Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story

I watched the long kiss, mesmerized. Then, shamed, I stole into the kitchen. Sitting there at the table, I reviewed a world made suddenly impossible. Anthony and Suzie must have been laughing at me for suspecting nothing of their relationship. The feeling of exclusion I had experienced in the garden flooded back, more intense. Seeing them like that made all the difference. Hitherto the only kisses I had really seen were on the television screen in plays and films that glamourized them, presenting love as a cataclysmic,all-revealing passion. But this was the real world. I could not go along with it.

This, I told myself in a sudden cold certainty, was not passion. But it was the stuff of which most marriages were made. No one would ever want to do that to me, I knew. But no longer did I want them to. How could Suzie do it? Anthony, with his pimples and his moods—like all his friends.

No! The whole thing was certainly not for me.

With a shock I heard the front door opening. My mother was back from the hairdresser’s. Guiltily, I stole into the garden and picked up my book.

“I don’t mind! Really, Anthony! I don’t mind for myself. But with Suzie! … She’s such a little slut! … She’s having such a bad influence on Karen!” I heard snatches of my mother’s fury.

Suddenly the idea of being a bride of Christ seemed enormously attractive. I thought of Anthony. There seemed no comparison. Of course I wasn’t going to be a nun, I told myself. The idea was ridiculous. To be as fulfilled as Mother Katherine was a reward for having given up an awful lot. Books, theatre, freedom—until an hour ago I would have added sex. But that no longer seemed any sacrifice at all.

“Karen!” my mother called me. I turned round and squinted up at the house, narrowing my eyes against the sharp glare of the evening sun. My mother was standing at my bedroom window. Her face was tense, and momentarily I compared it to Mother Katherine’s, which was always so serene and untroubled. No, marriage was not all it was cracked up to be.

“Come up here a minute!” Her voice had that deliberately casual tone it always took on when she was upset and was trying to pretend that nothing was the matter.

“Just look at yourself,” she commanded, turning me round to the mirror, gripping my shoulders as though she were about to take me into custody. “Do you think you look nice?”

I stared at my reflection, but all I could see were my eyes. They looked lost. I dropped my gaze. My mother was angry about Suzie and Anthony. It was more than just her view of Suzie as a slut. She was angry with me, too, though she didn’t quite know why.

Sex was the matter, I thought suddenly. She wants to save me from sex.

“Well!” my mother demanded. “Do you?”

With a start I jerked my mind back to her question. It was an irrelevance. That was not what we were really talking about. I hadn’t been kissing Anthony in the sitting room, but, obscurely, my mother and I both felt that I had. I felt ashamed and guilty.

“No,” I said dully. What else was there to say?

“You look cheap! You look like a tart!” And with that she picked up my hairbrush and with savage tugs dragged it painfully through the beehive, smoothing it flat. Then she picked up my damp washcloth and scrubbed my face, her fingers jabbing into the tender flesh round my eyes. She breathed in shallow, agitated gasps. Neither of us said a word.

“There!” she said. “That’s better!”

I looked at the schoolgirl in the mirror.

“You look like yourself now,” my mother insisted.

I nodded slowly. My brief flirtation with beauty was over. She had expressed the simple truth.

So, giving up hope in the body, I began to develop my mind. That first year in the Sixth Form was in one way intoxicating. Pitting myself against more and more difficult ideas, I discovered I could fly. My body might well be clumsy and unformed for love, but my mind was graceful. It could have been a very happy year.

But things were changing at home. They were changing silently because, as a family, we never talked about the really momentous things. Yet again I wanted to shield my parents from a knowledge of something they were anxious to keep from me. And the easiest way to do that was not to let myself realize what was happening.

For one thing my parents had reversed roles. After years of housework my mother had started to go out to work. This was unusual in 1960. Nobody else’s mother worked; mothers were supposed to be chained to the kitchen, a constant welcoming presence in the home. I liked the change. I was proud of the distinction of my mother—her new alertness and interest in the world of the university. She came in anxious, harassed by having too many things to do, but alive in a new way with a challenging breadth of understanding. It was good for her. When we got in from school it was my father who was there with the tea ready, the inexpertly cut bread and butter. For he was at home all day.

What was it? I asked myself and then quickly turned away from the dangerous topic. I watched my father drifting aimlessly about the house, carefully doing the small tasks that my mother set him. His pride and gaiety had all gone. He seemed snuffed out. When our eyes met, he hastily looked away. Every morning he walked the dog in the park and sat sometimes for hours on a bench, gazing blankly at the lake.

