Come to the Edge_ A Memoir Part 1

Come to the edge: a memoir.

by Christina Haag.

August 1985

Seeing a place for the first time at night gives it a kind of mystery that never leaves.

John's mother's house in rural New Jersey was on a private stretch of road between Peapack and Bernardsville in an area known as Pleasant Valley. Bernardsville, a charming town an hour west of New York City, claims Meryl Streep as its hometown girl, and buildings from the turn of the century have been converted into video stores and pizza parlors. Peapack is smaller, quieter, with an antiques store and two churches. Close by are Ravine Lake and the Ess.e.x Hunt. The Hunt was founded in 1870 in Montclair but soon relocated nearby, and Mrs. Ona.s.sis rode with them for years. And in the surrounding fields of Somerset County, John had gone on his first fox hunt.

On the left side of the road as you approached the house, there was a meadow and a ridge with a dark line of trees at the top. On the right-country estates, deeper woods, and a small river, a branch of the Raritan. The house was nestled on a hill. What I remember is the peace and comfort of being there. It was a place to rest and recharge. Mrs. Ona.s.sis had a great talent for making you feel welcome, for creating an atmosphere of elegance and ease in all of her homes, although each had its own special character.

The cottage in Virginia, which she used during foxhunting season, was simple, with pressed linen sheets that smelled like rain, a sloping roof, and a large sunlit bathroom with a sisal carpet and a comfortable chair to read in. When John and I lived in Washington during the summer of 1987-he was interning at the Justice Department, and I was performing at the Shakespeare Theatre-we spent weekends alone there. It was a particular pleasure to sink into that deep tub on an afternoon, the rain beating on the roof, and listen as he read to me from the chair, a book of poems or Joseph Campbell or whatever novel he was reading.

The house in New Jersey had five bedrooms and an airy living room with yellow walls and French doors that opened onto a pool and a stone patio. It wasn't grand or ostentatious; it was timeless and the colors subtle. You hadn't realized that you wanted to put your feet up, but there was a stool waiting. You hadn't realized that you wanted to read, but there was a light nearby and just the right book. Comfort and desire were antic.i.p.ated, and you felt cared for.

But I didn't know any of this on that summer night in 1985-I'd never been to either home. Tonight would be the first time I would stay at the house on Pleasant Valley Road.

Rehearsals had ended earlier that evening at the Irish Arts Center, a small theater in Manhattan's West Fifties. It was a Thursday, and the play that John and I were in rehearsals for was opening that Sunday. Winners Winners is set on a hill, and our director, Robin Saex, had always talked about running our scenes outside. She had been toying with spots in Central Park and Riverside when John volunteered a slope near his mother's house in Peapack. It was steep, he told us-so steep we could roll down it! We would rehea.r.s.e there on Friday, which would give the crew the entire day to finish the set and hang the lights in time for our first technical rehearsal on Friday night. is set on a hill, and our director, Robin Saex, had always talked about running our scenes outside. She had been toying with spots in Central Park and Riverside when John volunteered a slope near his mother's house in Peapack. It was steep, he told us-so steep we could roll down it! We would rehea.r.s.e there on Friday, which would give the crew the entire day to finish the set and hang the lights in time for our first technical rehearsal on Friday night.

The three of us set off in his silver-gray Honda. When we arrived close to midnight, we found that supper had been laid out by the Portuguese couple who were caretakers of the house. They were asleep, but a very excited spaniel was there to greet us instead. Shannon was a pudgy black and white dog-a descendant of the original Shannon, a gift from President de Valera of Ireland to President Kennedy after his trip there in 1963. John scolded him affectionately for being fat and lazy and told him that the bloodlines had deteriorated, but the spaniel was thrilled by the attention.

On a quick spin through the house, he showed us his old room. It was a boy's room-red, white, and blue, with low ceilings, some toy soldiers still on the bureau, and in the bookshelf Curious George Curious George and and Where the Wild Things Are Where the Wild Things Are. Robin dropped her bags near the bed, and we went downstairs and ate cold shepherd's pie and profiteroles, a meal I would come to know later as one of his favorites.

