Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Church, so when Sister Jacques set out to find Matisse a suitable model, the logical first choice was that family’s voluptuous seventeen-year-old Croetine, the girl who would, at Domino’s birth slightly less than a decade later, become her aunt.

Switters whistled. “Well, boil my bunny in carrot oil!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe it.”

“You can’t believe what?”

“That I’d wander into the middle of goddamn nowhere and stumble upon my actual, original, flesh-and-blood blue nude.”

“Matisse painted a variety of blue nudes,” she cautioned, “dating back to 1907. And what do you mean, yours?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine. But she’s the one, all right. You’ve got to let me meet her.”

Domino would agree to nothing until he’d explained, and even after he had, she informed him that Masked Beauty was not receiving visitors. Moreover, while she found the blue nude coincidence remarkable—Domino couldn’t help but be amazed that he’d grown up around that particular painting—she saw no need for Switters to get so carried away. Maybe she was right. More than she might realize. A man immobilized by a pyramid-headed Indian’s curse was not a man who ought to be overreacting to a dollop of synchronicity, even when it involved an object of much sentimental wahoo.

“Okay,” he said. “Forget it. I’ve been ill. Get on with your story. Excuse me. I mean, please get on with your story. S’il vous plait.” At the same time, however, he was vowing to himself that he would not leave the oasis without having met Masked Beauty, and thinking, also, what a kick it was to be sitting there listening to the blue nude’s niece.

Croetine posed for Matisse for more than two years, at Cimiez and later at Vence, and having fallen in love with the artist’s paintings, photographs, and souvenirs of Morocco, made plans to accompany him there as soon as the war was over. When V-E Day arrived, however, Matisse was not hardy enough to travel, and at the encouragement if not outright insistence of her uncle, a well-known archbishop, Croetine made the decision to enter a convent.

Because of her background as a nude model, Croetine was forced to spend an extraordinarily long time as a novice before being allowed to proceed to final vows. Her physical beauty was so unnerving to the Church fathers that her uncle advised her to find ways to make her face and figure more godly, which, assuming that God is inclined toward plainness, she did, stopping just short of grotesque disfiguration. By the time she was finally permitted to formally “marry” Christ, an ovule of rebellion had been planted deep in the sod of her sanctimony.

The solemn vows were still rippling in her saliva when she began to petition for assignment to Morocco. Not wishing to be too accommodating, they sent her to Algeria, instead. She worked in a mission there and liked everything about it; liked it so much, in fact, that her mother superior feared she was going native, and, citing such disturbing activities as “long solitary walks in the desert,” had her transferred back to France. It was in Paris in the mid- to late fifties that she formulated and promoted her ideas for the Order of St. Pachomius.

“Since I have a snakelike fascination with examples of extreme human behavior,” said Switters, “I really ought to have paid more attention to the lives of the saints. But I confess I’ve never heard of good St. Pachomius.”

“Pachomius was an Egyptian Christian ascetic. Around the year 320, he founded the first religious community for women, the very first convent. He built it out in the desert. So, Pachomius is the father of all nuns, and nuns had their beginnings in the desert. Today, the Middle Eastern desert countries are Islamic, and while there are small Christian minorities in these lands, those are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox. It was my aunt’s idea, back when she was Sister Croetine, that an order of desert nuns be formed that would both honor St. Pachomius and give the Roman Church at least a token presence in the region. Pretty smart, don’t you agree?”

The Vatican had agreed. Up to a point. Which is to say, it liked the general idea but was sorry that it had come from Croetine, who not only had once posed for naked pictures but who, on at least two occasions, had openly expressed reservations about Rome’s prohibition against birth control. The Church never rejected the Pachomius idea, it simply dragged its velvet slippers when it came to implementing it.

“Then, something happened. I can’t tell you what it was. It was in 1961, and Croetine’s uncle—my great- uncle—had been appointed to a cardinalship and was then stationed at the Vatican. He had come into the possession of an item—a document, let us say—that he wished to conceal in the safest way possible. So, our cardinal used his influence with Pope John the Twenty-third to get the Order of St. Pachomius approved. Quarters were procured for it in Jordan. Croetine was named as its acting abbess, and when she went to the desert, she took the cardinal’s secret document with her to safekeep it there.”

“What kind of document?”

Domino shook her head, causing her cheeks to wobble like puddings on a pushcart.

“Does she still have it? Are you privy to it?”

“You’re pretty cotton-picking nosy, Mr. Agent Man.”

He touched her wrist. “You know, Domino”—it was difficult to call her “Sister” when she was in white lace and orange blossoms—”you know, Domino, I hate to have to tell you this, you trying so hard to be hip American and all, but the euphemistic expression, cotton-picking, left the idiom about the time you left Philadelphia. Or even sooner. Nobody says cotton-picking anymore.”

Domino looked as if a scorpion had stung her, and Switters felt as low and venomous as any one of those arachnids. However, she quickly recovered her composure. “If I say it,” she announced haughtily, “then somebody still says it.”

And as she took a sip of tea before resuming her story, Switters thought, Now here’s a woman who would stick to your ribs.

When it had been proposed that Abbess Croetine be permitted to personally choose the nuns who’d serve with her in Jordan, one prelate objected on the grounds that she might stock the new order with those who shared her radical views. “Of course she will,” said another, “and what better way to get them out of our hair.” The area of Jordan where the convent was to be located was not only remote but also dangerous. Moreover, it was chartered as an enclosed convent, one in which the sisters, fully isolated from the outside world, would be expected to seek their salvation and that of others through a regimen of worship, prayer, and contemplation, rather than providing health care, education, or social services.

For several years, while they adjusted to the enclosure and the climate, the Pachomians stuck to that blueprint, but eventually Croetine and her twenty-two hand-picked sisters began—through epistolary campaigns and journal articles—to take public issue with the Holy See’s inflexible stand against birth control. From the peeling wastes east of Az-Zarq?a, there came a faint but persistent cry, a cry to dam the flood tides of semen, to leash the sperm packs running wild in the sheets, to zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt, to garrote the gullible glorification of gamete, forsake the foolish fidelity to fecundity, and wrest free from a woman’s shoulders the boa of spermatozoa that the Church had draped there like a weighty shawl and that pulled her ever downward into sickness and servitude, while at her skirts her too-many children went hungry, went bad, or just went.

“Rome tolerated it for quite a while,” said Domino, “but after Croetine’s uncle died in 1981, they finally erupted against her.”

“Naturally,” said Switters. “Isn’t it the sacred duty of the Catholic masses to increase geometrically the number of true believers in the world, just as it’s a secular duty to provide merchandisers with more and more little consumers?”

“Pachomians don’t look for ulterior motives. That’s too cynical. We petition for free will and common sense and compassion, and avoid casting blame on the guardians of the doctrine. After all, they were divinely commanded to ‘go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.’ “

“You mean their tribal antecedents were so commanded. Four thousand years ago. Before a person had to stand in line for an hour and a half just to get a whiff of fresh air. It’s tough to say who’s a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.”

In the ensuing exchange, Domino made it clear that while she might be estranged from the Church, she would no more brook criticism of its mediators than Skeeter Washington, in exile from New York, would accept insult to the Yankees. In the absence of an urgent ax to grind, Switters was happy to shut up and let her get on with her chronicle.

The Vatican fathers did not officially abolish the Order of St. Pachomius—an act that might have engendered bad publicity—but in the hope of drying it up, they quietly reduced its budget by two-thirds. A necessary economic