Читать книгу Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story - Karen Armstrong - Страница 9

“Children! I have something very wonderful to tell you!” Mother Katherine, my headmistress, stood on the raised dais in the school hall, presiding over the morning assembly. I was in the Senior School now and at twelve was still slightly in awe of the formality and the size of my new surroundings. We stood in alphabetical order in lines of classes. Mine, the First Form, by the wall. Mother’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm; her hands, draped in the long, black ceremonial sleeves, were clasped together with suppressed emotion.

I shifted from foot to foot uneasily. These ecstatic announcements were frequent and never seemed to me to occasion much rejoicing.

“You all know Miss Jackson,” she continued. “Some of you, the older girls, will know her very well indeed.” What can she have done? I thought to myself. Miss Jackson taught A-level physics to a handful of girls in the Sixth Form. She was a pale, colorless figure. Sometimes I glanced at her as she strode round the school with her white overall flapping round her short legs, her frizzy hair gripped back from a bony face. I glanced at her and mentally dismissed her. Perhaps she’s got married, I thought with a flicker of interest. Then I shrugged. Unlikely.

“Well, Miss Jackson has decided to give her life to God,” Mother Katherine’s deep voice rang out dramatically. “She has decided to become a nun.”

I gasped. I had always known in theory that nuns were ordinary people once, but in reality they had seemed a separate species. I looked at Mother Katherine with new eyes and for the first time noticed that she was a lovely looking woman. No, perhaps woman was the wrong word. I couldn’t imagine her in ordinary clothes, with hair and legs.

Not quite. But her face was lovely.

We filed out of the school hall, each one of us dropping a curtsey to Mother Katherine as we passed the dais.

“Fancy that!” I whispered to my friend Diana. It seemed a terrible fate.

“More fool her!” Diana replied. “I can’t think of anything worse, can you?”

I shook my head.

“And never getting married!” Diana sounded aghast. “Imagine—actually choosing not to get married and not to have children. I’m going to get married as soon as I leave this dump!” She looked contemptuously at the cream walls of the corridor, punctuated here and there with bulletin boards. “And I’m going to have masses of children—seven at least. Aren’t you?”

I nodded. I had always assumed that I’d get married. After all, everybody did. But suddenly getting married seemed rather less attractive. It was so predictable. We entered the classroom and began scrabbling in our desks for our French textbooks.

“Still,” Diana went on, “I don’t suppose Miss Jackson would ever have gotten married, do you? She was pretty ugly, really. And old.”

“No,” I agreed with Diana, “I don’t suppose anyone would have married her.”

“Well, then, it’s probably all for the best. Anything’s better than being an old maid. I’d die if I wasn’t married before I was twenty. It’d be so embarrassing!”

During the morning I forgot about Miss Jackson. During the lunch hour, however, I noticed a photograph on the bulletin board that hadn’t been there that morning. It was, I realized with a shock, Miss Jackson. I looked closely at it. She was wearing a long black dress, a little cape, and a short, floppy white veil. Her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and she looked out at the camera with an expression of—what was it?—yes, surprise. Even Diana was impressed.

“I wonder what it’s like,” she muttered. “Golly! Doesn’t she look ghastly!”

We both involuntarily looked down the corridor to the baize door that separated the school from the enclosure where the nuns ate, slept, and prayed. We were never allowed to go through that door.

“She’ll know now what they do all the time,” I said, staring at the photograph, fascinated.

I remained at the bulletin board, studying Miss Jackson’s expression. What had she seen to make her look so surprised? It was an intriguing thought. I looked at her face. She seemed so ordinary. But, really, I thought, she couldn’t have been ordinary at all.

“You seem very interested in that photograph, Karen.” I spun on my heel and found myself looking up at Mother Katherine. I was in awe of her. She swept round the school, remote in her exalted position. But when you had a chance to talk to her on her own, it was easy. She was smiling now, looking down at me questioningly.

“Yes, Mother,” I said feebly. It was that kind of obvious statement that grown-ups often made, expecting you to reply significantly. I could never think how to go on.

“What does it make you think?”

“Well, Mother, why she did it! I just can’t think why anyone would want to be a nun!”

“Why not?”

“Well, it must be terrible!” I said and then blushed. That wasn’t very polite of me. “I’m sorry,” I said hastily, “I don’t mean to be rude, but …”

“What seems to you to be the hardest thing about it?”

I thought. There were so many horrors. But then I thought of the happiest moments of my life—the holidays. The first day of the holidays filled me with a pleasure that almost hurt.

“Well, never being able to do what you want to do. I’d hate not to have some time to myself when I’m free to do whatever I want. You know, sleep late, read—and be able to go on reading all day if I want to!”

“You mean freedom?” Mother Katherine said. She smiled. “But no one is really free much of the time, Karen. Think of your mother, any mother of a family. She’s not really free to do what she wants either.”

I was silenced. It was absolutely true. I thought of my mother endlessly running from chore to chore—shopping, cleaning, cooking, mending, washing, ironing.

“But my mother has fun sometimes,” I said. “A nun can’t really enjoy herself, can she? It must be like Lent all the year round.”

Mother Katherine laughed. “Well,” she said, “a nun doesn’t enjoy herself in quite the same way as people in the world do. Of course not. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t happy.”

“Happy?” I wrinkled my nose.

“Have you ever seen an unhappy nun?”

Again I was silent. No. I thought of the nuns’ smiling faces, unlined and peaceful. I looked up at Mother Katherine. Her eyes were smiling at me and behind the smile there was a peace and a stability. When she was talking to me, she wasn’t like other grown-ups I knew. Their minds weren’t ever with me one hundred per cent. The anxious lines around their mouths, the flickering moments of worry in their eyes showed that their minds were teeming with a dozen preoccupations. But Mother Katherine’s mind was uncluttered.

“No, you all seem happy enough,” I said grudgingly.

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Well, Mother, I can’t really imagine how God can make you happy. Really happy, that is. I know He ought to, but it’s very difficult to believe.”

“Why?” Mother Katherine spoke quietly as though she were thinking over something precious and secret. Nuns often did that, I noticed. They smiled with amusement when you talked to them about God as though they knew something nice that you didn’t.

“Well, it’s hard sometimes to believe that God is a real person.”

“Of course He is,” she laughed.

“But what about other people!” I said, rather dismayed. “Don’t you ever get lonely? Or fed up with having a hard life? You know, not going to the theatre or watching television.”

She gave me a long look. “When you’re in love the things you do with the person you love are always exciting and wonderful—even when they’re difficult.”

“And are you in love with God?” I said, amazed. “Love” was a fairly abstract idea for me, but I knew what being “in love” was. It made the heroines in films and plays rush about, sing, do incredibly difficult dances, surmount all kinds of difficulties. “Are you in love?” I asked again.

Mother Katherine nodded. “Yes,” she said very quietly. “There’s the bell! You’d better hurry along to class.” She turned on her heel and started off down the corridor. She never really walked anywhere, I realized; she seemed to swoop and float—not so difficult from those film stars after all, perhaps. As she reached the foot of the stairs leading to her room she turned round.

“Come and talk to me about this again, won’t you, Karen?”

