Life With Mother Superior (7 page)

Chapter Ten: Marvel Ann

Mother Superior had a long talk with Mama. The general feeling around the convent was a difficult one. A total stalemate existed between the faculty that had put up with Mary Clancey and me for our first two years of high school life, and the faculty that was about to receive us. The first faction felt that we should be promoted at any cost, even against all principles. They felt that Mary and I had enjoyed any and all talents they might have had. The Sisters that taught the junior and senior class felt that we were not ready spiritually or mentally to wear the twenty-two white buttons on our uniforms as a distinguishing sign of an upperclass-man. So, for a change, it was not student versus faculty, it was faculty versus faculty.

Mother Superior suggested to Mrs. Clancey and Mama, at one of their semimonthly get-togethers, that they either take us out of St Marks and put us in the hands of a competent psychiatrist, or let her handle us as she saw fit. This handling would, however, put us on a very strong extracurricular activity program. By extracurricular, Mother did not mean tennis, she meant extra classes.

“Extra
curricular,” Mary whimpered, “I can’t keep up with the just regular curricular.”

“If only my mother would stay out of my life, I think I could manage better. Now we’ll have to take painting, and leather tooling, and all that junk.”

And painting it was. Mother Superior arranged our time so that we finished school around eight in the evening and began at eight in the morning. If we weren’t painting, we were petit-pointing and if we weren’t petit-pointing, we were praying. We had absolutely not a free minute. But, even though we were never again left to our own devices, it had its reward. We did inherit Sister Angela.

“An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” she greeted us pleasantly.

“Good afternoon, Sister Angela!”

“Don’t good afternoon me, I don’t want you in my lovely class.”

This was a new approach. We stared at each other.

“Well, we didn’t want to come,” Mary said. I promptly kicked her, as this was merely playing into her hands.

Our art teacher reached into her file and took out two great sheets of manila paper. “Five cents, please.”

“I thought the supplies were paid for,” I snarled back.

“They are, dear one; this is for the Missions. I am offering up my time to teach you art. The least you can do is offer up your spending money.”

We sat in front of mahogany desks that tipped. Mary screwed hers up with all the vehemence of a night nurse with a hospital bed. It banged down.

Sister Angela picked her promptly off her artist’s stool by the back of her collar and quietly whispered, “If you want to break something, try your head.” For all of her arty side, Sister Angela obviously had a special reserve of strength. Neither of us wished her to use it on our bodies. We got to work.

The weeks slipped along and we drew stuffed bluebirds sitting on a log. Mary was convinced that Sister killed all her own birds and stuffed them. We drew pineapples, apples, and oranges and what we couldn’t draw, we ate. From three-thirty in the afternoon until prayer time, Sister Angela kept us under her protective wing. Custody, of course, would be a better choice of words. While we drew, Sister painted. She was really very avant-garde, painting very much in the Cubist school. Neither Mary nor I nor Mother Superior appreciated her talent at all, and her rendition of Good Friday was really quite frightening and caused quite a sensation among the rest of the Sisters.

Actually, she was almost as much of a misfit in her way as we were. When Mary and I tried, however, to imitate her Mondrian flair, she slapped me so hard I saw cubes.

I didn’t have as difficult a time with my charcoals, however, as Mary did. Her hands not only perspired, they manufactured sweat, and when I say “sweat” I really mean they dripped. Mary tried and tried to get her bird drawn without getting the paper soaking wet.

“It’s all in your mind, Miss Clancey.”

“I can’t help it, it just happens.”

“It won’t, if you don’t want it to. Think dry and you’ll be dry.”

It finally got so that Mary would put the chalk on and I’d rub it, but with rubbing my own chalk and Mary’s, I was fast wearing out my fingerprints. Meanwhile, the more welcome and more talented students of art came and went at their leisure. We were the only two captive artists. Everyone painted Red Cross posters, and pictures of Baby Jesus, and Spiritual Bouquets, and one group even mixed plaster for casts and made grand cherubs’ heads. It was the plaster that started the whole thing.

Mary and I decided to cast her cousin Marvel Ann, who was a freshman. Sister Angela kept her eagle eye on us during the week, so that we felt we would certainly do better artistically if we waited till Saturday. Saturday, at the convent, was the day when those students with no demerits went to town. For us, Saturday was a quiet go-to-confession day, hang-around-the-kitchen-and-watch-Sister-Purity-make-bread day, and sit outside on the hill. The Sisters did as they pleased and so we never saw them on Saturday. Our only contact was the Sister in charge, who checked on us every hour or so.

