The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"A luminous debut . . . Haunting, gripping, and surprisingly nuanced . . . A work of great depth and seriousness."
—Kirkus Reviews

When Sister Angela receives an anonymous package containing an ornate silver candlestick, an object she hasn't seen in twenty-five years, her safe and secure life begins to shatter. Suddenly, she must confront her darkest secret: her participation in a crime from which she can no longer hide. As she sets about discovering who sent her the package, memories of St. X. School for Girls come back to haunt her.

At the center is a group of girls who call themselves The Sisterhood, from whom fourteen-year-old Angela desperately seeks comfort and approval. Saddened by her mother's declining health and her father's abandonment, Angela looks up to the group's beautiful and alluring leader, Rachel. When she is encouraged by Rachel to play a joke on another student, the rituals of The Sisterhood take a violent turn. Now, from within the safe refuge of her convent and with the unexpected help of a young pregnant girl, Angela at last faces the truth-and the boundaries of faith.

In the tradition of The Secret History and Lying Awake, The Divine Economy of Salvation is a dark, powerful, and suspenseful story that captures the innocence and cruelty of adolescence and the mysteries of adulthood.

Release date: September 1, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

My name was Angela H. then. You may remember me. We went to school together at St. X. School for Girls. I had long brown hair, cut at the waist in a single straight swipe, and I used to wear a tiny silver chain with a faux-gold locket in the shape of a heart, a picture of my mother inside. We knew each other. We all did. By name or by deed. Or at least I thought so at the time. I’ve had plenty of time here, plenty of time to think about the past and what we did know, or thought we knew, about what we, what I, have done. The air is thick as the stone walls with memories, with ghosts of us. I do not think it sacrilegious to speak so about ghosts. Jesus Christ is a ghost, the Holy Spirit is a ghost, the Bible tells us. I imagine God too, omnipresent and without form, is a ghost haunting my night. A wind in this darkness. I have food and water, a bed and paper. This is all I need.

You may remember a few of the girls began a group, The Sisterhood, and we snuck out of our dormitory rooms to meet. You and I, we were invited to join. We met in the dark of the hallway, our movements anxious, almost animal, feeling our way to Room 313, Rachel’s room, the girl with the shoulder-length blonde curls and light-green eyes, the one we wanted so to impress, the one we believed was the strongest. I can still smell the sweet perspiration, girls’ clean preadolescent sweat. It is different from the sweat here, a grown woman’s sweat we try to hide by doing the wash early in the morning after pacing in our rooms, restless, alone. The hard sweat of layers of clothing, the heavy habits if we choose to wear them, the blankets we pile on top of our bodies to keep us covered at night. Or the cold, blank sweat of the nightmares many of us have. Before I moved in here, I never would have thought so many nightmares should fill a place of God. Prince of Peace. But I guess we did know. We lived one of our own at St. X. School for Girls. Our sheets were washed then too. The stains of sin, Sister Marguerite would have said, her large chest pounding like a needle on a sewing machine. No one ever found out what happened in Room 313. That’s the part that disturbs me most in the middle of the night in this tiny basement room, a single window the height and width of one of the bricks at ground level. I watch feet go by, have come to identify the different boarders and visitors by the kinds of shoes or boots they wear. By the noises they make treading on the grounds. How our footsteps changed. No one confessed, you know. The crosses that hung over blackboards and bulletin boards in the classrooms and the adjoining church were oblivious to our crime, and the nuns only punished us for the ordinary sins of daily living, the banal trespasses of girlhood. No one confessed, until now. If you choose to remain hidden, I will not expose you. But I must confess. It’s time. Don’t turn away. We held hands once in the dark. You may remember me.

SISTER BERNADETTE CAME BY to see me this morning with a package. I nodded when she entered, from where I was kneeling on the white square-tiled floor, reciting my morning prayers in white cotton pyjamas, the late autumn air crisp after having left the window open a crack in the night. She smiled, laid the brown wrapped box in the middle of my already-made bed, and shut the door gently, her sneakers echoing softly down the empty basement hall. I had known she was coming because of those shoes; the left one squeaks on the tiled floor. The package held little interest for me, as I assumed it was from my sister, my real sister, Christine, who married a lawyer and has two sons. I washed my hair and ate my breakfast without opening it, compelled to get out, to see the changing leaves of the maple trees on the front lawn. Their thin, flat bodies, forced to fall for the coming winter, have always attracted me. After it has rained, if you hold a leaf tightly, sometimes the colours run onto your hands.

