Life With Mother Superior

by Jane Trahey

  Murphy’s mad, cinnamon-colored eyes sparkled at the thought of a tour of the cloister.

  “Sure, I’ll watch the door.”

  “You had better whistle if anyone comes.”

  “I won’t be there if anyone comes.”

  “Aw, come on, Kate, be a sport or we’ll never see how the other half lives.” Mary wiped her sweating palms in pure anticipation of the tour.

  It was so easy to see the cloister, we were really quite disappointed. We rambled from room to room. Most of them were bedrooms or large dormitories where the novices slept. The whole place looked like a charity ward in some hospital.

  We made a special point of finding Mother Superior’s room. It was as bare as the rest of them. I suppose we expected to find the trappings of an early Medici, but it was not like that at all. A crucifix on the wall, a chest of drawers, books piled on the chest and not a one of them interesting.

  Then we took in the refectory, the recreation room and the baths.

  “Well, how was it?” Murphy quizzed us. “See any hair shirts or racks or chains?”

  “Hell, no,” Mary said, “it’s as dull as the rest of this place.”

  “Listen,” Murphy confided in us. “I’ve been thinking. I bet we could sell tours through the convent. Everyone wants to see it and no one has the guts to look. If we’d take them for a quarter, I think we could have a lot of fun.”

  Mary was delighted. The thought of dealing so crushing a blow to Mother Superior was a real thrill. “First of all,” she said generously to Murphy, “you have got to see it.”

  So Murphy took the tour and from that moment the “Cloister Tour” group went into business. “Want to see where the Sisters and Mother sleep?” It was foolproof. No one would open their mouths because they either wanted to go or had been.

  Occasionally some good girl would say, “It’s forbidden.”

  “Of course, it’s forbidden if you get caught, but who’s going to get caught?”

  As the year progressed, we took the younger groups and even some of the graduating seniors. The more we took, the more business we had. Children who had never done a wrong thing in their school life went simply because they were compelled to go. No one could resist seeing a cloister.

  We even thought of hiding some knotted ropes around and saying we had found a secret torture chamber, in order to get some repeat business. By the end of six weeks, we had toured just about everyone at twenty-five cents a head. We couldn’t have been more pleased had Mother Superior contracted a fatal illness.

  One afternoon, two of the biggest sticks in the whole school came to see us. We had never expected them to fall.

  “How much do you charge for the tour?” asked Florence Mackey. She was a pet hate of Mary’s and mine as she was the only one we knew who bathed regularly. She and Lillian Quigley were our leading lights, constellations in Mother Superior’s crown. They could do no wrong.

  “Thirty-five cents.”

  “Your price has gone up,” they said smugly.

  “It’s getting more difficult all the time to just handle the traffic.”

  “I don’t think it’s worth it.”

  “So skip it.”

  Finally, we agreed to take them at the usual fee and they accepted. We told them to meet us at the cloister side door. The time was twenty-five minutes to five. The Sisters all went to prayers at four-thirty, and five minutes after it began, they were hard at it.

  Florence and Lillian were both there and quite nervous.

  “You’re sure we won’t meet anyone?”

  “They’re all at prayers.”

  “What about Sister Portress?”

  “She sits at the front door. We never go near it.”

  “Well, there might be something to see there.”

  “Look, if you two want to go on by yourselves, feel free.”

  Mary was obviously peeved, but getting these two to go at all was such a feather in our caps we couldn’t let them out.

  We were wasting too much time. We waited until the few stragglers of the faculty appeared at prayers late (they were always the same ones) and then we started. We knew there were two sick Sisters and we would have to avoid the hallways in front of their rooms. We kept the tour on the main road: Mother Superior’s room, bathrooms, recreation rooms, dining rooms. For some strange reason, the dining room fascinated the tourist more than anything else. The long polished tables were gaunt and bleak-looking and at the far end of the room stood a podium with a bookstand. A great black book was open, perched on it. At the other end of the room was a sink where the Sisters washed their own plates and knives and forks. It did not resemble the Jolly Tea Room.

