frequently, for many years, ever since she had come to St. Matthew's. “Why did you hate them?”
“I hated them because they beat me,” she said simply, sounding humbler than he had expected, and far more open. He knew only that she was one of the postulants, but this was only the second time he had come to hear confession there, and he knew nothing about her. The other priests all knew Gabriella, but he didn't. “Actually, my mother beat me,” she went on to explain. “My father only let her… but when I thought about it as I grew up, I hated him for it.” It was the most outspoken she had ever been in any confession, and she wasn't sure why she was doing it now, except that she needed to make a clean breast of everything so as to free herself of her feelings about Sister Anne. She had been utterly tormented by her but was ashamed of her dislike for her.
“Have you ever told your parents how you felt?” he asked, sounding very modern, trying to heal the wounds and relieve her of them, and not just hearing her confession.
“I've never seen them again. My father deserted my mother when I was nine and I never saw him after that. He moved away to Boston, and a few months later my mother left me here, and never came back. She told me she was going away for six weeks to Reno, and she got married again and decided that I didn't fit into her new life. In a lot of ways, it was a blessing. If I'd gone back to her, eventually she'd have killed me.” There was shocked silence on the other side of the grille again.
“I see.”
She decided to tell him the rest of it then, and make a good confession. “Sister Anne is starting to remind me of my mother, and I think maybe that's why I hate her so much. She shouts at me all the time, and tells me how bad I am… my mother used to do that… and I believed her.”
“Do you believe Sister Anne?” Gabriella's knees were beginning to hurt from the length of the confession, and it was terribly hot in the confessional for both of them. It was like kneeling on the floor of an overheated phone booth, and the total darkness made it seem even warmer. “Do you believe what she says about you, Sister? About how bad you are?” He sounded deeply interested in her problem.
“Sometimes. I always believed my mother. I still do at times. If I hadn't been bad, why would they have left me? Both of them. There must have been something pretty awful about me.”
“Or them,” he said gently in a deep voice, as she tried to imagine the face that went with it. “The sin was theirs, not yours. Perhaps the same is true of Sister Anne, although of course I don't know her. Perhaps she's jealous of you for some reason, because you seem so confident and so at home here. If you've lived here for most of your life, she may simply resent it.”
“And what do I do about it?” Gabriella asked, sounding desperate, and this time he chuckled.
“Tell her to knock it off, or get out her boxing gloves. When I was in the seminary, I had a boxing match with another seminarian I'd had a series of disagreements with. It seemed like the only way to resolve it.”
“What happened?” she whispered, smiling at the unconventional confession. It had been more like a session with a therapist than an ordinary confession. But whoever the unknown priest was, she liked him, and she felt as though he had helped her. He seemed to have compassion, wisdom, and humor. “Did the boxing match help?” she asked with interest.
“Actually, it did. He gave me a fantastic black eye, and almost knocked me out cold, but we were great friends after that, for some reason. I still hear from him every Christmas. He's a missionary priest with the lepers in Kenya.”
“Maybe we could arrange for an early novitiate and Sister Anne would like to join him,” she whispered. Even in college, she had had no exchanges like this one, bantering with her fellow students or professors. And the priest with the youthful voice was chuckling discreetly.
“Why don't you suggest it to her? In the meantime, say three Hail Marys and an Our Father, and mean them,” he said pointedly, sounding serious