“The Mischievous Sinfulness of Mother Coakley,” a thoroughly reworked version of his New Yorker story “Mother Coakley’s Reform” (March 18, 1944), is an example of Gill’s exploration of the life of Catholic clergy in his fiction and is set in a monastery in a Carolina town. The narrative tone is warm and somewhat whimsical in telling the story of a nun struggling with sins of pride, envy, and greed stemming from, of all things, her competitiveness on the tennis court and a priest facing two specific weaknesses of his own. The hopefulness of faith and the capacity for change make this a meaningful pairing with “The Knife.”
The Mischievous Sinfulness of Mother Coakley
by Brendan Gill
Even in old age, Mother Coakley was as round and smooth skinned as an apple. In her billowing black habit, she had the air of being about to be caught up in a gust of mountain wind and carried aloft to the sunny corner of heaven that had long been set aside for her. Not that she was in any hurry to go. She loved God, but she also loved life. “He knows where to find me when the time comes,” she said to Father Naylor, the chaplain of the convent school. “Sure, I haven’t budged from this spot in fifty years.”
Father Naylor had a weakness for drink, which was a problem especially serious for a priest. He had a second problem—one that, again because he was a priest, was scarcely less serious than the first. It was a horror of death. He was revolted to be in its presence. To touch a dying or dead person made him ill; on more than one occasion, performing the last rites, he had fallen unconscious beside the bed. As a parish priest out in the world, he could never avoid this horror. In his eyes, the best thing about the convent school was that it was filled with laughing, teen-age girls, who looked as if they would live a thousand years.
The Bishop’s theory in placing Father Naylor in the school was that keeping him away from the one problem might keep him away from the other. The Bishop was a kind man, but a trifle simple-minded; his theory had yet to be verified.
Mother Coakley was well aware of Father Naylor’s attitude toward death, and that may have been the reason that she chattered on about it—she was convinced that it was good for people to have their noses rubbed in things they didn’t wish to face. Besides, there was a touch of malice in Mother Coakley, for all her virtue. The obvious misery of her friend gave her an ample measure of satisfaction. “There must be many and many He has to scour the world for,” she said to Father Naylor, “but not me—the moment He whispers my name, I’ll be up and away, leaving not a pin behind.”
It was true that she was a quick little thing; if she moved in death as she had always moved in life, her guardian angel would be hard pressed to keep up with her in the race to heaven. On earth, her most notable manifestations of speed were on the tennis court. Despite the Mother Superior’s hints of disapproval—hints that by anyone else would have been taken as commands—Mother Coakley liked playing tennis with the younger convent girls. The court was on the crest of a hill behind the ramshackle wooden buildings that made up the convent chapel and school, and what seemed in the Carolina town in the valley below an agreeable summer breeze approached, on that dusty oblong of root-ribbed and rocky court, the force and temperature of a winter gale. Mother Coakley paid no attention to temperatures, hot or cold. Gathering the full skirts of her habit into her left hand, she scampered about the court like a frantic chipmunk, letting her veil float out behind her in ghostly disarray and only just showing the tops of her high black shoes. She had learned to play tennis as a novice at the mother house in France, no one knew how many years ago, and she played it unexpectedly well. Like most people who learned the game in the early years of the century, she had little interest in rallying. She was prepared to lose point after point in order to attempt a ruthless high-bounding put-away or a cut shot that would drop ever so gently and venomously over the net; when she had done so, the ball being unreturnable, Mother Coakley would drop her racket and clap her hands in unaffected delight.
She had no use for the conventional courtesies of tennis. If she failed to return an opponent’s serve, she never called, “Good shot,” but, screwing up her face in an expression of extreme self-contempt, would say, “Drat it! A six-year-old couldn’t miss a serve like that!” As she played, her cheeks grew more and more deeply suffused with blood; they went from pink to red to purple, and this was so alarming to her opponents that it impaired their game. They began to lose points out of fear of having to witness a massive cerebral hemorrhage right on the court. Mother Coakley took advantage of their fears by scorning them. She never heeded suggestions that it might be wise for her to rest for a few minutes between sets. “I always get to look like this,” she would say, panting heartily. The French crispness of tone taught her at the mother house in Dijon would slur away into the soft Irish brogue of her earliest childhood. “Sure, I looked like this in the cradle. Didn’t the doctors and all despair of me? Don’t give it a thought. Come take your beating.”
