“We may assume,” said the teacher, “that there are no Hemingways or Faulkners in this classroom. Therefore we expect you to write in decent sentences.” I loathed the very idea of assuming mediocrity. I barely got by. The one story I submitted to the college literary magazine was rejected. I was told it wasn’t a story. 7 7
But these weren’t defining experiences for me. In the fifth grade, I’d written a novel which my schoolmates had read with great interest. And in the seventh grade, after seeing the film King Solomon’s Mines, I wrote another novel in longhand which my classmates loved too. I wrote some short stories, and I attempted to write other grander longer works.
I was able to sink into my writing in a way that I could not do with books. I wrote fast, and my work had a penchant for character and action. What style it had I don’t recall. People were impressed with these compositions of mine, but there was no real place for this type of creative writing in my world. It was not something rewarded in the classroom. It happened on the margins, and the good responses to it were not something that involved the teachers. In fact, I sort of kept it secret from my teachers, and when I did attempt original writing, in response to an assignment, the results weren’t so good.
All during these years, I struggled to do something significant, usually with music, or with reading. And I was not a success.
Not only had I pecked away at the piano, and struggled to learn some simple songs on my own, I’d also fallen in love with the violin. As a young teenager I wanted desperately to learn to play it, as there was no sound like it for me on earth. I’d heard Isaac Stern play the Beethoven Concerto for Violin and Orchestra at the Municipal Auditorium and this had been one of the transformative experiences of my life. I bought a violin at a pawnshop, with money given me by my father, and I struggled painfully hard to learn to play it. A C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s kindly teacher at Loyola University even offered to give me lessons at no cost, but she was candid about my lack of ear and lack of general talent. She promised me that if I stuck with it, I could play well enough for the orchestra someday. But I wanted to be a virtuoso. And I found the discipline overall too difficult and finally gave it up. Later on, I wrote novels about people who are shut out of life for various reasons. In fact, this became a great theme of my novels—how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately, out of human life itself.
I recall that I was shut out of the realm of music by my lack of talent, and I was shut out of book learning, and also, in a real way, I was not part of the world of the child. I came out of my education with no sense at all of gender, and no liking whatsoever for being a child. I can’t say that Catholic education in all girls’ schools made me a genderless person, because obviously thousands of girls went to Catholic schools and they didn’t come out of the experience with no sense of gender. And many of them probably understood childhood and how to be children perfectly well enough. But I emerged from these years with no clear sense of either one, and most likely because I did not get a sense of either one at home. If you are named Howard, if you grow up calling your parents by their first names, if you are raised to believe you can do just about anything you set your mind to, if you are never around “a superior gender” which takes precedence over you in anything, well perhaps you’ll grow up 7 9
having no sense of gender. But I would say that my lack of gender understanding transcends even these influences. I had no sense then of being a feminine person, or indeed of being a masculine person. I did not identify with girls. I did not know boys.
And I felt extremely uncomfortable being called a child. I didn’t fit as a child. I didn’t “get” what childhood was. And I was a failure as a child. I knew I was. I made blunders with other children. I couldn’t really speak their language. They knew something was “wrong” with me. They never trusted me and I didn’t blame them. I didn’t fit.
In retrospect, I feel the adults I knew did not give me a clear understanding of what a child was, and why anybody would want to be one.
I am not trying to be humorous.
As I look back on it, the state of childhood was regarded by adults of this time with suspicion, and there was a slight criminal taint to being a child. I resented this and refused to acknowledge it. I didn’t agree that children had to be controlled, taught, restrained, disciplined, and above all made to do dull and boring things ad nauseam because this is what they deserved.
I didn’t like other children, and I did not identify with them in any general war on adults.
I certainly didn’t think I was guilty of any crime in being a child, or really that any other child was guilty of any crime, and I deeply detested the fact that we were treated as though we were guilty of weakness, sneakiness, poor ambition, general ignorance, and that we were being punished for this by C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s the routines of our life, by the daylong prison of school, by the year-in and year-out confinement with some forty other persons, and by the intolerable burdens of written homework which was supposed to devour our free evening hours, and that this would go on until we grew up.
No disaster of my adult life ever equaled the misery and sometime hopelessness of childhood, as far as I’m concerned. At no time did I feel as frustrated, as angry, as useless, as cut off from the real world as I did as a child. Huge blocks of my childhood were shameful wastes of time.
