Authors: Carla Van Raay
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 up 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 that 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.
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.’
We could hardly believe what we were hearing, or what came out of her mouth next.
‘Margaret Ellen Winchester,’ read Mother Clare, ‘formerly known as Superior General of the Order of the Faithful Companions of Jesus from 1948 to 1965, has been declared to have been of unsound mind during the last three years of her life. In view of her insanity, it is not possible to attribute to her any form of malicious wrongdoing.’
We drew in a collective deep breath. Had we heard right?
Insane!
Our General, mentally ill to the degree of insanity,
therefore not held responsible for her actions?
I smiled into my lap, ruefully gratified at hearing these words spoken in public in our private domain. Would this have to formally appear in the newspapers? But my mind was working overtime. The events pertaining to the reign and deposition of Madame Winchester were to be kept secret in archives in the Bishop of London’s residence. I suspect that Mother Clare made a mistake in reading that announcement to her community. As far as I can make out, it was not repeated in any other convent. And the order was never sued.
Claiming insanity to avoid litigation was one thing, but to deny that injustices had been committed was quite another. The statement was an admission of guilt, but,
because of her madness, the General was deemed innocent and irreproachable! There was no hint of apology, reparation or offer of counselling for the poor nuns who had suffered at her crazy hands. This news produced a welter of emotions in me—triumph, anger, betrayal, and sneering disdain.