Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [11]
O’Connor’s father had invested all of his business hopes in the vulnerable real estate market. The year his daughter entered the first grade, the downward graph of Edward O’Connor’s business career was already visible in the Savannah City Directory. In 1927, he had officially entered his new business for the first time, listing himself as manager of the Dixie Realty Company. In 1927 and 1928, the company’s most successful years, he took out display ads pitching his company as buying, selling, renting, and insuring properties. In 1930, he added the Dixie Construction Company to the business entry, but by the next year the affiliated venture had disappeared. At the height of the economy, in 1928, Dixie Realty Company was one of a hundred companies placing such ads; by 1930, one year into the Depression, that number had already decreased to eighty-five.
Whatever tensions the girls entering St. Vincent’s were sensing in their own homes, the school maintained a nearly medieval aura of Latinate order and spirituality. Run by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Mary Flannery was born, St. Vincent’s was an enclave of parochialism of the sort she would later label the “novena-rosary tradition.” Each morning the “big girls” of grades five through eight, with their classes on the top floor, lined the long interior staircase, while the “little girls,” including Mary Flannery during most of her years at the school, remained standing in their classrooms on the floor below, adding their high, quivering voices to sing the opening daily hymn, “Veni Creator Spiritus,” or “Come, Holy Ghost.” Prayers were then dutifully recited before classes, before and after lunch, and at the dismissal.
In preparation for a special “Communion Sunday” during the school year, the girls gathered before intricately carved, dark wood confessionals, with velvet drapes and sliding panels — two at the back, two at the transept at the front of the cathedral — to count their sins and rehearse the formula of the sacrament of penance: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” They fasted from midnight on the day before the Communion, and, like their parents and other family members, abstained from eating meat on Fridays. For a florid May Day procession, all the girls — 324 of them, taught by nine sisters the year she began — lined up in matching white dresses, clutching bouquets of spring flowers, and marched into the cathedral to recite the rosary and sing sentimental Marian hymns: “O Mary we crown thee with flowers today / Queen of the angels, queen of the May.”
She caught glimpses, too, of the activities of boys — unfamiliar outsiders in her enclosed world. Mostly these were among the 340 pupils of Marist Brothers School, run, in 1931, by nine Brothers of Mary. Underlining the awkward divide between the two companion schools and genders, Dan O’Leary, enrolled at Marist while O’Connor was at St. Vincent’s, recalls being enlisted to deliver a note to one of the nuns: “I delivered my message, and the sister said, ‘Thank you, son.’ I said, ‘You’re welcome, brother.’ All the girls cracked up and I retreated with my ears burning.” On Sundays, chosen Marist boys served as acolytes or altar boys, dressed in white surplices, little hats, and Buster Brown collars, swinging censers and reciting brief Latin responses at the Italianate marble high altar of the cathedral, or singing, as boy sopranos, at midnight mass.
In such a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world, O’Connor found herself a misfit from the start. In an autobiographical sketch for a Magazine Writing course at Iowa, she remembered herself as “a pidgeo-ntoed, only-child