Saint Training (4 page)

In God’s love,

Mother Monica

Saint Mary Magdalene Convent and School

A
pril showers bring May flowers,” Anne was singing as she watched the sky empty itself in torrents out the bedroom window.

Mary Clare sat up straight in her bed. “Oh
no,”
she said, thinking about the dozens of molasses and chocolate chip cookies she had baked last night for her sale today. She had even spent forty cents of the money she’d already collected as an investment in the chocolate chips. But if it kept raining like this, she could forget earning the rest of the money for Gabriella’s First Communion supplies before tomorrow. She still needed $2.25.

“You look funny,” Anne said.

Mary Clare turned to look in the mirror. She had rolled her hair in soup cans to try, once again, to straighten it. Instead, the cans cluttered her bed and the floor, except the two that dangled off the left side of her head. The rest of her hair was just as curly as could be. Maybe it was a sign that God wanted her to become a nun and cover it up, once and for all. A saint would let go of her pride. The best Mary Clare could do was to offer her humiliation up to Jesus.

“You look funny too,” she said to Anne, who had wrapped
herself in the white lace curtains so only her freckled face and blue eyes were visible. “You look like a fancy kind of nun.”

“I wish nuns really did wear lace veils,” Anne said.

“Good idea,” Mary Clare said. She made a mental note to remember lace veils in case she decided to start her own convent. She had been thinking about that. If she started her own convent she would be the Mother Superior for certain. Saint Clare had started her own convent, and that was probably why she got made into a saint. The idea was becoming her backup plan in case she couldn’t get the job as a Good Shepherd nun.

Mary Clare watched as Anne twisted the curtains tighter. “If you pull those curtains down you’ll be in big trouble,” she said.

The storm made it so dark outside that Mary Clare wanted to crawl back in bed and pull the covers over her head. But it was already 9:30 according to the alarm clock on her dresser. She wondered why her mother hadn’t called her to help get the kids ready for the 11:00 Mass. Mary Clare reluctantly collected the cans that had failed to straighten her hair and meandered down the stairs. She found her mother in the kitchen reading a book by Betty Freidan. The kitchen smelled like coffee and cigarettes and whatever sweet thing was in the oven. By the looks of the full ashtray in front of her, it appeared that her mother had been sitting there for quite some time. Mary Clare winced when she saw her mother’s red-rimmed eyes. When she reached for her coffee cup, Mary Clare stopped her.

“Mom, what are you doing? You forgot to fast for Communion!” Her mother looked up briefly at the clock, then turned her attention back to her book. This was so different from the way her mother used to be. Her mother was so careful that everyone remembered to fast before Mass, she’d tie rags around the faucets to remind them.

“I’m not going,” her mother said.

Mary Clare looked at her mom carefully. She didn’t look like she was dying or anything. Missing Sunday Mass was a sin. Mary Clare pulled up a chair next to her mother to get a better look. Her mother had no makeup on and was wearing old—practically ragged—maternity clothes. Other than the red-rimmed eyes, she just looked sad.

“Mom, are you sick?”

“Sort of,” her mother answered. She hoisted herself up from the chair and waddled over to the oven, as if she’d already gained her usual thirty pounds in her pregnancy. “Sick and tired,” she murmured under her breath. “Just sick and tired.”

Now Mary Clare was frightened. Her mother was losing her faith. Sister Regina, Mary Clare’s third grade teacher, had warned about this. How adults sometimes just wandered away from their faith and could be lost, forever, to the Kingdom of Heaven. She couldn’t let that happen.

“Mom, you have to…”

Mary Clare’s mother slammed the pan of poppy-seed coffee cake she’d retrieved from the oven onto the top of the cooling rack.

“Don’t you tell me what I ‘have to,’ Mary Clare! I have been doing what I ‘have to’ my entire life, and I won’t have you or your father or…even the Church tell me what I ‘have to’ do.”

Mary Clare nodded. She didn’t think her shocked vocal chords could manage a peep just then. She noticed the bookmark in
The Feminine Mystique.
Her mother was halfway through it. And from the number of cigarette butts in the ashtray, it looked like she had been reading all night. Could that book be stealing her mother’s faith?

This was the very reason the Holy Catholic Church sent lists home of “approved” and “prohibited” shows to watch on television. She hadn’t seen one yet, but there had to be lists of
prohibited books as well. She would have to find a way to read that book to find out what was happening to her mother.

