“TALES OF CHESTER continues here. As the city declines so does the sanity of a teacher.

AT THE END of her stories, she would intone: “The mills of God grind slowly …,” and, by mid-October, we would reflexively join in the refrain, …. “but they grind exceeding fine.” 

This would set her off. That didn’t stop us; we couldn’t help ourselves. “I don’t need your help!” she would scream, spittle spraying onto her starched bib like rain drops onto a white car hood. That was just to clear her throat for the main event that always followed. “You ig-norant, ig-norant, ig-norant PIGS! You NO-bodies from NO-where.”

Monday mornings were the worst. We had an overwhelming dread of confronting another endless week with Sister, and the week would begin with a tirade as sure as a baseball game began with a first pitch. On Sundays, we were required to attend the 8:45 a.m. Children’s Mass. We sat in assigned pews in front of our respective nun. The Sisters had already been to the early Mass and had had their sacramental experiences, so they were free to count heads and pay attention to everything we did.

We sang children’s hymns during the Latin liturgy; listened to a sermon targeted to the audience, amid announcements about bingo times, block collections and other fund-raising activities; and marched solemnly back from the Communion rail, our fingertips pointed to heaven, if we valued our health and immortal souls.

On the first Sunday of the school year, I noticed that Sister was not taking attendance. This was unprecedented, and something else that very much separated her from “the Sisters before me.” On Monday, she asked how many had failed to attend the Children’s Mass. This, too, was unprecedented; in the previous seven years, there had been no need to ask. Eleven kids stood up that first Monday after the first Sunday.

Three had notes from their parents asking Sister to please excuse them because they had some debilitating, albeit temporary, malady, and they had bravely come to school although they were not fully recovered. We questioned the sanity of the other eight. Sister stared at them until the last remnants of color had disappeared from her sallow face, fully possessed with a strange grin.

“You ig-norant, ig-norant, ig-norant PIGS! You NO-bodies from NO-where. No wonder you couldn’t get to Mass on Sunday morning, your parents were in the alleys and gutters on Saturday night.” Now this took her a step beyond shaking the daylights out of snips and boobs. She was ripping into our mothers and fathers, not all of them undeserving. These adults, who had never questioned corporal punishment or the educational strategies of any nun, were not flattered when this information was relayed to them by their children. They wanted to know more about what was going on in our classroom. Their concerns would lead to a rebellion and attempted coup.

Every Monday, she took the same census, and every Monday, kids would stand up for reasons God only understood, and she would repeat her indictments of our home lives.

As promised, Trooper Newcombe came to visit one morning. He was a Pennsylvania state policeman, an intimidating 6-foot-4 leather gladiator in a Smoky Bear hat and a megaphone voice. When he removed his hat, we saw that he had a Marine boot-camp haircut that gave his face a severe look. With him was Officer Gorman, a Chester policeman. Gorman was an older, gentler man who had had a long police career and now was in charge of the city’s safety patrol.

With that megaphone voice, Newcombe lectured the boys on how they could become good safeties. With every comment, Newcombe would all but spit, “Isn’t that right, Gorman?” Gorman kept his counsel, accepting his role as foil. We laughed,. albeit nervously. We were astonished to see an authority figure, a Chester policeman who probably had arrested some of our older brothers in his prime, suffer such humiliation. Authority figures were not belittled in Catholic schools, unless one considered the bony-kneed Jacqueline Kennedy an authority figure.

Siter nodded, smiled that strange grin and flashed her crooked teeth as Newcombe sang her praises. She was tough, he told us. Maybe you don’t like it now, but you’ll be better for it. When she was in Philadelphia, she had the best safeties in the city. That’s why they wrote her up in the magazine. Could we measure up to that standard? Of course not.

The truth was, definitely not. Nor did we want to. We elected a safety-patrol captain whom we knew couldn’t care whether we showed up at our posts in the morning. He was everything we had hoped.

In early November,  Father Higgins also came to visit, but not at Sister’s invitation. Father Higgins was our pastor. Unlike the other priests, Higgins had the bearing of an aristocrat. His white hair was elegant, he had wire-rimmed glasses and he smoked cigarettes on a long cigarette hole like an aspiring Franklin D. Roosevelt. Father Higgins had a soft voice and was not an inspiring sermonizer. He was an outstanding administrator and a genius at raising money.He had restored the interior of the church magnificently and had fireproofed the school.

