Mississippi Rubicon

It’s done. No unforeseen technicality to stop me from leaving. No lightning bolt cracking the firmament to halt me in my tracks. No last-minute change of heart, struck from my horse, to turn me around. I am out not in. I am here, not there.  I settle into my seat and glance out the train window, assuming an air of nonchalance as if boarding a train is the most ordinary occurrence, not worth a second’s thought, rather than an experience I’ve had only twice in the last five years, and that a round-trip, which leaves you where you started, thus gets you nowhere, and so fails to qualify as travel adventure. This trip, however, is a voyage out. I have left my life in the convent. I am going home.  

A year ago, I traveled to Anaconda, Montana via Butte on my first assignment teaching at the high school, returning ten months later to the Motherhouse in Sinsinawa Wisconsin, seven miles east of Dubuque. For both journeys I wore the Dominican habit as Sister Edmund Campion. About half an hour ago, the Motherhouse driver dropped me at the train station in Dubuque, so I’ve already crossed the river once today going west. Crossing back on the train going east, I’m headed for Chicago as Dorothy Hunt, dressed like everyone else, on my way to my former neighborhood, former family, former name and former self, altered but recognizable. 

Entering the convent I was trying out another way of life, and given seven years before making a final commitment, unlike those who marry with scant chance to test the arrangement beforehand. So choosing the religious life has an advantage over choosing the married state. On the other hand, unlike marriage, leaving the religious life means leaving it forever. Divorced or widowed persons can remarry, but my departure can never be revoked. I cannot throw myself upon the mercy of Mother Benedicta to take me back, casting myself upon the floor to ask forgiveness as I did after listing my transgressions in Chapter of Faults. My departure can never be revoked. My farewell is forever. 

So consumed have I been with leaving, I’ve hardly thought of the future.  Now, seated on the train, I brace myself against the fear that threatens to engulf me. What I will not be doing with my life, a worrying question I could not answer for months, is clear. What I will be doing with my life, on the other hand, is hazy. I have a vague sense of a lay vocation, nothing specific.  I still love teaching — will it figure somehow?  I haven’t any specific option in hand, but I can’t afford to upset myself worrying about my fuzzy future.  So I try to concentrate on the moment. I am seated on the train. I am gazing out the window at the sign for Dubuque.  I am going home. 

Because I changed my mind, I’ve had to change my clothes to appear like everyone else, but I’m not sure I’ve made the grade in my belted red cotton shirtwaist with a collarless round neckline and short sleeves. My head bare for the first time since I left home, my dark-brown hair is only three months grown out from my shaved head into the semblance of a pixie cut, more like James Mason as Brutus than Leslie Caron as Gigi. Beige nylon stockings rather than convent-issue black lisle, and low-heeled shoes complete the ensemble. How odd I feel in these clothes that make me blend in. So ordinary, yet to me a costume for a nameless character with no script.  Many would think my former religious dress, not my current look, was the costume. The white habit and black veil of a Dominican nun made me stand out in a crowd. Now, when I should feel normal in a dress, I feel as if I’m impersonating an alien.  

Five years ago, as a senior in high school, I acted various roles, beginning as Andromache, Hector’s wife, in The Trojan Women, a tragedy by Euripides from the fifth century BCE; and ending as the title character, Mary Herries, in Kind Lady, a melodrama by a now forgotten playwright, Edward Chodorov, from the 1930s. As Andromache, clutching her baby son, Astyanax, before a Greek soldier hurls him over the parapet, I wore an emerald green Greek chiton. As Mary, trapped in her London townhouse by an extortionist gang, I wore a dowdy dress reflecting a matronly disdain for fashion, with a beige cardigan wrapping my shoulders to quell any doubt.  Such range as an adolescent bodes well for recapitulating myself as casually as my idol Fred Astaire tapping his way down a staircase.  At least I hope so.  

The conductor is calling out “Tic-kets!   Tickets please,” as he makes his way along the aisle in his dark blue polyester uniform and peaked cap set squarely atop his head, with tufts of reddish-brown hair poking out on either side, like muttonchop whiskers set too high, reminding me of a less flamboyant Bozo the clown. Wearing rimless glasses, his moustache reaching toward those matching tufts and setting off his smile, he lingers along the way for some friendly exchange with a passenger, apparently enjoying his job. “Next stop,” he says to the seatback in front of me, reaching out his hand toward me at the same time. I hand over my ticket with conscious nonchalance, playing my part. Glancing down as he punches it, he returns it to me and looks at me for the first time.  Suddenly his jaw drops and his whole body jerks, as if he’s suffered an electric shock.  “My God!” he says.  (What’s wrong? Does the nun show?)  “With that haircut, you look like Liz Taylor.”  I clamp my jaw to stifle some stammering response, and smile as he passes to his next customer.  But I feel totally discombobulated and mortified. I was right to be worried about looking like James Mason, which the conductor saw but modified to a more flattering comparison. The jig is up. I should have covered my head somehow. I’m exposed as an impostor. That so-called haircut brands me as unmistakably as Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. A stranger just doing his job penetrated my disguise in an instant. He may as well have said, “Ex-nun, right? Bet you just left the Motherhouse other side of the river. Believe me, I seen plenty o’ those.” 