“I’m sorry, Mary Clare. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.” Her mother wrapped Mary Clare in a vanilla-and-tobacco-and-coffee-smelling hug. “Now, be my angel and run down to the basement to get a pair of Martha’s underpants from the dryer. She put on her own dress but told me she didn’t have clean underwear.”

Mary Clare did as she was told, but once downstairs she decided to fold the whole load of clothes. Each member of the family had either a basket or box for clean clothes, and Mary Clare carefully separated each item into the right pile. When she was almost finished, her mother called to her.

“I’m running Luke over to church. He’s serving at the eleven o’clock Mass. Please get Johnny dressed—it’s getting late.”

Mary Clare ran back upstairs, forgetting about the underpants. She still had to get herself dressed and was running out of time.

“Your mother’s not feeling well,” Dad said as he ushered Mark, Mary Clare, Anne, Gabriella, Margaret, Martha, and Johnny into the car. Matthew had stayed at the seminary this weekend, but it was still just as crowded. Mary Clare asked if all the girls had remembered head coverings for church, but the question got lost in Margaret and Martha’s squabble over who had to sit on the floor.

By the time Dad had let them out at the front door so they wouldn’t all get drenched, Mass had already begun. They stood in the vestibule waiting for their father to park the car and join them. Even the short distance from the car to the door had left them wet.

“They’re at the confiteor already,” Mark hissed through closed teeth. He glared. “This is so embarrassing.”

Mary Clare looked out over the congregation. Sure enough, they were reciting the prayer that asked God to forgive their sins. She was embarrassed too, but she was too busy checking all the kids to give into it just then. “Where’s your chapel veil?” she hissed at Gabriella. Gabriella shrugged. Mary Clare made the girls search their pockets but they came up empty-handed. Finally Mary Clare pulled a Kleenex from her pocket. She found a bobby pin to attach it to Gabriella’s head.

Mark rolled his eyes. “From now on I’m walking to Mass,” he proclaimed just as their father walked through the door.

“You can start by walking home today,” he said.

Mark glanced nervously at the rain, but then his face hardened. “Fine,” he said.

Going into church late made Mark angry every time. The early birds always took the middle pews and people worked their way back from there. By the time Mary Clare’s family arrived, the only seats left would be in the front of the church. A somber usher would walk them past row after row of the congregation, who would turn from prayer to watch the motley O’Brians make their way to the front of the church. Today there was only one pew in front of them.

The minute the priest started saying the Gloria, Mary Clare knew what was about to happen. She turned to see Anne and Gabriella mouthing the words to the popular Van Morrison song. “Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A. GLORIA!” Mark snickered, but Mary Clare and her father glared at the girls. Mary Clare tried not to think about how many people behind them were staring.

Gradually, Mary Clare pulled her attention away from her family and into the service. But when Father Williams started the sermon, she decided to pray rather than try to follow what
he was saying. Even Saint Theresa would have had trouble listening. She prayed that her mother would not lose her faith, and that she would be okay with having another baby. She prayed for God to bring her family enough money, for her parents and all her brothers and sisters, for the pagan babies and unpopular kids and the poor souls in purgatory. She thanked God that the long winter was over and that they would soon be out of school and able to go swimming every day. She prayed to win the essay contest on vocations so she’d know that God accepted her deal to take care of her family if she became a saint. Finally, she asked God to inspire her to find a way to get the two dollars and twenty-five cents she still needed to turn in to Sister Agony.

She was abruptly pulled out of prayer when Johnny dropped his picture prayer book over the pew and practically fell over trying to get it from the floor in front of them. As Mary Clare pulled him back, Martha tried to retrieve it. She bent over the pew as far as she could, revealing a
bare bottom!
There was an audible gasp from the row behind them, followed by whispers and giggles. Mark pulled Martha roughly back to her seat. Mary Clare hadn’t seen his face so red since the boys played cowboys and Indians years before and Mark painted his face like a warrior.

Underpants! Mary Clare remembered far too late. That’s what she had gone downstairs to get.

