An isosceles triangle is one in which there are two equal sides. For theology, I would write a composition: “The efficacy of the Sacraments do not depend upon the worthiness of their ministers.”
For English, for a teacher with the stately, extravagant name of Mother Mary of the Incarnation, a term paper: “The Structure of the Scarlet Letter: Scaffolds Real and Implied.”
Then a list of prepositions, in, cum, sine, ab, ex, de, pro, memorized in order to recite like a cheer in Latin. “What do they have in common?” our teacher always wanted to know. “They all take the ablative,” we would answer as a group.
Back to French: a trompe l’oeil is a trick of the eye.
My gaze soaked up the symbols in my books, the squiggles and slashes and dots and circles.
Still the words continued, the sick stew of sound.
I tried to ignore the commotion, above all, not to lock eyes with my mother because whenever I did, her expression appeared hollowed out, disemboweled, stricken, as if she were recalling the innocence with which this all began, a woman delivering her first baby, ordering birth cards with a tiny blue bow. How did it get from here to there, from his first sentence to this ricochet of venom?
In May 1962, after only twenty days at Lackland Air Force Base, Raymond was asked to leave. The reason was confusing. Either he didn’t obey orders, or he did obey orders that no one else had heard.
“If anyone asks,” our mother said, “tell the truth. Tell them that the air force discovered there was something wrong with his ears.”
Uncle Dermot would say, “Maureen, you’re paying too much attention to him, making him too much the center. If you’re not careful, he’ll take the rest of the children down with him. You can’t shelter him forever.”
His argument was matched in unassailability by her own.
“He’s my son. I’m his mother. I’ll do what I can to help him. He needs me.”
Dermot would try again and meet with the same steely resolve.
And, maybe, one more time. Same gambit, same results.
After which Dermot would sigh and shrug and return to whatever Bruce Catton book had just won his gaze.
“You can’t,” he often said, “fight city hall.”
Chapter Eight
“Serviam”
WE WERE, IN A WAY, SAVED BY THE NUNS.
My mother had driven me to Ursuline for Mission Day, a chaste little carnival that had in my opinion only two advantages: classes were canceled, and we could wear normal civilian clothes. Throughout the day a girl in a white dress, wearing a crown, circulated the gym, dispensing robotic hellos. She was our Mission Day Queen, elected solely on the basis of her goodness, which meant she had, during private consultations about her spiritual future, let it be known that a religious vocation was not entirely out of the question and, also, that her favorite color was blue, the same as the Blessed Mother’s. A car was raffled. Elaborate exhibits showed foreign children in uniforms studying at Catholic schools supported by events like our fair. There would be scads of offspring, barefoot and brown, standing in front of smiling parents with downcast eyes. The parents were forever being quoted as saying that as long as you had faith, food didn’t matter. You could purchase pictures of saints and pricey rosaries and little pins with the school motto, which was the same as that of the Jesuit school attended by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Serviam,” Latin for “I shall serve.”
Mother Francis and our mother discussed literature that day. Not much later, a phone call came.
Ursuline was expanding; lay teachers were needed to complete the staff, especially at the coed elementary school level. My mother’s salary of $270 a month would be sweetened with free tuition for all four girls. At the time, the starting salary for stewardesses at United Air Lines was $325 per month with the potential of a $90 monthly bonus. This would solve my commuting problem: she would be our chauffeur. And now all the Blais girls were guaranteed that Ursuline gloss.