Before returning to my room I went upstairs to the second floor of the convent to help Sister Irene with her pills. She has been in and out of the hospital, back and forth, the last three years. There was discussion about giving her a room on the first floor, so that stairs wouldn’t be a problem when she needed to go back again, but she’s settled in her room now and the next trip, we know, will be her last. The doctors can do no more, and they insist she’d probably rather die here, though she has few friends among the other Sisters, the ones left. So many she had known when she first entered this convent, back in the years of World War II, have already died, passed on to where they believe themselves to go. With the onset of her sickness, Sister Irene turned rude and ill-mannered, rushing into rooms without knocking, yelling at a Sister for the tiniest inconvenience she might have caused, muttering under her breath every time she saw a Sister leave the main entrance, implying they were involved in something sinful. In the early stages, most refused to walk by her room, avoided her in the dining hall when she still took her meals there, pretended to have other engagements when she’d try to talk to them in the recreation room. With her time drawing nearer to an end, however, some Sisters have taken it upon themselves to light candles in her name, recite a specific prayer in her favour before bed, or drop off a treat, a bag of butterscotch candies perhaps, which she likes to suck. A few requested Father B. say a weekly Mass for her health. Still, most avoid her room, refusing to pass directly under the archway between her death and our lives.

I too have little affection for Sister Irene, though I am compelled to witness the change in her. Since the stroke, she has lost feeling in her legs and in the left side of her face. Her single bed with its twenty-year-old box spring and mattress is her sole domain. I hold her bendable drinking straw to the good side of her mouth when I feed her a liquid meal, her dark lips large and soft from inactivity. They used to be so thin, tight, well-sealed, those lips. Now she tells me things. Or she tries to, mumbling incoherently, her tongue unskilled and numb against her teeth as she struggles to form simple syllables. She grips my arm at the wrist as if she would snap it like a twig in her frustration, but she lacks the strength, tries to attract my attention with her brown eyes, while the wrinkles on her face deepen like etchings in stone. She tells me addresses and telephone numbers, listing them off without including names, and I’ve given up prodding her to remember whom they belong to. She doesn’t seem to care anyway. She just enjoys reciting the numbers themselves over and over as if they are well-loved people. It is almost comforting, except the strong spice-like smell of her keeps me at a distance on the stool beside her, her body leaking, forcing itself to the outside. The pills calm her, put her to sleep, her hair thin against her pillow, olive scalp tough as hide. I’ve touched her scalp as she’s slept, pushed my hands against its surface petting her, an attempt to unleash what has become trapped over time. Once, she bolted up, holding her hands in front of her, confused, as if she couldn’t understand who these hands, the skin over the knuckles white and bumpy like curds of milk, belonged to. “Death is backwards!” she cried. “Backwards!” It’s the only thing she’s said to me in the last month resembling a sentence. And I’ve wanted to ask her what she meant, but it seems as she sleeps, her head pressed against the cloth of her pillow, that she will be taking her secrets with her.

Only in the afternoon, after leaving Sister Irene to her drug-induced peace, did I notice that the address of the convent on the package was typed, and no return address announced itself. I could not decide at first whether to open the package, although besides the unfamiliarity of the typing, there was no reason for my hesitation. We frequently receive packages from elementary schools, the social services department, or from thoughtful parishioners in thanks for our work or time. A particular man or woman may simply have believed I’d helped them personally, beyond my call of duty, and made out a gift to me. I’d just donate the contents to the convent, inform Mother Superior. She might even praise me, I figured.

Yet deep down I knew. I knew it was no gift I was about to receive. My hands trembling, I was sure my face had lost its colour, though there is no mirror hanging in my room to check such things. I could feel blood leave my cheeks, pump quicker to the heart. I tried to reason I’d exhausted myself with Sister Irene and needed a good nap. Cold, I wrapped the grey wool afghan from my bed around my shoulders. A tiny ceramic hand-painted statue of Mary, a gift from my mother when I received First Communion, which I sometimes hold in the palm of my hand when I think of her, seemed to forsake me from her central place on my dresser. Do you know who has come for you? I heard the season’s wind ask, beating against my low window, a yellow leaf’s face flattened against the glass. I did.

