The Whore's Child

she gradually came to accept the inevitability of Sister Veronique’s cruel prophecy. She would become one of those whom she detested. Ironically, this fate was hastened by the prophet’s untimely death when she was kicked by a horse, not in the head as Sister Ursula had prayed, but in the chest, causing severe internal hemorrhaging and creating an opening in the stable. During her long sojourn at the convent, Sister Ursula had learned to prefer the company of animals to that of humans, and so at the age of sixteen, already a large, full woman like her mother, she became herself a bride of Christ.
    Sister Ursula’s chronicle of the years following her vows, largely a description of her duties in the stable, featured several brief recollections of the single week she’d spent at home in the city during the Christmas holiday of that first year she entered the convent school. During that holiday she’d seen very little of her mother—a relief, since Sister Ursula dreaded the heat of her mother’s embrace and the cloying stench of her whore’s perfume. Rather, her beloved father took her with him on his rounds, placing her on a convenient bench outside the dark buildings he entered, telling her how long he would be, how high a number she would have to count to before he would return. Only a few times did she have to count higher. “Did you find work, Father?” she asked each time he reappeared. It seemed to Sister Ursula that in buildings as large and dark as the ones he entered, with so many other men entering and exiting, there should have been work in one of them, but there was none. Still, that they were together was joy enough. Her father took her to the wharf to see the boats, to a small carnival where a man her father knew let her ride a pony for free and finally to a bitter cold picnic in the country where they ate warm bread and cheese. At the end of each of these excursions her father promised again that she would not have to remain much longer in the convent school, that another Christmas would find them together.
    The installment ended with Sister Ursula taking her final vows in the same chapel that for years had been her refuge from the taunts of children for whom she would always be the whore’s child. There, at the very altar of God, Sister Ursula, like a reluctant bride at an arranged marriage, indulged her fantasy of rescue right up to the last moment. When asked to proclaim her irrevocable devotion to God and the one true Church, she paused and turned toward the side door of the chapel, the one she’d always imagined her father would throw open, and willed her father’s shadow to emerge from the blinding light and scatter these useless women and hateful children before him.
    But the door remained shut, the chapel dark except for the flickering of a hundred candles, and so Sister Ursula became a bride.
    â€œIsn’t there a lot of misogyny in this story?” observed a male student who I happened to know was taking a course with the English department’s sole radical feminist, and was therefore alert to all of misogyny’s insidious manifestations. By stating this opinion in the form of a question, perhaps he was indicating that the distrust and even hatred of women evident in Sister Ursula’s memoir might be okay in this instance because the author was, sort of, a woman.
    At any rate, he was right to be cautious. What would you expect, a chorus of his female classmates sang out. The whole thing takes place in a girls’ school. There were only two men in the story and one was Jesus, so the statistical sample was bound to be skewed. No, read correctly, Sister Ursula was clearly a feminist.
    â€œI
would
like to see more of the mother, though,” one young woman conceded. “It was a major cop-out for her to die before they could get to the hospital.”
    â€œYou wanted a deathbed scene?” said another. “Wouldn’t that be sort of melodramatic?”
    Here the discussion faltered. Melodrama was a bad thing, almost as bad as misogyny.
    â€œWhy was the daughter sent for?” wondered someone else. “If the mother didn’t love her, why send for her?”
    â€œMaybe the father sent for her?”
    â€œThen why wasn’t he there himself?”
    â€œI know I was the one,” interrupted another, “who wanted to see more of the father after the last submission, but now I think I was wrong.