"Anyway,” Hildy said, “if God wanted that he could do it himself, and he doesn't, so he doesn't want to.” Hildy thought it was silly to imagine God as a sort of busybody continually interfering in the quotidian: the natural order of rules and their consequences had been set up at the beginning, and they functioned now by themselves, accessible to any thinking person of good will. Mary might appear to children here and there with messages, for reasons of her own, but God didn't bother with those sorts of miracles. What Hildy most appreciated about God the Father was his clear if impersonal realism. It's what she most appreciated in her own father too.
Living far from institutional checks, Sam Oliphant had grown heterodox, Pelagian; unwittingly he fell into the heretical doctrine of two churches, one for children and the ignorant, in which all the stories were true as given, unquestionable; and another for the smart, who knew better. Like an eighteenth-century deist, Sam took it that his ground of faith was simply the conclusions of reason, and every layer of liturgy or dogma or ritual compliance laid over that ground was made acceptable, if not actually justifiable, by the initial irreducible sensibleness. You met all your varied obligations in the big church to the letter, but you believed only what reason agreed to; in fact if reason demanded it, then it was dogma. The world itself was the product of reason, of evolution progressing, making sense, of people getting smarter and seeing the sense the world made. The sense the world made was truth; God had made it, and His Church wasn't going to contradict it. Like fraternity secrets or team mascots, the absurdities of faith didn't bother Sam, because this was his side, they were his absurdities.
"Daddy, did you ever baptize anybody?"
"Not that I remember."
"Well because Sister said that everybody and especially doctors should know how to baptize somebody, in case you find somebody dying who wants to be baptized. Especially doctors."
"In case I'm about to lose one, huh? I should get them to heaven if I can't keep ‘em on earth."
"You don't need a priest or holy water. You just do it."
"What if you don't have any water?"
"It has to be
mostly
water. You could use muddy water."
"
Mostly water!
You know your own body is mostly water? Sixty-five percent. A
woodchuck
is mostly water! Am I allowed to baptize people by hitting them with a woodchuck?"
"Daddy!"
In the fights he liked to pick with his children or with Winnie over religious punctilio (to which he brought a gleeful sophistry), Sam seemed often to be actually addressing someone else, or intending someone else to overhear and be amused, some other version of himself; he said things the child couldn't be expected to get or even to notice were supposed to be funny. Pierce could sometimes tell when he did it to Warren, so he could assume Sam was doing it to him as well, when he couldn't tell.
Irony doesn't come naturally to children; brutal sarcasm ("
Now
are you satisfied?") they can recognize and deplore, but—especially in religion—they are dogmatists, not ironists; Sam's teasing left them in difficulties he seemed not to feel, and mortified. They all caught on to the trick eventually, and made it their own, as they did Sam's heresy of Two Churches, which came to seem only common sense to them; but it generated within them a kind of double life, lived differently by each of them. It was a harsh training, and Hildy only survived it in the end by reversing the terms, Sam's terms, which were outward observance ironized by inward demur: Hildy's outward jokey familiarity would approach contempt, and get her in some hot water with her Order and its superiors, but it expressed an inward allegiance deeper than any words.
Sister Mary Philomel's was a different deity from Sam's, more manifold and perplexing, more nearby too.
"Children,” she said to them. “In the little garden in the middle of the hospital, right in the middle of the garden where the pathways cross, there is a birdbath, do you know? And right in the middle of that birdbath there is a silver ball. Isn't there?"
"Yes'ster."
"Now if you look into that silver ball you see that it reflects everything at once, up, down, below, above, near, far. Doesn't it?"
"Yes'ster."
"Yes. You can see the walls curving all around and every window and even yourself sitting there looking in. And when I sit and look into that ball I think, That is what the eye of God is like, looking at everything at once."
