Authors: Francine Prose
It turned out that no one had ever promised that the letter’s contents would be revealed—only that the letter would be opened. It turned out that the Pope had read the letter and decided, for the good of the world, to keep Our Lady’s message a secret.
By the time this news filtered down to the classrooms of St. Boniface, Theresa was convinced that the whole thing was her fault. With the monumental egotism of an eight-year-old, she had come to believe that God, the Virgin, the Pope, and even the children of Fatima had engineered the entire incident to remind her of her sins.
One night, when her disappointment was still fresh and almost constant, Theresa closed her eyes and begged God for a sign. When she opened them, the first thing she noticed was a spelling paper from school, more red pencil than black, topped with an angry-looking C-minus. Next she saw the zebra plant which her mother had given her and which, in her anxiety over the letter, she’d neglected and nearly killed.
Signs, evidence, positive proof—and all of it pointing to her. It stood to reason that the Virgin might hesitate to squander the key to salvation on a world full of sinners too lazy to water a plant. Theresa had always dreamed of becoming a nun, but now she asked herself: Why would God want a bride who couldn’t spell?
She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t wanted to join the convent. It was as if she were born with her vocation, the way other children came into the world with a fear of dogs, an allergy to watermelon. But it was stronger than any allergy or fear. Once, when she was very small, her father had shown her how to raise the hair on her head with a comb rubbed along her sweater; that pull on her scalp was the closest thing she’d ever felt to her attraction for the cloister. She’d longed for it, even before she knew what it was, the way children who have never been to the circus long to run away and join one; in school, she discovered that the life which the sisters described was what she’d been longing for. At meals, while Joseph and Catherine talked butcher shop gossip, Theresa imagined the refectory with its noiseless chewing, its silent forks and spoons. Saturdays, at the movies, she watched Robin Hood marry Maid Marian and thought of taking her final vows in a wedding gown which would make Maid Marian’s look plain as a housedress. At night, she lulled herself to sleep by conjuring up a convent choir singing the Te Deum in high, clear harmonies.
Only now, with the silence from the Vatican in her ears, did she realize how this dream had already removed her from the world—not to any higher, more contemplative plane, but down into sloth and pride. Vain in her calling, she did poorly in school; drifting away from her fantasy-refectory, she left her mother to clear the dishes alone; off in her imaginary convent, she had let the zebra plant die.
That night, Theresa vowed to spend the rest of her life repenting and, like so many eight-year-old penitents, decided to begin with her homework. From that night on, she studied with the zeal of a fanatic. No medieval monk transcribing the Holy Writ could have taken his job more seriously than Theresa recopying her math problems till the columns hung straight as plumb lines, Theresa drafting a wall-sized map of Italy with colored pencil on the regional boundaries, a little green star for Rome and a big gold one for the Vatican.
Meanwhile she asked herself: Is this enough? Is this enough? She told no one that she was doing her schoolwork to atone for the confusion over Fatima, but in confession, agonized over every spelling mistake. Though the priests could find no penance to assign her, they recognized that she was headed for trouble and warned her about scruples. Yet these well-meant lectures only added doubts to her scruples. Uncertain of ever finding the way, she could only keep on going, while praying for God to turn her in the right direction.
At the end of the term, she coaxed copies of next year’s lesson plans from the sisters and spent the summer preparing for fifth-grade math. Three summers later, while the girls on her block were stuffing tissues in the tops of their bathing suits and working on their suntans at Coney Island, Theresa was working ahead on the eighth-grade essay, “Why Communism is the Anti-Christ,” six pages of narrow-ruled looseleaf covered with her neat round print. Her theme was that the Russian people, cut off from the church, were like infants snatched from their mothers’ breasts; her style was so eloquent that she couldn’t believe she had written it.
The nuns couldn’t either, but they knew Theresa too well to suspect her of plagiarism, and voted unanimously to award her first prize in the St. Boniface Middle School Essay Competition. In a ceremony held in the auditorium for the entire school, Theresa was presented with a copy of St. Therese of Lisieux’s autobiography,
The Story of a Soul,
specially bound in white vinyl with gold-tooled letters.