You’re letting your imagination run away with you, I tell myself. My conductor may have, but only unknowingly, punched the tickets of other women leaving the Motherhouse for the last time. But he can’t know why I fear being exposed as a former nun because of my haircut. “It takes one to know one” sums up the context, so I must explain hair care upon taking the veil. 

The crucial piece of clothing is not the veil, but what the veil covers, the cap, which resembles a balaclava that shows the face. This so-called cap is made of soft white cotton fabric with a stiffly starched band about two inches high creased in the center running across the forehead. One inserts one’s face into the front opening and pulls it tight, closing it securely at the back with straight pins threaded through the cloth. Hair is trapped and matted down, with no air circulating, so shaving my head is clearly the best pragmatic and hygienic option. In deciding to leave, I had not included the length of my hair in my list of pros and cons. Compared to discerning God’s will and possibly ruining the rest of my life, hair did not make the grade.  I decided to leave only three months before the day I had to renew my vows, and let my hair grow out from that moment, but that still left very little to work with when the kind came to leave. 

No one has ever commented on my physical appearance in the last five years. Maybe this is part of customer relations. Aside from his faulty eyesight, my conductor seems capable, punching tickets, announcing the next station’s arrival time, offering a hand as passengers alight. Pop culture hasn’t been my focus over the last five years, but I remember Liz Taylor as Rebecca in the film of Scott’s Ivanhoe. I know many think of her as the most beautiful woman in the world, so maybe the conductor means his exclamation as a compliment. He’s not criticizing my haircut, but saying it makes me look like a movie star. No doubt my upbringing has unconsciously kicked in. Vanity and immodesty are sins, even for ordinary lay people, let alone for nuns, who must rise above the frivolity of cultivating an attractive physical appearance. Rise above. What’s more, the public look at nuns as neuter, so being attractive is suspect, and certainly irrelevant to a religious vocation. A normal person, not an ex-nun, would hear a compliment.  In any case, even though I’ve been churning up inside, I presented a calm exterior.  Even if I hadn’t known the name, I could have smiled knowingly. I store that insight for future use and take heart in my first exchange as if never a nun, as if I were a normal person caught up in a normal exchange with another normal person crossing my path. No one seated nearby notices. I’m the abnormal one masking my reaction. From now on I’ll expect the unexpected, however one does that. Thank you, Mr. Anonymous Conductor, for that after-the-fact obvious insight.  

(Much later, I develop a deep aversion to others’ habit of commenting on women’s physical appearance, as if being attractive were our destiny, with childbearing a far second. This standard applies to men as well, but farther down the list of criteria, way below “competent,” “strong,” “brave,” or “authoritative.” Even so, judging anyone on looks diminishes everyone, take that and so there!) 

As the train crosses eastward over the Mississippi, I picture Julius Caesar navigating the Rubicon. I’m not defying the Senate, nor engaged in any illegal action.  But I am taking a risk that seems almost as momentous to me as his to him. Luckily my commoner status rules out assassination.  “The die is cast,” Caesar famously, perhaps apocryphally, pronounced. I echo his words within, not as a clarion call but as a muted whisper, fearing hubris.  Since the utterance itself is timid, I repeat it to rouse my courage.  “The die is cast. The die is cast.” 

At this turning point I’m stressing about what I’m wearing because clothes signify, even define, and I’m undergoing significant redefinition in my red belted shirtwaist. As the train chugs on, I picture being dressed all in white for my First Communion, looking forward to consuming the body of Christ to become him as he becomes me. Such a privilege was bestowed only after mastering The Baltimore Catechism and going to confession. The first requirement was straightforward, entailing memorizing a few dozen answers to questions about Catholic belief and practice to show I’d reached the age of reason. This didn’t mean questioning or disputing, like Socrates pacing back and forth in the Athens marketplace. Ours not to reason why, ours but to nod, comply. Confession meant examining my conscience to unearth sins required for absolution. No sins, no confession, no forgiveness, no First Communion, no becoming one with Jesus. Such dire consequences threatened an already heightened situation.  

Transgressions against the Ten Commandments meant I had to understand them, not always the case. I eliminated taking the Lord’s name in vain when I learned what it meant. Whatever coveting goods and wives, let alone adultery, were, only grown-ups did. Sunday Mass to keep holy the Sabbath day? Skipping unthinkable. Stealing, like lying, was also out of the question. Thieves were less despicable than liars in Mother’s book, but just barely. I might understandably feel a little smug as so far sinless, but I don’t feel virtuous, just nonplussed. I can’t invent sins, can I? That would be lying– wait, there’s one! But how would that work?  I’m getting desperate. On the edge of despair, another serious sin I’m not committing, I learn arguments and name-calling are sins against charity and can even be considered forms of violence, thus covered by “Thou shalt not kill.”  Disobeying my parents violates “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Eureka! Granted, no murder or mayhem, but I shed my angst and enter the confessional box ripe for absolution. I’ll make my First Communion in the morning in my special dress, veil, anklets and shoes, all stark white, a color signifying purity but needing vigilant care against dirt or stain. Everything seems so bright so light, so clean, like my six-year-old soul.  

