The Whore's Child

powers of imagination. Rather, what frightened her was the possibility that if she was taken from the convent school, her father no longer would know where to find her when the time came. This terrible fear she kept to herself. She and Sister Veronique did not speak a word on the long journey to the city.
    Late that evening they arrived at a hospital and were taken to the charity ward, only to learn that Sister Ursula’s mother had expired just after they had left the convent that morning. A nun dressed all in white informed Sister Veronique that it would be far better for the child not to see the deceased, and a look passed between them. All that was left by way of a keepsake was a brittle, curling, scallop-edged photograph, which the white nun gave to Sister Ursula, who had offered no reaction to the news that her mother was dead. Since arriving at the hospital, Sister Ursula had lapsed into a state of paralytic fear that it was her father who had fallen ill there. Instead, it seemed at least one of her prayers had been answered: her father was free.
    But where was he? When she summoned the courage to ask, the two nuns exchanged another glance, in which it was plain that the white nun shared Sister Veronique’s belief that she had no father, and Sister Ursula saw, too, that it would be useless for her, a child, to try to convince the white nun otherwise. Her fury supported her during their train ride, but then, when the convent came into view from the carriage, Sister Ursula broke down and began to sob. To her surprise, if not comfort, Sister Veronique placed a rough, callused hand on her shoulder and said softly, “Never mind, child. You will become one of us now.” In response Sister Ursula slid as far away from the old nun as she could and sobbed even harder, knowing it must be true.
    â€œAre we ever going to meet the father?” one student wanted to know. “I mean, she yearns for him, and he gets compared to Christ, but we never see him directly. We’re, like,
told
how to feel about him. If he doesn’t ever show up, I’m going to feel cheated.”
    Sister Ursula dutifully noted this criticism, but you had only to look at the old woman to know that the father was not going to show up. Anybody who felt cheated by this could just join the club.
    The day after Sister Ursula’s second workshop, my doorbell rang at seven-thirty in the morning. I struggled out of bed, put on a robe and went to the door. Sister Ursula stood on the porch, clearly agitated. The forlorn station wagon idled at the curb with its full cargo of curious, myopic nuns, returning, I guessed, from morning Mass. The yard was strewn with dry, unraked November leaves, several of which had attached themselves to the bottom of Sister Ursula’s flowing habit.
    â€œMust he be in the story? Must he return?” Sister Ursula wanted to know. As badly as she had wanted her father to appear in life, she needed, for some reason, to exclude him from the narrative version.
    â€œHe’s already
in
the story,” I pointed out, cinching my robe tightly at the waist.
    â€œBut I never saw him after she died. This is what my story is about.”
    â€œHow about a flashback?” I suggested. “You mentioned there was one Christmas holiday . . .”
    But she was no longer listening. Her eyes, slate gray, had gone hard. “She died of syphilis.”
    I nodded, feeling something harden in me too. Behind me I heard the bathroom door open and close, and I thought I saw Sister Ursula’s gaze flicker for an instant. She might have caught a glimpse of Jane, the woman I was involved with, and I found myself hoping she had.
    â€œMy father’s heart was broken.”
    â€œHow do you know that, if you never saw him again?”
    â€œHe loved her,” she explained. “She was his ruin.”
    It was my hatred that drew me deeper into the Church,
began Sister Ursula’s third installment, the words cramped even more tightly on exactly twenty-five pages, and this elicited my now standard comment in the margin. As a writer of opening sentences, Sister Ursula was without peer among my students.
    In the months following her mother’s death, an explanation had occurred to Sister Ursula. Her father, most likely, had booked passage to America to search for work. Such journeys, she knew, were fraught with unimaginable peril, and perhaps he now lay at the bottom of the ocean. So it was that