Sinful Mother Coakley—base taunts were among the weapons she used to secure victory. Short of outright cheating, she was unscrupulous in her desire to win. Where words would help her, she used words; where delaying tactics were needed to confound an adversary, she would fall back upon one or another of a host of ignoble tricks. A favorite trick was the manipulation of her habit, with its numerous layers and mysterious fastenings. Luckily for her, she belonged to an ancient order, which felt no need to be in fashion; the Mother Superior in Dijon had affirmed that gear which had been à la mode in the saintly thirteenth century might well be judged worthy to outlast the licentious twentieth. “Le genou, c’est le communisme,” she had written to Rome, and Rome had yet to contradict her. At a moment of crisis, with the score at, say, forty-love, Mother Coakley would astonish the server by suddenly retreating to a point back of the baseline and plunging both hands deep inside her habit, to adjust some strap or placket that had presumably gone askew. It was hard to maintain control of one’s service after an interruption of that kind. Mother Coakley also made cunning use of her rosary, which, stuffed carelessly inside her belt at the start of a set, would work itself loose and flail about her waist until, with tears of excitement streaming down her cheeks and wisps of clipped gray hair showing at the sides of her wimple, she would be obliged, with a shout, to stop playing. “If I didn’t, Lord love us, I’d strangle myself on my own beads,” she said. “But for them, I’d be happy to go on playing till dark.” Perhaps so and perhaps not so—it was nearly always the case that Mother Coakley used her beads as an excuse to stop playing while she was still ahead but had plainly begun to lose ground.
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Pride (wishing to be the best player in the convent), envy (wishing to possess another player’s backhand), and greed (wishing to keep the court when her allotted time was up) were among the sins that Mother Coakley wrestled with in vain from year to year. In the months when frost and snow and the muddy rains of spring made the court unplayable, Mother Coakley was in and out of the confessional in a matter of seconds and was finished with her penance so fast that, by the calculations of other nuns in the chapel, it could have consisted of little more than a token “Hail, Mary” or two. But in high summer and in the long, golden days of the Carolina autumn, the length of her stay in the confessional and the amount of time it took her to say her penance were the subjects of much whispered comment. Some of the younger nuns would dare to tease her about this as they made their way at night up the steep, worn stairs to their cells. “What a temper Father Naylor must have been in today!” they would say. ” To think of his making you suffer so because of his migraine.”
“My penance is none of your business,” Mother Coakley would say, with a great show of indignation. “Kindly respect the secrecy of the confessional. Vous connaissez les règles.” It happened that “migraine” was the nuns’ word for Father Naylor’s hangovers, which were prolonged and overlapping, and Mother Coakley took care to defend his good name as well as hers. “It strikes me as curious,” she said, “that at the very moment when you are expected to be contemplating your own no doubt manifold sins, and bitterly regretting the anguish they have caused Almighty God, you can find time to speculate upon the imaginary failings of others!” She might be old, but her tongue was as sharp as her feet were nimble. The young nuns stared at her in love and admiration: she was who they would like to become in the course of the long journey leading to their promised bridegroom.
It was Father Naylor who was given the shock of his life when, late one windy October afternoon, he rounded a corner of the chapel and caught sight of a nun lying by the backboard of the tennis court. He lumbered up and knelt beside her. Even from a distance, something about the round shape of the body had let him know that it must be Mother Coakley. For once, her little face was as white as paper. Her racket lay where it had fallen; the two or three balls with which she had been practicing shots against the back board had rolled this way and that, unregarded. Summoning all his courage, Father Naylor reached out and touched her forehead; it was cold. Awkwardly, he called her name, knowing there would be no answer. He took out the vial of holy water that he carried with him always and sprinkled a few drops over the body. If there was the least faint tick of life left in her anywhere, it would be worthwhile giving her conditional absolution, and he did so. He was trembling with hangover and still more with fright. He had squandered his strength in the act of touching her; now he was faced with the task of picking her up. No, it was impossible. He felt sure he would faint; then there would be two of them lying there on the court. He took out something else that he carried with him always: a flask of whiskey. He unscrewed the cap, tossed back an ounce or two above Mother Coakley’s unmoving face, screwed the cap back firmly into place, and returned the flask to his pocket. She would not have liked him to be afraid of her. She would have given him a good scolding for his cowardice. She would have made him rub his nose in it. But she wouldn’t have minded his taking strength from the whiskey.
Father Naylor worked one hand and arm under Mother Coakley’s neck and his other hand and arm under her bent knees. Slowly he lifted her and then, finding the burden easy, got to his feet and started for the convent. To anyone who didn’t know the nature of his burden, Father Naylor would have seemed a jaunty figure, striding across the lawn in the clear dusk. The wind was freshening; there was a taste of November in it. He cradled her in his arms as if against the cold. She didn’t like winter to come, because it put an end to her tennis. She took the game seriously and seriously deplored her moral lapses in respect to it. She faced her sins—pride, envy, greed—head on and struggled to avoid them. Envy was the worst. Envy was her implacable foe. More than once in the confessional they had agreed that the best way for her to outwit her enemy would be for her to improve her skill. That was why she had been out at the backboard: she had been practicing for spring. He gave her a little toss in his arms; oh, but she was light! Like a bundle of feathers. And he was not afraid.