On the surface the biggest differences between Ursuline and public school were the absence of boys and the uniforms: those ugly gray blazers, box-pleated green gabardine skirts, loafers, and nylons. But more than that, the nuns had a way of micro-managing our social interactions, ensuring that even the sorriest girls had some kind of circle. Someone who in a different school would have been ripe for hazing, given her assorted social handicaps—such as never shaving her legs, never closing her mouth, or possessing a retarded aunt—even she had friends. The nuns made a point of informing us that the more humble and penitential our behavior in this life, the more days we could lop off purgatory in the next through a complicated system of plenary and supplementary indulgences. Their main disciplinary strategy was to treat misdemeanors as if they were felonies. You earned demerits if your nylons sagged or had runs: a messy outer life announced an equally sloppy inner one. In between classes we walked in silence in single file. Lunch consisted of a bleak sandwich composed of a lonely piece of see-through meat. Most of us were so hungry we kept secret bags of chips and candy in our blazer pockets, which we learned to extract piece by piece during class and consume noiselessly without ever being caught.
One time, some girls got suspended for playing Spin the Bible with some elementary school boys on the bus. Their faces were stricken and frightened when they were summoned one by one from their classrooms to explain themselves to the principal.
Encouraging kissing games was bad.
Using the Bible for twisted purposes was worse.
The combination of the two?
Unspeakable.
At each report card, the students who were well behaved got a blue ribbon to wear on the sleeve of their blazers. Girls who were good, and bright to boot, got blue and gold ribbons, and once in a while a brilliant sinner merely got the gold, a cold secular trophy revealing a weak nature and an underdeveloped conscience. Our grades were arrived at with pinpoint precision: Math 86.7%. When I flunked a major chemistry final during my senior year, the grade was written on my report card in red ink: “67%.” I asked Jacqueline, “Do you think Mom will be mad?”
“Try her,” said Jacqueline.
She wasn’t mad at all. “Don’t worry about it. You won’t need science. I never did.”
At Ursuline, we were, most of us, the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The Cuban girls were the only genuine newcomers. They showed up overnight, mysteriously, shortly after the Bay of Pigs, their only baggage their colorful pasts, musical accents, and pierced ears. The principal, the daughter of a Bronx cop, used to brag, “This is a dictatorship, not a democracy,” which must have been especially disappointing to them. When we prayed, we listed our intentions, and after Conchita and Mercedes arrived, we added our hope that someday they would get good enough in English to dream in it.
Our last names were Marinello and Giamalvo, Cosgriff and Glynn, and Conway and McCarthy. Although in 1960 a Catholic was elected president, we still imagined we were living on America’s margins, fearful of quotas and closed doors.
It was also a tricky business, back then, the education of girls. No one worried about our sabotaging ourselves with bouts of low self-esteem; society had ensured that that would be redundant. We knew our education had a hot-house ornamental quality. After disappearing into our grown-up fates, all that Latin and all that business with Bunsen burners would be useless. We were to marry: Jesus, a man, or Service to Others in the form of spin-sterish devotion to jobs at, say, the soul-eroding Registry of Motor Vehicles or in mournful classrooms filled with interchangeable unruly pupils year after year. If we didn’t watch out, our intellects would be like all those Christmas trees on curbsides in January, denuded, discarded, and the impulse to duty and good deeds would be all we had left. We prayed in Latin, English, and French. Amen with a toga, amen with a baseball cap, amen with a beret.
Very few of our mothers worked outside the house. The fathers had Chevrolet dealerships or they practiced medicine or they did legal work for the di
ocese. Tiny, freckled, with a high, happy voice, a girl named Connie Breck, about whom everyone said She has good hair, thank God, was our only celebrity. Her father was a shampoo and hair conditioner magnate. This was the golden era of the famed Breck ads, with their idealized girls with gleaming hair and glowing complexions, fixtures in every reputable magazine with a female clientele. “Who is the girl in the Breck portrait?” the ad would ask itself. “She’s a teenager in Tucson, a homemaker in Fargo, a career girl in New York. She’s like you in many ways. Loves the things you love … home, family, children. Most of all she loves to be loved.”
It really said that: Most of all she loves to be loved.
We asked Connie how it was that each Breck girl possessed the exact same degree of prettiness as the next. At first she wouldn’t tell us, holding us at bay until finally, clearly against her better instincts, she relented and whispered, in strictest confidence, of course, what we took to be a well-guarded company secret: “It’s all in the lighting.”
