Nunzilla Was My Mother and My Stepmother Was a Witch Read online

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  Sweet or not, the Sisters of St. Francis, who operated St. Ann’s as well as SVO, had the greatest influence on my life—although I’m still not sure they’d like to take credit for it.

  Many of the nuns at SVO were from Germany, and they frequently conversed in German so that we wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Still, we were able to pick up an occasional word or two when the words sounded close to English or were used so often in a certain context. The non-German nuns would whisper with their faces close together when they didn’t want us to see or read their lips. The stiff edges of their linen headgear blocked their faces beneath their black veils. We figured they were telling secrets or reporting on our misbehavior. We doubted they told jokes, as we seldom saw anyone smile besides the laboring nuns and an occasional teacher.

  A few of the nuns used verbal abuse and sarcasm as a weapon against children who displeased them. Most of the others, particularly those who had direct supervision over children, believed strongly in physical punishment. They also believed in strict adherence to the most minute detail of religious practice, and they demanded unquestioning compliance when it came to their views of how our daily lives should be conducted, whether in church, school, the dormitory, the dining room, or the playground. They were quick to punish the smallest deviation.

  Some of these minute deviations occurred in church. Praying with fingers curled down on clasped hands rather than pointing upward was strictly forbidden, as was slumping instead of kneeling upright as you said your prayers. After the service, such deviations could earn you a slap across the face or a crack with a heavy leather strap, plus continuous practice of the correct position until the fearsome nun was satisfied.

  Silence was the golden rule at SVO, and breaking that rule during meals or while marching in line could result in your getting only bread and water at your next meal. Sometimes they’d punish an infraction on our part by making us stand in front of our plates for five or ten minutes before being allowed to sit and eat—cutting down our total mealtime considerably. You learned to eat quickly at SVO to prevent the bigger kids from grabbing your food.

  In the dining room, dropping a piece of silverware or making a spot on the tablecloth could get you sent to the "pigs' table." When you were a dining room worker, breaking a glass or a plate was so serious that you were sent to the Mother Superior. The Mother Superior would look at you sadly, sigh heavily, open her desk drawer regretfully, and then take out her strap and lay into you—for your own good, of course.

  Some of us thought we could avoid a whipping by the Mother Superior if we gained her sympathy. We’d lightly cut a finger or hand with a jagged piece of glass or china. Squeezing hard until the blood spilled over our fingers, we’d try to look pathetic when we went to her office. It often worked.

  Each nun had her own unique style of rendering physical punishment. There was one who laid you over a chair and then made the sign of the cross over your behind before whipping you with her strap. Some swung wildly and let the strap or stick hit you wherever it landed. One nun asked you to “hold up your snoot” so she could hit you in the face. Another would take off her wooden sandal and use her weight to hold you down as she beat you.

  Occasionally, a nun lacking a strap or stick would get carried away and use whatever was at hand. One lost her temper and threw her keys at a girl, hitting her in the collarbone and breaking the skin. One nun was known to hit kids hands with her crucifix.

  I once stuck my tongue out at a nun when her back was turned. She had been haranguing us, yelling at us, and being especially sarcastic. Unfortunately, the nun turned around and caught me. She gasped in shock and acted as though I had sinned against God himself. I worried that maybe I had, because the nuns had taught us that God spoke through them. It frightened me, knowing I had been blasphemous and was in danger of hellfire. I ran up the back stairs to the fifth floor landing outside the attic, got down on my knees, and prayed, “Dear God, if you will forgive me for the terrible sin I committed, I will become a nun.”

  That was the only time I contemplated such a life, but when God didn’t show up in a cloud of smoke, I promptly forgot my promise.

  The teaching nuns had their rulers for problem students and the gum-on-the-nose punishment for those who dared to chew gum in class. One nun would grab you by the hair and bang your head against the blackboard in an effort to force the knowledge into your head. Once, a boy who had been sassing the teacher had to get down on his knees and lick the wooden floor with his tongue, thereby cleansing the part of him that had sinned.

  In another class, an older boy got angry with a nun who had been berating him, and threw his schoolbook at her. As punishment for such a serious sin, the resident priest gave him a whipping in the middle of the children’s dining room as he lay over a chair. Although we thought the boy’s sin was horrible, we also thought he was very brave for not crying at all.

  Some nuns needed no weapons at all, and would whack you across the back with their massive and muscular arms. You’d usually lose your balance and fall against the wall or onto the floor.

  According to some nuns, you were never supposed to defend yourself against accusations of wrongdoing, even if you were completely innocent. They didn’t apologize if later information proved your innocence. They theorized that you had undoubtedly gotten away with something in the past, so even if you were innocent of the current misdeed, the punishment would still be apropos. There was no way we could win. The nuns felt they were doing us a favor by letting us suffer in this life so we wouldn’t have to in the next. One nun insisted that you thank her after you were punished.

  Although most nuns had no hesitation regarding physical punishments, one of the nuns on playground surveillance duty apparently hated doing the whipping herself. She would keep track of all our misdeeds and report them to the dormitory nun at the end of the day. After we had washed up and gotten ready for bed, the children she had reported were called by name to line up for a couple of lashes with a strap before they went crying to their beds. Sometimes when a misdeed could not be attributed to a particular person, everyone had to line up for a couple of strokes.

