School Days

Alex loved school, earned good grades, and for the most part was a cooperative student. There were exceptions.

One noontime Alex was very late returning for our mid-day dinner. He finally arrived, flushed, ruffled, collar askew and shirttail out, with a muttered explanation that Sister Aloysius had kept him after school. Alex ate a hasty half-meal and returned to school.

Soon after one o’clock I received a telephone call from the Principal’s office asking me to meet Sister Patricia later that afternoon. It was the first time I had been called to school about an errant child, but I was more curious than concerned as I walked up to school.

Our apparently wayward son, looking far smaller than usual, sat wide-eyed and solemn on a chair too large for him in the bare anteroom. Sister Patricia swished forward forbiddingly, black robes rustling, and stiff white linen framing a stiffer visage. She motioned me into her office, closed the door, leaned back against it, and began shaking with soundless guffaws.

When we both were seated, she described Alex’s misdeeds in her Irish brogue, broken with quiet laughs. “Alex didn’t finish his arithmetic,” Sister Patricia began. “Sister Aloysius knew he could do it and was annoyed that he hadn’t been paying attention. When class let out for lunch, she told Alex he had to stay until he turned in his work.”

According to the laughing Principal, Alex protested that he had to get home, that his mother would worry about him. Sister was firm. Alex was frantic. Finally he threw down his pencil and, disregarding his arithmetic book, open on the desk, dashed out the door.

“When I saw them,” Sister Patricia continued, her smile broadening as she enjoyed the memory, “Alex was bolting down the veranda with Sister Aloysius flying after him like a great black bat.” She flapped her arms in the loose, dark sleeves of her habit to illustrate, then fell back in her chair laughing aloud.

Sister Patricia proposed, and I agreed, that Alex would be lectured sternly, but that his terror had been ample punishment. I was sent out to the anteroom to wait as the Principal, her face refrozen into its mask of sternness, summoned my quaking son to her inner sanctum. Alex cast a last, desperate glance over his shoulder at me as he followed the swishing black skirts.

 

Only once more was I called in to confer with Sister Patricia about Alex’s misbehavior. This time she was less amused. History class had reached Henry VIII and his untidy marital record. The teacher described his divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, according to Catholic teaching. Our Episcopalian (in Belize, Anglican) son could not agree with the Nun’s version of English history and would not remain in discrete silence. He raised his hand, was recognized, and gave a polite, but cogent, description of that period of history as he had read it in other books and heard it in Sunday School. Sister was shattered; Alex was banished; Mother was summoned.