After supper, Robin yawned and said, "Guys, I'm turning in. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow." I was tired as well, but too excited to sleep, and when John asked if I wanted to go see the horses in the neighbors' barn, I said yes. He put some carrots and sugar cubes in his pocket, and we headed down the driveway and across the road to the McDonnells'.

Murray McDonnell and his wife, Peggy, were old friends of John's mother. She boarded her horses with them, and their children had grown up together. The McDonnells' hound, who spent most days visiting Shannon, began to follow us home, and Shannon, who never strayed far from his kitchen, trailed behind. John teased both dogs, saying they were gay lovers. He leaned over and shook a finger at Shannon, admonishing him again for being fat. "Don't be too sweet, Shanney, don't be too sweet. Or I will bite you. I'll bite you." Shannon thumped his stub of a tail and waddled back up the drive.

It was one A.M A.M., and I was getting the moonlight tour. When I asked if we'd wake the McDonnells, John shrugged and told me not to worry. He showed me an old childhood clubhouse, and we ducked through the small wooden door. He showed me the roosters and the barn cats and the caged rabbits. And when an especially eager bunny nipped my fingers through the chicken wire, he said that Elise, his mother's housekeeper, ate them for treats. I whimpered-the desired response, I now think.

We moved into the cool of the barn and met Murray McDonnell's gelding and John's mother's mount, Toby. Like us, the horses could not sleep-or had been awakened by a whiff of carrot. I was not a horsewoman by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd ridden summers until I was fourteen, and I knew how to feed a horse. Still, it felt like the first time, and I let him show me. I had begun to value when he taught me things-his patience, the joy he took, how he never gave up.

"See, you keep your hand flat and your fingers back."

I stood close to him by the stall and he reached into his pocket.

"Let him take it, he won't bite. Like this..." Toby sniffed, lowered his velvet head, then looked up expecting more.

"You try." In the darkness, John had stepped behind me. "Go on, keep your fingers back."

"I'll just feed him a carrot." The carrot, for some reason, seemed safe.

"Here," he said, opening my hand and placing a sugar cube there. "Don't be scared." And with the back of my hand resting in his palm, the horse kissed mine and the sugar was gone.

Our hands broke. But his touch stayed with me as we fed the horses the rest of our stash. It was with me when we left the barn and walked out into the ring. And when I climbed onto the split rail fence, John hopped up beside me.

The moon was full, and we were quiet, watching the sky.

"It's a blue moon tonight," I said. "I heard it on the radio."

"Oh yeah?" He crooned, "Without a dream in my heart, without a love of-"

"What is is a blue moon?" I wondered aloud. a blue moon?" I wondered aloud.

"It's when there are two full moons in one month. Not as rare as an eclipse, but definitely rare." Because of his time in Outward Bound and a NOLS stint in Kenya, along with his innate curiosity, he knew so much about the natural world that I didn't.

"So it's got nothing nothing to do with being blue?" to do with being blue?"

He shook his head, smiling.

"But it seems special, like a stronger moon."

"Maybe it is," he said, looking into my eyes.

"Look." I pointed. "It is is brighter. Everything is silver-the leaves, the barn, the stones, the horses, the road, everything." I shifted my weight on the fence. brighter. Everything is silver-the leaves, the barn, the stones, the horses, the road, everything." I shifted my weight on the fence. Everything Everything.

Again we were quiet-the shyness that came from knowing each other well in one way, as we had for ten years, and then the knowledge deepening. We had been friends in high school, housemates in college, but now-walking home together these past few weeks, practicing the kiss in rehearsals, falling in love through the imaginary circ.u.mstances of the theater (a professional hazard for actors: Is it real? Or is it the play Is it real? Or is it the play?)-attraction had become undeniable. We sat for a while under the stars and felt no need to speak. But then he did.