The nuns gave us lessons in graciousness. Now that a Catholic president was in the White House, our horizons as young women had suddenly expanded. They saw us all as future Jacqueline Kennedys, an amazing leap when you consider that we all had Frito breath. But still they persisted in seeing us in the most hopeful light, the way the Irish describe vicious downpours as nothing more than an overactive mist. Maybe we too would marry a world leader, in which case we had to know where to stand in a reception line, how to curtsey before a monarch, and what to say during conversations with men of substance at a state dinner. “What would you do,” we were asked, “if by chance you were seated next to a nuclear physicist? What would you say to him?”
Our blank faces must have been frustrating.
The nuns provided the answer. “Talk to him about himself and his work, of course. Find out where he’s from. Ask: What’s nuclear? What’s physics?”
“Girls, here’s something to ponder,” said the priest who was leading our weekend retreat. “What age would you be if you could be any age at all?”
We were all fifteen. Our answers did not vary much. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe twenty-one.
“Does anyone want to be younger?”
No one did.
“An infant, perhaps?”
Again, no takers.
His face lit up: bull’s-eye. “No one would ever choose to go back to being a baby, yet that is exactly what Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour was willing to do when He came down to earth in order to die for our sins. That’s just one more example of the kind of sacrifice He made so willingly, and look at you, not one of you willing to be even one day younger. How many of you have heard the song that goes, ‘To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him’?”
We all knew and liked the song, by a group called the Teddy Bears.
We all guessed, correctly, that he was about to ruin it.
“What does it mean? Does it mean that the more you get to know a boy, the more you like him?”
We exchanged glances: this guy was a real genius.
He moved in for the kill. “The same is true for our Lord, you know.
“Some of you, I know, are wondering about the ways in which you can honor the Lord. Every day, He gives us the opportunity to honor Him in large ways and in small ones. Let’s look at one of the small ones: lipstick. Many of your parents have asked that you wait until you are older before you start wearing lipstick. Why? Because you are vessels of the Lord, you are His handmaidens, and the wearing of excess color can be an invitation to lust. A modest amount can be an enhancement in a much older woman, but you girls are still very young and surely nature at this stage requires no enhancement. It will ergo be considered a violation of your uniform if you paint your face in an excessive manner. We must constantly remind ourselves that we have been conceived in original sin, and we are born into a state of darkness, from which the Lord in His infinite mercy has seen fit to rescue us through the Blessed Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. For these blessings we must offer constant thanks and daily witness, through prayer and in our actions. Our lives must be conducted in a meritorious fashion so that eventually we can enter the Heavenly Kingdom ruled by the almighty risen Lord and we can achieve the highest goal of mankind: we can bask in the Beatific Vision, the dazzling light of His goodness.
“The eating of meat on Friday.
“The missing of church on Sunday or on Holy Days of obligation.
“The failure to perform one’s Easter duty.
“The tragedy of marrying outside the faith.
“These are the large transgressions with which we are all familiar. But sometimes I fear that in our enthusiasm to avoid these sins we relax our vigilance against Satan’s less dramatic beckonings, the small moments that are also sinful but perhaps not as public in their depravity. I am talking about some of the thoughts that might occur to you as you bathe. I am referring to the sin of self-pollution. I am referring to the all too popular custom of close dancing, to driving around in cars sitting on the laps of boys, to the lure of liquor in all its cheap perdition. Convertible automobiles, racing toward pleasure: a prime example of the insidious nature of Temptation, arriving as it does in the finest of outward apparel, masking its rotten core. The serpent did not appear in a swamp; he came to Adam and Eve in a garden. Let us now pray to our Blessed Mother for divine guidance to recognize Satan in all his guises, great and small. Mother, most holy, tower of strength.”