He was the ultimate “father” figure. He rarely set foot in the school, which was rightfully the province of the nuns; God’s House was the rightful province of the pastor.

We were still bitter that on a snowy day back in fourth grade he had sent word that school would open tomorrow “even if it snowed 10 feet.” Nevertheless, we were glad to see him show up in our eight-grade classroom, four years later. We were glad to see anyone who wasn’t Sister. When a priest visited, it was an invaluable break from the routines of the day. In fifth grade, Father Faye came to the class one day and took up the entire morning with stories of how he drove his convertible across the country and how he was able to go 90 m.p.h. in Oklahoma.

Father Higgins told us no stories. He was here on business. He had heard tales from parents. He had heard that Sister was saying nasty things about them and that she had not been teaching. Was this true, children?

We were paralyzed with fear that manifested itself as silence. We had encountered nothing like this before. Our parents had complained? Parents never questioned what a nun did under any circumstances. Should we have kept our mouths shut at home? Was he suggesting the parish might yank her out of school? Could we ruin this woman’s life?

He asked us to speak up.

Silence.

He asked again.

A longer, deeper silence — a paralysis wrought by fear.

We didn’t know what to say, but that’s not the big reasons we weren’t saying anything. (We didn’t know what to say in confession either, but we said something anyway.) We were silent because throughout the interrogation, Sister remained in the room, at her desk, staring at us with her strange grin.

‘Father Higgins announced that since we had nothing to say, he would assume that hte stories were untrue. “Good morning, children.” He left the room.

Sister stayed until the end of the year. But that was her last year of teaching.

After Father left, the incident was erased. We were ashamed of our silence, however we knew that with Sister in the room silence was more practical than cowardly. We talked about the pastor’s visit among ourselves at recess, at lunchtime, yet by day’s end the entire episode was an abstraction. No one could be sure it had actually happened.

It did little to alter Sister’s behavior, although she did make one change. She dropped the “alleys and gutters” reference and started telling us we came from “good homes.” Such breeding, however, did not keep us from being boobs, snips and ignorant pigs with numbing frequency.

Emboldened by Trooper Newcombe’s visit, and having survived a coup attempt and the close encounter with the pastor, she convened a meeting of the safeties. We were to report back to the classroom at 4, after, presumably, we had seen all the children safely home. This was a confrontation we dreaded. No doubt she had figured out that we weren’t always showing up at our posts in the morning, and if she hadn’t, some goodie-goodie had told her. We would deserve whatever we got.

As usual, she and the other nuns herded the lines of children heading home. Control was so complete that no one questioned the necessity of walking home in well-organized lines, shepherded by the nuns and escorted by the safety patrol. At 3:45, the 15 safeties met in front of Pat’s Sandwich Shop, at Seventh and Crosby, and we walked back to school together to face the executioner.

Sister was waiting for us. To date, her moods and behavior had defied anything we had experienced from nuns or any other adult human being, for that matter.

Yet we had never seen her like this.

She was sitting at her desk as if she had melted into a heap, as though the air had been let out of her persona. We were stunned. She spoke softly. “Boys,” she said, “be good safeties.” She bowed her head. That’s all she said. We sat in silence. “God bless you.” She dismissed us.

The transformation was so disconcerting that it undercut any sense of relief we had at having escaped further discipline. Had we taken something out of her?

In the morning, it was almost reassuring to hear that refreshing refrain: “This place, I can’t wait to get out of this place.”

It was obvious even to us that she had lost both mind and body. It was obvious even to us that she had had a hard life. Her stomach growled loudly, and her mouth gave off a foul odor. Her endless repetitions suggested her memory was shot.

Something had clearly gone wrong in her life, as sure as something had gone wrong in the life of Chester. Our class size had shrunk every year. By eighth grade, only about 20 members of the original first-grade class remained. The replacements almost invariably were poorer than the departed, and we always lost more than we gained, even counting the kids who had been left behind from the grade ahead of us. We were running out of kids.

Chester had become an Archdiocesan backwater. Poor Sister was into the muck up to her neck.

We were part of the muck.

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