Today, the morning short stories are coming a bit early, as I am very excited to share this one. It is an adaption, loose as it may be, with the parable of the 10 virgins.
The Bridegroom Cometh
It was on a Friday in the fourth week of Epiphany that Lady Matilda Strump kneeled before the Presence in the chapel of her renovated plantation home just outside of St. Gabriel, Louisiana, and it was on the following Saturday that she died.
Matilda, for she was known as Lady only by virtue of her eccentricity and Catholic only by virtue of her baptism, was keeping a brief vigil before the Sacrament in her chapel, which she had constructed after watching the miniseries adaption of Brideshead Revisited and finding herself overcome by a sense of calculated, Connecticut-like piety. The Baptist architect responsible for expanding the house for the chapel had at first declined Matilda’s proposal on religious grounds, but reconsidered when she had offered a compromise of only depicting the apostles in any artwork, with the exclusion of St. James, whom the Baptist had referred to as the other one, and whom Matilda conceded she couldn’t be bothered to care much about.
The chapel should have taken seven months to complete, but Matilda feared the Jewish implication and insisted the architect and his workmen take another month, rounding it to eight, which symbolized a far more Christian aesthetic in her mind. The chapel was, incidentally, completed on Good Friday. However, the Baptist didn’t notice and neither did Matilda, who was more concerned with the way St. Paul had been painted to appear frightfully stern and like he would have had a speech impediment. Matilda and the architect argued over this point for some time, but eventually reconciled over the shortbread the Lady had baked for the occasion of the chapel’s completion.
Over the shortbread, the architect had finally asked Matilda outright why she wanted to construct a chapel in her home. Previously, he had been under the impression that her reasoning was simply natural to her Catholicism and had wanted nothing to do with it, as the architect had come to experience during his time at university that the illness of Catholicism was easily caught. But the architect’s wife had used the Internet to look up Catholicism on Wikipedia and had discovered that it was not a particularly Catholic thing to construct a private chapel in a home, which she informed her husband of with a kind of reserved curiosity. The architect was thus inclined to inquire, feeling the question justified by its possible use in his attempts to witness to Matilda. Neither Matilda nor the architect had ever fully exchanged a conversation about God in which something beside semantics were argued with anyone, let alone each other. But the sermon at Narrow Way Baptist the previous Sunday, as it was every Sunday, had been about evangelism, and the architect considered that it wouldn’t hurt to make an effort toward the most likely to be damned in his life. After all, it was the completion of the project. Should the conversation have gone poorly, the architect never had to see Matilda again, except for in Heaven, where she would embrace him for planting the seed of Christ in her heart which eventually brought her to the Light.
Matilda had received the question with her own particular understanding of grace. “I have agoraphobia.” She pronounced it with a kind of violence, suggesting that of all the people to ever have agoraphobia, she had it far more seriously, perhaps more sophisticatedly, than anyone. The veracity of this claim was subject to speculation, as Matilda’s family and neighbors had long suspected that agoraphobia was more akin to severe distaste for humanity and the minor inconveniences of living. But the architect had the unusual kind of Baptist courtesy about him that made his brow furrow and head nod gravely, as if he too had experienced agoraphobia at some point in his life and was acutely aware that it was the power of Christ that would make it better. This Matilda had ignored, as she had seen a similar look on the Mormons who had called once and especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses who kept coming back for her shortbread, which she found particularly agitating. “Therefore,” she went on, “I would like a place where I am able to worship the Lord free of the entrapment of my disease.”
The architect saw his opportunity. “Just imagine. If you ask Jesus into your heart, when Jesus comes back and we fly up to Heaven, you won’t be afraid of the outside anymore.”
Matilda blinked. “Do you believe Hell is a large place?”
The architect, again asserting that particular power of evangelical piety, cast his eyes to the table before him and nodded gravely. “I fear that it is.”
“Well that resolves it,” Matilda replied curtly, “Either in eternal bliss or torment, I shall have enough to preoccupy me that I shall not give a damn about the wide open space.”
Matilda had used damn in the archaic sense and therefore had meant no offense by word choice but through her sentence’s general meaning. The architect, however, had only understood damn to be a profanity and had ignored the rest, deciding that Matilda could not be reached with the Gospel and it was time for him to leave. He took three pieces of shortbread in a napkin on his way out, at Matilda’s behest.
