Changing Habits Read online

  “Do?” he asked, looking at her for the first time in two long days. “What we’ve always planned for you. That’s all I want.”

  “What you always planned for me,” she corrected.

  Her father’s gaze returned to the television. “God took your mother and my son away from me. I’ll be damned if I’ll give Him my daughter too.”

  “Oh, Daddy.” Her heart ached to hear him utter such terrible words.

  “Enough, Angelina. There’s nothing more to talk about.”

  Defeat settled over her. “All right.”

  Frowning, he glanced at her. “All right?”

  “I won’t go.”

  His eyes narrowed, as though he wasn’t sure he should trust her. Then he nodded abruptly and said, “Good.” That settled, he returned his attention to the small black-and-white television screen.

  She did try to forget God’s call. Angie wrote Mother Superior a letter and said it was with deep regret that she had to withdraw her application. Her father would never accept her vocation and she couldn’t, wouldn’t, disappoint him. She was all he had left in the world.

  Sister responded with a letter of encouragement and hope, and stated that if God truly wanted her to serve Him, then He would make it possible.

  Angie wanted to believe Sister Agnes, but God had His work cut out for Him if He was going to change her father’s heart.

  To all outward appearances, he was dead set against her joining a religious order.

  In July and August, Angie worked at the restaurant every day. At night, mentally and physically exhausted, she hid in her room and wept bitter tears. She feared that if she was unable to follow her vocation, her life would be a waste. She prayed continually and begged God to make it possible for her, as Mother Superior had said. Every night, on her knees, she said the rosary until her mind was too numb to continue.

  The first week of September, just three days before the convent opened its doors to postulants, her father burst into her bedroom.

  “Go!” he roared at her like a demon. He loomed in the doorway, his shoulders heaving with anger. “You think God wants you? Then go!”

  Angie was too stunned to speak. She looked up from where she knelt, the rosary in her hands.

  “I can’t stand to hear you crying anymore.”

  Slowly Angie came to her feet. Her knees ached, her back hurt, but she stood there shocked, unmoving.

  “Go,” he said again, his voice lower. “It won’t take you long to realize I was right. You’re no nun, Angelina. It isn’t God’s voice you’re hearing… I don’t know who put this idea in your head, but they’re wrong.”

  “Daddy.”

  “You won’t listen to me. I can see that. If I make you stay, in the end you’ll only hate me. This is a lesson you need to learn on your own.”

  “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t sincerely believe I have a vocation.”

  He muttered something in Italian that Angie didn’t understand. From his tone, she suspected it was just as well.

  She wanted to explain that God had taken hold of her soul and she couldn’t refuse Him. But she was afraid that if she gave him the slightest argument, he might reverse his decision.

  “Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes, humbled that he had given in to her.

  He didn’t say anything for the longest while, and when he spoke, his voice shook with emotion. “I said you can go, but God help me, I refuse to drive you there.”

  “I can take the bus.”

  “You’ll have to.”

  Saying goodbye to her father that September morning in 1958 was the most difficult thing Angie had ever done. He dropped her off at the Greyhound bus depot and hugged her tight. Then, with tears glistening in his eyes, he loudly kissed her on both cheeks.

  “You’ll be back,” he muttered, backing away from her.

  Angie didn’t argue with him, but she knew otherwise. She’d been born to serve God as a St. Bridget’s Sister of the Assumption.

  2

  KATHLEEN O’SHAUGHNESSY

  1951 to 1963

  Kathleen always knew she’d become a nun. She knew it from the day she received her First Communion. She heard her mother say it.

  Kathleen stood with three of her cousins for a group photograph. She wore a white dress with a satin sash, a short veil and white gloves. It was the same Communion dress her three older sisters had worn. The same dress her cousin Molly had borrowed a year earlier. Kathleen held the white prayer book, clasped her hands and bowed her head devoutly for the camera.