  The convent at this time of the day had a shadowy quality, as it was just beginning to get dark. Our spooky shapes reflected along the walls and polished floors and sent Florence and Lillian into a cold sweat.

  Mary was the leader, then the tourists and, up till that very day, Murphy brought up the rear. We felt, however, that the profits of this particular venture could be all ours, so we did not include Kathryn in our tour. This, then, was my first day in the rear echelon. At least, I thought I was the last one in line. I never knew how long Mother Superior had been following os. What she did was inexplicable.

  She merely locked every door after me and there has never been such a trap set before or after that day. We confidently strolled through the convent explaining the various spots. We showed them “her” room, their homeroom teacher’s room, and even gave them the added thrill watching a sick Sister thrump-thrump-thrump down the hall on her way to the bathroom. She was wearing a long white gown, a tiny cap and a flannel bathrobe. Lillian and Florence were in total shreds.

  “We’d better blow,” Mary said, “they’re beginning to break.”

  I pushed the exit door that led back into the non-cloistered part of the building. “Okay, this is the end of the tour; on your right you will find you are on the right side of the gymnasium,” I chanted to them, like the tour man I had seen at a carnival.

  Mary said, “The door’s stuck, give me a hand.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I said confidently. “Here, let me try.”

  I shoved, and Mary shoved, and Florence shoved, and Lillian shoved.

  “You promised we wouldn’t get caught.”

  They both began to cry about their gold ribbons and the shame of it all. We tried all the usual exits we had ever used. They were all locked. We were indeed caught in the trap. We were in the cloister. It was then Mary and I decided to run for it.

  “Come on, let’s shake these two and Mother Superior will merely think it’s them,” I whispered. I was the sort of spy who would have turned in his grandmother.

  Mary nodded and we twisted in and out of corridors and around the halls. We knew them like a book. It was beginning to get dark out and the halls were deathly still. Finally, Mary spotted an exit, and said “Thank God.”

  It was the fire escape—an old-fashioned sort of Coney Island ride that was fitted on the outside of the building and made of metal. It was the sort of chute that had an exit on every floor so that anyone could hop in it and be safely delivered to the ground. It was on the back of the building, and we had been to fire drills twice that year and used it. It was pitch black inside and Mary gave me a shove. I flew down the escape hatch, jubilant over the fact that Mother would find the two honor students, Florence and Lillian.

  I felt as if I had hit bottom and could kick the door to the outside with my foot. I waited for Mary to join me and I heard her whirring down.

  “Well, here you are,” I said, grabbing her shoulder in the dark. We practically embraced with the good feeling of having just, for a change, not been caught.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Mary said. I kicked open the door. The air smelled crisp and fresh and cold. One came out of the chute in a sitting-down position. I struggled out, being first, put my feet on the ground, and stood up and held the door open for Mary. It was almost dark in
the late winter twilight, but it was light enough for us to recognize instantly the familiar shape of Mother Superior waiting for us. In fact, she helped steady Mary.

  “Well, now,” she said, “where’s the fire?”

  Chapter Three: Water Babies

  Although Mother Superior felt that the calisthenics of the mind and of the spirit were infinitely more important than that of the body, she gave into the Illinois state requirements and saw to it that we were properly exercised every which way. The only “out” to four years of varied gymnasium was a letter from your physician and this was extremely hard to come by in my family. My mother had distinct Christian Science tendencies and would not take an aspirin if she could help it, and my father only took pills that were administered by Michigan Avenue doctors to his friends—and the pills had to have accomplished miracles. The hope, then, of my ever obtaining a letter was out of the question. However, since there were five classes of students ranging in age from eleven to seventeen, the gymnasium offered a varied program. One had the choice, for instance, of swimming or fencing, basketball or volley ball, general calisthenics, golf or tennis. The gymnasium and pool were adjoined and they were ruled by an iron hand in a fencing glove—that tall dark monster who had met us the first day, Doris Connelly.

