Jewish convert was a particular prize. “Your father is a very distinguished man,” she said. “It’s a high standard to live up to. But with God’s help” or “with the dear Lord’s blessing . . .”
It’s certainly possible that Maria enjoyed the suspicion that her father made Sister Berchmans feel a little worried about herself, maybe a tiny bit inadequate. If her father could do that and she was his daughter—that was a sentence she was afraid to finish for herself, even in the silence of her own vain heart. Oh, I must tell you that in those days she was very vain. The incomparable vanity of the pious adolescent. But they bred it in girls like Maria.
It was an impulse born of the diction of saints’ lives that made her say to Sister Berchmans, “Oh, but you know my father can be a lot of fun too.” She blames herself for wanting to tell the nun stories. She believes everything that followed sprang from that: the impulse to entertain, to impress the nun with tales, in the shape of the Lives of the Saints. Because she forgot herself; she lost herself in the story, not remembering that with nuns and priests you always had to be on the alert, because at any minute the gate could come down and the person you’d just been chattering with could bring into the room the whole authority of Rome. The Holy Roman Empire. Just when you’d been eating chocolate chip cookies or talking about
My Fair Lady
or a hat you’d seen in a store window or the Dodgers winning the World Series or your favorite shade of blue or the flowers that bloom in the spring.
Sister Berchmans loved the story about Dr. Meyers and Joseph and Maria in Rumpelmayer’s. Maria described the room; it was like a doll’s room, pink and white and ribboned, a room that looked like you could eat the whole thing up. “My father ordered cream puffs and hot chocolate for us. He put on his very serious face. ‘It is important,’ he said, ‘to know exactly how to eat a cream puff. When I was in Paris, very great ladies would say to me,
C’est de la plus grand importance savoir manger un cream puff comme il faut
.’” She told Sister Berchmans how he kept his pretend-serious face on and cut into one cream puff deliberately, carving up pieces with the right mixture of pastry and cream, then popping them into his mouth like Charlie Chaplin. “My dear children,” he said. “It takes a lot of practice. You must eat many, many cream puffs before you can truly say you know how to eat them comme il faut.”
She told how he ordered one cream puff for each of them and then said, “That’s good, that’s good; you’re getting the idea but I don’t think it’s quite yet comme il faut.” And he kept his serious face on, almost an angry face, and ordered another for them, and another, and then when he saw they were completely stuffed he said, “Ah, I think you’re getting there. You’re learning the fine art of eating cream puffs comme il faut.”
Oh, she was really getting into her saint’s-life narrative, saying, “He takes us to Laurel and Hardy movies, Three Stooges movies, and he laughs so hard we have to pound him on the back.” And, letting her know his tender side, “He’s very kind when I’m sick or anything,” painting her a domestic scene by Chardin of the time she and Joseph had had scarlet fever and had to stay at home for a week. “One night, we couldn’t sleep because we’d slept so much during the day,” she said to Sister Berchmans. All her life, she has been able to recall that feeling of feverish wakefulness, her eyes pressing out past the bones of her skull, pushed out as if on stalks, her hot restless body longing for sleep yet excited by its own overalertness; frightened too by the numbers on the thermometer going up, up, up.
She tells Sister Berchmans her father let her and Joseph lie on his bed. “He read us
Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott.” Purposely naming the author: with nuns you could at any moment come upon a
It’s certainly possible that Maria enjoyed the suspicion that her father made Sister Berchmans feel a little worried about herself, maybe a tiny bit inadequate. If her father could do that and she was his daughter—that was a sentence she was afraid to finish for herself, even in the silence of her own vain heart. Oh, I must tell you that in those days she was very vain. The incomparable vanity of the pious adolescent. But they bred it in girls like Maria.
It was an impulse born of the diction of saints’ lives that made her say to Sister Berchmans, “Oh, but you know my father can be a lot of fun too.” She blames herself for wanting to tell the nun stories. She believes everything that followed sprang from that: the impulse to entertain, to impress the nun with tales, in the shape of the Lives of the Saints. Because she forgot herself; she lost herself in the story, not remembering that with nuns and priests you always had to be on the alert, because at any minute the gate could come down and the person you’d just been chattering with could bring into the room the whole authority of Rome. The Holy Roman Empire. Just when you’d been eating chocolate chip cookies or talking about
My Fair Lady
or a hat you’d seen in a store window or the Dodgers winning the World Series or your favorite shade of blue or the flowers that bloom in the spring.
Sister Berchmans loved the story about Dr. Meyers and Joseph and Maria in Rumpelmayer’s. Maria described the room; it was like a doll’s room, pink and white and ribboned, a room that looked like you could eat the whole thing up. “My father ordered cream puffs and hot chocolate for us. He put on his very serious face. ‘It is important,’ he said, ‘to know exactly how to eat a cream puff. When I was in Paris, very great ladies would say to me,
C’est de la plus grand importance savoir manger un cream puff comme il faut
.’” She told Sister Berchmans how he kept his pretend-serious face on and cut into one cream puff deliberately, carving up pieces with the right mixture of pastry and cream, then popping them into his mouth like Charlie Chaplin. “My dear children,” he said. “It takes a lot of practice. You must eat many, many cream puffs before you can truly say you know how to eat them comme il faut.”
She told how he ordered one cream puff for each of them and then said, “That’s good, that’s good; you’re getting the idea but I don’t think it’s quite yet comme il faut.” And he kept his serious face on, almost an angry face, and ordered another for them, and another, and then when he saw they were completely stuffed he said, “Ah, I think you’re getting there. You’re learning the fine art of eating cream puffs comme il faut.”
Oh, she was really getting into her saint’s-life narrative, saying, “He takes us to Laurel and Hardy movies, Three Stooges movies, and he laughs so hard we have to pound him on the back.” And, letting her know his tender side, “He’s very kind when I’m sick or anything,” painting her a domestic scene by Chardin of the time she and Joseph had had scarlet fever and had to stay at home for a week. “One night, we couldn’t sleep because we’d slept so much during the day,” she said to Sister Berchmans. All her life, she has been able to recall that feeling of feverish wakefulness, her eyes pressing out past the bones of her skull, pushed out as if on stalks, her hot restless body longing for sleep yet excited by its own overalertness; frightened too by the numbers on the thermometer going up, up, up.
She tells Sister Berchmans her father let her and Joseph lie on his bed. “He read us
Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott.” Purposely naming the author: with nuns you could at any moment come upon a
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