Marvel Ann had a pug nose, freckles, pale green eyes and a definite point of view. “Go drop dead, you slobs.”

“Aw, come on, Marvel, we only want to do a mask of you. You can send it to your papa at Christmas.”

“It’s so much better than pen wipers,” I added wistfully.

“Listen, you two idiots, if you think you’re going to cover me with plaster, you’re crazy.”

“We’re not going to do all of you, just your head.”

Mary and I had watched the other art students mix the plaster with water in a large pail, and pour it over their clay mold, let it harden and then with one fell swoop of the hammer and chisel, the mold would fall off the clay and there you would have, right in the palm of your hand, the cast for a great statue.

“Just your face, Marvel—that’s all.”

“Well, what if you get that stuff in my eyes?”

“Keep them shut and it won’t go in.”

“Okay; but you had better not let anything happen or I’ll scream my head off.”

We slipped into the art room. It was quiet, polished and sunny. Not a sound but the big wall clock ticking merrily away. We went to work. It took a good bit of plaster to get the amount we needed.

“Maybe we can sell statues of you, Marvel,” Mary said as she began to slap the plaster on Marvel’s forehead.

“Keep it out of her hair,” I whispered.

“It feels gooky.”

“It’s good plaster, that’s all.”

Then Mary, tired of the conversation, padded the plaster in and around Marvel’s mouth. She left holes for her to breathe and began the chin area. Marvel began to get restless, and Mary and I both began to hurry up the job. When we had her all done, the whole thing looked so amazing, we went completely to pieces.

There sat a great, white Frankenstein kind of mess, with bright orange hair sprinkled liberally with plaster blobs.

“Doesn’t she look too marvelous!” Mary said happily.

Marvel mumbled something. It was impossible for her to talk.

“Let it get good and hard, Marvel, so you won’t ruin the mold.”

“It will come off, won’t it Mary?” I asked less confidently.

“Of course it will.”

Mary reached for Sister’s chisel and began to chip away. After the first few blows that almost had Marvel off her stool, it began to be apparent that Marvel was in quite permanently.

Mary began to wipe her hands, as they were sweating quite freely.

“Hit her hard,” I suggested. This only made Marvel mad and she kicked out at both of us. By now, I was getting quite frantic

“Good God,” Mary said, “what will we do?”

“Stay here and I’ll see if I can find Sister Purity. She might help us. If Mother Superior catches us, I’m going to be sent home again.”

I headed out for the convent kitchen. Sister Purity had gone. Only the smell of the fresh bread told me it was getting close on to four o’clock. This left us a little over an hour to get Marvel out of her mold before dinner.

I asked the Sister Portress to ring for Sister Angela.

“Why can’t you leave poor Sister alone on her day off?” she scolded. “Poor dears, they get enough of you all week.”

It must have been the way I looked that made her ring.

“Ring it loud, will you, Sister?”

“Oh, you young ones are all alike. Thoughtless. Thoughtless.”

She rang Sister Angela’s code. Three rings, then four, then one. Finally, Sister Angela came into the parlor.

“Well, young lady, and what can I do for you?”

“We’re in a real jam, Sister,” I confided.

Her look was of dry ice. “Yes?”

“Mary and I have done Marvel in plaster.”

“Oh.”

“We thought we would just do a mask, but it didn’t turn out too well.”

“Where did you do the casting, might I ask?”

“In the studio.” I realized what this admission meant.

“Hmmm.”

She sat down and surveyed me much as a headwaiter in a fine restaurant might look at a worm in a salad.

“And just what do you think I can do about it?”

“Get Marvel out of the plaster.”

“But you got her into it.”

I began to get panicky. The only other alternative was to go to my homeroom teacher, Sister Dorothy, and she would just go directly to Mother Superior. She had followed this pattern too many times to be trusted on this mission. I felt that I could not face Mother Superior again this season.

I took one last fling. “I think Marvel Ann might not be able to breathe.”

That was the last and best straw. Sister Angela rose, grabbed me by the arm and off we glided down the hall to the art studio.

Mary was sitting perched up on the window sill staring out into the convent yard. Marvel Ann was sobbing, crying, and slightly hysterical.