  Since we wore uniforms to and for every occasion at the convent, gymnasium was no exception. Where Mother Superior showed a decided conservative streak in our everyday uniforms, she showed a decided flair in our gym suits. They were Kelly green knickers which were allowed to hug your legs just above the patella. It was really kind of a jump suit which buttoned down the front, with elbow-length sleeves—which we “did not roll up”—and which were a decided handicap in throwing a ball anywhere. The shirt had a sailor collar, under which we tied a white sailor tie. It doesn’t take too much imagination to gather that the school colors were Kelly green and white. We wore our suits with black full-length lisle stockings held up by garters and tucked nicely under our knickers. This, touched off with high white Keds, gave the opposing team a fright if nothing else.

  For swimming we had Kelly green tank suits, most of which Mother Superior bought from the 1925 Olympic team of overdeveloped lady athletes—I tried most of them on and they were simply not the size for an underdeveloped race of teenagers. Over a period of years, Sister Seamstress had taken up the shoulder straps, but at the end of each semester the wool jersey had stretched back to a very drooping affair.

  With a choice of fencing or swimming for our first semester, Mary and I quickly picked swimming. It was the easiest class to get excused from. All you had to do was appear looking pale and wan and tell Miss Connelly, or her assistant—a tall and strong senior who undoubtedly to this day is in some swimming pool of a private school—that you were “indisposed.” We were bright enough to know not to go to the same person two weeks in a row, and with twenty young water sprites to cope with two or three times a day, it was difficult to remember who had been in the water and who hadn’t. After Miss Connelly dropped the hint that she hadn’t ever seen me in the pool—this after the first six weeks of class—I found that she kept her “indisposed” books in a locker in her office and I simply erased my weekly “X” and put a check there. Mary, who really was terrified of water, followed suit, only she never could leave well enough alone.

  For each top student—the ones we hated, like Ramona Sapper and Lillian Quigley and Charlotte Sweeney—the kind that never skipped anything but dessert, Mary would see to it that the week they were supposed to stay out of the water was the week following a large “X” sign. This made Miss Connelly wary of them after two or three times, and it positively delighted us. Our record, despite some memory misgivings on Miss Connelly’s part, was A-l. We simply never for a moment thought that Miss Connelly was going to insist on our actually swimming to get our credit. However, one day toward the end of the semester, she made that chilling announcement. It was a day, of course, when we had been excused for indisposition. Mary and I blithely went our way not knowing that anything except perhaps lifesaving rules would be demanded from us at our last swimming session.

  We arrived at this last session briefed on resuscitation and artificial respiration. Miss Connelly favored us with a blast of her whistle. The whistle actually was so powerful it could pierce your eardrums, but it produced a sort of hushed silence not easy to attain in a swimming pool. “Since this is our last session in swimming for this semester, I want to tell you how very much I enjoyed this class.”

  “How about that?” Mary whispered. The whistle blew again.

  “And I want to tell you just how we’ll conduct the examination.”

  We leaned nonchalantly against the cool tile waiting for her questions on the art of lifesaving.

  “Each and everyone of you will dive in the pool and swim the length of the pool and back. Then you’ll float, then you’ll be assigned a partner, and you will be responsible for saving this partner.”

  I looked at Mary aghast.

  “For those of you who have attended each swimming class this will be a simple test.” She seemed to aim these sentences at us.

  “Good God,” said Mary, who had never been in any water but the bathtub all her life, “what will I do?”

  The whistle sounded again.

  “Captain Finnegan will call the names and assign the partners. And,” she added, “for those of you who are indisposed today I will be happy to give you the test any time this week. Just be sure and make an appointment.”

  “What are you going to do?” 1 whispered to Mary.

  “What are you going to do?” she whispered back.

  I couldn’t see any way out. I had been indisposed last week on the chart and hadn’t removed the “X” since I figured that this exam wouldn’t call for much. I had to go.

  “I’ll try. If I drown, they’ll have to get me out.”

