Miss Balton’s education

1870-1878

When she was eleven years old and a convent girl in St. Aftons, Ann Balton would have been entirely satisfied to live on the ancient grounds forever.  Nothing was lacking; it seemed to Ann a world of such codified and eternally ordained perfection that she could imagine no improvement.  At eleven she was at the zenith of her girlhood, and was in her own way an imperfectible specimen.  She was tall, with a slender inquisitive face, her hair gathered modestly onto the back of her head, with a body still undiscovered by any of the advance scouts of puberty.  Standing up from the washtub on Friday night the water would fall away and leave her steaming under the electric lights, her hair a dark slick down the center of her back, and in the long toweled procession with the other girls down the flagstone corridors, their bodies rapidly cooling as they walked, Ann felt a flush of gratitude to know that she had been enrolled as a citizen of the one sensible and dependable society she knew of, the Catholic Church.  She understood in the half-informed way of children that other churches existed, but what stupid and paltry things they seemed!  They had no saints; they had no convents, no cloisters, no priests; and besides their worshipers were all going to hell, a fact she accepted with a little moue of regret, in the same way she had learned to accept the fact that some men were drunkards, some people used oaths, and that some women were Loose, and Got In Situations.

Among the other girls she was popular.  She was envied.  Her mother was dead.  Her father was an Englishman posted perhaps forever to India.  Every few months a brown strangely-scented envelope would arrive for her, containing a single sheet of her father’s puzzling handwriting.  To maintain her tragic position among the other girls she would contrive to look sad and lonesome for a day or two after the letters came, though in fact she struggled to read them and what she could make out seemed the unpained jottings of a happy man:

My dear Annie,

I hope this finds you in [undecipherable].  I am certain you [hitret?] the things they tell you, [although?] it is not all boushwah and some of it would have served me [undecipherable].  [Undecipherable] Tinkham is not a bad sort if you can [standard?] the old [gollich?].  She was never the same after [the doctor?] had a [undecipherable] at her [hollster?].  [Undecipherable]!  On the other hand you must be nearly grown now that you are eleven.  Girls here at that age can be married and packed off forever.  I have the photograph you sent along here on my workdesk where it is the envy of [Webster?] who has only sons.  I say to him we ought to meet up when we are all [dehearted?] but he is a [Wertsman?] and has no interest in the Great United States.

His letters did not provide the most fertile ground for a tragic life but she made them do.  With care she bound them in white ribbon.  She was sure always to have a witness to this act, though she was equally sure never to allow the letters to be read by anyone else.  For two years she had kept them in her desktop but when she heard of noctural adventurers entering the hall and investigating forbidden places – the storage closet, for example, with its alluring stacks of laundered linen — she thought better of this and handed them over to Sister Wendy.  Her choice was a cunning one.  Wendy was no one’s favorite.  Short and fat with an electric temper, she ruled the stairwells with a shrieking rancor.  But Ann saw that she was a true believer in principles and after all her request was an innocent one.  Sister Wendy would no sooner have let the letters slip than she would have stood on the refectory table and sung.  Ann’s confidence in Sister Wendy earned her no favors; that would have been against principle; but Ann never feared for her father’s letters again and was therefore free to sigh and appear fretful and distracted, and to continue her sad life as an orphan, or near enough.

There are plenty of real sadnesses in life, of course, and only the young and protected can afford to adopt the false ones for long.  By the time she was fifteen and effectively a woman the lovely strictures of St. Aftons began to chafe.  Her father’s letters, once a source of false pain, had become painful enough in truth.  He was a simple if affable man and now that she was older and had some sense of things, the English in India seemed not so much a benign white overlay on a dusky chaos but a permanent and utterly natural feature of the place, as inseparable from it as cream from custard.  Her father, it was plain, was never returning.  She had no other living relations in the United States and only a few distant throwoffs in England whom she had never met.

She felt very alone in the world.

For a year she resolved to make the best of her situation and become a true Catholic Believer.  But she found she had lived too close to the source for too long for an honest faith to take hold.  Like Mithradates she had taken the daily dose and was now immune forever.  What conceivable God could possibly use these flatulent, flat-chested, powder-skinned women as mediums for anything but misery?  Like any adolescent she felt grace was a natural function of physical beauty and she knew that the most graceful use of physical beauty had nothing to do with God and everything to do with Getting Into Situations.  She was no longer a slender, undiscovered girl.  She had no doubt any longer what her body was for.  She now listened with the secret intensity of a spy to the dispatches from the barbarous country of other girls’ brothers and male cousins, where she would eventually have to travel.  These dispatches were full of useful news, and from certain whispered conversations she picked up a set of facts that was not entirely at odds with the truth.

Truth became important then in a way that it had not before.  Everything the Sisters had stated with such imperiousness was plainly false; it had not at any point considered love or passion and now Ann felt these things dashing about in her brain in a most beautiful way.  Priests interested her not at all but from her window she had a view of the gardener’s shed.  He was only a pale candle of a man, about forty.  But he had a sadness in his eyes that suggested a fundamental seriousness of nature and that answered to Ann’s basic love of tragedy and difficult circumstances.  He mowed the lawn with a look of despair.  His patient entanglements with the rose garden – he was always getting a sleeve caught – seemed the actions of a man long accustomed to negotiating with a private sorrow.  He had a little gray hat that was nice to think about.  When she dared walk near his shed she caught a lovely rich scent of mowed grass and oiled machinery.  But seen from too close the look of sorrow became something entirely vacant and there were times when he sat alone inside his shed smoking and visibly not having a thought in his head.  Soon he was replaced in her imaginings by the man who delivered the cheeses from the dairy.  He was older, with thick red hair and a beard, but carried the brusque air of a man who would do with her what he wanted.  This was something she pictured in great detail, over and over.  He was soon supplanted by a boy from Connecticut who appeared twice, a brother of one of the younger girls, the two of them the only survivors of an auto accident.  He was rich, it was said.  And his sorrow was not to be doubted.  But why then did he look so pleased with himself?  Then he went to California and was never heard from again.

