Читать книгу Starved - Anne McTiernan - Страница 11

CHAPTER 1

Starving

“You need to look pretty today,” Margie said with pursed lips. “It’s a very special day.”

I sat on the edge of my bed in the room I shared with my aunt Margie (pronounced with a hard “g”). I liked the crinkling sound my shiny blue dress made as I swung my feet back and forth. With each swing forward, I could see the tip of my black patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Still, I listened carefully to my aunt’s words. The catch in her voice told me the special day, a sunny September afternoon in 1957, might not be a fun day.

Margie brushed my hair so hard I would have cried if I wasn’t already used to it—every morning she pulled my hair into a perfect, tight ponytail with an ink-stained rubber band she’d saved from the rolled-up Boston Globe. This day, she added my straw hat with the strap that dug into my chin if I opened my mouth. Then she gave me my white cardigan sweater to hold in case it got chilly. I felt hot with my stiff blue dress and shoes and didn’t want to put on the sweater anytime soon, but Margie always knew what I might need in case of an emergency.

Margie led me to the living room sofa in our third-floor walk-up apartment on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. I lived with my mother and Margie, her sister, when I wasn’t staying at one of the boarding homes my mother sent me to from the time I was three months of age. Very few mothers worked in 1953, and daycare was scarce. The few women who did work usually had a relative or babysitter take care of their children in the home, but it was rare for a mother to send her child to a boarding home.

“Sit quietly now, Anne. Don’t mess up your dress, or the sisters will think you’re naughty,” Margie said.

I didn’t know what sisters she meant and I didn’t understand why they’d think I was naughty if my dress got a little wrinkled. But my mother was home, so I knew that I had better sit still. While I waited, I held my doll—I named her Ruthie—close to my side with her legs sticking straight out just like mine.

The yellow taxi pulled up to a four-story, light brick building in Watertown, just west of Boston. We climbed out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk while the driver went around to the back and struggled to pull a long box out of the trunk. My mother opened her black purse, counted some money carefully into the driver’s hand, and asked him to carry the box up to the building.

“That wasn’t part of the deal, lady,” he said, “and if you’re not going to give me a tip, why should I do you a favor?”

My mother’s face contorted into the look she got right before she slapped my face, so I hid behind Margie’s skirt and held Ruthie’s hand tight.

As the taxi pulled away, my mother said, “Well, we’ll just have to carry the damn thing.”

She and Margie each grabbed a handle on the box and lugged it across the sidewalk to the building’s entrance, their faces scrunched with the effort. They wore almost-identical black skirts and white blouses with pearl costume necklaces and earrings. The seams of their nylon stockings rose perfectly straight up the backs of their calves. Crimson lipstick provided their only spots of color. Both women had dark brown hair and deep brown eyes—the latter rare among the Irish. “Black Irish,” they might have been called, although they considered their pale, freckling skin proof of their Celtic roots. My blonde hair and blue eyes contrasted sharply with their coloring. Years later, my mother would tell me this came from my bastard of a father, making me regret my palette.

My mother pushed a button next to the front entrance. After a few minutes, a woman opened the tall, wooden door. She wore a long black dress that covered her feet and a funny black cloth wrapped around her head so it looked like she didn’t have any hair. I’d never seen anyone in such strange clothes.

“Hello,” said the lady, “I’m Sister Mary Joseph. Welcome to Rosary Academy. You must be delivering one of our new boarders.”

“Yes,” said my mother. “I’m Mrs. Mary McTiernan, and this is my sister Miss Margaret Smith.” She emphasized the “Mrs.” and the “Miss.”

“And who is this?” Sister Mary Joseph asked as she looked down at me, smiling.

“This is Anne Marie McTiernan,” my mother said.

“How old are you, Anne Marie?” the nun asked.

I looked down at my shoes.

“Anne, tell Sister Mary Joseph how old you are.” My mother pinched my shoulder.

I held up four fingers. It bothered me that I didn’t know how to show with my fingers that I was four and a half.

“Four years old? That will make you our youngest boarder.”

“Make sure you don’t spoil her,” my mother said.

“Hmm,” the nun said. “Well, then, you’d better follow me.”

Sister Mary Joseph led us down a dark hallway. My Mary Janes tapped the tiled floor. We climbed up four flights of wide staircases; my mother and aunt stopping at each step to lift the box between them. The smell of Lysol permeated the cold air. I shivered.

“This is the dormitory,” said Sister Mary Joseph. “We have only girls boarding at Rosary.”

We entered a long room. Thirty identical beds, covered with white chenille bedspreads, lined the room. Whitewashed walls contrasted sharply with the black linoleum floor and dark wood wainscoting. The room was silent. Sister Mary Joseph led us over to the first bed on the left. My mother pointed to a sign I couldn’t read taped to its foot.

“This is your new bed, Anne Marie,” she said. “This is where you’ll be sleeping from now on.”

I looked up at my mother and asked, “Where will you and Margie sleep?”

All three grown-ups laughed.

“Margie and I will sleep at home,” my mother said.

Panic shook me. I was being sent away again. For the past year, I’d lived in the apartment with my mother and aunt. Margie’s lingerie sales salary was so low that it was cheaper for her to work evenings and Saturdays, and take care of me on weekdays, than for my mother to pay for me to live at a boarding home. I loved being with Margie every day. She and I slept in the same room—so I wouldn’t disturb my mother’s sleep—and I knew that she’d comfort me if I called out for her at night. Now I felt sick to my stomach.

A brand-new doll sat on the pillow. It had perfectly curled brown hair, brown eyes, and a stiff pink dress. I hated it immediately. I hated the lady with the weird black clothes. I didn’t want to stay in this place. I wanted to go home with Margie to my own bed. I wanted to hear Margie breathing if I woke up scared in the middle of the night.