Much later, Theresa’s former schoolmates would tell of having seen her take this prize and press it to her chest, as if hoping that the words inside it might somehow skip her eyes and brain and pass directly through her clothes to her heart. But the truth was that Theresa didn’t open the book till later that evening, when she’d finished her homework; and even then, she approached it from a certain distance.
The first book she’d ever read was a life of St. Francis, in simple sentences with big round print and color illustrations of birds. Since then, she’d read dozens of saints’ lives, preferring the ones who traveled and had adventures, like St. Helena, and the ones with the grisliest martyrdoms; she’d reread St. Lucy’s blinding till she could hardly stand it. Most of all, though, she loved the saints who did crazy things, like St. Simon, perched atop a pillar in the desert for twenty years. But she could never connect these stories with her own life, and she wondered: Where would St. Simon perch today? A rooftop TV antenna? Nor could she picture St. Theresa of Avila riding her donkey down Mulberry Street.
Yet now, in the introduction to
The Story of a Soul,
Theresa learned that St. Therese was born Therese Martin, in France, a country without deserts, in 1873, a time without knights in castles—not Mulberry Street, exactly, but more like Theresa’s own world. And besides, as the monsignor who wrote the introduction kept emphasizing: except for one thing—the intensity of her devotion—Therese Martin, “The Little Flower of Jesus,” was in no way extraordinary, but rather, the simplest of simple girls.
By the time Theresa finished the first paragraph of the autobiography itself, she had opened her notebook and was copying down whole sentences with the dreamy absorption of a bride copying recipes from a magazine. And indeed no cookbook could have seemed easier to follow than the Little Flower’s Little Way. Her whole life was a testimony to modesty, humility, vocation. Service to God in the most mundane and menial tasks.
“To ecstasy,” wrote St. Therese, “I prefer the monotony of daily toil.”
When Theresa read that line, she understood that her prayers had been answered. She had asked God to show her the way, and He had not only taken her by the shoulders and turned her around, but given her step-by-step directions, impossible to miss: Theresa, go here. Do this. Turn there. Stop when you see Me.
The painting-on-metal of St. Therese (which Theresa bought at the same store where her mother had purchased the St. Anna medallion) showed a pink-cheeked girl with the eyes of a cocker spaniel: The Little Flower was prettier than Theresa, sweeter than the sweetest girls in her class, and dressed like a nun, in brown. Still, she looked like a pretty nun you might see on the street. And she wasn’t carrying her head on a plate like St. John, or her eyes like St. Lucy, but rather an armful of roses and a crucifix.
Certainly the Little Flower had suffered; as the introduction said, she had packed a lifetime of suffering into her short span. But her specific martyrdom could have happened to any sickly, unlucky girl on Mulberry Street. By the age of four, she had lost four siblings and watched her mother die horribly, of cancer. Later, she would see her beloved Papa crumble away—insanity, paralysis, another slow death. She herself nearly died at nine, suffering fever and hallucinations so violent that the nails in the wall appeared to her as the stumps of charred fingers. And she departed this world at twenty-four, of the virulent consumption which, she confided, felt “like fire, like sitting on a bed of nails.”
Yet through all this, she kept faith. Her first near-fatal illness was cured when a statue of Our Lady—perhaps the same one Theresa had in her room—seemed to smile and shed radiance on the ailing girl. On recovering, Therese sought admission to the convent—a request denied, because of her youth, until she was sixteen. Then she was taken into the Carmelite order to live out a few brief years of service and humility till her final agony began.
Shortly before she died, the Little Flower was sent a bouquet of roses. When the petals dropped, she asked the sisters to save them, and predicted: Someday, someone would find the petals “pleasurable.” After her death, there would fall “a shower of roses.” This shower, as the introduction pointed out, was symbolic. For the petals which rained on the world were the copies of her “little book,”
The Story of a Soul,
the spiritual autobiography completed in the last weeks of her life. Promoted by the church, translated into fifteen languages, the book became an instant best-seller—its influence not merely inspirational, but miraculous. Slowly at first, then faster, the reports came in: A poor Lyons family prayed to Therese and, while gardening, unearthed a sock stuffed with a million francs. A modest Saint-Malo shipbuilder received, with Therese’s intercession, a government contract. An Auvergne boy, mute from birth, spontaneously began to read aloud from
The Story of a Soul.