  “Kathleen looks like an angel,” her aunt Rebecca said to Kathleen’s mother.

  Annie O’Shaughnessy nodded. “She does, doesn’t she? I have the feeling Kathleen’s going to be our nun.”

  “You think so?”

  “Ned and I are sure of it.”

  Kathleen was sure, too. It was 1951 and she was all of six years old. By the time she entered high school on Boston’s east side, there were ten mouths to feed in the O’Shaughnessy household. Kathleen ranked number five of the eight children sired by Ned and Annie O’Shaughnessy, only two of them boys. Everyone old enough to work was employed in the pub owned by her uncle Patrick O’Shaughnessy.

  Kathleen and her sisters attended St. Mark’s High School and were taught by St. Bridget’s Sisters of the Assumption. After school each day, Kathleen and her year-older sister, Maureen, walked to the pub, where they worked as janitors in order to pay for their tuition at the parochial school.

  They could have been twins, she and Maureen, they looked so much alike. Both had long thick auburn hair and eyes so blue they sometimes appeared violet. Kathleen’s hair fell to the middle of her back and had the sheen of a new car, or so her mother claimed. It was her greatest delight, her hair, and she religiously brushed it a hundred strokes a night.

  “Do you think nuns cut their hair?” Maureen asked her as they walked to the pub one cloudy spring day in March of 1962. Her siblings enjoyed riling her about convent life. They were jealous of the special attention their parents gave her because of her vocation.

  “They probably do,” Kathleen returned, refusing to allow Maureen to upset her. If chopping off her hair was what God asked of her, then so be it, she told herself. Nothing would dissuade Kathleen from her vocation.

  “How can you stand it?” Maureen asked curiously.

  “Having my hair cut? Don’t be silly.” Although the remark was flippant, it wouldn’t be easy for her to lose her precious locks.

  “No,” Maureen countered. “How can you give your life to God? Don’t you even wonder what sex is like and what you’ll be missing?”

  “Maureen!”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  In fact, Kathleen thought about sex a great deal. She didn’t want to admit it for fear her sister would tease her. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep her unruly mind from wandering down that forbidden path. Obviously, anyone who wanted to be a nun shouldn’t allow herself to dwell on such profane matters. It worried Kathleen immensely. She was about to renounce sex forever, and she had no idea what she was giving up.

  “Don’t you?” Maureen pressed, unwilling to drop the subject.

  Kathleen increased her pace, but Maureen kept up with her. “I think about it some,” she finally muttered.

  Maureen slowed her steps and then in a low voice, said, “Robbie and I did it.”

  Kathleen came to a complete standstill and stared at her in shock. Maureen had lost her virginity? “When?” she gasped. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, her sister was crazy to risk getting pregnant.

  “Last week… We weren’t planning to do it, but his parents were out and we got to kissing, and the next thing I knew we—well, it just happened.” Flustered, her sister tucked her schoolbooks tightly against her and looked straight ahead.

  Kathleen’s mind buzzed with a hundred questions, but she asked the most important one first. “Have you been to confession?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maureen, you
’re putting your immortal soul in jeopardy.” Without absolution from a priest, her sister was headed for eternal damnation.

  “I’ll go to confession on Saturday, same as always,” Maureen said, casting Kathleen an exasperated look. “Don’t you want to know what it was like?”

  God help her, Kathleen longed to hear every sordid detail. “Did it hurt?”

  Maureen shrugged. “Some, at first. I thought we must be doing it wrong because Robbie couldn’t make his…you know…go inside me.”

  Kathleen could no longer breathe and closed her eyes, mentally fighting off the image of Robbie squirming on top of her sister, pushing into her.

  “When he did, I thought he’d ripped me wide open.”

  “Was there blood?”

  “Judas Priest, I hope not! We were in the middle of the living room carpet… Anyway, if there was, Robbie took care of it. He’s the one who’d have to explain it to his parents.”

