Excitement

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  She said that she was expecting me to ask her.” Within three months Dan and Matilda were sealed as husband and wife in the Provo temple and moved to California, with Matilda’s kids in tow, so that Dan could enroll in the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic. One Sunday near the end of their five years in California, Dan and Matilda happened to hear a member of their local LDS ward give a talk about plural marriage. “During the talk this guy said, ‘Okay, let’s see a show of hands from everybody who comes from a polygamous background,’ ” Dan recalls. “And there were only like four people who didn’t raise their hands in the whole congregation. That really got my attention. I decided to learn everything I could about polygamy.” When Dan completed his chiropractic training he moved his family back to Utah County, and there he embarked on an energetic investigation of the polygamous history of the Latter-day Saints. Nosing around in the special collections of the Brigham Young University library one afternoon, he came across a fifty-one-page typescript of a nineteenth-century tract in praise of plural marriage: An Extract, From a Manuscript Entitled “The Peace Maker,” or the Doctrines of the Millennium: Being a Treatise on Religion and Jurisprudence. Or a New System of Religion and Politicks. It had been written by a mysterious figure named Udney Hay Jacob. The booklet’s title page indicated that it had been published in 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois, and that the printer was none other than Joseph Smith himself. The Peace Maker offered an elaborate biblical rationale for polygamy, which it proposed as a cure for the myriad ills that plagued monogamous relationships and, by extension, all of humankind. Part of that cure was making sure that women remained properly subservient, as God intended. According to the tract, The government of the wife is therefore placed in the husband by the law of God; for he is the head. I suffer not a woman saith the Lord to teach, or to usurp authority over a man, but to be in subjection. . . . A right understanding of this matter and a correct law properly executed would restore this nation to peace and order; and man to his true dignity, authority and government of the earthly creation. It would soon rectify the domestic circle and establish a proper head over the families of the earth, together with the knowledge and restitution of the whole penal law of God, and be the means of driving Satan, yea of driving Satan from the human mind. . . . Gentlemen, the ladies laugh at your pretended authority. They, many of them, hiss at the idea of your being the lords of the creation. . . . Nothing is further from the minds of our wives in general, than the idea of submitting to their husbands in all things, and of reverencing their husbands.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Pat supposed that Valérie would drink lemon squash and generally act as a douche of cold water, she was sure to grow sleepy or disapproving, she was no acquisition to this sort of party. But could they rely upon Stephen’s car? In the cold, grey dawn of the morning after, taxis were sometimes scarce up at Montmartre. Stephen nodded, thinking how absurdly prim Pat looked to be talking of cold, grey dawns and all that they stood for up at Montmartre. After she had left, Stephen frowned a little. 2 The five women were seated at a table near the door when Mary and Stephen eventually joined them. Pat, looking gloomy, was sipping light beer. Wanda, with the fires of hell in her eyes, in the hell of a temper too, drank brandy. She had started to drink pretty heavily again, and had therefore been avoiding Stephen just lately. There were only two new faces at the table, that of Jeanne Maurel, and of Dickie West, the much discussed woman aviator. Dickie was short, plump and very young; she could not have been more than twenty-one and she still looked considerably under twenty. She was wearing a little dark blue béret; round her neck was knotted an apache scarf—for the rest she was dressed in a neat serge suit with a very well cut double-breasted jacket. Her face was honest, her teeth rather large, her lips chapped and her skin much weather-beaten. She looked like a pleasant and nice-minded schoolboy well soaped and scrubbed for some gala occasion. When she spoke her voice was a little too hearty. She belonged to the younger, and therefore more reckless, more aggressive and self-assured generation; a generation that was marching to battle with much swagger, much sounding of drums and trumpets, a generation that had come after war to wage a new war on a hostile creation. Being mentally very well clothed and well shod, they had as yet left no blood-stained foot-prints; they were hopeful as yet, refusing point-blank to believe in the existence of a miserable army. They said: ‘We are as we are; what about it? We don’t care a damn, in fact we’re delighted!’ And being what they were they must go to extremes, must quite often outdo men in their sinning; yet the sins that they had were the sins of youth, the sins of defiance born of oppression. But Dickie was in no way exceptionally vile—she lived her life much as a man would have lived it. And her heart was so loyal, so trustful, so kind that it caused her much shame and much secret blushing. Generous as a lover, she was even more so when there could not be any question of loving. Like the horseleech’s daughter, her friends cried: ‘Give!

