1
The late afternoon sky is pewter. Wind whips through the Manhattan canyons. In Central Park, a single large gingko tree stands golden against the glowering clouds. Underfoot are the thickly fallen leaves of maple, oak, and ash. Gusts of wind send the leaves dancing. Dog owners like myself hurry their charges on their rounds. It is nearly Thanksgiving, and the dark comes early.
Perhaps because of all my school years, fall for me is a time of beginnings. The short, steep days send me tumbling into my past. I am fifty-seven years of age, neither old nor young. My life has swept me along on its tide, but now, at the midpoint, it is time to pick my way along the shoreline, to see what of value has been washed up, which mementos should be pocketed and which cast aside. Mine has been a turbulent life. But it did not start out that way.
I grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, in a large yellow house in the woods. An oversized, overstuffed English cottage, the house was made of fieldstone and wood. Cold pried at the windows. Dark gathered in the surrounding trees. As early as late September, fires were built in the three fireplaces to ward off the chill. Just outside the front door stood a large maple tree. When its leaves turned crimson, my mother would carefully press the best between sheets of waxed paper. These leaves were then tacked on our kitchen bulletin board amid vivid charcoal drawings of Halloween.
Fall was fierce, but my mother domesticated it. As the wind stripped the trees, my mother made simmering pots of vegetable soup. She baked shortbreads and berry pies. As early as October, she began her holiday baking, filling the downstairs freezer with a dozen different Christmas cookies, divinity, and fudge.
“Let’s go to your house,” my school friends would say. Of course they did. Homemade cookies and frosty milk were staple after-school fare. If we felt daring, we raided the freezer. Christmas cookies tasted best a month or two before their time. “Who’s been after the Christmas cookies?” my mother would interrogate us, but she always seemed secretly pleased by the chance to bake some more.
When winter displaced fall, reading spots in front of the fireplaces were at a premium. The best locale was in our living room. There the reader could loll on thick café-au-lait carpeting. A mesh screen protected errant bookworms from flying sparks. Prodded by a wrought-iron poker, the fire could be built to a snapping roar, so hot that clothing singed. “Don’t crawl in the fire,” my mother would warn. Pajamas were the favored gear. What could be more idyllic than flannel pajamas and a new volume of Nancy Drew? Even better, the latest volume by Marguerite Henry, Misty of Chincoteague, Sea Star, Brighty of the Grand Canyon, or King of the Wind. Ours was a house filled with books.
Just off the kitchen, the den was a snug reading room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Here were found the classics: Crime and Punishment, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Gulliver’s Travels, and rows more. The books in this room were leather-bound and gleamed in the light of the brass lamp that hung suspended from the ceiling. An overstuffed sofa, ideal for sprawling, ran wall to wall, bookcase to window. The only other furniture was Mother’s writing desk and a straight-backed chair.
It was in the den that I first discovered Lawrence of Arabia, striding through the pages of his memoirs. His hot Arabia was accompanied by cool jazz. Hidden behind a magic wooden panel, the stereo played Dave Brubeck for my father or, if my mother did the programming, “The Nutcracker Suite.” I went through an obsessive phase when all I wanted to hear was Ravel’s “Boléro.” I choreographed my sisters and brothers dancing and dying. “Either change the music or change the ending,” my mother pressed me. I went back to reading.
Upstairs, in the long hallway that ran between the bedrooms, there was another floor-to-ceiling bookcase—and this one not for classics. Here was the family cache of mysteries and big, popular potboilers like Exodus, The Listener, and Dear and Glorious Physician. Here was my brothers’ stash of Hardy Boys and my older sister Connie’s Nancy Drews. I do not know that I read every book, but I do know that I tried. I still remember the guilty exhilaration I felt racing through the Reader’s Digest condensed books, three tales to a volume.
