God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  I settled into the feeling of belonging to a group of people whose lives, like mine, were dedicated to God, and who were mostly kind and humorous. My perception of how convent life might be was realised at last, in this little place in the country. For many years after leaving, it was this intensified and idealised feeling of community that I searched for in my dreams. I had a recurring dream in which the nuns I looked for were standing in the vegetable patch. As I approached they looked up and said to each other, ‘Here she comes again; I wonder how long she’ll stay this time?’ I would wonder, then, how many times I had indeed been back, and why I had left again and again. I would fall on my knees and tell them how much I loved God and wanted to serve him, and they always allowed me to try again. I wore a strange mixture of habit and secular clothes in those dreams, and once I was there, I would wonder why I had returned. When I got really close to the nuns, a dark cold chilly energy, like an angry wind, would hit me and I knew it couldn’t last.

  Our lay sister at Benalla was a tiny woman with a harelip, whose eyes shone mischievously through round metalrimmed glasses. Sister Antoinette was no longer young when I knew her, but in spite of her size and middle age she was undaunted by any task. She was the cook-in-charge and prepared meals for all the nuns and boarders with panache. She was Irish and missed her homeland sorely, having been sent to Australia when she was only twenty. As the sole lay sister, she was doubly lonely. She wasn’t included in any of the discussions about the main business of the convent—the running of the boarding school or the parish primary school. She was just a workhorse.

  Sister Antoinette and I became good friends. I enjoyed helping her out in the kitchen. One week she and I made ginger beer. The recipe was deceptively simple, and for eight days or so we added sugar and ground ginger to the ‘plant’. Finally, it was time to put the liquid into the bottles we had scrounged from all around. So far, so good.

  While we were having breakfast a few weeks later, an explosion rocked our silent thoughts. It came from the kitchen cellar, and one glance at Sister Antoinette told me what was going on. I caught her looking helplessly at Reverend Mother, with a twinkle in her eyes in spite of the tragedy going on below us.

  The first explosion was followed by another a few moments later, and soon there was a veritable barrage. Breakfast continued in silence as if nothing were happening. All we could do was wait until it was certain that the last bottle had exploded and then deal with the mess. Sister Antoinette did not have to ask for help for this job—everybody pitched in to remove the shards and slivers of glass embedded in our vegetables and cheeses, as well as in the walls. It was a mammoth task. Ginger beer-making was never attempted again, not least because it proved to be alcoholic instead of a pleasant-tasting ginger-lemonade.

  I would have done anything for Sister Antoinette because she was humble and ordinary, friendly and non-judgmental. She also had a reliable sense of humour. She often helped me to laugh at myself, God bless her kind soul. In the end, she was forced to watch me grow distressed beyond redemption, looking on in her quiet way. But she was always there for me, she always prayed for me, and her prayers were genuine; her heart never judged.

  We both loved the garden and the chicken run. The vegetable patch could never keep up with the demands of nearly forty-five people, but the chooks laid all the eggs we wanted and more. Many an hour was spent spreading Vaseline over the shells to preserve them for future cakes and other recipes when the chooks went off the lay. I asked Sister Antoinette to show me how to make patty cakes—I still have her recipe in my scrapbook of favourite things.

  ‘Sister,’ I said one day when I had some time on my hands, ‘I’ll clean the kitchen windows for you.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, now,’ came Sister Antoinette’s swift reply. ‘The windows are dirty because they are much too high up and nobody can reach them.’

  It was true; the windows reached nearly to the ceiling, which was very high up indeed. They hadn’t been washed for years, the top parts perhaps never, and this meant the kitchen never felt as sparkling clean as a good kitchen should.

  Antoinette knew it wasn’t possible to stop me from carrying out a good deed once I got hold of the idea, but

  she tried to warn me. ‘Take care, now, Carla.’ She eyed the wooden ladder I’d dragged inside. ‘Those steps get slippery when they get water on them. So don’t get them wet. And make sure now that you don’t touch the sides of that hot urn.’

