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From 8:30 to 9 is a "charge" period in which sisters do whatever cleaning has been assigned to them. This is the first time in the day that they are permitted to talk. From 9 to noon, and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., the sisters work. Many attend classes (Maryknoll operates an accredited teachers' normal college). Some take courses outside the convent in nursing, social work, medicine. Those not studying during work periods may be building a new terrace, or working in the kitchen to help Sister Gregory, who spent 26 years in Hawaii and can manage a graceful hula. Maintenance Chief Sister Jeannette always has plenty of odd jobs going begging. "I received the most wonderful present for Christmas," she says. "A power saw! Things like that are what we really need—not more black gloves and fountain pens and devotional books."
Compline, the last hour of the Divine Office, is sung at 7 p.m. and closes with a candlelight procession in the chapel. Real recreation comes now, from 7:30 to 8:30. The sisters usually spend it in the large, attractive community room, chatting. At 9 o'clock all sisters pause wherever they are to recite to themselves the De Profundis for the dead. Curfew rings at 9:30, but not all the sisters go right to bed. Mother Mary Columba's light burns late into the night.
The Torch-Song Background. Each year some 75 young women between the ages of 16 and 30 are accepted as postulants. They bring a "dowry" of $100 (it may be dispensed with in hardship cases), which goes toward financing the order's work. Postulants take no vows while undergoing a kind of basic training. After six months a postulant may receive the habit and white veil of a novice together with a new name. For the next two years she leads the full life of a Maryknoll sister, but also studies Catholic doctrine, the essentials of religious life ("Emily Post in the Convent,"as the course is jocularly known), and the Mass responses and Gregorian chant."When they first come, nowadays," says Sister Jeanne Marie, the novice mistress, "their singing is a cross between a howl and a wail— I guess it's a torch-song background."
After two years a novice normally takes her temporary vows. The ceremony resembles a marriage service: the priest puts the Maryknoll ring on the third finger of the novice's left hand, and she receives the black veil of a full-fledged sister, vowing poverty, chastity and obedience. These are binding for six years only; at the end of that time, provided that she is at least 21, she may make her perpetual vows, which commit her— unless she is specifically released by the Vatican—for the rest of her life.
Beginnings on the Hill. "I never had any idea of being a nun," recalls Maryknoll's founder, Mother Mary Joseph, now 72. "As a matter of fact I never cared for nuns, anyway. They wore black habits, and I thought, 'I certainly wouldn't want to go around dressed that way.' "