Gene Wolfe - Mary Beatrice Smoot Friarly, SPV.pdf

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MARY BEATRICE SMOOT FRIARLY,SPV
by Gene Wolfe
* * * *
Born Beatrice Smoot Friarly, Easter Sunday, 1925, in New Canaan, Mas-sachusetts.
According to Sister Mary herself, her birth on Easter was due entirely to the efforts
of her mother (Martha Smoot Friarly), who would normally have given birth on Holy
Sat-urday, but who contrived by an uncom-mon effort of will and with considerable
pain to delay genesis until the minute hand of the large clock on the wall of the
delivery room was well past twelve.
Mrs. Friarly was undoubtedly hoping for a boy. She did not, however,
proceed to raise little Beatrice like one, but like nothing on Earth.
When Beatrice was fifteen she ap-peared (weeping) one fine June morn-ing at
the door of Father John O’Murphy, her pastor. She had spent the previous
twenty-four hours in prayer and had concluded that her vocation was real. She
begged Father O’Murphy to bring her to the attention of some order that might
accept her as a postulant. Mut-tering that it would at least get her out of her mother’s
house, Father O’Murphy promised to see what he could do.
Approximately a year later (June 17, 1941), Beatrice entered her novitiate with
the Sisters of Perpetual Vigilance, an order of nuns intent on saving their oil for the
coming of the bridegroom. Upon completion of the vows, she took the religious
name of Mary and took over the Fourth Grade at the School of Saint Apollos the
Persuasive.
Her collection of cookbooks was be-gun somewhat late in her life, when the
grateful mother of one of her pupils presented her with a tattered volume that had
been passed from one generation to the next for nearly eighty years. That evening,
Sister Mary spent half an hour looking it over, and was a collector ev-ermore.
As such, she possessed but feeble means; the prices of all but the most
humble dealers were far beyond her reach. But she had a considerable amount of
time at her disposal, having discovered long ago that reading did her young charges
more good that any-thing she could say; boundless patience; the good will of
thousands of men and women now scattered across the face of the world who
looked back upon the Fourth Grade as the happiest year in their lives; and a strange,
unpresuming suppleness of speech that she attrib-uted (when she was willing to
admit that she possessed such a power at all) to nearly fifty years of the most faithful
prayer to St. Apollos.
On a sullen summer night not long ago, when black clouds gathered over the
Hoosac Hills and the wind stirred like a restless child, Sister Mary com-pleted her
evening devotions and re-tired to bed. It was about nine thirty.
 
A short time later, as it seemed to her, she heard a knock at the door of the
small convent she shared with Sis-ters Bruno and Evangellica. For a mo-ment or two
she lay quiet, waiting for Sister Evangellica, who was much younger, to answer it.
Then it came to her (she could not say how) that Sister Evangellica and even Sister
Bruno slept on, and would go on sleeping though the knocking continued all night.
That they could not hear it and would never hear it.
She rose then, went to the door, and opened it. It was raining, and the rain
turned to steam when it struck the cloak of the short, dark man who stood at the
doorstep. “Shalom,” he said.
“Shalom,” Sister Mary replied auto-matically, and he stepped across the
threshold.
“And I mean it,” he said. “I come in peace. I’m coming in answer — partly
— to your prayers.”
“You mean my prayers have only helped to condemn me,” said Sister Mary,
who had recognized him. “I’d hoped for more. But I’m sure the sen-tence is just,
and I’m ready to obey it.”
“So let me explain,” the dark man said. “It’s not like you think. In fact, I gave
up on you a long time ago. Can I sit down?”
“Please do,” Sister Mary told him.
“And can I smoke? It won’t bother you?”
“Not at all.”
He began to smoke, mostly from the groin, but a good deal from the hands
and the top of the head. “You’ve prayed to behold an angel,” he said. “Your ex-act
words were ‘the least of Your mes-sengers, Lord, would be sufficient for me.’
Behold, I’m an angel, and not the least of His messengers.”
“Come now,” said Sister Mary.
“I’m Lucifer, the Morning Star. A real angel. You haven’t read about me? A
certain loose liver we both know pretty well said, ‘I watched Satan fall from the sky
like lightning.’ That’s nothing to you?”
“All right,” Sister Mary said, “you’re an angel. But a fallen angel wasn’t
ex-actly what I had in mind.”
“I’m the archangel in charge of pun-ishments,” Lucifer explained. “That’s all.
 
