—
At night, Miriam and I made love on the floor, though surely the song of the frogs in the millpond would have been loud enough to drown out the creak of bedsprings.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The following evening, Monday, Miriam had gone to bed early, exhausted from her work in the garden. A couple of hours after she had gone upstairs, I was just putting away the last of the dishes when I heard her footsteps descending the stairs. I turned to ask Miriam if she had been unable to sleep, only to encounter the auburn-haired girl instead.
“Daniel,” she said. I had not heard her speak in the days since I had arrived. “You don’t remember me?” she asked, her English clear, the accent British, and still a second passed before I recognized her.
“Ba—Bernadette?”
“Béatrice. Sister Béatrice. From Leuvray. We met the day you and Miriam drove down from Paris.”
“How stupid of me—” I said.
“I am not in habit. Most people see only the habit.”
“No, but—” How could this face—so evidently the same one I had instantly disliked at Leuvray—still appear so different? Here in soiled overalls, without kerchief or her order’s blue garments, she could have passed as a graduate student, smoking in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning or grading essays on a rented porch.
“Do you like it here?” she asked. Taking a seat astride a bench at the long table, she motioned for me to sit down beside her.
“It is very scenic.”
“I no longer notice the countryside,” she said. She said she had been here a long time, as though she were twice as old as she was—which I took to be her late twenties or early thirties. “When I was a postulant, I thought I was signing on to spend the rest of my life in heaven.”
“And you were wrong about that?”
“We are who we are, Daniel, even in Burgundy. And God knows why we choose what we choose.” I felt my former dislike click back into position.
“Do you have regrets?” I asked.
“Are you asking if I am human? Is it so hard to see a nun as a human being?”
“I’ve never known any nuns.”
“We say that you come to this life for one reason, and stay, if you stay, for another. Have you discussed Miriam’s plans with her?”
Had I? Suddenly it seemed I had not.
“So she has not told you what she is considering?” There was a pause. From across the millpond, frogs chirruped in ragged counterpoint.
“Ah,” said Béatrice.
“New York,” I heard myself say, as though I were answering a question. “I am from New York.”
“Is New York where you came from, or where you live?”
“It is where I live.”
“Ah,” she said again.
“And what does ‘ah’ mean?”
“It is where you live,” she repeated. “And you are returning soon?”
“I’ve already postponed my departure for a month.”
“Are you a believer?” she asked. “In God.”
“I am a psychoanalyst.”
“And a psychoanalyst cannot believe in God?”
“Needn’t believe.”
“Except in psychoanalysis.”
“Anything can be imagined,” I said.
“Imagined,” she repeated. A crispness had spread over her voice, like a feathering of frost. “Can a New York psychoanalyst imagine living in a community such as this?”
“What?” The question hit me square in the solar plexus. So was this what my summons had been about? “I don’t even know what this community is.”
“Certainly, it may have no future,” Béatrice said.
“Does any utopia have a future?”
“There’s nothing utopian about the Nièvre. It is one of the poorest regions in France. There is great need.”
“For backup nuns?”
“The countryside is short on doctors.”
“Is that why Miriam asked me here? To sell me on a life in some kind of imaginary settlement, an unreal—”
“Unreal?” she said abruptly, as though arrested by a thought. “The need is real, whether or not we are.”
“A need for American shrinks? In rural France?”
“You are also a physician.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Forget this, Daniel. I should not be speaking to you.”
“But you are speaking anyway.”
“Because you must know it already….”
“Must know what?”
“You must know…” She paused again. Finally she drew a breath and said, “You are telling me you do not envision a future with Miriam.”
“I was under the impression that her future had already been thoroughly envisioned. By your order.”
“Let me say only that she is considering a change of plans”—another pause—“and that the order supports that decision.”
“You are saying she will not be accepted, as a novice, or postulant, or whatever you call it?”
“I cannot speak for Miriam. It may be that she has chosen another path. She is considering life in the lay community—”
“This community, you mean.”
“A community composed of members under minor vows, single people and married people. Perhaps there will be children here.”
“Béatrice, what are you saying?”
“Only that Miriam is happy here. And she is happy that you are here.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because she cannot. She will not,” she said with a sudden vehemence. “Fine, Daniel, you are not a religious man. But do you feel no obligation to her?”
“Do only religious people feel obligation?”
Her fine nostrils flared. “Daniel,” she said, and her gaze for the first time fixed mine, her eyes a metal blue, set like rivets. “Is it not possible that a bond has developed between you, a bond you have not noticed? You must believe me that I am not speaking on her behalf. Is it not possible that your plans—your plan to return to the States, her plan to join the order—is it not possible that they have become a means of avoiding that bond?”
“Those plans predate us. They predate our…”
“Relationship. Love affair. Why can’t you call it what it is?”
“Our time. Our borrowed time. It has always been borrowed.”
“My intention has not been to provoke you.”
“I am not provoked. I am curious.”
“I am not speaking to you as a religious. It is true she is my spiritual charge and my confidante, but she is also my friend. I am only asking you—” She broke off.
“What are you