Under Sister Mary Philomel's tutelage the Oliphant kids and Pierce were enmeshed again in the old net of observances and scruples, and provided again with the ritual objects, scapulars, holy cards, Miraculous Medals, which under Miss Martha they had been without. Now for their parents’ birthdays or for Thanksgiving or Christmas gifts they were each to prepare a Spiritual Bouquet: a cluster of prayers said, Masses heard, Communions taken, rosaries told—even tiny prayers whispered throughout the day, scattered in the Bouquet like baby's-breath, Ejaculations.
"Jesus Mary and Joseph!” said Hildy. “That's an Ejaculation."
"Or Oh my God!” said Sam, whom she was instructing in this prayer type, not understanding why he had laughed at her offering of One Thousand Ejaculations.
"You can make Ejaculations all day long,” she said. “Wherever you are."
"Yes,” said Sam, still laughing. “I see."
Sister Mary Philomel was their daily instructrix in such pieties; she was the great pythoness of their cult, the guardian of the gate into the land of the dead: it was she who taught them what prayers the Church had determined would, if said at Mass on All Souls’ Day, free a soul from its salutary torments in Purgatory and get it (still sore and trembling) right into Heaven; she who all on her own gathered them up on that November morning, next day after All Saints', bitter damp day with the smell of coal fires and dung sharp in the air, and got them to church to do the work. Two, four, six souls released by their prayers, and Hildy wanted to stay longer and do more, imagining the grateful dead freed by the prayers of conscientious children like herself worldwide, winging upward by tens and hundreds like autumn blackbirds rising to migrate.
It was she also who convinced Pierce (and Winnie and Sam too) that Pierce was fit to take up liturgical duties himself; she touched his vanity and his taste for the hieratic as well as his good nature and willingness to assent, and she brought him to Father Midnight to be instructed. Now (she said) it would be easy for him to make a daily Communion; now he could begin accumulating the special benefits that accrue to those who volunteer in God's service. Joe Boyd snorted, amazed that Pierce would volunteer for duties he could have wriggled out of, but Pierce didn't mind; he learned his lines by rote, he took his place beyond the altar rail with Father Midnight. And long after, when the words he had committed to memory were no longer said anywhere, not anyway in the dead language Pierce had learned them in, they would now and then return spontaneously to him like the jingles of old ads, heard by an inner ear in the mnemonic rhythms he had bent them into, their absurd dago-American pronunciation.
Soosheepiat Dominus sacrafeechium d'manibus tooies.
Touching him with an inexplicable poignancy in the street or on the stair.
In some ways dealing with Sister Mary Philomel was like dealing with a smart and powerful child, a Warren able to make a grownup's case for his fear of the dark or his theory that badguys came into his room at night while he was asleep and messed up his things. If Sister Mary Philomel opened a closet door in search of her umbrella and found it not there, and then not much later (after asking God's help in finding it) she opened the same closet again and there it was, her first thought was not that she had overlooked it the first time. Saints and angels, when compelled by the proper invocations, interceded on the petitioner's behalf with the remoter divine figures, who then altered the weather or the natural order, sped mailmen on their way, and of course healed the sick and saved the lost or the endangered.
The Oliphant children weren't equipped to argue with claims which Sister Mary Philomel had after all a large authority to make. She told them Jesus had promised: if you asked it would be given to you, period. If you asked for bread, God wouldn't give you a stone.
"But if you ask for a real gun or a hundred pounds of candy you won't get it,” Hildy warned Warren and the others after school. “God won't give you what's not good for you. Just try it."
Which cut out almost everything you might want to apply for, especially since the decision about whether the item was or wasn't good for you wasn't yours to make: it never was. And yet His promises remained; Sister Mary Philomel took as given that they were to be acted on, and when she prayed for His aid with the intercession of His Saints it wasn't in the self-mocking way that Winnie sang out:
Dear St. Anthony
Please find my keys for me
Or I won't get to the grocer-ee.
