Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [34]
Although Shannon had known about other orders that ministered to the poor or worked in hospitals and schools, she could imagine no higher calling than devoting her life exclusively to praying for the betterment of the world, she has since explained to me. The only contact the sisters had with people outside the convent was through handwritten prayer petitions slipped into a narrow slot in the monastery wall.
If Shannon thought she’d be winning our father’s blessing, she was mistaken. My parents both thought entering the monastery was a bad decision. She continued on nonetheless. Just as I was seeking my own community of acceptance, so was Shannon. She desired an authentic sisterhood, a connection with other women that she’d never had in our family. She also prayed that the cloistered life, free from the stress of the everyday world, would restore order and peace to her body. Blood, as ever, was a monthly ordeal. Though less painful, her menstrual cycle had become distressingly irregular. Shannon hoped the sisters’ ascetic disciplines would be an anchor, physical as well as spiritual.
As the first stage in joining the order, she had to meet regularly, over a six-month period, with the monastery’s Reverend Mother. The two women were separated by a small grille and, while it sometimes felt like being in a confessional booth, Shannon has said, she found the Reverend Mother to be a wise, wonderful woman with a delightful sense of humor. “We’d talk about my conviction in becoming a Carmelite, about prayer and faith. And about family. She was kind of like a therapist.”
In Shannon’s most recent retelling of this story, I found that it had more shades than I’d previously known. “Only one thing scared me about joining,” she told me, trying to sound portentous but breaking down in laughter.
I tried to guess. “They wouldn’t let you play Joni Mitchell on your guitar? No crewelwork allowed?”
“No, no, no. I was really nervous about—don’t laugh—about my feet being cold. You had to wear sandals with bare feet. And,” Shannon said, as if this were the final straw, “the monastery was unheated.”
“So that was the deal-breaker?” I laughed. “The bad footwear?”
“Well, no—”
She fell silent. “Actually, you helped me with that,” she said.
“I did?”
“Yes—” Another pause. “—when you came to me and shared that you were gay.”
I wasn’t following.
She then explained that she’d looked more deeply into the church’s views on gay people, and that ended her desire to join the Carmelites. “In fact, that’s when I left the church.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I’d unwrapped an eighteen-year-old present, one made with such love, but also one that I could not have appreciated at twenty-three. I’d have seen it then as too huge a sacrifice, a debt I’d need to repay. Now I saw it not as an abandonment of religion but as her claiming her own voice, an expression of true faith.
“Well, there was no question,” Shannon added. “I just turned completely around and walked the other way.”
FIVE
Origin Story
Is he strong? Listen, bud!
He’s got radioactive blood. . . .
—SPIDER-MAN THEME SONG LYRIC, 1968
MOST OF MY BEST INFORMATION ON THE ARCANE INNER world of comic books has come from Steve’s occasional late-night, half-medicated commentaries. “Listen to this,” he said in bed recently, reading aloud a snippet from the letters page of a back issue of Fantastic Four: “This is a fan writing: ‘Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, . . . The characters shine. They live and breathe. Real, red human blood pumps in their veins. I can easily believe their world for, though colorful and bizarre, it is just as real as ours. . . .’ ”
Steve chuckled. “Wow, he’s got it bad.”
I put down my New Yorker. “Fantastic Four? That’s the one with Mary Hart?”
“Uh-huh.”
Of course, this made perfect sense to me. A young Mary Hart (from TV’s Entertainment Tonight) would be Steve’s pick to play the Invisible Woman in a big-budget Fantastic Four