I was reminded sharply of Miss Jackson a few weeks later on my grandfather’s birthday. It was 20 October 1956, a cold autumn day, and the family, gathered together for a celebration, were sitting together round the fire, which as usual was banked up far too high and roared dangerously up the chimney.

“Good God, Madge,” said my father irritably, “that fire’s positively lethal!” Whenever we got together like this with my grandparents there was tension, I thought. Why? I followed my father’s eyes and looked at Granny, standing by the window pouring sherry into a glass. Her hand, I noticed, trembled slightly, and the drink splashed onto the crocheted white cloth. I felt protective of her. Tiny, skinny, her spectacles perched perilously on the end of her nose, she looked so frail. In a family of giants the two of us were the odd ones out, united by our small stature and the growing complicity of our minds.

My mother was sitting near me by the fire. She was smiling.

“What are you drinking?” she asked pleasantly, but with a heavy edge of significance. “Gin?”

“Gin!” Granny was horrified. “Gin! I hate gin, hate it,” she repeated emphatically. “No, I’m having a little sherry.” She held up her tiny glass, in which a thimbleful of amber liquid glowed in the angry firelight. “I never drink gin.”

I felt my parents’ eyes meeting over my head. Granny had taken her glasses off and her eyes flickered round the room. They looked frightened and alone.

“I’d better go and look at the dinner,” she said.

“Karen! Go and help Granny,” said my mother, prodding me urgently in the back.

I got up and followed her out into the kitchen, which was filled with a savory smell from the oven. Vegetables bubbled busily on the hobs of the old gas stove. It was a steamy, comfortable place. I perched myself on the formica-topped table and sat there, legs swinging, while she jabbed the potatoes with a fork.

“Nearly done,” said Granny. “It’ll be another quarter of an hour, I think. When I was at school,” and her voice was softened with memory, “I’d have been expelled for knowing what a potato looked like before it was cooked! A lady didn’t do this kind of thing then!”

We laughed comfortably, at ease together. This was familiar ground. Granny had been at a convent school in Liverpool run by the same order of nuns that taught at my own school. That had been an important factor in my parents’ choice of a school for me.

“You liked school, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she was smiling quietly to herself. Then suddenly she coughed loudly. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I’ve got a bit of a tickle in my throat.” She turned her back to me, and, with a nervous glance in the direction of the living room, she went to the tray beside the stove, which contained a large array of cooking bottles: vinegar, oil, brown sauce, and one squat green bottle. She filled a generous glassful of a clear liquid like water and, coughing markedly at me, knocked back the draught in one swift action.

“Hmm,” she cleared her throat. “That’s better. It’s a nuisance, this cough.”

I turned my eyes resolutely away from the green bottle and deliberately closed a shutter in my mind. This, I knew instinctively, was something that I mustn’t know about.

“Can I do anything to help, Mummy?” my mother called suddenly.

We both froze and looked guiltily at one another.

“No, thank you, dear!” Granny called back, “Karen’s doing a great job out here. We’ll be back presently. Help yourself to another drink!”

“All right!” My mother’s voice was deliberately casual.

Granny went on, dreamily. “I was terribly naughty at school! I remember once a priest came to give us a retreat. ‘In Heaven,’ he said, ‘you’ll be singing “Glory be to God!” forever and ever!’ and I whispered to the girl next to me, ‘How boring! I don’t think I want to go to Heaven.’”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “It sounds awful, doesn’t it? Glory be to God forever and ever.” But if you didn’t want to go to Heaven there was only one alternative. I shuddered. It was a dilemma.

“Unfortunately, the priest heard me whispering, and when he had finished his talk he said, very solemnly, ‘Who is the little girl who doesn’t want to go to Heaven?’”

“Oh no!” I breathed. “How dreadful! Did you own up?”

“Yes,” she smiled slightly and leaned against the wall, her eyes fixed dreamily ahead. “I had my Holy Innocents medal taken away from me as a penance.”

“Do you think you’ll go to Hell, then?” I masked the fearful import of the question with a giggle.

“Yes!” she laughed. “Oh, yes! I expect the devil’s got a nice warm spot for me down there! Do you think those potatoes are done yet?”

I prodded them. “Not quite,” I said, preoccupied. Hell terrified me. It seemed so hideously easy to go there. “But you have to commit a mortal sin to go to Hell, don’t you?” I asked. “A very serious sin indeed, knowing that you’re doing it.”

“Yes!” Granny laughed hollowly. “Yes, that seems to be the idea.”

I looked at her. She seemed so harmless. And I loved her with a great rush of tenderness.

“Well!” Granny said, looking wistfully at the green bottle. “I think we’d better be getting back to the others. You dish up those potatoes and leave them in the hot drawer, will you? Thanks. I’ll just put one or two things away in the larder.”

She disappeared into the tiny little room next door, carrying the bottle of Worcestershire sauce and—I saw out of the corner of my eye—the green bottle. Standing at the sink, waiting for her, I saw the darkening garden outside looking misty and sinister in the autumn twilight. The world seemed a puzzling place. “I think you’ll have to go to Heaven, you know, Granny,” I said. “I don’t think you’re bad enough for Hell.”

My mother’s eyes bored into Granny as we entered the room.

I went over and sat close to my mother, smiling up at her, feeling that, in some way I didn’t understand, I had been disloyal. Saturated with warmth, I gazed into the flames of the fire.

“Just time for another drink,” Granny said briskly. “We ought to leave the meat to stand for a few minutes, don’t you think? Is Karen old enough to have a sherry?”

“Oh, yes, I think so,” my mother’s voice was cheery, consciously filled with the birthday spirit. “Just a small one. Would you like a sherry, Karen?”

“No,” I answered promptly, without thinking. The refusal was automatic. For some reason that I would not analyze, it was impossible for me to accept. “No, thank you, Granny.”

I watched her walk across the room, replenishing my parents’ glasses. As she navigated the coffee table, she stumbled slightly, and my mother’s sharp intake of breath cut through me. But as soon as she caught me looking at her, my mother smiled and said, “What were you two gossiping about in the kitchen?”

“Oh, Granny was telling me about her school,” I answered. “It still sounds awfully like my school, you know. We do all the same things, have all the same customs.”

“Mmm,” my mother said vaguely. “You were happy at school weren’t you, Mummy? Like Karen.” For a moment her eyes were wary as she listened to what she had said, startled. “You like the same things.”

“Happiest days of your life, Madge?” asked my father genially.

Granny glanced at my grandfather, who was still quite oblivious to his birthday celebration, and her eyes wandered aimlessly round the room.

“Yes, I expect they were in a way.”

“School was?” I said, appalled.

“Yes,” Granny said musingly. “You know, you think you hate it while you’re there, but lately I’ve been looking back at those days over and over again. We were happy.” She sipped her sherry reflectively.

I looked at Granny in amazement. Surely not. Everybody knew that school was terrible; life began once you had left it behind you. Didn’t it?

“I suppose they were,” Granny repeated quietly. “You know,”she smiled inwardly, “when I was just a little older than Karen—oh, I must have been about sixteen or seventeen—I wanted to be a nun. My mother wouldn’t let me. You never know,” she added obscurely, “it might have made all the difference ... Yes, perhaps I should have been a nun.”

