Alex Goes to School

After the novelty wore off, hotel life was a straitjacket for the children.

Friends advised us to enroll Alex in nearby St. Catherine’s Elementary, an excellent school operated by a group of Sisters of Mercy from a Rhode Island convent.

Alex had attended nursery school in Sarasota and was pleased at the idea. I proceeded with the formalities of enrolling him. My short walk took me down Marine Parade, in front of the hotel, for three pleasant blocks. On my left, I passed Memorial Park and old Colonial-style white frame houses with green blinds and red corrugated metal roofs faded to pink by the tropical sun, standing high on stilts behind white picket fences.

On my right, a walking-width seawall was splashed by waves silty with the effluence of the nearby river’s mouth. Not far out from the seawall, crystalline Caribbean waters flashed their ever-changing sequences of blues and aquas. Mangrove islands edged the horizon unevenly with a deeper green.

I turned left, away from the sea where Marine Parade came to a dead end, not dreaming that one day in the distant future we would own the house on the corner I was passing. The school was a short block up Hutson Street, just to the seaward side of the United States Consulate.

St. Catherine’s was a group of buildings in Mediterranean style with wide, pillared verandas, soft buff and beige in color. The school was surrounded by spacious lawns, or at least what was accepted for lawn on Belize City’s saline soil pumped up from the sea.

Wandering along an arcade and asking for help from whomever I could find outside the classrooms, I finally found my way to the Headmistress’s office.

Sister Patricia was easily recognized as unalterably Irish, even before she said a word in the brogue that confirmed the impression. She was a tall, robust woman with blooming cheeks and twinkling eyes that belied the severity of her black habit.

We quickly finished the formalities of enrolling Alex in Sub One (or Sub-Standard One, the equivalent of U.S. First Grade), and I payed the modest fees. Sister Patricia said that he would start school the next morning, no foolishness about waiting for a Monday.

The following day, I dressed Alex carefully in sport shirt and shorts, and escorted him down the seawall and up to school. The nun who was to be his teacher met us at the door. She welcomed Alex warmly, and dismissed me firmly. Our five-year-old had been both excited and apprehensive about being thrust into a group of unfamiliar children in a foreign country. His last glance toward me was a mixture of slightly scared reassurance and an acceptance of a force beyond his control in his new teacher in her strange dark garb.

I went home to suffer for him for the rest of the school day.

By the time I returned to St. Catherine’s to meet Alex, he had found friends to join him on the walk back down the seawall. One was the slightly older son of the Comptroller of Customs, an Englishman from the Fiji Islands.

“How many countries have you lived in?” the boy asked Alex.

“Two,” Alex replied.

“I’ve lived in five,” his new friend boasted and proceeded to list what sounded like half Britain’s more distant colonies.

Alex, who had been overwhelmed with pride at being in his first foreign country, was deflated, to the dismay of his hovering mother.

Sonia arranged for a seamstress to make Alex’s school uniforms of khaki pants and short-sleeved white shirts. He settled in happily, made friends, and walked back and forth to school on the seawall feeling remarkably adult. Carli was vocally unhappy at being left behind with Sonia.