Crossing Highbridge by Waters Maureen;

Author:Waters, Maureen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2019-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

INTEMPERATE NEED

Sister Monica was a fairly demented nun, probably in her fifties, though it was hard to tell about nuns. Hard-pressed to maintain control as she careened along from math through civics to grammar, she forced rebellious cases to their knees before the class or else consigned them to the clothes closet. One culprit was incarcerated for two weeks, desk and all, her voice muffled and resentful among the winter coats. Eventually she got around to me, but when I refused to budge, she let me alone. It was a rare gesture on my part, meeting her head on instead of rapidly shifting ground and locating a detour.

Apart from occasional bursts of spleen, we got along amiably enough in the eighth grade. Sister Monica called us “her girls” and posed toothily alongside us for photos. And she inscribed her name among the little poems and epigrams we were collecting in autograph books we expected to keep forever. (“Rocks and rills divide us/Distance be our lot/You may have forgotten me/But I’ll forget you not.”) For my own part I scarcely listened in class, escaping as usual into the hallways or lost on the Egdon heath with Eustacia Vye. I was consciously drifting through the days, anticipating high school. Meanwhile it was not unpleasant reading novels and daydreaming in the back of the room, a lopsided education, no doubt, but one which shaped my moral sense as much as did the Baltimore catechism or my parents’ earnest example. Heroic self-sacrifice, alone and misunderstood (though not indefinitely), like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities mounting the guillotine, had enormous appeal.

Tethered within the congenial circle of our parish, most of us were uncertain about choosing a high school; there wasn’t one in Highbridge. The main thing impressed upon us was that the school should be a Catholic one where we would be “safe,” where our religious beliefs would not be questioned. Indeed, after nearly eight years among little girls with blue ribbons on their pigtails and rosary beads in their pockets, we were afraid of the public schools. The kids looked tough and intimidating and slick. You only went there if you couldn’t afford Catholic school tuition (fifteen dollars a month in those days plus the cost of uniform, books, and transportation).

This precipitated a crisis at home, and there was considerable pressure on me—the intellectual—to win a scholarship. So I was sent one day into Manhattan for the examinations at a large diocesan school, one I had actually seen and which struck me as the fifties equivalent of Dickens’s bootblacking factory. Instead of getting off at midtown, I spent the morning riding the IRT with a few cronies who had similar reservations, seeing how far we could travel on a nickel. So much for noble self-sacrifice. While my poor, trusting parents waited hopefully for word from the school, I skulked around the house, never admitting my guilt. What made it even worse was that they never voiced their disappointment, thinking I had done my best.

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