Then Came Heaven (24 page)

“Olczak, come here! How many times have I told you!” she screamed and latched on to Anne’s shoulder like an eagle nabbing its dinner. “Now look what you’ve done!” Anne stared up at the nun, transfixed with fear. “Pick up that bell!”

Anne picked it up posthaste and deposited it back on the parapet. The first-grader was yowling with blood streaming from a slice in her forehead.

Sister Mary Charles pointed a bony finger at the floor. “You wait right here, and don’t you move one inch. Do you understand, missy?”

“Yes, s’ster,” Anne whispered as sheer terror swooped through her.

Sister bent to attend the younger child. “Come along, let’s see what’s happened.” She took her away to her own teacher to be examined and bandaged. The bandaging was done, however, in the flower room which also doubled as the first-aid room, so poor Anne had to wait ten minutes with her terror mounting, until Sister Mary Charles returned for her. By this time her cousins had all disappeared and were watching from a safe distance while noontime play continued throughout Paderewski Hall.

Sister Mary Charles reappeared, sour-faced and bitter, with her hands stuck up her sleeves. “All right, young lady, march!”

Anne didn’t have to ask where. She knew.

She was already crying when the flower-room door closed behind them. Through her tears she could make out the strip of rubber floor tile waiting beside the ferns. It was dark green and formidable. There was an empty space on the lowest tier of bleachers for misbehavers to lean over if their punishment was to be meted out on their backsides. The ignominy was nearly as bad as the pain. Through her tremendous fear she was trying to gauge which would be worse, having to lean over, or getting it on the palm of the hands, which was said to be as bad as when Jesus got scourged on Calvary.

“You are a disobedient little girl!” Sister said, rolling up her wide right sleeve, “and disobedience must be punished—do you understand?”

Anne tried to whisper, 
Yes, Sister,
 but no sound came out.

Sister picked up the rubber strip. Her face was hard as cast metal, her mouth pinched with self-righteousness.

“All right. Hold out your hands. And don’t pull them back, because every time you do you’ll get one extra swat. And while you get punished you pray to God and ask him to forgive your sins, do you understand?”

“But I didn’t si—”

“Don't talk back to me!”
 Sister screamed.

“But it was an acci—”

“Silence!”
 She screamed so loud her voice shook the fern fronds. “Now out with those hands or I’ll give you five more!”

Anne’s two sweaty hands, no bigger than wrens’ nests, trembled forward in slow motion.

Sister raised her weapon and swung—and Anne couldn’t help it, her arms retracted like window shades.

Sister Mary Charles’s outrage magnified. 
“All right! It was going to be five! Now it’s six!”

________

Lucy was sitting Indian fashion with her back against a hall wall, playing cat’s cradle with the younger girls, when her cousin Mary Jean came tearing toward her and slid to a stop on her knees.

“Sister Mary Charles’s got Anne in the flower room!”

“Annie? What’d she do?”

“She knocked the bell off the parapet and it fell on some little kid’s head.” Lucy knew 
you didn’t touch that bell.
 
“We were playing tag and running after Sister told us not to.” Lucy also knew 
you did not run in the hall.

“Annie?” She looked toward the flower room and got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “She’s in there with Sister Mary Charles?” Lucy peeled the yam off her fingers and was getting to her feet without realizing it.

Don’t you hurt my sister, you big meanie!

“Hey, Lucy, wait!”

But Lucy was running in the hall, heading to the rescue, and she didn’t stop till she got to the flower-room door. Inside, she could hear Sister screaming, “Don’t talk back to me!” and her fear of the legendary persecutor overwhelmed her courage. She began crying and ran to the closest person she could think of to help.

“Sister Regina, come quick! Sister Mary Charles’s got Annie in the flower room, and she’s giving her a licking!”

Sister Regina had been sitting at her desk, supervising the noon-hour play in her room. She jumped to her feet so fast her chair tipped over as she headed for the cloakroom door.

“Go play, Lucy, I’ll take care of this.”

She flew through the cloakroom in a dervish of black veils and flung open the flower-room door.

“Stop that this instant!” she shouted.

Anne had taken four licks and stood sobbing, holding her striped hands out for more.

