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My Vocation
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one? She'll be joining the same order as you, I'm thinking.' And he
roared out laughing again: a very common laugh I thought, even
though he was my father.
And he was nothing to my brother Paudeen.
'We'll be all right if it isn't the Order of Mary Magdalen that one
joins,' he said.
What do you make of that for commonness? Is it any wonder I
wanted to get away from the lot of them?
He was always at me, that fellow, saying I was cheapening my-
self, and telling Ma on me if he saw me as much as lift my eye
to a fellow passing me in the street.
'She's mad for boys, that one,' he used to say. And it wasn't true
at all. It wasn't my fault if the boys were always after me, was it?
And even if I felt a bit sparky now and then, wasn't that the kind
that always became nuns? I never saw a plain-looking one, did
you? I never did. Not in those days, I mean. The ones that used to
come visiting us in Dorset Street were all gorgeous-looking, with
pale faces and not a rotten tooth in their heads. They were twice as
good-looking as the Tiller Girls in the Gaiety. And on Holy Thurs-
day, when we were doing the Seven Churches, and we used to cross
over the Liffey to the south side to make up the number, I used to
go into the Convent of the Reparation just to look at the nuns. You
see them inside in a kind of little golden cage, back of the altar in
their white habits with blue sashes and their big silver beads dan-
gling down by their side. They were like angels: honest to God.
You'd be sure of it if you didn't happen to hear them give an odd
cough now and again, or a sneeze.
It was in there with them I'd like to be, but Sis - she's my girl-
friend - she told me they were all ladies, titled ladies too, some of
them, and I'd have to be a lay sister. I wasn't having any of that,
thank you. I could have gone away to domestic service any day if
that was only all the ambition I had. It would have broken my
mother's heart to see me scrubbing floors and the like. She never
sank that low, although there were fourteen of them in the family,
and only eleven of us. She was never anything less than a wards'
maid in the Mater Hospital, and they're sort of nurses, if you like,
and when she met my father she was after getting an offer of a
great job as a barmaid in Geary's of Parnell Street. She'd never have
held with me being a lay sister.
'I don't hold with there being any such things as lay sisters at all,'
434
Mary Lavin
she said. 'They're not allowed a hot jar in their beds, I believe, and
they have to sit at the back of the chapel with no red plush on their
kneeler. If you ask me, it's a queer thing to see the Church making
distinctions.'
She had a great regard for the Orders that had no lay sisters at
all, like the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Visiting Sisters.
'Oh, they're the grand women!' she said.
You'd think then, wouldn't you, that she'd be glad when I de-
cided to join them. But she was as much against me as any of them.
is it you?' she cried. 'You'd want to get the impudent look taken
off your face if that's the case!' she said, tightly.
I suppose it was the opposition that nearly drove me mad. It
made me dead set on going ahead with the thing.
You see, they never went against me in any of the things I was
going to be before that. The time I said I was going to be a Tiller
Girl in the Gaiety, you should have seen the way they went on: all
of them. They were dead keen on the idea.
'Are you tall enough though — that's the thing?' said Paudeen.
And the tears came into my mother's eyes.
'That's what I always wanted to be when I was a girl,' she said,
and she dried her eyes and turned to my father. 'Do you think there
is anyone you could ask to use his influence?' she said. Because she
was always sure and certain that influence was the only thing that
would get you any job.
But it wasn't influence in the Tiller Girls: it was legs. And I knew
that, and my legs were never my strong point, so I gave up that
idea.
Then there was the time I thought I'd like to be a waitress, even
though I wasn't a blonde, said Paudeen morosely.
But you should see the way they went on then too.
'A packet of henna would soon settle the hair question,' said my
mother.
'Although I'm sure some waitresses are good girls,' she said, it
all depends on a girl herself, and the kind of a home she comes
from.'
They were doubtful if I'd get any of these jobs, but they didn't
raise any obstacles, and they didn't laugh at me like they did in this
case.
'And what will I do for money,' said my father, 'when they come
looking for your dowry? If you haven't an education you have to
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