The Friday preceding the day before her death, Lady Matilda had kept a vigil of twenty minutes before the Sacrament in her chapel before descending the stairs to collect her mail from the slot in her front door. Like her groceries, clothing, and prescriptions, Matilda had her mail delivered to her front door so that she would never have to leave the house. The mailbox on the edge of her lot had sat vacant for nearly two decades, beginning on the twenty-seventh day after Matilda’s husband had died in a factory fire, which was sixty-eight days after their daughter succumbed to Progeria, eighty-nine days after her seventeenth birthday.
The chapel had been constructed thirteen years after Matilda stopped collecting her mail from the mailbox. A priest had been called, Fr. Boetius—whose name was nearly always misspelled with an added h—who had agreed to supply Matilda with a consecrated wafer and a bit of wine as the lax attendance on the Sundays during Ordinary Time had made him incredibly anxious to practice what he viewed as sanctioned Christian magic, by which transubstantiation occurred. (He was considered particularly intelligent, in that he had graduated from a respectably progressive and evangelistic seminary, notorious for failing anyone who sounded like a scholastic or made purposeful reference to Thomas Aquinas.) The priest had arrived on Matilda’s porch bearing the wafered Body and a vial of Blood in a small, wooden box with a statement of authenticity printed on cardstock.
Matilda had greeted this offering skeptically. She was grateful for the Sacrament, but disappointed with the presentation. The priest and his vow of poverty had proved unhelpful in this regard and it was left to Matilda to phone the local jeweler—a Presbyterian, and then a national jeweler—an ethnic Jew, and then someone in Italy—an ex-Roman Catholic who still thought of himself as Catholic and kept a picture of the Pope in his bathroom—about constructing a box formed of pure gold that the Sacrament might be stored in atop the alter in Matilda’s chapel. It took three months for the box to arrive. Only Matilda had ever seen it, but the local town was aware of it. The priest had been unable to formulate a homily for a Mass during Lent and had instead taken the passage in the Gospels about storing your treasure in Heaven and had equated it to Matilda’s reverence for the Sacrament. The thirteen people present for the service then told at least three people each and the news spread, even to the Baptists, and eventually to the architect, who considered it the final confirmation of Matilda’s damnation, news he received with the tensioned piety of a doorknob—seemingly unaffected but potentially moved if only a hand, perhaps a divine hand, should intervene.
Matilda collected the letters that were cascaded on the floor before the front door.
Three envelopes were from the secretaries of the protestant televangelists she wrote weekly to criticize. She had a particular dislike for black preachers, in that they always seemed to be angry about the very things that were societally necessary to be stoic about. After that came the charismatics, who were oftentimes also black, whom she regarded with a kind of fascination as if they were mental patients set loose to engage the common people in a giant, cosmic sociological experiment. Then came the academics, whom she despised for still using whiteboards, as the ink never rendered properly on the TV screen.
Another four envelopes were from the desks of the Catholic telepriests, who were able to write her directly as they received considerably less mail. Matilda took particular issue with them, as they were boring. One priest frequently asked Matilda if she was still saying her prayers and advised she seek the intercession of the Virgin herself, though he had consistently referred to Matilda as Mattingly since the beginning of their correspondence. The others politely encouraged her to seek the counsel of her local parish and, barring that, a licensed physician.
There were bills, a receipt from a recent home shopping purchase, and an invitation to the upcoming Fat Tuesday pancake meal that the Methodists were staging in the cafegymatorium of the local high school. But there was another envelope, golden and gleaming, with a delicately inked Matilda Strump on its face, but without a return address. She opened it hastily. Inside, she found a brief message carefully formed in beautiful calligraphy on heavy Crane stationary.
Hail Matilda,
I have seen your works and I know your ways.
Enclosed, find a blank cheque that you may fill out for any amount you desire or for anything that you wish. Tomorrow, I shall bless you with what you ask for by mail, the same way I have written to you now.
God
Matilda shifted the letter and found, indeed, a blank cheque made out to her with a simple Divine Providence where the name and address of the account holder should have been found.
