Sister Collette Smacks the Spirit of Love: My Second Attempt at Theater

My sister Susan was always a More Fully Well Rounded Person than I was; she actually paid attention in school, volunteered at a camp for disabled children, competed in Debate and Speech events, and participated in school theater. She could not sing, but she always snagged the largest non-singing part in plays. I was her adoring and devoted audience; whereas my parents went to one performance of each play and forced my brothers to do the same, I found a way (tricky, since I was much too young to drive) to attend every performance. I was the Adoring Audience. And really, once you’ve snagged a stage, a company, a set and a script, what is more important than an Adoring Audience? I knew my part, and I played it well.

Watching Susan on stage over the years and seeing how much fun she was having, I started to recall my own triumphant turn as a gypsy in my second grade ballet recital (here)That memory inspired me to put my disastrous Drama Class Adventure behind me (here)and audition for the seventh grade Christmas Play at Christ King School.

I was cast, and in a major role. This was well before the days of “participation ribbons” and the philosophy of “everybody wins,” so being cast as one of the leads was a real coup. All of the girls and even many of the boys tried out, so there were quite a few disappointed seventh graders. For once, I was not one of them. I have no idea what the title of that Christmas play was, nor who wrote it. I do know that it was not a very good play, so it is possible that Sr. Collette wrote it herself. Sr. Collette loved to engage in creative activities, but her efforts often fell short of whatever mark she was aiming at. Earlier that year, for example, she had decided to create a filmstrip about “The Joy of Reading,” starring the entire class. In this film, each of us wore a giant board with a letter on it and walked around forming words with our bodies accompanied by the song “Celebrate.” (For those who missed the 1960’s, the lyrics were “Celebrate! Celebrate! Dance to the Music!”) I am unclear as to what Sister’s vision was for this project, but I could tell when we watched the completed film that we had not achieved it.

Wherever it came from, the seventh grade contribution to the Christmas Pageant was a one act play with a short running time; there were eight other acts to get through in one afternoon, after all. I was the Spirit of Love. I do not remember who played the other two parts; in fact, I don’t know what the other two parts even were, although I assume they were the Spirit of Hope and the Spirit of Faith. My part consisted in gliding onto the stage at some point, dressed in an ethereal white robe, and giving a misty speech about love to a little boy lying in a bed. I don’t remember why he was in the bed, but I assume that the action was taking place on Christmas Eve a la A Christmas Carol, and the little fellow was going to learn some important life lessons from his Spirit Visitors.

In order to achieve the “ethereal” effect, Sr. Collette arranged with Mr. Keeley, the Christ King Choir Director (and a very intimidating man) to borrow three long white choir robes from the Christ King Choir. Mr. Keeley agreed reluctantly to let Sr. Collette use the robes, but he pounded into her the warning that nothing must happen to these robes. On the day of the dress rehearsal for the play, we three Spirits of Something got to put on our robes, and—even more exciting—we rehearsed in full makeup. The little boy in the bed didn’t get any makeup, but then he didn’t have any lines, either. We three Spirits, however, were decked out in vivid pink cheeks and red lipstick.

I don’t remember the rehearsal itself, but it must have gone just fine, because whenever anything didn’t go well in our seventh grade classroom, Sr. Collete would become memorably angry. She had an Artistic Temperament. After rehearsal, we three Spirits ducked into the cloakroom to disrobe and rejoin the dull world of People Who Aren’t in Theater. As I was taking the Very Expensive Choir Robe off over my head, I caught the front of it with my fully lipsticked lips, leaving a sizable smear right on the front of the robe. It looked like the Spirit of Love had been attacked by a knife-wielding maniac.

Seeing the impressive red slash on Mr. Keeley’s Choir Robe, my two Spirit castmates gasped and ran out of the room as fast as they could. One of them (who in that moment was definitely channeling the Spirit of Tattling) yelled out to Sr. Collette that “Maloney messed up Mr. Keeley’s Robe!” I stood there in stunned disbelief, looking down at my sorry choir robe and coming to grips with what had just happened, dreading the moment that Sister found out what I did. Sure enough, Sr. Collette swooped into the room, a black and white blur of rage.

No doubt Sister herself was terrified of Mr. Keeley; we all were, but I was also terrified of Sr. Collette, and never more than in that moment. When she saw the red lipstick smear on the robe, she hauled off and slapped me right across the face, as hard as she could, and she was not a frail woman. I never questioned her response; I knew that I had—accidentally, but still—committed a dark deed, and no doubt betrayed any trust she had in my ability to For Once Not Screw Up.

I never told anyone that Sr. Collette hit me. I was relieved that we were in the cloakroom and no one else saw it; I was at least spared a public humiliation. Also, I really didn’t blame her. I knew that she was now in deep trouble with Mr. Keeley, and it was my doing. Sister tried the best she could to get the lipstick stain out with cold water, and after her ministrations it was reduced to a faint pink blur. Surely (we hoped) the mark would be invisible to the audience while I was on stage. Neither of us held out any hope that the same would be true of Mr. Keeley.

The Christmas Program took place during the afternoon; in those days, evening events were unheard of, since our teachers thought that our parents deserved relaxing evenings at home after their day’s work rather than having to haul themselves up to school to watch their children do things badly on stage. Those parents who were at home during the day were welcome to come and stand in the back of the gymnasium, but very few parents did so.  My mother had told me that she would try to get there to witness my triumphant stage debut, and my sister Susan was planning to come as well. (She must have had the day off from high school, as she would never have been allowed to miss school for a grade school pageant.) The Program started at 1 p.m., and as soon as the curtain went up, I started looking for my mother and Susan to appear. As the moments ticked by and there was no sign of them, I got more and more anxious.

