Read Online Pearl by Mary Gordon - Free Book Online

was banished too. She told her father it wasn’t fair: if Joseph was being given the opportunity for the finest education in the world for young men, she should be given the opportunity to have the finest Catholic education available to young women. She presented him with brochures for the Sacred Heart School in Noroton, Connecticut. She had chosen that school particularly because she knew it would appeal to her father’s Europhilic fantasies: the madames of the Sacred Heart, a French order (she didn’t know that almost all the nuns were Irish), with holidays called congés and four years of compulsory Latin.
    Her father was in no position to refuse her. And so he lost her, and she lost her childhood faith in her father’s word. She believes she gave up her old love for him in the name of justice, in the name of standing beside Joseph. But none of this would have happened if the times were not as they were, in the reign of John F. Kennedy and John XXIII, when the glamorous dreams were of tipping the scales of justice but the chastity of young girls was considered fragile and beyond price.
    .  .  .  
    Now we are in September 1962. Maria starts school at Noroton. For the first time she has friends, friends who are girls. For the first time she thinks of herself as one among many. These are the years for this, when many people think of
we
as opposed to
they,
whom
we
shall overcome.
    Maria learns the joy of having friends, a joy she will never lose. She and her friends try to copy Joan Baez. They sing “I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow,” “I Was Born in East Virginia,” and “Long Black Veil” and iron their hair so it will look like Joan Baez’s (it never does), but only on the weekends when they go to someone’s house, because the nuns won’t allow hair ironing. Maria and her friends form a folk group, The Poor Girls, because to perform they wear herringbone skirts and poor-boy sweaters, short-sleeved ribbed sweaters that are the rage. Maria is happy wearing something that is the rage, happy shopping at Orbach’s and B. Altman on the weekends with her friends, sometimes even at Bloomingdale’s.
    Maria and her girlfriends sail through stores like heiresses, buying their too-short skirts—or skirts the older nuns think are too short. But not their champion, Mother Dulcissima, who does not accuse them of anything and encourages The Poor Girls to sing at folk masses, which are allowed once a month. They make up liturgical words to Peter, Paul, and Mary songs: “Take this bread and take this wine and take our hearts and take our minds.” They sing this to the tune of “500 Miles.” Maria’s father abhors all liturgical reform and, most of all, folk masses. He travels to the city every Sunday for a Latin mass.
    Her life is her friends. They think of their lives as a wonderful movie, perhaps a musical; at least a film with a great sound track.
    Then it is November 1963. The president is shot. The palette of the world darkens. The music is silence; silence goes around the world, or if there is sound it is the sound of taps or bagpipes. For months, everyone moves as if they’d been the victims of a crippling blow. The world is not as they had thought, but still they think they can change it.
    Maria and her friends are the heads of everything, presidents of everything. They have the solos in the glee club; they are the stars of the plays, the captains of the debate team and the basketball team and the volleyball team. They believe that one of them will be president of the United States, one will cure cancer, one will be the female Picasso. Maria, since she is thought of as a poet, will be the female e. e. cummings. They mention their femaleness in their plans for themselves; they know it is a factor, but they don’t know how, only that they don’t want to be boys and yet everyone they think is important is a man.
    They rarely see boys, sometimes to debate in debate club or to sing with in glee club; there are