Life With Mother Superior

by Jane Trahey

  Life with Mother Superior

  By Jane Trahey

  Foreword

  I was lucky enough to be born a Catholic and fortunate enough to be Irish. What more could anyone ask? Well, my mother asked much more than that. She wanted a charming, polite, intelligent, well-mannered youngest child—instead of the off-beat rebellious child she had.

  For the first twelve years of my life, she tried, unsuccessfully, to produce the results desired; then disillusioned and tired, she turned me over to the academy, which she firmly believed would and could polish her treasured piece of carbon and produce to order on Graduation Day one sparkling diamond.

  The nuns I knew certainly deserved “A” for effort, considering what they had to work with—and what I found fun and amusing to write about my days at St. Marks and Life with Mother Superior perhaps concerns itself more with the frosting than the cake. My impressions of the life were the first light shed on the fine art of living, and if I could live it over again, I wouldn’t change a minute of it.

  Chapter One: Bad Day for Black Sock

  The only difference between the school Mama picked out for me and The Girls’ Reformatory was tuition. Mama paid for me instead of having me committed. Other than that, the rules, the hours, and the food were just about the same. I had no intention of going to St. Marks, and had made many gay little plans for entering the very avant-garde New Trends High School. Mama had no intention of sending me to New Trends and had planned to enter me in the freshman class of St. Marks. Age and money were on her side, always, and, as I had my uniform fitted one hot August afternoon, I had the feeling that St. Marks and I would not see eye to eye, any more than Mama and I did.

  I had loved the New Trends Grammar School. It was my favorite place. It was at New Trends that I had learned to grow sweet potato plants, play the silent keyboard, and sing. The rest of my preliminary education was fairly sparse. It wasn’t until my father realized that I couldn’t add or spell that he thought I should be sent to the nuns.

  My father had been paying one dollar a week for me to learn the piano. At New Trends, we worked on a long cardboard keyboard that opened out three times. Even if you had a piano at home, you weren’t supposed to play on it.

  “Why don’t you use the piano?” Papa asked crankily one night.

  “I can’t play on that,” I said, aghast that he would suggest such a thing.

  “Well, who in the hell is going to want to hear you at the silent keyboard?”

  “It’s not time yet.”

  “Time for what?” sneered Papa.

  “It’s not time for us to come out of our musical cocoons. I’m crystallized,” I told him.

  “You’re nuts, that’s what.”

  And that’s when it all began. Mama convinced him that I should finish New Trends and graduate and then the nuns would take over.

  In preparation for graduation, Miss Home, my eighth grade teacher, had asked us to please print our correct names on the cards she would distribute. No nicknames like Sally or Bunny or Peggi. We were to put down our real names. She passed out the cards and we all fell to writing our full and proper names on them.

  “These are for your diplomas,” she added:

  I hated my name. Jane. What a dumb name. Plain Jane. Pain Jane. Arcane Jane. None of them suited me. I was the more glamorous type.

  What I needed was an exciting name and I would give myself one. I was reading a book where the heroine’s name was Adrienne. I printed that as my first name. Now what would go well with Adrienne? I peered over my shoulder at the little girl in back of me. Her name was Mary Frances Carroll. Frances. . . . I thought. No, that’s not exotic enough. Francine. Francine. That was beautiful. I printed in: Francine.

  When Miss Home picked up the cards she looked at mine.

  “I thought your name was Jane.”

  “Just for short,” I said.

  Miss Home was supposed to check them against the records but she obviously didn’t follow through.

  The night of graduation, I shook through the whole ceremony. When they called “Adrienne Francine Trahey” there was a slight murmur from where my family sat.

  My father poked my mother and said, “I had no idea there was another Trahey in her class.”

  “There isn’t,” Mother said, knowingly.

  My father sighed. “What if the nuns don’t take her?”

  “They will,” Mother said with determination. As usual, she was right.

