Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

The pace inside the oasis was slow, and summer seemed to drone on like a filibuster, even to Switters, who was one of those who believed that time in general was gathering speed. When he wasn’t asleep on his Fannie- crippled cot, perusing the odd paragraph of Finnegans Wake, or exchanging the infrequent correspondence with Bobby or Maestra, he was interacting, in various, particular, and for the most part lackadaisical ways, with the eight pious pariahs with whom he shared the outpost.

Where most of the ex-nuns were concerned, interaction was fairly minimal. He joined them for simple meals at one or the other of two rude wooden tables; and complaining that “Italian nights” were too few and far between, he instigated thrice weekly “music nights,” meaning that on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (the sisters fasted on Sundays, and Switters was forced to steal into the garden then and eat cucumbers off the vine), he’d lug his equipment into the dining hall and play during supper a CD from his limited collection. It goes without saying that he wished wine to flow on those occasions (“Let us be festive!” he’d cry, or “Let the good times roll!”) but succeeded in getting it served only on Saturdays. Saturday became “blues night,” for the women had rather taken to his two Big Mama Thornton recordings; on Thursdays he treated them to the Mekons (about whom they were lukewarm), Frank Zappa (whom they actively disliked), or Laurie Anderson (they were baffled but fascinated); while on Tuesdays, never without a tinge of concealed embarrassment, he’d spin Broadway show tunes (nearly everybody’s favorite).

In his self-appointed role as recreation director, he tried to get them involved in making toy boats and racing them in the irrigation troughs, but the Pachomians were not the Art Girls. Only Pippi exhibited either inclination or aptitude. The racing program quickly petered out, though not before Maria Deux scolded him in front of everyone for christening his stupid slat of wood The Little Blessed Virgin.

Speaking of Pippi’s aptitude, the fact that her role as the convent’s handyperson was never challenged by Switters disappointed those who had believed that in inviting him to stay, they would be getting “a man around the house,” a Mr. Fix-It but his serious lack of dexterity didn’t bother Pippi. Proud of her minor skills in carpentry and simple mechanics, she was protective of her domain. The Marias, however, were appalled, and Bob muttered once that it was no wonder that Fannie had fled. Not everybody got Bob’s meaning.

Bob had taken over Fannie’s duties as goatherd and chicken mistress, which left Maria Une a bit shorthanded in the kitchen. ZuZu mopped his room once a week, and either she or Mustang Sally delivered the pitchers of water with which he must constantly rehydrate himself in the Syrian summer, and the pails of water he must use to bathe. Since he elected not to attend chapel, he saw the six undernuns primarily at meals, although, of course, he glimpsed them going about their various chores as he stilted to and from his office. Beneath their placid, reverent, industrious exteriors, he began to sense an undercurrent of skittishness, almost a controlled hysteria, but he reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that it had nothing to do with him.

Despite his shortcomings in the areas of maintenance and religion, they seemed generally unresentful of his presence among them, finding him, well, novel, if not actually entertaining. At least, he didn’t exacerbate their ingrained fear of maleness. (Was it not just such a fear that had led them to marry the mild and distant Christ, the one male figure who never would threaten them with brutish strength or callous sexuality?) Masked Beauty once referred to Switters as their monstre sacre, and among themselves that had become their pet name for him. When Mustang Sally ventured that as far as she could tell, he was neither monstrous nor sacred, Domino, in perfect imitation of his tone and his demeanor, had grinned and said, “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

As for Domino, his relationship with her had changed since the Fannie affair, but it was a subtle change. Had Fannie not fled, things might have gone more as Bobby had predicted, there might have been in her attitude a discernible measure of jealousy or scorn. As it was, she was aloof from him to such a smallish degree that he was forced periodically to suspect that he only imagined it. At no time was she unfriendly. On the other hand, at no time did she show up at his door again with flowers behind her ear.