So they all wore their itchy and unmanageable phylacteries and their tin medals on ten-cent beaded chains (Where did she get this stuff, Pierce later wondered, did she spend her own pin money on it or did it just come naturally out of her concealed and bottomless pockets?), and for a week Pierce worked on believing that a dim ectoplasmic glow somehow generated in the corner of his room was a vision of the Virgin, or maybe the Holy Ghost, come to answer his prayer that Joe Boyd quit trying to pick fights with him; and Hildy learned to ask her Guardian Angel to wake her up in the morning so that she would have time to bathe and dress more carefully than she was accustomed to, and in a way more pleasing to Sister: and it worked. Sam thought that was funny too.
It wasn't unlike the commitments of make-believe: it required the same division into a proposing and an accepting self, the same quick discarding of unrewarding instances, the same communal intensity of effort. It was like wishing, too, the objects more restricted, but requiring the same surrender to desire, the willingness to accept provisionally (for as long anyway as the wish, or the prayer, filled up the heart) the primacy of desire over common reality. Sister Mary Philomel called it Faith.
From the beginning she felt a special responsibility had been placed on her for these smart wild children. Miss Martha had come at nine and left at noon, having handed out assignments she might or might not remember to ask for next day. Sister Mary Philomel left at noon, a dark frigate under sail, walking down the hill toward the hospital and her lunch; and then at two, to the children's horror, she sailed back again, her arms full of papers and projects, to pester her charges for an indeterminate length of the afternoon. She had no real commission for this; she said she was there only to “tidy up” in the schoolroom and prepare for the next day (prepare what?), but the very ambiguity of her afternoon presence within the compound gave her scope Miss Martha would not have dared take. There were plenty of things active children could be set to doing instead of watching Garry Moore on television.
What Sister Mary Philomel couldn't know was that her fuss-budgeting disrupted more than idleness. The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black-shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven. His faith was not as strong as hers.
When he came later on in life to study history, unavoidably learning something of the history of the Church in which he had been raised, Pierce would experience a definite but unnameable thrill when (usually by chance) he would happen upon one of his own old beliefs just coming into being, some practice or complication of ritual which he had used to assume was somehow pre-existent, eternal, given: Ember Days and Rogation Days, feasts and fasts and the reasons for them, the divisions of the next world and its inhabitants. The cult of the Sacred Heart (gruesome Jesus with effulgent exposed organ wrapped in thorns) swept the Church in the early nineteenth century; the choirs of the angels (Thrones Powers Virtues Dominations and the rest) came into being in the late second. It was a pleasure like and unlike the pleasure of opening an old school reader
(Roads and Highways)
and finding it full of tales of dirigibles and Pullman cars, organ-grinders and circus-wagons, Arbor Day and Armistice Day: what he had then taken for the whole great world shown to be only a transverse section, worldwide maybe but decade-thin, and gone by, now, along with those who had issued it.
"What would you think, children,” asked Sister Mary Philomel, “if a rich man at dinner heard of a beggar at his door, who had nothing, and sent out to the beggar some food? That would be good of him, wouldn't it? And what if this rich man sent the poor beggar his own dinner? Wouldn't you think he was a good man? And children what if the man sent the beggar
his own arm to eat?
That would be wonderful charity, wouldn't it? Well Jesus gives us not only His arm or just a part of Him for us to eat but His whole Body. Now think of that.” And they did think of it, only a little horror-struck, unaware that (as Pierce would read years later, and hoot with amazement and triumph to read) Sister Mary Philomel had retailed a common trope of Baroque piety, dating from the years when embattled Catholics were pulling out all the stops on transubstantiation, the years when Sister Mary Philomel's own order was being founded.
For all that she lived in a world malleable by belief and desire, still Sister paid close attention to mundane reasons, and the daily management of life; Pierce would think of her when his favorite teacher at college, the historian Frank Walker Barr, pointed out how even if the primitive hunter believes his prayers and his magic are what guide his spear to his prey, still he knows he has to sharpen the spear, and learn to aim and throw it.
"Will God help us if we ask Him?"
"Yes'ster."
"Will God help us if we do nothing for ourselves?"