A Lisieux man recovered from terminal cancer after swallowing a petal from the Little Flower’s last bouquet. Documented cures, recorded in a ledger at the Lisieux convent, soon filled an entire library. Her birthplace became an unofficial shrine. Three miracle cures were chosen as substantial proof of Therese’s beatitude; canonization followed shortly thereafter. And the whole church welcomed this paragon of modern saintliness, of holiness achieved not through heroic mortification, but through ordinary domestic chores; this unassuming girl who moved sainthood out of its medieval castle and into modern life.
“I am only a very little soul,” wrote the Little Flower, “who can serve God only in very little ways.” Young women were exhorted to follow her Little Way, and the good ones, like Theresa Santangelo, were rewarded with copies of her “little book.” All over the world, girls like Theresa reread their copies so often that the bindings disintegrated, and the pages had to be tied with string and rubber bands; not that it mattered, for they knew the book by heart and could recite their favorite passages like prayers. Countless bedrooms like Theresa’s sheltered private altars: candles, plaster Virgins, saucers to catch the dripping wax, paintings of St. Therese, embroidered cards and, invariably, a certain holy card—the best known photo of the saint. Grainy, out of focus, the picture showed a skinny girl on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor with a brush. “To ecstasy,” said the caption, “I prefer the monotony of daily toil.”
Every night, some little girl like Theresa read
The Story of a Soul
and felt that she had been graced with revelation: The answer was love. The way was serving God in the simplest acts, in the dirty dishes, the laundry. And every morning, some girl would wake to discover the difficulty of following this Little Way through one single hour. Each day, these girls would reaffirm that old cliché, the truth which the church and even the Little Flower identified as one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the spiritual path: That is, you can take a million vows in the middle of the night, but things look different in the morning.
The next morning, Theresa insisted on doing the breakfast dishes. The warm water and the flowery smell of detergent were pleasant, and Theresa reminded herself, over every plate, that she was scouring it for God. But when she found a smear of egg yolk on her clean white cuff, her first impulse was to throw a dish at the wall. Determined to love everyone, she smiled at the people she passed on the way to school; but by second period, she was hating Sister Angelica, the Latin teacher, for getting all teary-eyed and quivery over Cicero’s
Oration Against Catiline.
That afternoon, Theresa offered to cook dinner. Catherine was delighted, partly because she wanted so badly to see it as a sign that Theresa was changing; as far as she knew, nuns didn’t go in for cooking. Besides, she had read in her magazines that girls of Theresa’s age showed an inclination—sometimes a positive genius—for imitating their mothers. But whom was Theresa imitating, to imagine that normal people ate omelettes and raw vegetables for dinner? Never suspecting that these were among the few foods which the Little Flower was documented to have eaten, Catherine reassured herself with the magazine-advice that girls should start with something simple: Eggs. Salad. English muffin pizza.
Later, Theresa would never understand exactly how she burned the omelette, but would think of it as a lesson which most of the great female saints must have learned, and which even the Little Flower had taught her Carmelite sisters: That is, the kitchen is no place for ecstasy. All Theresa knew was that she had the eggs in the pan and was cutting the carrots in perfect julienne strips, contemplating every cross-section with its thin green ribbon, its grain like orange and yellow wood….
Suddenly the kitchen filled with smoke, and Catherine, who’d been studiously keeping her distance, rushed in, shut off the burner and opened the window. She flipped the omelette onto a plate, sliced the blackened crust off the top, cut the remaining egg into three parts and called downstairs to Joseph.
“Don’t worry,” she told Theresa. “Some days, everything goes wrong in the kitchen.”
The apartment was still smoky when they sat down to eat; everything tasted of charcoal. But Joseph and Catherine were so charmed by their daughter’s effort at domesticity that they crunched their carrots and ate their scorched egg with genuine pleasure; already they were prepared to look back on this bit of family history with irony and warmth, like the dinner Catherine ruined at her father’s house.