Called Out of Darkness Page 0,17

ferocious with the boys. I can't look back on those times without feeling a special reverence for those in religious life; and happily, I remember how beautifully visible they were in the Catholic city of New Orleans, nuns in pairs, riding free on the streetcars and buses, and the priests often wearing their full-length black cassocks, with large rosaries hanging from their broad leather belts.

I felt a special kinship for the Redemptorist Fathers. They had educated my father. And they were our priests. They were passionate in their sermons, and frequently their sermons were events. I remember being riveted by the description of how the Romans had martyred a young male saint. And I recall the passionate anti-Communist words spoken from the pulpit. I don't know how many priests there were in our parish, except there were a great number and they were always busy, coming and going from the rectory on Constance Street, saying Masses in two giant churches and in one nearby chapel, and hearing Confessions from an enormous body of parishioners on Friday nights. I remember names like Father McCarthy, Father O'Connoll, Father Flynn, Father Greenberg, Father Steffens, Father Baudry, Father Dillenbeck, Father Toups. I don't remember anyone ever calling a priest by his first name in those days. And I never heard the slightest word of scandal regarding these men. In fact, it's almost impossible to believe there was any scandal. And perhaps in those days, in that parish, there was not.

Let me return now to that first school building.

There were two lush and lovely gardens attached to this property, one on either side of the main building, and we did often pass through one of these gardens to go into the music room. The other was the nuns' garden, and that was a matter for peeping again.

I have one special and radiant memory connected to the garden by the music room. We were passing there one day, perhaps to go to sing in preparation for a school pageant, when we came upon a group of older girls who were gathered there because they were making a "Retreat." Now a Retreat is a period of a few days during which one remains totally silent, and prays and listens to sermons on religious matters; there were closed Retreats at Retreat Houses to which Catholics went where they remained under strict rules of silence both day and night. And there were open Retreats which we made at some point during the school year.

And as we came into this garden, one of the girls, my cousin Kitty Belle Murphy, looked up and smiled at me and greeted me cheerfully and kindly by my old name. "Well, how do you do, Howard Allen?" she said with a lovely generosity that was characteristic of her every time I ever spoke to her.

I remember being startled, not by the old name, but by the friendliness with which she greeted me, that she didn't mind people knowing I was her cousin. I already had a profound sense by then that I was a rather disreputable or ques-tionable person. And Kitty Belle Murphy was perfect in every respect.

She was the youngest girl in a family of eight which was a model Christian family, and her mother, our aunt Lillian, was one of the most beloved people in our world. Uncle Cecil Murphy, the father of the eight children, was the perfect model of a Catholic man. Kitty had a great glow-ing generosity of spirit very like her mother, and she remains in this memory of mine nestled among the flowers and near to the Grotto of the Virgin, a large stone edifice, in which the Blessed Mother stood with arms out, appearing to the kneeling figure of St. Bernadette. No Catholic school existed in those days that didn't have a grotto, with the Virgin and St. Bernadette. We all knew the Virgin had appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes, France, and that there was a great miraculous shrine there where people were constantly healed by the powerful waters that had sprung from the earth at the command of the Virgin to Bernadette.

Kitty was a saint for me as certainly as was Bernadette.

Indeed, Kitty had a saintly and lovely sister named Bernadette, and she too was a shining light in my childhood, and my years of growing up. After my mother's death, the Murphy girls were like my elder sisters, and they helped me with many of the small problems that a teenage girl confronts.