Sister Berchmans loved the story about Dr. Meyers and Joseph and Maria in Rumpelmayer’s. Maria described the room; it was like a doll’s room, pink and white and ribboned, a room that looked like you could eat the whole thing up. “My father ordered cream puffs and hot chocolate for us. He put on his very serious face. ‘It is important,’ he said, ‘to know exactly how to eat a cream puff. When I was in Paris, very great ladies would say to me,
C’est de la plus grand importance savoir manger un cream puff comme il faut
.’” She told Sister Berchmans how he kept his pretend-serious face on and cut into one cream puff deliberately, carving up pieces with the right mixture of pastry and cream, then popping them into his mouth like Charlie Chaplin. “My dear children,” he said. “It takes a lot of practice. You must eat many, many cream puffs before you can truly say you know how to eat them comme il faut.”
She told how he ordered one cream puff for each of them and then said, “That’s good, that’s good; you’re getting the idea but I don’t think it’s quite yet comme il faut.” And he kept his serious face on, almost an angry face, and ordered another for them, and another, and then when he saw they were completely stuffed he said, “Ah, I think you’re getting there. You’re learning the fine art of eating cream puffs comme il faut.”
Oh, she was really getting into her saint’s-life narrative, saying, “He takes us to Laurel and Hardy movies, Three Stooges movies, and he laughs so hard we have to pound him on the back.” And, letting her know his tender side, “He’s very kind when I’m sick or anything,” painting her a domestic scene by Chardin of the time she and Joseph had had scarlet fever and had to stay at home for a week. “One night, we couldn’t sleep because we’d slept so much during the day,” she said to Sister Berchmans. All her life, she has been able to recall that feeling of feverish wakefulness, her eyes pressing out past the bones of her skull, pushed out as if on stalks, her hot restless body longing for sleep yet excited by its own overalertness; frightened too by the numbers on the thermometer going up, up, up.
She tells Sister Berchmans her father let her and Joseph lie on his bed. “He read us
Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott.” Purposely naming the author: with nuns you could at any moment come upon a pocket of virtuous ignorance. She didn’t admit that
Ivanhoe
bored her; it is a famous book, an important book, and Joseph and her father like it, so she will not allow herself to understand that she is bored with it; she tells herself that what she’s feeling isn’t boredom but something else, something whose name she doesn’t know, because books are never boring and if her father and Joseph are interested it must be interesting, and what she is feeling is not important or not real but has to do with the fever.
“You and Joseph were lying on the bed together?”
Her alarm, then, seeing the nun thinks it’s wrong, realizing she should have known it.
“It was my father’s bed. Joseph’s and my rooms are next to each other and my father’s is across the hall. He could hear we were awake.”
“Your rooms are next to each other?”
A knife falls down between them.
“Your father has been very kind to Joseph and his mother. I’m sure they’re very grateful.”
“They’re like our family.”
She said that because she thought it was something the nun could understand, and she was hoping it would make her forget that there was something bad about her and Joseph lying on her father’s bed. But the minute Sister Berchmans asked the question—“Your rooms are next to each other?”—Maria knew it was wrong, although it wasn’t wrong before, so it was wrong but it
wasn’t
wrong, and for the first time in her life Maria experienced moral confusion. So she said, “Joseph is like a brother to me, we’re like brother and sister,” and Sister Berchmans said, “I’m sure.”
Maria saw the light glint off her rimless glasses and took in for the first time that the nun had some darkish hairs on her upper lip. And she knew that she and Joseph were in danger, and she had put them there.
It wasn’t long after that conversation with Sister Berchmans that Maria’s father took Joseph to the city, just the two of them.
When they came home, her father looked a little flushed and Joseph looked sick. He went right up to his room. When she knocked on the door, he said he was busy. Then she realized he was crying. When she went into her own room, she could hear his sobs through the wall. Joseph rarely cried, even as a child, and when he did his tears were modest, reluctant, whereas Maria’s were loud and violent.
Joseph still looked punished when he came down for dinner. Maria’s father tapped his water glass with a knife, as if demanding silence. But no one had been saying anything.
