Life With Mother Superior Read Online Free PDF Page B

give me some white tissue.
    Miss McBride couldn’t believe that I had won honorable mention and ten dollars, with the additional bonus of a lifetime membership in the Coats and Clarke Thread Company and a pair of pinking shears. I was completely carried away and immediately made plans for the wild spending spree I planned to go on with my ten dollars. Then Mother Superior made an alternative suggestion.
    “I really think Miss McBride would love to have the pinking shears for the class, so why don’t you give them to her, and the ten dollars I thought would just make our quota to the missions—but I do feel you ought to keep the thread for your very own.”
     

Chapter Five: The Sour Note
     
    I was not the only one who looked forward to Mother Superior’s semiannual trip to an education convention in Chicago. I had the distinct impression that the entire faculty was just as delighted as we were to see her tall, imposing figure climb into the convent bus with her companion. By leaving town she unintentionally announced a holiday. The whole kit and convent of us responded to the festive mood. It was an emotional release for all of us, and, if Mother Superior found it stimulating to leave, we found it more refreshing to have her gone. Oh, we still had classes and prayers and the usual convent chores, but by and large, they were done with humor and a wee bit of sloppiness on every one’s part. It never entered our heads for a moment that Mother Superior might have been experiencing the exact same emotion. In the years I spent in the convent, Mother Superior spent about six days a year away from us. Three days each semester. It was perfect timing. We had one day to get used to the idea of her being gone, one day to enjoy it, and one day to get ready for her return. And each time she came back, she came back enriched and endowed with the distinct idea that we were anything but model students. This might be divided into any of the various categories, depending on the convention. Once it was science. We were in no way prepared to face a life of scientific experimentation, and if faced with a dividing cell, we would probably flounder and fall. Yet from that moment on, Science would occupy Mother’s mind and spirit, and all of us were expected to fling ourselves into the mood of Louis Pasteur or Madame Curie. But then the next convention might be on a more cultural level and Mother would make up her mind that St. Marks was not giving us proper balance in the form of art or music, and to bring up a generation of scientists would be dismal, at best. After all, what was life without a bit of music in it?
    Up till this particular convention, we had been spared the necessity of music appreciation. It all worked out rather well in the basic plan. None of the Sisters had any particular talent, and there was no orchestra leader material, God knows, in my class. And that was how Mr. Orman Gettinger came into our lives. Needless to say, the convent had little peace and quiet after his arrival.
    Mother Superior made it quite clear from the start, to the Mothers’ Club, to Mr. Gettinger, and to all of us, that she not only expected St. Marks to have a band, but she expected this band to be a prize-winning band. And then we all knew Mother Superior had what we called a “superior” motive. First prize in the Amer ican Music High School Band Contest was $500, to be used any way the school saw fit. Mother had already spent the money. She was determined to buy a great world globe for the library. Not that any of us were particularly impressed with the world at our age, but Mother Superior ruled what we knew of it, and she wanted the rest of it at her finger tips.
    Mr. Gettinger was really the first close-at-hand Neanderthal man I had ever seen. He had a hairline that never seemed to end, long dangling arms—an asset for a bandleader—huge lips, rather remote eyes, and a barrel chest. Despite this rather forbidding appearance, he was really