The box was wrapped first in plain brown packing paper, the kind you can buy in rolls at the post office for a couple of dollars. The stamps were Canadian, standard red maple leaves, totalling $7.35, the postmark illegible. When I shook the package, an object grudgingly slid from side to side, the weight comparable to a medium-sized pot. I tore at the paper with my blunt, bitten fingernails, the bits of packaging on the bed like pieces of bark scraped off a tree. The actual box was made of white cardboard, void of logos, but the type found in department stores, easy to put together, flimsy, the edges folded into wings and taped shut. I checked the door. It doesn’t have a lock, but I made sure it was firmly closed. When it is left ajar, my entire enclosure can be seen if someone happens to walk by, the room being only nine by seven feet. Not that many people come by here. To see others I usually need to seek them out by going upstairs. I am the only one living down in the basement. The room was assigned to me when I entered the convent because renovations were being done to the second and third floors due to weather damage. All the Sisters were grouped together on the first floor until construction was finished, bunking like girls, two or four to a room after years of sleeping in their own quarters. The bunks were all filled up. Besides a bathroom, furnace room, and storage area, there is only one room in the basement suitable for living. I took it. When the other rooms became available, I clung to the excuse that I was accustomed to my space and didn’t need to move. Mother Superior didn’t mind. Better to use the space than leave it vacant. And I honestly felt comfortable in the small room, encased and protected. A single bed, an oak dresser like the kind my father crafted for my mother when I was a child that I found at an antique store, a single folding chair, photographs, a few other mementos, and a large leather tote bag for my sister Christine’s letters are all I own. My room doesn’t even have a closet. Now I wished there were more places to hide.

The tissue paper inside the package was white and had a faint perfume smell. The strangely familiar scent forced me to take my hands off the box. Lilies. I had accompanied Mother Superior once to the mall to visit the wig lady, a woman who helped the older Sisters, the ones who had lost their hair from too-tight wimples, brush out their wigs. The wig lady wore a similar scent that day, and I ran out of the store without explanation. How could I tell them that the smell made me see blood, blood spilling over the glass counters like fountain water, blood on my hands, my habit, my shoes, on the holiday decorations, blinking in the lights, the store windows, the exits? Blood on the wigs, on the faces of the mannequins, on their Styrofoam lips, and on Mother Superior’s scalp, down her round cheeks as the hairnet was fitted. No, I couldn’t tell them of the sights occasioned by a woman’s perfume. Though it is my belief, if the dead come back to earth, they travel by smell. Lilies.

It was at that moment I knew for sure. I swallowed hard, in an effort not to choke. The box open, the only thing left to do was to look. The room took on a yellowish hue, like that of old photographs. I tried to blink it away and rubbed my eyes vigorously, thinking I might be allergic to the scent. An unacknowledged ache forced its pressure against my stomach. For the first time in years, I longed for a companion, someone who would comfort me for no reason except that I asked. For the first time in years, I longed for God to announce Himself, to speak in a language I could understand. As if in a dream, compelled to continue, I unfolded the white tissue. The silver candle holder lay at the bottom of the box like a slender body frozen in the snow.

A knock at the door startles me. I cough, clearing my throat, and throw the tissue paper back over the silver candle holder. I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting here in a daze, staring at the offensive object, when Sister Bernadette arrives.

“Come in,” I invite.

Sister Bernadette’s white forehead peeks through the doorway. My attention distracted, I had missed the squeak of her left shoe.

“Come in,” I say again.