"Can I do this for real?"

He didn't wait for an answer; he leaned in. Only our lips touched. It was gentle, hands-free, exquisite. I opened my eyes for a second, not believing that what I'd dreamed of was happening, and saw, by the lines at his eyes, that he was smiling. I held on to the fence, woozy. A world had opened.

"I've been waiting to do that for a long time," he said, looking not at me, but at the sky. He was still smiling, and I remember thinking then that he looked proud. For the past week and a half, we had kissed in rehearsals, but in my mind, we were the characters, Mag and Joe, teenagers from Ireland about to be married because she was pregnant. At least I had tried to believe that. But this kiss was different. This kiss was ours.

"I guess that wasn't supposed to happen," he said finally, tucking one of his ankles behind the fence rail.

No. It's right. Again. Don't stop, I thought. Then my mind went to the actor I'd been with for almost three years, who was kind and good and could make me laugh, even in a rough patch, and to John's girlfriend from Brown, whom I liked and admired. Reality. People would be hurt. Or did he mean it wasn't supposed to happen because we were friends and should remain so? It occurred to me only later that he was testing the waters.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked.

He didn't answer. Instead, he took my hand and said he wanted to show me something. I followed him into the woods, twigs snapping under our feet. The sky had grown brighter, and light danced through the thicket of elms onto the rocks and the river. Sound rushed, loud and exhilarating. In my dreams, I'd promised myself one kiss-just one-and now I'd had that.

John stepped into the shallow river and sloshed around in his sneakers. I took off my sandals and jumped from rock to rock as he steadied me, and when I finally gave in and stepped down into the cold water alongside him, it woke me. I felt alive. I'd been quiet in the barn, but now I could not stop talking. Nerves, excitement, happiness-I'm not sure which was stronger. We talked about our childhoods. I told him how I hid in books, loved the ocean, didn't like sports but adored ballet. "You sound like my mother," he said, somewhat under his breath. "But I seem to recall a table or two you danced on in high school."

I told him stories about my younger brothers and about the nuns at Sacred Heart, where I had gone to grade school and where his sister had also gone. He remembered the building on Fifth Avenue, he said, and its covered driveway. He'd gone to St. David's, two blocks down, and in the afternoons had walked with his mother or his nanny to pick his sister up. He told me about playing in this river and making forts, about being bloodied in a fox hunt nearby-an initiation rite in which boys are dabbed with the blood of the kill-and about how, when he was a toddler and the first Shannon was a puppy, and a mess was made or sweets were taken from the table, his mother didn't know whether to scold him or the dog. He laughed when he told that story. But his mood darkened when he told of another Shannon, the one he loved best, the one who was irascible. He had been away for part of the summer, and on his return, he found that his mother had given the dog away. "I didn't even get to say goodbye," he said sadly.

It's strange how one kiss can make you remember what is long past but what has made you who you are.

Upstairs, before we went to bed, he shared his toothpaste with me. Looking at his face in the mirror beside mine, I wondered if he always brushed his teeth so long. He didn't seem the type. I knew I wasn't. I just didn't want the night to end.

"Good night," he said finally, grinning in the hallway between the bedrooms.

"Good night," I said, grinning back, but neither of us moved.

We kissed again. This time, he pulled me to him, and our bodies met like they'd always known each other. I'd never been kissed so slowly. He stroked my back and buried his face in my hair and kissed my neck. He was wearing a soft cotton shirt he had gotten in Kathmandu the year before. It was white, and on the back there was a large evil eye embroidered in turquoise and black. I felt the loose threads and his muscles beneath them. I felt his hand at the small of my back. Then I smelled something. Mint. In our pa.s.sion, his toothbrush had become entangled in my hair. We looked at each other, realized, and began to laugh. I had toothpaste in my hair and I was happy. I was drunk with it. Then I pulled back.

"I hate to say good night-"

"Would you like to spend it with me?" he said softly.

