Custody of the Heart

by Sharon Mollerus

One should exercise custody of the eyes, the elderly ex-nun Jewel recalls from her new bed in the old-age home. Winter is past.

Her eyes are still sharp, but the view is narrow: the brown sun-bitten plains outside her window, the bronze crucifix on the wall, the photos of smiling nieces and nephews, graduating, marrying, having children. And also of the ears, closing up any noise that might wake the flighty heart, the vessels that pulse with a regular beat, but sometimes get tangled. Sick with love.

Like the time she knew Anthony, in the biblical sense, before he realized he must remain a priest. She buried herself in her job advocating for immigrants then, hiding in her apartment in pain and marching on the capitol each spring. Like one who wanders.

Here there are the sounds of various old imbeciles moaning and muttering, the clanging of lunch trays, the over-eager voices of visitors, the patting of young brown hands on old age-spotted fingers, the belt buckle snap of a wheelchair. How would you drown them out? Her roommate sleeps always and sometimes emits a discreet snore. The old woman’s hair is wispy white and her face wrinkled into deep rivulets, tributaries for her dried tears. She has no family having outlived them all, so Jewel’s room is kindly quiet. Until the day breathes.

And custody of the tongue like the desert fathers taught, and here she is silent and can only nod, the tube breathing for her after her stroke. She looks at the aides and signs gratitude with her eyelashes. She smiles at these old novitiate lessons and wonders that she remembers them after forgetting for so many years. The shadows flee.

There’s a school next door, like the grammar school where she taught in the 60’s. She hears the children play, though she’s too high up to see them penned inside the chain-link fences. She taught second grade then as Sr. Mary James and wore a wimple around her face like the white egg-shaped heads the kids would cut out and glue on construction paper for a picture of their family, adding little raisin eyes and red beans glued in curved lines for smiling mouths. Your eyes are doves behind your veil.

The children, their faces a blur, boys and girls, poor kids and rich, in the same white polos with rounded collars, plaid skirts for the girls, navy cords with thick wales for the boys. She wiped their snot, put them in line, taught them the curvy loops of cursive writing. She washed tear-streaked faces and cleaned and bandaged playground cuts. I sought him.

The Sacred Heart stood in the center of the garden pointing to his wounded chest. Her own heart pounded with love or need or just the pulse of her young life. You have ravished my heart.

The 60’s sent out sweet and sour waves of emotion. There were the soaring hopes of peace, love and equality, and then the waves of grief, the shooting of President Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, and she and Anthony out of clerics hand in hand at the rally in Washington just before. That you stir not up.

There was rage and heat waves, the hot L.A. nights, race riots. The bells rang in the monastery in the morning after sleepless nights, the bells between classes, the noon Angelus bells, the tolling bells for their dead. Which bell would toll for her? Just the unanswered telephone. Nor awaken love before it please.

There were those lost in mudslides that year, including the man who stood on the roof of his house in the rising black deluge, refusing to leave. The fire truck had to give up and back down the hill and leave him. The little boy in her class whose mother died early of cancer, too early. For love is strong as death.

The smell of death, the sweat of fear and anger, the hosing she took in Alabama at the rally with the others, their arms linked, flailing, kneeling on the street, the cold water sizzling over the boiling asphalt, their kneecaps burned with the scrape of sunbaked tar and the blast of the spray. And Anthony holding her at night. Your neck is like the tower of David.

She left, and he didn’t. He returned, and she stayed away. The headiness and emptiness, the nauseous disappointment, the loneliness which spread out across the years like a pool of blood seeping from a deep knife wound. Make haste, my beloved.

And now she was dying. Their old age they didn’t spend together. He a priest somewhere, or maybe he left later anyway. A garden locked, a fountain sealed.

So many gone. She never looked him up as she guarded the custody of her own flayed heart. And her thick wedding ring, the one from her spouse, she kept with her things, as she moved from one little downtown hovel to another, condemned from time to time, living as her clients, she alone. My beloved had turned and gone.

She was an advocate; she intervened or interceded on behalf of all the poor of the neighborhood. Who would advocate for her now. They beat me.

They always treated her with respect. She’s still known as the ex-nun, some forty years later. With her sensible skirts and flat black nurse’s shoes. She doesn’t wear a cross anymore. They wounded me, they took away my mantle.

The ring she always left out on her tiny desk as she worked and met clients. She didn’t have her own office; she shared a room crowded with desks and telephones and and chairs and overfull filing cabinets leaning against the wall. She’d put the ring just in reach, but still expecting some destitute person to pick it up sometime, especially as she got up to make photocopies or bring a cup of coffee to a shaking old man, but it never happened. She never wore it, but always pocketed it. As the hole wore through her old cardigan, the ring would drop through and clang on the street. She’d sew the pocket and replace the gold ring to its place, the sharp edges long rubbed smooth by her fingers. That’s her job, placements, placing people in places. Gazing in at the windows.

