Free Blue Moon by James King Page A

verb or did not know the proper plural of goose, your outstretched hands could be subjected to brutal lashes from a thick ruler or strap. If you were unable to remember something assigned for homework, you were automatically assumed to be guilty of slovenliness and had to be punished accordingly.
    Mother Patricia Francis was the epitome of the brides of Christ. Every morning, she lurched herself into the classroom like somehuntsman certain that his prey was on the point of evading him. A member of a family whose considerable fortune was derived from Hamilton’s steel works, this nun had absolutely no interest in us as young women. She would have preferred teaching at Cathedral Boys’. Her limited imagination, fixated on football players, was excited by the idea of manliness, qualities which her students were forever excluded from possessing and thus pleasing her. And, paradoxically, she seemed genuinely hurt and angry that we did not display such attributes. At the time, I had no comprehension of how her strange notions—especially for a girls’ school—had come into being. Now, I am certain that she was sexually repressed and envied those of us who might, in time, receive the manly caresses from which her vow of chastity permanently disenfranchised her. As a child, she made me feel there was something inherently wrong with me because I was born female.
    I was fortunate enough to have one excellent teacher during my eight years at Loretto. Mother St. John was small, thin, and pale. Her complexion was splotchy, her nose overly pointed, and she suffered so dreadfully from eczema that she always wore thin white gloves. That there was something exceptional about this awkward young woman could be first glimpsed in the majestic way she carried herself.
    â€œWhy do we read?” That was the first question she posed to the assemblage of sixteen-year-olds gathered before her. Without waiting for anyone to venture a response, she proceeded to answer her own query. Enjoyment was the first item on her list, although she passed over it quickly. Moral and spiritual enlightenment were mentioned but not dwelt upon. “To see into the creative spirit, the heart of the imagination?” she suggested. The tone in her voice revealed that, as far as she was concerned, this was the only real answer.
    When she taught us, Mother stood still, at the dead centre of the front of the room. She spoke quietly but with great authority. If she were to offer a particularly new or startling insight, she would move to her far right and position herself by the window. “Emily Dickinson lived what from the outside seemed a humdrum existence. She was isolated in that large house in Amherst, Massachusetts. She knew first-hand the dreariness of so much of daily life, its essential emptiness. And yet she wrote her strange, contorted fragments of poems as protests against dreariness. They were tiny, isolated little screams, celebrating the radiance one can find in the everyday. Those lyricswere wrenched from her solitary heart.” When delivering herself of such observations, Mother’s voice became quieter than ever. With every fibre of my being, I longed to hear more, to find some entry into the mysteries of my own humdrum existence.
    In those days, that irrepressible wild girl Emily Brontö was my ideal rather than her more careful elder sister, Charlotte. I knew that Emily’s excess of life led to her early demise, but I could not help but be overcome with Catherine’s devotion to Heathcliff, the way in which the lovers mirrored each other. At some level of my being, I understood the cruel sadism of Heathcliff, the many ways in which he is an outcast and a reprobate. In contrast, the gothic romance of Jane and Rochester seemed tame, too irrevocably adult. The explosive language of Emily spoke to my heart, already one filled with bitterness.
    Later, it would be maintained by various investigators of my early life