Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,10

wore, and I couldn’t get my navy blue knee socks to stay up the way they were supposed to. In almost every class I had to stand, say my name, where I was from, and what I liked to do. “Tell the class something about yourself, Laura,” the nuns asked. That last question stumped me until I hit on “I like to read”—which at least pleased the Freshman Rhetoric teacher, Sister Mary Margaret.

At lunch I ended up sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a bunch of other misfits. A more forlorn group of girls you couldn’t find. There were the girls on hardship scholarships, like me; there was one pathologically shy Asian girl, Soo Chee Chong, who never spoke a word and was ashamed of her name; there was Christy Lee, one of five black students at the school, who crept around so silently that she looked like she wished she were invisible; and there was Anne Harding, locked in a monstrous steel neck brace that didn’t allow her to turn her head independent of her body. We were, I later learned, what the other girls called the charity cases.

Have you ever wondered why so many unfortunate people seem so spiteful? Why they so often refuse—despise, even—efforts made to help them? I know why. Because I sat at their table, I know why. Within a week at Sacred Heart Academy, I had learned what every charity case knows: that any act of kindness can also be cruel. If some girl happened to be nice to us, we knew she was only being nice out of a sense of Christian duty, because she felt she had to be nice to us. And if some other girl wasn’t nice, well, that only proved how rotten all people really were at the core. So we, the charity cases, were doomed to be doubly bitter: bitter when rejected, and bitter when not.

Lucky for you, Liz, you don’t seem to have this problem. You’ve always had plenty of friends, and none of them charity cases as far as I can tell. Still, I suspect that all of us, no matter how fortunate, feel like charity cases at some time or another in our lives.

• • •

My only consolation that first week at Sacred Heart came in the form of a letter, delivered to me by Sister Agatha late one afternoon at the dormitory. Even now, thirty-four years later, I remember the shape and feel of that envelope, with the Zachary return address in the upper left corner, the six-cent Dwight D. Eisenhower stamp in the right, and my name square in the middle. And inside, the folded sheet of notebook paper covered with his handwriting; handwriting that was so like his character, teetering between an adolescent awkwardness and a touchingly earnest effort to appear upright and manly.

“Dear Laura,” Tim began. He went on to say how he wasn’t much of a writer, but he wanted me to know that he missed me more than I could imagine. If anyone was to blame for my being sent away, he wrote, it was him. He was the man, after all, and he should’ve been more responsible for our safety that evening. Not that he regretted it, though. That night, no matter what came after, would always stand for him as the best night of his life. Because it was that night, he wrote, that he found out what true love is.

Thus began our correspondence, one that would continue for as long as I was a student at Sacred Heart, and that, in the early days at least, was like a lifeline, tethering me to a tree of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.

I wrote back right away to tell Tim how much I loved and missed him, too. I wrote about my first miserable night in the dormitory, and my roommate, Melissa, and the charity cases at the lunch table. I wrote him letters in the back of my notebook from the last row of Freshman Science while Sister Helen—Yellin’ Helen—lectured on the periodic table. And in the afternoons, while other girls were out flirting with boys from Cathedral High School, or going to piano lessons, or attending basketball practice, I would write to Tim from the library, long shadows slanting across the dusty tabletops as I emptied out my loneliness onto page after page of white paper.

I came to rely desperately on his responses. My heart jumped up whenever Sister Hagatha-Agatha delivered another letter