Hotel Honolulu

27 Mortification

"There was this novice nun, Sister Anthony, in Holy Cross Convent in Eureka, California," Puamana said. She had gone there at the age of fourteen. "The age of consent in Whyee."

Her mother had sent the girl from Hilo, where they were then living, and had told the mother superior to communicate with her directly, not with anyone else in the family, and especially to avoid the girl's father, Wendell. Was he a tyrant? the mother superior asked. No, the woman said, far from it. Her husband was weak and cried easily. He couldn't bear to be alone, he hated the dark, and he looked for sympathy.

"He can't control himself," the woman said.

So the girl was admitted to the convent, and the secret was kept. It was not unusual in those days for someone even that young to prepare for a lifetime as a nun, renouncing the world. The mother superior knew of certain details and discerned others. Families could be monstrous, and for that reason the child would remain secure, under her protection and the protection of Jesus Christ, for the rest of her life. She would pass quickly from novice to nun.

Taking the name Sister Anthony, with a pale face and staring eyes that seemed a solemn expression of belief and understanding, for even fear could inspire a sort of faith, the girl said nothing more, and that silence seemed like prayer.

She was slim but strong from working on the family farm, outside Hilo on the Big Island. There were four boys and three girls. Sister Anthony was the eldest girl and therefore responsible for the welfare of her younger sisters. She had quit school early and Was hardly literate. She looked careworn, and at fourteen had the face of a woman, roughened by the weather and made serious by all her responsibilities.

The brutal fact was that when Sister Anthony's mother had been pregnant a year before, the father, Wendell, had begun sleeping with his daughter, demanding that she be silent and blaming his pregnant wife for his having to do this. "It's all her fault." Though she was frightened, the girl did not cry. "I don't know what to do," she whispered. Her father said, "Be like a rat. A rat will do anything to stay alive."

Discovering the father and daughter together, the mother howled at the half-naked man and hid the girl for as long as it took — about ten days — to send the girl to the convent on the mainland. She did not tell the police. She told the priest, who was roared at by Wendell when the priest visited and raised the subject. The woman was careful to keep the girl's whereabouts secret, though Wendell nagged her. He was demanding in a passionate way, not as a father searching for his daughter but as a man desperate to be reunited with his lover.

What would he have said if he knew that the novice Sister Anthony in her iron bed in her cell missed him — missed him more than any person

she knew, more than she did her mother. She who had feared him was astonished by how badly she wanted him. She did not miss the dreary chores or the responsibility of looking after her little sisters, but she did miss the company of the little kids. Yet nothing and no one, not even the risen Christ, could fill the void left by her father, and she often imagined him, so sad, sitting alone — as she sat alone — thinking of her.

"Pray for your soul," the mother superior said, because she knew that Sister Anthony had been corrupted by her father, that she was in danger of becoming lost. "And pray for your father's soul."

Praying for her father summoned up the sight and smell of him and made her long for him. As a novice she was watched closely. She knelt for hours with her head bowed, murmuring prayers, and with every utterance she was roused to passionate reflection and memories of his hands and his mouth on her. Prayer made her lustful, and meditating upon her father, she saw him rising out of the darkness, becoming a flame, as with folded hands she clutched her bent-over body, warmed by his nearness. So she prayed willingly, knowing that in prayer she would feel the rapture of her father's body.

Even the expression on her face lost its solemnity and became rapturous as she was praying, for in this imploring posture her father had possessed her; kneeling, she had become his lover. So prayer became the sort of passion for her that she knew other nuns must have shared, looking so exhausted in the morning after a whole night of whipping themselves, thrashing their backs, between prayers.

Nothing could cure her of loneliness, though prayer — her lust- inspiring prayers — gave her a little relief. Her mother had visited twice, bringing Hawaiian food — mochi, saimin, pickled plums, crackseed, poki, lomi salmon. But now she was never visited except by priests. She learned to read, she sewed, she cleaned, sweeping and mopping the floors of the convent, or worked on the convent farm. Being a novice meant being a menial. She did not mind; it was all she had ever known.

In the confessional she spoke fearfully of her thoughts — she knew they were wrong. There were so many church words for what she felt, and even the crucifix and the death of Christ were like a sexual passion. The priests, her confessors, who visited Sister Anthony seemed eager to forgive her, but they also said they needed specific details before they could give her absolution. She did not name her father. She even said that she had reached the age of consent. She spoke of "a man" — sometimes he seemed like all men, even the priests, for as she spoke to the priests, she sometimes wanted them to ravish her.

The priests themselves, as though sniffing it, seemed to know and were afraid. One suggested mortification. She did not know the word. "Mortify your flesh."

In the convent barn one afternoon, pitching hay, she found a rat twitching in a crate — not cowering, rats never cowered. She clapped a lid on the crate and afterward coaxed the rat into a small box, which she sneaked into her cell.

From Hawaii, archipelago of rat life, she knew the small roof rat and the black wharf rat, but this was a naked rat, a kind she had never seen before. The thing was hairless and mottled pink, with freckly patches on its tight skin and an even pinker tail that looked chewed. It stank in a way that attracted her, for it was a man's stink, and it was always active. It did not seem to sleep at all. She remembered what her father had said about rats. This one gnawed its box, but when she fed it the rat was calmer in its twitchy way. She kept the rat in her room and gave it the food she was served in the refectory — bread crusts, bits of meat, a paste of beans or potato, anything she could hide in the folds of her robe.

Not eating very much made her weaker and thinner, and she sometimes felt faint with hunger. The other nuns saw how enfeebled this young novice had become, how mortification had made her look so sorrowful. They did not know that her starvation, feeding the rat, had become like a drug; how the fever brought on by her hunger gave her intense hallucinatory images of her father demanding that she kneel and then clawing her head and making her gag. Mortification was deeper than prayer. Prayer gave her imagery, but hunger made her retch with lust, and she clutched herself and moaned as though in the death throes of love.

Meanwhile, the naked rat grew fatter and sleeker. The rat was a friend. When she was not praying she was lonely, and the rat relieved her loneliness. The rat was her father and her lover. The rat was bold, and yet while he was fed, he was as content in his box as Sister Anthony was in her cell. She brought the creature food from every meal. But there was no end to a rat's hunger, and when it wanted more Sister Anthony extended

her knuckles and let the rat gnaw them until they were raw. Then she folded her skinny bleeding hands and prayed.

Sister Anthony became a wraith, ghostly and pale, her trembling limbs sticklike under her thick robes. Hunger blinded her with migraines, but she endured it, believing that she was dying from love, and love was worth it. In this weakened state her fantasies were more intense.

The naked rat was monstrous and slow and fat now, almost too big for its box.

She returned from dinner one day to find the box clawed open, the lid under the bed, the rat dead, its belly torn open, bloodied like the human organ she had always taken it to be. Nor was it over, for the cat that had killed it was still biting it and playing with it — a wicked-faced cat that reminded her of herself.

Not long after, she left the convent and returned to Hawaii, Puamana said. She had to leave the cat, but would never be without a cat of her own.