Augmenting the books we owned were the books we borrowed. Once weekly my mother would load us in the car, a navy blue Vista Cruiser station wagon, and drive us the two miles to Cook Memorial Library, where we were allowed to take out fourteen books apiece, two per day. The library was a mansion donated to the village. It rose snowy white and stately amid splendid rose gardens. Outside and in, it was a place of enchantment. The horse books were upstairs on the second floor, front. There, Walter Farley reigned supreme: The Black Stallion, The Island Stallion, The Island Stallion Races … I read them all.
I had a limitless appetite for horse books, and for books of all stripes, for that matter. As a precocious sixth grader, I got in trouble with the vigilant checkout lady. She thought I was far too young to be reading Auntie Mame. I remember my shock and pride when my mother stood up for me. “Julie is allowed to read what she wants,” my mother told the clearly disapproving matron behind the desk. And so I learned of the profligate Mame and her secretary, Agnes Gooch, pregnant out of wedlock.
Reading about pregnancy was one thing; seeing a movie about it was quite another. Books had the legitimacy of being books. Movies were more lurid. During my teen years, the Legion of Decency graded every movie that went into major release. As young Catholics, we were allowed to see the A films and strongly cautioned against the Bs. (The few notorious films that were C were completely beyond the realm of possibility.) Our village theater, the Liberty, prided itself on family entertainment. It showed only As. Catholics went to see As.
Protestants were allowed to see whatever films they chose—A through C. My closest girlfriend, Lynnie Lane, was a Protestant. To be specific, she was a Christian Scientist. I was fascinated by the difference in our religions. Hers seemed so much friendlier than mine. She didn’t believe in hell and Satan. When I would tell her what the nuns were teaching us, she would laugh and dismiss it as scary hokum, “Catholic tales.” For my part, I was torn between embracing Lynnie’s viewpoint and believing the nuns—the nuns seemed so positive about what they believed.
I was in second grade when a nun briskly informed me that Lynnie could not go to heaven because she had never been baptized. For good measure, she added that animals had no souls and wouldn’t be joining us in the afterlife either. “Sister, you’re wrong!” I piped up. The class was flabbergasted. No one ever said, “Sister you’re wrong!” But I knew she was wrong about heaven and Lynnie.
From my perspective, Lynnie herself was heaven. My mother worried that I was under her spell—a Protestant spell—and I was. She was a born storyteller, and to spend time with her was to enter the enchanted kingdom. She had a horse, Hotnote, a chestnut mare, and I had a small bay pony, Chico. Although barely that tall himself, Chico could jump well over four feet. So could Hotnote. We jumped our horses bareback and no-handed. We raced through twisting woodland trails—daredevil riders. In Lynnie’s imagination our horses were Arabian chargers. We were exotic runaways. When we weren’t being runaways, we ran off to join the circus, practicing riding bareback, no-handed, and even standing. No nun was powerful enough to disenchant me with Lynnie.
Together we formed a club called The Roughriders. To belong, you had to be a daredevil and a tomboy. Initiation involved swimming your horse across the Des Plaines River—home to water moccasins, we claimed—and sinking yourself neck deep in the muck of the swamp. In the years that we ran The Roughriders, no one ever made it past initiation and into the club itself. It was really just for me and Lynnie. We shared everything. Even boyfriends. I “gave” Lynnie Joe Thomas. She loaned me Skippy Creguire.
It was in Lynnie’s musty hay-barn that I played spin the bottle and received my first real kiss from Skippy, Lynnie’s official boyfriend. If Skippy wasn’t exactly Prince Charming, he was close enough. With a little embroidery from Lynnie’s ever-present imagination, he did nicely. With just a pinch of imagination, everything did nicely.