During the first month of his residency, Domino had prayed over him quite a bit. A few times she succeeded in coaxing him to pray with her. He was sincere and respectful during their prayerful duets but also noticeably ill at ease. By late June, the exorcism instructions she’d requested from Sicilian Catholic sources had arrived via e-mail. On three successive Sunday evenings, after fasting all day, she had positioned and lit the prescribed number of candles, laid her hands on his head in the prescribed manner, and chanted the prescribed incantations. They were impressive little ceremonies (his favorite part was when she took his head in her hands), but since at their conclusion he refused to test the results, they were destined to be inconclusive. Goodness knows he wanted to please her, almost as much as he wanted the taboo dispelled, yet he had only to aim a trembling toe toward the ground than the stricken image of R. Potney Smithe flooded his brainpan, prompting a hasty, apologetic withdrawal. Frustrated, though sympathetic, Domino canceled further exorcisms and soon broke off the prayer sessions as well. He saw less of her after that.

His summer was spent most often in the company of Masked Beauty. For hours each morning, the abbess joined him in his baked little office, where they cooled themselves with tea and palm-frond fans, where he regained a level of fluency in French, and where the two of them gradually reached a level of comfort with the mask beneath the veil. It was such a nuisance raising the veil every time she took a sip of tea that after a week she’d asked his permission to bare her face. Of course, he assured her that it was fine, yet if “fine” meant that the wart was incapable of distracting him, that he was oblivious to it, or that he would ever become really used to it, then he had misspoken. Every Tuesday night, when the song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face” from My Fair Lady resounded in the dining hall, he couldn’t help but think, Henry Higgins would be singing a different tune if he’d hooked up with Masked Beauty.

Considering that in every other aspect she was as handsome as a person of her advanced age might hope to be, one would think that her little gift from God could be overlooked. It could not. It was the monstre sacre, a magical beast. He tried to compare it to the third eye of an Asian saint, but the wart was as blind as a mole rat and twice as ugly. Both repelling and compelling, it was charged with the grisly charisma of a serial killer. In its globby piled-on redness, it was a scarlet letter embroidered by an obsessive compulsive. And it was too damn vivid.

Nevertheless, they each made a certain peace with its imposition. He refused to allow the wart to unsettle him, she refused to brood over whether he might possibly be unsettled. Thus, they proceeded with their objectives.

“This little bastard operates on solar batteries, the likes of which are unknown to the civilian population. When you get your conventional desktop PC—and I wish we had one now because it’d be a lot easier to teach you on—you’ll either have to run your generator during daylight hours or else, if you choose to go DC, charge its batteries almost every night. Burn more fossil fuel, in any case, I’m afraid. The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms might flourish.”

Masked Beauty nodded. She didn’t exactly take to cyberspace like a duck to orange sauce. Switters attributed this to her background rather than to her age. Look at Maestra, after all. As the weeks dragged dryly by, the abbess learned little more than how to boot up and shut down. One problem was that she could barely type. When there was a lengthy e-mail to transmit, Switters functioned as a stenographer, taking her dictation directly on the keyboard. A couple of things prevented him from becoming so bored that he unleashed his imp: one, the realization that it was Matisse’s blue nude for whom he was clerking; and two, the delight he took in imagining the look on Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s steely face every time Langley intercepted another missive from Switters’s address clamoring for papal reforms and advocating global birth control. And, ha-ha, what about those exorcism instructions?

Soon, however, it seemed that less and less of their time was devoted to e-mail and more and more to searching the Internet. The subject of their search was Mary aka Miriam aka Maria aka Marian aka the Blessed Holy Virgin Mother of God, the legendary Jewess whose maidenhead was alleged to have remained unpopped, sound as a dollar, even after she gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy.

In one of their earliest conversations, Domino had disclosed to Switters that the Pachomians were busily redefining their relationship to their religion: to Jesus, to Mary, and to God. Working now with Masked Beauty, it was clear to him that, for the present, their central focus was on Mary. Since Mary was mentioned in the Bible no more than a dozen times, and then mostly in passing, and since she was paid little or no attention in the first four hundred years of the Church’s existence, any material upon which one might base a reevaluation of her was comparatively recent. That didn’t mean that such material was scarce. Oh, no. Enough had been written about her—an astonishingly huge amount in the late twentieth century—to fill every boxcar on the Bethlehem, Golgotha