Chapter 16
Ron Tuck knelt on the kneeling board with his hands folded and draped across the back of the pew in front of him. He was singing as if an angel were listening. His eyes roamed from the face of Sister Bernadette Catherine up to the old altar that was more there as a storage facility, now that the priests had been turned around and a new altar, more a large stone table, had been installed so that the congregation could see what was once hidden and whispered over in secret. The smell of the church sent him back to childhood and the way that he and his friends had gone to mass and stared at the rear ends of the girls in the rows in front of them while the girls smiled knowingly at each other and shifted on their knees and clenched their cheeks on and off to give the boys a little show. He did not want to look at his students that way and so he sang with elevated eyes and his head lifted upwards to the stained glass windows in back of the altar and the mural that must have been over 100 feet in the air.
It was First Friday morning and the school had gone to celebrate the mass that was held mostly for them on that day each month while school was in session. Bernadette Catherine was in charge of the choir of girls’ voices and their songs. She beamed as they sang and moved her raised arms in slow, well timed figure 8’s. Ron tried his best to sing as well as he was able, both for her and to set an example for his kids about how it was necessary to open one’s mouth when singing. He tried to breathe from his solar plexus and move his stomach to the cadence of the songs. “Holy. Holy, holy, God of Power and Light, Heaven and earth are filled with your Glory, Hosanna, in the highest…” He felt like he was making eye contact with her when they sang and that she could see him trying so hard for her.
Two days earlier, at the convent for dinner with the rest of the lay faculty and the nuns, she had asked him about his faith. They had saved a surprise for him and re-introduced him to Sister Grace Natari, who had been his 7th grade teacher when he had first come to the school. Sr. Grace had remembered Ron and said that she was glad to see him back with their church. She told the story about how Ron had been the first Protestant boy that had ever been allowed to attend the grammar school because his mother had met one of the priests while she was in the American Legion hospital. She told them about how Ron had gotten into trouble with the police and how his mother had come to the church and “begged” to have him admitted because he was on a path that was leading to no good. She smiled recalling how Ron had known scripture and how all the nuns had wanted to convert him to the true faith.
Ron winced when his mother was associated with begging, but he knew that it was true. He had been in trouble. His mother had gone and asked that he be allowed to go to school there. What the nuns didn’t know was that the detectives had given Marjorie the choice of either getting Ron into that school or sending him to a reformatory called Jamesburg.
Dinner was spread across five different tables and there had been bottles of wine and salad and chicken and roasted potatoes and string beans. Some of the lay faculty had known enough to bring their own bottles of wine to contribute to the meal. Ron was oblivious to this tradition and because he didn’t go to the faculty room for lunch, no one had told him that it was expected. The nuns suffered the lack of contribution patiently and with tight lipped perseverance. Some of them were sure that manners were not something that could be expected from this disturbingly popular young man.
When they prayed before dinner, Ron blessed himself with the others, feeling less awkward than he had before. He ate slowly not wanting to appear overly hungry. There was polite talk at the tables and soft bouncing polite laughter. Ron grinned and talked, not noticing that he was the only lay person seated at his table. He did not know that the table arrangements were a thing that was the object of discussion before the dinner and that some of the nuns had wanted very much to sit with him and others had expressed a desire to sit anywhere else rather than with him.
The mass reached the point of communion and the girls dutifully filed up to receive. Ron was unsure about what to do. Part of him wanted to move up, to be an example for his students. But what kind of an example would a lie be? What kind of example was he able to provide spiritually anyway? Wasn’t it all a lie when it came to that?
Ron got up and moved down the aisle towards the priest. He was determined to take the wafer in the new fashion and not to open his mouth and stick out his tongue as he had been taught. He cupped his hands hoping against hope that he was doing it right and looked into the thin worn face of the silver haired priest who seemed to hesitate for an instant before placing the wafer in his hand. Ron took it and was surprised by the lack of magic that he felt on his tongue. A cascade of memory voices used to flood him about not letting it touch his teeth and certainly not chewing it. The host was to remain on his tongue until it dissolved.
At the convent, Ron noticed that as the evening grew later that the voices around him got looser and the faces of the people became pink and red. The laughter was easier now and when Ron looked up he saw that some of the people had already left. Sister Bernadette Catherine took his hands and said softly, “When the weather gets bad Ron, you can stay here with us if it becomes necessary.”