Since I grew up in Washington, D.C., a number of people have asked me in the last weeks if I remember other inaugurations. For a purely personal reason, I do remember the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, especially because he was our first Catholic president. The prejudice against Catholics was still so strong in those days that people said if we elected Kennedy, the Pope would be running the United States.
My English Catholic mother had made a deal with my agnostic father that she would be allowed to educate all their female offspring while he took care of the boys. My brothers attended Episcopalian schools in town, but as I was the only girl of six children, I was enrolled in a private convent school run by Sacred Heart nuns an hour away from our house in Bethesda, Maryland.
As many recall, there was a blizzard the night before the Kennedy inauguration that snarled the city. Washington is famous for its inability to deal with snow. The city never had enough plows so the whole town came to a standstill and schools were often canceled minutes after the first snowflake hit the ground. Before JFK could be inaugurated, 1400 cars that ran out of fuel or got stuck in the snow had to be removed from the parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue.
My mother was thrilled that her adopted country was finally electing a member of her own faith. Imagine her despair when she heard the afternoon before the Inauguration that all buses were cancelled so that she had to drive out to Bethesda to pick me up. At first, she was hopeful she would get back to town in time to attend the fancy dinner party given by Phil and Katharine Graham, the publishers of the Washington Post. But halfway out to my school, her car slid into a snowbank and she was forced to shelter in a gas station for the night. In later years, it made a good story, but in that moment, she was furious.
Meanwhile, the nuns who’d spent that day wreathed in smiles at the thought of a Catholic in the White House, told me I would be spending the night. The convent school had a few boarders, mostly girls whose parents had sent them north from countries in South America. I’d be sleeping in an extra bed in their dorm room. I borrowed a nightgown, brushed my teeth with my forefinger, splashed water on my face and joined the others in the attic room lined with beds that reminded me of the twelve little girls in two straight lines in Madeline. But docile and holy as my roommates looked while Mother Mahaney offered a good night prayer of safety for our new president, the moment she put out the lights, the girls came alive. They gathered around, eager to show me their latest trick. Two of them boosted me up to the top rail of my iron bedstead. They’d discovered a small gap that ran along the top of the wall between the girls’ dorm and the nuns’ dorm. Because I was spending only that one night, I was accorded the prime spot.
“What am I looking at?” I whispered to the two holding my legs.
“Wait. They’ll come in soon. You get to watch them undress.”
Like solemn black birds, the nuns filed in slowly, kissed the crosses around their necks and laid them on bureau tops and bedside tables followed by the wooden rosaries from their bottomless pockets. With eyes modestly averted from one another, they began to remove layers, moving in what must have been a familiar choreography while studiously avoiding one another. They took off the long black veils and the stiff wimple cradling their faces to reveal shockingly shorn heads. They bent to untie the serviceable leather shoes and placed them side by side under each bed, then rolled down their woolen stockings. Finally, they lifted the long black tunics over their heads to reveal a stiff white chest piece called a guimpe that flattened their breasts. By the time they got to their underwear, I slid back down to my bed. It was too disturbing to see the solemnly garbed women who commandeered the hours of my day reduced to everyday people with shaved heads dropping nightgowns over their voluminous white cotton underpants. Before that night they had always felt sacred and other worldly. They rounded corners silently and floated down the convent hallways as if propelled by a mysterious force. Now they’d become nothing more than ordinary women who slept in narrow beds and changed into night clothes like the rest of us.
The next morning, we were awakened by a bell rung by Mother Sessions at the door to our dorm. She knelt by each child and whispered, “Domine non sum dignus.”
Lord, I am not worthy.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked my nearest neighbor.
“Finish the sentence,” she hissed back.
Luckily, I loved Latin and had memorized this particular sentence. Lord I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under Thy table. Say the word and my soul will be healed. What a terrible way to start the day, I thought years later. You’ve been deemed unworthy before you even lift your head off the pillow.
Meanwhile, I could never shake the image of Mother Sessions’ shaved head especially in the weeks that followed when she ordered me to the board in math class and screamed at me for missing a simple computation. After that night, whenever Mother Mahaney, our basketball coach, leaned over to change into black sneakers and pin up the front of her tunic, I looked away. She’d always been my favorite nun, but suddenly, it felt as if I were watching her undress all over again.
Right after breakfast, my mother made it the last few miles to the convent. Despite a treacherous trip home, she managed to turn herself around in time to dress for the official Inaugural Ball. I remember her descending the front staircase of our house in a teal blue satin ballgown to meet my father in his dinner jacket (the WASP name for a tuxedo) waiting for her in the hallway. As I watched them pick their careful way through the snow to the car, my mind flew back to the contrasting picture of the clutch of nuns shedding their clothes in their cramped dormitory room.
How happy my mother and those nuns, now long gone, would feel knowing that when America elected its second Catholic president, his religion was barely mentioned.
A postscript. My uncle Joe, a well-known journalist and friend of the Kennedys, was hosting a spirited post Inaugural ball in his Georgetown house when he heard a commotion outside. The entire block seemed to be out on their stoops in their night clothes, cheering and clapping. When Uncle Joe opened the front door, who should be standing at the top of the circular iron steps but JFK himself?
“Hello, Joe,” said the new president with a grin. “Jackie gave up and went to bed in the White House. Mind if I come in?”
Coming from Regal House, Fall 2022:
Daughter of Spies:
Wartime Secrets, Family Lies
#elizabethwinthrop, #elizabethwinthropalsop, #memoirs, #daughterofspies
