Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,11

to me in the afternoon at the dormitory, frowning in poorly disguised disapproval behind her old-lady eyeglasses. Who ever knew so much happiness could be contained in one small envelope? If Tim missed more than a few days, I would become anxious and dash off two letters at once, wondering what was wrong. He would write back apologizing, saying how he’d been out hunting with his buddies over the weekend and so wasn’t able to answer my last letter as soon as he would’ve liked, but not to worry, I was always on his mind. I’d write again: How could he even think about going out hunting with his friends and having fun when I was locked up here in this prison for girls? Didn’t he have any feelings at all? And why had he signed “Love” instead of his usual “Love always” in the closing of his last letter? Maybe he didn’t miss me as much as I missed him. Maybe what he called “the best night of my life” wasn’t so great after all. Maybe we’d be better off just forgetting that anything ever happened between us…. And so on, until he would send me a reassuring letter by Express Mail, filled to the margins with the most tender sentiments a girl could ever want to read. On paper, I learned, even arguments can be beautiful.

I suppose even at the time a part of me relished the melodrama of it. We were every pair of young and divided lovers there had ever been. We were Romeo and Juliet. We were Abelard and Héloïse, we were Antony and Cleopatra. But we were greater than all of them, because we were real and alive and this was ours. And the secret knowledge of the profound and historic suffering we were forced to endure on account of our love made our separation bearable; it made our separation, I daresay, almost pleasurable. Our sweet, secret pain.

Go ahead, roll your eyes if you want. In this hyperactive age of emails and text messages, the kind of correspondence that Tim and I shared must seem like an anachronism to you. (Anachronism: something so old-fashioned that it’s almost ancient.) But I sincerely hope, dear Elizabeth, that someday you might have the pleasure of such an anachronism; that one day you’ll experience for yourself the irreplaceable joy of receiving letters from a lover.

This would hardly be a story worth telling if something bad didn’t happen next. Something bad did happen—something that put the period at the end of my first semester at Sacred Heart Academy, and that for me will always be the standard by which to measure just how cruel teenage girls can be to one another.

By May of that year I had been at Sacred Heart for four months, and while my affection for the school hadn’t grown any, I had settled into a kind of stoic acceptance of my internment. My days were kept especially busy because my parents, to save money, had enrolled me as work-study, which basically meant I was a full-time slave to the nuns. Six o’clock every morning, while the nuns were at chapel, a couple of other hardship students and I went to the kitchen to help Maddy, the cook, prepare breakfast. After that it was: morning bell, lunch, afternoon bell, study hour, help Maddy again, nuns’ dinner, girls’ dinner, clean up, lights out, sleep. And then again: six o’clock, help Maddy, morning bell, lunch, afternoon bell, study hour …

This conventlike regime was amazingly effective in stifling any wayward emotions a girl might have had. Whoever invented it, I thought, must’ve been a genius. I barely had time to remember how miserable I was.

I’d since become friends with the other charity cases, too: Soo Chee Chong, whose tutoring helped me through Freshman Science; and Anne Harding, whose stiff demeanor hid a bitingly sharp sense of humor that, like her own steely orthopedics, gave us misfortunates the support we needed to carry ourselves upright through the halls of Sacred Heart. During study period, when I wasn’t writing letters to Tim, I studied, and my grades gradually began to improve. I received an “A—very nice!” for an essay on Pride and Prejudice for Sister Mary Margaret’s Freshman Rhetoric—the first A I’d ever received for any essay, anywhere. This pleased my parents, naturally, and validated in their minds their decision to send me to a private Catholic school: they had done the right thing. Those nuns knew their stuff.

Still, in spite