SISTER GAUDEAMUS, WORTHY FOE

A funny story by my father Herbert Eyre Moulton about his 1930's childhood. The witty, melodramatic battles between him and his Catholic School's Mother Superior Sister Gaudeamus.

SISTER GAUDEAMUS, WORTHY FOE

 

        One of the most exhilarating features of my grade school days at St. Cuthbert’s was the running battle between myself and the Principal, Sister Gaudeamus �" a stimulating ongoing confrontation, which, I’m sure, gave her as much pleasure as it gave me. She was a handsome, bespectacled woman of supreme dignity, but a dangerously low boiling-point, majestic when she drew herself up to her full height, seeming to loom over us like a giantess. Her holy name translated into English meant: “Let us rejoice!”. It was, however, clear that she did not always do so, save the occasional smirk while reprimanding me.

Years later, when I happened to call on her with my old partner-in-crime Chuck Reilly, we were astonished at (a) how genuinely merry a soul she was and (b) that she really was quite short in stature. Back in the 30’s in our days of trying to out-fox one another, she had positively towered, and that takes a bit of doing.

            Nowadays, in our era of watered down religion, the nuns looking like everybody else, robs them of whatever uniqueness and dignity they once possessed �" a bit dowdier, with only the trace of the headdress shrinked to a skimpy little piece of cloth revealing a head of hair, mousey in color, and in most cases, none too attractive.

Back in our time, they revelled in their medieval otherness, and the only hair visible would be a chin stubble or a delicate moustache, such as the one sported by our Middle-Grade teacher, Merita of the Moustache.

           The sanctified pecking-order at St.Cuthbert’s began with Gaudeamus and proceeded to feisty little Sister Apolexia AKA Jimmy the Newsboy or The Town Crier, with her thick Teutonic accent --- (the Mother House was in the Beer-City of Milwaukee). Then, there was the unfortunate Sister Alphonsine --- Al the Drooler --- for the trickle of saliva invariably at both sides of her mouth --- when in one of her tizzies, the trickles became gushes. Poor dear, she was the first to be driven into a rest home by our juvenile Reign of Terror.

           The First Grade teacher, St. Georgetta, youngest and nicest of the lot, was a different species altogether, gentle and mild-mannered (deceptively so), and the only one of the Death Squad (as we called them) to giggle, as she often did, at my antics. But she was much more than mere cotton candy. Beneath that winsome exterior was a lining of the same quality steel that buttressed a Hildegard, a Teresa or a Gaudeamus. She did not suffer fools or rowdies gladly. When little Ralphie Reilly, youngest and most mischievious of all the unruly Reillys, disrupted the class once too often, Georgetta, didn’t think twice about bundling him and his twin sister Rita (protesting shrilly) into a taxi and sending them home to their distraught mother Kathleen. That was the end of the affair until a general amnesty could be fixed.

           Our Gestapo - Nazi movies were then the vogue, and we saw as many of them as we could �" held one or two others, who replaced the ones already fallen off the porch. What I remember most about them was the standard warning to the pupils in their care, destined to strike terror in the most impressionable hearts.

           “You know what’s going to happen to you?” the early alarm-system ran, “you’re going to grow up to be exactly like Moulton!”

           It never failed.

           For the care and the nurturing of our aesthetic natures, a music teacher, known as Sister Arpeggio, was on duty with her long skeletyl fingers and voice like a broken factory whistle. During private piano lessons, I actually had one a week at 50 cents a throw, she’d sit tapping one foot and fingering a wooden ruler to bash the fingers of anyone not plinkety-plonking to her satisfaction. I myself never got this treatment, because I was one of the few who genuinely loved music, no matter what atrocities I committed otherwise.

I really tried with what pieces she gave me: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the 1^st movement in drastically simplified fashion, “Für Elise”, and the Minuet in G. The night before a lesson would find me thumping these over and over again at home, to the distraction of my parents and any callers unfortunate enough to drop in just then. What if it did hamper conversation? I had my career to think about.

