During Sister’s doctor appointment, Kate sat in the waiting room, wondering if nuns took off their clothes when they went to the doctor. She leafed through some outdated TIME magazines. She wished there were copies of LIFE or National Geographic with pictures of bare-breasted women in grass skirts, but before long Sister emerged and told Kate they would go over to St. Louis University and have lunch there in the lounge for nuns.
Its walls lined with oak bookcases, the lounge was an austere room with long tables for studying and a few creaky sofas—For what? she’d wondered. Did nuns ever put their feet up on a sofa and read a novel until they dozed off?
After a lunch of sandwiches and fruit, which Sister Helene had produced magically out of her large black briefcase, the nun opened a beautiful small leather-bound book with gold-edged pages. “I’m going to say my breviary now,” she told Kate. “You can go exploring in the building, if you want. There’s a chapel down at the end of the hall if you’d like to make a visit.”
Kate walked carefully on the polished marble floor of the long hall, dimly lit by weak spring sunlight. A door opened and a tall young priest, his cassock swirling around his long legs, rushed out. Through the half-opened door Kate smelled pipe smoke and heard the quiet murmur of men’s voices and the rustling of newspapers.
At the end of the hall Kate saw two dark-maroon leather doors crowned by a half-moon stained-glass window depicting a bearded youthful Christ with a lamb on his shoulders. She pulled open one of the heavy doors and tiptoed in, afraid to disturb the calm of the chapel. The only worshiper was a young man kneeling in a front pew, his head in his hands. Startled, she realized it was Tony Martino, a boy from the neighborhood who had been away at college for the last few years. She remembered that there had been talk in the neighborhood of his entering the priesthood. She sat very still, watching him. The sun glinted on the gold of the altar, and above it the stained-glass windows gleamed like rubies and sapphires.
What was he praying about? Was he struggling with God? Was he resisting his vocation? Suddenly that word tolled like a bell—vocation. Yes, she had a vocation. God was calling her to be a nun. The realization was a blow, and she felt it, low and hard, in her stomach. There was no sweetness in the revelation, no great rush of love for Christ. Yet, at thirteen, she knew that her life had changed. Stunned, she left the chapel where Tony Martino prayed on in silence.
From then on, through high school, the certainty of her call never wavered. She told no one about it, except Sister Helene. To others, her family and friends, it would sound weird, she knew.
Like many of the graduates of St. Roch’s, she went on to Mercy High School in University City. Wearing navy blue skirts and white blouses with smartly turned-up collars, Kate and her friends rode the bus down Skinker to Olive then walked two blocks to school, hugging their books tightly to their chests. Boys in big-finned cars screeched past them, yelling mild obscenities to the girls’ delight.
At their co-ed high school, the brothers and the nuns were demanding, strict teachers with no patience for what they called nonsense. The most serious discipline problems were smoking in the bathrooms, writing notes to each other during class, or worst of all, playing hooky to spend a day by the waterfall in Forest Park. Kate hated her math classes, loved English and history, and was surprised by the praise she received for her part in the freshman production of The Merchant of Venice. During her junior year she got the lead in The Crucible, and for a few weeks thought longingly about life on the stage.
But she kept her eyes on the nuns, watching them carefully. Kate cried bitterly when she saw The Nun’s Story. Audrey Hepburn made a graceful nun, but Kate didn’t recognize any of the funny, opinionated, very human nuns she knew among those stiff, cold nuns she saw on the screen. That summer, when her mother’s friends found out she was going to the convent, they asked her how she could stand it if the life was anything like the movie.
She waved her hand airily in dismissal. “Oh, that movie was about European nuns. They’re very old-fashioned.”
Kate’s vocation had one close call in the summer between her junior and senior year of high school. His name was Bill, and he was a sophomore at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He played soccer with Kate’s older brother Dan; Kate was often aware of his eyes following her when she walked by the den where the boys were sprawled on the sofa and floor, sweaty and raucous after a practice.
One day she lay sun-bathing in the back yard with her mother’s copy of Kristin Lavransdatter and a glass of iced tea. Little drops of perspiration trickled between her breasts. When she raised her head from her book, she noticed Bill standing on the back porch, staring at her. Feeling his gaze on her skin, Kate nervously replaced the straps of her white bathing suit on her shoulders. Bill grinned slowly from the shade of the porch.
“Little Katie’s all growed up, I see,” he drawled, trying to achieve a leer on his youthful Midwestern face.
“Shut up, Wigmore,” she said, pretending indifference.
“No, seriously, Kate. I’ve been noticing you this summer. Let’s go to Talayna’s for spaghetti tonight. Then maybe we’ll drive over to the Muny and sit in the free seats at the opera. I think it’s The King and I.”
She squinted up at him, shading
