to recite prayers with the other children, further evidence, if any were needed, of the moral depravity inherent to being the offspring of a whore. She discovered it was not an easy task, learning prayers to the cadence of public ridicule, but learn them she did, and though the rote recitation was, in the beginning, a torment, it eventually became a comfort. Most of the prayers she fought to memorize were adamant about the existence of a God who, at least in the person of the crucified Christ, was infinitely more loving and understanding and forgiving than the women He’d led to the altar as His brides.
    To be loved and understood and forgiven seemed to Sister Ursula the ultimate indulgence, and thus she became a denizen of the convent chapel, retreating there at every opportunity from the taunts and jeers of the other children and the constant crowlike reprimands of the nuns. She liked the smell of the place—damp and cool and clean—especially when she had it to herself, when it wasn’t filled with the bodies of stale old nuns and sweaty children. Often she could hide in the chapel for an hour or more before