of sin. In other words, you didn't have to find Albert Camus on a written index to know that you couldn't read Albert Camus. All you had to know was that he was an atheist and an existentialist. That made his work forbidden under pain of mortal sin.
In the world I'd left behind there had been much talk of the dangers of secular colleges. One teaching sister had told us in class that it was better for a Catholic not to go to college at all than to go to a non-Catholic college. My father had dismissed that notion out of hand.
So had I.
I needed a college education. My father and mother had not had college educations. I needed to work to become somebody. And there were no Catholic universities that I could conceivably afford.
There was also much talk in my late childhood of people
"reading themselves out of the church." If you asked too much, read too much, questioned too much, you would wind up outside the church and it would be your own damned fault. I took that to heart, as I took everything I'd been taught as a Catholic. But I was hungry for knowledge, hungry for information, hungry for facts.
As I roamed in the library and the bookstore at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas, I began to lose heart.
Sexually, I was in an agony of strong desire and impossible curiosity. It was a mortal sin to have solitary sex; to kiss; to do anything basically except to have conjugal relations in marriage which were entirely open to procreation. So this was an undercurrent of constant pressure and pain.
But the question of the modern world became bigger and bigger to me with every passing day. The old world of New Orleans was gone beyond reprieve, along with all its protective accoutrements, and I was no longer interested in it.
I wanted to read all the books I saw in Voertman's Bookstore, near the campus. I gazed at big thick trade paperbacks, with rich interesting covers, and names on them like Kierke-gaard and Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Immanuel Kant, and Aldous Huxley, and I wanted to know what was in those books. I wanted to read Nabokov's Lolita, even if it was a scandal. I wanted to see tantalizing and condemned foreign films.
My education, which had left off to some extent with my mother's death, resumed in earnest in college classrooms, as ideas poured forth from my professors on various topics ranging from sociological studies of American class structure to the preeminence of the style of the great writer Ernest Hemingway, who in our Catholic schools had been completely dismissed and ignored.
I was around students who knew much more of contemporary literature than I did, and who discussed subjects I'd never thought to discuss. They were hungry for learning, and there was no barrier to their learning. And they were good and wholesome people.
My faith began to crack apart.
All around me I saw not only interesting people, but essentially good people, people with ethics, direction, goals, values - and these people weren't Catholic. They negotiated their moral decisions with considerable thought but without the guidance, it seemed, of any established church. I liked them. I was learning from them, learning from fellow classmates as well as teachers, something which had not happened to me earlier in the purgatory of childhood where it seemed other children were monsters with precious little to teach.
Most of my new friends took sexual experiment rather casually. All girls were cautious in these times; pregnancy was the ever-present threat. Contraceptives could only be got from doctors and by married people. There was no birth control pill. Young women did not slip into affairs easily, but their reasons for this were practical, and they were as intimate as they felt it was safe to be, and they weren't tormented by notions of sin. They knew a great deal more than me about sexuality, and their attitudes seemed wholesome and natural.
My ignorance of sexuality, in fact, became something of a running joke.
But the lust for the modern world was infinitely greater in me, I think, than the desire for sex. I ceased to believe that the Catholic Church was "the One True Church established by Christ to give grace." Those are the words of the Baltimore Catechism, and we were too far from the world of the Baltimore Catechism and things were working entirely too well.
I couldn't understand why so much vital information was beyond my