How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge

Author:David Lodge
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781446496701
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

5

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How They Broke Out, Away, Down, Up, Through, Etc.

IN AMERICA, RUTH travelled from city to city, from convent to convent, like a medieval pilgrim, making notes about the changes that were taking place in the lives of nuns. She had been awarded a six month’s travelling scholarship for this project, but when her time was up she felt that she had only scratched the surface of the subject and wrote home for permission to stay longer. She relied on the religious communities she visited for food and accommodation, repaying their hospitality with whatever work was appropriate. She did substitution teaching in schools, auxiliary nursing in hospitals, helped look after senior citizens and mentally handicapped children. Sometimes she donned her habit and gave talks about the Church in England to parochial groups. Afterwards people would come up to her and shake her hand warmly, sometimes pressing into it a large-denomination dollar bill “to help with your expenses, sister.” At first she was embarrassed by these gifts, but after a while she got used to them, and indeed came to rely on such gratuities for her pocket money.

American nuns, she soon discovered, were in a state of upheaval that made England seem quite tranquil by comparison. In Cleveland, Ohio, she came across a community that had until recently been enclosed, supporting itself precariously by embroidering priests’ vestments, and had suddenly decided to train all its members in chiropody and turned itself into a foot clinic. In Detroit, Michigan, a nun in high boots and a mini-skirt ran a free school for juvenile deliquents and led a successful rent-strike against profiteering landlords. In St Louis, Ruth interviewed a sister who was secretary general of an organization dedicated to opposing male chauvinism in the Church. She wore a trouser suit and scattered words like “crap” and “bullshit” in her conversation. On the wall behind her head a poster depicted Moses telling the Israelites: “And She’s black …” In Texas, Ruth visited a community of nuns who came down to breakfast with their hair in huge plastic curlers. After a hasty grace (“Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat”) they tucked into hot cakes and bacon; then, immaculately coiffed, and clad in smart clothes, they swept off in huge shiny convertibles to their jobs as personal secretaries in downtown Houston. In the evenings they had dates with priests, who took them out to restaurants and movie shows.

Ruth herself had adventures. Travelling through the night on a Greyhound bus, dressed, as was her custom now, in ordinary clothes, she realized that the man in the next seat had placed his hand on her knee. She froze, wondering what to do. Scream? Cut and run? Stop the bus? After half an hour she dared a look sideways. The man was asleep, his limbs limp, his mouth open. Slowly, carefully, Ruth lifted his hand from her knee and restored it to his own. Eventually she slept herself and woke to find her head on the man’s shoulder.

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