“I have an exciting announcement. Joseph and I had a marvelous adventure today. Today we met Brother Raphael, the head of Portsmouth Priory. Starting in September, Joseph will have the privilege of studying with the brothers at the finest boys’ school in America.”
Maria jumped up and stood close to her father, closer than he liked. “Joseph will be going away to school?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you doing this?” she shouted at her father.
“It’s a great opportunity for Joseph.”
And then she knew he was a liar, and she hated liars, and she saw his cruelty, and the cruelty of Sister Berchmans and Father Lynch, the cruelty of a whole way of life, a way that believed in purity and punishment, and she understood that this was happening because people, starting with Sister Berchmans, thought it was wrong that they were a boy and girl not related living in the same house. And this had happened because she trusted Sister Berchmans, who was unworthy of trust. She would never forgive them, any of them.
And she never has.
. . .
These were the Kennedy years, when people of Maria’s age dreamed of going into the Peace Corps, dreamed of facing down Bull Connor’s dogs and Lester Maddox’s hatchets. Maria saw Joseph’s being sent away as an injustice she must stand up against. If her father could be untruthful, she could, in the name of justice, be the same. If Joseph was being banished, she would see that she was banished too. She told her father it wasn’t fair: if Joseph was being given the opportunity for the finest education in the world for young men, she should be given the opportunity to have the finest Catholic education available to young women. She presented him with brochures for the Sacred Heart School in Noroton, Connecticut. She had chosen that school particularly because she knew it would appeal to her father’s Europhilic fantasies: the madames of the Sacred Heart, a French order (she didn’t know that almost all the nuns were Irish), with holidays called congés and four years of compulsory Latin.
Her father was in no position to refuse her. And so he lost her, and she lost her childhood faith in her father’s word. She believes she gave up her old love for him in the name of justice, in the name of standing beside Joseph. But none of this would have happened if the times were not as they were, in the reign of John F. Kennedy and John XXIII, when the glamorous dreams were of tipping the scales of justice but the chastity of young girls was considered fragile and beyond price.
. . .
Now we are in September 1962. Maria starts school at Noroton. For the first time she has friends, friends who are girls. For the first time she thinks of herself as one among many. These are the years for this, when many people think of
we
as opposed to
they,
whom
we
shall overcome.
Maria learns the joy of having friends, a joy she will never lose. She and her friends try to copy Joan Baez. They sing “I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow,” “I Was Born in East Virginia,” and “Long Black Veil” and iron their hair so it will look like Joan Baez’s (it never does), but only on the weekends when they go to someone’s house, because the nuns won’t allow hair ironing. Maria and her friends form a folk group, The Poor Girls, because to perform they wear herringbone skirts and poor-boy sweaters, short-sleeved ribbed sweaters that are the rage. Maria is happy wearing something that is the rage, happy shopping at Orbach’s and B. Altman on the weekends with her friends, sometimes even at Bloomingdale’s.
Maria and her girlfriends sail through stores like heiresses, buying their too-short skirts—or skirts the older nuns think are too short. But not their champion, Mother Dulcissima, who does not accuse them of anything and encourages The Poor Girls to sing at folk masses, which are allowed once a month. They make up liturgical words to Peter, Paul, and Mary songs: “Take this bread and take this wine and take our hearts and take our minds.” They sing this to the tune of “500 Miles.” Maria’s father abhors all liturgical reform and, most of all, folk masses. He travels to the city every Sunday for a Latin mass.
Her life is her friends. They think of their lives as a wonderful movie, perhaps a musical; at least a film with a great sound track.
Then it is November 1963. The president is shot. The palette of the world darkens. The music is silence; silence goes around the world, or if there is sound it is the sound of taps or bagpipes. For months, everyone moves as if they’d been the victims of a crippling blow. The world is not as they had thought, but still they think they can change it.
Maria and her friends are the heads of everything, presidents of everything. They have the solos in the glee club; they are the stars of the plays, the captains of the debate team and the basketball team and the volleyball team. They believe that one of them will be president of the United States, one will cure cancer, one will be the female Picasso. Maria, since she is thought of as a poet, will be the female e. e. cummings. They mention their femaleness in their plans for themselves; they know it is a factor, but they don’t know how, only that they don’t want to be boys and yet everyone they think is important is a man.
