Too Close to the Falls (33 page)

Mother Agnese and I had an uneasy peace for a year or two while she soldiered on teaching our class. In many ways we were symbiotically attached. We were like the nursery rhyme “Jack Sprat.” She needed to suffer and we needed to torture. Our class was the worst in the school and, as she frequently told us, we were her penance. If one is to offer up her sufferings for the poor souls in purgatory then one has to have sufferings. That's where I came in, with five boys. We, known as the Satan's Six, gave her all the raw material she needed.

Your name went on the board if you were not “an ambassador of the Catholic faith.” My name was perpetually printed on the board for one thing or another. Usually around two in the afternoon my legs would get jittery and I would have an overwhelming desire to get up from my desk. I felt so trapped — being stretched on a rack would have been preferable to having my body folded under my tiny desk. In spite of our desperate desire to move around, we were supposed to work in our letter box. I hated that green three-by-five-inch box full of tiny cardboard letters no larger than a small fingernail. My letter box was like a Pandora's box which I dreaded opening. Within fifteen minutes of scrounging around in this tiny box in order to line up all the letters in alphabetical order, I would go berserk. I couldn't understand the principle. Why did we nose through these boxes every day looking for letters like animals looking for grubs? Since
I already knew the alphabet and I could spell whatever I needed, I didn't understand why my scholastic life had to be confined in a tiny cardboard box. Wasn't there something to learn outside of it? I'm sure part of my distaste for it was that I was really bad at it. It seemed as if only my letters blew off my desk whenever Mother Agnese rushed by with her ropes and rosary swaying.

Something always came over me about fifteen minutes into the exercise and I would start fights and take other people's letters if I couldn't find my own. Sometimes Anthony McDougall would blow on my letters and knock them off my desk. I would start poking at other people's letters or take their vowels just for a little fun. Every day I would swear that I wasn't going to disturb other's letters but I always fell short of the mark. By two-thirty I had usually stolen all of Linda Low's vowels, or I would have wild physical battles with the boys for their letters and it would all end in mayhem.

Then my name would go on the board and I'd be sent off to solitary confinement, kneeling alone at church and saying the stations of the cross for my penance. I was to ask God's forgiveness and to try and find a way to develop patience and rid myself of “sticky fingers.” Actually, being in church was better than being in school. It was quiet and the stone floor felt cool, a relief after our boiling hot, stuffy, crowded classroom. I felt uplifted under the vaulted Gothic ceiling and inspired by the altar and the walls of the chancel, the colour of a blue Mediterranean night sky with glittering stars painted on. The stations of the cross were copies of the works of Fra Filippo Lippi, a Renaissance master. He perfectly represented the quiet agony on Mary's face in her beautiful cobalt-blue dress as she watched her Son hang upon the cross. The entire
crucifixion came alive for me as I knelt in front of each station. When the strong afternoon sun shone through the window, the stained glass radiated and I actually felt for fleeting moments that I was in God's presence. Sometimes I lit all the candles in their cranberry glasses with the long sticks provided for all the poor people that didn't have enough money to pay for a votive candle. (Not that I ever paid for them, but I figured since God could make the world in seven days, He could spring for a few votive candles. Mother Agnese and Father Flanagan didn't share this view of God's generosity.)

On certain occasions I made up miracles or walked down the aisle as Joan of Arc or Maid Marian marrying Robin Hood. Once I was there with a girl from grade six who had to do the stations of the cross for combing her hair during geography. She made me pretend to be the priest presiding over her wedding. I got a real surge of power pretending to be Father Flanagan standing behind the communion rail marrying her to Elvis Presley: “Do you, Elvis, take this woman, Anne Marie Fassiano . . .”

