The Whore's Child

All that stuff with her father over the Christmas holiday? It was like we kept hearing what we already knew. And
then
he’s not there at the hospital when the mother dies. I’m confused.” He turned to me. “Aren’t you?”
    â€œMaybe somebody in the hospital contacted the convent,” another student suggested, letting me off the hook.
    â€œFor a dying prostitute in a charity ward? How would they even know where the daughter was unless the mother told them?”
    Everyone now turned to Sister Ursula, who under this barrage of questions seemed to have slipped into a trance.
    â€œI don’t care,” said another student, one of the loners in the back of the room. “I
like
this story. It feels real.”
    The fourth and final installment of Sister Ursula’s story was only six and a half pages long with regular margins, normal fonts and standard double-spacing.
    My life as a nun has been one of terrible hatred and bitterness,
it began. I considered writing,
You don’t mean
that,
in the margin, but refrained. Sister Ursula always meant what she said. It was now late November, and she hadn’t veered a centimeter from literal truth since Labor Day. These last, perfunctory pages summarized her remaining years in the convent until the school was partially destroyed by fire. It was then that Sister Ursula came to America. Still a relatively young woman, she nonetheless entertained no thoughts of leaving the order she had always despised. She had become, as Sister Veronique predicted, one of them.
    Once, in her late forties, she had returned to Belgium to search for her father, but she had little money and found no trace of him. It was as if, as Sister Veronique had always maintained, the man had never existed. When her funds were exhausted, Sister Ursula gave up and returned to America to live out what remained of her life among the other orphans of her order. This was her first college course, she explained, and she wanted the other students to know that she had enjoyed meeting them and reading their stories, and thanked them for helping her with hers. All of this was contained in the final paragraph of the story, an unconsciously postmodern gesture.
    â€œThis last part sort of fizzled out,” one student admitted, clearly pained to say this after its author had thanked her readers for their help. “But it’s one of the best stories we’ve read all semester.”
    â€œI liked it too,” said another, whose voice didn’t fall quite right.
    Everyone seemed to understand that there was more to say, but no one knew what it might be. Sister Ursula stopped taking notes and silence descended on the room. For some time I’d been watching a young woman who’d said next to nothing all term, but who wrote long, detailed reports on all the stories. She’d caught my attention now because her eyes were brimming with tears. I sent her an urgent telepathic plea. No. Please don’t.
    â€œBut the girl in the story never
got
it,” she protested.
    The other students, including Sister Ursula, all turned toward her. “Got what?”
    I confess, my own heart was in my throat.
    â€œAbout the father,” she said. “He was the mother’s pimp, right? Is there another explanation?”
    â€œSo,” Sister Ursula said sadly, “I was writing what you call a fictional story after all.”
    It was now mid-December, my grades were due, and I was puzzling over what to do about Sister Ursula’s. She had not turned in a final portfolio of revised work to be evaluated, nor had she returned to class after her final workshop, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t erase from my memory the image of the old nun that had haunted me for weeks, of her face coming apart in terrible recognition of the willful lie she’d told herself over a lifetime.
    So I’d decided to pay her a visit at the old house where she and five other elderly nuns had been quartered now for nearly a decade in anticipation of their order’s dissolution. I had brought the gift of a Christmas tree ornament, only to discover that they had no tree, unless you counted the nine-inch plastic one on the mantel in the living room. Talk about failures of imagination. In a house inhabited by infirm, elderly women, who did I suppose would have put up and decorated a tree?
    Sister Ursula seemed surprised to see me standing there on her sloping porch, but