Sister Bernadette is the youngest nun at the convent and loves to chatter. The two usually don’t go together, as the young tend to keep their secrets well-hidden, revealed only to their confessor, one of the resident priests at R. Catholic Church. However, few young women have been admitted here in recent years, so the tide might have shifted in this respect without my knowledge. Regardless, Sister Bernadette is of another ilk. Those who take vows out of optimism, instead of shame. A social brand of nun, who want to save the whales and protect the ecosystem. She is always passing around flyers and petitions, reciting a litany of statistics and studies. Her belief in fact is apparently unshakeable. She keeps meticulous records and files detailing her various projects and photocopies them at the church for Mother Superior’s office. Sister Bernadette has been rallying Mother Superior and Father B. to allocate some of the parish’s money to ethical mutual funds, citing examples of Sisters in the United States who hold shares in large companies solely so they can disrupt the annual shareholders’ meetings and control the morality of businesses. I wonder how Sister Bernadette will possibly survive in this world. Who has protected her for so long? Most of us can’t save even one person, let alone an entire species. She smiles often, though, her braces removed before she came to live here, her teeth perfectly aligned, and her brown eyes are quite pleasing, large and round like amber. Within a week of Sister Bernadette’s entrance into the convent, she took over the mail delivery from Sister Maria, whose knees are stricken with arthritis. There is no need for anyone to deliver the mail, but Sister Bernadette claimed it was “such a lovely way to say hello to everyone in the morning.” Mother Superior is amused by her, I gather, though Mother Superior herself is rarely visible in the mornings. She is efficient and incredibly organized. Perhaps because of this, she is rarely social with anyone when it doesn’t directly serve a greater purpose. It is rumoured she composes long religious sermons on the deterioration of the laws of the Church, on contemporary evils such as genetic engineering and plastic surgery, and that she packs them up and sends them to her brother in England who looks after her finances. Sister Maria says Mother Superior receives mail from academic religious journals under an androgynous pseudonym, but Sister Maria doesn’t read very well, English being her third language. The truth of Sister Maria’s claim is difficult to prove. Sister Maria also thinks Mother Superior wishes she had been born a man.

Sister Bernadette, twenty-four years old, tiny-hipped and small-breasted, her face scrubbed clean and makeup free, lowers her head in a mock gesture of guilt.

“With such a large package to deliver this morning, I forgot to give you this little letter,” she says, her left arm extended towards me on the bed.

The candle holder occupying my private thoughts, weighing heavily upon me, I try not to tremble as I take the letter from her hands. If there is any outward change in my behaviour or appearance, Sister Bernadette doesn’t seem to notice. Relieved, I let out a sigh, louder than I mean to, when I see the writing on the envelope. Christine always prints on her envelopes or packages, usually in bright pens or markers: purple, green, yellow, as if the sender were a child. She says she wants to brighten up the convent a little, add some colour. This particular letter is addressed in mustard yellow, and Sister Bernadette recognizes the distinct presentation too.

“From your sister, Christine, right?”

I nod cheerfully for Sister Bernadette’s benefit. My sister’s letters and visits rarely make me happy. We see differently. Even discussions about the weather leave us on opposite sides of a fence. The first time she came to visit me here, she walked into my room and gasped. “Couldn’t you ask for a nicer room, one with a little more light? What will you do in the winter? Did they give you this room because you’re new? Is there really nothing left? How about this floor, it’s going to be impossible in the cold. You’ll get sick. You’ll never get any fresh air from that window,” she ranted.

“Who sent you the package?” Sister Bernadette asks as she rocks toe to heel, the white sneakers peeking from underneath her habit. Months earlier, I had made a mental note to ask her if she wanted me to take hers to Sister Humilita for hemming; Sister Humilita mends the habits and orders new ones when she decides they need replacing. Sister Bernadette’s are all an inch too long, but I forgot to mention it, and I almost wish she’d trip to detract attention from my package. She waits for me to show it to her.

Do you know who has come for you?

“An old . . . an old friend.”

“A gift?” she asks with excitement.

There is no use hiding objects. The Sisters find out sooner or later if there are any new items in your room, even if your room is in the basement. Purchases are noted, gifts from friends and family brought out for others to see, especially during the holidays. They are considered tokens of love and goodwill. Blessings that should be acknowledged. Books are frequently shared, as well as any item deemed to have communal benefits, like bread makers or coffee percolators, sewing machines, board games or decks of cards, large packages of baked goods or canned preserves. When Sister Katherine’s brother sent her an electric typewriter, she immediately offered it up for the church’s use. This is proper procedure. Only thoughts can be concealed, and I’ve hidden my share. Enough for two, enough for this innocent Sister Bernadette. I remove the box from the bed, the weight resting on my forearms, and she approaches me eagerly.

“It’s a little heavy,” I tell her. “You’ll have to lift the tissue paper.”