Sister Angela started with towels wrung in hot water, then she grabbed out a jar of cream and began to work on Marvel Ann. After a few tense hours, she had lost only the top layer of her skin, her eyebrows and her widow’s peak. By chipping and picking, and clipping and cutting, and melting, Sister got most of it off. Marvel Ann still looked as if everyone in the free-form art class had pelted her merrily with plaster. Sister took her off to bathe and got her to bed with soup. It had been an exhausting day. She told us before she took quivering Marvel off that she would like to see the art studio really shined up. We shined it up.

The next morning, we went to visit Marvel Ann. She was definitely still in a state of shock.

“We’re sorry, Marvel, we didn’t mean to get you stuck. I thought it would come right off like it does in clay.”

Marvel was totally forgiving. She said, “Get out of here, you slobs, you witches, you creeps!”

Sister Angela, however, kept her mouth shut. No demerits, on her part, went on the scoreboard. We were so subdued by the whole incident that we never did a thing that whole week, and when Friday rolled around, we were quite eligible to go to town. We thought, as a matter of fact, that Sister Angela was one hell of a good sport, until she handed us, that beautiful, sparkling,
crisp, clear Saturday morning, a sheet of paper. It was
captioned, “The Permanent Saturday Help Sister Angela List.”

It kept us so occupied that we rarely noticed the bus leaving for town, or, for that matter, its coming home.

Chapter Eleven: The Birth of Aurora

After one of Mother Superior’s educational summers,
we returned to St. Marks to find out that she thought
we were singularly ungraceful, ungainly, clumsy and
awkward. To counteract this physical handicap, she
felt we needed more than just active sports.

“I have found the perfect answer. I have been for
tunate enough to be able to secure, for just two after
noons a week, the services of the famous danseuse, Mrs.
Mabel Dowling Phipps. She will teach you how to walk
and how to dance.”

No one I knew had ever heard of the famed Mrs.
Phipps, but if Mother said she was renowned, she must
have been.

Since we all considered ourselves fairly apt at walk
ing—getting to and from chairs with a certain amount of ease—we couldn’t understand what more she could
teach us about walking, but dancing was another
kettle of fish. We all wanted terribly to learn to do the Big Apple and the Carioca. Even though it seemed un
likely that Mother Superior wanted us to do the Carioca, we were excited.

“Now, since our program is very crowded for this semester, I have decided to give up two study periods
and let the seniors learn to dance.” She looked at us
and smiled. “If all goes well, Mrs. Phipps promises an
exciting program for all of you in June.”

“Mrs. Mabel Dowling Phipps,” Mother said, holding
out her hand. Mrs. Phipps came forward and danced
around Mother Superior. I don’t think Mother Superior quite expected this and looked a little embarrassed.

“Oh, my darlings, I know we will have the most
graceful-looking group. Now”—and she grabbed Lil
lian—”let me see you dance.” Lillian almost passed out
with embarrassment.

“That’s all right, my love, I’ll see to it that you are
the best of them all.” It was obvious to all of us that
Mrs. Phipps was not only a dancer, but one fine sales
lady. Mother Superior smiled graciously and left the
room. I had only seen her smile three times, and
obviously Mrs. Phipps either owned the mortgage on the school or she was a practitioner of hypnosis.

“Now, my darlings, I’m going to ask you all to write
home and ask for ten dollars for your costumes.”

“What will they look like?” we begged. I hoped it
would be sequined.

“That’s a surprise. Next time we meet, have your ten dollars.”

And she was gone.

My father sent a sarcastic note to Mother Superior
about costumes. Obviously, she had received a good many of them, as she delivered one of her “I’m trying to prepare her for a gracious life” answers. We all had
our ten dollars ready for Mrs. Phipps.

She took them and was gone—but before she went,
she said, “Today, I want you all to just walk up and
down the gymnasium, pretending you are a leaf . . . a leaf that is just drifting down from a tree. First you
flutter,” and she shook her arms in fluttering move
ments, “now, quietly, you descend to your death. You have left your Mother Tree and you are dying. You get
weaker and weaker” (and she got weaker and weaker),
“and now, finally, you return from whence you came.”
She was now writhing on the gymnasium floor. For
writhing, she wore khaki-colored tights with a sleeve
less overblouse and soft dancer’s shoes. As she writhed,
we gathered around her, fascinated. I could hardly wait
to writhe. I fell to the floor almost instantly.

“No, no,” she shouted. “You have to come down from your Mother Tree,” she admonished me, “never just do the end.”