Sister Mary Charles spun around. “This child has disobeyed! She must be punished!”

“Not that way! Not with anger and cruelty!”

“She disobeyed me not once, but twice, and this is what she gets.”

“No. I will not allow it.”

“You
 will not allow it! Since when is it your place to allow or disallow it when I’m reprimanding the children!”

“This is not reprimanding, this is persecution, and that is not a naughty child. A stern talking-to would do.”

“We teach them that disobedience is sin, and this is the punishment. It’s no worse than hundreds of others’ve gotten over the years, and they’re all better off for it.”

“God punishes sin, not you. And I cannot believe one of those children is better off for it. Anne, come here.” Anne dropped her hands and ran to Sister Regina’s side, flinging her arms around the nun’s hips and crying against her black clothing.

“Mother Superior will hear about this!” Mary Charles promised.

“Yes, Sister, she will.” More gently, to Anne who was still sobbing with her face a mess, Sister Regina said, “Anne, please go into the bathroom and blow your nose and wait for me there.”

Anne ran out, leaving the two nuns alone. Sister Regina said, in her calmest voice, “I’m very sorry, Sister, but I simply could not tolerate it anymore. I’ve disagreed with your whipping the children ever since I came here, but it seemed to be a tradition, and everyone accepted it. Well, not me. Never me. I see no reason why the children should be sacrificed to some bitter need you have within you. It is not the children who should go to Confession, Sister, but you.”

Sister Mary Charles had thrown her strap aside and was rolling her sleeve down, muttering, “... young progressive know-it-alls they’re turning out of the convent these days...”

“What are you so bitter about, Sister?” the younger one asked quietly.

“If it wasn’t for people like me those kids would be running all over us, blaspheming in the halls, skipping Mass and who knows what else!”

“Is that what Anne was doing, blaspheming in the halls? Skipping Mass? No. What was it? Running? like any healthy little fourth-grader is bound to do when she’s cooped up for eight hours a day and can’t even go outside for recess?”

“You overstep your bounds, Sister, and while you’re doing it you break Holy Rule.”

“Please, don’t speak to me of Holy Rule. You might try relearning chapter six on charity, where it says teachers may not inflict corporal punishment of any kind on a pupil. What about 
that
 holy rule?”

Sister Mary Charles scoffed and headed toward the door through which Anne had run. “I don’t have to stand here and take this from a nun who everyone knows plays favorites to those Olczak kids just because their dad is the janitor. I’m not stupid, Sister. Nor is Mother Superior. We know what’s going on!”

She went out and slammed the door none too gently.

Sister Regina dropped her face into her steepled hand and collected herself for a moment. Tears stung her eyes. Nerves jumped in her stomach. But a sense of righteousness overwhelmed her at the knowledge that she’d finally stood up for the children and stopped Mary Charles’s wholesale cruelty.

The bell rang for afternoon classes to resume, and Sister realized she was the one who was supposed to have rung it, and that Anne was still in the lavatory waiting. While her students took last drinks and shuffled toward the classroom, she went to find her.

The girls’ bathroom had windows of stamped, textured glass, and woodwork as dark as molasses. Anne was standing with her face against a corner, crying her little heart out, and Lucy was nearby, vicariously miserable but too young to know what to do.

When their champion arrived, Lucy stated soberly, “She got ’er on the hands, Sister, and Annie won’t stop crying.” Sister made Anne turn around, and Anne plunged against her, hugging hard. Sister’s heart swelled with pity and love and she disregarded Holy Rule, and her own threatened vows, and returned the hug with one hand soothing the child’s hair. Had Anne a mother of her own to go to for understanding, this would be a wholly different situation. What Regina had said to Mary Charles was true. This was not a problem child but a delicate one who’d been through enough turbulent emotions in the past several months. The ignominy and unjustness of today’s whipping might leave a serious mark on her delicate emotions. What to do now—send her back to the classroom to face the curious stares and whispers waiting there? Or let charity rule, and give her a reprieve?

When Anne calmed somewhat, Sister drew back and looked at her tear-streaked face. “Here, dear, let’s run your hands under cold water, and that will help.”

Lucy stuck close to her sister’s side, asking, “You okay, Annie? Do your hands hurt, Annie?”

