Life With Mother Superior Read Free

to teach everything twice just to accommodate us. We seldom got a chance to betogether, but upon occasion we managed to elude both students and faculty, and devoted ourselves completely to the downfall and destruction of Mother Superior.
    “The best time to go through the cloister is prayer time,” Mary said to me as soon as Mother Superior left the room. “They’re good for at least an hour.”
    “We’ve got to have someone watch the door and let us know if someone comes.”
    “How do you feel about Murphy?”
    “Okay with me.”
    Murphy was our first choice for a friend if we had to have a friend. She was what my father called a “slick” mick. This was opposed to the other breed of Irishman known as “thick” micks. In all the time that Mary and Murphy and I sewed the Sisters’ nightgowns at the neck, locked their bathroom doors from inside and climbed out windows, Murphy invariably made the honor roll. Mary and I were not only never on the honor roll, we were on Mother Superior’s blackest list.
    Murphy’s mad, cinnamon-colored eyes sparkled at the thought of a tour of the cloister.
    “Sure, I’ll watch the door.”
    “You had better whistle if anyone comes.”
    “I won’t be there if anyone comes.”
    “Aw, come on, Kate, be a sport or we’ll never see how the other half lives.” Mary wiped her sweating palms in pure anticipation of the tour.
    It was so easy to see the cloister, we were really quite disappointed. We rambled from room to room. Most of them were bedrooms or large dormitories where the novices slept. The whole place looked like a charity ward in some hospital.
    We made a special point of finding Mother Superior’s room. It was as bare as the rest of them. I suppose we expected to find the trappings of an early Medici, but it was not like that at all. A crucifix on the wall, a chest of drawers, books piled on the chest and not a one of them interesting.
    Then we took in the refectory, the recreation room and the baths.
    “Well, how was it?” Murphy quizzed us. “See any hair shirts or racks or chains?”
    “Hell, no,” Mary said, “it’s as dull as the rest of this place.”
    “Listen,” Murphy confided in us. “I’ve been thinking. I bet we could sell tours through the convent. Everyone wants to see it and no one has the guts to look. If we’d take them for a quarter, I think we could have a lot of fun.”
    Mary was delighted. The thought of dealing so crushing a blow to Mother Superior was a real thrill. “First of all,” she said generously to Murphy, “you have got to see it.”
    So Murphy took the tour and from that moment the “Cloister Tour” group went into business. “Want to see where the Sisters and Mother sleep?” It was foolproof. No one would open their mouths because they either wanted to go or had been.
    Occasionally some good girl would say, “It’s forbidden.”
    “Of course, it’s forbidden if you get caught, but who’s going to get caught?”
    As the year progressed, we took the younger groups and even some of the graduating seniors. The more we took, the more business we had. Children who had never done a wrong thing in their school life went simply because they were compelled to go. No one could resist seeing a cloister.
    We even thought of hiding some knotted ropes around and saying we had found a secret torture chamber, in order to get some repeat business. By the end of six weeks, we had toured just about everyone at twenty-five cents a head. We couldn’t have been more pleased had Mother Superior contracted a fatal illness.
    One afternoon, two of the biggest sticks in the whole school came to see us. We had never expected them to fall.
    “How much do you charge for the tour?” asked Florence Mackey. She was a pet hate of Mary’s and mine as she was the only one we knew who bathed regularly. She and Lillian Quigley were our leading lights, constellations in Mother Superior’s crown. They could do no wrong.
    “Thirty-five