Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [13]
The apparition was painfully thin, swaying, but resolute, and it seemed a miracle that it was capable of speech, when it said in a voice heavy with fatigue and sadness: “I desire to begin the time of discernment, the time of listening to God as He speaks in and through the Community. I ask for your prayers that I may spend the rest of my life in His Eucharistic Presence and prepare my soul for the great day of union between bride and Bridegroom.”
Matron recognized the litany of a postulant entering the order, words she herself had uttered so many years ago. Matron replied automatically, just as her Mother Superior had done, “Enter into the joy of the Lord.”
It was only when the stranger slumped against the doorpost that Matron came out of her trance, running around her desk to grab her. Hunger? Exhaustion? Menstrual blood loss? What was this? Sister Mary Joseph Praise weighed nothing in Matron's arms. They took the stranger to a bed. Under the veil, the wimple, and habit they found a delicate wicker-basket chest and a scooped out belly. A girl! Not a woman. Yes, a girl whod only just bid good-bye to childhood. A girl with hair that was not cut short like that of most nuns but long and thick. A girl with (and how could they not notice?) a precocious bosom.
Every maternal instinct in Matron came alive, and she kept vigil. She was there when the young nun woke up in the night, terrified, delirious, clinging to Matron once she knew she was in a safe place. “Child, child, what happened to you? It is all right. You are safe now.” With such soothing words, Matron comforted her, but it was a week before the young nun slept alone and another week before the color returned to her face.
When the short rains ended, and when the sun turned its face to the city as if to kiss and make up and say it was after all its favorite city for which it had reserved its most blessed, cloud-free light, Matron led Sister Mary Joseph Praise outdoors. She was to introduce her to the Missing People. The two of them entered Operating Theater 3 for the first time, and an astonished Matron watched as the stern and serious expression of her new surgeon, Thomas Stone, crumbled into something akin to happiness at the sight of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He was blushing, taking her hand in his and crushing it till tears came to the young nun's eyes.
My mother must have known then that she would stay in Addis Ababa forever, stay in Missing Hospital and in the presence of this surgeon. To work for him, for his patients, to be his skilled assistant, was sufficient ambition, and it was an ambition without hubris, and God willing, it was something she could reasonably do. A return journey to India through Aden was too difficult to contemplate.
In the ensuing seven years that she lived and worked at Missing Hospital, Sister Mary Joseph Praise rarely spoke about her voyage and never about her time in Aden. “Whenever I brought up Aden,” Matron said, “your mother would glance over her shoulder, as if Aden or whatever it was she left behind had caught up with her. The dread and terror on her face made me loath to ask again. But it scared me, I'll tell you. All she said was, ‘It was God's will that I come here, Matron. His reasons are unknowable to us.’ There was nothing disrespectful about that answer, mind you. She believed that her job was to make her life something beautiful for God. He had led her to Missing.”
Such a crucial gap in the history, especially that of a short life, calls attention to itself. A biographer, or a son, must dig deep. Perhaps she knew that the side effect of such a quest was that I'd learn medicine, or that I would find Thomas Stone.
SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE began the task of the rest of her days when she entered Operating Theater 3. She scrubbed and gloved