Too Close to the Falls (30 page)

My mother crawled back into her Republican closet faster than the pike eggs could dry up from lack of swampland and the Tuscaroras turned to bingo. Father Flanagan drove to the golf
course in a shiny new Cadillac with Robert Moses and the nuns suggested it was someone else's turn to learn about journalism. It was time to hand over the mantle of
The Franciscan
; however, no one wanted the job so my purple press was laid to rest.

I began to see that the nuns and priests could talk about being our brother's keeper and the good Samaritan; however, once someone like Moses divided the waters, the real instincts of human beings lay at the bottom of the exposed riverbed where most of us were bottom feeders at heart. The big fish ate the little and that was how it worked. To me that was a revelation. I had spent years of my life believing everything that everyone
said
, even the advertisers on television! I had spent untold hours berating myself for being unkind and not always thinking about others first. I wanted to be the type who could breeze into the role of the sister in
The Nun's Story
, never be tempted by worldly goods, care only for the lepers of the world. I thought that a good Catholic was supposed to hear how to be altruistic from God — have the calling — and then act on it. I blamed myself for God's silence. If only I wasn't packed with selfish thoughts and a soul besmirched with the dirt of greed, God could have found His way in.

It never occurred to me that advertisers only wanted to sell products, and nuns and priests and parents only gave the party line but grew up with the same prejudices and instincts that everyone else had. I had swallowed it all. I had been one of those baleen whales who cruise through the ocean depths with their mouths open, ingesting everything that came along. My stomach felt full of junk. I could no longer take it all in. You didn't have to read Marx to find out about power or Darwin to get how the fittest survived. You could live in Lewiston and figure it all out.

I was cast in the opposition where I emotionally remained, regurgitating my first ten years. The problem with a small town is that when you don't buy into the powers that be, there are very few other choices. It's like a play where there is only a “virtuous” lead, a villain, and bit players. Better to be the villain because you're not duped into believing you're in more than a play, and at least your name goes on the program.

Mother Agnese still lives within me. She's been my most admirable role model and my most formidable foe. We saw each other through several stages. She was my school principal and my teacher from first grade on and off until puberty. We both gained power in our own ways. I met her as Sister Agnese, then she
became Mother Agnese, then Mother Superior. As she crept up the ecclesiastical ladder, I passed from being a little girl to a teenager. I started as the good Catholic girl who wanted to be Mother Agnese for Halloween, trying desperately to emulate her holiness. (Fortunately my mother convinced me that Halloween was only
called
the eve of “All Saints' Day” at school by Mother Agnese. For the rest of Lewiston, it meant picking out a costume at Woolworth's, and that it was more normal to dress as Tinker Bell than as a Franciscan nun.) Next there was Cathy, the troubled child who stabbed her classmate, and finally there was Cathy, the angry teenager who went head-to-head with Mother Agnese, fighting for her emotional life.

She always had the advantage, yet I was never given a handicap. She had God on her side and I was still trying to slide in on the right side of eternity, where she held the tickets to most of the seats. She, unlike Father Flanagan with his Irish lilt and weakness for “a wee drop,” was an ascetic. She never took off the psychological hair shirt in all the years she taught me nor in the many years she was my principal. Although I didn't always agree with her, she never spoke with what Cochise, another one of my heroes, called a “forked tongue.”

Like most formidable opponents, she ultimately became one of my greatest influences. I learned that you can't punish the martyr, and you can't take from the ascetic. If you try, you're involved in a tug-of-war in which they let go of the rope. Her voice is one of the few I still hear in my head whenever I face a moral dilemma. I still see her starched wimple framing her brow furrowed in judgement. Yet her message — stand up and be counted — wasn't really a bad one. I always felt that we had a special bond. At some
level I recognized that we had similar personalities, we just played for different teams.

It's no wonder we were at odds so early. My initiation into school was truly inauspicious. My father was right when he said that, after working in the store for years before I went to school, I had no idea I was
really
a five-year-old child. On the first day of school, I vainly circled the room looking for my desk. I was mortally offended when I found out all I was allotted was a
nap rug
. Clutching my new zippered briefcase to my chest, I had arrived armed for learning, with paper, retractable pencil, notebook, protractor, eraser, nail file for manicure emergencies, and restaurant lunch money. I, and apparently my mother, had no idea that school was
over
at lunchtime. By eleven the din of children crying for their mothers was so loud, I felt like Scarlett O'Hara trying to help the thousands of wounded Confederates in Atlanta.

Over the first few months they attempted to make me into a devout kindergartener who sat inert in a circle learning to count from one to ten, and singing “The Farmer and the Dell.” When you were really lucky you had a turn to be the farmer and got to pick the mouse from one of the stunned faces in front of you. I felt I had bigger fish to fry than
that
! Our most active moment was when we lined up for the lavatory.

My mother, who enjoyed pedagogy, had spent hours at home teaching me to read, to add and subtract, and all about history and anthropology. I even had a Mau Mau skirt. In the long run she didn't do me any favours, for that's when my delusions of grandeur began. Actually I was no smarter than anyone else; however, based on what I knew compared to my classmates, I
believed
I was the next Madame Curie. Naturally I was insulted
when Mother Agnese suggested I spend whole afternoons learning the colours and reading Dick and Jane books. Mother Agnese had two aspects to her career: one was teaching reading and mathematics, both of which I already knew and was therefore bored and disruptive; the second was her vocation to strengthen our faith in God. Unfortunately, I seem to have been born a rationalist and, unlike my parents or others around me, had dexterity for the high jump, but not for the leap of faith.