The slow deterioration of my mother led to the feeling of powerlessness. Indeed, around me I saw much deterioration. New Orleans was an inefficient, crumbling city in which garbage was piled in open heaps or cans on the curb every day. The French Quarter had a smell one caught two blocks away. Gutters were filled with litter. Great old houses were marked for demolition because it was believed they could not be maintained in the present era. Magnificent mansions here and there were replaced by hideous modern apartment buildings. Along St. Charles Avenue, splendor and ruin coexisted on almost every block.
I wanted to escape this soft, endless drift towards ruin. Because I unconsciously identified with adults, and preferred to be with adults, I was mortified and insulted by them when they ignored me, patronized me, or degraded me, and I couldn’t wait for this strange purgatorial state to come to a natural end. Let me repeat: my mother treated me as a person, not as a child. My father pretty much did the same thing. My sisters were interesting people to me, not children 8 1
per se. But all this happened in the highly special world of our own household, with its disorder and its secrets, and its inevitable griefs.
I roamed around the city of New Orleans on foot or by bus and streetcar. And I did go all over the city, sometimes alone, and sometimes with a friend who liked to walk as much as I did. In fact, I walked all the time for the sheer joy of it, and riding the streetcar was dreamtime. In my wanderings, I became obsessed with architecture. I would stand for long moments contemplating some ruined house, dreaming of its restoration, dreaming of an adulthood in which I would live in some splendid building and restore it to grandeur, but how I didn’t know.
The great things I remember from school were incidental. I loved the Girl Scout troop to which I belonged in fifth and sixth grades, and remember the ladies who formed it with great affection, and during our times at camp, I experimented with writing plays for the other girls and acting in these plays. I simply loved this; and I remember vaguely that we did plays at recess in school too. That was very simply great.
I also remember our seventh-grade teacher, Sister Francesca, reading a novel to us in the afternoons. It was called Red Caps and Lilies, and it was about young children during the French Revolution and their adventures as they roamed about Paris during those troublesome times. I don’t remember a single thing from this novel, but I do remember the pleasure of listening to this story, and I remember, too, that other girls loved it, and that when Sister was reading this C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s story to us just about everyone was happy. There was peace in the room.
I
should add here that up until the age of fourteen I was a seriously religious child.
At twelve, I wanted to become a priest. When I was told that was impossible, I couldn’t grasp why. I remember pestering a priest named Father Steffens about this, and that he tried to make swift work of the explanation by telling me that not only could I not be a priest, but there had actually been a time when theologians weren’t sure women had souls. I think he was being humorous when he said this, and in a way he was murmuring to himself about this more than he was talking to me. But there was some connection in his mind between this theological matter and my not being able to be a priest.
He was in many respects a patient and loving man, and he worked hard for our parish. I pestered him with my rampant enthusiasms. But I really didn’t see why I couldn’t be a priest. In fact, I was pretty certain that sooner or later I could become one. It was just a matter of patience, because at twelve, I didn’t have enough power to swing it. But the time would come later on.
But I never forgot Father Steffens having said this, about theologians debating whether or not women had souls. I never forgot it yet it made no impression. I had no sense of being a young woman, or of being excluded from anything because of gender. The words seemed pointless and stupid and irrelevant. Yet I filed them away somewhere in my mind. And I decided that I wanted to be a nun.
8 3
My plans did not work out, and with reason. I was no more suited to go into the convent than I was to go from prison to Solitary Confinement. The most important sort of nun was a contemplative nun, a nun who might become a great mystic, and I was not cut out for the cloistered life. I lost interest soon enough.
But I want to describe one important experience before I leave this aborted plan.
For one entire summer of my life, probably between the fifth and sixth grade, I worked every day from 5:30 in the morning to 6:00 p.m. in the evening at a home for elderly people run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. I happened into this experience because of my sister, Alice, who had been going there to work as well. To work in such a place was commendable Catholic volunteer behavior, and I took to this with great enthusiasm, and lived an extraordinary summer as the result of it.
The convent was on Prytania Street, and like many convents, it was made up of a central building, which included the chapel, and two great wings. It was three stories high. And it was red brick. The property included the entire city block. One wing housed the elderly women; the other housed the elderly men, and the convent proper where the nuns lived. All the rooms of the building were immense; the old people slept in huge dormitories. The hallways were extremely wide. Light flooded in from windows everywhere. Doorways had glass transoms. The old people roamed many large comfortable sitting rooms on the main floors. The place was orderly and clean.