Then Johnny started to cry because he wanted his book, Martha cried because Mark had been mean to her, and Gabriella took off the Kleenex she was wearing as a hair covering to wipe both of their tears. Mary Clare got the two kids to smile at Luke, who looked angelic in his server’s garb but was looking anxiously at his family. When he saw that Johnny and Martha were smiling at him, he wiggled his ears in that hilarious way of his. Both kids laughed and stopped crying. Unfortunately, most of
the congregation laughed too, which made Father Williams furrow his eyebrows and raise his voice as he consecrated the host.

Mary Clare lowered her eyes and prayed with her whole heart to be invisible. It didn’t work. She didn’t dare look at her father, who she knew would be furious, or Mark, who would be mortified.

After Mass, Mary Clare was grateful that the family was in the front of the church. It meant that they would be the last people out of the sanctuary and wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. But a few of her parents’ friends waited for them in the vestibule. Mary Clare ignored the adults and held Martha’s hand tight. She was surprised when she heard laughter and realized it was coming from Mr. Zimmerman. “It certainly made for a memorable service,” he was saying to her father. She looked up to see her father’s angry look relax into a smile. Maybe his mood would soften now.

As the family raced through the parking lot traffic to avoid getting drenched, Mary Clare commented that Mark had left immediately after Communion.

“Where’s Mark?” Anne asked.

“Walking,” Mary Clare and their father chorused.

“If we pass him on the way we’ll pick him up,” Dad said. Mary Clare was relieved to hear the tenderness in his voice. She hoped they’d pick him up within the first block or two.

But they didn’t see him on the way home. They didn’t talk about what happened in church, either, because Johnny wailed the whole time. He was wet and hungry and didn’t want to sit on anybody’s lap, which wasn’t possible considering how crowded the car was.

As Mary Clare was setting the table for Sunday brunch, she caught a glimpse of a soaked Mark racing up the stairs. But by the time they were ready to eat, Mark joined them in dry clothes. He sat as far away from Dad as possible, which meant he
had to wait for each platter of scrambled eggs, sliced ham, and poppy seed coffee cake to get to his side of the table. “Can’t you guys pass a little faster?” he complained while Martha struggled with the mechanics of getting a spoonful of eggs on her plate. “Everything’s gonna be cold.”

Martha pouted. Mary Clare was ready to jump up and help her but Mark got to her first. He smiled at Martha to show he wasn’t mad at her. He heaped way too many eggs on her plate and then, seeing the surprised look on her face, put half back. Martha laughed.

“I’m wearing underpants now,” she reassured Mark.

“Good,” Mark said, and smiled at his youngest sister a second time.

By the time brunch was over and cleanup complete, the rain had stopped. It was still far too wet and sloppy to set up a table outside, and Mary Clare had pretty much given up on selling cookies when a few neighborhood kids started showing up. Mary Clare sold six cookies sitting behind the kitchen table. Thirty cents. Not even enough to cover the chocolate chips she’d bought. Still, she had pulled together $10.55 out of the $12.50 she needed.

She ended up giving cookies to everybody in the family, and because she felt desperate about the $1.95 she still needed, she ate a few herself.

When Mary Clare went to her room to rest off the awful feeling of too many cookies and monetary doom, all of her glow-in-the-dark statues were lined up on the dresser glowing. At first she was irritated. She wondered how the little kids had gotten up to the shoe box she kept them in on the highest shelf in the closet. But as she looked at them all lined up, Mary Clare had a brilliant idea. Forget selling cookies. She could have a different kind of sale—a private sale—where she’d invite only the kids
who would benefit most from owning one or two of the glow-in-the-dark statues she’d gotten from the nuns over the years. It would be both a sacrifice and “good works.”

The Healy twins would be good candidates. They were Catholic but surely neither had ever gotten an A in conduct, and she remembered Billy eying one of her statues wistfully. That was a while ago—maybe in third grade—but they still might want to buy one. But it was the public school kids in the neighborhood who she thought would most benefit. There were Tina Anderson and Becky Turner. Neither was Catholic but they were in the same grade as Mary Clare. They lived down the hill with just one house in between each other. Then there were the DeLuca kids, who lived across the street in the Southern-style white house with the rambling porch and didn’t go to any church at all. She considered Joannie Marino, who was also in her class and did go to Saint Maria Goretti School. She probably had tons of glow-in-the-dark statues because she was so shy she hardly ever opened her mouth. If Mary Clare was selling angels from her collection, she’d consider contacting Joannie. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t. She loved them too much.