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  As is common in such situations, the threat of evil was projected onto others. . . . Hence, at Nauvoo the innocent children of God realized their identity through their struggle against the evil followers of Satan, who dominated American society everywhere except in the city of the Saints. The problem, of course, with this kind of dichotomous myth is that, for the people who hold it, guilt and innocence become matters of belief, not evidence. JOHN E. HALLWAS AND ROGER D. LAUNIUS, CULTURES IN CONFLICT When the Utah businessman and Dream Mine supporter Bernard Brady brought Prophet Onias and the Lafferty brothers (minus Allen) together one crisp fall evening near the end of 1983, it seemed to all who were present to be an especially auspicious union. There was an instant feeling of kinship and shared values, and the men talked excitedly until “the wee hours of the morning,” according to Onias. Giddy with their sense of divinely empowered mission, everyone at the gathering was convinced that, collectively, they were destined to alter the course of human history. “Five of the six brothers,” Onias said, “became extremely enthusiastic when they realized that we had just been given a commandment by the Lord to send three sections of The Book of Onias to all the stake and ward authorities.” * He was referring to a revelation he’d received on November 26 of that year, in which God had commanded Onias to “prepare pamphlets to send out to the presidents of stakes and bishops of wards of My church”—the LDS Church—so that those who had committed fornication against Him would “be warned.” The pamphlet consisted of excerpts from Onias’s collected revelations, cautioning the entire LDS leadership—from the president and putative prophet in Salt Lake City down to the bishop of every ward across North America—that God was extremely unhappy with the way they’d been running His One True Church. God was especially steamed, Onias explained, that modern Mormon leaders were blatantly defying some of the most sacred doctrines He had revealed to Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century. Most egregiously, the men at the helm of the church continued to sanction and zealously enforce the government’s criminalization of plural marriage. And only slightly less disturbing, from Onias’s perspective, was the blasphemy perpetrated by LDS President Spencer W. Kimball in 1978 when he decreed that black-skinned men should be admitted into the Mormon priesthood—a historic, earth-shaking turnabout in church policy widely applauded by those outside the church. God had revealed to Onias, however, that blacks were subhuman “beasts of the field, which were the most intelligent of all animals that were created, for they did walk upright as a man doeth and had the power of speech.” † According to the pamphlet, God had given Onias an earful about blacks being ordained as LDS priests: Behold I say unto you, at no time have I given a commandment unto My church, nor shall I . . .

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  I’ve concluded that the scripture which says, ‘Unless you become like a little child, you can’t see the Kingdom of Heaven’ is another secret reference to getting high; as is also the mysterious account of Moses seeing God through the burning bush.” * After their contretemps with the School of the Prophets in April 1984 but before leaving Utah on their road trip, Ron and Dan had paid a visit to the directors of the Dream Mine in order to discuss the City of Refuge they intended to build near the mine entrance. This was their second visit to the directors: a couple of months earlier, Dan had offered to donate the labor of all six Lafferty brothers to help extract the gold everybody knew was close at hand, in order to finance the City of Refuge, but the managers of the mine had politely declined the offer. This time, Ron and Dan dispensed with all niceties and flat-out demanded that the directors turn over management of the mine to them; if they refused, Ron warned, the directors “would feel the hand of the Lord.” Ignoring the threat of divine retribution, the mine managers declined this offer as well, albeit less politely this time around. Despite being rebuffed in their efforts to take control of the Dream Mine and being expelled from the School of the Prophets, Ron and Dan remained excited about building the City of Refuge on Onias’s property below the mine. Toward this end, during their road trip they sought out a number of preeminent polygamists across the West and attempted to enlist their support for the project—among them John W. Bryant, the self-proclaimed prophet Ron had visited the previous December. After leaving Wichita at the beginning of July, Ron, Dan, and Ricky Knapp steered the Impala west, aiming for Bryant’s commune amid the tall fir trees and lush berry farms of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Upon their arrival there, Ron electrified Bryant’s followers with an impromptu sermon about the City of Refuge and the role it would play during the Last Days. According to one of these postulants, Laurene Grant, Ron “just had so much to love. Everyone picked up on it. Everyone just started to bubble.” Grant, a mother of four children, was also impressed with Dan, who used his chiropractic skills to treat members of the commune. She compared Dan to Christ, saying, “He was just so gentle and so loving.” By the time the Laffertys bid farewell to Bryant’s group and the damp charms of the Pacific Northwest, Dan had taken Grant as his third wife. The newlyweds and her two youngest children drove away together in Grant’s car, while Ron, her two older sons, and Knapp departed in the Impala. They agreed to meet in two weeks, at the Confederated States of the Exiled Nation of Israel—the Utah compound of Alex Joseph, one of America’s best-known polygamists.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These works are distributed over fifty different cities of Germany. Of all the works printed between 1518 and 1523 no less than six hundred appeared in Wittenberg; the others mostly in Nürnberg, Leipzig, Cologne, Strassburg, Hagenau, Augsburg, Basel, Halberstadt, and Magdeburg. Luther created the book-trade in Northern Germany, and made the little town of Wittenberg one of the principal book-marts, and a successful rival of neighboring Leipzig as long as this remained Catholic. In the year 1523 more than four-fifths of all the books published were on the side of the Reformation, while only about twenty books were decidedly Roman Catholic. Erasmus, hitherto the undisputed monarch in the realm of letters, complained that the people would read and buy no other books than Luther’s. He prevailed upon Froben not to publish any more of them. "Here in Basel," he wrote to King Henry VIII., "nobody dares to print a word against Luther, but you may write as much as you please against the pope." Romish authors, as we learn from Cochlaeus and Wizel, could scarcely find a publisher, except at their own expense; and the Leipzig publishers complained that their books were unsalable. The strongest impulse was given to the book trade by Luther’s German New Testament. Of the first edition, Sept. 22, 1522, five thousand copies were printed and sold before December of the same year, at the high price of one guilder and a half per copy (about twenty-five marks of the present value). Hans Luft printed a hundred thousand copies on his press in Wittenberg. Adam Petri in Basel published seven editions between 1522 and 1525; Thomas Wolf of the same city, five editions between 1523 and 1525. Duke George commanded that all copies should be delivered up at cost, but few were returned. The precious little volume, which contains the wisdom of the whole world, made its way with lightning speed into the palaces of princes, the castles of knights, the convents of monks, the studies of priests, the houses of citizens, the huts of peasants. Mechanics, peasants, and women carried the New Testament in their pockets, and dared to dispute with priests and doctors of theology about the gospel.748