Seeds had been planted: Lindsey’s illness, Miss Jackson’s decision, and this conversation with my grandmother were helping me to grow accustomed to an idea: the idea that people like me could become nuns. These incidents raised a question that at the time I preferred not to examine too closely. It was to be some years before the seeds blossomed into a decision.

The year 1960 was an important one for me. I was fifteen and eager to break out of the sheltered world of childhood, but the adult world turned out rather differently from the way I’d expected.

One thing that turned out badly was my friendship with Suzie.

I remember how it all came to a head one hot September afternoon. Suzie and I were sitting in our garden. She was lying sprawled in a deck chair, her skin-tight jeans stretched over her thighs, her breasts peaking provocatively under her orange tee shirt. I glanced down at my own lumpy body. Suzie was formed. She was complete and ready for life. Her lips were coated with orange lipstick; her nails—why would mine never grown that long?—were gleaming orange talons. She had done her best with me. Under her tutelage I was wearing a similar pair of jeans and a grey shirt, and my lips were covered with a chalky pink lipstick. Like Suzie’s, my hair was back-combed into a tangled beehive. I should look all right, I reflected sadly. In fact, if I concentrated on my face, I didn’t look too bad. My teeth were much too big, of course, but from the neck upward, I would just about pass. My body had nothing to do with my head, however. I could never look finished, all of a piece.

“How can you bear the thought of going into the Sixth Form, Karen?”

“I don’t know,” I replied untruthfully, “it seems endless.” The trouble was, I thought, I wanted to do A-levels and go on to college. Suzie—and indeed all my friends—couldn’t wait to get into the real world. Suzie herself, having scraped through five O-levels, was leaving school and was about to embark on a secretarial course. The prospect of that just didn’t appeal to me. It was no good; I was just different from her. But I did so want to belong to her world.

“You really ought to get out more,” she said, “you know, drink a bit, smoke a bit, find a boyfriend. You’re really not a bluestocking, you know, Karen. You can be really good fun once you let yourself go a bit. And you would, once you got a boyfriend!”

“Fat chance!” I muttered gloomily. Fat, I thought, looking down at myself, was the word.

“By the way,” she asked casually, “is Tony in?”

“Who?” I asked blankly. “Oh, you mean Anthony! Yes, he’s here. He’s in the sitting room, I think, doing something or other. Why?”

“Just wondered,” Suzie replied lazily.

Anthony, my cousin, was staying with us. Two years older than I, he was about to enter the police force, having decided not to carry on doing A-levels at school. Another one.

“It’s no good,” I said in a burst of honesty. “I’ll never be successful with boys like you are! I just don’t look right and I can’t talk to them.”

“Goodness, you don’t want to talk to them, do you? There are much more interesting things to do with boys than just talking, for God’s sake!”

I laughed knowingly, hoping that it was convincing. In fact, the whole area of sex was a mystery to me. It seemed hedged round with dangers. It was a wonderful thing, I had been told again and again. But if you did it when you were not married or when you were deliberately preventing a baby from being born (by means of some mysterious devices), it was a mortal sin. And that meant that if you did not truly repent you went to Hell for all eternity. And what exactly was “it” anyway? In biology lessons the nun who taught us made us read the chapter on reproduction by ourselves. It seemed to be all about rabbits, and I didn’t think I had much in common with a rabbit. The technical details of sex were shrouded in a disturbing obscurity. And then once you got a boyfriend there was all that business about “going too far” or “making yourself cheap”.

“Suzie,” I asked diffidently, “aren’t you ever afraid that you’ll get pregnant when you go with boys?”

“Course not!” she laughed confidently, happily ignorant of the fact that in three years’ time she would “have to” get married. “There’s loads of things you can do before you go that far.” I blinked uncertainly. What on earth could she be talking about? And what about those dark masculine urges that I was constantly being warned could not possibly be controlled? But confessing my ignorance would be too humiliating.

“Yes, I know,” I lied, “but don’t they want to do the whole thing?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered complacently, stretching her body in the sun like a contented cat. “But I can always handle them. By the way,” she sat up suddenly, “can I go and phone my mother to tell her when I’ll be in?” She dusted a few blades of grass off herself.

“Sure,” I said, reaching for my book. It was The Mill on the Floss. I watched her go into the house and turned back with relief to the ordered world of literature. I’d nearly gotten to the end of the novel. Poor Maggie. I knew just how she’d felt as a child. Ugly, precocious, a misfit. Then she’d become a beauty. Her position was hopeless, but the ugly duckling blossomed into a swan. I read of her drifting down the river with Stephen Guest, conscious of impending disaster.

After a while I glanced at my watch. Good heavens, Suzie’d been gone for a quarter of an hour. Her telephone conversations with her mother were usually brief to the point of rudeness. What could be keeping her? I went in to see.

I walked through the kitchen into the front hall. There, through a crack of the door that had been carelessly left ajar, I saw them.

Suzie was sitting on the hearthrug, her head bent back, her eyes staring blindly at the window. My cousin Anthony leaned over her. One of his hands kneaded her back, the other hand squeezed and paddled in her neck. Even as I watched, their lips joined in what I recognized was a familiar embrace.

I watched the long kiss, mesmerized. Then, shamed, I stole into the kitchen. Sitting there at the table, I reviewed a world made suddenly impossible. Anthony and Suzie must have been laughing at me for suspecting nothing of their relationship. The feeling of exclusion I had experienced in the garden flooded back, more intense. Seeing them like that made all the difference. Hitherto the only kisses I had really seen were on the television screen in plays and films that glamourized them, presenting love as a cataclysmic,all-revealing passion. But this was the real world. I could not go along with it.

This, I told myself in a sudden cold certainty, was not passion. But it was the stuff of which most marriages were made. No one would ever want to do that to me, I knew. But no longer did I want them to. How could Suzie do it? Anthony, with his pimples and his moods—like all his friends.

No! The whole thing was certainly not for me.

With a shock I heard the front door opening. My mother was back from the hairdresser’s. Guiltily, I stole into the garden and picked up my book.

“I don’t mind! Really, Anthony! I don’t mind for myself. But with Suzie! … She’s such a little slut! … She’s having such a bad influence on Karen!” I heard snatches of my mother’s fury.

Suddenly the idea of being a bride of Christ seemed enormously attractive. I thought of Anthony. There seemed no comparison. Of course I wasn’t going to be a nun, I told myself. The idea was ridiculous. To be as fulfilled as Mother Katherine was a reward for having given up an awful lot. Books, theatre, freedom—until an hour ago I would have added sex. But that no longer seemed any sacrifice at all.

“Karen!” my mother called me. I turned round and squinted up at the house, narrowing my eyes against the sharp glare of the evening sun. My mother was standing at my bedroom window. Her face was tense, and momentarily I compared it to Mother Katherine’s, which was always so serene and untroubled. No, marriage was not all it was cracked up to be.

“Come up here a minute!” Her voice had that deliberately casual tone it always took on when she was upset and was trying to pretend that nothing was the matter.

