When Katharine Hepburn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards as a somewhat old lady on April 2, 1974, she said, “I’m the living proof that a person can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”
I, now also a somewhat old lady, beat the great Kate by nine years, waiting 50 to be unselfish enough to attend my high school reunion on the former grounds of the Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel in White Plains, N.Y.. A former classmate and friend who was on the reunion committee told me she had made it her mission to get me there and, not wanting to disappoint, again, I hustled my considerable butt to meet her at the chapel for the Mass that would begin our journey into the past.
Inside, everything was changed, the faces at first unfamiliar, and yet precisely the same, as indicated by the excited chatter from a lively, intelligent bunch whom the nuns’ shushing could never quite contain. We eventually took our seats to sing hymns, led by Elizabeth de Almeida (Class of 1985), accompanied by pianist Daniel O’Connor, and to hear the Rev. Jack Rathschmidt compare us to the Gospel’s mustard tree, which grows and spreads mightily from a tiny seed, and to the saguaro, the tree-like California cactus that takes 50 years to grow its first arm, sheltering birds from predators. (When Rathschmidt talked about our next 50 years and someone let out a gasp, he said jokingly, “Well, I didn’t say you had to complete them.”
As the day turned to dinner at the Brazen Fox downtown, it became clear just how much these “girls” — now career women, wives, mothers and even grandmothers in some cases — were like the saguaro. It was gratifying to learn of their years in health and social services and education — professions, one of them noted, that were what was open to women back in the day.
But the 1970s — besides being a golden age for sports and the arts — saw a wave of feminism that opened other professional doors for women as well. Many said they had no intention of retiring. Some said they had to work. And those who were retired were not idle but pursuing new chapters, learning dance, musical instruments and foreign languages. Indeed even many of those engaged in business were also pursuing artistic passions like crafts and photography.
That was satisfying to learn and satisfying, too — humbling even — to know classmates had followed my writing career and thought I looked elegant, beautiful.
But the day was not without its bittersweetness, perhaps best exemplified by the five framed yearbook photographs, surrounded by candles, of classmates we had lost. The photos accompanied us to the restaurant, a reminder that death is part of life, sorrow part of joy.
Good Counsel is gone now — the private, kindergarten through 12th grade girls school founded at the turn of the 20th century by the Sisters of the Divine Compassion and cited for its educational excellence having closed in 2015 (the high school) and ’17 (the elementary school) and the 16-acre site, added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1997, sold to WP Development NB LLC.
As part of that 2015 deal, the chapel remains a house of worship, but its crypt — which houses the splendid mausoleum of the Rev. Thomas Preston, who co-founded the order with Mother Mary Veronica; the remains of early members of the order; and a copy of Michelangelo’s Pièta — has water damage and is in need of repair.
As I drove around the campus, past the now-silent buildings, I traced the first 12 years of my scholastic life. There was the Victorian elementary school, the former Tilford House, where we staged mysteries, pretended to be movie stars making films at recess and played tricks on the girls who went to the now-defunct Good Counsel College. (Pace University Law School occupies its site.)
There was the Spanish-style convent where we were occasionally sent for detention and where the older, retired nuns would invite us into the solarium for hot cocoa and a chat. There was the pink, stovepipe high school, scene of so many teenage triumphs, trials and tribulations. There was the gym, once a state-of-the-art temple to sport and assembly and the bane of my unathletic existence, except for a semester of modern dance in which I and my injured knee somehow excelled in recreating Martha Graham’s mythological heroines.
There, too, were the old hurts and rejections, hovering and hiding like so many shades, so many ghosts. The Gospel reading for the Sunday of reunion weekend spoke of the limitlessness of forgiveness. If true forgiveness is to forget, then in remembering are we refusing to let go?
Yet there is a kind of remembering that is flooded with love. I thought of all those parents, parental figures and teachers, now gone, who had gotten us to that moment, for as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses observes, “I am a product of all that I have met.”
And I thought again of those five dead classmates, eulogized by Sister Felicitas Russell, R.D.C., the chapel’s sacristan, in the poem “As We Remember Them” by Sylvan Kamens and Rabbi Jack Riemer. I could see them and the rest of us in our evening gowns processing into the gym on Class Night a half century ago — turning a corner to the front of the auditorium but also on a part of our lives — to Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Friends”:
“…It seems to me a crime that we should age
“These fragile times should never slip us by
“A time you never can or shall erase
“As friends together watch their childhoods fly
“Making friends for the world to see
“Let the people know you got what you need
“With a friend at hand you will see the light
“If your friends are there
“Then everything’s all right.”