  The word had got around, due to our panic-stricken looks, I suppose, that neither of us could swim a stroke, and even though some of the first contestants who flipped into the pool and swam like seals were free to go when they passed, they hung around awaiting our doom.

  My name was called first. I could swim a little but I had never dived.

  The water the passengers of the Titanic looked at could not have seemed any more ominous than that green chloride water of St. Marks pool did to me.

  The whistle blew. I took a deep breath and dived. After I hit the bottom of the pool with my nose it seemed to me that I would never surface again. Instead of heading toward the center of the pool and then coming up, I steered a perfect course into one of the corners. This delighted everyone in the class. As I kept bumping into the corner—it seemed to me that I was under water light-years—and thinking I had completed the length of the pool, I was astonished finally to come up directly under Miss Connelly’s swim shoes from where I had just departed.

  I surfaced much like a panicking baby elephant, splashing everyone near me. Miss Connelly had already yelled for the long “lifesaving” pole, which would have been a crushing blow to my ego. Once I got my breath I set out for the opposite end of the pool. I was determined to swim it, since it was the last time I ever wanted to get wet. By the time I reached the end of the pool and started back, there was a general tendency to bet on me. I had to be helped up the ladder and I fell exhausted onto the tile floor. Nevertheless, the test was that you swam the length of the pool and dived into it. I had, through some kind of super courage, done both—not well—but I had completed the first part of the test.

  Mary’s turn followed soon. She asked Miss Connelly if the water was cold and that really began the nightmare. Her dive resembled nothing more than that of an acrobat who’d lost hold of the trapeze. She hit the water with a resounding smash, which made everyone utter “Oooooh!”—at which point she just sank to the bottom and stayed there. Miss Connelly was in the water in a minute and I witnessed my first actual and serious lifesaving event. By the time Miss C. dragged up her inert body the entire class was
on her team.

  “Oh, let her pass, Miss Connelly, she’s just afraid of water terribly,” they cried and though Miss Connelly was tender and loving as Mary returned a good portion of the pool, she said, “Well, we’ll practice, won’t we?”

  My final test, the lifesaving test, was called and I watched Ramona Sapper blanch when she realized I was to be her lifesaver. Ramona swam, as she did everything else, with quiet perseverance. The idea was for her to go out in the middle of the pool and pretend she was drowning. And I was to jump in this time (since the class was almost over, Miss Connelly felt Ramona might well drown if I got in the corner again) and swim out and save her. The whole idea tickled me since Ramona had little faith in me. The charade started and I hit the water—sank immediately to the bottom, and came up choking and spitting and drowning. I pulled myself together arid started toward her, finally reaching her with such relief that I pulled her right down to the bottom of the pool. Ramona quickly surfaced and started swimming with me.

  “Just keep paddling,” she whispered, “and hold me under the chin. I’ll float. Just get yourself back.” I could hardly believe this was the stiff-necked Ramona who would share her secret homework—which was always one hundred per cent correct—with no one. I did what she told me and although Ramona must have swallowed a good bit of the pool because of me, I did drag her to home base.

  Miss Connelly, never one to shower compliments on a student, gave me the lowest mark she could—a C minus, but I received my credit in swimming.

  Mary tried all week to qualify for the swimming test, but she simply couldn’t stay up in water and Miss Connelly turned in an F. So, the next semester Mary had to take two gymnasium periods and she picked Interpretive Dancing and golf. I took golf with her. She carried her clubs and balls in a large A & P paper sack—needless to say, the local golf club people charged us for tearing up the turf to bits. Mary flunked Interpretive Dancing and got a D in golf. The following semester, she had to take three gymnasium periods. One had to have eight credits in gym to get a diploma and it was now up to Sister Registrar to work out a schedule that could cope with this number of active sports and still give Mary a working class schedule. As Mary said, gymnasium really conflicted with nothing but her free time. By the time she was a senior we rarely saw her, as from eight in the morning to sundown she raced from sport to sport. Obviously, Mary simply didn’t have the knack, as I did, for active sports.