This shining outfit worn only once gives way to an everyday choice, seen two years later in Dorothy’s third-grade school photo. The night before she has cut her bangs, and the resulting diagonal rather than straight line from right to left betrays her amateur’s hand. Clearly, she has not graduated from cosmetology school. Unsmiling, she seems pensive, looking straight into the camera. Her clothes may not reveal much to the onlooker, but they speak to me. She is wearing a plaid cotton short-sleeved blouse with a pointed collar, which she’s plucked from the bountiful ironing basket stored below the standing ironing board in the dining room, always at the ready, and ironed herself. Such enterprise at age eight results from her parents’ necessary benign neglect: five children (the sixth and last came later) are too many to track while mother and father work full-time. She’s on her own for her school photo, simply a fact, and she doesn’t mind. Ironing her blouse, like cutting her bangs, is just business as usual in her family. What’s more, fending for herself fosters independence and inventiveness, even if she’s not yet up to the tasks of barber and laundress. She looks a little lost in the picture. Maybe she’s bored with the slightly tedious process of satisfying the photographer, and has allowed her mind free rein, conveying a slightly vacant air. Even as I rue her circumstances, she endears herself to me  

Recalling another actual snapshot, I’m graduating from the Academy of Our Lady in 1958, standing next to my beaming mother. At 5’8”, I loom over her, taller by four inches, and I dominate the photo, which seems only fitting since it marks my achievement. Holding a large bouquet of red roses diagonally across my chest, I flash audacious whiteness with my cap and gown and toothy smile, all doubtless framed by the amateur photographer, my sister Mary Kay. I’ve won several prizes, once again crossing the finish line of pleasing Mother, and I feel a twinge of triumph. She beams and I bask. 

Leaving aside actual snapshots, my convent life elbows into my consciousness as the train gets closer to Chicago , and I picture myself in various iter­ations of my convent clothes as a triptych. At the left, still Dorothy Hunt, in the summer after my high-school graduation, dressed as a postulant in black blouse, skirt, and shoul­der-cape, black lisle stockings and rather chunky, clunky black shoes, laced and low-heeled, with a short black veil made of netting on my head, tied in place at the back of my neck. In the postulants’ main room, my crowd of 70 stretch­ing in scattered clumps behind me, I sit at one of the library tables, bent over a book. 

In the panel at the right, now Sister Edmund Campion, 1 wear the full Domini­can habit, except for the white, not black, veil of a novice flowing down my back held in place by a clothespin. In the gym of St. Clara Academy, the high school we staff on the Mother­house grounds, I’m shooting baskets with the other novices, all freed of flap­ping veils by those clothespins, thus enabled to take a clear shot with no interference from flying headgear. I’m at the front of the frame, novices scattered behind me in suspended stages of leap­ing and reaching and grabbing and throwing, giant fluttering birds of an unknown spe­cies, or intimations of angels with no one to guard taking a break. 

In the center of the triptych, wearing the black veil of a professed sister as well as the full habit, I’m walking with Sister Adona, my roommate, from the convent in Anaconda to the high school where we teach English, less than two blocks. We’re swathed in our outdoor cloaks to keep out the autumn cold, like pelisses minus their fur linings, black mantles that brush the ground. An ordinary day filled with our stu­dents, who are, we both hope, learning from our teaching. How sharp our purpose! How small our world!  I mentally fold the two sides over the center of my triptych and close it tight. 

We’re almost there.  I should think ahead to arriving.  I don’t relish seeing my mother. She expressed her disappointment when I phoned weeks ago from the Motherhouse to tell her I was leaving.  “You’ve broken my heart,” she said. I didn’t then wonder, hearing this, why she focused on herself and her broken heart instead of me and my struggle.  To be fair, I hadn’t discussed my agonized doubts with her just in case I ended up staying.  On the other hand, she knew my decision was irrevocable and must have known I had to endure uncertainty and internal debate. But she then spoke only of herself, and didn’t ask about me.  She’d probably never imagined I’d lived through anguished weeks of indecision. Even so…. Maybe I was too good at covering, presenting a tranquil front, trying to sound normal, even upbeat, just as now I’m trying to look and act like my fellow passengers.   

The train pulls into Chicago’s Union Station, and Mother is waiting for me at the gate. She doesn’t remind me about her broken heart. She welcomes me in a long hug and never reproaches me for failing to persevere. We start toward our suburban commuter connection. Almost home.