"It was my hatred that drew me deeper into the church, Sister
Ursula's third installment began,
the words cramped even more tightly on exactly 25 pages.
And this elicited my now standard comments
in the margin.
As a writer of opening sentences,
Sister Ursula was without peer among my students.
[LAUGHTER]
In the months following her mother's death,
an explanation had occurred to Sister Ursula.
Her father, most likely, had booked passage to America
in search of work.
Such journeys, she knew, were fraught
with unimaginable peril, and perhaps
he now lay at the bottom of the ocean.
So it was that she gradually came
to accept the inevitability of Sister Veronique's
cruel prophesy.
She would become one of those whom she detested.
Ironically, this fate was hastened
by the prophet's own untimely death
when she was kicked by a horse, not
in the head as Sister Ursula had prayed,
but in the chest, causing severe internal hemorrhaging
and creating an opening in the stable.
During her long sojourn at the convent,
Sister Ursula had learned to prefer the company of animals
to that of humans.
And so, at the age of 16, already a large, full woman,
like her mother, she became herself a bride of Christ.
Sister Ursula's chronicle of the years following her vows,
largely a description of her duties in the stable,
featured several brief recollections
of a single weekend that she had spent at home in the city
during the Christmas holiday of that first year
she entered the convent school.
During that holiday, she'd seen very little of her mother--
a relief, since sister Ursula dreaded the heat
of her mother's embrace, the cloying
stench of her whore's perfume.
Rather, her beloved father took her with him on his rounds,
placing her on a convenient bench
outside the dark buildings he entered, telling her
how long he would be, how high a number
she would have to count to before he would return.
Only a few times did she have to count higher.
"Did you find work, father?"
she asked each time he reappeared.
It seemed to Sister Ursula that in buildings as large and dark
as the ones that he entered with so many other men
entering and exiting, there should
have been work in one of them, but there was not.
Still, that they were together was joy enough.
Her father took her to the wharf to see the boats,
to a small carnival where a man her father
knew let her ride a pony for free.
And finally, on a bitter cold picnic to the country,
where they ate warm bread and cheese.
At the end of each of these excursions,
her father promised her again that she would not
have to remain much longer in the convent school.
That another Christmas would find them all together.
The installment ended with Sister Ursula
taking her final vows in the same chapel that for years had
been her refuge from the taunts of the children
for whom she would always be the whore's child.
There, at the very altar of God, Sister Ursula,
like a reluctant bride in an arranged marriage,
indulged her fantasy of rescue right up to the last moment.
When asked to proclaim her irrevocable devotion
to God and to the one true church,
she paused and turned toward the side door
of the chapel, the one that she had always
imagined her father would throw open,
and willed her father's shadow to emerge from the blinding
light and scatter these useless women and hateful children
before him.
But the door remained shut.
The chapel dark except for the flickering
of 100 candles, and so Sister Ursula became a bride."