As the program marched inexorably onward, the time came for the seventh grade to take the stage. No sign of my mother; no sign of my sister. Still, I knew that the Show Must Go On. I stepped out onto the stage when my cue came and spoke my lines with confidence, as if to say to my audience, “Ignore that pink smear on the Spirit of Love’s ethereal white robe. Attend only to the profound words issuing forth from the Spirit of Love.”

Susan and my mother missed my star turn, and they felt terrible about it. My mother was taking care of my other sister Marbeth’s baby that day, and Marbeth was caught in traffic and late to pick her up.  My mother had four other children and several grandchildren, and I knew she was juggling a lot of balls. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I had, at the moment I needed to, stepped up and given my performance. I was also very glad that it was Sr. Collette and not I who had to bring those robes back to the formidable Mr. Keeley.

My Smutty Book Club with Sr. Lydia

 

My mother worried continuously over my lack of friends and my weight.  I loved to read, and I was content to lay on the cot in our basement every day after school and all through the summers with a bag of forbidden chocolate at my side, reading my parents’ collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and whatever else I could find on our shelves. While my mother wished I were less in love with chocolate and would have loved to see me pursuing more physical-fitness oriented activities, she thoroughly understood my love of books. We always shared that passion, and it was a good one to have in common.

Books saved my life; at least, they saved my sanity. They had the power to lift me completely up and out of the world I was wedged into so physically, and they filled my mind with other peoples’ adventures and sorrows and loves, coloring in the sketched-in lines of my own. My first rescue through books came in the summer before fourth grade when my grandmother, whom we called Mommy Mayme, stayed with us after her failed eye surgery. We shared a room, she in one twin bed and I in the other. Mommy Mayme snored like a steam engine, and I would lie awake all night long, unable to sleep next to such impressive noise. As I would watch the pink sky creeping toward my bedroom window, I would listen to the radio I kept under my pillow, and some nights by the time that pink was advancing, I had heard  “Hurdy Gurdy Man” seven or eight times.

One night as I lay in bed listening to Donovan sing and my grandmother snore, I risked turning on a light. Mommy Mayme didn’t stir when the light clicked on, and I was off to the races. I started reading the first book in a series my sister owned called Honey Bunch.
They were awful books: syrupy sweet, with a perfect little girl named Honey Bunch who did no wrong and loved everyone. I read two a night, until they were gone. Then I read Cherry Ames: Student Nurse, but there were only two of those on the shelf. I moved on to the Bobbsey Twins. They were less tooth-achingly sweet than Honey Bunch, and the Twins had a funny Aunt who was deaf and heard everything incorrectly, but really the Bobbsey Twins were just a warm-up act for Nancy Drew.

I loved Nancy Drew, and when I found her books, I couldn’t wait to finish one so that I could move onto the next. Although Nancy must have had some sad times—she was sixteen years old, and her mother had been dead for years—you would never know it. She had a doting father, Carson Drew, a housekeeper who clucked over her regularly, her own Roadster, and two best friends, George and Bess. She even had a boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. Trouble always found Nancy, but she prevailed in the end, and she didn’t need parents or a boyfriend to do it. Nancy was smart and independent and I loved her.

Whenever I found a book that I adored, I read it over and over again, savoring it differently each time. I studied every moment of city-girl Betsy’s life with her farm relatives in Understood Betsy, I wished I had a baby sister like Phronsie in The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; I recoiled in horror when Jo married Professor Baer in Little Women. When I read Mrs. Mike, I fell completely in love with Mike Flanagan but also with Katherine Mary O’Fallon; I fell in love with their love and with their marriage, and when their babies, Ralph and Mary Aroon, died, I was devastated. I more or less memorized Mrs. Mike, and to this day I recall its images and anecdotes at various moments in my own life. No book quite took over my life, however, the way that Heidi did.

I found Heidi in a box in Anne Fischer’s basement. Anne was my mother’s best friend from childhood, and like my mother, she also loved to read. There were boxes and boxes of books in Anne’s basement and whenever we visited, she would tell me that I could take home any books I wanted, which was my version of heaven. When I found Heidi, I took it home and read it straight through. I fell in love with Heidi and with her grandfather. Heidi’s life was so difficult that it made my problems seem like nothing, and she never let her difficulties destroy her. I wanted to be in Heidi’s world, which is odd, since Heidi’s world included being abandoned to live with her grandfather, a very grouchy and distant old man, sleeping in a hut on a desolate mountain with this old man, building a loving connection with that same man through pure resilience and good humor only to be taken away without notice to serve as a companion to a rich crippled girl named Klara whose housekeeper despised Heidi…THIS was the world I wanted to leave my world for? Yes.

For most of a summer, I pretended I was Heidi without telling anyone I was doing so. I pretended my twin bed was a pile of hay in a loft, like Heidi’s was, “climbing” into bed each night from my rocking chair; I scrubbed my face each morning just as Heidi did each morning at the well; I ate applesauce whenever possible at meals because it most closely resembled the “mush” that Heidi and her grandfather ate every night. I think what affected me so powerfully was the fact that Heidi’s life was as bleak as it gets, but she never let it change her. She changed her world, instead, with a steady hope that things would get better and that if she loved people, they would become loveable.

Another book I found in Anne Fischer’s basement was Marjorie Morningstar. A hefty book, it took me weeks to get through it, and several pounds of chocolate malted milk balls. I was enraptured. Marjorie was a teenager in New York City during the 1940’s who wanted to escape her nearly certain fate of getting married and moving to the suburbs. She wanted to be an actress, and she was determined to make it happen. I didn’t realize until many years later that Marjorie had not actually been all that talented, that her own dreams of being an actress and an unconventional woman had been risible given her clear status as a typical Jewish girl of her time.

