An Education in the Faith

Seven is the age of reason in the Catholic Church. When I was seven, I followed my brother Francis to Camp Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a catechism camp run by the Diocese of Charleston with the help of missionary nuns from up North. Camp OLPH obeyed the rising of the tide: if the Okatee River was up at ten A.M., that was when we swam. Then at low tide, our hair still damp, we sat on the bluff at picnic tables to learn about the Magnificat and the Immaculate Conception and the sorrowful mysteries.

My teacher, Sister Claire, was a gray-eyed New Yorker, her skin pale as the oyster shells on the bottom of the river. She was a vision in her black habit. Her fingers were long and slender, the nails chopped straight across. I drew her as a saint in the margins of my catechism.

The boys tripped over each other to run errands for Sister Claire, and when she told them she couldn't say for sure, because she'd never actually read it, but she thought Mad magazine just might be an occasion of sin, so she probably never would read it, they all ran to the barracks and flushed away their latest copies. My friend Margaret said she'd have to pretend she liked Mad anyway, at school, because her mother didn't want her calling attention to their faith. They lived in a hot little midlands town called Pauls, and her mother was afraid of the Klan. But we didn't have those worries on the coast. We had plenty of Irish, even Italians, in Charleston and Savannah and Due East, plenty of boys who graduated from Bishop England and went straight into the seminary and came back to coach baseball or teach the high school kids at Camp OLPH.

I went to camp six summers straight, but then they shut it down. My father said they were having trouble finding enough children to attend a catechism camp, but my brother Francis told me it was because three counselors were pregnant in August, by three different seminarians.

My heart was broken.

When I was eighteen I followed Francis to New York. It never occurred to our parents to send the two of us to school down South. Francis went to Fordham and recommended Marymount Manhattan as safe for me. I didn't care which school, as long as it was in New York City. I meant to paint until my arm dropped off.

Francis went back to Due East after he graduated, but I stayed in the city. It was 1971, and all Manhattan was giddy. Every time I missed the lowcountry - the crazy green of the marshes or the pure blue light - I signed up for another class at the Art Students League or bought a new brush. I was sharing a little apartment on the east side with six other girls, girls with names like Maryagnes Haddigan and Rosemarie Rossini and Maura Donnelly. They were the only girls left in New York in 1971 who still wore cardigans and plaid skirts and low-heeled pumps. They called me bohemian. I was scared to open my mouth and contradict them.

One of my roommates was an old girlfriend of Francis's named Terry Devlin. Terry was a sharp-faced redhead with a tiny bow mouth, too shrill and too sure of herself. She sneaked boys into the kitchen after everyone was asleep, and Maryagnes threw black pumps at them from the pull-out bed. One night a thin graying man dropped by for her. From the doorway, his eyes bounced like pinballs around the apartment. Terry introduced him as Joe, her mentor, but she said the word a little sarcastically. Actually, Terry said everything sarcastically - she was a grad student in philosophy. When Joe went off to the bathroom she asked me to come along with them for supper.

I'd lived with Terry Devlin for six months...