Here she keeps the ring on her hospital table, thinking sometime when she’s asleep someone who needs it more than she will take it, the poor cleaning woman perhaps. He will take it back someday; he will come for it. Looking through the lattice.

The lady who brings Communion, Juana, has gotten wind of her and comes to her door. There aren’t so many priests anymore; so she’s got the job. My beloved is knocking.

Why does the ex-nun label stick to you everywhere? It’s such a big city. People are divorced. They don’t refer to first and second husbands, do they? when they don’t even know you? She hasn’t been to church since then; her church is the street, she always said. In the streets and in the squares.

And she walked the streets early Sunday mornings with the ring jingling in her pocket along with the change she keeps to give away. It’s her amulet, round as the hook of a question mark dangling from the clouds in the pink and gold rays of sunrise. She stopped thinking of pawning it and gave into the weight of it, the pull like gravity. She should have given it to the poor too, long ago, but there were too many. She would give it away to the last one, but she knew she would never find that one; that had been prophesied by her same prophet. My beloved had turned and gone.

They still call her Sister, on Sunday mornings, and in the afternoon in the soup kitchen. During the week she meets her parishioners from the street, finding them any kind of assistance she can rummage up: one more bed in the last shelter, a late meal, a warehouse job, a place in rehab, a foster home for a child. Turn away your eyes from me, for they disturb me.

She places people and women and children often sleep on the floor of her efficiency apartment for weeks at a time; but somehow she always finds a place for everybody. She knows people who will lend her a garage, a hunting cabin. There has to be someplace somewhere, for everyone. My dove, my perfect one.

Beverly comes to see her. Beverly stayed, all through the shakeup, the sifting of the order. Beverly kept track of everyone, like the family archivist who keeps accounts of even the black sheep because they’re most interesting, and this family of religion was overrun with them. She’s the one-woman alumni association of the high school who writes and asks you to answer back and tell everybody how you’re doing. She’ll keep up with you whether you like it or not, only Beverly never asks for donations for their alma mater, the old convent which broke up into apartments of one or two, and some of those left aging and impoverished themselves, scattered as they are. Beverly comes to visit on Saturdays. She teaches English and is assistant principal at the inner-city Catholic high school. She doesn’t wear a veil anymore, but keeps her all-gray hair clipped close at the neck. They have the same neighbors; the students and their families are also in Jewel’s street parish. O daughters of Jerusalem.

She thinks Anthony came to visit while she was so sick, but he doesn’t come now. He didn’t have much to say, ashamed of himself, or sad, more like. She wanted to tell him she forgives him, but there was no pen and paper, her hands were not steady, her throat was occupied with the breathing tube. She thought maybe he needed a place to stay. And at that moment she hurt so much, in her chest. He seemed to know it. They just looked at each other. Then he left. Perhaps he came a long way to make a visit. Jealousy is cruel as the grave.

There’s the Eucharistic minister who comes to see her, Juana, a Cursilloista, overly enthusiastic. I didn’t ask for you, Jewel wanted to say, but now it’s too late even if they take her breathing tube out. She won’t be able to turn Juana away either. Just as if Juana needed a place to camp out for a week or two until something better opened up. Another rock-hard case for her to soften up before death. It’s just the kind of place Juana needs. She camps out in hospital rooms, with anyone Catholic or not who doesn’t throw her out. She bobs in with a gold pyx hanging around her neck; she swings Christ on a necklace and smiles. If you find my beloved.

The doctor has come to hold Jewel’s hand, and she doesn’t hear him, but she sees by his face how it is. They call Juana, and she calls the priest. It could be Anthony; who’s to tell after all these years? They all look the same now, she, he, the others who find their place here at this home, with their furrowed faces and graying temples. Many waters cannot quench love.

He brings the oils; he’s got the purple sash around his neck. She still can’t speak, can’t say anything, but just like with the others, like with Juana, she has to let him in. Set me as a seal upon your heart.

He needs a place too, whoever he is. She can’t move her neck back to see the ring; she’s just used to checking on it. It glistens gold with the sunset in the corner of her eye where she knows it still is. Its gleam waits for her. Its flashes are flashes of fire.

She could never stop them from coming in, stop Anyone from coming in. He comes in. There I will give you my love.

She feels the cool oiling of her temples, lies outstretched over the cold floor before the altar again, in her rough brown robe and rope belt, her bare toes tapping the marble, her feet bound in leather straps. Make haste, my beloved.

The looped ropes of her veins pull the blood from heart to brain and out again, passing through the lungs, the limbs, the stomach, and back into the deep churning within, circling the heart’s one Love remembered. The Spouse comes and she lets Him come in, a ring of Blood carried on a wave and a shudder, a heartbeat stopping with a final leap into one foma; awe-filled Grasp. On the day of the gladness of his heart.

2005