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Show Anting Alone Page 294 Polycarpana had tried so hard to get Simone to exclostrate with her, to come out and live with her in the secular world, where a person could choose her own company. But Simone had cried some more at the suggestion, had held out two handfuls of her morbific, swollen flesh, and had cried, in a bitter voice, "Look what they've done to me already. I can't leave now. I'm a freakish part of this freakish sisterhood now." And the inevitable brave little joke had followed, even through the oily tears of rage: "Besides, I couldn't afford to maintain my lithium habit on the outside. At least not legally." Hard as it was to believe now, there'd actually been a time when Polycarpana would've been dismayed to hear convent life called freakish, a time when the beautiful and productive parts of convent life had held sway over her imagination, and she'd felt the joy of Christ Himself to be a sister. The few remaining lovely rituals that had survived Vatican II and the folk- Mass plague of the sixties, such as the Easter midnight vigil service with its intensely complicated and intimate symbolism of flint and fire and candle, had always helped to fill Polycarpana's life with ample beauty and mystery. And her activist passions had always been fully satisfied by her affiliation with Network - climaxed today, even on the eve of her dissociation with that organization, by this lobbying junket to Washington. It sometimes almost seemed that Machiavellian minds like Bopp's (or, rather, like the minds of the men whom Bopp spent his life emulating, here in his little domain) had cynically concocted the rituals and the political organizations as placebos, vespers for the dead energies of nuns, to keep the clergy's female minions pacified, satisfied that they weren't dying |