`You don't count. Sit down'

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I never thought I would love her. I never dreamed I could even like her. I answered the phone and heard her voice, unrecognizable after 32 years. When she identified herself and asked me to come and see her, I said yes, out of duty and curiosity and perhaps even old-fashioned respect.

That's what I told myself. That's what I wanted to believe. But I went for more selfish reasons than these. I went to see if she were as mean I remembered; to show her she was wrong; to once and for all open the door on a moment that has colored my life, then slam it shut and lock it forever.

"You'll never guess who this is," she had said on the phone. Her voice was bright, inviting, friendly.

She was right. I would never have guessed. Not in a million years. It was Sister Philip Julie, my eighth grade teacher.

Eighth grade, St. Marks School, Dorchester.

I lived in Randolph then. My parents drove me to school every morning. A bus from Ashmont took me home. I was an outsider, still the new girl, though I'd been at the school for a year.

Everyone else had been there for eight. They were all friends. They saw each other after school and on weekends. They went to Sunday Mass together. They belonged.

I didn't. I couldn't diagram a compound complex sentence, no matter how hard I tried. I wasn't good at the Palmer method; my "r's" betrayed me. I couldn't read Gregorian chants.

Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, I prayed at Mass every morning, for aching to belong, for chasing after the world instead of tending to my immortal soul.

"Please stand if you go to Mass every day," Sister Philip Julie said one April afternoon. Four of us rose from our seats. "One of you will crown the Virgin Mary."

One of us would have the biggest honor of the year.

Sister wrote our names on a piece of arithmetic paper. When she came to me, she paused.

"You're not in the parish, Beverly," she said. "You don't count. Please sit down."

YOU DON'T COUNT. Sister had said it, and that made it so.

"You wouldn't let me crown the Virgin Mary," I said 32 years later when she phoned. She'd been reading one of my columns when she came upon her name.

"You were in my class?" she asked. "When? What was your maiden name?"

She was so enthusiastic and friendly and warm and kind, but the words spilled out, like coins from a slot machine.

"You wouldn't let me crown the Virgin Mary."

I visited her, thinking that I wouldn't like her, no matter what she said, that I would see through the facade to the person she really was.

But there was no facade, and no Sister Philip Julie, either. Vatican II had transformed her, removed her black robe and her frown and given her back her real name: Grace.

Sister Grace met me at the door to her school, embraced me, led me into her office, introducing me to everyone along the way, then pulled up two chairs and began to talk.

And I began to listen ... and to hear ... and to see. This was a woman whose name fit. Grace means divine love. Sister Grace exuded this love. It poured out of her as she talked about her teachers and her students, introducing them as they wandered in, as she spoke about her family and her friends.

"I can't believe I told you you didn't count," she kept saying. "What a terrible thing to say to a child."

But did she really say it? Or did I make it up? Did I fill in the words? Did I hear what I expected to hear?

"They told us not to smile," she said. "They told us to be stern."

Sister Grace is no longer stern; I am no longer a child. And those three words which were said or imagined so many years ago have lost their capacity to wound.

Since she phoned last January, I have grown to love this woman, who for years I didn't like at all.