Sure, I’ve had a lot of bad press.”
“Please don’t say it’s a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.” Sister Mary
gathered her bathrobe more tightly around her, the unconscious legacy of ancestors
who had donned armor a thousand years past. “Then you’re say-ing you’re not
really evil after all?”
“If I were evil, would I come here to ask you to do good?”
“By the way, I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
“You need time to think, huh? Sure, I’m Jewish. If I weren’t, would I cut the
kind of deals I do? We’re all Jewish. Gabriel, Michael, everybody. Even on
Broadway, they know all the best an-gels are Jewish. Now you’ll say I don’t look
Jewish.”
“You don’t, more Syrian or Greek. What’s this about doing good? I thought
you’d come to tempt me.”
“I have.” Lucifer rubbed his hands, which nearly went out. “I’ve got for you
the one proposition you can’t turn down — a chance to help somebody who really
doesn’t deserve it. Me. And do good at the same time. You’ve got the greatest
cookbook collection in the world. You didn’t know that?”
“I’ve got a very good one,” Sister Mary acknowledged. “I’ve put in shelves in
the attic. They’re mostly up there.”
“The best. I’ve checked out every-body’s. Now in that collection, you’ve
probably got a lot of recipes for what you might call spiritual or mystical dishes,
don’t you? Like how to make sacramental wine, for instance?”
“You can hardly expect me to tell you that.”
“Oh, I know. I was just for-instanc-ing. But you’ve got it?”
“Certainly,” Sister Mary replied with some pride. “I know how manna was
baked. Do you want to know the broth simmered in the Cauldron of Cerrid-wen? I
can tell you. And I can give you the recipe for the dish of bitter herbs into which
Judas thrust his hand.”
“I know him,” Lucifer said. “A real loser, believe me. No, my problem is I’ve
got a dish I don’t know how to cook. I’ve boiled it, I’ve baked it, and I’ve roasted
it, but nothing helps. Would you have a look at it and see if you can help out? Wait a
minute — before you answer, let me say right off you won’t find my kitchen an
unpleasant place at all. You won’t get burned, or anything like that. And what I’m
trying to do — this is orders from On Top, you un-derstand. You want to help Him
 
out, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Sister Mary said.
At once the convent vanished, and she was surrounded by the leaping flames
of Hell.
“Hey, don’t be so panicky,” Lucifer told her. “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t get
hurt?”
“It’s just that it was so fast.”
“I like running tollgates — a little hobby of mine. Come on, I’ll take you to
see him. Hey, what’s the matter now?”
Sister Mary was looking at herself. “For one thing, I’m nude.”
“Everybody is. That’s the rule here. For you I’d like to bend it a little, but I
can’t.”
“And for another thing, I seem to be about eighteen again.”
“Nice-looking, too. You should be proud, and I’m not saying that just
be-cause I’m in the business. See, every-body here looks the right age to give other
people the most pain. I’m naked too, you’ve noticed.”
“But you’ve got more hair than I do, and it’s much better positioned. I’m not
stirring a step until I get some clothes.”
“All right,” Lucifer said, “I know I don’t have the rep, but I’m really a
gen-erous guy. Here’s the entire habit the SPV was wearing when you joined. The
black skirt, the wimple, the whole schmeer.”
For a moment, Sister Mary could see it just as it had once hung in her closet
at the convent.
Then the cloth vanished in a flash of fire. The wire hanger melted to something
like quicksilver and splashed the smoking stones of Hell. “I’ve been very foolish to
allow you to bring me here,” she said.
“Listen, if you could wear that stuff, everybody’d stare. This way, nobody’ll
notice. You want to get out? Come on.”
They walked down a narrow valley where every ledge was occupied by a
writhing figure. “I didn’t know Hell was this crowded,” Sister Mary said sadly.
 
“For people who don’t like crowds, it’s crowded. For people that do, lonely.
Hey, there he is. We’re in luck; some-times he wanders around.”
The man was tall and muscular. His face was expressionless, his skin a dull
red.
“So look at him,” Lucifer complained. “I’ve fried, I’ve chopped, I’ve boiled,
and just look. That’s agony?”
“Well, he certainly isn’t smiling,” Sister Mary said.
“He isn’t anything. I work my tush off, but does he give one damn? Hell, no.
You’re the expert; you’re going to tell me what I should do? Go ahead, I’m
listening. You think marinating might help? I’ve tried it. Sulfuric acid.”
As if on cue, a dickens appeared. “From Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the
Chairman says so where is he?” the dickens announced. “It’s line seven. Should I
tell him out to lunch?”
“Get out of here, you little schmuck.” Lucifer made Sister Mary a little bow.
“I got to go. Look him over, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Sister Mary nodded, and he vanished in a puff of evil-smelling smoke. When it
had drifted away, she said softly, “He knows what I’m going to do, you know. He
knows exactly what I’m going to do. I find that encouraging, exciting, and
disturbing. The universe is not as we thought.”
The red-skinned man nodded slow assent.
“Or perhaps this is not the universe at all,” she said. “Just the corner of a bad
dream. But I know how to end it. Take my left hand.”
“My hand burn you,” the red-skinned man grunted. He extended it
neverthe-less; and when she clasped it, it did not. It was a man’s hand, living and
strong. She held it and knew she had lived her entire life for this moment. And that it
had been worth it.
Then she crossed herself.
On the morning she awakened, there appeared in New Canaan a tall, swarthy
man whom the people of the town have decided is a Micmac Indian. He does very
little work, and sometimes he drinks too much. But he does no harm either (which is
much the same as not working), and he is very strong, so they leave him alone.
Besides being an In-dian, he had another peculiarity, which is that he whistles softly
whenever he sees Sister Mary.
 

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