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  When he did so, he was treated to magical visions. One of the things that appeared to him was a pocket-sized, white-colored stone “a great way off. It became luminous, and dazzled his eyes, and after a short time it became as intense as the mid-day sun.” He immediately understood that this rock was another peep stone; the vision also indicated its precise location underground, beneath a small tree. Joseph located the tree, started digging, and “with some labor and exertion” unearthed the first of at least three peep stones he would possess in his lifetime. His career as a “scryer”—that is to say, a diviner, or crystal gazer—was launched. Soon his necromantic skills were sufficiently in demand that he was able to command respectable fees to find buried treasure for property owners throughout the region. By 1825, his renown was such that an elderly farmer named Josiah Stowell came from Pennsylvania to meet Joseph, and was so impressed by the encounter that he hired the twenty-year-old to travel with him to the Susquehanna Valley to locate, with his peep stones, a hidden lode of silver rumored to have been mined by the Spaniards centuries earlier. Stowell paid Joseph the generous salary of fourteen dollars a month for his services—more than the monthly wage earned by workers on the Erie Canal—plus room and board. These and other details of Joseph’s money digging were revealed in affidavits and other documents generated by a trial held in March 1826, People of the State of New York v. Joseph Smith, in which the young scryer was hauled into court and found guilty of being “a disorderly person and an imposter.” Although Joseph had applied himself to scrying with vigor, dedication, and the finest tools of his trade, it seems that he had been unable to find Stowell’s silver mine. Nor, in fact, during the previous six years he had worked as a money digger, had he ever managed to unearth any other actual treasure. When this had come to light, a disgruntled client had filed a legal claim accusing Joseph of being a fraud. The trial, and the raft of bad press it generated, brought his career as a professional diviner to an abrupt halt. He insisted to his numerous critics that he would mend his ways and abandon scrying forever. Only eighteen months later, however, peep stones and black magic would again loom large in Joseph’s life. Just down the road from his Palmyra home he would finally discover a trove of buried treasure, and the impact of what he unearthed has been reverberating through the country’s religious and political landscape ever since. One night in the autumn of 1823, when Joseph was seventeen, ethereal light filled his bedroom, followed by the appearance of an angel, who introduced himself as Moroni and explained that he had been sent by God.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  It was expected that twenty years or less would see the dawn of that peaceful era.” It was in this superheated, anything-goes religious climate that Joseph Smith gave birth to what would become America’s most successful homegrown faith. An earnest, good-natured kid with a low boredom threshold, Joseph Junior had no intention of becoming a debt-plagued farmer like his father, toiling in the dirt year in and year out. His talents called for a much grander arena. Although he received no more than a few years of formal schooling as a boy, by all accounts he possessed a nimble mind and an astonishingly fecund imagination. Like many autodidacts, he was drawn to the Big Questions. He spent long hours reflecting on the nature of the divine, pondering the meaning of life and death, assessing the merits and shortcomings of the myriad competing faiths of the day. Gregarious, athletic, and good-looking, he was a natural raconteur whom both men and women found immensely charming. His enthusiasm was infectious. He could sell a muzzle to a dog. The line separating religion from superstition can be indistinct, and this was especially true during the theological chaos of the Second Great Awakening, in which Joseph came of age. The future prophet’s spiritual curiosity moved him to explore far and wide on both sides of that blurry line, including an extended foray into the necromantic arts. More specifically, he devoted much time and energy to attempting to divine the location of buried treasure by means of black magic and crystal gazing, activities he learned from his father. Several years later he would renounce his dabbling in the occult, but Joseph’s flirtation with folk magic as a young man had a direct and unmistakable bearing on the religion he would soon usher forth. Although “money digging,” as the custom was known, was illegal, it was nevertheless a common practice among the hoi polloi of New England and upstate New York. The woods surrounding Palmyra were riddled with Indian burial mounds that held ancient bones and artifacts, some of which were crafted from precious or semiprecious metals. It therefore comes as no surprise that a boy with Joseph’s hyperactive mind and dreamy nature would hatch schemes to get rich by unearthing the gold rumored to be buried in the nearby hills and fields. Joseph’s money digging began in earnest a few months shy of his fourteenth birthday, two years after his family’s arrival in Palmyra, when he heard about the divining talents of a girl named Sally Chase, who lived near the Smith family farm. Upon learning that she possessed a magical rock—a “peep stone” or “seer stone”—that allowed her to “see anything, however hidden from others,” Joseph harangued his parents until they let him pay the girl a visit. Sally’s peep stone turned out to be a small, greenish rock. She placed it in the bottom of an upturned hat, then instructed Joseph to bury his face in the hat so as to exclude the light.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  “Oh, Stephen, if only you could read this in Greek!’ she would say, and her voice would sound full of excitement; “ the beauty, the splendid dignity of it—it’s like the sea, Stephen, rather terrible but splendid; that’s the language, it’s far more © virile than Latin.’ And Stephen would catch that sudden excite- ment, and determine to work even harder at Greek. But Puddle did not live by the ancients alone, she taught Stephen to appreciate all literary beauty, observing in her pupil a really fine judgment, a great feeling for balance in sentences and words. A vast tract of new interest was thus opened up, and Stephen began to excel in composition; to her own deep amaze- ment she found herself able to write many things that had long lain dormant in her heart — all the beauty of nature, for instance, she could write it. Impressions of childhood — gold light on the hills; the first cuckoo, mysterious, strangely alluring; those rides home from hunting together with her father — bare furrows, the meaning of those bare furrows. And later, how many queer hopes and queer longings, queer joys and even more curious frustra- tions. Joy of strength, splendid physical strength and courage; joy of health and sound sleep and refreshed awakening; joy of Raftery leaping under the saddle, joy of wind racing backward as Raftery leapt forward. And then, what? A sudden impene- trable darkness, a sudden vast void all nothingness and darkness; a sudden sense of acute apprehension: ‘I’m lost, where am I? Where am I? I’m nothing — yes I am, I’m Stephen — but that’s being nothing — ° then that horrible sense of apprehension. Writing, it was like a heavenly balm, it was like the flowing THE WELL OF LONELINESS 75 out of deep waters, it was like the lifting of a load from the spirit; it brought with it a sense of relief, of assuagement. One could say things in writing without feeling self-conscious, with- out feeling shy and ashamed and foolish — one could even write of the days of young Nelson, smiling a very little as one did so. Sometimes Puddle would sit alone in her bedroom reading and re-reading Stephen’s strange compositions; frowning, or smiling a little in her turn, at those turbulent, youthful out- pourings. She would think: ‘ Here’s real talent, real red-hot talent — interesting to find it in that great, athletic creature; but what is she likely to make of her talent? She’s up agin the world, if she only knew it!’ Then Puddle would shake her head and look doubtful, feeling sorry for Stephen and the world in general. 3

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  both for Zerubbabel and for Joshua. Zerubbabel, however, was edited out of the text. The idea of crowning the governor was probably too explosive. The crowning of Zerubbabel was either prevented or suppressed, and the text emended accordingly. We do not know what became of Zerubbabel. The Persian authorities may have realized that he was giving rise to messianic hopes (whether he wished it or not) and may have removed him from the scene. It is typical of the way that biblical texts were edited that loose ends were allowed to stand. There was no systematic revision of the text to remove all reference to Zerubbabel. This may seem like careless editing from a modern point of view, but it has the advantage of allowing us to see several layers in the text and to reconstruct something of its history. Zechariah 7–8 The excitement and turmoil about the restoration of the monarchy that dominate much of Zechariah 1–6 disappear completely in the concluding chapters, 7 and 8. Chapter 7 reports how people from Bethel came to Jerusalem to inquire about mourning and fasting. The response attributed to Zechariah is reminiscent both of Deuteronomy and of older prophets, from Amos to Jeremiah: the Lord is not concerned with fasting, but with kindness and mercy, and the protection of the widow, the orphan, and the alien. The woes that have befallen the people are due to the fact that they have not obeyed the Law and the words of the prophets. The tone of this chapter is quite different from the visions of Zechariah and is similar to that of the sermonic prose (C) sections of Jeremiah. Zechariah 8 also brings to mind prose passages in the book of Jeremiah, especially the oracles of hope and consolation in Jeremiah 33. These hopeful predictions probably concluded the original book of Zechariah, as it was edited not long after the time of the prophet.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  But I knew its meaning and took pride in it. One day, to impress him, I rode our palomino Regis all the way down to the Nashua River and then cantered back up to the barn through the lower fields and along the rutted road. As the horse panted and dripped with sweat, I sat proudly, waiting to hear what compliment Brother Dominic Maria might have for me. “Girl, you rode like St. Joan of Arc,” he said. My knees began to shake, my heart beat madly, and my mouth became so dry I could barely manage a smile. As he helped me to dismount, I let my body brush up against his. A few evenings later, Sister Catherine made an announcement in our refectory. “Little Sisters and Brothers,” she said, “there are certain words we do not use because they’re not very nice. ‘Boss’ is one of them.” My stomach lurched. She’s talking about Brother Dominic Maria and me , I thought in a panic. I tried to recollect which Angel had been in charge the day he told me I was the boss of the horse. I waited for days, fearing Sister Catherine might call me into her office and tell me that I could no longer take riding lessons. But to my relief, my lessons continued throughout the summer—as did my crush. However, once we were proficient in riding sidesaddle, the lessons tapered off. By the end of August, the ten-week chicken-coop project was nearing completion. Using ropes, we hoisted long roof beams to the top of the ten-foot-tall structure, nailed plywood to the beams, put on a layer of tar paper, and sealed the roof with shingles. The final touches on the henhouse came with whitewashing the interior walls and installing dozens of nesting boxes. By Labor Day, a week before tutoring was to begin, we opened the gates to the enclosure and let in over two hundred pullets, the young hens Sister Teresa had been raising all summer. One more step in our self-sufficiency had been achieved. To celebrate the completion of our project, Sister Catherine treated the oldest of us to a first—a trip to Day’s Deli, an unfashionable trailer shack a mile or so down the highway, converted into a roadside takeout spot with picnic tables outside for eating. Nonetheless, this was a reward of monumental proportions, one that seemed to fly in the face of our mission to remove ourselves from any connection with the outside world. As we arrived and spilled out of the cars, Sister Catherine said, “You may order whatever you’d like, dears.” Whatever we want? The list of possibilities posted on the back wall of the structure was endless, with such oddities as fried clam bellies, onion rings, and a dizzying array of desserts, from frappes of all flavors to hot fudge sundaes, ice cream sodas, and banana splits.