I never blamed her for her anger toward me. I was demanding of time and attention. I was a bratty only child who thought she was smarter than she actually was. Once Mother Agnese's favourite, I had ultimately disappointed her. When she saw that I had no faith, but only the energy that was turning in upon itself and coming out as aggression, she was right to cut her losses, freeze me out, and focus on those who were willing to listen to her message.

Although I feared, even loathed her at times, she never disappointed me. Mother Agnese is the only person I ever met who never once stepped out of character. She lived and died a martyr. In the end she dropped dead from liver cancer while still in her forties, while attempting to make it to the communion rail at morning mass. As she wasted away, it seems she simply donned more and more layers of underwear and never even saw a doctor, offering up her suffering for lost souls when most mortals would have opted for a morphine drip.

She disdained talk of the usual minutiae of a Catholic girlhood education, such as who cleans the altar, who walks first in the May Day Parade, what dress to wear to first communion, or how to set up a Catholic home. She always went right to life's marrow. In grade one she had a daily theme and she wrote it on the blackboard.
One was “What are you doing, or what will you do today” — (“today” was in pink chalk) — “to convert souls in deepest, darkest Africa?” Then we would go around the room and say what we were going to sacrifice that day to help the missionaries. Anthony McDougall would agree to stay in his seat. Clyde Ayers would give up baseball in the playground. Linda Low always gave up her lunch. I never had a lunch, so Mother Agnese suggested that I “take the vow of silence,” since that would be my greatest sacrifice. I usually lasted for about an hour and then toppled off the tower into babble and left the rest of the work up to the missionaries. Mother Agnese gave me a D on my report card under “Self-control.” Who gets a D in grade one?

We spent a great deal of time talking about our souls and how to keep them in good working order so that in the event that we were killed our souls would have no trouble reaching Saint Peter, who held the keys to heaven's gates. I was concerned about the existence of my soul and on various occasions tried to find out where it was located. Was it part of my mind or my heart or some other organ? Mother Agnese told us that God, and on rare occasions certain humans, of which we were to assume that she was one, could see right through your body into your soul. God lived in our soul and if it was dirty or decayed or worm-infested, He was not going to stay long. After all, who wanted to live in a dirty house? Every morning we had to house-clean our souls and make sacrifices that would tidy up our Godly abodes. I became worried about my soul and was really attuned to everything that had to do with its existence. There was a shoe-repair man in Niagara Falls called the Sole Man and in grade one I insisted on going there to take my saddle shoes for repair. I carefully perused his shop and looked at
him carefully when he spoke; however, he didn't seem to be different from any other man and offered me no inside track on salvation.

In grade two I remember being jolted when the radio announcer, who had the same accent as Roy's, said Ella Fitzgerald had
soul
. I was alarmed by this and told Roy we
all
had souls. Roy didn't seem to be as personally tortured about souls as I was and simply said that some singers had more soul than others. He said Billie Holiday was all about wounded
soul
and Bessie Smith was
soulful
. Although I listened carefully, I couldn't tell any difference between their souls and Perry Como's.

One day when discussing capital punishment in grade two, we were debating whether it was right for the state to execute a man if he killed another. This was the famous case of the man the press called Joe Smith, who was being sent to the electric chair. Linda Low said that only God could take a life, but that maybe the executioner was working for God just as the Pope was working for God. After all, if execution was wrong, the Pope would have said something on behalf of God. Then Anthony McDougall suggested they have a public execution with the victim's family “turning on the juice” since the man on death row had killed their son “in cold blood.” He felt the family who suffered should have some retribution. Mother Agnese piped in that Joe Smith also had a soul that was no different in
kind
from the souls of each person in our class. She asked the class if Joe Smith beseeched God for forgiveness one minute before he was executed, would he go to heaven? Of course, since God was all-forgiving, the answer would be yes. Even Anthony McDougall got that one right.

I suddenly had what I thought was a flash of genius when Mother Agnese mentioned that Joe Smith had a soul. I stood up,
saying that I had solved the problem of the soul. Mother Agnese said that I had to sit down and raise my hand. (I felt she was being rather pedestrian since I'd solved such a huge problem that plagued mankind.) Finally when called upon, I said that I had established a sure-fire experiment for confirming the existence of the soul. I saw myself as an ecclesiastical Madame Curie. Patrick Hyla, the boy who was good at math and destined to be head altar boy, spoke for the class when he asked what I meant by the
problem
of the soul. In my enthusiasm I bounded ahead, saying that all we had to do was weigh Joe Smith before he was executed and then one minute after. That way we could confirm the existence of the soul and even know how much it weighs as it leaves the body for heaven or hell. I said that I thought the governor, particularly if he were a Catholic, would understand this request since we were trying to establish valuable information about the soul.

The class was silent, slow on the uptake, but following a lull I noticed they were looking at me as though I were Count Dracula dripping blood. Mother Agnese looked appalled, shook her head, and asked me to come to the front of the room and stand under the crucifix. She then said that I was exactly like one of God's Apostles. Turning to the horrified class, she asked, “Which Apostle does Catherine resemble?” I smiled broadly, hoping it was Saint Peter because he held the keys to the church and was my favourite. No one knew who I was until one of the dimwits who sat in the back suggested Judas. Then Mother Agnese said I was like Thomas, one of Jesus' favourite Apostles. When you are one of God's favourites you can hurt Him more profoundly than any other mortal. Lucifer was God's right-hand man until he defected for the fires of hell.