In eighth grade, I read Gone With the Wind. The book took over my life for a solid month. I would sit through classes all morning, and as soon as the bell rang for lunch, I would run home to eat my sandwich and read for twenty minutes before running back to school before recess ended. Then would begin the long wait for the last bell of the day, and the dash home to get into my comfortable clothes, grab the book and head to the basement, snacks in hand. I didn’t get much homework done, and the homework I did turn in that month was not very good. I was doing nothing to improve my solid “D” average in science and math; my reading and spelling scores were good because I didn’t have to study them to excel. Even my reading grade plummeted, though, when I had to turn in an art project about a book I had read. My task was to create a diorama about a book I had enjoyed and, lacking any artistic talent whatsoever, I dressed my Barbie doll in her best dress, put her in a box, and said she was Scarlett O’Hara. I got a D. The diorama next to mine was created by Dianne, a girl I had never seen read an entire book in her life, and she had a scene from Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, with a pond made from a mirror and realistic looking snow. She got an A.

When I was in eighth grade, Reading Class (now called “Language Arts” for some reason) involved everyone in the class reading the same book and then doing a great deal of non-reading activity about it. One of the assigned books was The Light in the Forest. It wasn’t a long book, but it took up huge amounts of time because most classes were not about the actual book; they were about things that had some remote connection to the book. So, for example, if the book mentioned someone eating applesauce, the class would make applesauce. If the book mentioned a shoemaker, the class would be subjected to a lesson on making shoes. It was Reading Class For People Who Hate to Read. Thankfully, there was a different group for “Advanced Readers.” The Advanced Readers were allowed to read anything we wanted to read, at whatever speed worked for us. The only requirement was that once a week, each Advanced Reader had to prepare a selection of one hundred words from her book of the week. The idea was to read our chosen passage out loud and then tell Sr. Lydia why the book was wonderful and what we learned from it. These “Advanced Reader” conferences took place while the other students made applesauce or colored pictures of shoes. After reading her “one hundred words,” the student would explain to Sr. Lydia why she chose those particular words and how they best represented what the book meant to her. The idea was that each Advanced Reader would read about one book a week; I easily read more than that, as reading was my favorite thing to do in the world, other than eating, which I could do while I read, thus combining two favorite activities in one experience, a win-win for me.

One particular Friday, I hadn’t yet read Sr. Lydia the “one hundred words” from my book of choice. I had probably read several books that week, but the only book I had with me that day was a book I had barely started. My mother was always happy to buy me a book if she saw one that looked interesting. Just that week, she had seen a book at the Marshall Field’s Book Store that she thought I might like, and brought it home for me. I had started the book, and liked it fine. So I just grabbed that book and went up to Sr. Lydia’s desk to read my “specially selected” one hundred words. Opening the book at random, I started reading, only to realize quickly that I had accidentally opened the book to a sex scene. My mother had not vetted the book, and I had not yet gotten to that page. When I got to the words, “They were closer than close,” I abruptly stopped reading. Sr. Lydia said, “Go on, dear.” Flushed, ashamed and sheepish, I miserably finished reading. I have no idea what I said in response to Sr. Lydia’s question, “Now why did you choose precisely those pages to read to me, dear?” I have blotted that memory out completely.

My mother believed that reading was the most important talent and the best hobby there was. She was thrilled that I loved to read, and had a very lassez-faire attitude toward my selections. One time in the gift shop of Chicago’s Union Station, I wanted to buy a book called Coffee, Tea or Me? for the train ride to Milwaukee from Chicago. My mother was a bit dubious given the somewhat racy-looking cover, and asked me what it was about. “The airline industry,” I said. “You know, how hard it is to be a stewardess or a pilot.” Reassured, she gave me the money to buy the book, and I read it happily all the way home.

I didn’t finish the entire book on the train, but I was very eager to pick it up the following day; the book was about the job of being a stewardess all right, but it was racy in the extreme and I was enjoying it wildly. I would not be using it for my “one hundred words” presentation to Sr. Lydia. I couldn’t find the book anywhere the next day, and when I went to ask my mother where it was, she informed me that my brother Jamie had ratted me out. He had told my mother that Coffee, Tea or Me was a “sex book,” and told her to open the book at random and read anything. She did so, and apparently learned some things even she, a mother with five children, didn’t know. That was the end of Coffee, Tea or Me for me, at least until a few weeks later when I finally found it on my mother’s closet shelf and finished it on the sly. She hadn’t kept the book to read it herself. My mother had very good taste in books. She just couldn’t bear to throw away a book, any book, and she certainly couldn’t give it away to anyone and be an Occasion of Sin.

The only other time I can remember my mother taking a book away from me and hiding it on her closet shelf was the summer of eighth grade, when I had a dermoid cyst removed from my ovary. That surgery was a major deal, and I was in the hospital for over a week, much of it spent hooked up to tubes and in a great deal of pain. My sister Marbeth’s best friend Jolie gave me a copy of the brand new book Our Bodies, Ourselves. I had been in no shape to look through it while I was in the hospital, but I certainly looked forward to perusing it once I got home.  One day while she was visiting me, however, my mother started paging through the book while I was napping. I awoke to a very irate mother, who had some rather unfavorable things to say about Jolie. “Who would give such a book to a twelve year old girl?” was, I believe, among them. “The first page I opened to had a picture of two women. Dancing. With each other. And they were both in the nude!” Our Bodies, Ourselves went home that day under my mother’s arm, and in order to read it weeks later, I had to find it on her closet shelf.

Finding and finishing the books my mother had put away for a later date—or forever—assured me that there was such a thing as a bad book, and that my mother actually knew what a good book was. I am still grateful for my mother’s love of books and her encouragement of my own love of books. We often clashed over food issues, and my mother was often distracted from my day-to-day life because of all the other demands on her attention—a sick mother, a troubled sister, teenaged children, an alcoholic husband—but we always had books in common, and that bond sustained us until the end of her life.