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  The daily headlines were replete with reports of the dire straits that faced the most powerful city in the world. But for my part, I could see only the upside. Gotham was my key to the world, a giant open door beckoning me to reach for the highest rung on the ladder of success. The Big Apple was my “ticket to ride.” I was but one college paper away from receiving my degree in economics from Boston University, a milestone that had taken nearly nine years to achieve. Nothing could stop me now. Long days and even longer nights, with travel to places like Peoria, Illinois, and Des Moines, Iowa, Pocatello, Idaho, and Morgan City, Louisiana—I reveled in the freedom to explore the world of finance and I marveled at the luxury of working in an industry that paid me to learn. It wasn’t long before I was building my own reputation as a go-getter analyst and had expanded my industry coverage to include the energy sector, a hot area in the market because of the rising price of oil. But growing success failed to relinquish me from the bonds of my still deeply held secret past. My comfort with the world at large was unable to unleash my inhibition to reveal anything about my childhood. The words wouldn’t form when I tried to imagine how I might tell my story. I feared being considered weird. I feared my parents would be derided. I feared the unknown. It was two years after moving to New York when I found the courage to step through that door. I had been dating a man for about a year, a respected oil analyst on Wall Street, whom I’d met at a business lunch. This man whom I adored was twenty years my senior, and in the short time we’d been together, he had unearthed a world that was far beyond the reveries of my once childish imagination. Together we traveled to exotic places—Egypt and Tobago. On the moonlit balcony of our room at the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he read to me—poems by Stephen Spender and passages from E. M. Forster. For Christmas, he gave me a copy of Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language before presenting me with a pair of gold earrings from Cartier. I sensed he relished the role he played in my life—the older man opening up the world of culture and literature to a receptive and energetic young woman. Perhaps a bit like Professor Higgins, although I hoped he didn’t consider me quite Eliza Doolittle. “Gamine” was what he sometimes called me. At first I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a put-down, but I came to understand it as a term of endearment—I was the raring-to-go, not-quite-settled girl and he was the already accomplished man of Wall Street.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I found myself more interested in socializing with the students than teaching them, but “fraternizing with the students” was frowned on by the stentorian headmistress, and one day she fired me. I was both terrified and relieved. Telling my mother that I was unemployed, particularly as I was aware of how much she counted on my weekly paycheck, was not an option. On the other hand, I was exhilarated to burst out of the confines of an intellectually vapid job that was palatable primarily on account of the friendship I had developed with one of the teachers—Mary Cudmore, whose kindness was so genuine that I found myself, on several occasions, on the verge of blurting out my story to her. But I always choked at the last moment. That evening I scoured my wardrobe for the most respectable outfit and the next morning I walked with confidence into an employment agency on Newberry Street, presenting my credentials. Within a few minutes, the agent offered me two possible options as a receptionist—one with the Atlantic Monthly , the other with a broker/dealer, Ladenburg, Thalmann. The Atlantic Monthly seemed particularly appealing, as I felt it might open up the literary world to me, and perhaps the opportunity to further my education. But my first interview was with Ladenburg, Thalmann, and when the partners offered me the job, which included a raise, I accepted on the spot. And thus began my career in finance. Even as I took on my new position with excitement and energy, I longed to participate in college life, as nearly everyone my age seemed to be doing. So I did it in the only way available to me, enrolling at Harvard University’s Phillips Brooks House, where I attended classes three or four evenings each week after a day of work. It was an empowering first step in shaping my own life—studying mathematics, French, political philosophy, and English literature from the very professors who taught those carefree Harvard students whose lives I coveted. Harvard Square was, in its own way, the center of the universe during the late 1960s. Demonstrations were a daily affair, as professors and students alike voiced loudly and even turbulently their opposition to the Vietnam War. Those demonstrations often turned into riots, as tear gas competed with weed and hashish as the fragrance of the moment in the square. Hippies, unkempt and unwashed, roamed the square in sandals, tie-dyed T-shirts, and long hair, arm in arm with intellectuals and students and bands of saffron-robed Hare Krishna monks. It was part of the pattern of life in Harvard Square, and I reveled in the spectacle. When the spirit moved me, I could appear as hippie as the best of them. With hair down to my waist, I donned long, flowing, formless cotton dresses and mingled seamlessly among the characters that were the movement of the time. In my apartment, I made candles and macramé baskets, not as a symbol of rebellion, but because I adored craftwork.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Therese’s House to the milk barn, burning rubber and raising clouds of dust. For years, Sister Catherine had warned us about the dangers of “particular friendships,” but in this new, unrestrained atmosphere, friendships formed instantly between the young singers and ourselves. Inexplicably, neither Sister Catherine nor any of the Angels appeared to notice, much less reprimand us. When Sister Catherine departed as usual for her home in Waltham, the already relaxed environment became even more comfortable. The rules went into a state of suspension. Several of the choir members were themselves boyfriend and girlfriend. They openly held hands and kissed, and I feared that the Angels might report such sightings to Sister Catherine. But nothing seemed to be out of bounds during the choir’s ten-day stay. I made one particular friend of my own, a beautiful dark-haired girl named Mercedes. She and I took long walks together through the fields, and I soaked up her every word (in her halting English) of her life in the university and the fiancé she planned to marry. I felt a twang of jealousy, imagining their future together in marital bliss, in contrast to the life I would lead. And then there was Pacco, a short but ruggedly good-looking young man, who caught my eye the moment he stepped off the bus. His jet-black eyes and his dimpled boyish smile made my heart beat faster and my knees wobble. Each evening after dinner when we gathered in the living room to sing songs and talk in our limited Spanish and English, I tried to position myself next to him. I breathed the scent of his cologne, hoping it would cling to my blouse. Life as a postulant was in abeyance and I wished it could be that way forever. The ten-day visit came to an end all too soon, and we exchanged addresses with our newfound friends, promising to write. Mercedes gave me a present of a miniature porcelain pitcher, which I still have more than fifty years later. Pacco gave me his address, and I noticed that he put a dash through his seven, a custom I instantly adopted. Then the forty young singers and their conductor boarded the Greyhound bus for the trip to New York and Lincoln Center. [image file=Image00029.jpg] Waving them off and promising to write, we sang a farewell song in Spanish, one they had taught us in four-part harmony. The music was punctuated with sobs. Even Sister Catherine seemed moved, waving her white handkerchief as the bus slowly headed down Route 110 on its way to New York City. As it disappeared into the distance, I was gripped with a sense of loss. The last ten days had seemed like a miracle, and now it was over. An ache as hard as a stone sat in my heart. Pacco was gone. So was Mercedes. Would I ever see them again?