  I climbed up with a bucket of water in one hand and a cloth in the other. I looked down—Sister Antoinette was praying for me, I could tell! Just below to my left was the large electric urn, full of water and close to boiling.

  I was near the top of the ladder when my lace-up shoe with its shiny leather sole slipped. The bucket left my hand and dropped violently, and I came down just as swiftly, the sleeve of my habit catching the boiler’s frame. The boiler let go of me—as if by a miracle—but my body landed sideways on the edge of the large stainless steel washbasin below.

  The commotion attracted the attention of the infirmarian. My upper right leg was severely bruised; the flesh visibly impacted by the fall. ‘Get yourself into a bath and soak in it,’ prescribed Sister Marian, in her casual manner.

  Well, it was better than nothing, given her attitude of ‘no malingering in this convent!’ An application of arnica, even some Epsom salts in the bath water, might have done some good, but alas, convent infirmarians were no herbalists. Herbal wisdom, once the province of monasteries and convents, had been neglected due to the new reverence given to science. My thigh retained a deep dented mass of damaged scar tissue. For a few days I had a limp, then forced myself to ignore it, the same as I tried to ignore the rest of my body.

  Something else clamoured for attention, however; a disagreeable disfigurement on my hands: warts. My hands were once so beautiful that Sister Marian had taken photographs of them, and my novice mistress used to sit and gaze at them. I wasn’t supposed to know this, but I did, the way people do who, for their own survival, have to guess all the time what others around them are thinking. Secretly I lapped up the adulation, but then, of course, came the guilt after the pride, and the inevitable self-punishment. So I grew warts, a large one on my left thumb and several spread over my fingers. Not exactly the thing for a teacher of needlework and craft, whose hands were always on show. The warts might prove risky in handling food as well, so it was decided that they had to come off—at the hospital.

  Benalla Hospital had never had a nun within its walls before. They did the best they knew, putting me under a general anaesthetic. Perhaps the anaesthetist thought it took a lot to knock out a nun, because he gave me such a large dose that I didn’t wake up for a very long time and then just long enough to vomit all over the floor. A woman patient sharing my room looked on helplessly as she watched me struggle not to vomit, and fail. By the time assistance arrived I had slumped back into unconsciousness.

  ‘Sister Mary Carla will not be going home until tomorrow,’ my enquiring superior was told.

  I was feted as the Sleeping Beauty on my return, and my swathed hands were kept away from work for a few days. At recreation time I was teased. ‘Sister, you didn’t keep your rule of silence while you were under!’

  ‘What? What did I say?’ Nobody would tell me, and I blushed to imagine what on earth could be so unrepeatable. Ah well, que sera, sera; what else could I do except shrug off the uncomfortable thought and join in with the laughter.

  RAISING MONEY WAS a constant affair for the convent and the school, and each year a fête was organised for that purpose. They were busy events, not especially memorable, except for the time when I took charge of a stall. Numbers matching numbered prizes were scribbled on pieces of paper and, together with a few blanks, were placed in a cotton-string bag. For twenty cents, people could try their luck. The most coveted prize was a good bottle of sherry. I soon noticed that it was the bottle that drew the gamblers, so didn’t want to lose it too soon. I looked u
p the ticket with the bottle’s number and pocketed it. Somebody else took over from me while I wandered about, looking at the sights and taking advantage of the relaxed rule of silence to talk to parents and children.

  When I looked around again I caught the quizzical and half-alarmed eye of my offsider; there were only three prizes left, with the bottle still sitting ever more lonely on the top shelf and a determined punter going crazy trying to win it! Swiftly I seized the bag and returned the ticket in less time than it takes to look around—too fast for anyone to suspect that they had been swindled. Luckily for me the bottle finally went to the right person, who was uncomplaining in spite of having paid for so many tickets. Why didn’t she suspect something? Was it that unthinkable that nuns might cheat? Probably. I was an undiscovered rogue nun, but I was praised for the great success of the stall and that was all that mattered.

