Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,49

Evelyn and Agatha. Two Beta Club girls stared at me, entranced, as they slowly sorted mail into teachers’ pigeonholes. When Sister Mary Margaret arrived, she shooed them away.

“Laura—” she said, stopping in front of me. The oversized wooden cross swayed against her tunic as she took a moment to collect herself. “First of all, is this true?” I nodded. “And what’s written there, is that … Browning?”

“He died,” I explained. “In Vietnam. Three weeks ago, just before he was supposed to come home.”

She brought a hand to her mouth. “Oh dear. Oh dear, you poor child. I’m so sorry.”

“There was a funeral, in Zachary. And I didn’t … You know I didn’t plan to do this, Sister.”

“No …”

“It was something … I had to do. For him. It’s for him.”

She nodded slowly, as if forcing herself to understand. “Yes.”

“I didn’t have a choice. This is what I had to do. To remind me … so I never forget … how much he loved me.” I looked away. It seemed hopeless. “They won’t understand.”

Sister Mary Margaret was quiet, as if thinking things through. After a moment she sighed and said, as much to herself as to me, “No. No, I don’t suppose they will.” I saw her glance anxiously at Sister Evelyn’s office. Then she bent down and gave me a hug. “Are you all right here?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said and, straightening her back, went in to join the others.

Sister Mary Margaret tried her best for me that day, I’m sure, but it was an impossible defense. She argued that, technically, I had done nothing wrong; there was no prohibition against tattoos in the school handbook. “There’s no rule against murderers, either, but we don’t allow them in the school,” answered Sister Agatha. Sacred Heart Academy, she reminded everyone, didn’t even allow girls to wear earrings to school.

Trying to deflect some of the blame onto herself, Sister M&M then confessed her role in the affair. She told how she was the one who had secretly passed letters from the boy in Vietnam, willfully violating the principal’s own orders, and thus leading the poor girl down the confused path that brought her to this desperate, grief-stricken end….

The good nun, I found out later, would pay for this admission. But for now, she succeeded only in delaying my immediate expulsion from the school. I was put on disciplinary probation until the academic staff council could meet and decide my fate. That very afternoon, I was sent home with my parents to Zachary, “so as not to disturb the other girls.”

It wasn’t a happy return home, as you can imagine. I kept to my bedroom, rereading Tim’s letters. My parents again wondered where they had gone wrong. At dinner, passing the potatoes and string beans, they tried not to look directly at me, the tattooed lady sitting at their table. Sister M&M phoned occasionally regarding the status of my case; the academic staff council wouldn’t meet until Friday afternoon, but in the meantime she was trying to lobby the other teachers on my behalf. It didn’t look promising. I had been suspended once before. And as a work-study student, admitted only through the charity of the nuns, I was already practically provisional. It wasn’t like I was the daughter of an important alumna, a legacy student; SHA could let me go without much fuss.

For myself, the tragedy wasn’t so much in the prospect of losing my diploma from SHA as it was in losing my chance to enter LSU. I had been awarded a small scholarship in the Journalism Department, and being expelled from high school would certainly mean forfeiting that. The university might not even accept me at all after this. I saw myself becoming the tattooed outcast everyone already thought I was, slinking around dark alleyways, thin and mean and full of sin.

You remember the charity cases, Liz. I can’t credit myself for the actions they took. When I first arrived at SHA, I had clung to them only as castaways in a life raft must cling to one another. It was instinctual, necessary—not born of any special generosity or sacrifice on my part. That’s why what they did for me seemed that much more surprising and, in retrospect, that much more valorous.

The first was Soo Chee Chong. She slipped away from campus after her last class one day midweek and found her way downtown. It must have been far more difficult for her to enter the