The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [159]
“How long have you been here?” Mitchell asked the beekeeper.
“Couple of weeks. Brought the whole family. This is our Christmas vacation. And New Year’s. My wife and kids are working in one of the orphanages. I figured this place might be a little tough on the kids. But taking care of cute little babies? Yeah, sure.” With his suntanned skin and blond curls, the beekeeper looked like a surfing legend or an aging quarterback. His gaze was level and serene. “Two things brought me here,” he said, before leaving Mitchell on his own. “Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer. Couple years ago I went on a real Schweitzer kick. Read everything he wrote. Next thing I know I’m taking premed classes. At night. Biology. Organic chemistry. I was twenty years older than anybody else in the class. But I kept going. Finished my premed requirements last year, applied to sixteen medical schools, and got into one. I start next fall.”
“What are you going to do with your bees?”
“I’m selling the farm. Turning over a new leaf. Starting a new chapter. Pick your cliché.”
Mitchell took it easy that day, settling in. He helped serve lunch, ladling daal into bowls. He brought the patients glasses of water. On the whole, the men were cleaner and healthier than he’d anticipated. A dozen or so were superannuated, with skeletal faces, lying immobile in their beds, but quite a few were middle-aged, and a few even young. It was often hard to tell what they were suffering from. No charts hung from their beds. What was plain was that the men had nowhere else to go.
The nun in charge, Sister Louise, was a martinet with black horn-rimmed eyeglasses. All day long, she stood at the front of the Home, barking orders. She treated volunteers like a nuisance. The rest of the nuns were uniformly gentle and kind. Mitchell wondered how they had the strength, small and delicate-boned as they were, to lift the destitute off the streets into the old ambulance, and how they carried out the bodies when people died.
The other volunteers were a miscellaneous bunch. There was a group of Irish women who believed in papal infallibility. There was an Anglican minister who spoke of the resurrection as “a nice idea.” There was a sixty-year-old (gay) New Orleanian who, before coming to Calcutta, had walked the pilgrimage route in Spain, stopping off to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Sven and Ellen, the Lutheran couple from Minnesota, wore matching safari vests, the pockets full of candy bars that the nuns forbade them to give out. The two surly French medical students listened to their Walkmans while they worked and didn’t speak to anyone. There were married couples who came to volunteer for a week and college students who stayed a half year or a year. No matter who they were or where they came from, they all tried their best to follow the guiding philosophy.
Whenever Mitchell had seen Mother Teresa on television, meeting presidents or accepting humanitarian awards, looking, every time, like a crone in a fairy tale barging into a grand ball, whenever she stepped up to the microphone that was inevitably too high for her, so that she had to hieratically lift her face to speak into it—a face both girlish and grandmotherly and as indefinable as the oddly accented Eastern European voice that issued from the lipless mouth—whenever Mother Teresa spoke, it was to quote Matthew 25:40: “Whatsoever you do for the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me.” This was the scripture she founded her work on, at once an expression of mystical belief and a practical guide for performing charity work. The bodies at the Home for Dying Destitutes, broken, diseased, were the bodies of Christ, divinity immanent in each one. What you were supposed to do here was to take this scripture literally. To believe it strongly and earnestly enough that, by some alchemy of the