by Kit Duncan
Midway through February Sister Martha Louise had us make Valentines for our parents. I finished my heart made of red construction paper and white paper dollies pretty quickly and bored, I began offering to help others with their cards. This aggravated Sister Martha Louise, and after several failed efforts to dissuade me from assisting my classmates, she suggested I make another Valentine.
"If there's anyone besides your parents who like you enough to get a Valentine's card from you," she scowled as she walked back to the closet. I didn't actually hear her say that, but Linda Mason, who sat two seats behind me, told me she heard.
I made Aunt Myrna a Valentine. It was almost identical to the one I made for Mama and Papa. On the back, I wrote, "Love, Katie." That sounded too sappy, though, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to tell Aunt Myrna I loved her just yet. I took a thick black crayon and scratched out "love" and wrote, "With affection," but that didn't look right, either.
I crossed out "with affection" with the black crayon and rewrote "love, Katie." It was Valentine's Day, after all. Everyone writes "love" on Valentine's Day.
Besides, it was just a word.
February was a dark, cold month, and March wasn't much better that year. I hardly ever saw Danny and Timmy, and even Blackie's company could not cheer me up. I hated being cooped up in the house. I listened to a few records from time to time, but mostly, when I thought about it, I read Lost Horizon.
By the beginning of April, just a few weeks before Easter, I had begun chapter ten. It was about this time that I discovered what I didn't like about Hilton's Miss Brinklow. It was as if she was allergic to having fun, that nothing was valuable unless it was unpleasant. Her religion, inseparable from who she was, required that any hint of enjoyment be squeezed like water from a sponge.
More than that, Miss Brinklow wanted to make the people of Shangra-La think like her, believe as she believed; she had no tolerance for anything less.
I wondered what the people in the valley thought about Miss Brinklow. But I knew Conway and Barnard agreed with me, and I liked them because they did. I worried suddenly that if I liked them because they thought as I did, and I didn't like Miss Brinklow because she didn't, how was I any different from Miss Brinklow? I found this very disturbing, and I set the book aside for several days.
My curiosity bested me in the end, though, as curiosity so often does, and I finished the chapter without further moral distraction. A vague, tired uneasiness remained, faint but present, in the back of my mind. I wrote to Aunt Myrna about my agitation. She wrote back right away. In her letter she said, "It is good that you have enough insight to recognize your own discrepancies. Wrestle through them, and you will emerge a better person."
I had to look "discrepancies" up in my dictionary.
I had very ambivalent feelings about Easter. On the one hand, I was all for celebrating the resurrection of Christ, and I loved the lilies that saturated the sanctuary. I was quite fond of the Easter Bunny, and there were few things better than coming home from Mass and finding a rainbow colored basket overflowing with things that would keep my dentist in business for a year.
On the other hand, there was the Saturday night Getting Ready For Mass ritual that was worse the night before Easter than any other time of the year. Even without enough hair to pin curl, there was a great deal of scrubbing, trying on new clothes and shoes, and having to stay absolutely clean from eight o'clock Saturday night until Mass the following morning. It was torturous.
To this day, I refuse to go out on Easter. I wear my oldest, most worn out jeans and sweat shirt. If at all possible, I work on my yard and I get as dirty as I possibly can. It is my private retaliation to a childhood of Easter Sundays, new white patent leather Mary Janes that were not yet broken in, new crisp pastel-colored dresses that made too much noise when I walked and scratched when I stood still.
The spring of 1963 was like having two Easter Sundays. Two weeks after Easter Sister Martha Louis' second grade celebrated our First Communion.
After years of having to sit still while Mama and Papa went up to the front rail to receive the Body of Christ I relished the idea of finally getting to walk with them. Forty-five minutes was a terribly long time for me to sit, kneel, and stand, but not walk.
Of course, I had some appreciation for receiving the Sacraments. But I was quite disturbed to learn that there were two hurdles to jump to get to the actual ingestion of Christ's body. The first, of course, was that, once again, I had to dress up, this time as a miniature bride. I took this cross in moderately good humor, however, having accrued a good deal of experience in the rituals surrounding Getting Ready For Mass.
What was more daunting, however, was giving my first confession to Father Emerson.
The week before our First Communion our class went to the church's sanctuary and Father Emerson gave us our final instructions for how to make a good confession. Then he genuflected in front of the altar, and disappeared into the middle of three closets toward the rear of the sanctuary and my classmates and I formed lines on each side of the two outer closets. One by one we each disappeared into a closet, and emerged a few moments later, our tiny souls basking in forgiveness.
My turn finally came to enter the small closet to the right of Father Emerson's. I knelt down, made the Sign of the Cross, and recited, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession."
Father Emerson asked me the nature of my sins, and I suddenly forgot everything he and Sister Martha Louis had been telling us for the last five months about how to say confession. I told Father Emerson every transgression I had ever made that I could remember, and the more sins I described, the louder and more animated I became. I told him about putting the three worms down Janey's back last summer. I told him about sneaking out of bed at night, but I told him I had no idea how many times I had done that and I hoped that would not be a problem. I told him about deliberately sliding off the edge of the see-saw when Ricky was high up on the other end just to see how fast he'd fall. I was halfway through the middle of my transgression about hiding Sister Martha Louise' ruler just before Thanksgiving when Father Emerson interrupted me.
"Katie Arlene!" he said sternly.
"Yes, sir?" I asked, then added, "I thought you couldn't see me through that screen, Father Emerson."
"I recognize you by your deeds, Child," Father Emerson signed wearily. "For your penance just say one Rosary, and we'll call it even."
"A whole Rosary!" I shouted.
Father Emerson whispered through clenched teeth, "We'll compromise. How's twenty
Hail Mary's, three Our Father's, and an Act of Contrition sound?"
"What about we knock off the Act of Contrition and I add an extra Our Father?"
"Katie?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Confession is not a negotiation."
"But you started it!"
There was a long silence in both our booths, and then I said, "So that's twenty Hail Mary's, three Our Father's, and an Act of Contrition?"
"Sounds fine," Father Emerson said wearily. And he began whispering in Latin. I assumed he was saying a very holy prayer, and I suddenly felt very holy.
The days grew longer, the air a little warmer, and dandelions shot up all over the neighborhood. Some of Mrs England's flowers bloomed, others, she told us, would bloom later in the season. I saw more and more of Danny and Timmy, but in the evenings, after Mr Watson had whistled the boys home, I read Lost Horizon, and I was nearly done with chapter eleven by the time summer came.
The last day of school I ran most of the way home with my report card. My grades were okay. Nothing spectacular, nothing horrible. But I couldn't wait to show Mama the note Sister Martha Louise had written at the bottom.
Dear Mr and Mrs Morgenstern,
It has been a unique experience having Katie Arlene in my class this year. I'm only sorry Sister George Anne will be denied the pleasure of her company in the third grade.
My friend Jeannie was visiting me at my house a few days later.
>
"Why isn't Sister George Anne teaching third grade next year?" I asked Jeannie.
"She's retiring," Jeannie said. She was mindlessly patting Blackie's torn ear.
"Do you think she'll keep living with the nuns?"
"No, she's moving to a convent in Covington, a special home for older nuns."
"Well, I expect Sister Martha Louise will miss her quite a bit," I said.
Jeannie gently set Blackie aside and said, "I don't know why she would. They despise one another!"
CHAPTER 14