When my mother was eighty-one years old, she discovered that she had terminal cancer, and when she went into hospice, we developed a practice of reading together every night before bed. For her birthday that same month , she had received as gifts a book about the Civil War from her grandson and The Secret Garden from her granddaughter. While I stayed with her in hospice, we developed a practice of reading both books at night before we went to sleep. Alternating between the two books, I would read aloud until she fell asleep. My mother died before we finished either book, but I was so grateful that we shared our love of books to the very end.

 

My Failure to Avoid My First Confession

Second grade was the year that we made our First Confession at Christ King School. I was in the second grade in 1966, so the changes wrought by Vatican II were still two years away for us. Sister Shawn Marie and Fr. Lippert did their best to make this process reassuring; Father visited class and practiced the routine with us (“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my — confession. Here are my sins: —–I am sorry for these and all my sins, especially for all the times I —–.”) Each student was in charge of enumerating her own venial sins, but for some reason that is not clear to me it was decided that Sr. Shawn Marie would supply us with what is called our “principal fault,” or the sin that came after “…especially for all the times I —-.” When it was my turn to sit next to Sister’s desk, I ran through the whole script with her and when I got to the “especially….” part, Sister supplied the words, “….for all the times I was lazy.” I remember thinking, “Huh. Did not see that coming. Lazy. Is that even a sin?”

I was a bit uneasy about this whole “going into a dark closet and talking to a grid” thing, not to mention the idea of confessing the sin of laziness, which I wasn’t all that convinced was my biggest flaw anyway, so I solved the whole problem by pretending to be sick the day of my First Confession. My mother had no idea it was the day of First Confession, because in those days the school handled these things on their own without bringing the parents in all the time. I thought it was very clever of me to avoid the entire situation and also have a day off from school. I don’t know why I didn’t understand that Confession was going to happen again, but I didn’t. And so, about one month after First Confession, Sister announced that we were to line up and march over to Church for Confession. My heart lurched. Confession! This was going to be a Regular Thing! And now everyone else was lining up in a confident and serene manner, with an air of “Oh, yeah. Confession. We totally know how to do that. That’s cool.”  What to do?

I did the only thing I could do, which was line up with the others and march to Church with all those relaxed second graders who had already been there and done that. I sat in the pew and ran through the script in my head, trying to remember the right words and where to plug in my sins. After not nearly enough time had passed, Theresa Buth opened the heavy wooden door of the confessional and nodded at me to enter. I gulped and walked inside the little dark room. Best to just launch in, get it done and exit with as much panache as possible, I decided, so I knelt down and said the whole thing in one big breath: “BlessmefatherforIhavesinnedherearemysins…..” etc. Just as I was finishing up I heard a scrapy, sliding sound in front of my face and suddenly a kind male voice said, “You may begin.” Begin? I had just done the whole thing! Where was HE?” He was, of course, on the other side of the confessional. I closed my eyes in resignation and started over: “BlessmefatherforIhavesinned…” I remembered everything I had planned to say; I did not, however, confess being lazy as my major sin, as Sister had instructed me. I had decided, all on my own, that my Big Sin in the last action-packed seven years was stealing a holographic block from Patty Goodnetter. The block I had stolen was so attractive to me because the pictures kept changing, just like a television set. Not knowing the words “holographic block” at the age of seven, I cut to the chase and confessed to Father that I had stolen a television set.

I remember there being a pause after the words “….especially for the time I stole a television set,” and then Fr. Lippert gently said, “How old are you?” “Seven, Father,” I replied. “Could you please describe to me the television set?” I did so, and—after another brief pause–Father told me that I had made a very good Confession and asked for my Act of Contrition. Wow, I thought, I think maybe I aced this. I totally got an “A” in Confession. I was so amazed at my Confession Prowess that I almost didn’t hear my penance–two Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. As I opened the wooden door to let the next penitent in, I felt the weight of all my sinning lift off my shoulders; cleansed and pure of heart, I floated out of that confessional and rejoiced in my sinless state. As I knelt down in front of the statue of Mary to say my penance, I realized that, immediately after being absolved of my sins, I had been prideful about my Awesome Confession Skills. Not to mention that I completely forgot to confess the illness I faked to get out of Confession in the first place. Sighing with resignation, I squared my shoulders, acknowledged the constancy of my own fallen nature, and understood that I would be going to confession again very soon and for the rest of my life.

 

My Failure To Avoid First Grade

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, my first grade teacher at Christ King School hated me. Seriously. Mrs. Wojciechowski despised me. I was a quiet, painfully shy five year old (I turned six in November of that year) who, more than anything, wanted to lie low and avoid trouble. Who knows what Mrs. Wojciechowski saw when she looked at me? Even though her surname was Polish, she had a truly lovely British accent and said things like “the loo” and “going on holiday,” so maybe I looked Irish and she responded to me in a historically consistent way.

No doubt a great deal of my trouble in first grade was the result of my tendency to drift off into my own thoughts at random times.  Also, I had an uncanny ability to show up for life with all the wrong information, as if I had been supplied with the playbook for a different game than the one being played. I spent the summer before first grade learning how to read, because my sister Susan had convinced me that everyone in my class would be reading and I would be the only one who didn’t have a clue. My reading skills—or, more precisely, my lack of reading skills—became Susan’s Summer Project, and she did a fine job. I remember being deeply puzzled when, on Day One, Mrs. Wojciechowski started holding up basic words printed on cards and showing us all how to “sound them out.” Sound them out? The word is “ache,” I thought to myself. Why would I sound it out?