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  With his customary mixture of vivacity, gesticulation, heavy accent, and speed, he explained to us that his brother, Jesús, the conductor of the choir, had been invited to the United States with forty of the choir members to participate in the opening of Lincoln Center. But before going to New York, they were coming to stay with us for ten days, arriving in a week’s time. Brother Stanislaus elaborated with exuberance. “They will eat with us, sleep in the guest houses, and be part of the community. We want you to give them a good time, taking them down to the barns, going horseback riding with them, and showing them the animals.” College students from out in the world coming to stay with us? For ten days? It was unfathomable—only the most trusted Center friends were allowed to spend at most a single night in the guest house. But my incredulity was put to rest when the young men and women, between the ages of eighteen and twenty, alighted from the Greyhound bus. The vision was surreal—an array of gorgeous girls, each a picture of fashion in bright colored blouses and skirts that ended well above their knees. The boys were handsome, every one of them, with khaki trousers and V-neck sweaters or vests. Speaking little English, but overflowing with enthusiasm and high spirits, the troop of Spanish singers turned life as we’d known it in Still River for the past eight years on its head. At all hours of the day, they would come barging through refectories, kitchens, or living rooms, babbling in Spanish or singing and laughing. The rule of silence went flying out the window. While Brother Stanislaus ostensibly organized our activities, in fact it was the Center children and the troop of young Spanish singers who really ran the show. Sister Catherine seemed a mere bystander, putting no restrictions on any activities, not even for us postulants. For what seemed like an eternity of heaven on earth, she faded into the background, barely a presence in this adventure, and doing nothing to staunch the energetic exchange of high spiritedness among thirty Center teenagers and forty attractive college students. Little Sisters were allowed to talk to the young men and Little Brothers to the young women. [image file=Image00028.jpg] The five Walsh children in 1965: (L to R) Peggy, me, David, Cathy, Ronnie. Tutoring took a back seat to entertaining our merry band of singing guests. When we brought them to the chicken coop to demonstrate how to collect the eggs from the nests, the sudden arrival of exuberant strangers caused pandemonium as squawking chickens flew in all directions. Herding the students out of the henhouse, we took them to the barns, where we saddled up our horses and ponies and went on galloping treks through the fields. When they tired of riding, they turned their attention to our giant black Oldsmobiles, careening up and down the driveway from St.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  We followed as though behind the Pied Piper and scrambled into the back seat of the black Oldsmobile—all five of us. Sister Catherine drove, explaining little other than that we were going to see a surprise. Nearly an hour later, we arrived at our destination—a mansion (or so it appeared to me) with large picture windows and a huge wraparound porch dotted with wicker rocking chairs and cushioned sofas. The sprawling house sat on a promontory, overlooking the ocean. A broad stretch of green lawn sloped down from the house. Countless bushes of beach roses in full bloom surrounded the house, and the breeze in the air was filled with their exquisite scent. I held my breath as Sister Catherine unlocked the front door and led us into an expansive hallway that opened up to a wide, carpeted staircase. A pink glow poured down from the paned windows on the second floor, lending an almost magical aura to the house. “This is where you’re going to come all summer,” Sister Catherine said as she invited us to explore. “The Little Sisters on one day and the Little Brothers the next. We’re naming it St. Pius X House.” The five of us ran from room to room on our own. I marveled at the mystery of the sliding doors that disappeared into the walls, turning two rooms into one. I peered into the seemingly endless array of bedrooms and bathrooms. This must be what it’s like to live in a palace , I thought. And when I tumbled head over heels down the long stairway, unused to carpeting under foot, I dusted myself off and pretended nothing had happened. Better to not let Sister Catherine know, lest my calamity change her mind about our summer here. And for the whole summer, three times a week, twenty of us Little Sisters crowded into two black cars and a station wagon and were driven from the heart of Cambridge to the seaside town of Nahant. On the first day of our vacation, Sister Matilda gave each of us a pair of brand-new white sneakers. Then, in single file, we followed her down the steep road to the stony beach at the bottom of the hill, next to a Coast Guard station. I took off my sneakers and wobbled barefoot to the edge of the water, my feet not yet hardened to the sharp edges and the heat of the stones underfoot. Holding up my long navy-blue jumper just high enough to keep it from getting wet, but not so high as to show my knees, I put one foot and then the other into the sea. The shock of the cold water was exhilarating. I wiggled my toes into the pebbly sand under the shallow water. Sister Matilda had laid down the rule—we were not to go in any deeper than our ankles.