Every first Friday of the month as well as on Holy Days of obligation, we celebrated the mass. Because the altar boys were at their own schools celebrating their own masses, we females were allowed as an assembly to give the response to the priest, and to this day when some middle-aged man is discovered to be an altar boy of that vintage, I will challenge him to see who can remember the most liturgical responses, a contest I sometimes win, my one shiny nickel, the verbal equivalent of a three-point shot.
Once and only once, as I recall, a priest was brought in to hear everyone’s confession: I’ve wondered since then if he didn’t have a secret task of ferreting out a rumored pregnancy.
We filed into the makeshift confessional, reciting the boilerplate offenses for girls our age:
Bless us, Father, oh how we have sinned: We listened to the radio after lights out, we snuck a cigarette from our mother’s purse, we sipped some beer at Polly’s New Year’s Eve party, we stopped at Friendly’s when we said we were coming straight home. And then pausing, our voices becoming softer and more serious: we touched ourselves, we allowed ourselves to be touched. More details: the edge of someone’s underpants had been stroked by a boy on the dock outside Doreen’s beachhouse in Old Lyme one summer night, a bra had been loosened from its mooring after dark in some boy’s car. The vision of all of us in our turn confiding to a dark, shapeless creature, dressed in robes, seated inside a box, has a lingering air of the absurd and frightening and the kinky: Samuel Beckett meets the Inquisition meets Penthouse magazine.
For people who had taken a vow of chastity, the nuns certainly enjoyed talking about sex a lot, only they called it fancy names like “concupiscence” and “the marital debt.” Out-of-wedlock babies were a major obsession, and the nuns all had well-thumbed pamphlets, supposedly actually authored by a fetus before it died in an abortion. They would reach inside the billowing black folds of their habits, extract the pamphlet, and read details about each of the fetus’s developmental triumphs, such as its first little kick or faint heartbeat, leading up to Month Three and the startling revelation “Today my mother killed me.”
The nuns believed in something called moral hygiene, a loophole that meant that even if you were inclined toward wrongdoing, you could cleanse your soul with really good deeds. Every now and then we got to go on class trips, but it wasn’t like at the public school, where the kids took big yellow buses to Mountain Park or Riverside and got to ride on the Cyclone all day and gorge on cotton candy. We drove around in kids’ mothers’ station wagons, and our excursions
were designed to result in a corporal or spiritual work of mercy. And we didn’t sing fun songs like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” either. We sang songs like:
An army of youth
Flying the banner of truth
We’re fighting for Christ the Lord
Heads lifted high
Catholic action our cry
And the cross our only sword
One time we brought brownies and root beer to an orphanage, where a little boy who kept scratching his head tried to sell me a slingshot. Another time we gave homemade sock puppets to some people at a hospital who drooled and made noises you couldn’t understand, but which the nuns said meant thank you. Then it was off to a home for veterans. During “Jingle Bells,” an old man reached into his pants and started singing along, the same words but totally off key. Later, he asked one of the prettiest girls if she liked sarsaparilla, which he said would put hair on your chest, and then collapsed into a smoker’s hacking laughter at the word “chest.” On the way back it was decided that we made a mistake when we sang secular songs about reindeer and white Christmases and we should have stuck with the holy ones with their calming emphasis on sleeping infants. The orphans and the sock puppet recipients and the old soldiers were united by one redeeming characteristic: they were all Catholic.
One nun stood out as possessing a gypsy streak, our mother’s benefactor, the French teacher, Mother Francis Regis, or Franny, as we called her behind her back. Franny was by far the most temperamental and, as a result, the most invigorating of our teachers. Her favorite dictum was, “Pensez-y and profitez-en.” Think about it and profit from it. She was Miss Universe for le mot juste. She had those frequent displays of impatience that often characterize teachers of foreign languages, and her way of showing it was to recruit some sorry specimen to stand in front of the room and be the object lesson for the words that embodied our failings:
Mademoiselle is messy.
Mademoiselle has holes in her clothes.
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