“Just look at yourself,” she commanded, turning me round to the mirror, gripping my shoulders as though she were about to take me into custody. “Do you think you look nice?”

I stared at my reflection, but all I could see were my eyes. They looked lost. I dropped my gaze. My mother was angry about Suzie and Anthony. It was more than just her view of Suzie as a slut. She was angry with me, too, though she didn’t quite know why.

Sex was the matter, I thought suddenly. She wants to save me from sex.

“Well!” my mother demanded. “Do you?”

With a start I jerked my mind back to her question. It was an irrelevance. That was not what we were really talking about. I hadn’t been kissing Anthony in the sitting room, but, obscurely, my mother and I both felt that I had. I felt ashamed and guilty.

“No,” I said dully. What else was there to say?

“You look cheap! You look like a tart!” And with that she picked up my hairbrush and with savage tugs dragged it painfully through the beehive, smoothing it flat. Then she picked up my damp washcloth and scrubbed my face, her fingers jabbing into the tender flesh round my eyes. She breathed in shallow, agitated gasps. Neither of us said a word.

“There!” she said. “That’s better!”

I looked at the schoolgirl in the mirror.

“You look like yourself now,” my mother insisted.

I nodded slowly. My brief flirtation with beauty was over. She had expressed the simple truth.

So, giving up hope in the body, I began to develop my mind. That first year in the Sixth Form was in one way intoxicating. Pitting myself against more and more difficult ideas, I discovered I could fly. My body might well be clumsy and unformed for love, but my mind was graceful. It could have been a very happy year.

But things were changing at home. They were changing silently because, as a family, we never talked about the really momentous things. Yet again I wanted to shield my parents from a knowledge of something they were anxious to keep from me. And the easiest way to do that was not to let myself realize what was happening.

For one thing my parents had reversed roles. After years of housework my mother had started to go out to work. This was unusual in 1960. Nobody else’s mother worked; mothers were supposed to be chained to the kitchen, a constant welcoming presence in the home. I liked the change. I was proud of the distinction of my mother—her new alertness and interest in the world of the university. She came in anxious, harassed by having too many things to do, but alive in a new way with a challenging breadth of understanding. It was good for her. When we got in from school it was my father who was there with the tea ready, the inexpertly cut bread and butter. For he was at home all day.

What was it? I asked myself and then quickly turned away from the dangerous topic. I watched my father drifting aimlessly about the house, carefully doing the small tasks that my mother set him. His pride and gaiety had all gone. He seemed snuffed out. When our eyes met, he hastily looked away. Every morning he walked the dog in the park and sat sometimes for hours on a bench, gazing blankly at the lake.

But nothing was said. The misery of my father, and my mother’s worry about him, ran silently through every conversation. I thought of my grandmother, still drinking gin in the larder. What kind of a world was this when people shut themselves up with some unhappy secret, unable to communicate it to anybody? And how many other secrets surrounded me?

At school things were better, and more and more I found myself watching the nuns walking round the grounds, their hands hidden in their sleeves, their eyes bent on the ground as they glided under the shade of the huge cedar trees on the lawn. Sometimes, at midday, we saw them having recreation, sitting in a huge circle under the cedars, sewing and laughing together, their laughter harmonious and innocent. It seemed to me a vision of sisterly unity. They would have no secrets from one another, living together in such a close, loving community. And what conversations they must be having, I thought enviously, looking at that closed little circle. Excluding all trivia from their lives, filled with the joy of seeking God, they must have so much in common and so many wonderful discoveries of the mind and spirit to share. “Such happiness,” Mother Katherine had said.

One morning in late summer I went into the Sixth Form classroom and overheard a conversation I would never forget. Charlotte was standing in the center of a tight little knot of girls. I stood by the door, frozen with unhappiness, as I realized they were talking about me.

“She shouldn’t be at the school, you know.”

“Why not?”

“Because her father has gone bankrupt.”

“It happened at the beginning of the year, and she’s just deceitfully gone on pretending that everything’s normal! She’s a hypocrite!”

“That’s right,” another girl agreed. “This school is for people who can pay the fees. Not for people who can’t.”

I felt winded with shock. If my father was bankrupt, how on earth were my fees getting paid? And then what kind of attitude was theirs? Yes, it was a fee-paying school, and in a sense they were right. If my fees weren’t being paid then I shouldn’t be here. But stronger than all this was amazement. They seemed to have no hearts at all, no compassion.

I took a deep breath and made my presence known. I didn’t feel in the least tearful, thank goodness. This was something too fundamental for tears.

“Well,” I said quietly, “so what? What has it got to do with you?” They wheeled round to face me sharply.

“It has, you know.” Charlotte’s reply was almost saucy.

“Why?” I asked. What else had they got in store for me?

“Because our fathers are paying your fees!”

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s a Catenian, isn’t he?” I nodded. The Catenians were a Catholic society exclusively for men, the Catholic form of freemasonry. “Well, the Catenians—and therefore our fathers—are paying your fees. Didn’t you know?” My expression must have told them that I didn’t, despite my belated attempt at a nonchalant shrug. I felt deeply humiliated. To be living on other people’s charity was bad enough, but what would my father feel if he found out what was being said at school? He must feel bad enough anyway.

“No,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, “I didn’t know that. But that’s because my father didn’t want me to know. And I still think,” I added, my voice gaining conviction as I went on, “that it has nothing to do with you.”

I turned on my heel and walked out.

I was still shocked that they would reject me for such a reason. I found myself walking in the direction of the chapel. I wanted to be by myself, to think, and that was the only place in the teeming building that guaranteed privacy. The chapel was a modern one, all pale shiny wood and cream walls. There was a faint smell of incense, and here and there nuns knelt, black lumps in the sunlight, their heads buried in their hands.

I sat down, finding that I was trembling. I could never tell my parents about this, I knew. It would hurt them, and I’d feel so feeble running home and saying that the others were being horrid to me. It seemed so unfair. My father had had a tough enough struggle to get where he was. He and my mother seemed so brave in their lonely struggle with disaster. I remembered a cocktail party I had gone to with them a few weeks ago. It had been one of those Sunday morning affairs; the room was filled with cigarette smoke and loud, frenetic talking. Everybody had been to Mass that morning and priests filled the room. They were standing in groups, florid with gin and tobacco, worldly, disillusioning. My parents and I had squeezed into a relatively secular corner.

“The church here in full force, I see,” muttered my father sarcastically as we studied the guests.

“Who on earth is that?” I asked. My eye had been caught by a man wearing a green uniform with epaulettes, a thick leather belt, and a sword. He looked like a cross between Prince Charming and Buttons the clown.

“Ssh!” hissed my mother, giggling. “Don’t talk so loudly! It’s Sidney Foster.”

“Yes, but what’s he doing dressed up like that?”

“He’s a Knight of St. Gregory.” My mother was on the verge of laughter and my father snorted with amusement.

“Him,” he said bitterly, “he’s a shark in business. An absolute bloody shark! He’d sell his own grandmother.”

“Shut up!” my mother laughed helplessly, “he’s coming this way. Hello, Sidney!”