  WHEN I WAS a girl at Vaucluse College, I had been taught by Sister Anthony that kissing made you pregnant. That wasn’t such bad information in itself, being a half-truth, except that nothing was ever added to that initial, shattering revelation. Sister Anthony had either been ignorant herself, or unwilling to divulge any more. Now I too was participating in the cult of disguised ignorance.

  I was nearly thirty-one when I found out where babies came from—and fifty-four before I discovered why kissing makes you pregnant had produced that vivid image of semen travelling down my throat when I was seventeen. My knowledge of things sexual took a giant leap when the convent finally obeyed a directive from the bishop to provide pupils with proper sex education, following reforms instigated by Pope John XXIII.

  The person to teach it was Father Gregory, our senior parish priest, after heavy persuasion by the nuns. In the summer of 1967, the nervously sweating man visited the convent to explain conception to a hallful of students. As a teacher, I was allowed to sit in.

  Father Gregory presented a slide of the statue of David by Michelangelo. The projection was a shadowy image that made it difficult to work out what and where the testicles were that the priest was talking about. Inside the body, were they? And what was the scrotum? One thing was for sure: the penis was on the outside and we were told it had to go inside a woman’s most private parts, called the vagina, to cause conception.

  Well, that was one piece of information that just couldn’t be true! The idea was so hugely gross that my mind couldn’t register it. It reeled at the thought of a woman taking off her knickers, exposing herself to a man who had his pants off too, and him sticking his—penis? What an ugly word!—anyway, the thing that he peed out of into the woman! Outrageous! Abominable! No wonder Jesus opted to be born of a virgin, who never had to suffer such debasing goings-on!

  My burning mind clung desperately to what I’d learned when I was seventeen: kissing makes you pregnant! Maybe the priest was wrong. Look at how he was sweating! Something wasn’t right, for sure. Mercifully, a question box was circulated and questions could be anonymous.

  ‘Is there any other way a baby could be conceived?’

  My question was read out by the priest in the half-light. My heart stopped. It sounded such an ignorant question, and of course it was. The answer came like the sentence of a judge in court—final, irrevocable, no longer deniable.

  ‘No, this is the only known way, except in the case of the Immaculate Conception.’

  I’d been duped! Rage against Sister Anthony’s sex education boiled in me, but most of all I was overcome by shattering humiliation and shame. Shame at my ignorance; shame at my parents; shame at all parents who were now ‘exposed’. I felt shame at the thought of adults copulating all over the world to produce all those children; shame at the beauty of romance destroyed. All these thoughts rioted through my mind, threatening to fuse my brain. Audrey Hepburn, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly—how could you do it? How could anyone look so innocent and do such things?

  The mother of one of the girls stood up. Here was a woman who had ‘done it’. As I looked at her, the question in my mind was not ‘Had it corrupted her?’(I took that for granted), but ‘How was that corruption visible?’

  She was about forty, had permed hair, and held herself quite steady on her feet. She wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t scared to speak. She seemed unaffected by the electricity in the air. ‘You didn’t say,’ she addressed the priest, ‘that the sexual act is very pleasurable.’

  Silence. She continued. ‘It isn’t just a functional act. It can be highly enjoyable, and you never mentioned that.’

  My mind went into a further state of shock at this woman’s words. I felt that she had openly betrayed her fellow adults by this statement. She had let out a secret, an adult secret, to a hallful of adolescents. It was like publicly proclaiming to children that Santa Claus wasn’t real; it set the seal on the destruction of innocence.

  Father Gregory fumbled with the papers in his hand. No sound came from him, just a nod of approval, or of admission. He didn’t say, ‘Is that so?’, which he should have, since he was a priest and shouldn’t know about such things. But someone might have told him, or he might have read about it…My brain-on-fire was trying to save him. It was significant, of course, that he hadn’t mentioned the pleasurable side of sex. That was a message in itself, which sank into all the minds in that packed and steamy little hall, for each to interpret for herself.

  This woman had touched on the main reason why sex was reprehensible: it was obviously perversely pleasurable. Obviously perverse? Oh yes, otherwise it would have been mentionable in the first place.