Was this something he did easily? What would it mean? Would it be one night? And the play, would it change the play? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large and what looked to be quite opulent bed in the guest room, where his bags and the dutiful Shannon waited. At that moment, there was nothing I wanted more than to be with him. But other thoughts flashed through my mind, and I behaved not as I desired, not as I'd fantasized, but like the coy Catholic girl I was. The eroticism of waiting.

I stepped up on the landing that brought me closer to his height and whispered, "I would, but it's...complicated."

He smiled. "Well, if it ever gets uncomplicated..."

I was confused. "Isn't it for you?"

"Oh, I've had a lot of time to think." He dropped his head to one side, as if that way he could see me better. "I've walked you home so many times and trudged away alone."

What did he mean? Before I could speak, he brushed the hair from my face and pulled me close.

"But one more kiss."

This time it was harder to resist.

I stayed alone in Caroline's room that night-a girlhood room with twin beds in white eyelet, and trophies and colored ribbons from horse shows. The setting was virginal, but my thoughts were not. I stared at the ribbons late into the night, unable to sleep. It wasn't just the play opening, or the moonlight flooding through the window, or the smallness of the bed. It was the knowledge that our rooms adjoined through the hall door and he was sleeping so near. It was the knowledge that a kiss we had shared near a field by some horses might change my life forever.

Beginning

Within you, your years are growing.

-PABLO NERUDA

In the cool of a June evening long ago, a man holds a child in his arms. Across the field, light is falling behind a bank of trees and resting on a water tower, a dome of red and white checks. She's in a cotton nightgown and her legs dangle. He is wearing tennis whites, but they're rumpled. They always are. No socks, his shirt untucked. Behind them, a shingled summerhouse rambles down to a dock and a muddy bay. Near the kitchen door, a painted trellis is heavy with the heads of pale roses bowing.

Every night they do this. He sings her made-up songs and tells her stories. Some are silly, and she laughs. Daddy Daddy, she says. Some are of women in long dresses. Some of a princess with her name and a knight who slays dragons. But on summer nights, as he does on this one, he points to the tower and tells her it is hers. Her very own. He tells her, and she believes him. His eyes, sharp like the blue of a bird's wing, gaze into hers. She lays her head against him, hair damp from the bath, and breathes the salty warmth of his skin. She wraps her legs at his waist and curls into him as the story ends and the light dies.

My parents were married under a pink and white tent on the East End of Long Island on a July night in 1959. The tent, sheer and billowing and filled with stephanotis and daylilies, was propped for the night on the grounds of a robber baron's estate in Quogue, New York, a resort community some eighty miles from Manhattan. The estate was not on the ocean; most of the grander homes there were set back across the ca.n.a.l from the spit of barrier beach that ran from the Moriches Inlet in the west to the Shinnec.o.c.k Inlet in the east. There, on the eastern end-standing on the jetty past Ponquogue Bridge, looking at that wide, ancient bay and the cut where the Atlantic rushed in-you could see across to another sandy spit, and miles later, there was Southampton, where lavish shingled cottages were indeed built by the sea, on Gin Lane, on Meadow Lane, on Dune Road.

The rented house where they were married, with its diamond-mullioned windows and its graceful veranda, was close enough to the water so that when the wind changed-when dinner ended and the dancing began-the scent of the sea would have mixed with the music and laughter and the heady perfume of the sweet, high-hedged privet.

The bride's organdy gown was from Bergdorf Goodman, her portrait by Bachrach, and the engraved invitations by Cartier, and if you thumbed through the glossy black-and-white proofs of cake cutting and veil straightening, you might think children of privilege, society wedding. But you would be wrong. My parents' story was different.

They were both Catholic, both of German and Irish descent. They came from small towns in Pennsylvania and Nebraska. My father was the son of a railroad foreman, my mother the daughter of a rancher, farmer, wanderer, and occasional Prohibition bootlegger. They had come to New York to find their fortunes, and on a winter day, seventeen months before the wedding by the sea and twenty-six months before I was born, they found each other.