           At the end of the school year, Sister Arpeggio always had me host her annual pupils concert down in colonial hall (the basement concert hall), for the occasion cheerful with masses of fresh flowers from parishoners’ gardens: lilacs, tulips, peonies. I was also given a free hand in arranging the programme, ending with my own massacre of a Chopin Nocturne. Along with such surefire Liliputian crowdpleasers as March of the Wee Folk, The Elves Picnic, A Simple Story, Minstrel Nights, and The Ladybug’s Picnic.

           You can imagine how stunned the nuns were, with Gaudeamus leading all the rest, at the miraculous change wrought in this ‘useless piece of furniture’ (as she often called me). Whoever would have thunk it?

           Such gala occasions were rare enough. Otherwise, it was strictly Business-as-Usual in the ongoing Sister-vs.-Herbert-Campaign, each of cheerfully striving to score off one another in a Marathon of One-Upmanship. There were risks for anybody foolhardy to enter the lists against the mighty Sister Superior. Once, however, Destiny with a big D, in the guise of old Mother Nature, proved mightier than either of us mortal antagonists.

           One morning in springtime, while S’ster was luridly describing, James Joyce-like, the torments reserved for the damned in Hell, suddenly, no warning whatsoever, I was struck by the most severe attack of what could be called The Trots. Sister was suspicious at once, harking back to my fondness for crying Wolf.

Indeed, she wore the look of one who smelled a rat �" under the circumstances, a most unhappy choice of words.

           Let’s just say she doubted the validity of my appeal to be allowed to go the The Boy’s Washroom , but urgently!

           “Must it be now? I’m just getting to the good part!”

           My next request was more pressing than before, and met with Sister’s adamant:

           “What?! Again?! Really, Herbert, really!”

           “But, S’ster,” I sobbed. “We had RHUBARB for breakfast!”

           (This, by the way, was to become a favorite saying in that class.)

           My every return to the classroom was greeted by murmurs and moans, with one smart a*s, Bob Stroot by name, compounding my humiliationby holding his nose and muttering:

           “P �" U!”

           When my hand flew up again, Sister, her patience obviously at an end, rebelled:

           “I don’t care what you people had for breakfast, nobody should have to go more than four times in a row!”

           “FIVE times, Sister,” piped the loathsome dwarf Mary-Lou O’Connell, Little Mary Sunshine, as penned by Poe. “I know, ‘cause I’ve been keeping count!”

           Before I could frame a suitable retort, I was on my way once more, the human cannonball about to explode.

           When I returned to the classroom, weak as a sick kitten, it was being dominated by a new a ponderous figure: that of Powerful Katrina, the convent-housekeeper-nun seldom seen by daylight and said to be usually chained to a ring in the kitchen floor. But now she had burst her bonds and was standing there with a blue-and-white union apron lounching up her habit, and wielding a large bottle filled with a dreadful looking black compound.

           Without a word, she had me gripped in a powerful half-nelson and was ladelling the disgusting stuff down my gallet, grunting in a coarse Milwaukee-Deutsch: “Ach, verdammt Rhabarber!!! Raus mit ihm!” (“Ach, damned rhubarb! Get him out!”)

           The funny thing was, by some miracle or other (black magic from the black forest), it did the trick. What might well have been a horrrible ecological calamity had been averted. But it was the first time that one of my mom Nell’s five-star-recipes had (you will have to excuse the expression) backfired with a loud ‘ka-puff’.

           Oh, it was Laff-a-Minute guaranteed. All except for the one time, a few weeks after the Rhubarb-Incident (cue for a Vincent-Price-like laugh: “Mwua-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaa!”), when I for once went too far in striving for The Big Guffaw (notice the capital letters and enter the drummer, hitting his high hat).

It was during a particularly dull stretch of Gaudeamus Country, with herself expounding on what she hinted would be the greatest step forward in practical religion since the invention of Bingo: the introuction of her FIFTEEN HOUSEHOLD VIRTUES, augmenting in their homespun fashion THE THREE CARDINAL and FOUR THEOLOGICAL ones.