This moil of feeling brought her to her sixteenth year.  If she was not the most studious girl she did have a good brain when she wanted to use it.  She could read Latin without a pause and could count off her Kings and Queens with only a little trouble remembering how exactly the early Henrys went.  The Presidents were a stout gray parade in her mind with an occasional Lincoln or Jackson leaning into a kind of gaunt grotesquerie.  But men of power held no real interest.  Men beaten down by power were a far grander thing.

She had continued to receive mail from her distant father.  Out of instinct she had continued to hand the letters off to Sister Wendy, whose galvanic furor had not subdued itself but who had, after all, begun to behave a little affectionately toward Ann.  Now and then she would smile.  It was plainly not a natural act and did not always come out looking as it was probably supposed to.  More than anything Sister Wendy was a private person – as many of the Sisters were, Ann had gathered – and some sympathetic current had slowly developed between the two of them, in the way a nerve might grow its slow way through old bone.  Now and then Sister Wendy invited Ann into her room.  This was a shared chamber that smelled of plaster and an underlying permanent emptiness.  Her father’s letters were still secured in the old white ribbon and stored in an upper cupboard.  Sister Wendy would reach down the packet – now grown to about two inches’ thickness – and hand it over, allowing Ann to see that it was her own knot that still held them fast.  Caring less and less about it every time, she undid the ribbon and put the new letter atop the stack and tied it again before handing it back.  She could feel the falseness of her own actions and feared these feelings would make themselves plain on her face.

But Sister Wendy saw something else there.  “Do you ever think,” she asked, “about having a place of your own here?”

She had not; she knew of no such arrangements.

“There are rooms down below, which we might make available for – study.”  Sister Wendy accepted the letters and turned to put them up.  “It’s not easy to be always, always in someone else’s company, is what I mean to say.”

“It would be my own?”

“Not to sleep in.  But if you wanted to make use of it for work, or prayer – “  She went up on her toes and tipped the packet into the cupboard again.  “Well, or just to be in, Ann.”

“What do I have to do to get it?”

Sister Wendy looked at her with a flicker of malice.  “Nothing, Ann, I’m offering it to you.  I supposed you might have liked the idea.”

“Oh, but I do,” she said.

“You’ve been a good girl here.  I suppose it has occurred to you that you could have been otherwise and we would have had very little recourse.  Frankly we were worried about taking on such a situation.  But you’ve turned out very well.  You must be beginning to think about where you’ll land.”  Sister Wendy leveled a long unnerving glance at her.  “You weren’t thinking of taking vows, I guess.”

“No.”

“Of course there are the placements.  We have a place for a girl of good family, it’s not at all awful: you would be a tutor.”

“I would?”

“You do look alarmed.  Surely you’ve given the matter some thought.”

“Whom would I tutor?”

Sister Wendy handed her a cold flat steel key.  She took it.  “We will let you know,” she said.

The key opened a small dark room in the cellar of the dormitory.  The room was eight feet square with an arched window near the ceiling.  Through the glass the underside of a privet hedge was visible; when the weather turned in October the hedge swam and dodged the wind.  She was given a discarded desk to work at and a chair, and a shelf was installed for books.  The cellar was a vast open space broken only by the stone pillars that supported the three stone floors above.  The furnace throbbed with mindless menace and was fed by coal that came thundering down the chute every Friday.  Away in the dark reaches of the basement lurked other discarded furniture.  She looked this over with a proprietor’s eye and took possession of a square cracked mirror and a deeply musty red velvet chair, whose depths gave up an ancient, kindly odor of decay.  In fact the chair smelled exactly like a tomb but in a damp inoffensive sort of way.  She had no light aside from what entered the high window.  Therefore when winter came with its darkness she found an old oil lamp and installed it on the shelf.  This shelf contained six books and, now, her father’s little paper stack.

She would take the orders only a few years later, and it was this basement room, with its unimagined privacy, that allowed her to remain for as long as she did.  And there were sensual pleasures to be had, of a sort; the starched wimples were as rigid and clean-smelling as good paper, coming off the press holding the strange winged curves of an extravagant pastry; and from within their fanciful folds she acquired for the first time in her life a feeling of ease and self-containment.  In her secret heart she suspected she would not be there forever and as though in apology she did her best to be as good a Sister as she could be, young as she was and otherwise without a plan.  A good Sister, Sister Ann.  And in fact, at moments – at the windowpane, for example, watching the storm-tossed garden, the old shed door now swinging open and rattling to again — she wondered if she was not in fact, despite her skepticism, really being visited by a divinity of some kind.   The presence in the room behind her was a lightly pressing ethereal faintness, as though the air had taken on a conscious aspect and was now observing her with scrupulous neutrality.  Yes, she had felt it before; she had felt it all her life.  It was the pressure of the world.  She was helpless.  She turned around.  The low simple bed, the white table, the bare floor.  Yet when she turned again it was behind her again.  A silent gallery of the physical world, eternally unjudging.  She would have a son one day, of course, and the son would feel this pressure as well – this divine inquiry, alive in the tissues of the world; it is one of the things that can be passed on, more valuable, possibly, in the end, than money; more useful possibly.