Several relatively peaceful days went by, and then we had singing class again. Sister Veronica and Sister Hildegarde entered the room together. They nodded to the four of us to come to the front of the room and stand before the school. When we had been isolated in this manner, Sister Hildegarde, whose face was filled with severity and grief, said, “We all heard these girls try to sing last Sunday. We know what a shameful exhibition they made of themselves and of the school. I am not going to punish them and I am not going to scold them. Their case is too grave for that. Not only did they let us down but they deliberately let Our Blessed Lord down. I am only going to say that they need all the prayers they can get. Will every girl who is willing to give an extra minute each day to say a prayer for these misguided and stubborn girls raise her hand?”

We four continued to look where we had been looking, at the floor. Cecilia, the fat girl, began to sob. I was relieved to know where we stood. We had been given our chance, and the Devil in us had defeated us. The reason for our guilt was still hidden from us, but in a dim but comforting way we were now convinced of its existence. We had not seen the shape of the Devil, but we had felt his power, in our dry throats and thumping hearts. The thing was now clear to us that had always been clear to the nuns, because we realized as well as they did that if God had been on our side, surely He would have given us the voice to sing His praises.

The Clever One

__________

NOT LONG AGO, I was staying in Washington, D.C., with my younger sister, Deirdre, who is married and has four young children. It was spring. We sat in her large, pleasant living room, with the trees all fresh and green outside on Garfield Street, and the shrubs bursting into bloom — white, pink, blue, yellow — in her garden, where the children were giving themselves wholeheartedly to some raucous game, and we began to speak, as we often do, of the time when we two were small together. There is less than two years between us. Our childhood was spent in Dublin, most of it in a small house in Ranelagh.

“The first time I remember seeing you,” I said, “was before we went to live in Ranelagh. It was when we were living in the house on Belgrave Road. You must have been about eighteen months old, I suppose. Someone was holding you in their arms, and you snatched Emer’s cap off her head and threw it in the fire, and she cried. It was a new woolen cap she had.” Emer is our older sister.