Her fingers move delicately, as if she realizes the solemnity of the gift. If initially I wanted to hide the candle holder, now, equally desperately, I want someone to touch it, leave fingerprints on it. Prove the object is made of matter. That it won’t disappear or crumble when taken out into the light.

She takes it out of the box, relieving my burden, cradling the silver in her arms like a baby, her eyebrows arched in appreciation. A strong rain pounds against the windowpane. The afternoon has grown dark under the threat of a storm. Normally there should be snow this time of year, but rain and autumn have won out. My window leaks and the drops come down, some caught by a coffee mug kept for that purpose on the inner ledge. I shiver, anticipating another cool night.

“It’s beau-ti-ful,” Sister Bernadette hums.

That it is. I often thought so back then, before everything else began. I had coveted that very silver candle holder or one exactly like it twenty-five years ago. It spoke of another world, with its crafted austere elegance, sitting attentively on Rachel M.’s bookshelf. It was a gift from her father, purchased on a downtown street in Rio de Janeiro, where he’d vacationed. He had brought her back silver necklaces and chocolates, thin cotton dresses and wooden-faced black dolls with haunting orange circles around their eyes, but she asked for the candle holder. Made of real silver and quite valuable, her father told her to be careful with it. The features are the same as I remember: a square base with four squat legs, its body vertically converging to the mouth where a candlestick would be inserted. There is a wick melted onto the silver. At the four bottom corners are black burned etchings, intriguing but foreign, strokes in a language I don’t know how to read: a loop swallowing itself, a type of cross with two horizontal arms, a star with a jagged edge, and an oval like the outline of an eyeball. When polished, the candle holder’s shell reflects like a mirror. In the dark, lit by a single wax candle, it dominates the room, the light contained but threatening to break. The days at St. X. School for Girls were like that shell. The nights were like that light.

I could lie and tell you I’ve never thought of those days until the arrival of the silver candle holder, but I won’t. I’ve thought of my time at St. X. School for Girls every single day, and if a day does pass and it occurs to me that I haven’t thought about it, then for the next couple of days I’ll be haunted by little else. The gift is no surprise, but a sign I have been waiting for these twenty years in this small convent in Ottawa. At least I can bless the fact that it has finally come.

WE MOVED TO OTTAWA because my mother was ill. The long straight hair my sister Christine and I inherited had thinned upon her scalp to strands of black thread. Her eyes, circled with dry patches and puffy as blisters, were most of the time wan and dazed. She applied lotion to the skin on her face three or four times a day, and she wore rose-tinted glasses to shield her hazel eyes from the sun, the only thing the doctors had ordered that seemed to help. My father loaded us into a rented van, and my mother slumped in the front seat like one of our hastily packed bags. She slept most of the way, her weak groans drowned out by the classical radio station she had requested for the trip. “Ave Maria,” sung by young boys with high girlish voices, propelled us forward through the farmland and small towns with family-run grocery stores and cheap gas stations where we would all get out, except Mother, to stretch our legs and take another look at the map. Three hundred miles of driving that took all afternoon, the exhaust from the van filtering into our noses, my mother coughing, her head and mouth against the glass, my father’s foot at intervals solid, then teetering on the pedal, changing our speed.

Christine was excited by the possibility of city life, pointing at the signs announcing the number of miles left, pronouncing the names of the towns we didn’t drive through, rocking in the seat beside me, ritualistically eating a single potato chip from her bag each time we reached a new town name. I wanted to be back in my bed, the one my father had made from the trees on our property shortly after I was born. Eventually, my feet fell a couple of inches over the edge of the red oak frame, but I refused to let him build me a new one. I had crawled underneath and etched my initials into the wood. I felt the bed and I were a part of each other, even if I’d outgrown it. We left it for sale like all his other handiwork: rocking chairs and shelves made of oak and pine, birch dressers and maple chests, cabinets and sewing tables. My haven of privacy, where I would lie under the covers reading or daydreaming about when I would be married and have a house of my own, was abandoned like our home. I made a fuss to my father about it, wringing my hands and crying, holding onto the bedposts as if they were part of the family and couldn’t possibly be left behind.

“We’ll get a new one, Angela.”

“No! I want this one!” I had cried.