After graduating from St. Mary College in Xavier, Kansas, my mother took a monthlong TWA flight attendant's course. When asked to put in for their home base, she and her best friend swore they'd stick together. My mother wanted Kansas City, but her friend pushed for New York. "Aim for the top," she said. "You can always come back." They tossed a coin, and my mother lost.

By the time she met my father, she had been in the city for almost four years and was living in a one-bedroom apartment behind the Waldorf-Astoria with two roommates. No longer a stewardess, she was a Foster-Ferguson model with dreams of becoming an opera singer. She did commercial and editorial print, but not high fashion. She was the girl next door with the winning smile-Miss O'Neill Lyons Club, the Dial soap girl, and the second runner-up in the Miss New York Summer Festival of 1958. And in every snapshot from my childhood, no matter who was crying at the time, she looks perfect-her face catching the light, her ankle turned just so.

My father was thirteen years older. He'd been in New York longer and was in his element, as though he'd been born rushing somewhere in a single-breasted charcoal suit, a topcoat easy on his arm. He'd been a pilot during World War II and had flown a Martin B-26 Marauder over Utah Beach. In the winter of 1945, on R & R in Miami, he met a girl at the Delano Hotel and sc.r.a.pped his plans to join the Flying Tigers and fly the Hump to China. He married her three months later-the daughter of a showgirl and a Chicago industrialist-and they settled in her city, where he went to Northwestern Law on the GI Bill. But the marriage was unhappy, and when I was ten and allowed to know such things, my aunt whispered that when it ended, my father was crushed. For him, New York was a fresh start. At thirty-one, he became publisher and president of Everywoman's Everywoman's magazine (later magazine (later Family Circle Family Circle), before moving on to run a thriving boutique advertising agency. He had no intention of remarrying. There hadn't been children with his first wife, and although he wanted them, he believed it wasn't possible.

My father ran with a fast crowd, mostly Madison Avenue types like himself, and twice a month they held "scrambles." To all appearances, these were martini Sunday brunches at someone's Midtown apartment. But the point was women, and the rule was that each bachelor had to bring three "recruits," preferably models and no repeats. My mother went with her friend Tex, and although she was impressed by my father's Tudor City aerie, she recognized the situation for what it was and left quickly. She also found him annoying. He didn't like The Music Man The Music Man, and she did. He, however, was smitten. Richer men, kinder men pursued my mother then, but my father was fun, and after a date or two, she decided that was what she wanted.

On May 4, 1960, six days before Senator John Kennedy won the pivotal West Virginia primary, I was born, the child my father hadn't thought possible. He filled the room in the old wing of Lenox Hill Hospital with balloons and flowers, and smoked Partagas downstairs with his best friend, Lloyd. That summer, as they did for many summers to come, my parents rented an old farmhouse with nine bedrooms, a potbelly stove, two fireplaces, and a rickety old dock on Quantuck Bay, not far from the gabled house where they had married the year before.

When I was small, my mother read the story of Cinderella to me every night, at my insistence, and when she tried to skip a page out of boredom, I knew. I didn't want the Disney version, although we had that, too. It stayed on the shelf by my ballerina music box, and she would alternate between the Perrault and the Grimm-the one with the talking doves, the wishing tree, and the blood in the shoe. And when I could read, I devoured every color of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books.

I would ask my mother then to tell me the story of how my father had proposed. Her answer was always the same. One day we just started talking about it. One day we just knew One day we just started talking about it. One day we just knew. This horrified me. There was no kneeling, no meaningful locale, no diamond slipped into a champagne flute or buried in chocolate mousse. No gla.s.s slipper. I kept thinking she was hiding the truth from me and if I just bothered her enough, she'd tell. Despite my badgering, that never happened, and I vowed, as seven-year-olds do, that it would be different, far different, for me.

Still-in the wedding pictures that filled the cream and gold binder, separate from the alb.u.ms of my brothers and me and our birthdays and our bikes, there was a small crown in her hair that held the short veil in place, and her impossibly small waist was made smaller still by the starched crinoline of the dress.