His dress sword brushed against me, laddering my stocking.

“I was just admiring your uniform,” I said innocently, ignoring the poke my mother gave me. “What is a Knight of St. Gregory?”

He took a slug of brandy and swirled it in his mouth. “It’s a special order,” he said complacently, “given by the Pope.”

“Gracious!” I said, winking at my father, who earnestly studied the olive in his martini. “What a marvelous person you must be. What’s it given for?”

“Well,” he said modestly, “it’s given in recognition of charitable works.” There was a splutter from my father, who had transferred his attention to a potted plant. His shoulders were heaving strangely. He coughed.

“Haven’t seen you for some time, have we?” my father said, and I noted an ironic edge to his voice. “You were always popping in and out at one time. Not so long ago, either.” Sidney Foster looked momentarily confused and cleared his throat. “Still, I expect you’ve been too busy getting on with your charitable works,” said my father genially. “Well,” he finished, clapping Foster jovially on the shoulder as he determinedly set off in another direction, “be seeing you, no doubt.”

As we forced our way through the chattering crowds, I looked back at the Knight who, red in the face, was talking animatedly to a monsignor about the funds for a local church roof.

“I was damn useful to Sidney in business once,” my father said caustically. “Interesting that we never see him now, isn’t it?”

“It’s Birmingham,” my mother replied shortly. “All they ever think about is money.”

And now, sitting in the peaceful chapel, I saw what she had meant. What had that very Catholic party with its materialistic values—values that even my “friends” seemed to share—to do with Christ? My readings of the Gospels over the years had built Christ up for me as a dynamic figure. He stalked across my mind, vivid and challenging, driving the money lenders out of the Temple, inveighing angrily against the hypocrisy of His day, overturning all the conventions with the unpredictable nature of His love. He had mixed with prostitutes and sinners, not hypocritical Knights of St. Gregory, and had frightened His hearers with His shattering commands. Leave all you have and come, follow Me.

Follow Me. Suddenly the familiar invitation leaped out at me with a new force. Leave all that you have. Really, what was there in the world that was worthwhile? You couldn’t count on anything the world had to offer. Friendship could be destroyed in a moment because people valued what you had, not what you were, whereas God’s love was perfect. Human love just couldn’t measure up to it. I thought of Suzie and Anthony. I wanted more than that. Even the most perfect love would ultimately be destroyed by death. In fact, when you came to think about it, death was the only thing in life that you could be absolutely certain of. It was inescapable and made everything but God seem empty and hollow.

Follow Me. How much more satisfying to leave all the emptiness of the world and follow Christ! A nun in the bench in front of me got up, genuflected gracefully in the aisle, and quietly left the church. Her face was serene. It was as though she had tapped some hidden store of strength before plunging into the melee of afternoon school. I looked up at the crucifix. That was what sustained her. The cross turned all human values upside down; they just weren’t worth worrying about. And the cross showed the greatness of God’s love. As I looked at the tabernacle, which contained the Real Presence of Christ, I felt a pull toward Him that was almost physical in its intensity. I’d thought a few minutes ago that death was the only certainty. Now I saw clearly that the only way to achieve life was by leaving the world behind and looking for God Who was there for the seeking. Absolute power, goodness, and love.

As I knelt there I knew that something very important had happened. I wanted to find God so that He would fill my life, and that meant giving my life back to Him. I wanted Him with a desire that was frightening in its urgency. And I knew that looking for God had to be a full-time job; no half-measures would do. The cross showed that clearly. But how satisfying such a search would be. Far more satisfying than pursuing the chimeras of the world, which could only lead to disappointment and death.

Silently I made the sign of the cross and left the chapel. I had made up my mind.

Once my decision was made, the world with all its confusions seemed to fall into place. Second place. The strange pull I had experienced in the chapel stayed with me and I knew that I must act upon it soon. That was why I found myself some weeks afterward standing outside Mother Katherine’s room one afternoon. I have to do something about this, I was telling myself. Until then it won’t be real. “Come in!” I heard Mother Katherine call. I glanced down at myself, straightened my school skirt, and, seizing the brass doorknob, burst into my headmistress’ office.

“I want to be a nun!”

The words were out now and, startled, I listened to them in the ensuing silence, turning them over and examining them. Yes, they fit. But how strange to hear them spoken aloud for the first time, after hearing them lumbering round in my mind as a possibility that was almost too momentous to believe in.

“Sit down, Karen.”

I looked at Mother Katherine. For a moment I had almost forgotten about her, I had been so intent on speaking the words, spilling them outside myself.

“Come on!” she urged kindly. My hair fell over my eyes in two sweeping curtains, but shaking these aside I looked at her intently, shifting from foot to foot, my plump adolescent body self-conscious and uneasy at being the object of close scrutiny. “Come on!” Mother Katherine repeated. “Don’t stand on one leg like a restless stork. Sit down!” and she gestured dramatically at the small wicker armchair opposite her desk.

Everything Mother Katherine did was dramatic. Rumor had it that she had been an actress before she became a nun. She was certainly beautiful enough. Her smooth olive skin was slightly touched now by middle age, but the lines spoke of character and strength. Her regular, generous features were enhanced by the severe wimple, and her blue eyes looked out challengingly on the world—frightening, passionate eyes.

I sank into the chair and looked at her apprehensively. What was she going to say? How was she going to react? It suddenly seemed an impertinent announcement to have made so impetuously. “What, you!” she would say. “You! What makes you think you have it in you?” No, she wouldn’t say that. She’d be kind and tactful. But wouldn’t that be even more humiliating?

“Say it again,” she said quietly, her face for a moment alight with attention before she continued sorting through the untidy pile of papers on her desk. “I’m listening to you, but it will probably help you to talk if I don’t look at you, won’t it?”

“I want to be a nun.” Less of an eruption this time. More calmly spoken.

“I’m not in the least surprised,” she said, still leafing through the pile of bills. “It’s a wonderful life.”

We sat there silently, at peace.

“Why?” she asked suddenly, her eyes watchful.

“Well,” I sought round helplessly for a second as the reasons swarmed round me. Which one should I pick out as the most important? “Well, really, Mother, I want to find God.”

“Yes?” she pushed her papers to one side and leaned her chin on her hands. “Go on.”

“I want to know more about Him,” I plunged on. “The more I think about Him the more other things and other people fade into insignificance. He seems so passionate and generous with no time for compromise and sloppiness. And I want to get to know Him better.”

“Then why become a nun?” Mother Katherine probed. “You don’t have to enter the religious life to get to know Him better. Couldn’t you do that just as well in the world?”

“No,” I said quickly. I was really in my stride now. “Not so well. Not for me anyway. I mean, He said that if you wanted to follow Him you had to be prepared to give up everything. After all, He gave up everything for us.”

“Are you prepared to give up everything?” Mother interposed swiftly and, seeing me about to rush on, said, “No, wait. What about your family? Are you prepared to leave them?”

I thought for a moment. Yes, it was hard. I’d often felt that leaving one’s family was one of the hardest things about the religious life. But there was no option.

“It’s awful to think about it,” I said slowly, “leaving home for good. Nuns never go back home again, do they—even for a visit?”