There was one ground where Mother Agnese and I had a bond, a truce. It was over sports. She was the athletic director, as well as spiritual adviser and principal. Father Flanagan referred to himself as “men's athletic director” and taught the boys sports and formed the teams for competitions. Outfits were provided for the boys' baseball team sponsored by McDonald's Dairy. The girls had no equipment or teams, nor were we ever placed in any competitions with other schools. In fact, there was absolutely no athletic program for girls. In the fall we gathered chestnuts; in the winter we huddled in groups, hiding from the boys who threw snowballs; and in the spring we were the audience for the boys' baseball
game. While the boys went on field trips to identify deciduous and non-deciduous trees, the girls were left in the school cafeteria to make belts decorated with tiny rice-sized beads that spelled out “Niagara Falls.” All of these crafts were ultimately donated to the African missions. When I watched
Ramar of the Jungle
on Saturday mornings, I checked out the natives' costumes, but I never saw one of them in one of our beaded Niagara Falls belts.

Once a team of experts from the University of Buffalo, who were running a study funded by New York State, came in to test our reflexes and measure how well we did at certain gymnastics. The amazing part of this exercise was that in this case
our
meant boys
and
girls. The professors all wore matching tee-shirts and whistles around their necks woven in boondoggle. They carried clipboards and charts and wrote down all our dimensions and even wrote what we'd had for breakfast. They had stopwatches and made us go through a whole routine, including balance beams, high jumping, broad jumping, rings, the horse, the parallel bars, and the uneven parallel bars. We had to check in at each station and give them our name.

Mother Agnese gave the school a big lecture before they arrived about how the professor was not sure he wanted to come to Hennepin Hall because we had no formal athletics department. She said that we had to ask for God's help, so that these “so-called experts” could understand that Catholic faith was more integral to success than any planned athletic program. She pointed out that when Jesse Owens won at the Olympics, he thanked God first and then the United States. We all knelt on the hardwood floor and said the rosary in hopes that God would inspire us on the uneven parallel bars. She suggested we make the sign of the cross before
our journey on the course started and again after it finished.

Men arrived with trucks and set up equipment in the lunchroom while the whole school ate lunch at their desks, except for those who went home for lunch, and for me, who went alone to Bradshaw's Restaurant.

Of course the boys went first. They all wore pants while we had to wear our kilted uniforms, not ideal for doing reverse parallel or an “upside-down parrot” on the rings. Finally it was the girls' turn. Now I understood why I had trouble sitting at my desk. I was born to run through this obstacle course. I whipped through it so fast the college-student aide couldn't keep up. He yelled to the director, “Hey, we got a live one here,” after I'd finished the course and he checked my time. They raised everything and I tried the next level and the next, like a stairway to heaven, until it was only me and one other boy, Luther McCabe, from grade six. Luther was better at the rings than I because he had stronger arms and he could do a reverse faster than I could, but I beat him on every other thing — even the fifty-yard dash.

The physical education professors came back over weeks and taught me how to do the uneven parallel bars, use the blue chalk on my hands to absorb my sweat so I wouldn't slip, and how to bend my knees when I dismounted so I wouldn't hurt my back. On the balance bar I learned a routine of how to extend one leg in the front and one in the back and bend at the same time. My broad jump was something else again, and they had to take pictures to believe the distance at which I landed. However, the high jump was my speciality. I took to it as though I'd been a grasshopper in a previous life. Finally the whole school was watching as the professor raised the black-and-white-checkered
pole higher and higher, and each time I cleared it, landing triumphantly in the sand pit.

“Well, Sister, I've got to hand it to you,” remarked one of the professors, “you were certain they would perform well and they have. They are on average higher than the public school, and the McClure and the McCabe kids are amazing. McClure could have made it in the floor-exercise category but she is weak on the rings. She has strong long legs, and flexibility. My God, you don't even have a swing set.” I, in fact, did have a swing set and a jungle gym in my yard at home.

“Yes,” Mother Agnese said with her arms folded within the long drop sleeves of her uniform, simultaneously exhibiting a mysterious smile. “Well, we have our
own
ways of reaching for the best.”

“Sister, I hope that you don't mind when I tell you that you look exactly like Ingrid Bergman in
The Bells of Saint Mary's
, especially in that outfit.” Mother Agnese simply looked at him as though he were from another planet. Much to my horror, he continued as I practised. “I notice you don't have a western New York accent. Sounds East Coast to me.” Mother Agnese dealt with this by completely ignoring it.