Lynnie was six inches taller than I was, and she had a mane of thick chestnut hair. She looked like a Thoroughbred, we would joke. I looked like an Arabian. She would toss that mane like a wild horse’s as she sang anthems from Rodgers and Hammerstein, strumming enthusiastically away at her guitar. Lynnie was nothing if not fierce as she trumpeted, “Climb every mountain…” and “When you walk through a storm/Hold your head up high…”
I told Lynnie stories of saints, angels, and devils. There was St. Lucy, whose eyes got poked out. And St. Agnes, crucified upside down. Lynnie’s Christian Scientist mother was horrified. From her perspective, mine was a primitive religion. She didn’t want Lynnie getting contaminated. From my perspective, her religion was like no religion at all. Why, sin barely entered the picture. Kisses were kisses, not venial sins, and by the time Lynnie moved from Libertyville to Lake Forest at age twelve—a catastrophe in my world—mortal sins seemed hard to conjure as well.
I went to stay at Lynnie’s nearly every weekend. Friday afternoons, we would rendezvous at Kraft Pharmacy, where they made delicious bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. More Fridays than I care to remember, I would forget that it was Friday, forget that meat was forbidden, and order a scrumptious triple-decker club. Yes, weekends at Lynnie’s my Catholicism seemed far away.
The Deerpath Theatre, in sophisticated Lake Forest, Lynnie’s new town, featured more cosmopolitan movie fare than we had back in Libertyville. It was there, seated in the third row of the balcony amid the smells of popcorn and Eau Savage cologne, that I saw A Summer Place—a B movie in which Sandra Dee yields her virginity to Troy Donahue. Her resulting pregnancy was far more disturbing than that of Agnes Gooch. Gooch, after all, lived in New York, where anything, including pregnancy, could happen. Alarmingly, Sandra Dee got pregnant in a small town not so different from our own.
In the movies, there were bad girls and good girls, and the same was true in real life. Bad girls flirted and “put out.” Good girls flirted and did not put out. Cheerleaders were the only girls who seemed to straddle the line. They were good girls who pranced and preened like bad girls but to the approving applause of the crowds.
Clad in formfitting letter sweaters and satin-lined skirts, they flaunted what they had. Cartwheeling and doing splits, they were overtly sexual, but all in the name of “school spirit.” Egging the team on to victory, they could kick like a cancan line and then finish their routine off with a pyramid and a casual back flip. You weren’t supposed to notice that cheerleaders were sexy, but they were. They had charisma. Peggy Conroy, Joyce Bork, Debbie Hobson—these were names to conjure with. Forty-five years later, I can still remember that Joyce Bork was the first girl in our crowd to “need” a bra. Once Joyce got one, Peggy and Debbie quickly followed suit—and then the rest of us, lagging behind, not wanting to look too “fast.”
We were anything but fast. There were eighty-five girls in the Carmel High School for Girls’ first graduating class—and not a single unwanted pregnancy. We didn’t drink, we didn’t smoke, and our make-out sessions were limited to seniors-only parties with the parents right upstairs. Our knowledge of sex was largely theoretical: that B movie with Sandra Dee; the lingering shame down through the centuries of Mary Magdalene. At Carmel, where we had a boys’ high school as well, devoted couples went steady and in doing so invited speculation. How long would Sue be able to hold out against Bill’s advances? The fact was that the Carmelite priests held a tight rein on the Carmel high school boys. Bill was being watched, and he knew it. We all knew it.
If the boys were watched, and the girls were watched over, no one talked about the sexual subtext that existed between the girls and the young priests who were our confessors. Father Elliot, Father Bryan, Father Fintan, Father Chester—the priests were virile thirty-year-olds. We told them everything—impure thoughts and impure deeds. They gave us penance and went on their way, carrying our burdens. Did any one of us dare to say that the priests themselves were the objects of our desire? I doubt it. And yet Father Elliot was the recipient of heated attention. Tall, dark, long-lashed, and handsome, he had a sensitive nature that made him an ideal confessor for tremulous adolescent girls. He listened with such acuity and attention that it was hypnotic. Confession was an erotic rite of passage. The priests, self-contained and inviolate. The young girls, all whispers and yearning. Who could ignore the masculine appeal of the young priests? Far from solemn and repressed, they played basketball with the boys. They wore loose-fitting, coarse-woven habits belted low across the hips. A sinewy forearm would shoot out of the folds of cloth. Swoosh, the ball would fly through the net. The priests always scored.
