Vaucluse convent – Sixth in Line

Start at the door

‘We’re all ruins in the making.’ Robin Hemley

My fingers are chilled. In the absence of fingerless gloves, they are only part of my body uncovered beyond my face and head on these cold mornings where to type is to feel the cold rise through the keyboard.

Fingerless gloves, and I remember her hands. Sister Domonic of the short stature and regal poise. Nuns were like aristocracy. When you read the lives of the founders, many of them like our founder, Marie-Madeleine d’Houët, were noblewomen whose lives were turned on their heads for whatever reason. Women who decided the best way to finish their lives was to lead others in prayer and penance and help the sick and needy. To educate the uneducated, the children who could not otherwise get an education.

The Faithful Companions of Jesus, so named after the women who stood at the foot of the cross of Jesus during and after his crucifixion before his body was laid in the tomb. Mary, his mother, and Mary Magdala, those two symbols of the chaste and adulterous. The two symbols which have taken over the Christian world and marked women’s fate for ever. Beginning with Eve in her paradise garden and that fateful apple of temptation. After all it was her fault.

I remember these lessons the nuns taught.

‘Now girls, remember to keep a boy’s ardour in check. He cannot stop himself, but you can put a lid on anything God would not like.’

I never understood what the nuns feared might stir up in the hearts of these men, what lustful desires looked like, even as I had an inkling from my own father. His love of the salacious. His interest in women’s breasts, those featuring on the front pages of The Truth newspaper.

But the nuns were not talking about our fathers or even our brothers. They were talking about the young men who went to the schools nearby. The boys who might join our school at the nuns’ invitation. The boys from De La Salle in Malvern or from St Patricks when it existed, or from Xavier, and the Christian Boys College in St Kilda. All the local Catholic boys’ schools, including toffy St Kevin’s where we Vaucluse girls sometimes went on sports days to borrow their oval.

‘Be careful not to inflame them,’ the nuns said, as if these boys were like piles of kindling ready for the match. We needed only to strike one red head against the rough side of the small box from Bryant and May, and whoosh all would be in flames.

I have a prompt written in my scrawl on a post-it note which I stuck to the back wall of my computer along with several others. I stick these prompts onto the back of my computer for the mornings and weekends when I write. To give me a start to the process. But this prompt fails to jog my memory of what I wrote down in the first place.

But it’s an intriguing prompt.

Simply, ‘Start at the door’.

I have a door in mind. The back entrance to Vaucluse, which boarders entered after times away from the convent. A wooden door neatly recessed into an otherwise long series of brick walls, with a small entrance way shielded by a gate. Inside a green door. Green one of the primary colours of my convent school, and I don’t know why only I’d hazard a guess it might have something to do with St Joseph the father of Jesus, the real-life adoptive father of Jesus and a carpenter.

He always struck me as an odd fellow. One who was never caught up in the lust the nuns described in the boys who came to our school dances. Because he was the husband of Mary who conceived Jesus in an immaculate way, when a thunderbolt descended from Heaven.

Something like in horror films. An alien overtaking a woman. You can watch them at the movies. Like Rosemary’s Baby, only this baby was Jesus and therefore like Mary was immaculate. Without sin, until they crucified him.

When I write the story like this and remember the way it persisted in my small child mind no wonder it was confusing. The stuff grown-ups did together which we were not supposed to know about too soon, but there it was all around us. In the naked breasts of the women in The Truth and in the words of the bible if you were clued up enough to go looking.

Even in the words of the prayers. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. I almost blushed at that one. The word womb was as obscene as the word pregnant. A word we could not say. Only that a woman was expecting. In the family way. A euphemism for the consequences of all the ardour the nuns taught us belonged only in marriage.

When I brought my husband his second cup of tea for the morning, after I had made my own second cup and warmed my ice-cold fingers under the warm water tap to get the circulation going again, I told him I need some fingerless gloves.

‘Don’t you mean mittens,’ he asked.

“No,’ I said. ‘Fingerless gloves, the ones without fingertips so you can use your fingers freely.’ He looked bemused. ‘Mittens,’ I went on. ‘The type that have no individual finger covering only a mass covering.’ I wiggled my fingers in front of my face. Mittens are usually for children who do not need to use their fingers. The rest of us wear gloves.’

I shall make it my business to get myself some fingerless gloves before these cold days are over.

I shall look like Sister Dominic only I am now so much older than she was then. I was a girl in her mid-teens, and Sister Dominic was in her thirties. Still a young woman and still young when she finally left the convent a few years later.

I know so little about her. She and my analyst Mrs Milanova morph into one in my dreams. And I have long thought of both as replacements for my mother. In my psyche.

Both were elusive. They were hard to find, and I searched for them everywhere. The number of dreams I have when I’m back at Vaucluse as when I was sixteen, walking along the ambulacrum with its red brick colonnades in search of Sister Dominic or Sister Shella as she became.