On that same first day of school, Mrs. Wojciechowski told the class that we would start each day by reciting the Hail Mary and end each day reciting the Our Father. Uh oh. Those two prayers were certainly prayers I had heard before, but I was not at all confident that I could recite them by heart. At Mrs. W’s command, the other students promptly stood up next to their desks and said the Hail Mary, with me mumbling along with the gist of it. She noticed, and told me to know my prayers by heart when I showed up to my second day of school. I had a solution to that problem; I decided to myself that I was done with first grade. I enjoyed wearing my new outfit and having my hair pin-curled, but the learning curve seemed pretty steep and I missed my house and my mother.

Since I wasn’t going to be back, I ignored Mrs. W’s order to get busy memorizing prayers. The next morning, when my mother woke me up “for school,” I informed her in Bartleby-esque fashion that I preferred not to. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that my preferences were not going to be consulted and this wasn’t a choice I was going to be allowed to make. I sat down on the kitchen floor and refused breakfast (which was just about the most radical tool in my toolbox, as my mother knew that I adored breakfast) to no avail. I showed up at Christ King School hungry and prayer-less.

Of course Mrs. Wojciechowski called on me to lead the class recitation of our morning Hail Mary. I am proud to say that I gamely stood up and gave it a shot. It didn’t end well, and Mrs. W was not happy. My innocence was gone; I understood now that this was my brutal New World, so when I went home on that second day, I told Susan that I needed to memorize some prayers, and fast. Susan jumped into the fray immediately, and by the end of the night I could reel off not only the Hail Mary and the Our Father, but the Glory Be for good measure. (Susan suggested that a backup prayer was probably a good idea, because who knew where Mrs. Wojciechowski would strike next?) I was Set.

The stakes in the game, however, had changed. While I was busy being proud of knowing the Hail Mary, the Our Father and the Glory Be, the class had moved on; we were now re-enacting Bible scenes. On my third day of the first grade, Mrs. Wojciechowski announced that we were going to act out the Story of the Good Samaritan, and asked for volunteers to play the roles of the Good Samaritan, the unfortunate fellow at the side of the road, and the Jewish passers-by.

Whoa. Susan Kwak already had her hand in the air for the part of Good Samaritan while I was still at my desk thinking, “What?” I went to mass with my family every Sunday and sometimes on weekday mornings in the summer with my mother. I had a vague idea who the Good Samaritan was, but certainly I didn’t know this story well enough to act it out in front of the class.  Numb with anxiety, I watched Susan Kwak don the bedsheet and turban supplied by Mrs. W and rescue Benjamen Winkleman after Valerie Alt and Steven Cybell had walked right on by. I wasn’t sure that even Susan was going to be able to get me through this year.  I thought about the sheer size of the Bible in our living room bookcase at home, and gave up. My only goal at that point was to endure whatever was to come as stoically as I could, and bring my own books to class to read under my desk while the rest of them conducted “First Grade.”

Thus began the pattern of my days at Christ King School. I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on in the front of the room, and when I could not easily read under my desk (other kids would tattle if they saw me), I would count slowly in my head to 300, knowing that when I got to 300 another five minutes would have passed; I poured Elmer’s Glue-All on my fingers and shaped little glue cups that I would then pop off and save for some later use (no such future uses every occurred to me); I would memorize the capital city of every state in the United States and every country in the world (I had a pencil box which sported a cool dial system where I could scroll to, say, “Venezuela,” and the other side would dial up “Caracas.”) And as for Mrs. W? She was Dragline to my Cool Hand Luke.

My sister Susan, a fourth grader, walked to and from school with me every day; Christ King School was five blocks from my house and I had a tendency to get lost easily. Mrs. Wojciechowski, for some reason, found this arrangement to be deeply problematic. She insisted that I leave my sister alone and let her walk to and from school without me. Even though Mrs. Wojciechowski had laid down the law, the very next day I walked home with Susan anyway; I wasn’t doing it to be rebellious; I was just afraid of getting lost. The next day when I arrived at school, Mrs. Wojciechowski told me that she had watched out the window the day before and saw me walk home with Susan and then she yelled at me quite a bit. I must have brought this problem home to my mother—or Susan did—and my mother had a conference with Mrs. Wojciechowski.

In later years, my mother admitted that her conference with Mrs. Wojciechowksi was, to say the least, enlightening. Her first words to my mother were “May God forgive you for raising that child.” After this conference, my mother told me that I would no longer be in Mrs. Wojciechowski ’s classroom; I would be in Sr. Rose’s class. Sr. Rose had the face and voice of an angel and indeed, I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven in her room. My reprieve from Mrs. Wojciechowski lasted exactly one day. I don’t know what happened, but my transfer to a classroom away from Mrs. Wojciechowski ended after twenty four hours. And when I landed back in Mrs. Wojciechowski classroom, she hated me even more.

The rest of first grade is a blur, but several incidents stand out; the first happened during Reading Time. Mrs. Wojciechowski held up a card with the word “Mrs.” printed on it and called on me, saying, “Anne, spell it.” I stood up and recited, “Mrs. Capital M, r, s, period. Mrs.”

“Wrong,” she said. “Spell it.”

Bewildered, I said again, “Mrs. Capital M, r, s, period. Mrs.”

“Wrong again,” Mrs. Wojciechowski said, her eyes twinkling. “Spell it.”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, so I said again what I saw: “Mrs. Capital M, r, s, period. Mrs.”

At this point Mrs. Wojciechowski turned to the rest of the class and said, “Anne doesn’t know how to spell ‘it!’” In a mock-scolding tone, she turned back to me and said, “Anne, ‘It’ is spelled “I, t.” The class laughed. I didn’t tell my mother what happened that day, because I wasn’t sure myself what happened. Mrs. Wojciechowski had tricked me, and laughed at me, but at the age of five, I wasn’t sure that she had done anything wrong. I thought I may have brought this ridicule on myself.

