Life With Mother Superior by Jane Trahey

Author:Jane Trahey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Memoir
Published: 2012-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine: Sister Liguori

We knew something had happened. No one rang the morning bell; only Sister Ethelreda, the tall postulant, came and wakened us, one by one.

“Hush, wake up,” she whispered, “get dressed and try to be quiet.”

“What’s the matter?” we all asked.

“Get up, get up, be quiet, I haven’t time for questions.”

“What’s up, Sister Ethelreda?”

The place was either on fire or we were at war with China, as Sister Mary William had predicted.

“It’s Sister Liguori, she’s dead,” she whispered, and tears flooded her pale gray eyes.

“Dead,” we all breathed back, shocked by the very word.

“Yes, God rest her soul, she died in the night.”

Mary and I sat back on our beds and contemplated this totally unexpected news. Sister Liguori was the only “nice” teacher we had. She taught geometry and she was so bright and nice to us, we simply felt it pointless to pull any of our tricks on her. Without our even realizing, we had become not only fond of her but fond of geometry as well.

“Does this mean we won’t have geometry today?” Florence asked. She seemed saddened, not so much by Sister’s death as the fact that she would miss out on geometry.

“Don’t be silly, of course not,” said Sister Ethelreda; “we won’t have any classes.”

It was a grim holiday that left us bereft of regularity. We dressed quietly and wandered down to the chapel.

No one seemed terribly concerned about us today. This, in itself came as a surprise since usually the Sisters concerned themselves, with nothing but us. This morning, however, they had withdrawn into their own lives, their own community—and whereas we had lost a teacher we liked, they had obviously lost a friend they loved.

Sister Liguori was a tall, heavy-set nun, who seemed to find our nonsense precisely that and nothing more. In fact, Mary and I amused her and she would prod us into telling her about our escapades and secret plans. She would “tsk” and “tusk” a bit here and a bit there, but she took such pleasure in our silliness that it was impossible to do anything but be good as gold in her class. It was our first sample of reverse psychology.

With her lumbering, teeter-tottering kind of walk, she would tread heavily into class and greet us as old and good friends. She kept the whole class amused with geometry did it with such deftness, we never learned her tricks. It was the most competitive atmosphere I had ever been in—leaving the childish gyrations of our senior basketball team looking like a game of tiddlywinks. We learned from Sister Liguori, for instance, the way to bet. There were mornings when we played geometric roulette, there were mornings when we played the horses, and there were mornings when we worked out masterly moves with chess. Whatever background Sister Liguori stemmed from, somebody in her household loved to bet, and she merely applied this universal liking for taking a chance to her geometry class. We had team against team, seat against seat, friend against friend.

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