  Kathleen’s head started to pound. She was horrified that her sister had been so careless. “What happened after he put it in?”

  Maureen looked away, but not before Kathleen caught a glimpse of her disappointment. “Nothing. Robbie kept saying how sorry he was and how he never meant to hurt me. Then he grunted a little and started to pant and before I knew it, he was finished.”

  It all sounded rather disgusting to Kathleen. “You’d better not wait until Saturday to go to confession. What if you get run over by a bus before then?”

  Maureen rolled her eyes. “I can’t go any earlier,” she said.

  “Why not?” She couldn’t understand why her sister would take risks with her salvation, especially when Father Murphy heard confessions every morning before eight o’clock Mass. Maureen could slip into church on her way to school.

  Kathleen was about to remind her of that when Maureen announced, “Robbie wants to do it again tonight.”

  “You can’t!” Kathleen was aghast that her sister would even consider such a thing.

  “His parents are going out of town and he said he’d pick me up at the pub once I’m finished cleaning.” Maureen defiantly flipped her thick red hair over her shoulder. “I already said I would. There’s just got to be more to it than what we did.”

  “Are you nuts? You can’t take this kind of chance,” Kathleen cried. “What if you get pregnant?”

  “I know, I know… But Robbie said he’d use something so I wouldn’t end up with a baby. And even if I did get pregnant, Robbie said he’d marry me.”

  “You’re not even eighteen. What about college?” Her sister received top grades. She could get a scholarship; Kathleen was positive of that. No one in their family had gone to college yet. Sean had joined the Army when he graduated and Mary Rose was married and the mother of a two-year-old. Joyce and Louise shared an apartment and worked at the pub. Joyce was a waitress and Louise made sandwiches back in the kitchen. They split the tips. After they’d moved out, Kathleen had a bed of her own for the first time in her life.

  “You’re only seventeen,” Kathleen wailed. “How do you know you want to marry Robbie?”

  “How do you know you want to be a nun?” Maureen flared back.

  That shut her up. “Just be careful,” Kathleen cautioned.

  “You won’t tell Mom, will you?”

  Kathleen promised she wouldn’t.

  Late that same night, Maureen woke her out of a deep sleep. Moonlight shimmered in through the sheer drapes, and the sound of the television traveled up the stairs like distant whispers.

  “Are you awake?” her sister asked, putting her hand on Kathleen’s shoulder and lightly shaking her.

  Kathleen propped herself up on one elbow. It sounded like Ben Casey playing downstairs, which would keep her mother distracted. Maureen’s eyes sought hers.

  “Did you do it?” Kathleen whispered.

  Maureen nodded. “Twice.”

  “In one night?”

  Again her sister nodded.

  Kathleen shouldn’t be this anxious for details, but she had to know, despite the fact that she’d never experience physical love herself. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her bent knees. “Tell me what it was like.”

  A soft smile lifted the edges of her sister’s full mouth. “I know why Mom and Dad had eight of us. It feels so good, Kathleen. It’s like…oh, I don’t know. It’s like nothing else in the whole world.”

  Kathleen leaned against the headboard and bit her lower lip, taking in her sister’s words. “Did Robbie use…protection?”

  Maureen lowered her eyes.

  “Maureen!” Sure as anything, her sister was going to end up pregnant before graduation and the whole family would be disgraced.

  “He put it on, but he said it wasn’t as good and—”

  “You should’ve made him do it.” Kathleen covered her mouth with both hands, equally dismayed at her sister’s foolishness and her own willingness to abandon the Church’s stand on birth control. “If you get pregnant, Mom and Dad will kill you.”

  Indignant, Maureen leapt off the bed. “Robbie said it was a big mistake to tell you. I should’ve listened to him. Miss Goody Two-shoes. No wonder entering the convent is all you talk about.”

  “That’s not true,” Kathleen snapped.

  “If you tell Mom or Dad, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I’m not going to tell.”