“Some orders don’t,” Mother nodded. “We don’t.”

“After all, nobody knows you as well as your family does. And no one ever will—not in the same way. I feel bound to my family—closely tied up with them in all sorts of ways. It’s almost a physical bond.”

“Yes,” she said quietly, her eyes watching me carefully. “St. Teresa said that when she entered her convent and left her family she felt as though she were being pulled apart, limb from limb.”

I remembered.

“Would you be prepared for that kind of suffering?”

“There really isn’t any choice, is there, and in a way it’ll be even worse for them.”

We looked at one another. “Yes,” Mother Katherine said, “I know. My mother lost three of her children to the religious life.”

I nodded soberly. “You’ve got two brothers who are priests, haven’t you?” We’d seen them at the school when they came to visit her. “It must have been so hard for your parents. At least I’ll have chosen this, but my parents won’t have. It’ll just be pushed on them.”

“Yes,” she smiled at me, her eyes still boring into mine, watching my every reaction. “Your parents will share your sacrifice, but they’ll also share your joy eventually. I know my mother says that she’d never have it any different. But there are other things, too. What about marriage, children? Are you prepared to give up all that natural fulfillment?”

This was easier.

“I used to think that I wanted to be married,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully. “But lately I’ve not been so sure. For me it isn’t the answer to everything. You know, ‘The Prince married the Princess and they lived happily ever after.’”

“Go on, think it out carefully. You can’t go rushing into this without thinking over all the pros and cons. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Well,” I said, “can any one person fill all your needs? Every single one of them? A husband’s not like God Who is perfect, Who isn’t limited, and Who knows you through and through. You said that marriage is our natural fulfillment …”

“Yes,” Mother Katherine said, “for most women it is. Do you think it is for you?”

“It’s hard to tell,” I shrugged slightly. “How could one be sure? But even if I didn’t want to be a nun I’m not certain, really, that I’d want to get married. Husbands, babies—all that. I don’t think I’d be completely fulfilled being a wife and mother.”

“But even so, that doesn’t mean that you have to be a nun,” she insisted.

“No,” I said, “but I was going to say that even if—and it’s a big if—marriage does fulfill most women naturally, there’s a supernatural part to all of us. Nuns are brides of Christ, aren’t they?”

She nodded and glanced down at the ring, shaped like a crucifix, on the third finger of her right hand. Her wedding ring. For a while she said nothing, twisting her ring round and round her finger, and for a moment I thought I saw a flicker of pain on her face. Then she looked up and smiled.

“You’ve thought it all out very carefully, haven’t you, dear?” she said quietly. “Good.” There was a pause. Then, “Is there anything else in the world that you think you might miss? You know, parties, high life, all that.” She gestured extravagantly with a wide sweep of her hand as if conjuring up a vista of glittering social occasions. We laughed easily together.

“Not really. When I go to parties often everything seems so empty, so pointless. People caring about their appearance, money,and so on. I mean, once you’ve seen that God exists, everything else—all these other things—seem much less important.”

“Yes, I know. It is a waste of time—and energy.”

“People get so worked up about all that!”

“Karen.” There was a warning in her voice. “It’s hard, you know. Christ’s way is the way of the cross.”

“Of course it’s hard,” I returned energetically. “It’s a challenge!”

She laughed. “You’re a great one for a challenge, aren’t you?” she said. “The harder something is, the better you like it. You’ve been like that ever since I’ve known you. Ever since the first year!”

I thought for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I have.”

“But becoming a nun is like signing a blank check,” Mother Katherine said. Her voice was a mixture of affection and concern as she looked keenly at me. “Tell me,” she went on. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

I thought for a long time. I could, I found, pinpoint certain events that had all pointed to my decision, a series of steps that, when I looked at them now, had started a long time back.

“I don’t know.” I pushed my hair out of my eyes and squinted across at her in the brilliant afternoon sun.

“Is the sun in your eyes?” she asked. I nodded, and she drew the blue curtains slightly, filling the room with dim, cool shade. I watched her quick, vital movements. For a long time I had admired her. Everything she did she flung herself into wholeheartedly. Everywhere she looked she found beauty; everything she touched she found significant. She’d given up the world for God and He had given it all back to her a hundredfold.

“I haven’t had a vision or anything like that. But gradually things have pointed that way. Step by step. It seems as though God’s been there always, giving me the odd nudge in this direction.”

“Yes, I think you have a true vocation. Thank God.” Mother Katherine spoke gently with a certain awe. From the playing fields the whistle sounded. Everything so ordinary. Just another afternoon at school. But for me the start of a new life.

“Have you got a lesson now?” She looked at the clock. Twenty-five to three.

“Yes, history,” I said and smiled.

“You like history, don’t you? Do you like it better than English now?”

“I don’t think so.” I paused for a moment. “I can’t stand the ins and outs of the wool trade!” We laughed. “And literature—books, reading—are very important to me, always have been.”

Mother Katherine looked hard at me for a moment. I wondered at the concern—almost fear—that passed over her face. Then casually she asked, “Which order do you want to join?”

“Yours.” The reply came instantly.

“Why?”

“Well, it seems meant, somehow. I’ve been at school here for eleven years, ever since I was five. I’ve gotten to know you all. I’ve gotten to know the Order well. It’s a teaching order; I like the idea of teaching. It all fits in. It seems natural.”

“And when do you want to enter? I mean, you’ll have to finish the Sixth Form; you’re not old enough yet. You’re a year young for your class anyway. Aren’t you still only sixteen?”

“Yes, seventeen in November,” I answered. “Another year at school. A-levels this time next year. And then I’d like to enter straight after that.”

“You don’t want to go to college first?”

“No,” I shook my head emphatically. “What’s the point? Now that I’ve made up my mind, why waste three years mucking about?”

“Yes, I think you’re right. After all, if you persevere in your vocation the Order will probably—though only probably; you can’t bank on it—send you to college after your religious training. To prepare you for teaching.” She thought hard. “Yes, I think you have a vocation. I think it’s for next year. September 1962. I think you should go to the Provincial House in Tripton then. You’ll be a postulant for nine months, a novice for two years. Then, if you stay, please God, you’ll make your vows. Up to then you can leave at any time, or we can send you home if you’re not suitable!” She smiled confidently. “But I don’t think we’ll do that. Then once you’ve made your vows, it’ll be for life.”

The bell rang and I got up to go.

“God bless you, dear.” Her voice was affectionate, almost tender. I walked to the door.

“Karen,” she said suddenly. I turned to look at her. Her face was solemn now and her eyes steadily commanded full attention. “Karen,” her voice was quiet. “Remember that blank check, won’t you?”

For a long, long moment there was silence. Mother Katherine was looking hard at me, trying to find the words—for what? I waited, looking at the apprehension in her face, wondering what was in her mind. Finally she spoke.

“It’s a very austere order, you know.”

“I want to be a nun.” Once more the words were out. But this time they fell into no welcoming acceptance. My parents froze with horror.

It was the summer holidays. We were sitting in the living room waiting for supper. Outside the hot sun blazed through the thin silvery curtains that softly muted its glare. My parents each had a drink.

