Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,9

Evelyn tilted her head to one side below the picture of Jesus.

At that point I had no feeling one way or another about Sacred Heart. But I despised my parents just then, for all they’d done and for all they stood for—their bigotry, their hypocrisy, their low-down meanness. And I knew my relationship with Tim was as good as dead, so staying at home in Zachary or going away to Baton Rouge hardly made any difference to me. For the hopeless, one prison is as good as the next.

Sister Evelyn waited for my response. Behind her back, Jesus pointed to his burning red heart, commanding me to speak.

“I want a better life for myself,” I said at last. Which was the truth at least as far as I could tell it.

I’ve sometimes wondered since then why the school took me in. I suspect Sister Evelyn knew there was more to our story than what we were telling. We weren’t the first non-Catholic family to come knocking for admission since the integration of the Louisiana public schools was announced, after all. And if that wasn’t the reason, well then, everyone knew that Sacred Heart was where families sent problem girls who needed reform. None of this was spoken of openly, of course. And regardless of the truth of the situation, I believe the nuns in their own blinkered way preferred to see my enrollment simply as one more victory for the faith: a poor Baptist farm girl from Zachary had been brought into the fold. One more ransomed pagan baby, saved.

Sunday evening before the start of classes for the new year 1970, Sister Agatha led me and my parents down a black-and-white linoleum tiled corridor to my room. Sacred Heart Academy used to have one wing of the convent building reserved for a small number of boarding students. That year, I remember Sister Agatha telling us, there were thirty-two—“Now thirty-three, of course, counting you.”

It seemed like all thirty-two came to their doors to witness my arrival. I had my suitcase, my mother carried the linens, my father had a cardboard box full of books and things. Sister Agatha explained to us about the house rules, the hall phone, my work-study obligations. My new roommate, Melissa Thayer from Hammond, watched as my mother hugged me goodbye, and my father, pushed forward by my mother, kissed me stiffly on the cheek. He gave me five dollars and they left.

“Welcome to the nunnery,” Melissa said when they had all gone. She was tall and thin, with sharp features and an abrupt manner of speaking. “Laura Jenkins,” she said, looking me up and down. “Did you just come from the farm, or what?”

“Zachary,” I said.

“Oh. Wow. Sorry,” Melissa said.

What has been the most lonesome night in your life so far? Could you pick out one, say, “That was the worst of them all”? For me it would have to be that first night at Sacred Heart. Separated from my boyfriend, abandoned by my parents, I felt like the most unloved fifteen-year-old girl in the universe. As the stark reality of my situation sank in, I was filled with a loneliness that ached in every bone and tissue of my body. My mother and father weren’t going to be overcome with remorse and return the next day to bring me home. Tim wasn’t going to appear on the lawn below the window to carry me off in his arms. Nothing was going to get better. Pale winter moonlight shone through the barred window at the head of the room, casting a gray grid on the floor. Buried down under a too-thin blanket, I tried to stifle my sobs so as not to disturb my new roommate. Sometime around midnight, Melissa called from across the room:

“Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep over here.”

• • •

To be a high school transfer student is hard, but to be a midyear high school transfer student is even harder. Most of the girls at Sacred Heart came from old-time Baton Rouge families, daughters of daughters of alumnae, and so a new out-of-towner like me was a great curiosity. I might have been a chimpanzee just delivered from the zoo for all the stares I got that first morning. I kept tugging at my new uniform; it didn’t seem to fit right—it was too tight in all the wrong places and too loose in the others. I was wearing ugly thick-soled lace-ups instead of the smart penny loafers the other girls