Lady Matilda had always considered herself to be a particularly rational woman, observing the social graces before she ever made consideration of the ecclesial. She took seriously the command of her Faith that it was most prudent to keep a staunch piety about polite impiety, private devotion being a much more favorable custom than the vulgarity of public display. Decades previous, when she entertained the outside world and suffered it as good as any of the first martyrs, she had always been careful to mention her rosary only between sips of sweet tea and to casually remark on the papacy only when the occasion arose during the fish course. Accordingly, Matilda regarded the cheque with doubt and considered the writing duplicitous. If the letter was, in fact, from God, then why had He not addressed her as Lady Matilda, instead of the crass and plain Matilda? But in the quiet of her heart, where the sin of pride had already conceived, a strong shoot of verdant rationalization sprang and Lady Matilda considered that God would likely only address her by the name given to her at her baptism, not by the title she had coopted for herself three and a half years after her husband had died in the factory fire.
She was then faced with another concern: she was unsure how one proceeded when receiving a miracle. The Church had taught her much about confessing her sin and the place of rote ritualism, but she could not recall a particular instance where instructions for the reception of a miracle were given. Matilda imagined that she should express some sort of disbelieving joy followed by a measured response of gratitude, in which she should, at least once, be moved to tears and unable to properly express herself. (Having no cues from the Catholic televangelists, she was slightly grateful for the charismatics, whose frequent miracles at lease provided an emotional point of reference.)
Matilda waited a moment, expecting to be properly moved by the Holy Ghost. When she felt nothing but the vapid absurdity that had governed her mortal life, a feeling she could not distinguish from what she perceived as her own brilliance, Matilda decided that having considered how she was to react was in essence the same as having reacted. Moreover she presumed, not entirely erroneously, that the Holy Ghost would split the difference by means of the prayers He offered on her behalf for things she did not even know to pray for.
And the saints. Matilda considered the saints would likely pray for her too.
She had to search three rooms before she found a pen that worked. It was blue and heavy at the bottom so that it felt more that the pen wrote on its own than by the work of her hand. Matilda gently etched what she wanted on the line where the amount was normally spelled out and left the numerical box blank, as she had asked for something, in her mind, more precious than money. She stared at the blank box for some time, wondering if she should make a clarifying mark, a drawn line through, an X, a n/a, or something of the kind to clarify the nobility of her desire to not ask God for physical wealth. Eventually, after some serious deliberation and the ingestion of four pieces of shortbread to combat the stress of her decision, she concluded that the box could be left blank without serious detriment. The omniscience of God, she considered, was not without its advantage.
That afternoon, Matilda paced her dinning room in furtive contemplation. The arrival of the cheque, though wonderful, presented her with the difficulty of waiting. There was no clarity as to what she was supposed to do upon filling it out. Lady Matilda considered that she was possibly supposed to engage in a particular religious devotion, like fasting, but the earlier consumption of the shortbread had hastily done away with the possibility. She considered prayer, but quickly dismissed the idea as impertinent. What good was prayer when God had considered her worthy to receive such a profound gift?
Her mental state was saved by the arrival of a four-piece turquoise place setting. The bowls of the set were cause for agitation. Matilda was concerned most acutely with curvature, having a decidedly Copernican view of the Almighty and the cosmos. The bowls of the turquoise place settings, however, had been slightly squared, enough to make them dangerously angular. She had not anticipated this blasphemy when she had placed the order and called the company to complain.
After three different customer service representatives transferred her to superiors, Matilda was finally answered by a woman who identified herself as Melissa, but who pronounced her name as Mehlispuh, and sounded as if she were chronically short of breath.
“How mayh … I help … you tohday?”
“I’m calling about the bowls you delivered that are not completely circular.”
“Arhen’t they wondruhful?”
“They are not.” Matilda barked. “They are essentially a blasphemy.”
“Essentuhlly?”
Matilda steeled her patience. “Essentially, yes.”
“Blasphomey?”
“In the utmost.”
“I should think … this is a cohncern … for your priehst.”
“I have recently been regarded by God as worthy to receive anything I desire from Him. Does it sound like I’m the sort of person who needs a priest?”
“Noh.” Melissa conceded, in hearty agreement.
“So you understand my concern?”
“I haveh … identifihed … ah concern.”
Matilda hung up the phone. Within a minute, she received a call from an automated service asking her to rate the experience she had while speaking with one of the customer service representatives. Matilda patiently waited through the menu options until she was able to give the least satisfactory review as possible for Mehlispuh, whom she identified when she was able to leave a specific message as “essentially impertinent.”
Of all possible obsessions, essentiality was particularly significant to Matilda.