Generally a gentle man, my father shocked me, clamping my shoulders in his large arms and pulling me up, my feet dangling above the floor. I was afraid he was going to hit me. My eyes shut, his cracked voice blurted in my ears: “I can make a new one! Don’t you understand? I can make you a new one! I can’t make you a mother! Do you hear me?”

He dropped me and left the room, slamming my bedroom door, a few hangers on the doorknob falling to the ground, tinkling. I pushed against the headboard, beating the wood with my fists. The bed, like our home, like our farm property, was going to remain without us. We would go on without the things we had come to rely on, and I knew instinctively that once we left, nothing would be the same. What I didn’t know then was that I would never sleep again in a bed that was solely my own.

When we entered the city limits, the highway twisting down into a concrete valley with high-rises and numerous bright street-lights, Christine, ten years of age, four years younger than me, let out a childish squeal, slapping her now empty bag of potato chips across her knees.

“Stop it, Chrissy,” Father silenced her.

Mother, startled, woke up. She shifted her weight on her seat and I could feel it against my knees, the top of her head peeking out of the headrest.

“Joe, I can’t see. I can’t see,” she panicked, her hands fumbling over the glove compartment in front of her and onto the windshield.

“It’s dark, Anna,” my father told her, veering the vehicle to the curb and stopping, covering my mother’s shaking hands with his own, eyes searching hers for recognition. “It’s night. Only night. See, I’ll turn on the light.”

He flicked on the small reading light located on the roof of the van and waited as my mother, the instant tears which had come with her fear drying upon her cheeks, put on her rose-coloured glasses and waited for the shadows to adjust.

“Oh, Joe, your eyes,” she exclaimed. “Your eyes!” And then she slumped back down in her seat, breathing heavily.

My father took longer to recover, unfolding the map again, tracing the route we had taken with a pencil, periodically staring blankly out the windows at the new signs. Cars were passing us, their headlights on, anticipating arrivals, and I wondered how many drivers or passengers knew where they were headed on this night or if there were others like us, finding bearings in a new place.

“Daddy, do you know where this new house is?” I asked, while Christine busily pointed to a row of pine trees along the roadside.

“Look at them, they’re all so small!” she cried. The ones on our old property were three times the size and could only be decorated outside at Christmas, being far too large to fit in our living room.

“Of course I do,” Father assured me. “Can you girls just relax and let me alone ’til we get there? Please,” he added, feeling my mother’s forehead beside him for temperature. “Your mother needs her sleep.”

“She’s always sleeping,” Christine muttered, pressing her hand against the window, outlining the dusty print it made with her fingers.

“Shut up,” I told her.

“You’re no better, always moping around. Can’t anyone have some fun?” She leaned forward, jutting her head into the front of the van. “Can’t we have some fun, Daddy?”

My father reached back with his right hand and ruffled the bangs of her hair. He was probably at the end of his tether, but he adjusted the rear-view mirror to offer us both a sympathetic smile and then started the engine again. “Soon, Sweetheart. Let Daddy drive now.”

Christine leaned back into her seat and, astonishingly, was asleep within minutes. I always envied her ability to meld into her surroundings, no matter how foreign or strange. Her ability to adapt. My eyes remained open the whole trip, keeping watch over Mother’s breath, Father’s erratic driving, the scenery passing us, as if I might be able to find my way back if needed. Reflected in the window, my face was as grave as the dark pines we were passing. I did not like this city, this new house, before we ever arrived. The air, thick like gas, and the smell of burning pulp from the paper mills in the town we had driven through just a half-hour earlier had left me nauseated. The city’s being rose up like an animal out of a hole. How does it breathe, I wondered, under all this dirt? Then it started to rain.

Ashbrook Crescent, a street with grey concrete curves that wound around the houses as if protecting the lights in living rooms with drawn curtains, possessed humble homes with one-door garages and short, stubby driveways, almost all split-level bungalows made of red or grey brick, townhouses, split into two. The autumn foliage was the only hint of nature’s stubborn intrusion. The windows were untrimmed, the backyards hidden by fences, the front entrances ornamented modestly with dried cornhusks or wooden plaques. Three streets earlier a park with a miniature baseball diamond and a neglected plastic playground had stood vacant, with crossing signs that read “Watch Out for Children,” though none were playing there, and I didn’t see any on the streets as we drove. Not a single person was outside when we