Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

Kathleen swallows as Sister Saint Monica scans the page. The other girls start whispering. “Silence!” Silence. Sister dangles the book before Kathleen and commands, “Share a few gems with the class.”

Kathleen takes the book and bites her lip.

“Loudly and clearly. I for one do not wish to miss a single charming word.”

Kathleen starts anywhere, reads, “‘I often catch a glimpse —’”

Singsong: “I can’t hear you, Kathleen.”

“‘— of dark robes —’”

“Louder.”

“‘— passing across the little open space yonder —’”

“Good, continue.”

“‘— with something of the longing for forbidden fruit.’”

Giggles on all sides. Kathleen takes a breath, blinks. Continues, “‘Doubtless one would get a knowledge of good and evil by being better acquainted with convent life. I suspect more of the evil than of the good … ’” Gasps from the other girls. Kathleen waits, her eyes on the book, please don’t make me continue.

“Continue.”

“‘but Papa forbade me to hold any intercourse whatsoever with the Romanist ladies.’”

Silence, shocked and appalled. Sorrowful sister. “Girls, profit and perpend. This is a piece of unalloyed trash, a libel hatched by a low type of woman whose refusal to publish under her true name testifies to the evil of her intentions. No one but an idiot or a fiend could derive pleasure between its covers; which, Kathleen, are you?”

Kathleen can’t look up. All around her, petty triumph.

She forces herself to answer, which is, in itself, a defiance. “Neither.”

Sister Saint Monica confiscates the book and swishes away to her desk.

Sister Saint Monica is the one teacher who does not subscribe to the untouchability of Kathleen Piper. She has been looking for an opportunity to give the girl the gift of mortification, but it hasn’t been easy; Kathleen is a model student and it is well nigh impossible to put one’s finger on the insolent pride that colours her flawless manners — not to mention the unsubstantiated but unmistakeable whiff of immodesty. “I’ll teach her,” thinks Sister Saint Monica, locking the offending book in her desk.

“She’ll learn,” thinks Kathleen, staring at the inkwell, hot with humiliation. “She’ll be sorry, I’ll kill her with a stake in her heart, I’ll be famous and she’ll be ugly and dead, I’d like to poke out her eye, I’ll show her. She’s not worth showing.” Kathleen bites her lip. Hard. “I’ll show them all.” She feels her eyes brim up. Don’t cry. Don’t. Stare. Harder.

Kathleen glares out the window at the blast furnaces of Dominion Iron and Steel; imagines herself bursting in flames from the stack and soaring all the way to La Scala. Or anywhere, so long as it’s far from this one-horse burg, this wretched rock, these horrible girls —

“I said! Advance to the front.”

Kathleen starts and looks up. Sister is waiting on her high platform in front of the blackboard — Ice Age, Cretaceous, mass extinction — what now? Kathleen slides from her desk, leaving palm prints on its surface, snagging her woollen stocking on a splinter, and walks the gauntlet of female eyes.

“Face the class.”

Kathleen obeys. The next thing she knows, she is showered with scrap paper and pencil shavings, and the lights have gone out.

“Since you’re so eager to fill your head with garbage,” says Sister Saint Monica, “you may as well have a garbage can on your shoulders.”

Shrieks of laughter.

“That’s enough, girls. Now, Kathleen. Sing for us.”

Kathleen is paralysed. Blinking into the darkness of the metal can, she feels sweat trickling under her arms, between her legs.

“You’re a ‘songstress’, aren’t you?” — whack! — the yardstick against the side of the can.

Kathleen is spared the sight of row after row of girls with their hands clamped over their mouths, plugging their noses against hilarity, crossing their legs — “I said sing!”

Only one song presents itself, perversely, to her mind, and she begins, muffled and echoey: “‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen … ’” — hysterical laughter, sister gives them free rein — “‘Across the ocean wild and wide —

“Louder.”

“‘To where your heart has ever been — Since first you were my bonny bride’” — a bare thread of a voice is all that’s available to Kathleen, and it breaks.

“Continue.”

“‘The roses all have left your cheek — I’ve watched them fade away and die — Your voice is sad whene’er you speak. And tears bedim your loving eyes…. ’”

Kathleen is finally crying. Helpless, enraged. What’s worse is that she hates this song — old-fashioned, sickly sweet, nothing to do with her but her name: “‘Oh I will take you back, Kathleen, To where your heart will feel no pain — And when the fields are fresh and green, I’ll take you to your home again.’”

The song finished, Kathleen waits in dread to be dismissed — how can she possibly remove this can from her head in front of everyone? She knows she must, eventually. Some day. She has to go to the loo. She feels as though she’s wet her pants with shame. Surely that’s not possible, surely she would know if she had…. Kathleen realizes that she’s been standing there for some time. And that Sister Saint Monica has resumed the lesson.

“… And what occasioned the putting aside of Saint Augustine’s African concubine?”

“Oh, sister, sister, I know —”

“One at a time, girls.”

Kathleen stands motionless until the bell signals lunch and she hears Sister Saint Monica swish out after the last pupil.

Kathleen has no friends. She has her work and she’s grateful for that because friends are simply not to be had at Holy Angels. Not that Kathleen goes out of her way: “Snob.” Seeing her up there, anonymous, with a green metal garbage can for a head, hiding that conceited face — why do people think she’s so pretty, her hair is horrible, it’s red . That’s all it is. Not “auburn,” not “strawberry blonde,” red. Like a demon, like a floozie. Kathleen’s ordeal at the hands of Sister Saint Monica soothes a lot of badly ruffled feathers.

The truth is, Kathleen has no idea how to go about making a friend. She has been trained to live for that glorious place, the Future. Friends are superfluous. This is reinforced by the tacit understanding that she is not to bring anyone home. Something to do with Mumma. She and Daddy would never say it, but they both know it.

Other girls spend nights at each others’ homes, tucked in together talking till dawn. Kathleen overhears them whispering in the lavatory. She never finds out that Daddy would not let her spend a night at a friend’s house, because she is never invited. James is planning to send her all the way to Italy by herself, but that’s different. That’s Life. The other is Nonsense. And who knows what another girl’s father might get into his head? Kathleen is chaperoned every moment but she does not see it that way. Freedom consists of being insulated from the envy and ignorance of the unimportant people who temporarily surround her.

Now, after five years at Holy Angels, Kathleen would not know a friend if one sank its teeth into her wrist — which is more or less what she expects from the mass of other girls. She skirts them cautiously, as if they were dangerous wild animals loitering about a common watering-hole ready to pounce, you’d never know why or what hit you. She fears them, sharp glinting creatures, and hasn’t a clue what they talk about or how they do it. How they merge into gregarious packs. Kathleen is in fact horribly shy, but no one would ever suspect it — after all, she gets up and sings in front of halls full of people.