I told Roy that the athletic director told Mother Agnese that she looked like
Ingrid Bergman
and referred to her habit as an
outfit
. I was completely scandalized. I suggested to Roy that maybe the professor didn't understand how awful it was to refer to a nun's person. At least I'd never heard it done. Roy didn't seem to think the professor was as off-base as I thought. He reflected upon it for a full minute and said, “There's no denying Mother Agnese is one
fine
lady, but I wouldn't want to run into her in a dark alley, even if it was a shortcut to heaven.”

Mother Agnese worked with me every day after school on the track-and-field equipment my father donated. We tried approaching the bar from every different angle to establish my optimal position. We worked on the straddle jump and developed an approach procedure which included the sign of the cross, taking off with my inside foot, planting, throwing my arms up. The most important bit was when to spring and when to lower my back leg from the straddle.

She and I went to Lewiston Porter High School and watched their team and listened to their coaches. I was so young that they found it amusing, and all the older boys and coaches helped me out and laughed and clapped when I vaulted over the bar. I followed our practised approach minus the sign of the cross since I didn't want to look like an apple polisher in front of all these big foreign Protestant creatures, some of whom even had whiskers. Mother Agnese put her entire body in front of me as I sprung forward and I fell to the ground in order to prevent bashing into her. Her starched habit was almost as wide as the twelve-foot bar. I could tell that the boys thought a nun was weird and they had never been in contact with one before. She made no effort to make them more comfortable. As I ground to a halt, she said, “Catherine, I believe that you forgot part of your takeoff procedure.”

Although I knew what she meant, the boys looked puzzled. I knew what I had to do; yet I hesitated because I was totally embarrassed to do it. I was young, but not so young that I didn't know what was ridiculous to teenagers. After all, I had a teenage babysitter every week and I listened to her as she talked on the phone. Knowing what I had to do, I reluctantly returned to the starting block, hung my head, and quickly made the sign of the
cross, and
then
planted my inside foot and ran at my usual forty-five-degree angle. The boys shook their heads in amazement at my height, patted my back, roughed up my hair, and made soothing sounds of approval, which were ambrosia to my ears; even Mother Agnese smiled.

On our way back to school, Mother Agnese asked me if I was embarrassed to be a Catholic. I'd been waiting for this. She told me I was a Catholic ambassador just as Jesse Owens was an ambassador for the black Americans and a foil for Hitler. I must always try and make converts and have exemplary behaviour in front of others. Did Joan of Arc deny her Catholicism? Did The Duke of Canterbury stand up to be counted when the king wanted to be divorced? She continued, “Catherine, it is easy to be a nation of sheep, but we must always stand up for Christ and His word. In every situation you're in, no matter how much you think you are alone, God is watching you. Stand up and be counted amongst His flock. Would you deny knowing your mother or father . . . or Roy?” I knew from that moment on, I would always make the sign of the cross before every approach.

The night before the Niagara Falls Junior Track and Field Meet, my mother and I were sitting in a booth at Schoonmaker's Restaurant with Mrs. McMaster and Trent, the class suck, who was basking in his recent glory after having won the diocesan science contest for his drippy display of osmosis, when Mrs. Schoonmaker came over and gave me a free Vernors and said, “Good luck tomorrow, Cath,” and Mr. Schoonmaker and the other bartender held up their glasses in a toast and told me not to jump over the bar.

Trent piped up with “Cathy, you do realize that your father was
Buffalo high hurdle champion, and then regional champ. You simply have his genes for jumping. I'm afraid unless you plan to become a Mexican jumping bean in later life, this genetic advantage will be of little use. I have genes for
science
.”

No one said anything, such as “Trent, how are you going to clean the test tubes — with your tongue?” Which is what we were all thinking as he gesticulated with his stubby frostbitten digits. Trent had a right to be bitter. My mother put her hand on mine at dinner, hoping I wouldn't retaliate. I think I remember this because my mother so rarely gave me any direction. She had never said one word about my involvement in the Trent river episode, but now I felt, as her shaking hand rested on my wrist, how hard the event must have been on her.