C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Morning began with Mass at five-thirty in the chapel, and the chapel, like all the Catholic chapels I knew, was exquisitely beautiful, with the requisite carved pews, ornate altar, and opulent flowers on the linen-draped altar at all times. The workday involved the care of the elderly at three meals which were served in the refectories on either side of the central building, the making of beds and dust mopping of the dormitories in which the old ladies lived, and some work in the infirmary where the bedridden were kept in long rooms, and some work in the laundry where I spent time with Sister Pauline, a Chilean nun, ironing clothes or working a mangler for the pressing of men’s shirts and sheets. Sister Ambrosine, an elderly French sister, managed the old ladies. At noon, a young sister, Sister Ignatius, came to help with the serving of the food.
This was a distinctly European place. And its architecture and atmosphere were apparently replicated not only all over America, but perhaps all over the world.
I loved working with all these sisters, but the most deliriously happy times were spent with Sister Pauline. She told me fabulous tales of growing up in Chile, and she also had a great love of the garden, and I went with her to cut marguerites, or white-petaled daisies, to put into vases for the many statues of the Virgin and the saints which were all over the convent.
These experiences in the garden were rapturous. It seemed there was a whole field there of white daisies through which we roamed. And beyond, the garden stretched the full length of the block, ending at the back walls. There was a long row of fig trees, a veritable orchard. Sister Pauline and I climbed 8 5
up into these trees, and gathered figs for the old people. And it seemed we could move through these trees along these thick smooth branches, without ever climbing down to the ground.
In the infirmary, I wrote letters for the bedridden old people. I did many other chores. The nuns pretty much let me try anything that I wanted to try. What impressed me was the ease with which things could be accomplished or maintained in this environment. Caring for the old people was a noble and interesting task. And I loved old people. I wanted to join the order. I begged my father to let me join. But he said no. He told me that he needed me at home and that I was trying to run away from being needed. And I knew that he was right. I sought a refuge in the coherent and intense life of this convent, in its great physical beauty, and in the gentle orderly ways of the nuns.
My father also told me that none of my talents would be of use to the Little Sisters of the Poor. It was not the order for me. In spite of my poor grades, it seemed I was perceived as having a great interest in music, books, and writing. And I think he was right that my temperament was not for the Little Sisters of the Poor. After all I was a person of rampant enthusiasms and dreams, of great frustration and longing, though how I was going to realize any dream was not clear. My father told me another thing that summer. He said he was worried about me, that I was putting in a full day of work, and indeed a day of work that was as hard as his day. And I was not an adult, I was a child.
This was of course just what I loved about this summer. I was working, working with other adults, and in a realm of C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s adults, where there were no children, and what I did had integrity. I was a part of a meaningful world. When the summer came to an end, I went back to school, though I preserved my dream of being a nun someday in some order, and of being a saint, like the saints whose lives I read all the time.
Shortly after that, the home of the Little Sisters of the Poor on Prytania Street, this beautiful brick building with its gorgeous gardens, was torn down. It could not meet the fire codes of the period and it had to go. The old people were scattered to other homes, and I assume the nuns were too. And the building was soon obliterated and replaced by a modern building, as if the lovely coherent world there had never existed. It was a chilling loss.
I retain one key memory from that period. One evening I left the convent as usual and headed for the streetcar stop to take the car home. It was just one of many such evenings, with the sun still burning in the rapidly changing sky. On this particular evening as I walked up Prytania Street to Amelia Street, I caught sight of a huge tree, against the golden light, with its branches catching the breeze. The breeze took hold of the tree, limb by limb, and finally the entire tree, with its countless tiny curling leaves, was moving as if in a great dance.
I knew perfect joy then as I looked at that tree. I knew a joy that was beyond description. All was right with the world. The world made sense. God made us and God loved us; and I’d done a good day’s work with the best people I knew and for the best reasons I knew; and here was this mag-8 7 nificent spectacle, this entrancing vision of this simple common tree caught in the simple common miracle of the evening breeze.
I was transported in that moment. No sorrow, no worry, no frustration, meant anything. It was a glorious moment, and I think of it all the time.
Move forward in time eighteen years. I’m a continent away from that spot and that moment; I’m an adult, an atheist. I live in Berkeley, California. I’m married, and I have a beautiful child. I am coming home one evening from the grocery store to our apartment. r />
And suddenly I look up and see another tree catch the breeze, just as that long-ago tree had done. This is an acacia tree of huge dark branches, and myriad leaves. And the sky is red with evening, and the light is going away. But the tree catches the wind and goes into this great transformative dance.