I remember going to visit Angie, singing along to the radio while Mike drove this car. My parents trailed us in their Oldsmobile, which meant we pulled over every ten minutes for them to catch up. It didn’t bother Mike that my father poked along so. Nothing really fazed him, he was like Judy that way. He loved life, truly. He let it wash over him.
I swing the peppy BMW onto Route 1 heading south, serenaded by Prince. Route 1, the old Baltimore Pike, is more direct to the convent than I-95. If I don’t get lost, I’ll be there by nightfall.
Angie entered the convent just after we graduated from Penn. I majored in English, she in religion. “What kind of job will you get with that major?” I asked when she chose it, but she answered with a shrug. When she finally told us, my parents were delighted, but I was appalled. I screamed at her, told her she was throwing her life away. My mother begged me to stop, my father merely shook. I ran from the house. My last look back was at Angie. She sat there, impassive behind her coffee, dead calm at the vortex of a familial hurricane.
The traffic on Route I moves swiftly, fluidly. I catch barely a light. A woman I don’t recognize sings a ballad. My thoughts turn to the convent.
Angie’s first year as a novitiate was my first year as a law student. She wasn’t allowed visitors, telephone calls, or even mail. It was to be a test of her commitment to a religious life, and we heard nothing from her. I felt an almost unendurable loss, as if she were held hostage by religious fanatics, which was my take on the situation anyway. Outside the cloister, life went on. My mother’s eyes deteriorated, my father gained twenty pounds. I made law review and learned to trust men again. With Mike’s help.
The sad song ends abruptly, in silence.
Which was the worst thing about Angie’s life in the cloister. Her vow of silence. How could they silence Angie, who was so full of talk, of ideas? I remembered the nights we gossiped in our room, the whispered jokes in class, the shouted jeers on the walk home. So much talk, so much language. English and Italian at home, French in school, Latin at mass. No more.
The traffic thins out, the stoplights are fewer. Madonna comes on,thumpa thumpa thumpa, and I turn off the radio with a satisfyingclick. I hate Madonna; she’s even more confused about Catholicism than I am. I barrel through the rural stretches south of Media, past dairy cows and old barns. The odor of manure wafts through the air. I step on the gas.
After Angie’s first year, we were permitted to see her. The visits-four a year-were held in a small room called the Parlor, and there was a wooden screen between us, almost like the lattice in a garden trellis. I wasn’t able to touch her, and there was no privacy; the room was filled with the equally excited families of the other nuns. I found the visits an exercise in frustration. I couldn’t talk to Angie about anything that mattered, couldn’t reach her in any meaningful way at all, so the garden trellis might as well have been made of concrete. All I could do was watch us grow apart. Over the years, her face thinned out and her demeanor grew subdued. By the time she became a professed sister five years later, I felt I hardly knew her at all. I hugged her then, after the mass, and cried most of the way home.
I speed by farm after farm, and all I see for a long time are cows and billboards.WELCOME TO MARYLAND, says the sign when I cross the border. I wind slowly through Harford County, with its quaint farms and not-so-quaint trailer parks. The sun sets off to my left, behind a Bob’s Big Boy. The car rumbles along quietly; my mind is a blank. The exit for the convent comes up. I twist the car off the highway, into a suburb near the convent. I forget the name of the town, but I recognize the landmarks. A housing development of fake English mews, then a housing development of fake French chateaux.
My anticipation sours slightly. I grow apprehensive. What if they won’t let me stay? What if Angie’s angry at me for coming? A hard ball begins to form in my chest. It seems to calcify as I drive by a diner where Mike and I ate lunch after he met Angie for the first time. I remember that lunch.
“I understand why you miss her so much,” Mike said, fiddling with the top of a red squeeze bottle of ketchup. “It would mean a lot to me if she could be at our wedding.”
“Our wedding?”
“Our wedding.” He grinned and slid the ketchup bottle toward me. On the red cone of its lid hung a small diamond solitaire.
That was Mike’s proposal, and I accepted, but Mike didn’t get his wish. Angie wasn’t allowed out of the cloister to go to his wedding.
They did let her go to his funeral, however.
24
Iwalk alongside the convent’s high stone wall until I find the front gate. It’s an ancient iron gate, painted in a color impossible to determine in the twilight: forest green, maybe, or black. I can’t see through the gate-it’s opaque and reaches at least ten feet high, culminating in a crucifix. Of course.
Boom! Boom!I bang on the gate. Its bubbled paint flakes off.Boom! Boom! Boom!
Silence.
“Is anybody there? Can anybody let me in?”
More silence.
Boom!“Please, it’s an emergency! Please!”
“Wait a minute,” says a thin female voice on the other side. I hear the metallic clatter of a barrel latch being retracted, and the door opens a crack. One blue eye peers out from behind a rimless spectacle. I catch a glimpse of a white veil-a novitiate-whose face comes happily to life when she sees me. “You look exactly like one of my sisters!”
“Really?”
“Yes! Sister Angela Charles.”
Hersister. I’ll never get used to this. “Angela’s my twin. I’m Mary DiNunzio. I need to see her. It’s a…family emergency.”
The novitiate looks alarmed. “Oh, my. Well. Good thing I was out here. Come in, please.” She yanks on the iron gate, grunting with effort. I push on the gate from the outside, but even with both of us laboring, it’ll only open enough to let me through sideways. “Sorry about that,” she says, with an easy laugh.
“That’s okay. I appreciate your letting me in.”
“No problem. Follow me. I’ll tell Mother you’re here.” She bounces ahead of me, up a flagstone path that winds through the grass to the convent. Over a hundred years old, the convent’s made of Brandywine granite and covered with lush ivy. If it weren’t holding my twin sister captive, I’d say it was beautiful. The roof is terracotta tile, like the rooftops of Florence, and the arched windows are a stained glass that seems to glow with deep colors, radiating light from within on this dusky evening.
As we approach the front door, unmarked except for the Sacred Heart at its keystone, I can hear the nuns singing in the chapel. Their voices, forty in all, carry in the still night, floating over the lawn. One of the voices belongs to Angie. An alto, like me.
“In we go,” says the novitiate, as she opens the carved oak door.
It’s the smell that hits me first, the smell of holy water. It’s a faint and sweet scent, vaguely like rosewater. The novitiate’s breath smells of it too, and I wonder how this is so, or if I’m imagining it. I hear the singing, louder now that I’m inside, and we pass the closed chapel doors, over which is stenciled:
CHAPEL
DEDICATED TO ST. JOSEPH
RECOLLECTION
Angie is inside.
The novitiate leads me to the parlor. Above the door it says:
PARLOR
DEDICATED TO ST. L. GONZAGA
DISCRETION, MODESTY
The novitiate flicks on a lamp, which barely illuminates the room. “Please wait a minute while I tell Mother that you’re here,” she says.
“Thank you.”
She closes the door, leaving me alone. The parlor looks larger now that it’s empty, but it still evokes frustration in me. I sit among the vacant wooden chairs on the civilian side of the trellis, wondering how many twin sisters have sat here in the past century and if any of them felt like I do. The order used to be much more isolated, and Angie says there’s talk of moving to a remote location in the Adirondacks. That’s so far away I’d never get to see her. It makes me feel sick inside.