  The Convent of St. Marks was not only a school, it was also the Motherhouse of the Order. It was here that the young Sisters attended novitiate and the old Sisters came home to die. The school ran almost incidentally. The old building was nearly a hundred years old, the new school was only fifty. The whole Megillah sat on the side of a hill overlooking a soft flowing river—much like a huge, fat old lady sunk in a cozy chair.

  The architecture was pure King Arthur—turrets, spires, niches, stone. It was a formidable home away from home. Fortified by a nine-foot stone wall and a gate that had everything but broken beer bottles on top, it lacked only a moat and drawbridge to completely isolate us from the outside world. If the truth be known, Mother Superior had undoubtedly tried to cajole the Fathers’ Club into digging one.

  Roger, the janitor, and Miss Connelly, who we surmised by her build was the gymnasium teacher, met the few of us arriving on the 5:15. I had noticed a wizened-faced blond girl smoking a cigarette on the train and hoped upon hope that she would be going to St. Marks.

  Some little old lady who sat next to her told her she was shocked to see a child that age smoking and the blonde merely looked at her through the cloud of Twenty Grand smoke and said, “Madam, I am not a child, I’m a midget.”

  When the conductor called the station, she stood up, and St. Marks already seemed a livelier place.

  “Line up girls, line up. Everyone for St. Marks, line up,” Miss Connelly shouted.

  She seemed to me to be overdoing it a bit, as there were just four of us and the most we could do was huddle together.

  “I’m Miss Connelly,” she said, “and I’m part of the lay faculty at St. Marks. Now, if you’ll all line up we’ll count heads.”

  This seemed ridiculous to me since it wasn’t any strain to figure there were four of us.

  “When I call your names, please answer ‘here.’”

  The blond girl whispered to me, “Let’s not answer.”

  “Okay with me,” I said.

  She got her message to the other two and we all lined up.

  “Clancey.”

  There was no answer.

  “Trahey.”

  I kept mum.

  “Schlessman.”

  She seemed restless, but went along with the gag.

  “Wertheim.”

  Miss Connelly turned the card over to see if by any chance she had been reading the wrong side.

  Schlessman began to titter and the blonde gave her a withering look.

  I adored this girl. She was the most composed criminal I had ever met.

  “Aren’t these your names?” she asked incredulously.

  “No, ma’am,” the blonde said meekly.

  “Well, who are you?” she said, digging into her military knapsack for a pencil. She put the card up against the station door and said, “All right, now spell out your names, one at a time.”

  Obviously, she dealt with low I.Q. children, as everything she did had an institutional quality to it.

  The blonde began, “F-a-y—” She paused.

  “First or last name?”

  “First,” the blonde said.

  “Last.”

  “W-r-a-y.”

  Spelling it out this way made it seem more possible,

 
; I suppose, to Miss Connelly, since she never batted an eye.

  “Next,” she said. It was my turn. Apologetically she said, “Mother Superior must have given me the wrong list to meet.” Secretly, she seemed delighted to have all these problems. It was sort of a oneupmanship on Mother Superior.

  By the time she loaded us on the bus she had carefully copied down our names. We were delighted with ourselves and, for a moment, forgot to be homesick. Before Miss Connelly could blow her whistle, we all had new names and I obviously had a new friend.

  Miss Connelly smiled and chatted with us all the way, reassuring us that we would be very welcome, despite the bad beginning on St. Marks’ part. She was a serious, hard-working girl, the kind of faithful St. Bernard who finds they can’t leave the school, so they teach in it. With care and diligence she ran us into the main hall of the building. Everything Miss Connelly did was paced toward the Olympics; she did not walk, she slowly trotted. By the time we got to the office, we were all a bit out of breath. It was a hot September afternoon, stifling as only Midwestern Septembers can be. Like the movie-house slogan, it seemed to be twenty degrees cooler inside the convent, though this slogan, we learned, held just as true in the winter as it did in the summer.

  “Now line up nicely,” she urged, “and I’ll find out how I met the right train with the wrong list.”