After Vatican Two the nuns were permitted to show their hair and shorten their habits if they chose. Some chose not to. At least not at first. Nuns could also go back to using their first names. No longer having to bear the names of saints, often male saints. A practice that baffled me as a child.

All these women sporting the names of men. Sister Mary Paul, Mother Mary John, before they dropped the Mother appellation for Sister. Sister Stanislas, Sister Anthony.

By the time I reached the end of my school journey all nuns had stopped calling themselves Mother, all except the reverend mother. Over the years they even dropped the sister and all other tell-tale signs of nuns though some still wear crosses on the pointy ends of their collars. Hell bent on revealing something of their religious affiliation.

Not always a safe thing to do.

I left you a long time ago at the door to the convent on Rowena Parade, the one we boarders used after weekends away. Once inside the boxy office where we were greeted by the nun on duty usually one of the workers from the kitchen. These were the nuns who lacked the education of the more esteemed nuns and sent their lives in actual service to God and the other nuns and the boarders.

They cooked and cleaned. They scrubbed floors. The hid behind the scenes but we caught glimpses of them when we walked through the back corridors of the convent where they day scholars never went. On our way to the dormitories, a stone’s throw from the nun’s cubicles. Only we never went their either. Forbidden territory.

So much forbidden territory in a convent. We walked over tessellated tiles, red and ochre with cream borders. Onto parquetry floors and the sign. ‘No stilettos allowed’.

I could only imagine some mothers who came to the convent in their stilettos who walked along those cold floors in stockinged feet, suddenly dismantled and reduced in stature after an edict from the nuns who despised all things worldly, in anyone who visited the convent, especially its students and inhabitants.

My index finger is losing circulation again and the need for fingerless gloves increases. We are only just onside the convent barely through the corridor that runs past the reverend mother’s room which you would not want to visit unless you were called to receive your blue medal as a daughter of Mary. Otherwise, it was tantamount to being called to the principal’s office in a secular school. And only happens to those who are bad. To those who have sinned. To those guilty of wrongdoing.

And I cannot say I went to the reverend mother’s office for such behaviours because on the surface I practised being a good girl. I stayed away from trouble and practised all the things the nuns taught.

Chastity, poverty and obedience even before I ever made their vows. And although I was once tempted to join them, all in a bid to stay close to Sister Dominic/Sheila, in the end, the life at university with all the shattering of illusions, even with my few visits to the Newman society, the place the University of Melbourne where Catholics pooled together, I could not stick by her side.

There was a whole world out there promising so much more. Even as I contemplate wearing those fingerless gloves and evoking her spirit in my memory, I am no longer lured to such a life of austerity.

For her to banish the chilblains. For me to banish the cold.

‘The writer of history is a walking anachronism, a displaced person using today’s techniques to try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself,’ Hilary Mantel.

To scrape at my memories is to pick them off a wall of experience where they sit carefully unexamined and then I throw them up to the light. Almost immediately they lose their centredness, cut off from the rest, from their context, from the minutiae of a life lived long ago and subject to the governing criteria of my younger self.

Was this aspect of me an extension of the me who exists today? Or a different entity, one I can never hope to resurrect, so different are we each from the other, like strangers at a party meeting for the first time.

In the red brick chapel over the way from the ambulacrum which we entered on one side, through a dark cloak room and into the bright mosaic scattered corridor of light wood panelling with a separate entrance to the Victorian style house where the nuns hid, you entered the mystery of this place of worship. A chapel so small, on full school occasions there was standing room only. The nuns took up the three back rows, the students filled the front.

During free times on weekends when I was a boarder and lived each day at the convent, I slipped inside this chapel and sat with my green A4 notebook in the back pews where the nuns usually sat. To write.

At fifteen years of age, I saw this writing as a way of talking to myself. Or in high minded moments when I was on the cusp of religious disbelief, I considered it a way of talking to Jesus, only he had let me down so thoroughly in recent years after I put the miraculous Lourdes water from my rosary beads into my father’s teacup one morning and imagined it would stop him drinking. It did not.

Such a pervasive desire in those days that my father might stop drinking alcohol and behave like other fathers, and that I might go home to a different house where people did not need to tip toe around the sleeping monster in the lounge room, who like the cranky bear in so many childhood stories might erupt at any moment and give voice to his rage.

In my green notebook in the silence of the chapel my father’s rage slid into the walls of my home and shook. Close to the white plaster of that sacred house, I was safe to put words on the page.

I did not know about writing then. I did not know that to describe a feeling, a sensation I needed to flit into an image, a place, to create a mood and describe in detail so my reader might then share with me, the depth of my sorrow.