  We didn’t have contact with all the nuns at SVO. Some resided in the SVO convent and taught at one of the Columbus parochial schools, while others merely did administrative work. It seemed that most of the nuns in day-to-day contact with the orphanage kids did not like children at all, but were placed in care of them in the belief that God would help them gain the necessary skills and correct attitudes. Unfortunately for the children under their care, these nuns never acquired the necessary gifts from God, and their anger and frustration merely deepened and grew over the course of the months and years.

  When the nuns who did not like children tried to relate to them, they frequently lacked the necessary sensitivity concerning what would be appropriate. One time, the nun in the big girls dormitory thought it would be a very funny April Fool’s joke to put candy bars under each girl’s pillow. The joke fell flat because nobody laughed. What looked like real candy bars were only blocks of wood covered with real candy wrappers. We didn’t get candy often enough, particularly candy bars, to appreciate the joke.

  One nun thought it was humorous or efficient to call you by your laundry number rather than your name. Perhaps she was just showing off her excellent memory, but either way, we didn’t like it, because we knew that people in prisons were also given numbers for identification. Another nun liked to call children by the nicknames given to them by other children, even if those names were derogatory. I don’t know if this was meant to be humorous or merely portrayed a lack of sensitivity in someone whose talents could have been better used in other work.

  Many nuns were convinced that if your eyes shifted around, or if you couldn’t look them in the eyes, you were a liar. Even though looking into a nun’s angry face was scary, we learned how to stare them straight in the eyes even if we were lying. Successfully staring a nun down was something to brag about on the playg
round.

  The nuns who taught church history and religious studies could get quite angry if they considered your questions out of line. When I was in one of the lower grades, the teacher was telling us how God had sent his son Jesus to earth for the express purpose of dying for our sins, and that the Jews killed Jesus. She told us the Jews asked that the blood of Jesus be on them and on their children, and said they carried the mark of Cain. Thinking this over, and remembering that one of our jump rope chants included a rhyme about a “dirty Jew,” I felt that this was a bit unfair, so I asked her, “Why should we hate the Jews? Jesus wanted to die for our sins. He couldn’t have done it if nobody killed him.”

  Wow, did that make the nun angry. She belittled my intelligence and motives, suggesting that I thought I knew more than the mother church. She warned me that I should guard my mind against the devil’s promptings. That lesson taught me to keep my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself, even though I often wondered how Mary had lucked into being born without sin, whereas I was born with original sin and was always in danger of being thrown into hell. Why couldn’t I have been so lucky?

  The laboring nuns were the kindest to the children, and they were the only ones who actually seemed to enjoy having them around. These nuns did all the heavy work for the convent. They worked in the laundry, the children’s kitchen, the garden, and the potato cellar. Unfortunately, we weren’t in contact with these good-natured nuns as much as we were with the strict and humorless ones who weren’t too fond of the orphans placed in their care.

  As it turns out, most of the so-called orphans at St. Vincent’s had at least one living parent. In some families, the single parent was too impoverished to take care of the children (these were the depression years when many people couldn’t find work). Some of the children had a parent with a mental or physical illness, or one who had been imprisoned.

  The kindest, most motherly nun was Sister Annella, who was in charge of the children’s kitchen. She had a rolling gait like a cowboy—I think she had grown up in the West. Sister Annella would occasionally give you a hug, or a sweet bun or cookie left over from the nuns’ dining room, especially if she caught you crying in the basement hall after a punishment. She would give a deep sigh and shake her head after you had confided the details. Somehow you just knew that her sigh and head shaking didn’t mean she was exasperated with you, but was on your side.

  Sister Flavian, the laundry nun whom I never had the pleasure of working with, is fondly remembered by former SVO residents, who said she used to make their ironing labors more pleasant by telling them stories as they worked.

  In my early years at SVO, there was a very small, old nun in the little girls dormitory whom all the children loved. Her name was Sister Desideria, but we called her Sister Daisy among ourselves. She was very gentle and loving, and would never wake you by poking you with the long stick used to open the top dormitory windows, or by spraying you with cold water from a toothbrush like another nun did. She would merely ring the bell softly and say, “Good morning, children. Wake up! Wake up!” Sister Daisy often put a licorice button on our pillows at night before we went to sleep and gave us a little pat on the shoulder or cheek as she whispered, “Good night.”

  We had nicknames for a few of the other nuns as well, calling a very tall nun “AIU Building” after the tallest building in Columbus, and titling another “Pinchpenny” because she would pinch your legs if she felt that your bloomers were rolled up or your cotton stockings were rolled down under your dress. Other nuns were just given common nicknames, although we wouldn’t have dared to call Sister Elizabeth, Lizzie, or Sister Magdalene, Maggie, except to each other.

  Religious Fears and Shenanigans

  Overwhelmed with worries about whether I was good enough to stay out of the clutches of the devil and off the path to hell, I often wished I had been a heathen. They certainly never had to worry about such things. The Catechism teacher said heathens never had the opportunity to learn about Jesus, so they would not be sent to hell.