  When she left, the other two girls seemed worried. “I don’t think we should go on lying.”

  “Your name,” said the blonde sternly, “is Lemmon,” and she turned to the tallest girl and said, “And your name is Bottom.”

  They didn’t want to play. I said, “My name is Pawnee and I’m a full-blooded Seminole.”

  “That’s right,” she said, pleased with me.

  I was delighted with her.

  “Girls, this is Mother Superior,” Miss Connelly said. We heard her first, a soft rustle of beads, a swish-swish—it was a sound that would haunt me for my days at St. Marks.

  And there she was, the High Lama of the Lamasery. She seemed to be about eight feet tall with swarthy skin, black eyes, and bushy eyebrows that thatched above her glasses. She looked medieval. She held her hands under her front cape on her habit and observed us quietly. I suppose we were a typical sampling of every freshman class she could remember.

  One of the girls, the tall one, giggled, and Mother’s look was like a quick slap.

  Her voice was of cut glass. “How do you do.”

  We all coughed back in answer.

  “Mother,” said Miss Connelly charmingly, “there seems to be some mistake. I was supposed to have picked up these four”—she handed Mother the card—“and instead, I got these four.” She headed toward Mother Superior and leaned over, pointed to her own printing and read out, “Wray, Lemmon, Bottom and Pawnee.”

  “Did you know she’s a pure Seminole?” she said aside to Mother.

  “Really,” Mother Superior said, “really, I had no idea we had any pure breeds in this class at all. Which one of you is Pawnee?” she said, smiling coldly.

  At that moment, I rather wished I had said I was Bottom or Lemmon.

  “I am,” I stuttered. I tried to look and sound as Indian as I could, which wasn’t easy with my pale coloring.

  “And what is your first name, Pawnee?” Mother Superior quizzed, much as an Indian chief might ask at a burning ceremony.

  “Black Sock.” I could hardly say it, I thought it was so funny.

  Miss Connelly looked impressed.

  “And you, Miss Wray, what is your first name?”

  “Fay,” the blonde answered coyly.

  “Fay Wray,” Mother said. “My, that’s pretty. And Miss Bottom?”

  The girl completely forgot her first name was Sandy and Mother Superior said to Miss Connelly, “You take Miss Bottom and I think you can take Miss Lemmon to Sister Portress. And you can go on and meet the next train. I know you’re anxious.” She looked at the two of us. “I think that I would like to get to know our Indian friend and Miss Wray just a bit better.”

  Miss Connelly flexed her sweatered muscles and shepherded the two other girls out of the room. Fay and Mother Superior and Black Sock headed for the other side of the building, where Mother Superior made it clear that she did not appreciate this kind of tournament.

  “I suppose you”—she flipped through her cards and pulled out one that she read—”are Mary Clancey.”

  The blonde smiled and said, “That’s me.”

  “A simple ‘Yes, Mother’ or ‘No, Mother’ will do.

  “And you”—she looked at me—”you must be Adrienne Trahey.”

  “No, Mother,” I said miserably, “I’m Jane.” Stumbling badly, I tried a light explanation of my various monickers.

  “And so your real name is Jane,” Mother Superior said resignedly.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “I do not know what you were taught at New Trends,” she added sternly, “but I want you to forget it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “All right, you can both go now. I hope that we will not meet again under this type of circumstance.”

  We scooted out of her office and went wandering through the empty corridors. Jane Trahey and Mary Clancey. I felt as if I had known her for years.

  “Let’s go have a smoke,” Mary said. “I’m dying, simply dying for a smoke.”

  Suddenly St. Marks looked brighter to me than New Trends ever had.

  Chapter Two: The Secrets of the Cloister

  Even though there were a hundred-odd clocks at the convent, everyone told the time by Sister Melchior’s bell. Now this was no ordinary bell that rang automatically. It could neither be pushed into action with Sister’s long mystical finger, nor slapped into action by electric clocking. This was a plain, old-fashioned silver hand bell, about the size of a pear, and Sister Melchior swung it with the same authority the early fathers of our country must have had ringing the Liberty.