The dress stayed in a long, plaid cardboard box tied with twine on the top shelf of her closet at 142 East Seventy-first Street, the prewar building off Lexington Avenue that we moved to when I was three. It sat next to a portable green sewing machine and the hard case that held my father's letters home from the war. I'd look up at the box sometimes and wonder, even though I already knew that the puffed sleeves, sweetheart neck, and fluffy, girlish lines were not for me. I wanted satin-a dress that looked like the nightgown of a 1930s movie star-and an ivory mantilla that trailed the floor. During the Depression, my Nebraska grandmother had eloped a month shy of her seventeenth birthday in a red traveling suit with a cloche hat, and this fascinated me-along with the fact that she was one of the only divorced people I knew.

When she was twenty-nine, my grandfather took whatever he could sell and left her with two kids and 320 acres of family homestead on South Pasture Creek. It was 1943. The land was worthless from drought and crop failure, the farmhouse would burn the next year, and she was a woman alone. But she worked hard and saved her money, and eventually she had a dress shop in town and a slew of admirers: the auctioneer for the county, the town solicitor, and the one she loved-a married man who took her dancing when the big bands came to town.

She held on to the land until she died, and by the time my brothers and I visited in the summers, she lived in town, leasing it to ranchers and alfalfa farmers. We always drove out there in her gold Oldsmobile, and when we reached the cottonwoods by the creek, she'd direct one of us to run and take down the barbed wire gate, hold it open as the car pa.s.sed through, and then hook it back on the fence post so the cattle didn't get out.

My grandmother walked with a p.r.o.nounced limp, the result of a near-fatal car accident the year before I was born, but she'd point out the milkweed and the musk thistle or the face of a particularly forlorn calf she'd fallen for that spring. My grandfather had been dead for years, and she never mentioned him. My mother rarely did. Although a cousin might say something, it was always hush-hush, and no matter how much I prodded, she remained silent.

I became obsessed with old family pictures. Afternoon farm picnics, with straw boaters and white dresses, and slicked-haired men, stiff in their studio portraits with the hard paper frames. It was my mission; I didn't want the faces to be lost. I'd cart the photos to the kitchen table, and while my grandmother smoked her Pall Malls, I'd scribble dates and names, whatever she remembered, in pencil on the back.

I found one picture-small and insignificant, with white matte borders-of a man on a big paint horse with a la.s.so in one hand and a bottle in the other. Even though it was blurry, I could make out the jaunty grin. "Is this him? Is this him, Grandma?" I was like a miner hitting pay dirt. She stared at the image for a long time, and although it wasn't exactly a smile that crossed her face, it was enough. As I held my breath, she lowered her chin and made a small clicking sound at the side of her mouth, the way you do when you urge a horse to go faster. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h," she said softly before returning to her cigarette.

My mother's dress was brought down from the shelf three times-twice for cleaning and once, five years after my father died, when she moved out of the apartment that had been her home for thirty-five years and where she had raised us. The dress was the last thing packed. I stood on a piano stool and handed her the box. It was lighter than I remembered. She took it to the bed, careful of the broken edges, and when she opened it, she wept.

The Otto Kahn mansion stands at the corner of Ninety-first Street and Fifth Avenue, on the far reaches of Millionaires' Row on New York's Upper East Side. The five-story rusticated limestone facade is softened by simple pilasters and corniced windows, and an inner courtyard fills the many rooms with light, even on cloudy days. Inspired by the sixteenth-century Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, it was completed in 1918 as the primary dwelling of the Wall Street financier and arts patron. The mansion wasn't the only tony building on the block. The Burden and Hammond residences stood next door, and Andrew Carnegie's s.p.a.cious Georgian-style home with brick-terraced gardens, now the Cooper-Hewitt museum, was across the street.