Another memorable moment of my life with Mrs. Wojciechowski happened one day just before the last bell of the day rang.  At Christ King School, students had the option of staying for lunch or going home for lunch. There was no hot lunch at the time, so students either ate bag lunches in their classrooms or went home and came back in time for recess. I was one of the students who went home for lunch, as was my sister Susan. The students who stayed for lunch paid for milk, and every day a large box containing individual cartons of milk was delivered to each classroom. Each student who stayed for lunch was responsible for getting her or his milk out of the box and drinking it.

One day, there was a carton of milk left in the box after lunch. Someone—I am not sure who—put the full carton on the windowsill of our classroom, where it sat all afternoon, in the sun. By three o’clock, when the bell was about to ring, the milk was not in drinkable condition. Just before that final bell, Mrs. Wojciechowski  spotted the milk and said, “Who didn’t have milk with lunch today?” I had gone home for lunch, but I did not, in fact, have milk with my lunch that day. My first grade mind was a literal mind, and so when Mrs. Wojchichowski asked her question, I raised my hand in response. I had not had milk for lunch that day.

Of course, the carton of now-sour milk had been left by a stay-for-luncher, not me, and I suspect that Mrs. Wojciechowski knew it. Nonetheless, she brought me to the front of the room and taught everyone An Important Lesson by insisting that I drink the full carton of sour milk right then and there. Again, I didn’t tell my mother this happened, because I was pretty sure that what happened was my fault, somehow, and I didn’t want to get into any more trouble than I already was.

My final enduring memory of first grade is of the day I wet my pants. The rule at Christ King School was that, if you had to go to the bathroom during the day, you raised your hand. Only once the teacher called on you could you request permission to use the “lavatory.” We had two scheduled bathroom breaks each day, and so most of us had no need to ask for an extra trip to the “lav.” On this particular day, however, I did have to go to the bathroom. It was a Friday afternoon, at about 2:15, and I raised my hand. Mrs. Wojcieschowski did not call on me. I kept my hand raised for a very long time, and even waved my hand a bit; Still, Mrs. Wojciechowski did not call on me. I was growing increasingly desperate as my bladder bulged, and I started to squirm in my chair. I didn’t know what to do. At some point, I realized that Mrs. Wojciechowski had no intention of calling on me, so my task was to get to the end of the day at 3:00 and race to the Girls’ Room on my own. I remember watching the minutes tick by so slowly, as my agony steadily increased.

I didn’t make it. At about ten minutes before 3:00, I felt my bladder surrender and, to my horror, watched as a stream of pale yellow urine started snaking away from underneath my chair and across the aisle. I am grateful to this day that not one other student said a word. No one even acted as if they noticed. I can only surmise that they knew I had had my hand raised for forty-five minutes to no avail, and they pitied me. I sat in my wet underpants for the few minutes left before the bell, and the moment the bell rang, I raced out of the classroom and home. Once again: I didn’t tell my mother what had happened. I was too ashamed to report that I had wet my pants at the age of six. Surely another part of my hesitation to report these acts of hatred was the knowledge that when I had complained before and my mother had tried to help, I ended up spending one day in a different classroom only to be sent back to Mrs. Wojciechowski, where everything was only worse.

I am happy to report that my second grade teacher, Sr. Shawn Marie, was a lovely lady and very kind. In conversations today, if I ever mention having a bit of a “rough go” of it in first grade, others will nod knowingly and say, “The nuns, right?” “Wrong,” I always reply. The nuns were nothing but good to me at Christ King School. I cannot say the same for Mrs. Wojciechowski.  I made it through first grade somehow; as Friedrich Nietzsche once pointed out, whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Mrs. Wojciechowski: you made me an Existentialist, and a stronger person. But you were not a nice lady.

My Failure to Avoid German Class

Mrs. Lane was my third grade teacher at Christ King School. Unlike my first grade teacher, Mrs. Lane actually liked me. (Sr. Shawn Marie, my second grade teacher, also liked me and was kind, but I figured that was her job since she was a nun and so I didn’t “count” her when I reflected on my Likeability Factor.) Mrs. Lane was a dear lady, but she was very old, and I suspect that by the time I came along, her best teaching days were behind her. On those rare days in class when I would tune in to hear what was going on, Mrs. Lane would invariably be telling the class about her husband, and about their beautiful love story, and about his tragic death. These stories were actually more interesting than whatever the class was supposed to be talking about, and I would often stay in the moment to listen to her sad and beautiful tale. Despite the fact that I learned very little, I have fond memories of Mrs. Lane.

Third grade was the year we began the study of Foreign Languages at Christ King School, and for us that meant German. Frau Mittmann came in three times a week to teach us German. Most schools added Spanish classes to the schedule, but at Christ King the decision was made for German, perhaps because Milwaukee was a heavily German city at that time in its history. In any event, Frau Mittman was hired.

I loved her. She was a big, fleshy woman with fat strands of greasy gray hair pulled back into a sloppy bun affixed with a black headband. I don’t know how old Frau Mittman was when she was our teacher, but she seemed to us quite aged and world-weary; she had large, technicolor varicose veins and wore shapeless house dresses to class, paired with thick socks and rubber-soled lace up shoes. From Frau Mittmann we learned every single word pertaining to the weather and to Easter. I don’t know why Frau Mittmann was so passionate about Easter and weather, but she must have had good reason. Maybe she decided that this was the vocabulary we would need one day if we travelled to Germany and were in a pinch. Perhaps she thought this combination of Weather/Easter would give us precisely the conversational flexibility we needed. We would be able to say helpful things to native German folk such as, “Jesus, it’s hot today,” or “I require chocolate eggs when it thunders.” In any event, I have fond memories of standing at our desks three mornings a week when that bulky gray figure entered the classroom and saying in unison, “Guten Tag, Frau Mittman; Wie Gehts?” before settling into our lesson. Frau Mittmann’s answer to our polite query was always in English, and always the same: “Lousy.” She would emphasize the “s” sound dramatically, which made the word “lousy” sound more like “LOUSE—Y.” We believed her.