  Just before six in the morning, Sister Melchior made the rounds of all the sleeping quarters, in and out of the cloister, ringing her bell till you could wring her neck. From that moment of awakening, right on through the day—lunch, dinner, study, recreation and finally praying one’s way to sleep—you could listen to her softly retreating clang as she padded along the halls on her healthy, black leather arches.

  Sister Melchior was in fact a veritable symphony of sounds with her squeaky shoes, her clicking beads and her pear-shaped bell. Naturally, we called her Paul Revere and told all the newcomers to the school she was a German princess who had lost her mind because they (the German king and henchman) had thrown her lover in a moat filled with crocodiles. Nevertheless, all the time we owned in the world was at the helpless mercy of her swing.

  She had been portress of the convent as long as I could remember. Her station was just inside the great front door. Front doors are never used on convents. Side doors are always used. Only parents and visitors use front doors. Sister Melchior’s desk was at the top of five highly polished and superwaxed steps. She kept a tiny, green-shaded light on at all times as it was dark in this part of the convent. From her perch she could view the front door, both side doors, and almost all the comings and goings of the entire convent. She guarded us like a great medieval dragon, sitting directly between the cloister front door and our world.

  We had been told in no uncertain terms, from the moment of arrival, that the cloister was out of limits to all of us. Woe be to the student who was found in it.

  “Young ladies, a portion of this building is the holy cloister.” Mother Superior peered out over her octagonal glasses and her black eyes pierced mine. “Do we all understand this?” I nudged Mary Clancey, who was cleaning her nails with a holy card corner.

  “It is strictly forbidden for anyone of you to enter any door in this building that is marked ‘Cloister.’ I presume you all read.”

  “Sarcasm, sarcasm, the devil’s weapon!” whispered Mary.

  “Miss Clancey seems to feel that h
er message to Miss Trahey is vastly more interesting than any message I might want to give to her.” Mother Superior glared at us.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mother,” Mary apologized, “but I thought Miss Trahey was going to faint, and I merely asked her if she felt all right.”

  This threw me into a complete panic and it was exactly the sort of thing you could expect from Mary under pressure. But that was one of her weaknesses—and she had so many charms.

  “Well, just hang on another minute, Miss Trahey, and you can,” she snapped back.

  “This is the Sisters’ home. You wouldn’t want strangers roaming about your house. We do not want them in ours. If”—and she let us hang on this word for almost a whole minute—”if I ever find one of you in the cloister, you will have only me to reckon with.”

  The thought of this was both frightening and challenging. For Mother Superior had not taken an instant dislike to Mary Clancey and me; it was rather like a stone that gathered moss. We had only been around her a few days and already this dislike was being cultivated by all three of us.

  The moment I met Mary, I knew that life at St. Marks could be palatable and exciting. Perhaps not as inspiring as I daydreamed about life, but at least bearable. From the beginning, the Sisters did everything in their power to separate us, but with so few students it was impossible to teach everything twice just to accommodate us. We seldom got a chance to be together, but upon occasion we managed to elude both students and faculty, and devoted ourselves completely to the downfall and destruction of Mother Superior.

  “The best time to go through the cloister is prayer time,” Mary said to me as soon as Mother Superior left the room. “They’re good for at least an hour.”

  “We’ve got to have someone watch the door and let us know if someone comes.”

  “How do you feel about Murphy?”

  “Okay with me.”

  Murphy was our first choice for a friend if we had to have a friend. She was what my father called a “slick” mick. This was opposed to the other breed of Irishman known as “thick” micks. In all the time that Mary and Murphy and I sewed the Sisters’ nightgowns at the neck, locked their bathroom doors from inside and climbed out windows, Murphy invariably made the honor roll. Mary and I were not only never on the honor roll, we were on Mother Superior’s blackest list.