  Naturally, Jesus was not conceived like other people; he was born of a virgin, untouched by a human penis. The inferences are clear: conception is sullied by sexual intercourse, and normal human birth is therefore inferior.

  Human beings hadn’t yet figured out how to give birth without having sex. As it is difficult to populate the earth without sex (and so make the Catholic Church grow) sexual activities somehow had to be condoned. So the Catholic Church had made up a sacrament called Holy Matrimony, or marriage, a concession to human frailty. Sex was to be strictly for the purpose of procreation. And a church which had put so much energy into sanctifying pain could hardly sanctify the pleasures of sexual intercourse…

  The lecture was over. Unable to risk meeting the glances of any of the girls or my sister nuns, I left the hall and slipped into the chapel. There I knelt bolt upright, stiff with embarrassment at my own extreme ignorance, cheeks ablaze. I stared at the tabernacle with a huge question mark on my face, but no enlightenment came forth from the silent space on the altar. God appeared to be totally indifferent to my dilemma: how to absorb the shame?

  ‘Yes, well, I…er, made people this way, yes, but well…er…at least my Son was born of a Virgin! That’s the best I could do. You were born in original sin. At least I sent my Son to save you from your sinfulness. I created temptation, but Adam and Eve should have been strong enough to resist it. Too bad; it’s done now. And didn’t you throw away that booklet your mother gave you when you were seventeen? There were libraries in your world—why didn’t you ever get out a book on sex?’

  Yes, it was true: I seemed to have deliberately not wanted to know anything. Why?

  Time ticked by, but I didn’t notice. At last, there was an urgent whisper from Sister Madeleine at the door. ‘Sister Mary Carla, it’s time for reading!’ It was six o’clock. School had been out since four. I flew to the common room and took my place among my sisters, who mercifully had their heads bowed to listen to the text being read by our superior. I didn’t hear a word she said. For the hundredth time, I tried to put away the image of a penis entering a vagina.

  I had many torrid dreams in the months to come, followed by repetitive weekly confessions to the priest. Who knows what words escaped my dreaming mouth in the dead of night? It was not for nothing that I was never chosen to be a dormitory mistress, one who slept in the same room as the boarders. But what had been stirred up that afternoon started to melt a kind of ice within me, awakening feelings th
at I grew to not entirely dislike.

  Within a few weeks, the tone of my confession had changed. ‘Father, I don’t think these feelings are sinful. I think they’re natural.’

  The priest sighed. He wasn’t game to venture an opinion. ‘I think you should discuss this with your bishop,’ was his careful reply.

  NOT SO FAST, SISTER

  OUR GENERAL WAS suddenly deposed in 1965 amidst turbulent events in England which were kept as quiet as possible elsewhere. In Australia we were simply told that she had resigned for health reasons. For months the FCJs was without a General, then, in the following year, an Irish woman with a sparkling social talent and a brilliant gift for organising, Mother Raphael, took over the post. It was now up to her to get things moving; it would be like trying to turn a dinosaur into a gazelle. Margaret Winchester had been made General in 1948, and had stayed on for nineteen years.

  When the General died in 1967, her death provoked such little ceremony that I can’t remember exactly when it happened. What I do remember is the shocking announcement Mother Clare made about her, on a day when we heard more than one thing that would change our lives for ever.

  Reverend Mother Clare was nervous—we could tell by the colour of her cheeks. They usually had an attractive bloom, which ruddied when she got excited or stressed. On that day, her face was blotchy and held an ambiguous smile while she fidgeted with the papers in her hands. Her back and neck were stiff as she moved; another sign of stress.

  We were asked to put away our needlework, the better to listen to a special announcement. Everybody knew then that something serious was afoot and the room came to perfect silence. We sat with our eyes down, holding the tension.

  ‘The announcement I am to give you is a formal public notice, worded in legal language,’ Mother Clare began. Then, before she uttered the news, she took on her sternest tone: ‘You are never to comment upon what you are about to hear, as a mark of loyalty to our late Mother General, whom we have all revered.’