  Maureen hurriedly undressed in the dark. “I could never enter the convent,” she whispered, calmer now.

  “Because you’ve lost your virginity?”

  “No,” she returned with a snicker, “because I could never live without sex. You’re better off not knowing, Kathleen. If you did, you wouldn’t be so keen to listen to that call from God you’re always saying you hear.”

  Thankfully Maureen wasn’t pregnant, although once she and Robbie had started having sex they couldn’t seem to stop. Three months after graduation, Maureen had an engagement ring, and all thoughts of attending college were discarded like yesterday’s newspaper.

  In the last month of her junior year, Kathleen was elected prefect of the Sodality, the society dedicated to the devotion to Mary, the mother of Christ. She felt elated that her classmates had entrusted her with this honor—until her uncle Patrick unexpectedly pulled her aside at the pub one afternoon.

  Kathleen was sure he intended to offer her a weekend job as a waitress. She was a good worker and the extra money would mean she could afford a few extras without having to ask her mother.

  “Sit down, Kathleen,” her uncle said, showing her to a table at the back of the pub. She wondered why he’d chosen to sit in the shadows.

  He pulled out a chair for her, and as she sat, she glanced down at the floor; even in this dark corner it shone. She took whatever task she was given seriously. There wasn’t a spot or a speck of dust on the polished oak floor.

  “I’ve never hidden the fact that you’re my favorite niece,” her uncle said, folding his arms across his big chest.

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and Kathleen wondered if he was already into the beer. Her uncle had a weakness for his own product.

  “Since you are my favorite, it pains me to tell you this. Damn, it doesn’t seem right, but your mother and father said…” He let his words fade, then took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

  Kathleen thought she must have heard wrong. Let her go? It sounded as though her own uncle was firing her. She couldn’t imagine what she’d done to deserve this. Furthermore, without the job, she had no way of paying her tuition. When the shock wore off and Kathleen managed to find her tongue, she said, “You don’t want me working at the pub any longer?”

  Her uncle stood abruptly. “Back in a minute.” With that, he trotted toward the bar and drew himself a mug of Harp. He took a healthy swig before he sat down at the table again. “Let me tell you a story.”

  Her uncle was the best storyteller she’d ever met. It was one reason the pub was so popular. Boston didn’
t lack for Irish pubs, but every night her uncle’s tavern was filled with music and laughter. And every night, the affable Patrick O’Shaughnessy entertained the crowd with a story or two. He had the gift, and what a gift it was. But if not for her father’s handling of the accounts, she feared her uncle would have lost the pub ten times over. Although he was a wonderful host and told a grand story, her uncle Patrick had no sense when it came to money or beer.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she asked before he could get caught up in one of the Irish legends or folktales he loved.

  “Wrong? My Kathleen? Never!”

  “Then why are you telling me I can’t work in the pub anymore?” Apparently her mother and father already knew because her uncle had discussed it with them. Come to think of it, her father generally did the hiring and firing for the pub. Not this time, though.

  Uncle Patrick leaned over and clasped her hand in his. “Your parents and I talked it over, and we decided it just isn’t right for you to be here.”

  “But why?”

  “Kathleen, you’ve a calling from God!”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Next year you’ll be in a convent. And now that you’re head of the Sodality, well…it isn’t seemly to have you working in a tavern.”

  “But Father O’Hara is here two and three nights a week.”

  “Father O’Hara isn’t a nun. It’s different with priests. I don’t know why, but it is. Now, I realize this comes as a shock—and that you need the money for tuition.”

  A sick feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t her father or even her uncle who’d come up with this outlandish notion. That…that sodden priest must have planted the idea in their minds. “Is this Father O’Hara’s doing?” she demanded.

  “None of that matters, Kathleen. Just accept that we all want the best for you. This is hard on me, too, you know. Your beautiful face won’t be gracing my afternoons any longer, now will it?”