Without the concern of the turquoise bowls to occupy her time, Matilda was forced to spend the evening keeping vigil in her chapel. The space had a simple altar, where the golden box with the Presence inside it rested in the center. To the right and left of the box were five candlesticks on each side, representing the Commandments. At least, Matilda had reasoned they represented the Commandments by virtue of there being a sum total of ten. She had moved the golden box of the Presence toward the left of center and had put the cheque in its place, considering it a sort of new covenant between herself and God, a Eucharist in its own right, and, in her mind, far more life giving. She hadn’t felt such unbridled excitement about God in years, certainly not since the factory fire.
She knelt in front of the altar and fixed her eyes upon the cheque. Slowly, the image blurred. Her body relaxed. She centered herself by the cheque’s presence and found herself transported into a kind of ecstasy, pulled up and out of her own body to commune with the higher power of the world, leaving all enfleshed grief behind.
Matilda woke around ten the following morning, her body slumped over in child’s pose, which she immediately feared to be a blasphemy—as all Eastern traditions were—and corrected by returning to a kneeling form. She attempted to meditate on the cheque again, but found her mind wandering to the unpleasant memories of the past, which she regarded as moral failing, unable to put to death the things of the flesh.
She occupied her time instead by readings of the daily lectionary. A life spent in mostly solitude meant that Matilda often failed to recognize time properly. It was thus that she read a psalm about divided garments, a paragraph about Balaam’s ass, an exhortation of Philadelphia, and a parable about ten virgins without once considering that she may have the appointed readings incorrect. Matilda read them with care, stopping at the end of each verse line to contemplate the syntactical reasoning behind the placement of a comma or the decision to render an enjambment in the psalm when it could have easily been corrected. These suggestions she marked with care using an old fountain pen her husband had once used to write letters.
By noon, Matilda had nearly reached the end of the parable when she considered that the postman should arrive shortly. In haste, she rose and crossed to the altar in order to prepare the moment for sanctity. She bowed before the cheque, then pulled a box of matches from behind one of the candlesticks. With care, she began to light the candles, contemplating her coming glory. Having lit the fifth candle, Matilda heard the sound of a motor outside and in her joy, turned and sprinted from her chapel, leaving the remaining candles unlit.
Seeing no mail before her front door, she moved to the side window, where she was able to observe the postman in his car. Except that Matilda could see through the tinted glass that it was not the usual postman, but a woman, who was opening Matilda’s mailbox and passing letters directly into it, including, Matilda keenly observed, one in a golden envelope.
(It was later learned that the postman was sick and had called in a replacement. The woman who replaced him—Lydia St. James—had been given specific instructions about delivering Matilda’s mail to her door, but Lydia had undiagnosed dyscalculia and ended up delivering the mail to the door of a man seven streets over, who had only then collapsed of a heart attack. Through the glass of his front door, Lydia saw him collapse and she promptly called the paramedics, saving his life.)
Matilda felt paralyzed as she watched the postal car pull away. Her reward awaited her, only just beyond her reach. Was this a test? She suddenly supposed that keeping James in the apostles might not have been such a terrible idea. Panic set in slowly, as well as the fear that God would pass her by if she did not act. There was little she could think to do, as the requirements of her disease demanded certain discernment regarding her actions. She paced for nearly a quarter hour when the solution came like a thunderclap, though the Holy Ghost groaned in protest, which she interpreted only as pang of hunger.
Lady Matilda darted up the stairs to her linen closet, whereupon she pulled out fourteen king-sized, unfitted crimson sheets. Incidentally, the sheets were crimson in memory of her late husband, who used to wear a crimson robe in the late evenings. He would sing, from time to time, a little verse while he wore it, looking over their daughter while she slept in her cradle. Matilda knew the song only as familiar in tune but she had never seen written out.
His dyeing crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er his body on the tree.
She had concluded it to be about a mythical textile worker. She insisted on purchasing only crimson sheets upon her husband’s death. Matilda never made the connection that this action was about attempting to keep him close, but there was never anyone around or interested enough to beg the reasoning in the first place. That she had so many was more to do with her perpetual fear that the color, moreover the memory, should ever fade.
She descended the stairs with the fabric bundled in her arms. She tied the first sheet carefully to the banister of the stairwell, then tied its opposing end to the next sheet. In order to brave the peril of the outside world, Matilda would need to keep herself rooted in something familiar and safe. Anchored to the certainty of her own house, she could dare to venture into the world beyond. The last sheet she tied about her waist, opened her front door, and set a foot tentatively into the light.