Only then I used words that trivialised the experience by telling my unknown readers that I was sad, or that I was scared or that I was in love with my favourite nun. Such feelings were against the natural order of things. No one should ever read my journal, for fear of ridicule.

Years later in one of my many moves, into the house in which I now live, I found my diary gone. Lost somewhere, somehow. And I have mourned for it ever since. To read first-hand the meanderings of that tortured adolescent mind, to re-meet my younger self, might give me the greatest pleasure even as it might cause me to cringe.

When you looked to the front of the chapel, there was a round rail that separated the altar from the brown wood pews filling the room like so many sardines. The altar was open and airy and culminated in marble steps that led to the place where they housed the tabernacle. All in gold, the tiny door, boasted a keyhole only the priest could use. And in the tabernacle the priest housed the left-over hosts from Communion each day. This white farex-tasting round wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth once you pulled in your tongue after the priest had placed the host square in the centre.

The only time it was okay to let your tongue be seen – even on visits to the dreaded dentist when you had to hide your tongue somewhere in the back of your mouth so the dentist could get at your teeth without distraction – was at communion.

In those days I did not know about the women somewhere in America who cut out their tongues in protest at being raped. A silent protest that spoke to the atrocity of being violated in body such they refused to speak ever again.

‘Hold your tongue,’ the nuns said, if a girl was insolent and spoke out of turn.

Hou je mond, my father said to my mother. Shut up. Shut your mouth. Be silent.

These words come back to me and rattle round in the corners of my mind whenever I try to speak at psychoanalytic conferences or in front of certain colleagues. As if the prohibitions of my childhood are loudest in those spaces that have somehow become sacred.

The analytic world has long held that awe for me. A place where mysteries are revealed. A place of pomp and serious intent. And when I find myself in the company of analytic colleagues, something of the nun’s austerity slips inside my mind, like a cloak I must hide behind.

If I do not, if I reveal too many of my thoughts, then I will be ostracised for speaking out of turn. For my wagging tongue. For my inappropriate behaviour. For upsetting the gentle quiet reflective space that is meant to be an analytic encounter between colleagues where we sit together in earnest thought and reflect to one another on matters of great seriousness. Where we do not let slip anything to do with our feelings.

Feelings belong elsewhere, in the people with whom we work. Not in us, not in each other’s company. Not when we grapple with the profound thinking of our forebears. Those who laid out their maps of the mind. Freud and Klein, Lacan and Winnicott, all the sacred men of the past, and even the occasional woman, but mostly eminent white men who knew their theory, their history, their stuff, and would not be sidelined by the rambling rantings of a woman with a tongue she could not keep still.

I thought once it was easy to stay silent. To hide my uncertainty and questions behind a shell-like face that hid all trace of concern, but it was never like that underneath. Like belonging to a club where the rules make no sense and are therefore hard to follow. To create that world and experience is to exaggerate with words, an idea which harks back to Hilary Mantel’s thoughts about the historian as an anachronism.

A young woman in her prime, full of wonder and doubt, I did not know how to let it show without the sensation of being all wrong. And this reinforced by the stern eyes of my analytic ancestors, of the teachers in my analytic training who stay with me still in the back of my mind. Their deep eyes shrouded in thoughtfulness and a priest like reverence that brings us closer to the god who was Freud whom I could never be, loose tongued and sloppy child that I was.

I see my younger self back then trying to emulate these stern figures from my past and cringe at my lack of warmth. The way my gushiness snapped shut under the weight of professionalism. The blank screen, the place onto which all others might project their own fantasies and the pleasure of being able to sit back and watch someone else spill their guts over me. I could step back unaffected only curious about them.

We may not see it like this now. Now when we become participants in this process and are aware of how affected we become in this analytic dance, but when I was a fifteen year old school girl and another fifteen years later, a young woman in search of analytic understanding, I only saw a need to hide and to hold my tongue.

On the radio today I heard about the research of one Wendell Johnson who hypothesised that children who stuttered might stop stuttering if they were told often enough their speech was fine. To complete this experiment, he selected 20 children from a local orphanage, divided them into two groups, half of whom stuttered, the other half not. Then he subjected half that compliment via a researcher, one 22-year-old Mary Tudor to tell one group including five stutterers and five non stutterers their speech was fine.

For the other group, half of whom also stuttered and half who did not, that they had a problem speaking and should only speak when they were sure they had their words correct. Those in the group told their speech was all wrong suffered, especially the non-stutterers.

The person who investigated this ‘Monster’ research talked of how this research took place in 1937, when psychoanalysts were arguing that stuttering was the result of neurosis. They argued people who stuttered suffered from repressed homosexual desire manifested in their anal muscle stuttering in unison, or some such bunkum.

It horrifies me to learn that psychoanalytic ideas could be so misused in the service of labelling people whose affliction might well have some other source beyond so called neurosis.