“Have a sherry, Karen!” my father said. I refused emphatically. I could never be persuaded to drink. My ideas about Granny were more clearly formulated now. I was too like her ever to dare to take one fatal step down the liquid path to alcoholism. She had ruined her life by not becoming a nun, I thought. That too was a factor in my decision.

I had not intended to broach the subject that evening. We had been discussing my future. My mother asked me whether I was still thinking of staying on at school an extra term after taking my A-levels.

I knew only too well how much my parents longed for me to go to Oxford. Nobody in my family had ever gone there before and it seemed a paradise to them, a fairytale world of intellectual perfection.

“No,” I said slowly. It was no good allowing them to cling to this hope. I felt their disappointment sharply fill the room. “No, I don’t think I want to do that now.”

“But what do you want to do?” my father asked unhappily.

“I want to be a nun.”

In the silence that followed, I sat, trembling slightly, feeling sick and excited. I had dreaded telling my parents, but now, for good or ill, the die was cast.

“But why?” asked my mother. The question came out in a bewildered wail.

“I want to give my life to God,” I answered shakily. These answers had seemed quite in place in Mother Katherine’s study, but here they seemed thin and unreal.

“But you can do that quite as well in the world!” snapped my mother briskly. She had obviously decided on the no-nonsense approach.

“No, you can’t,” I said, “not really. I mean, honestly, how much time do we all have for God at the moment? Oh, I know we’re good Catholics and all that. We go to Mass every Sunday, we don’t eat meat on Friday, we go to Confession twice a month. But that’s not enough for me. We fit God into our lives but they’re crowded with other things.”

“But there’s nothing to stop you from going to Mass every morning if you want to,” my mother said. “You often do, anyway.” My father just sat there, turning his glass round and round.

“But even that’s not really enough,” I said. “Seeking God has got to be a full-time commitment. A profession, if you like. He’s too important for half-measures.”

“But why not think about it again after you have been to Oxford?” asked my father miserably. “You’ll be a bit older then, you’ll have had a chance to look around a bit and see …” he trailed off.

“See whether it is convenient for me to enter a convent,” I finished for him. “Put the world first and give God second option.” I was determined to counter this approach. It seemed so reasonable but was, I felt, quite wrong.

“If you’ve got a true vocation it will last a few years,” said my mother rather crossly. I could tell she was feeling that she was losing control of me. I had never really argued with her before. She was so firm and definite in her views and needed so much to impose them on me so that I should be exactly what she wanted. If I argued with her, such an uncomfortable atmosphere ensued that it just wasn’t worth it. She was astonished and hurt, I could tell, by my obstinacy.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “You can throw a vocation away, you know, just like everything else. I might get to like the world too much to want to put God first.” I could see that happening. Once I was at Oxford the world would beckon with all its seductive wiles. I could not imagine what these might be. The world seemed futile and trivial now, but human nature was weak. I could easily persuade myself that the sacrifice I had decided on was not for me. “After all,” I added cunningly, “look what happened to Granny.”

It was a direct hit. My mother gave a start and looked moodily at the fireplace. My father shifted in his chair, which squeaked uncomfortably.

“But you can’t mean to go now,’ my mother said despairingly. “You’re much too young. You’re only sixteen.”

“No, but I can go next year when I’m seventeen,” I replied firmly.

“It’s ridiculous,” said my mother hotly, “quite ridiculous. A child of seventeen—oh, I know you don’t think you’re still a child, but you are. Anyway, it’s quite out of the question. They’d never accept you as young as that.”

“Mother Katherine said they would,” I replied, watching them carefully. It was another hit. They both stiffened. They respected Mother Katherine. I knew that. They were also just a tiny bit in awe of her. Whenever my mother protested against school policy she had been gently and with considerable charm put firmly in her place. Mother Katherine was the only person I knew who could do that to her.

“You’ve already talked to her, then, have you?” asked my mother. I could tell that she was hurt. “How long have you been thinking about this, then?”

“Oh! quite a time now,” I replied vaguely. It was true. The decision had been quietly growing for years, now that I looked back over my life.

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” asked my father. “Did you think that we’d be so much against it?” He sounded aggrieved.

“Well, you are against it, aren’t you?” I countered.

Impasse. My mother waved her empty glass at my father, who, glad of something to do, leaped up and busied himself with the ice; he poured out large measures of gin, I noticed. I was sorry for them. They seemed out of their depth.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” my mother said impatiently. “What about all the things you’re going to miss—the theatre, books? How the hell do you think you’re going to adapt to community life? You haven’t even been to boarding school. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Life in the forces was hell. Endlessly cooped up with other people—all their annoying little habits get on your nerves till you could scream.” Her voice had risen now as the objections came tumbling out.

“Look,” I said quietly, amazed at my calm. “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. Of course it isn’t. Mother Katherine has told me how hard it will be sometimes. But if it’s God’s will for me to become a nun, then my whole life will be ruined if I don’t. God has a special plan for each one of us. You don’t want me to mess up my whole life, do you?”

There was another pause. My mother nervously lit a cigarette. My father kept silent. Since the bankruptcy he had become more and more withdrawn. He had lost confidence in his ability to run his family life. I knew how much I was hurting them both, but there was no going back now.

“After all,” I said again into the dead silence, “you believe in God, don’t you? You believe that the religious life is the highest human vocation. Well then, how can you possibly refuse to allow me to enter?”

I could almost hear my parents’ thoughts crackling through the room. I could feel them struggling with the dilemma they were in.

“Of course we believe that,” my mother stubbed out her cigarette. Her voice was quieter now. “But that doesn’t mean that we can believe you are ready to take such a big step. I still think,” her voice rang out confidently now—once she took her mind off the disturbing thought of God and His will, I noticed wryly, she became much more sure of herself, but God was the whole point; He couldn’t just be ignored—"I still think,” she repeated, “that you are much too young. You don’t know anything about the world that you are going to give up. Don’t you think so, John?”

“Absolutely, dear, absolutely,” muttered my father gloomily. He was looking at me with astonishment. “Do you really want to give us up?” he asked, his voice trembling slightly. “Don’t you see how much we’ll miss you?”

I sat there, fighting a lump in my throat. I could barely trust myself to speak. Don’t let them turn on the emotion, I prayed silently. I can’t cope with that.

“Of course I’ll miss you,” I said huskily.

Once again we sat in silence. The cars on the main road outside swept by with a carefree swishing sound. I wanted this to be over. But I knew too that while I was at home it would never be over. The convent was there now, splitting the bond between us. Things would never be the same again.

“The meat must be nearly ready,” said my mother weakly. “John, will you carve? And call Lindsey …” she gestured helplessly toward the kitchen.

“Look,” I said, “it’s pointless going on with this. I’ll never be able to convince you. To you I’m just a little girl. I always will be, as far as you’re concerned, even when I’m"—I paused, searching frantically for an age of suitable antiquity—"thirty! Why don’t you go and see Mother Katherine? She told me that she’d be very willing to talk to you about it. After all, she’s the professional. You know about life and the world. But she knows about life and the world and the convent. She’s known me ever since I was five—almost as long as you have. Why don’t you go and see her?”