  It didn’t seem fair. Sometimes I even thought that I would rather have been born a tree. A tree could just live and be beautiful and didn’t have to worry about a thing, since it didn’t have a soul. Although the teacher said animals didn’t have a soul either, I had no desire to be one, because the nun told us the devil often takes on an animal’s form. I worried that if I’d been born a dog or cat, with my luck the devil would’ve caught up with me.

  The nuns would tell us stories about how various groups persecuted the Christians and killed them for their faith. This gave me nightmares about soldiers breaking into the orphanage and asking me if I believed in God. I couldn’t decide how I would answer. Saying yes would mean torture and death, but saying no would condemn me to hell.

  Back then, thinking about going to confession was like a heavy weight you carried around all week—less from the anticipation of confessing to the priest, but more from the fear you might die before you had a chance to confess. The nun always emphasized how important it was to confess all our sins, especially the mortal sins. Dying with a mortal sin on your soul would send you straight to hell.

  In preparation for confession, we were told to lay our heads on our desks, close our eyes, and think very carefully about all our sins before we left for church.

  I knew that purgatory rather than hell would be my destination if I died with venial sins on my soul, but I never wanted to take any chances. I feared that God might have a difference of opinion as to what was a mortal or venial sin. As such, I always padded and exaggerated my sins when I went to confession, to be sure all possible sins were covered. It didn’t occur to me that technically I was adding to my sin load by lying in confession. If the priest was surprised at the number and quality of my sins, he didn’t say anything about it.

  Perhaps I was too scrupulous in examining my conscience, which one of the nuns claimed was one of Martin Luther’s failings. But with the nuns' scrupulous detection and punishment of our smallest misdeeds or deviations, it was hard to determine exactly the right amount of scruples one should possess.

  After confession, we sometimes kidded around that we felt light as a feather, because the weight of all our sins had been lifted away. We were pure once again, we rejoiced. But all kidding aside, we did feel lighter.

  I wonder what God thought about one particular confession, given during one of the annual retreats, when we couldn’t talk or whisper for three days, and spent all our time praying and reading holy books. During one memorable retreat, a fierce-looking bearded missionary priest was invited to enhance the gravity of the retreat by giving the sermon at mass and by listening to the children’s confessions. The stern-looking priest scared me so much that I forgot the words to the prayer that begins, “Oh my God, I’m heartily sorry,” and just made whispering sounds without any words—pretending I was praying. Then I peed on the confessional floor.

  I had overly religious periods when I went around praying “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” during play time or while I was working, times when I was constantly examining my conscience or just worrying about my many sins. I would make up little tortures to atone for them in imitation of saints whose stories had inspired me.

  Sometimes I’d put little stones in my shoes, prick myself with a pin, or hold my arms straight up above me for as long as I could stand it before I went to sleep at night. The idea was to mortify the flesh, which was a constant theme in our religious instruction. I tried my best, hoping that all the mortifications I performed would balance the heavenly scales in my favor when God was weighing all my sins. Other girls, as well as I, were frequently haunted by dreams of hell and the devil, waking up everyone with hysterical screams until the whole dormitory was in an uproar. If the nun who came out of her cell to see what the commotion was about didn’t immediately turn on the light, she would set off further pandemonium because she was completely garbed in black.

  I wasn’t exactly sure of heavenly protocol or how much power each saint
had, so to keep on the good side of the whole bunch, I tried to pray to each one whose name I could remember before I went to sleep. I didn’t know what the repercussions would be if I forgot one saint and he or she got jealous. I had a difficult time getting to sleep because I always seemed to think of another saint as I was drifting off.

  To top everything off, I began to worry that perhaps I was becoming too saintly. We had been told stories of saints who had been visited by devils coming to tempt them, or by angels. I worried that I might get such visits. Whether devil or angel, the idea terrified me, and I often prayed to them, “Please don’t come to see me.”

  Perhaps the nuns didn’t realize how literal-minded children can be when they told us harrowing stories of saints and their excessive self-mortifications and held them up as ideals for us to imitate. The nuns often seemed to expect us to live the same constrained and ascetic life of the nunnery.

  There are always children who can be told the goriest tales without blinking an eye, or who can shrug off stories about hell, damnation, and saintly suffering as merely another type of fairy tale—not to be taken seriously. I was one of those literal-minded kids who thought saintliness and martyrdom were proper goals for children, and, if we did not achieve these goals, should be prepared to take the consequences after our deaths. I tried very hard to live up to the ideals set before me, and I worried constantly when I failed in my efforts. I felt overwhelmed by the weight of my sins.

  That said, I must have had some sort of internal safety valve, which succeeded in keeping me in balance. Often, perhaps as a defense against religious frenzy or because the zealotry was imposed on me rather than being a personal choice, I would go into a heathen mode. Becoming absolutely bored stiff with all the praying and kneeling, I would stare at the linoleum pattern on the floor of the chapel instead of keeping my eyes on the priest during mass. If I kept focusing and unfocusing my eyes, eventually I would get a cool 3-D effect.