Sister Theresa
For one summer I held a job in the business office at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, a Catholic college on the north side of Baltimore. I was in college myself and my mother, who also worked in the business office at CND, swung the job for me. I sat at a desk in a large office in the College’s oldest building, Forier Hall, and entered payee information into an accounts-payable computer program. The work was easy and repetitive and on the worst days numbing, but my friends were sweltering as they sealed driveways or pruned Christmas trees that summer. Sometimes after talking to them I felt like a glorious petty clerk, a temporarily-willing Bartleby.
. . . . .There were nuns at the College of Notre Dame, both in the administration and in the classroom. They belonged to the order of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. For years the sisters had been retiring and dying faster than the convents could replace them, and so the College community was becoming more secularized, but several sisters still passed back and forth through the high-ceilinged hallways. They lived in a small convent above us, on the third floor of Forier Hall. Their chapel was located on the second floor. Some of the sisters were infirm; one, perhaps the oldest, leaned heavily upon a walker, the cross around her neck swinging with every heave-and-plant.
. . . . .I had always liked nuns. In my childhood they were a source of great mystery to me for perhaps two reasons, one of them being that my next door friend growing up, Ryan Shope, attended a Catholic elementary school while I went to public school (we, he said, were Methodist pagans). Ryan Shope was a thick, round-faced kid, a troublemaker. It was his idea to smash the frogs dozing on the scum of the nearby golf-course pond with willow switches and then drop their corpses into the cups for the golfers to find, and once I stood below his attic window as he lowered down to me, in a bed sheet cinched with a rope, a 24" television he had misappropriated for our tree house. Ryan was lazy but sly, bright but a mediocre student, and he claimed authority on the subject of nuns. Each week he emerged from the corridors of Pope John Paul School—he called it Pope Dope—like a veteran infantryman with harrowing tales of combat. The nuns at Pope Dope, he said, had it out for him, which was probably true: something about Ryan Shope seemed to invite a beating. In his tales, all nuns enjoyed cruelty. They spoke sharply, never laughed, and were avid connoisseurs of corporeal punishment.
. . . . .This apparent darker side of their vocation seized hold of my imagination, especially against the devotedness of that life. I remember my mother telling me when I was very young that nuns never married men because they married the Church—married God. That seemed to me, even as a child, a very strange and lonely and beautiful thing for a person to do.
. . . . .Much of my childhood romanticism about nuns evaporated quickly that summer. They were often in grumbly spirits. Some were rumored to be corrupt—Sister Sharon, who ran the physical education program and coached the girls’ field hockey team, supposedly collected receipts dropped in the parking lot of the local grocery store and tried to turn them in for reimbursement. The secular staff whispered that another pair were lovers. Sister Katrina McLeod of the English Department had the most potent body odor I’ve ever smelled on anyone anywhere. Another nun, the head of the education department, ruled on high with an iron fist. Not one of them burst into song like the Mother Superior in
The Sound of Music, encouraging their downtrodden students or assistants to “climb every mountain.”
. . . . .There was one sister I came to know rather well, or who, to put it more accurately, came to know me. Sister Theresa-Marie Heldorfer, secretary to Sister Eileen O’Day, the chair of the education department, came by the business office several times a week. She was a wisp of a woman, a tendril of incense. She did not wear the full habit, but she always wore the headpiece atop her soft, wrinkled forehead. I don’t believe I ever once saw her hair except for a patch of feathered silver above her ears. The rest of Sister Theresa’s dress was grandmotherly: long, pressed skirts always dark in color, and ruffled blouses with long sleeves even during the most beastly Maryland summer days, glasses, and a modest cross around her neck. Among the nuns in the building she was one of the most nun-like. She was a walking question to Ryan Shope’s authority: Sr. Theresa-Marie didn’t seem capable of beating anyone, or raising her voice.
. . . . .Sister took an immediate interest in me. Why, I didn’t know. I certainly didn’t give her reason to. That summer I was a college junior, and like most men I’ve known of that age, I was respectful but taciturn around the elderly.
. . . . .Sister asked me about college, how I liked the work, what my future plans were. I answered her like a scared kid, in sentences one to four words long. A couple times she caught me reading on the job— Rick Moody,
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, a book which I could not have described to her without blushing. When I finished with Moody I switched to a book about which I thought she might have something to say—Tolstoy, I think—if she ever asked. She never did.
. . . . .Soon, whenever Sister brought by a check request, she wanted to speak with me about it, not to make sure I got the amount or the spelling of the payee’s name right, but because she enjoyed my company. She would appear on other side of the high counter, just barely able to see over, and point at me with a crooked finger.
. . . . .“Working hard?” she would ask, her voice a rusty alto.
. . . . .“Of course,” I might say.
. . . . .Smiling, she would pat my hand. Her own hand was both soft and hard, the skin smooth and winkled but the thin bones beneath prominent. We would share a long silence, and then she would turn away and take small steps out the door.
