Elinora’s claimed religious calling

Elinora’s claimed religious calling gives a spiritual name to a desire that remains entangled with romance, family authority, and the convent’s struggle over its unfinished chapel staircase. She presents herself as called to become a nun and urges the girls to wait for Saint Joseph to provide a miraculous solution. Yet she also uses that claim to persuade her uncle, Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, and to organize resistance to the carpenter. When she finally makes her vocation conditional on whether Saint Joseph appears, the story leaves faith and self-determination in uneasy proximity rather than settling which one governs her choice.

The claim and its context

The calling emerges amid a conflict over how the chapel’s choir loft will be reached. The nuns have prayed a novena to Saint Joseph, while the Bishop acknowledges that they expect him to perform miracles even though he cannot. He gives the hungry carpenter a chance to examine the staircase problem, treating practical work as a possible answer rather than promising divine intervention. Against this combination of prayer and ordinary labor, Elinora’s claim asks the school to regard waiting as an act of faith.

Her declaration also arrives in a story of private desire. Lizzy has already learned that Elinora secretly left their room while she slept, and that Elinora’s mother had run away at sixteen. Later, Elinora herself says her uncle’s rules drove her mother away. The family history does not prove that Elinora’s religious claim is false, but it places her insistence on a vocation beside a remembered pattern of women resisting the Bishop’s authority. Her assertion can sound like a spiritual commitment and, at the same time, a way to claim a future not chosen for her by her uncle.

From vocation to public pressure

Elinora brings the claim directly into the staircase dispute. When the Bishop agrees to delay construction for a week so the girls can give Saint Joseph a chance to provide a miracle, he also explains that one of the girls has a calling to become a nun and has beseeched him to honor her wishes. Lizzy recognizes that Elinora has persuaded her uncle to accept the calling as genuine. The private declaration has become a reason for changing the work schedule and granting Elinora’s request.

Elinora then recruits the other girls to make the delay effective. She argues that a carpenter already working on the premises would show a lack of faith and prevent Saint Joseph from coming. She blames Lizzy for bringing the carpenter and for other troubles, including Delvina’s death, and casts the man as an instrument of Satan. These accusations turn her claimed vocation into a boundary between the girls’ hoped-for miracle and the practical intervention she opposes. With the others’ support, she proposes a fast: they will take only liquids and refuse food until the carpenter is removed.

When Mother Magdalena challenges the fast, Elinora answers with calm certainty that God called her that very week and that Saint Joseph may have spoken to her. Mother Magdalena counters by identifying the immediate occasion for Elinora’s nighttime departure: a note from Abeyta summoning her to meet him under the Comanche moon. The exchange exposes the competing explanations surrounding the claim. Elinora invokes a divine summons; Mother Magdalena points to a romantic one. Neither the existence of Elinora’s desire nor the force of her declaration is in doubt, but the authority she gives it is sharply contested.

A vocation made conditional

Elinora later states the alternatives more plainly. If Saint Joseph comes, she says, she will become a nun; if he does not, she will marry Abeyta. She calls the week’s outcome a sign and presents either path as something she must accept. The declaration gives her a rule for choosing, but it also makes the supposed vocation conditional: religious life is not described as an independent certainty, but as one branch of a decision bound to her feelings for Abeyta and to the result of the staircase crisis.

That condition differs from the way religious practice appears elsewhere in Lizzy’s life at the school. The novena and evening prayers provide Lizzy with a quiet interval in which she can sort through her thoughts and remember Mama. Sister Roberta’s care for Mrs. Lacey also joins religious language to practical help: she explains that God forgives disobedience when it serves someone in need. These episodes do not establish what Elinora believes inwardly. They do, however, set her public appeals to miracle and obedience beside forms of faith expressed through reflection and care.

The sign and its unresolved meaning

The carpenter finishes the staircase and leaves. The girls and nuns gather to see its graceful spiral, with thirty-three carefully trimmed steps and no banister. Sister Roberta interprets the missing handrail as a demand for faith and demonstrates a cautious way down; Mother Magdalena then declares that the carpenter was Saint Joseph. The community therefore receives the finished staircase as the miracle Elinora had demanded, although the intervention arrived through a man who had actually built it.

Lizzy does not accept that identification. She remembers the carpenter as a person who listened to her troubles, held her kitten, and spoke of his own family; she cannot reconcile that human presence with the nuns’ instant certainty that he was a saint. The difference matters to Elinora’s conditional promise as well. What counts as Saint Joseph’s arrival is not self-evident: the sisters see the carpenter’s completed work as confirmation, while Lizzy remains skeptical. The narrative thus leaves the calling without a simple external verdict. Elinora has used it to challenge authority and to frame a choice between religious life and marriage, but the apparent sign is interpreted differently by the people around her, preserving the uncertainty between conviction, desire, and the meaning others assign to her words.