After teaching us a thorough vocabulary of weather and Easter words (this took up about the first ten minutes of our lesson), Frau Mittmann would spend the rest of the hour reminiscing about her childhood. She was a child during the First World War, and we could tell that being German during the Great War was no picnic. Fat tears rolling down her plump grey cheeks, Frau Mittmann would describe riding her bicycle to school only to have a bomb fall on the street and open a crater in front of her. She told us that she came home from school one day to find no home at all—just a hole where her house had been. That story always had Frau Mittmann’s whole frame shaking with tears, and I sometimes teared up right along with her. It certainly put our petty American first world third grade problems in perspective.

I cannot imagine where the Powers That Be at Christ King School found Frau Mittmann, but after several months of these compelling lessons, someone must have said something because our regular teacher, Miss Weinfurt, stayed in the classroom for German instead of ducking out for a coffee break. Shortly after Miss Weinfurt observed class, Frau Mittmann disappeared and was replaced by a thin, nervous woman whose name I do not remember and who told us no stories at all.

Later on in college, I became a History major and surprised my professors with my empathy for the Germans in World War I, arguing that they might have been the “fall guys” rather than the pure villains they were portrayed as being by the rest of Europe. I owe that to Frau Mittmann. She was at Christ King School for less than a year, but she was one of the very few teachers I paid attention to. The other German teacher spent much more time on vocabulary, but to this day the only German words I remember are “gewitter,” “blitz,” and “chocolaten eye.” And when Frau Mittmann made it to heaven, I hope she didn’t look around, roll her eyes, and pronounce it “LOUSE-Y.”

The Beer Stein Candle and My Brief Career as a Journalist

I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, the “Hey! Let’s Try Anything!” era of education. One of Christ King School’s earliest experiments was Flexible Friday. We had classes in things like Math, History, English, Spelling and Religion on Monday through Thursday, but then on Friday we were allowed to sign up for a variety of “different” classes, taught by the same teachers as the rest of the week but about different subjects. Mr. Del Bello’s Current Events class, where we spent an hour reading the daily newspaper with him, was one of the best. There were some awful classes; I remember that one class was Black History, taught by our very white Math teacher to a very white class of thirty boys and girls. I have mercifully blotted out most of my memories of this class, but I do remember that Gone With The Wind was discussed favorably.

One of the Flexible Friday classes I was eager to take was Newspaper. The idea was that we, the seventh and eighth graders, would spend an hour on Fridays planning, writing out, and making copies of a school newspaper. In theory, this sounded wonderful to me, and right up my alley. In practice, however, I was the only girl who signed up and the boys wanted to write only about sports. After several failed attempts to propose stories about other things, I finally proposed a sort of “how-to” column about how to make cool stuff. “Like what?” one of the boys asked skeptically. I racked my brain and remembered seeing an article in one of my teen girl magazines about making a candle that looked like a glass of beer. I hadn’t read the article, knowing that my mother would never let me make a beer candle even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. Thinking (correctly) that this was a “how-to” project that boys might like, I proposed it. The boys immediately agreed that I should write an article about how to make a beer candle.

The problem, of course, was that I hadn’t actually read the “how-to” piece; in fact, I didn’t even know exactly which magazine I had seen it in; I couldn’t find it at home, and surmised that I had seen it in a magazine I had thumbed through at the doctor’s or dentist’s office. In any event, I didn’t have it now. This was a very long time before the age of the internet; there was no “looking up” how to do something like make a beer can candle. I was going to have to wing it.

That is what I did. I imagined how it might go, and wrote that down. My “how-to” column told my readers to obtain a couple of regular candles, one yellow and one white. Then, I instructed them, find a beer stein to hold the Beer Candle.

Melt each candle in separate saucepans, I counseled, and when the wax is completely liquefied, pour the amber wax into the beer stein. Take the white liquefied wax and beat it to a froth with your mother’s electric mixer, I counseled. Once it’s nice and foamy, pour that into the beer stein and insert a wick. Voila! Frothy Beer Candle in Stein!” It certainly sounded plausible enough to me, and it easily passed muster with the rest of my Crack News Team. I thought no more about it until about six days later, when one of the quieter, nicer boys in my class called me on the telephone. I couldn’t imagine why he would call me, but I soon found out. “Um, hello? So, I’m making the Beer Candle you wrote about in the Christ King Kingly News, and I think I did something wrong, because it’s all kind of a mess and I can’t get the wax out of my mother’s electric mixer.” My stomach plummeted. It had simply never occurred to me that someone would actually take something that I had written seriously. I had not envisioned the possibility that anyone would actually try to make this candle. I felt awful. I couldn’t tell him at that point, his mother’s mixer encased in wax and God knows what mess in his kitchen, that I had made the entire thing up. I took the only open path I saw open to me: I faked it. I told him some gibberish about the process and got off the phone as quickly as I could. I felt terrible. I have never forgotten that young man, and I had learned a powerful lesson in the Responsibility of the Press.

 

I Was a Second Grade Rosary Thief

When I was in second grade at Christ King School, we were instructed one day by Sr. Shawn Marie to bring our rosaries to class the following day. Since we were preparing for both our First Confession and our First Communion, it may have had something to do with that. I don’t know if I even owned my own rosary at the time, although I am pretty sure I didn’t, because I would have brought my own rosary had I owned one.