. . . . .I think now that my mother must have told Sister Theresa-Marie about me well in advance of my arrival at the Business Office—that I was an avid reader, a workaholic, carrying a 4.0 GPA into my third year, but that I had also, inexplicably, managed to mess up my life my life by getting ensnared with the wrong girl. Everyone, including me, was hoping that my priorities would get reordered. When the summer passed and they didn’t get reordered, my mother likely continued lamenting to Sister Theresa-Marie in the fall. My mother would not have had to say much, only to breathe a sentence about me and sigh.
. . . . .“Ah, God’s will,” I can hear Sister saying, even though she never once said such a phrase around me.
. . . . .In my imagination all the nuns speak like this from time to time. They are, after all, professional believers. It is one reason why the sight of them, even just the thought of them, comforts me: I imagine that their faith, so much stronger than my own, compensates for the holes and cracks and incompetence through which my own hope so often leaks.
. . . . .In time, I began to fear disappointing Sister Theresa—not in my personal life, which I didn’t think she knew too much about, but in the accuracy of my work. By July I had become a genuine Bartleby; I’d have preferred to not do any of my duties, and my indifference took the form of transposition errors, typographical errors I let live if they seemed close enough to the real spelling of the payee’s name not to affect the delivery of the check or the bank’s endorsement policies, and long, idling walks through the huge building, occasionally up to the nun’s chapel on the second floor. I never went to the third floor, where they lived; for one thing, it was a private place, their home, but I’d also heard by then that some decrepit nuns did in fact languish on that floor all day.
. . . . .Sometimes, if I passed Sister in the hallway, she would smile and raise her right hand, palm outward. It could have been just a simple greeting, but coming from a nun, the gesture felt like a benediction, a gentle greeting of peace. I would not see her for several days, and then, coming from the doorway:
. . . . .Where’s my boy?. . . . .Right here, Sister.
. . . . .Ah.
Good.
. . . . .That call-and-response, all summer. Nothing else. When the time came for me to return to school, we said goodbye across the counter without shaking hands, but I felt a desire, a need, almost, to put my arms around her brittle body.
What was the currency of our friendship, exactly? The daily exchange of pleasantries? The silent smiles in the lemon-scented shadows of Forier Hall? A mutual wonder for each other’s lives?
. . . . .I question the use of that word,
friendship. I do not make or keep friends easily. In my lifetime I have had only a handful, fewer than ten. I know people who have too many friends to count, who give fabulous parties during which their houses hiccup and reel, who go on weekend fishing excursions in large groups; and whenever I think of my brother, who is one such person, it is difficult for me to assure myself that my own life is not a failure in this way. Yet I cannot help it: I value quiet, and solitude, and meditative space too much to satisfy the obligations of most friendships. Or, at least, to satisfy so many of them at once. People seem to sense this about me, and so I do not receive many applications, as it were, for the position of Friend. For my part I do not submit many. The friendships I do have are much like anyone else’s, I imagine: intense, and rooted in shared beliefs and history and pastimes, and that trickiest of concepts, loyalty.
. . . . .Sister Theresa and I shared none of these. I could not tell you if she preferred knitting to crochet, tea to coffee, summer to autumn. I could not tell you one concrete detail about her, except that she did have a tragic love for the Baltimore Orioles. She prayed for the Orioles (ineffectually), and joined several other nuns at Camden Yards for a few games each year. But that is all I know about her, really. I, too, remained a mystery to her, except for what my mother told her, which I’d like to think doesn’t count. And yet, unlikely as it seems, I think of Sister Theresa as one of the closest friends I have ever had.
. . . . .She must have thought of me as a friend too, though perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she thought of me as a grandson, or the son she had never had:
How’s my boy? I did not realize it at the time I was working at the College, but of course many of the nuns had families, blood sisters and brothers with whom they kept touch because they were not cloistered. Some of these siblings likely had families of their own. There still must have been times when they longed painfully for that other life. Even with its close community, the life of the most willing nun or monk is one of the loneliest and most difficult—and, paradoxically, the most beautiful—that I can think of. For this reason, perhaps, the professionally devout have never seemed to me to be entirely of this world. The sight of a nun coaxing a Buick into a slot at the grocery store (they always seem to pilot huge automobiles), for instance, or bleakly waving a pennant in the box seats, is one of the most jarring and comical sights I know. And how pleased I am to see a nun on board the airplane I am riding!
. . . . .Now I think the very qualities that have made me a poor friend to so many others made me an attractive friend for Sister Theresa. Our friendship was of the mind, perhaps the soul. We experienced a harmony of moods and sensibilities that did not need to be named. Probably it was exciting for her to find this in someone so young, just as it was exciting for me to befriend someone so old. For as long as I worked at CND, and, even after, Sister continued to seek me out. When, the next summer, I returned to the College to take a job in the bookstore, she remembered me, and every week or so I would hear her voice from far across the room where I stacked texts on memory and cognition,
The Phaedrus, or
The Road to Coorain.