Sister was touched by the younger sibling’s fierce loyalty and recognized that the bond between them had grown even stronger since the death of their mother. This was not a day on which they should be separated.

Though she would have to answer for it, Sister made a decision.

“Come with me, girls. Let’s go find your daddy.”

They found him in the lunchroom, carrying out the luncheon garbage. The cooks, Mrs. Fisher and Mrs. Zapp, were sitting quietly eating their own meal before washing the dishes. Globules of tomato-covered macaroni dotted the floors and the smell of hamburger goulash permeated the room.

They could hear the garbage cans rattling in the rear hall, so Sister took the girls around the comer, out of earshot of the cooks. Mr. Olczak came in with an empty garbage can and stopped in surprise when he saw the three of them. “What’s going on, Sister?”

She stood with one hand on each girls’ neck, holding them near her protectively. “I think it would be best if Anne and Lucy left school for the rest of the day. Is there someone whose house they could go to?”

“Sure. Aunt Katy’s, but why?”

“Anne had an accident and knocked the bell off the parapet. It hit a child and Sister Mary Charles punished her in the flower room. I stopped her.”

He pulled off his soiled gloves and went down on one knee, frowning. “Annie? Come here, honey.” Both girls went, but he put his hands on Anne’s hips and spoke only to her. “Tell me what happened.”

“We were playing tag, Mary Jean and Lawrence and Joey and a bunch of us, and Sister told us not to run, but I was 
it,
 and I accidentally knocked the bell off the parapet and it hit this little girl on the head and it was bleeding, but it was an accident, Daddy. Sister said I committed a sin, but I didn’t, and she hit me with the rubber strap on my hands... and... and...” Her chin was wobbling and fat tears filled her eyes again. “...I w... wish Mommy was still alive.”

Sister Regina had never seen Eddie’s face suffused with anger that way. She watched his expression set up with indignation as he listened to Anne’s recounting of her punishment. She thought she could read his mind, and that what was on it must be what was on hers—how dare that bitter old nun perpetrate her viciousness on a little girl who hadn’t a mean bone in her body, who was a model of comportment, and who had been through 
enough
 hell, having lost her mother!

“Come on. You, too, Lucy.” He rose, stem-faced and decisive, taking both girls by the hands. “We’ll go get your coats, and I’ll take you over to Aunt Katy’s. You can stay there till suppertime. And don’t you worry about whether or not you sinned, Annie. You didn’t.”

He stalked so fast the girls had to run to keep up, back to the third- and fourth-grade room. While Sister returned to her students and began the afternoon classes with a prayer, Eddie went into the cloakroom to find the girls’ coats. But before he left, he stuck his head into the classroom and motioned for Sister to come to the doorway. Then he whispered, “Thank you, Sister. Will you be in trouble for stepping in?”

“No, Mr. Olczak.”

“Good. It’s... I’m so...” She watched him do battle with an anger so immense that it knew no
suitable expression. “Nothing. I’ll talk to you later.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It surprised Sister Regina how calm she was now that the time was here. The misgivings from the past seemed to have vanished. Her doubts had dissipated with her abrupt decision to step in and stop Sister Mary Charles from whipping Anne. It was as if that moment galvanized her decision, for she knew with calming certainty that leaving was the right thing to do and now was the right time to set the wheels in motion.

She tried nothing so pointless as to beat Sister Mary Charles at telling Mother Agnes about what had taken place in the flower room; therefore, by the time she and Mother Agnes met at eight o’clock that night, Mother Superior was cognizant of it all.

Sister Agnes waited in the empty community room after all the others had retired to their rooms.

“Come in, Sister Regina,” she invited in a kindly tone, “and close the door if you like.”

Sister Regina did so soundlessly. Her shoes squeaked as she approached and knelt for Mother Superior’s blessing. A whisper, a touch on the head, and she rose, seating herself at a right angle to the other nun on an armchair with a stiffly upholstered seat and a straight back. The house was silent, the knitting and crocheting of recreation time returned to the drawers. A single dim lamp glowed on a corner table between the two nuns, the forty-watt bulb their standard of poverty in illumination, and from a crucifix on the wall the tortured Jesus looked down upon their black-clad figures.