We adored Mrs. Phipps and looked forward to the hour. It was pure insanity and we had nothing like it. We fluttered and fell, we rocked with laughter, we imitated her; it was heaven. Was it possible that Mother Superior realized how much fun Interpretive
Dancing was? Our initial saddened mood over not
learning more up-to-date dances was dispatched by
Mrs. Phipps’ moods. She flew into class much as Peter
Pan did, only she didn’t have invisible wires. Actually, I think she might have had some form of levitation, as
she could actually stay up in the air quite some time, her little body fluttering, her legs wildly flailing the air.

When our costumes arrived, we must have looked
quite terrible, for Mrs. Phipps tried to adjust some of
them. They were khaki-colored togas over khaki-
colored leotards, and we wore sandals with our toes
hanging out, and little laurel wreaths in our hair.

“You’re all too fat—too, too fat!” she wailed. “Just
look at you.” We all looked down at our protruding stomachs and our just budding bosoms. All in all, it was no
corps de ballet.

“I’m going to speak to Mother about your diet.”

And she did. School food is institution food. Anything cooked for a hundred simply doesn’t taste like
food. The gravy was canned and it went over lumpy mashed potatoes. We were so hungry most of the time that we would eat anything. The menu varied from day to day, but not week to week. On Sunday,
we had meat of some kind. It was usually rather stringy
roast beef and we ate it with mashed potatoes and
gravy. If we had a salad (none of us liked them), we
had a Jell-O mold that was lime green filled with
canned chopped fruit. On Monday, we had roast beef,
chopped up. We called this Puss’n Boots on the Half
Shell. Wednesday, we had beef stew made with dumplings of Spackle. Thursday, we had corned beef and cabbage—which none of us liked; Friday we had Tuna
Fish a la King, which was a good bit more a la than
King. Saturday was baked beans and ham with Jell-O mold, and Sunday the cycle began again. Only in this
cycle, we had chicken and leftover chicken as the pivotal point.

Mrs. Phipps gave the cook a hard time and we found
ourselves munching salads and more Jell-O, and fewer
sweets were served. We all began to lose weight, which
made Mrs. Phipps overjoyed. By this time, we were
getting used to our togas and laurel leaves—only an occasional outburst of hysteria came up when some
one fluttered to the ground and crashed on an elbow or arm. We were preparing for the May Day dance,
which was to be held on the lawn if the weather permitted, and the parents were to be asked. This was to be combined with solo concerts of the students who
studied violin or piano or voice privately.

Mrs. Phipps was in a wild fury of perfection. We
practiced being little blades of grass blowing to and fro in the wind. We practiced being flowers peeping op on the first spring day. We simulated a Maypole,
but Mother Superior said Maypoles were communistic
and there wasn’t to be one. “Where she got that idea,”
Mrs. Phipps asked, “I don’t know.”

The big program was planned to be in three parts:
(1) Dawn and Sunset; (II) The Birth of Aurora; (III)
The Marriage of Apollo.

Naturally, it rained and we had to take our program to the gym. The parents sat upstairs and after the music concert, that had lasted a good hour and a half, my father could think of nothing but a drink. I saw him pacing up and down the top row of seats in
the gymnasium. Smoking was not allowed.

Mrs. Phipps brought some green turf to simulate the spring mood and we did Dawn and Sunset on it. The parents didn’t know when to clap, or whether to
clap, for we waved to and fro in utter silence, oc
casionally knocking into each other. I’m sure, if there
had been no program, they would never have guessed it
was Dawn or Sunset. At the end, we fell to the floor in
a bow. There was feeble applause.

Mother Superior seemed pleased that no one under
stood—it gave her a distinct edge over smart parents.

The second act, The Birth of Aurora, which seemed
quite innocent to us, must have seemed anything but
to the audience. When the actual scene of child labor
began to take place, there were several snickers from the fathers. The audience was shocked into silence as
Aurora finally got born, and there was less applause. The Marriage of Apollo must have knocked Mother
Superior right off her chair—it was quite spicy, as I
remember. My father laughed through the whole thing
and said it was the only thing at St. Marks he’d ever seen that he wouldn’t have missed for the world.

Mrs. Phipps was last seen with Mother Superior heading for her office. Her grass was returned the
following day. We started gradually going back to
fuller and fuller meals, and we never did have another
dancing teacher, at least not while I was at St. Marks.