Her movements were slow and calculated. She progressed the length of four sheets before a step forward was truncated by the violence of a scorching wind that swept in from the east. Matilda felt anxiety prick her being and she fell, onto her hands and needs, slowly crawling across the green of her front yard as she made her way toward her mailbox. When she was three feet away, the sheets tugged taut and Matilda found herself mere inches from her glory. A desperate hand went out, straining to reach the mailbox, but to no avail. She beat her hand on the ground close to it, crying out for the mercy of God, but only the scorched wind from the east seemed to answer.
Matilda wrapped her body into the fetal position and remained motionless under the late winter sun.
“Lady?”
Matilda stirred.
“Lady, are you alright?” A black man was looking down at Matilda, a trail of sweat slipping down one side of his face.
Matilda stirred slightly. “Lazarus?” she blinked several times. Lazarus was the hired man that tended to Matilda’s grounds. She didn’t much care for him, as he was Episcopalian and by implication a bastard Catholic, but he did the job well enough. She rarely tipped him, as she considered the war reprobation for the War of Northern Aggression to have been more than adequate. “Lazarus, go open my mailbox and get the golden envelope, it’s very important!”
But Lazarus was shaking his head and trying to untie the crimson sheet from about her waist. “No mam; can’t do that. Your house is on fire and we need to get you somewhere safe.”
She brushed away his hands and pushed him back. “Idiot!” she scoffed, “My house is not on fire! You’re just trying to trick me, to keep me from my glory!”
But as Matilda looked beyond Lazarus, she could see that a small trail of smoke had begun to rise from the corner of her house where the chapel was. Alarm filled her. Should the cheque be consumed by fire, she would lose everything she longed for. She made to get up and flee back to her house, but Lazarus pulled her back, close against his bosom. “No, no,” he commanded, “You stop that. That gold box doesn’t matter now, what matters is your life.”
“This is no life,” Matilda declared, before she gnashed her teeth and bit Lazarus hard on his right forearm. He yelped in pain and recoiled, arms gone slack so that Matilda could spring up and run toward her house. If only she could reach the cheque.
Smoke was beginning to gather in the atrium. Matilda coughed repeatedly as she climbed the stairs, stumbling once and then twice over the crimson sheet. She pulled open the door of the chapel and the fire swept forth in a vengeance. She staggered back, feet tangling in the crimson sheets, until she felt the ground slip from her and Matilda was falling backward onto the stairs.
It was slow motion, her fall. She was able to see into the chapel, where the five lit candlesticks had turned over, where the cheque was completely consumed by flame, where the golden box of the Presence had begun to melt, being constructed not of gold, but pyrite. And she thought, for a moment, that the crimson sheets consumed her before the flame broke in. She gasped in surprise, for as she slid from the world into eternity, she received the glory she had written on the cheque.
To be surrounded by the people who are exactly like me.
At Matilda’s funeral, they sang verses 1, 2, 3, and 5 of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” but skipped the 4th out of propriety. She was buried next to her husband and daughter in the cemetery of Most Saints Church—which had once been called The Church of Lächerlichtod before World War II gave justifiable reason to admonish the Germans. The funeral was under attended, Lazarus and Fr. Boetius being the only two guests present.
The house had been completely consumed by the fire, Lazarus being unable to convince the firemen to come because they had mistaken by his voice that a black owned the house in flames. By the time one of the neighbors down the road saw the smoke and called, it was too late. The house succumb to the weight of the firestorm and collapsed. The only thing Matilda owned that survived the fire was her mailbox.
Inside it, Lazarus had found three letters. The first was offer for a credit card affiliated with the home shopping network she bought from frequently. The second was an invitation to a senior adult class at Most Saints Church, which was going to study the parables of Christ during Lent.
The third, the one in the gold envelope, was a promotional offer from a housekeeping company based out of New York but with affiliates throughout the country. The information card explained that they had hoped Matilda had enjoyed their promotional letter the day before and that she, surely, had written down on the cheque from Heaven that she needed someone to help her keep her house clean, as every housewife would think to write. And, moreover, if they guessed right, they would have liked to send Matilda one of their certified domestic workers for a free day of cleaning to see if she would like the service continued in the future. The employees of Spiritualistic Administrators of Tidiness And Nicety were always willing to meet every wish and need.