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Poinsettias dotted the hallways, the chapel, and the great front room. During meals, our single record player provided a constant stream of English, French, and Italian Christmas carols, as well as Gregorian chants by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes Abbey. Christmas was only days away, when Sister Catherine made an announcement in our refectory. “Little Sisters and Little Brothers, I have a surprise for you.” She paused before proceeding, and I held my breath, hoping the surprise would be a really good one. “Before you go to bed on Christmas Eve, you will each be given a stocking that you will pin to your curtain. While you’re asleep, Baby Jesus will come and bring you some presents.” I’d seen pictures in storybooks of Christmas trees with presents underneath, and I’d read about stockings loaded with gifts, but that all happened “out in the world,” not at the Center. And now, Sister Catherine was telling us that we, too, could have presents. What had we done to be so lucky? We chatted among ourselves about what Baby Jesus would be bringing us as presents. One of the younger Little Sisters asked, “How can Baby Jesus carry presents?” Mariam was quick with her answer. “He’s God. He can do anything He wants.” That seemed to satisfy the gathering. I thought otherwise, but decided it was best to keep my ten-year-old’s skepticism to myself. I recalled a time before the red fence had been built when I had seen Santa Claus in a big red suit and a white beard in Cambridge. And I remembered, too, how Father had railed against the commercialism associated with Christmas. “There is no Santa Claus,” he’d yell during his sermon at First Breakfast, rubbing his hands together in his rage. “That’s a sacrilege. The Jews have turned St. Nicholas into Santa Claus so they can make money. Santa Claus is just a big, fat, ugly man in a red suit. Santa Claus is of the devil!” I put the picture together—Baby Jesus was our Santa Claus. At eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, the entire community attended Midnight Mass and when we returned to St. Ann’s House, the Angels helped us pin our thick, gray, woolen, knee-high stockings to our curtains, the same stockings we wore inside our boots during winter. Once in bed, as I gazed at the glowing Christmas tree, excitement banished sleep while I tried to imagine what presents I might get in my stocking. This is going to be the most wonderful Christmas of my whole life, I told myself. I woke the next morning to the sound of whispers in the corridor and peeked out of my curtain. Mariam was already up. The floor under the Christmas tree was piled high with games of all sorts and large toys—a pogo stick, Chinese checkers, Parcheesi. And the stocking I had pinned to my curtain was stuffed full.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  J 14 Countdown 1957–1958 anuary 31, 1958, couldn’t come fast enough. Sister Catherine had announced that was when we’d be moving to Still River. Tutoring filled much of the day, but I found it hard to concentrate. My mind drifted away from my books as I daydreamed about our move and the new life that lay ahead. I felt as though I was embarking on an adventure—it was like a new start to my life. Especially thrilling was the idea that, come summer, I would celebrate my tenth birthday in our new home. I had it planned out in my mind. We’d play all day. I’d run through the fields with grass as high as my waist and let the wind blow through my hair. And after dinner, there would be a big chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and ten candles just for me, and the whole community would sing “Happy Birthday” in rapturous harmony as I blew out all ten candles in one breath. After the New Year arrived, the days seemed to grind too slowly, so I occupied myself by helping the Big Sisters pack up the pots and pans, carving knives, and cooking utensils. Even as I taped and marked the boxes, a small worry lurked in the back of my head—that something might happen that would prevent us from moving. But as the boxes piled high, that gnawing anxiety gradually faded away like an evaporating fog. It really is going to happen, I told myself. By mid-January, it was time to pack my own possessions. Everything I owned fit into one small, rectangular cardboard box. First my clothes: two pairs of navy-blue socks, two white long-sleeve blouses, a petticoat, bloomers, two pairs

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Even as I took on my new position with excitement and energy, I longed to participate in college life, as nearly everyone my age seemed to be doing. So I did it in the only way available to me, enrolling at Harvard University’s Phillips Brooks House, where I attended classes three or four evenings each week after a day of work. It was an empowering first step in shaping my own life—studying mathematics, French, political philosophy, and English literature from the very professors who taught those carefree Harvard students whose lives I coveted. Harvard Square was, in its own way, the center of the universe during the late 1960s. Demonstrations were a daily affair, as professors and students alike voiced loudly and even turbulently their opposition to the Vietnam War. Those demonstrations often turned into riots, as tear gas competed with weed and hashish as the fragrance of the moment in the square. Hippies, unkempt and unwashed, roamed the square in sandals, tie-dyed T- shirts, and long hair, arm in arm with intellectuals and students and bands of saffron-robed Hare Krishna monks. It was part of the pattern of life in Harvard Square, and I reveled in the spectacle. When the spirit moved me, I could appear as hippie as the best of them. With hair down to my waist, I donned long, flowing, formless cotton dresses and mingled seamlessly among the characters that were the movement of the time. In my apartment, I made candles and macramé baskets, not as a symbol of rebellion, but because I adored craftwork. Behind the scenes, however, I voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, and I wore a copper bracelet that supported one of the thousands of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. I was no hippie—what I wore did not define me. Looking the part was a fashion statement, but it bore no resemblance to the person I was, the person I wanted to be, as I carried out my mission to educate myself. Skeptical of much of what I’d been taught regarding government and politics at the Center, I wasn’t sure of the truth, but one thing I did know—our fighting soldiers in Vietnam had no choice in the matter. The lucky souls who were able to avoid (or at least postpone) the draft seemed to forget their privileged position as they spewed venom on their less-fortunate and less-educated fellow Americans. I found the hypocrisy deplorable. Over the ensuing months that stretched well into the early 1970s, college campuses across the country were transmogrified into cauldrons of seething