           She actually had the hope of receiving the Church’s imprimatur on these.

           Aimed mainly at the female faithful, they would do equally well for the menfolk. These were inspired by the example of the Blessed Virgin, along with Martha and Mary, the two sisters of Lazarus, with the Virtuous Woman of the Old Testament, all of them helping one another aquuire such virtues as Thrift, Orderliness, Chastity (naturally!), Humility, Neighborliness �" I forget the rest, because a fight broke out in the back row, shattering the carefully built-up-mood. Anything to dispel the boredom, too, as I decided at the time had come to inject a bit of Pizzazz.

           ME: (waving my hand eagerly) S’ster! S’ster!

           SISTER: (pausing with a sigh and a frown, eyeing heavenward, voice producing a slow, solemn monotony) Yes, Herbert, was there something?

           ME: Pardon me, Sister, but I have something important to tell you!

           SISTER: Must it be now?

(Warning: Storm Ahead!)

           ME: I only wanted to say, I have a birthday tomorrow!

(Not true, of course, but essential to the build-up!)

           SISTER: And what, pray, do you want us to do about it? Have a party? Declare a national holiday? Hire a caterer?

           (Warning: Sarcasm is always a bad sign!)

           Rather short notice, isn’t it?

           (Laughter from the grandstands. Ka-Ching!)

           ME: No, S’ster, since it is my birthday, may I wear my birthday suit to school?

           CRASH! BOOM! BANG!

           My oneliner unleashed an avalanche of mirth from everyone present. All except Sister, which was to be expected. But what was not be expected was her reaction. That was as far over the top as what had precipiated it, more so, even.

           In an instant she had risen like a Prophetess of Old, breathing heavily through her nostrils �" an Old Testament amazon of righteousness: Judith, Deborah, the Witch of Endor all rolled into one. A vehement signal for silence and the laughter subsided at once. Everybody knew that this was it. The Big Crush.

           SISTER: (A low vibrant, barely controlled voice:) You will leave this room at once, Sir, do you understand? Nasty-minded RODENT that you are ... No, not into the cloakroom, that would be too mild ... Out, out into the corridor! Or just wait till your parents are informed of this!

           ME: (Striving for one last laugh, little Herbie appearing Elisha Cook, Jr., an impression from the Warner Bros. James Cagney films:) No, S’ster, not the corridor! It’s too cruel �" Not Siberia! Say you don’t mean Siberia!

           But I realized that this time I had really gone too far, aiming for the laugh of a lifetime, I had come a universal cropper instead.

           Sister held her ground, pointing, inexoribly, not unlike The Ghost of Christmas Future, towards the door, pointing at me, full of doom.

           ME: But it’s cold and dark and lonely out there, S’ster ...

           SISTER: All the better for contemplation if one’s malefactions. (Producing her golden pocket watch:) In precisely one half-hour, a worthy Pastor will be here to deliver another one of his lectures on “Ours is the Only True Religion”. I dare say you will meet out in the corridor, Siberia, as you choose to call it with your perverted sense of mirth. That, young man, will be only the beginning of your problems.

           I swallowed hard and started lurching towards the door, the last of my bravado having vanished along with Elish Cook, Jr.

           As I stepped out into the corridor, I heard Sister saying: “All right, Class. For your part in encouraging That One in his wicked ways, your punishment shall be �"“

           Game, Set and Match for Sister Gaudeamus.

           And Little Herbie waddled out into a Siberian corridor in Illinois, U.S.A., planning his next little triumphant sketch in order to add a well concealed smirk to the Sister Superior’s facial expression.

Author's Note

My father Herbert Eyre Moulton (1927 - 2005) was a true Renaissance Man: actor, playwright, historian, studied theologian, singer, author and teacher. He worked with People like Clint Eastwood, Joan Crawford, Maria Callas, Jussi Björling, Nicolai Gedda, Alan Rickman and Jeroen Krabbé. This anecdote takes place when he was a funny little kid in Illinois of the 1930's.