They rarely see boys, sometimes to debate in debate club or to sing with in glee club; there are dances, longed for, dreamed over, always disappointing. The boys are sweaty in their herringbone jackets; they spill punch, they drop potato chips and crush them into the floor with the soles of their desert boots. Their jokes are stupid. Everyone is in love with one or two of them, but they have girlfriends, girls who have no time for other girls. Maria and her friends dream of sex, but only as an accompaniment to their dreams of the great world. Their dreams of sex are mainly about kissing or about the moments after sex. Their images of themselves as great lovers are taken from the book in Mother Dulcissima’s homeroom,
The Family of Man.
In their dreams, they are not themselves, they are the black woman in the photograph in the book, gripping a lover’s back with strong red fingernails; they are the Parisian woman in the raincoat and high heels being kissed on the Champs-Élysées. They don’t know what the Champs-Élysées looks like, but it sounds like the right place to be kissed in Paris. Or they are Cathy Earnshaw, and Heathcliff is on a motorcycle. Or they are the girl at the edge of the sea in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
they are Holly Golightly, but only on the fire escape in the rain; or Jackie Kennedy, but only at the grave. They are Franny in
Franny and Zooey.
They are ancient peasant women surrounded by grandchildren who kiss their gnarled hands.
Everything is extreme. They can’t imagine it being any other way. When they think of weather, it’s blazing hot or freezing cold. Some days all they do is sleep. The way they sleep! Sleep seems to fall on them hard, like a safe falling from a cartoon sky.
So tired,
they say to themselves,
just exhausted.
They drop down to filthy sleep; their dreams are perverse, murderous; they wake and say they had terrible dreams but they don’t remember them. On weekends, the nuns won’t let them sleep enough. The girls who live close enough go home to their mothers on weekends just to sleep. They sleep and sleep. In their dreams they beg people to allow them to sleep, not to force them to wake up. To allow them to wake at two in the afternoon to roam a mother’s spotless kitchen and make combinations of sweet foods, followed by salty ones, then savory, then back to sweet. They crave sweets and sometimes take them from the kitchen back to their beds.
Maria does not go home. She does not have a kitchen stocked with sweets by a mother who would allow her to sleep until two in the afternoon. Her kitchen is spotless but is presided over by Joseph’s mother, and there are no snacks there: Maria’s father does not believe in snacks, as he doesn’t believe in sleeping late. So she doesn’t go home much; she goes to her friends’ houses, where their mothers are kind since she is motherless (not knowing she is punishing her father by being with them), and where they sleep and sleep and then take the commuter train into New York City and go to the Village and talk their way into bars and talk to men who frighten them, but they go home with one another and tremble a little on the train at what they might have done. They hear Ravi Shankar play the sitar; they listen to Allen Ginsberg chant his poetry. They love Monet’s
Water Lilies
and Shakespeare, but only performed outside where the poor can see it.
They love everyone, they hate everyone; their school is heaven, is a prison; Mother Perpetua is a mental case and Mother Emmanuel is a saint; and they adore and envy Mother Dulcissima because of the berry color of her full lips and because she went to Selma and their parents wouldn’t let them. She is the nun they all want to be. Except that they would like to marry. Someone like Bobby Kennedy or Harry Belafonte. They imagine what their parents would say if they came home with Harry Belafonte. They are not afraid of their parents. Mother, Father, they would say, this is my fiancé, Harry Belafonte. Harry, don’t worry about my parents or race prejudice. Everything will be fine because we are very much in love.
They, of course, know they have no race prejudice. The two black girls in the class are the same as everyone else, Maria and her friends are sure of that. When do Maria and her friends start calling them black? They cannot imagine a time when they used the word Negro. One of the black girls, Barbara, is a little prickly, a little unfriendly, but they know it has nothing to do with being black. She must know they are on her side. They are Democrats and anti-Communists. They will be virgins on their wedding night. None of them has had her breasts touched. They know they will love being pregnant. They will each have many children. They will all live together. They will raise their many children together on a sheep farm in New Zealand. First, though, they will teach children in Harlem, like Mother Dulcissima in the summers.