Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

who took her arms and led her, very gingerly, for she appeared to be old, to the fire. Masked Beauty? Switters wondered, although as far as he could tell, she wore no mask.

Two other nuns had gone inside the residence hall and lugged out a kind of wooden settee. A third went inside and fetched cushions. Masked Beauty—it must be her—stood in front of the settee and, assisted by the shapely one he believed to be Domino, undressed. With surprising vigor, she likewise flung her habit into the flames.

After Domino arranged the pillows for her, she reclined upon the settee, propping herself on one elbow, the better to view the conflagration, and the pose she then struck was so strangely familiar to Switters that it gave his spine an electrical shock.

And just then, as Masked Beauty’s doffed habit erupted into full blaze, he, still tingling, saw by its light that the thin shift she wore as an undergarment was an equally strange and familiar shade of strangely familiar— blue.

Silence is a mirror. So faithful, and yet so unexpected, is the reflection it can throw back at men that they will go to almost any length to avoid seeing themselves in it, and if ever its duplicating surface is temporarily wiped clean of modern life’s ubiquitous hubbub, they will hasten to fog it over with such desperate personal noise devices as polite conversation, humming, whistling, imaginary dialogue, schizophrenic babble, or, should it come to that, the clandestine cannonry of their own farting. Only in sleep is silence tolerated, and even there, most dreams have soundtracks. Since meditation is a deliberate descent into deep internal hush, a mute stare into the ultimate looking glass, it is regarded with suspicion by the nattering masses; with hostility by business interests (people sitting in silent serenity are seldom consuming goods); and with spite by a clergy whose windy authority it is seen to undermine and whose bombastic livelihood it is perceived to threaten.

However, when Domino returned to the infirmary to find Switters propped up in bed, his arms folded, palms upward, across the rough sheet, a thick aura of quietude around him, she attributed it to the fact that he was in recovery from illness and would not have guessed that he might be trying to steady himself after witnessing, an hour and a half earlier, Masked Beauty’s startling impersonation of his grandmother’s painting.

As far as that goes, Domino might not have registered her patient’s meditative air at all, so absorbed was she by her own cares. Her eyes resembled a serving of salmon sushi, and while their puffy redness could conceivably have been caused by bonfire smoke, Switters guessed that she had been weeping. She knew he wanted to talk (though she couldn’t have known how badly), but she begged off, claiming fatigue. “A demain,” she promised, and then apologized that exhaustion had made her lapse into French.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” he said.

“It’s Sunday, so I will be free all the day, after chapel.”

“You’ll still have chapel?”

She was momentarily puzzled. “Oh, you mean after? . . . Mais oui, yes, of course we will have chapel.” She paused. “You watched our brazen ceremony, didn’t you? I saw your silhouette at the window.”

“I wasn’t intending to spy.”

“Ah, but you couldn’t help yourself: you’re CIA.” Sensing instantly that she might have yanked a sleeping dog’s tail, she issued a retraction. “No, please, I’m only making a joke. It would have been impossible not to notice our. . . . We should have waited until you had gone away. Tell me, did you find our display to be tasteless?”

“No, on the contrary, it struck me as rather tasty. But, then, I have an appetite for bold gestures and burned bridges.” To himself he added, And blue nudes. “I don’t much savor pain, however, and I detected a sharp hickory of hurt in the fumes from your little barbecue.”

She looked him over slowly, as if seeing him in a new light. “You are not an entirely stupid fellow,” she said, and she smiled.

“Thanks, Sister,” he replied. “Your own mental prowess has also proven to be significantly superior to that of the average pecan. Nevertheless, what I am most taken with are your eyes.”

“Ooh-la-la,” she protested, brushing her fingers across her lids. “Tonight they are ruined. But as a rule, they are my nicest feature.”

How refreshing, he thought. A woman who knows how to accept a compliment. “It’s like they were congealed from nitroglycerin and mother’s milk. I can’t tell if they’re about to nurture me or crack my safe. And your mouth has a sneaky habit of getting them to do most of your smile-work.”

“Yes, I admit it. I have such a round face that my father told me when I make a big grin, I look like a, how do you say, jack-in-the-lantern.”

“Nonsense,” he objected. “I know my pumpkins, and you’re not of their race. If your cheeks are a little full, it’s because they’re packed with secrets and mysteries, like the moon.”

Domino snorted, and her snort sounded surprisingly like Maestra’s Heh!—an exclamation that usually suggested that what he’d just uttered was a load of bunkum, though a not uninteresting load of bunkum as loads of bunkum go. “I warned you, Mr. Switters, don’t be trying to butter me off.” She then left the room so abruptly he wondered if she might actually be peeved.

When she returned the next morning, however, she wore a starched white dress, an affable aspect—and a sprig of orange blossoms behind her ear.

Switters, for his part, was freshly shaved, brushed, and dressed in a yeast-colored linen suit (the one he’d soaked in the landing on Jonah’s beach) over a black T-shirt with the discreet C.R.A.F.T. Club emblem above the left pectoral. The cologne that he liked to call Jungle Desire, but which, in fact, was simply Old Spice, had been splashed recklessly about his face and neck. He sat, for the first time in more than a week, in his starship, and she seated herself on the stool opposite him.

“Mmm. Mr. Switters. You clean up very nice.”

“Don’t be trying to butter me off.”

She didn’t mind that he mocked her but, rather, seemed amused by it, though she put on an insulted face. He liked it that she was amused, and he liked it that she pretended otherwise. There was something of Maestra in her, and something of Suzy, as well, but he didn’t dwell on those similarities. No heart-shaped blip could be said to have formed on his radar screen. Sister Domino was as charming as she was kind, as fresh as she was wise, but she was too old and too religious, and, besides, he’d be gone in two or three days: whenever the supply truck showed up. Meanwhile, he had an industrial-strength curiosity to satisfy.

“This woman you call Masked Beauty—”

“Yes,” Domino interrupted. “We should begin with her, because everything that we are in this place is a result of her. I’m unsure what you know of nuns. . . .”

“Well, nun comes out of Egypt, an old Coptic Christian word meaning pure.”

“There’s much disagreement over that, but I’m pleased and impressed that you’ve connected the nun to the Middle East, to the desert. That’s very important to us here. But let me go on to Masked Beauty, who is our founder and leader, and who, in the secular realm, also happens to be my aunt. Before I can say much about her, however, I must say a little about the famous French painter, Henri Matisse.”

Like the helmeted heads of an itty-bitty army springing from the trenches, goosebumps appeared along the length and breadth of Switters’s epidermis, where they marched in place, as if, intent on pillage, they were preparing to advance on his brain.

Although Domino might have been loath to make such a claim, Switters gathered from her description of Matisse that he owed much of his greatness as an artist and as a man to the fact that he was simultaneously epicurean and pious, hedonistic and devout; that he made little or no distinction between his love of wine, women, and song and his love of God—an attitude that struck Switters as entirely sensible.

At any rate, as Domino’s account went, Matisse, in the early 1940s, had painted several large pictures of his nurse at the time, a Dominican novice named Sister Jacques. Matisse loved to paint the contours of the female body, lush, rhythmic volumes that were shown to their best aesthetic advantage when undisguised by garb. Naturally, Sister Jacques could not pose nude. However, knowing the genius to be honorable, ailing, and elderly (in 1943, Matisse was seventy-four years old), and hoping to persuade him to decorate a chapel (which he did for her in 1948 at Vence), she didn’t mind encouraging another girl to sit for him.

For generations, Domino’s family had been deeply involved in both French art and the Roman Catholic