. . . . .Where is he? Where is my boy?. . . . .When I produced myself for Sister’s inspection, she never wanted anything in particular. She never said anything of consequence. Not the whole summer. She seemed to want only to verify that I was still there. Sometimes she touched my arm, a gesture which always startled me, gave three short pats, then walked away without saying anything, smiling as if about some secret she knew.
After that second summer passed I returned to college and applied to graduate schools. I had jettisoned the bad relationship by then; my priorities were ordered. When I think of how I went about the application process now—blindly, without any thought as to what I was doing, where I was applying, or what I would do instead if I were to be turned down, the odds of which were surely better than the odds of my being admitted—I think that God must indeed watch after fools. I applied to five of the best programs in the country and sat back, waiting for letters of acceptance. I had no alternate plan, no thought that the world might not consent to admit me to my dreams.
. . . . .The first school, the University of Massachusetts as I recall, rejected me. So did the second. And the third. The fourth put me on a wait list. I had been denied things before, but never had I been so resoundingly
dispatched, as if with the slamming of heavy steel doors, and now I tasted true despair. Early one morning, while the snow fell in bitter, swirling squalls outside, I received more bad news. I walked back to my dormitory room, a single I had rigged into a rough approximation of a writer’s studio, and smashed the blade of my hockey stick through my wall. Even before I swung I felt that I was about to do something embarrassing and melodramatic. For a moment I regarded the jagged hole in the wall, the chunks of plaster sprayed across my bed. I remembered the tales I’d heard of the University charging hundreds of dollars to patch mere thumbtack holes. Worse, I did not feel any catharsis in the destruction; I felt only the genuine stupidity of someone who clearly did not deserve to study anything, because now he would now have to drive to the hardware store in two feet of drifting snow to buy a can of spackle, a putty knife, and sandpaper before the residence-life staff discovered the damage.
. . . . .Later on as the spackle dried, my friends, who had already been admitted to their graduate schools, showed up and dissuaded me from going to my afternoon class—what good, after all, was education doing me? They took me to the Hoot Owl as soon as it opened. Hours later, they carried me home.
. . . . .When my mother called again at the end of the week, it was to make sure my acts of stupidity weren’t intensifying, and to tell me of a strange encounter she’d had that day with Sister Theresa-Marie. She had been walking to the lady’s room at the end of Forier hall when Sister spotted her, dropped her papers, and waited for her to come outside. Sister had asked after me:
How’s my boy?. . . . .It had been a long time, apparently, since Sister received an update. My mother told her the truth: Things were looking grim for Sister’s boy. I see them huddled in the wide hallway, talking in low voices. The air grows stale from Sister’s breath. Sister might have said the obvious, which was that my denial
wasn’t inexplicable, that I was young and cocky and had much to learn, but instead she says that she has been thinking about me. Sister has been thinking about me, and, she assures my mother, raising that crooked finger, she knows everything will be all right. She is sure of it. Will my mother please convey these words to me, exactly? In my mind, I see Sister speaking for the first time with a gleam, a meddling electricity, in her eyes. She has been doing her work. She knows.
. . . . .Three days later, I received a letter admitting me to Michigan on a full fellowship.
One of the first concepts I taught my freshman composition students when I began teaching as a graduate instructor two years later was logical fallacy. Among the easiest logical fallacies to fall victim to is the
post hoc fallacy, known formally by the Latin phrase
post hoc, ergo propter hoc: “Out of this, therefore because of this.” The pressure point is that pair of slippery words
therefore-because, a rusty hinge of hasty generalization, foregone conclusion, superstition, optimism, or desperate wish: a woman notices a correlation between a single penny in her pocket and passing a driving test, and calls the penny lucky; a nun tells the mother of a college kid on the brink of despair that she
knows all will be well, and it is so; the college kid credits his admission to his dreams to the nun’s divine intercession.
. . . . .Of course, many coincidences could have brought the letter of admission to me at that time. We might also question the reliability of the messenger who conveyed Sister Theresa’s words. But whenever I think of my mother’s encounter with Sister and what followed immediately after, I think of a line by the poet Stephen Dunn: “You can’t teach disbelief to a child, only wonderful stories/ and we hadn’t a story nearly as good.”
. . . . .And so fallacy seemed deliciously fallacious.
. . . . .I would have thanked Sister, had I ever seen her again. When she died two years later I was in Michigan, happily doing my work beneath the dreary watercolor sky. Word of her death reached my mother, who by then had left the College for another job, several months after, and so I was relieved of the burden of Sister’s funeral. I’d like to think that I would have flown back to Maryland to pay my respects if I had known. In truth, had I returned to Baltimore, I would not have been able to enter the chapel. I could not have touched the polished edge of Sister’s coffin or her cheek. Such a gesture would have seemed somehow wrong, too much. And if the other nuns, smiling at the pleasant surprise of the apparition of such a young man in their midst, had asked me how I had known Sister Theresa-Marie, I would not have known what to tell them.
Paul Graham has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of literary journals and commercial magazines, most recently
Poets&Writers. He teaches creative writing and literature at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he lives with his wife and their new (and first ever) puppy, a German Shepherd named Tucker, who is currently watching the road with much suspicion.