“And if she doesn’t make us change our minds, then will you promise to go to college before you think about becoming a nun?” asked my mother quickly. She was already setting her shoulders squarely, ready to do battle.

I had every confidence in Mother Katherine. “Yes, I promise,” I said.

From odd things my parents said after their momentous interview with Mother Katherine, I could imagine exactly what had happened. My parents had been taken into the convent parlor, a room I knew well. There were a sofa, two or three easy chairs, and rugs placed chastely over the polished floor boards. Fra Angelico prints hung tastefully on the walls, and a restrained flower arrangement adorned a little bureau by the French window. It had been early in the evening, and outside they could still have seen the cedar trees and the graveled terrace. They would have been given coffee and biscuits.

The pleasant surroundings were a consolation. “One good thing about that Order,” my mother always said, “is that they have decent taste. No bleeding hearts or anemic madonnas.”

“Too bloody aristocratic,” my father would quip. “What was it that priest called them? A bunch of society ladies!”

They sat in the parlor, filled with determination not to give in.I was too young; later, if I still wanted to enter, there’d be plenty of time. But they were nervous, too; so much depended on their standing firm.

Then Mother Katherine came in. I could see it all—the lilting walk, the beaming smile of welcome. She shook their hands. Mother Katherine’s handshake was a family joke. You’d grasp her hand and it would simply lie in yours like a wet fish, with no answering pressure. And she’d lean away from you archly. That handshake summed up what my parents had often noticed about the nuns.

“They always hold you at arm’s length,” my mother would say. “They seem to be saying ‘Keep off; you can come this far, but no farther.’ Oh, I like them very much as an order. At least they’re all individuals. Not like the nuns I was at school with—you really couldn’t tell one from another; they even looked alike. But for all that, you never really get to know them.” On that evening the handshake must have stopped being a joke. How could you argue with someone who never really accepted your presence?

Mother Katherine fussed over them, urged more coffee on them while they eyed her warily, waiting for the battle to begin.

“She’s too young,” my mother said firmly, stirring sugar into her cup. “Far too young. I mean, I know that a religious vocation is a wonderful thing. We’re not questioning that, are we, John?”

“No, indeed,” my father agreed politely, but I knew that for him it seemed a terrible life, a rejection of all that made life sweet—love, sex, beauty, travel, fun, freedom—even though the faith told him what he really ought to think about it.

“But Karen’s just not mature enough to make such a huge decision,” my mother continued. “She’s never known anything else. How can she make a proper choice? And she’s very emotional, you know, very intense.”

Mother Katherine smiled calmly. “Of course emotion has to be kept in control. But if Karen weren’t as sensitive as she is, all her gifts for poetry and art wouldn’t exist. She’d be a different person. And a poorer one. And I think she is far more mature than you realize. Of course, you will always see her as a little girl,” she laughed kindly. “How can you help that? It’s very, very difficult for parents to see their own children objectively.”

As she said that, my parents began to feel quite helpless. Mother Katherine always managed to make them feel like children themselves. Those pale blue eyes of hers looked straight through you and seemed to spot all your weak points, things that other people didn’t notice. Now she claimed to understand their own daughter better than they did. And how could they argue? Of course they were biased; they were bound to be.

“Now look,” Mother Katherine took a fresh tack, “do you agree that the fundamental question here is not whether you or I want Karen to become a nun next year, but whether God wants it? We’ve all got to empty ourselves of our own limited, human responses. It’s what God wants that matters.”

And with the mention of God the whole thing became much more frightening. After all, if you believed in God, then of course a religious vocation was a wonderful thing. It must have made them wonder, in a sudden guilty moment, whether they were selfishly opposing God’s will. Who could tell? Once God came into it the solid ground of common sense started crumbling away under you.

“But how can we tell what God’s will is?”

And then Mother Katherine gave them the acid test of a vocation as defined by the church, a definition I was to hear many times.

“There is only one way of being absolutely sure whether a girl has a true vocation. She has to be accepted by the religious order she wants to join; that is the only criterion that the church accepts as proof. Feelings, prayers, thoughts, ideals—none of these counts for anything beside that. If the Provincial Superior at Tripton accepts Karen, then her decision has the whole force of the church behind it. And the church, we know, is empowered by Christ.”

“But let’s face it, Mother,” my father said ironically, “you don’t turn people away. You must need new recruits.”

“Indeed, Mr. Armstrong, we do turn people away,” was the rather tart rejoinder. “Look at it this way. Somebody without a true vocation would only be a disruptive influence and eventually undermine the Order. We have to be very, very careful whom we admit.”

“But what if—I know you won’t admit this—but if," my mother pleaded, “a mistake is made—surely that’s possible. Then at seventeen Karen’s whole life will be ruined.”

“Not at all,” Mother Katherine retorted. “Of course we do admit people into the Order who find later that they haven’t got a vocation. But you know, Mrs. Armstrong, I’d hesitate to call that a mistake. If they were accepted by the Order, then God, in His infinite wisdom, called them there for His own special purposes. And this may happen to Karen. She may find after a while that it isn’t God’s will and she will be free to go, or we shall be free to send her home. Yes, Mr. Armstrong, we do send people home,” she laughed, “at any time during the first three years.”

Sadly my parents, faced with these cosmic immensities and Divine purposes, realized that their own feelings didn’t count for much. Helplessly they felt themselves carried along by the force of Mother Katherine’s certainty.

“Believe me, Mrs. Armstrong,” Mother Katherine was saying, “if Karen has no vocation she couldn’t stay. It’s a very careful training, you know. She will be trained as a postulant and novice by people who really know how to look into a girl’s heart. There is no way she could bear to stay if it weren’t God’s will. All the other reasons for entering get refined in the noviceship. The only reason for staying is that God wants it.”

“And she can leave at any time during the first three years?” my father asked.

“At any time before first vows.”

“I suppose,” said my mother, voicing for the first time the reason she would use again and again to comfort herself, “that if we stop her now and insist that she go to college, she’ll spend the whole time pining for the convent and never really enter into anything properly.”

“Yes,” said Mother Katherine. “She’d just be marking time.”

“Whereas if she goes next year and then leaves, she’ll have gotten it out of her system sooner,” capped my father.

“Exactly, Mr. Armstrong, but don’t bank on that. I think she has a true vocation—thank God—and I don’t think she will leave. I must tell you that. And believe me, if Karen doesn’t do the will of God, she can never be happy. God makes each of us for a special purpose. If we choose to thwart that purpose, our lives are useless.”

My parents must have thought then of my grandmother. Was that where it had all gone wrong for her? Perhaps she was right. Perhaps she should have been a nun.

“Mr. Armstrong, Mrs. Armstrong, will you give her to God?”

I had been waiting nervously on the stairs for them when I heard the key turn in the lock. It was a moment that was to decide my whole life. As soon as I saw their faces, I knew.

“Well?”

They looked so tired.

“You can go, if you really want to.”

“Oh! Thank you!” How inadequate to say it, to embrace them. And how inadequate as the expression of the joy that suddenly filled me. There was nothing to stop me now. The road stretched clearly ahead to God.