By Kevin Cullen
Globe Columnist / June 18, 2009
She lives in a city north of Boston but grew up in Ireland, when it wasn’t green as much as it was black and white.
When she was 7, her mother died, and the father she knew as warm and kind grew cold and mean.
When she was 14, her father put her on his bicycle and pedalled 25 miles, to a convent.
“The nuns were nice until my father left,’’ she said. “I don’t remember saying goodbye to my father.’’
The nuns ran a school for orphans and the unwanted and a laundry peopled by older cast-off’s. They took her in and took her name. They gave her the name of a saint.
On your saint’s feast day, you got a hard boiled egg. Or a tooth brush. You didn’t get both, and you didn’t decide.
The laundry was like a prison, she recalls. You couldn’t talk at work, and you worked six days a week. The rougher, meaner girls were like trustees, and they curried favor with the nuns by enforcing a brutal code.
Every Sunday, the head nun, the Reverend Mother, sat before the laundry girls in a huge chair and read out the week’s transgressions. One day the Reverend Mother read her out, saying she had been talking at work. She called the Reverend Mother a liar, and two girls held her down while the Reverend Mother used scissors to cut off her hair.
Once, a nun accused her of having a dirty uniform.
She looked down and said, “There’s no stain there, sister.’’ And all at once her face was burning, because the nun smacked her with an open hand. She reacted, pulling off the nun’s habit. As punishment, she was placed in a small room for 48 hours. There was no food, no water, no window, no bed, no toilet. She held her bladder until it was bursting, and when she finally peed on the floor she felt like nothing.
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