He looked into each of their eyes, his gaze traveling slowly around the room. Almost every girl’s hand shot up, with no hesitation. Kate noticed that among the girls, only she and Gracie Gilmartin, who was a tomboy and swore a lot, had not raised their hands.
“And what about you, young lady?”
The bishop focused on Kate, and she stood up as Sister had taught them to do when called on by the bishop. “Actually, Bishop, I’ve been thinking about becoming a ballerina.”
The boys behind her snickered.
“And what is your name, my dear?”
She couldn’t tell if the bishop’s tight smile was one of amusement or annoyance. “Mary Katherine O’Neill, your Excellency.”
“Well, Mary Katherine O’Neill, you’ll be just the one to enter, I’ll wager,” he said with a slight smile, nodding his head to Sister Mary Joan sitting on the edge of her seat in the back of the room.
Kate dismissed this—to her—ominous prediction. Although the nuns’ lives were mysterious and thus seductive, she knew she was too vain to become one of them. She spent many hours standing on the marble-topped coffee table in the living room watching herself swirl and curtsy in the red-gold mirror over the sofa. Sometimes she would sit for hours at her mother’s old dressing table with its large central mirror flanked by two swinging mirrors. If she positioned the mirrors just right, she could see an endless series of Kates. Once she read a whole scene from Romeo and Juliet into that mirror, watching her face in the multitude of reflections until it grew too small to see.
Kate couldn’t remember when she began to notice the grace of the nuns’ habits as they glided down the long polished halls of St. Roch’s. The habit of her teachers, the Sisters of St. Joseph, had a medieval elegance that was becoming on even the plainest among them. Their long black wool habits with wide sleeves, when rolled back, revealed silky net sleevelets that covered their pale arms; white wimples framed their faces, and thin, diaphanous black veils fluttered behind them as they rushed to catch up with their uniformed charges scampering to recess.
Many mornings as Kate arrived at St. Roch’s on her bike, Sister Mary Theresa, the convent cook, would smile and wave to her from the porch she was sweeping. A round, saucy woman, she swept briskly with her sleeves rolled back and her long habit pinned up beneath her blue and white checked apron.
They were old friends. One day, when Kate was in second grade, she forgot her lunch. Sister Cornelia, her teacher, sent her over to the convent where Sister Theresa bounced cheerfully around her neat kitchen, fixing her a lunch of the daintiest ham salad sandwich, slices of apple, and homemade oatmeal cookies full of raisins. After Sister went off to look for a holy card to give her, Kate wandered into the back hall and stared up at the narrow staircase that led to the second floor. If she could only go up to see their bedrooms! They were called cells, she knew, which lent a mysterious, penitential air to that part of the convent labeled “cloister,” where only the nuns were allowed to enter.
Sister Helene, the eighth-grade teacher, was Kate’s favorite, and ever since fifth grade Kate had been waiting to have her as a teacher, hoping Sister wouldn’t be transferred. This nun was tall, athletic, and young, with thin, perfectly arched black eyebrows like the wings of a blackbird framing her dark eyes and a heart-stopping smile. When she looked at you it was as if you were the only one in her life. Sister played softball with the girls at recess, lifting up her habit and running hard when she smacked the ball against the back fence, laughing and flushed when she scored a run. All the girls agreed that she had a wonderful figure hidden beneath that habit.
Her past, hinted at in bits and pieces, was exotic. She hadn’t entered the convent right after high school as most girls did, but had gone to St. Louis University and majored in theater. She told the class about the time she directed and starred in Synge’s Riders to the Sea—and when they read the play aloud in class, the throb of emotion in her low voice thrilled them.
One Friday afternoon in the spring of Kate’s eighth-grade year, Sister Helene called Kate aside and asked her if she would have time to go with her downtown on Saturday, since she had a doctor’s appointment and none of the other sisters had time to accompany her. Kate knew that nuns never went out alone, but always in pairs, like sedate penguins. Kate wondered what the nuns thought might happen to them on the quiet, leafy streets of St. Louis, but she was thrilled at the invitation—a whole afternoon by herself with Sister. Maybe she would ask Sister about being a nun, maybe even confess that she, too, was thinking seriously about entering the convent.
Kate dressed carefully, choosing and discarding many combinations until she settled on a freshly ironed white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar, her long, gored green-and-black plaid skirt, and her Bass Weejuns with shiny pennies tucked in the flaps. In the bright sun, she walked the few blocks to St. Roch’s, swinging her purse, noticing the lacy shadows the new leaves cast on the sidewalk, tasting the incredible sweetness of life.
Sister had dressed with care, too, for she had on a longer, finer veil than usual, and her black oxford shoes were new and highly polished.
