"Gene Wolfe - Mary Beatrice Smoot Friarly, SPV" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

MARY BEATRICE SMOOT FRIARLY,SPV
by Gene Wolfe

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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