For reasons that are murky to me,  I told no one I needed a rosary–that would have been the easy, sensible approach and so not my first instinct–instead going into my mother’s dresser drawer to find one of hers. My mother usually had several rosaries; one in her nightstand drawer for sure and then at least one more in her dresser.The rosary that I spied in her dresser that day was the sterling silver one that my grandmother Mimi had held in her hands at her own wake two years earlier.

When the undertaker had closed Mimi’s casket for the trip to the cemetery, he removed her jewelry and the rosary and gave them to my father. My mother no doubt put the rosary in her dresser that night for safekeeping. I knew the rosary was in there  because I had seen it on one of my regular treasure hunts in my parents’ bedroom. I was a major snoop, and poked around in places I had no business being. (For another story of how this character flaw landed me in deep and wholly self-caused trouble, see A Frozen Playboy, A Bowl of Ice Cream, and the Wages of Sin.)

My mother’s dresser drawer was always a reliable treasure trove, and I loved looking through it. She had a box of silver dollars in there, an unopened bottle of Shalimar perfume in a purple velvet case, the box that had once held her pearls (my dad had bought them for her when he was stationed in Tokyo in World War II), some extra stocking-to-girdle clips, random family pictures, and even what I thought was a First Class Relic. (For those who are not Catholic: a First Class Relic is a piece of a saint’s body or a piece of her/his clothing.) I used to wonder which saint the Relic belonged to; I assumed it was a cute female saint because the relic was a small-but-tasteful blue-and-white checkered piece of cloth encased in a plastic dome. Many times I had held the Relic in my hands and imagined this holy saint dying a tragic but fully tasteful death in her blue-and-white checked dress.

On that particular day, I didn’t stop to look at the Relic, the pictures, or anything else in the drawer.  I spied the rosary, scooped it up, put it in its black zippered rosary case, and brought it to school with me the next day. I figured I would have the best rosary in the class, no doubt attracting the envy of the other girls, who would see this classy silver rosary, realize what an intriguing and desirable girl I was to have such a rosary, and instantly start vying for my attention and friendship. I would wave the silver rosary around (discreetly, of course, like the future saint I almost certainly was), perhaps even letting some of the girls hold it for a minute or two.

To my chagrin, no one even noticed my silver rosary, much less asked to hold it. Apparently, I was the only Rosary Snob in the class, and Rosary Envy was not A Thing. Disappointed and chastened, I put the rosary back into its case when Sr. Shawn Marie told us to line up for our march back to our classroom.

When we got back to the classroom, I noticed that the black rosary case was not zippered. It was open. It was upside down in my hand. And the rosary was gone. In an instantaneous black panic, I rushed up to Sr. Shawn Marie and told her that I had lost my rosary on the way back from church and could I please go and look for it? Sister said yes, I could look in the hallway but should come right back whether I found it or not.

I ran the route from our second grade classroom to the Church and back several times. I went back into the Church and laid down on the pew to look underneath it. I examined every tile on the church floor. The rosary was gone. It had vanished. Weighted down with shame, panic, fear and guilt, I trudged back to the classroom and spent the rest of the day in a daze of stunned terror and dread. When the final bell rang at 3:00, I walked home, worrying that my mother had already noticed that the rosary was missing and would be waiting for me at the back door.

She was not waiting for me, and apparently had not noticed that the rosary was gone. For days, I searched the halls of Christ King School and the aisles of Christ King Church, praying to see a silver glimmer in a corner or a pew. Nothing. Every day, I waited for the ax to fall when my mother  noticed that Mimi’s rosary was missing. Nothing. I prayed more passionately to God than I had ever prayed for anything, ever. I begged Him to restore the rosary. I imagined my life with the rosary found and back in my mother’s dresser drawer, dreaming of how light and free and joyful I would be when it was found.

I never found the rosary. I never told my mother I took the rosary. My mother never asked me where the rosary was. Thirty one years later, when my father died, I thought that my mother would finally look for his own mother’s rosary, to place in his hands in the coffin. I was thirty eight years old, and still anguished about that lost rosary. My mother must have noticed the loss many years earlier and never thought to ask if I had taken it. It probably never occurred to her to think, “I wonder if Anne looks through my dresser drawers now and then and decided one day to take Mimi’s rosary.”

Many years later at a family party, I asked my mother which saint she had a First Class Relic of. Puzzled, she looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?” My siblings, who were there at the time, also had thought that the plastic dome held a relic, because they joined in on the questioning. Finally, I went upstairs, got the Relic out of her dresser drawer,  and brought it downstairs for verification. When my mother saw what I held in my hand, she said, “That is a sample of some wallpaper I was thinking to buy for our family room back in Park Forest.” The origin of the Myth of the First Class Relic–the identity of the spying Maloney sibling who first invented and then spread that tale–is a mystery that endures to this day.

My father was waked with his own battered rosary, the crucifix so beaten up that he had affixed Jesus more securely to His cross with chewing gum. The undertaker prettied up my father’s rosary and it went into the casket with him. By the time my mother died, four

Me at the Age of Reason

years later, I had stopped worrying that someone would ask about Mimi’s Missing Rosary, but I never quite got over wondering what happened to it and feeling badly for having lost it. A few weeks after The Case of the Missing Rosary, we made our First Confession at
Christ King School (another occasion I made a great deal harder that it had to be–see My Failure to Avoid My First Confession.) Oddly, it never once occurred to me on that penitential day that I should tell Father about my snooping nature, my invasion of my mother’s private dresser-drawer space, my theft of a rosay, and my failure to tell my mother what I had done. At seven years of age  I had reached the age of reason but clearly the age of self-knowledge was still ahead of me.