But nothing was said. The misery of my father, and my mother’s worry about him, ran silently through every conversation. I thought of my grandmother, still drinking gin in the larder. What kind of a world was this when people shut themselves up with some unhappy secret, unable to communicate it to anybody? And how many other secrets surrounded me?

At school things were better, and more and more I found myself watching the nuns walking round the grounds, their hands hidden in their sleeves, their eyes bent on the ground as they glided under the shade of the huge cedar trees on the lawn. Sometimes, at midday, we saw them having recreation, sitting in a huge circle under the cedars, sewing and laughing together, their laughter harmonious and innocent. It seemed to me a vision of sisterly unity. They would have no secrets from one another, living together in such a close, loving community. And what conversations they must be having, I thought enviously, looking at that closed little circle. Excluding all trivia from their lives, filled with the joy of seeking God, they must have so much in common and so many wonderful discoveries of the mind and spirit to share. “Such happiness,” Mother Katherine had said.

One morning in late summer I went into the Sixth Form classroom and overheard a conversation I would never forget. Charlotte was standing in the center of a tight little knot of girls. I stood by the door, frozen with unhappiness, as I realized they were talking about me.

“She shouldn’t be at the school, you know.”

“Why not?”

“Because her father has gone bankrupt.”

“It happened at the beginning of the year, and she’s just deceitfully gone on pretending that everything’s normal! She’s a hypocrite!”

“That’s right,” another girl agreed. “This school is for people who can pay the fees. Not for people who can’t.”

I felt winded with shock. If my father was bankrupt, how on earth were my fees getting paid? And then what kind of attitude was theirs? Yes, it was a fee-paying school, and in a sense they were right. If my fees weren’t being paid then I shouldn’t be here. But stronger than all this was amazement. They seemed to have no hearts at all, no compassion.

I took a deep breath and made my presence known. I didn’t feel in the least tearful, thank goodness. This was something too fundamental for tears.

“Well,” I said quietly, “so what? What has it got to do with you?” They wheeled round to face me sharply.

“It has, you know.” Charlotte’s reply was almost saucy.

“Why?” I asked. What else had they got in store for me?

“Because our fathers are paying your fees!”

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s a Catenian, isn’t he?” I nodded. The Catenians were a Catholic society exclusively for men, the Catholic form of freemasonry. “Well, the Catenians—and therefore our fathers—are paying your fees. Didn’t you know?” My expression must have told them that I didn’t, despite my belated attempt at a nonchalant shrug. I felt deeply humiliated. To be living on other people’s charity was bad enough, but what would my father feel if he found out what was being said at school? He must feel bad enough anyway.

“No,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, “I didn’t know that. But that’s because my father didn’t want me to know. And I still think,” I added, my voice gaining conviction as I went on, “that it has nothing to do with you.”

I turned on my heel and walked out.

I was still shocked that they would reject me for such a reason. I found myself walking in the direction of the chapel. I wanted to be by myself, to think, and that was the only place in the teeming building that guaranteed privacy. The chapel was a modern one, all pale shiny wood and cream walls. There was a faint smell of incense, and here and there nuns knelt, black lumps in the sunlight, their heads buried in their hands.

I sat down, finding that I was trembling. I could never tell my parents about this, I knew. It would hurt them, and I’d feel so feeble running home and saying that the others were being horrid to me. It seemed so unfair. My father had had a tough enough struggle to get where he was. He and my mother seemed so brave in their lonely struggle with disaster. I remembered a cocktail party I had gone to with them a few weeks ago. It had been one of those Sunday morning affairs; the room was filled with cigarette smoke and loud, frenetic talking. Everybody had been to Mass that morning and priests filled the room. They were standing in groups, florid with gin and tobacco, worldly, disillusioning. My parents and I had squeezed into a relatively secular corner.

“The church here in full force, I see,” muttered my father sarcastically as we studied the guests.

“Who on earth is that?” I asked. My eye had been caught by a man wearing a green uniform with epaulettes, a thick leather belt, and a sword. He looked like a cross between Prince Charming and Buttons the clown.

“Ssh!” hissed my mother, giggling. “Don’t talk so loudly! It’s Sidney Foster.”

“Yes, but what’s he doing dressed up like that?”

“He’s a Knight of St. Gregory.” My mother was on the verge of laughter and my father snorted with amusement.

“Him,” he said bitterly, “he’s a shark in business. An absolute bloody shark! He’d sell his own grandmother.”

“Shut up!” my mother laughed helplessly, “he’s coming this way. Hello, Sidney!”