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  With his customary mixture of vivacity, gesticulation, heavy accent, and speed, he explained to us that his brother, Jesús, the conductor of the choir, had been invited to the United States with forty of the choir members to participate in the opening of Lincoln Center. But before going to New York, they were coming to stay with us for ten days, arriving in a week’s time. Brother Stanislaus elaborated with exuberance. “They will eat with us, sleep in the guest houses, and be part of the community. We want you to give them a good time, taking them down to the barns, going horseback riding with them, and showing them the animals.” College students from out in the world coming to stay with us? For ten days? It was unfathomable—only the most trusted Center friends were allowed to spend at most a single night in the guest house. But my incredulity was put to rest when the young men and women, between the ages of eighteen and twenty, alighted from the Greyhound bus. The vision was surreal—an array of gorgeous girls, each a picture of fashion in bright colored blouses and skirts that ended well above their knees. The boys were handsome, every one of them, with khaki trousers and V-neck sweaters or vests. Speaking little English, but overflowing with enthusiasm and high spirits, the troop of Spanish singers turned life as we’d known it in Still River for the past eight years on its head. At all hours of the day, they would come barging through refectories, kitchens, or living rooms, babbling in Spanish or singing and laughing. The rule of silence went flying out the window. While Brother Stanislaus ostensibly organized our activities, in fact it was the Center children and the troop of young Spanish singers who really ran the show. Sister Catherine seemed a mere bystander, putting no restrictions on any activities, not even for us postulants. For what seemed like an eternity of heaven on earth, she faded into the background, barely a presence in this adventure, and doing nothing to staunch the energetic exchange of high spiritedness among thirty Center teenagers and forty attractive college students. Little Sisters were allowed to talk to the young men and Little Brothers to the young women. [image file=Image00028.jpg] The five Walsh children in 1965: (L to R) Peggy, me, David, Cathy, Ronnie. Tutoring took a back seat to entertaining our merry band of singing guests. When we brought them to the chicken coop to demonstrate how to collect the eggs from the nests, the sudden arrival of exuberant strangers caused pandemonium as squawking chickens flew in all directions. Herding the students out of the henhouse, we took them to the barns, where we saddled up our horses and ponies and went on galloping treks through the fields. When they tired of riding, they turned their attention to our giant black Oldsmobiles, careening up and down the driveway from St.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “This is where we’ll soon be living,” she told us as she led us through the stately white clapboard colonial-style house on eighteen acres of land. Then bringing us to the vast green field, she beckoned us to run around. Putting my arms out like wings, I sped through grass as tall as my shoulders. The smell of hay and the tickling sensation of the dried grass on my legs and arms were novel and exhilarating—different from the ocean, but full of newness and freedom. “And when we move here next year,” Sister Catherine said, as though letting us in on a secret, “we’ll have cows and chickens, and you can each have a pet of your own.” A pet of my own! It was almost too good to be true. This was Sister Catherine the way I wished she would be all the time—jovial and full of promises of good things to happen. Toward the end of September, the flu pandemic that had started in Asia reached the United States with full force and the red fence was unable to keep it at bay. Tutoring was cancelled, as all thirty-nine of us children fell victim. After a week of being confined to bed in a state of forced silence, it was Sister Catherine who came to the rescue, bringing us coloring books and crayons, jigsaw puzzles and Little Golden Books of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Best of all, she dispensed with the rule of silence. Where was Sister Matilda? I wondered. She, who for the last three years had been solely in command of every facet of our lives, was suddenly no longer the head Angel. It was now Sister Catherine herself who assumed that role, becoming an omnipresent force in our daily life. Why? I pondered this unannounced but significant shift in power but knew to keep my questions to myself. At the Center, one didn’t ask aloud why things changed. Sister Catherine’s motherly demeanor that afternoon turned to rage a few days later when Mary Catherine, who was now just seven years old, refused to eat her breakfast. She and I were having our meal together at a small table set up in the kitchen on our floor. As Mary Catherine, still ridden with the flu, sat stone-faced looking at her scrambled eggs, her hands in her lap, the Angel in charge tried to cajole her. “Be a good girl now and eat your eggs. Do it for the souls in purgatory so that they can go to heaven.” Offering things up for the souls in purgatory was a common exhortation at the Center. I was convinced that a battalion of souls had been released from their purgatorial sojourn and had floated on their way to the beatific vision because of my sufferings—each soul the beneficiary of a scraped knee or elbow, the toothaches, earaches and headaches that often ravaged me.