In 1934, shortly before Kahn's death, the building was sold to a French order of cloistered Catholic nuns and became the Convent of the Sacred Heart, the school I went to from kindergarten through eighth grade. In 1940, the convent acquired the Burden mansion, and the two buildings were joined by narrow pa.s.sageways.

When we visited the school in the fall of 1964, there was no doubt in my mother's mind that I would go there. After the tour, I was sent off with a novice, a slim girl not yet in full habit, to play on the silver slide on the roof deck by the kindergarten rooms. My mother stayed behind with the small woman in the dark robes. When the inevitable question came-was there divorce in the family?-she didn't lie. She listened as the Reverend Mother explained what she already knew. In the eyes of the Church, marriage was indissoluble without an annulment. Sacraments could not be received. And although I was blameless-still, they could not in good conscience accept me for the next fall. My mother, however, remained determined. After all, that same year, Mrs. Kennedy, newly arrived in New York, had enrolled her daughter, Caroline, in second grade, and this had made an impression on all Upper East Side Catholic matrons. Having been educated by nuns herself, my mother knew exactly what to do. She crossed her ankles firmly under the chair, raised her head, and, without shame for what she was about to do, began to cry.

The school is still there, but the world I entered in 1965 when I pa.s.sed through the heavy oak doors on Ninety-first Street no longer exists. Now there is a small plaque on the corner of the building that says LANDMARK STATUS LANDMARK STATUS. After years of scaffolding, the stone, once sepia with dirt, is bone white. Bal.u.s.trades have been repaired, murals have been restored, and the threadbare velvet railing I once ached to touch has been replaced. The courtyard and coffered-ceilinged foyer by the chapel, the banquet hall, and the mirror-paneled ballroom where we danced barefoot in miniature Isadora Duncan garb can be rented for photo shoots, weddings, galas, and the occasional memorial service.

The nuns no longer teach. They are, in fact, gone. They no longer swish down the halls in long robes, no longer live in the fifth-floor wing that was forbidden to us and, because it was forbidden, fantasized over endlessly. By a blocked-off stairwell, two burly older girls once cornered me and my friend Diane. The larger one rapped on a hollow oak panel and convinced us that this this was where the nuns hid the bodies and we'd better watch it. was where the nuns hid the bodies and we'd better watch it.

Times were changing even then. The Second Vatican Council concluded at the end of 1965, and by 1967 there was an opening of cloistered life. In the years that followed, the Religious of the Sacred Heart heeded the call from Rome to adapt to the modern world. They began to venture outside the convent walls and were free to find vocations in areas other than teaching. But with renewal came an unraveling, and the eventual dwindling of their numbers.

Halfway through first grade, the order's habit was modified-the fluted bonnet became a veil-and those we knew as "Mother" were now to be called "Sister." Soon we saw their hairlines-a revelation. And by the time we entered middle school in 1970, most of them wore street clothes just like our lay teachers', only plainer, and formal traditions had given way to folk Ma.s.ses and felt banners with cheery New Testament sayings.

I was never hit with a ruler, never taught the rosary or the difference between a venial and a mortal sin. When I was in second grade, an earnest nun with huge eyebrows taught us how to baptize. Just in case Just in case. One day, she said, we might find ourselves on a desert island with someone who wanted desperately to convert. She shut the cla.s.sroom door, turned the bra.s.s k.n.o.b until there was a click, and in hushed tones made us promise not to tell our parents. I did as she asked. I was quiet at dinner, but later solemnly baptized my dog Tango with bathwater so that we would be together forever in heaven.

The teaching methods began to change, too. We were still drilled on multiplication tables and French verbs; we still curtsied every morning and were silent on the stairs. But now there were journals for everything, and Arts Days and Medieval fairs; and if, instead of writing a paper, we wanted to paint a picture or put on a play or design a costume, we could. For Ancient History one year, we trooped to Central Park and sc.r.a.ped around in the dirt by Belvedere Pond pretending to be Sumerians. The sixties had seeped through the walls, and what we learned was love and not to hide our light under a bushel.