By the time I was sixteen, I was reading Teilhard de Chardin and Paul Tillich. I was striving to find a God I could believe in, one concerned with more than the As, Bs, and Cs of the diocesan movie code. Surely God had larger concerns than that? Paul Tillich thought he did. He called God “the ground of being,” and I craved a God that would give me a sense of grounding.
My junior year, the Carmelite priests supplied a retreat master who would answer all of our questions about faith. I remember sitting in the small auditorium, listening to him say, “And so, heaven, you see, would be like watching God on the silver screen seated next to your mother.” I was horrified. I muttered my discontent to the other girls at break. “But he’s so handsome,” they breathed back, missing my point entirely. Handsome wasn’t enough for me, I groused.
Word of my unrest reached Sister Mary Cecil, our principal. I was called into her office, a troublemaker. “You’re so unhappy,” she said. “There’s no pleasing you, and now you’re getting the other girls upset.” Stoop-shouldered and kindly, she had only my best interests at heart. It was possible, she felt, that I needed the services of a psychiatrist. My God concept needed adjusting, and so, for my own good and the good of my immortal soul, I was sent to see Sister Marie Raymond, a one-hundred-forty-mile round trip to be made every Thursday afternoon after school. There was no question that I would do it.
Sister Marie Raymond, both a Sister of Charity and a psychiatrist, held a residency at St. Xavier’s College, a campus on the far south side of Chicago. To get there, I drove the tristate toll road. There were seven toll booths in each direction. I would drive through at perhaps thirty miles per hour and catch the toll basket with a well-flung quarter. I prided myself on my toss. I prided myself, too, on my honesty with Sister Marie Raymond. I told her of my disbelief in the cozy God I was being taught. Surely God was larger than the nuns and priests were letting on? Surely God must have some answers to supply, some balm for my tormented feelings of emptiness? Sister Marie Raymond wasn’t shocked by my angst. She implied that it was part of the spiritual path.
“There’s nothing really wrong with you.” I remember Sister Marie Raymond’s considered opinion. “You are just smart.” Being “just smart” had made me into an agnostic. I couldn’t believe in God as told to me by the nuns and priests. Surely there was something to their vocation that they were not telling us? Surely they believed in something more substantial than God on the silver screen? Every day in the school library, I read Paul Tillich and tried to fit his teachings to my life. Grappling with my spiritual turmoil, I looked for answers in the busy, seemingly happy lives of those all around me.
Sister Mary Elizabeth, who worked part-time for NASA, taught us calculus and seemed to believe in a God of higher mathematics. Sister Julia Clare, who taught us English, mentioned only her devotion to Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats. God was implied in her classroom by a love of beauty. We studied poem after poem as if all the meaning of life could be found distilled in the beautiful lines. Was God a poet?
Forty years later, I am still in touch with Sister Julia Clare. Ninety-two and going strong, she has made a whole life out of the love of words and beauty. When I write well, I get an excited note from her. “How I wish I’d had this book of yours when I was thirty-five,” she generously writes to me. Sister Julia Clare is kind—and determined to throw a wide enough net to catch us all.
The influence of Carmel is hard to shake. Take the ideal of modesty. Our uniforms were long plaid skirts and shapeless navy blue blazers worn over wide-collared white blouses. Four decades later, a bestselling author, I still go out to teach wearing ankle-length skirts in somber, subdued colors. I still wear shoes any nun would be proud of. My jackets diminish any curves. Make no mistake, my teaching persona is Mother Abbess incarnate. Sexuality has no place in the classroom. I learned this from the young nuns who taught us. Lesson learned, I pass it on.
“We learned about sexuality from women who gave all that up,” jokes my friend Julianna McCarthy. She is not kidding. Catholicism lingers. Seated at the head of a boardroom table, surrounded by attractive men, I do not flirt. My attention is on the topic at hand. The nuns have taught me how to be focused.
Copyright © 2007 by Julia Cameron