My mother opened the long box and showed me the contents. All my clothes and shoes were folded and stacked neatly, along with pink towels, white sheets, and a green blanket. My mother and aunt made the bed.

“There, honey,” my mother said, “now it’s all ready for you.” Then she put my clothes into the two drawers of a small metal cabinet that stood by the head of the bed.

“All your things are in here,” she added. “Your pajamas and underwear are in the top drawer, and your dresses and sweaters are in the bottom drawer. Your toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush are here on the top of your cabinet. I’ll leave your jacket in the trunk.” She closed the lid of the trunk and slid it under the bed.

“My tummy hurts,” I said.

“You’ll be fine,” my mother snapped.

I looked at Margie. Her eyes were wet, so she looked around the room and at the nun, not at me.

“Has Anne had her dinner today?” Sister Mary Joseph asked.

“Yes, I cooked a big Sunday dinner. She ate a nice meal.”

“Good, then we’ll just give her some sandwiches in the dorm later. The cafeteria won’t be open until tomorrow.”

I wondered what a cafeteria was.

Sister Mary Joseph brought us back down the stairs to another, smaller, room. It had books, several tables and chairs that looked about my size, and bright-colored things like blocks, pegs, and crayons. On the other side of the room, a door and two windows looked out on a playground.

A different lady, dressed exactly like Sister Mary Joseph, greeted us. Her black shoes with black laces peeked out from under her dress. This new lady smiled and talked with my mother and aunt, but I wasn’t listening. Instead, I looked around at the things in the room, wondering what they all were. There were no other people around, just the four of us. The room echoed a little as the three women talked.

After a while, my mother announced, “It’s time for us to go, Anne Marie. Be a good girl now.”

“No, don’t leave me,” I cried.

“We’ll be back real soon, Anna Banana,” said Margie. “On Friday. I love you.”

I cried while my mother and Margie walked out the door then watched as they walked through the playground. Margie turned around and waved. My mother didn’t turn back. I thought I’d never see them again.

“There now, Anne Marie, it will be okay,” reassured the nun as she picked me up. “No need to cry. You’ll have fun here at Rosary. Tomorrow you’ll start school and meet the other children who will be here for you to play with.”

I should have been used to institutional life by that time. Throw my things into a duffle bag on Sunday afternoons and say, “C’mon, Ma and Margie, gotta get to Rosary on time.” But, being four years old, I wasn’t quite up to being a trooper about this leaving home stuff. I’d certainly had a lot of practice at it in my short life, though.

My mother later told me that I began my semi-incarceration at three months of age. I lived at the first group home Sunday afternoon through Thursday night and at my mother and aunt’s apartment for the rest of the week. The facility’s owner devised shortcuts to handle the dozen or so babies in her charge. Toddlers and older babies sat on potty chairs while they ate—to accomplish two functions at one time. Diapers were changed once a day. Babies were fed in their cribs with bottles propped on their chests. Crying babies were left alone.

By the time I was eight months old, I had a diaper rash severe enough for Margie to bring me to the family doctor despite the five-dollar charge—about a quarter of my mother’s weekly salary. Later in medical school, I shuddered when I saw pictures of bacterial skin infections that developed in severe diaper rashes, as I remembered Margie describing the raw, red area stretching from my upper legs to my waist, covering front, back, and sides. It would have been swollen and oozing a yellow liquid with areas of bleeding and peeling skin. After the doctor examined me, he told my mother to take me out of that home.

Years later, when my mother told me her side of this story, she talked about the difficulty of finding childcare in a time and place where women were expected to stay home with their babies. “That doctor made my life hell,” she said.

Now as a doctor myself, I can see the influence this man had on me. Some people become physicians to follow a family tradition or because they aspire to wealth and status. A few enter the medical profession in gratitude for excellent treatment through an injury or illness. I chose medicine in part because I wanted to save people—similar to how my childhood doctor rescued me from neglect. My research extends this desire to the general public; if I can discover whether diet changes, weight loss, or exercise reduces risk for cancer or other illness, then hopefully some people will be saved from suffering.

Within a month, my mother sent me to a home for physically and mentally handicapped children near Boston. Teresa Burns took care of babies and children with diverse conditions, such as polio, rheumatic heart disease, water on the brain, cerebral palsy, brain injury, and Down syndrome. In the 1950s, many of these children had life expectancies of only months or years. Their parents could not, or would not, care for them.

I’m not sure how I managed to get admitted to her facility. Maybe our doctor pulled some strings, saying I needed special treatment for the skin infection from my diaper rash. I certainly fit the criteria of having parents who did not want to take care of me. Full of love and warmth, Teresa was as wide as she was tall, her body as soft as a feather pillow. To this day I love the comfort of being hugged by a chubby woman. This helps as an obesity physician and researcher, as I’ve never thought of obese patients as ugly, but rather as people with a health condition. I stayed with Teresa until I was three years old. For the following year, Margie babysat me on weekdays while my mother worked. The comfort and joy I experienced with Margie during this period made the move to Rosary Academy even more wrenching.

Rosary was my third institutional home. It was as if I was a repeat offender. Go to an institution, do your time, get a short reprieve at home, commit a crime against your mother, face more time. My mother would often slap my face when I cried, or was sick, or wet the bed, or if she didn’t like the way I looked at her. I tried to be a good girl so she wouldn’t hit me or send me away, but it was difficult to know exactly what I was supposed to do to make her happy.

Many of my memories of Rosary are hazy with its Gothic-like settings of dark hallways, classrooms, dormitory bedrooms, and bathrooms. Other memories are crystal clear like it’s happening to me right now in such bright light that I can see details without my bifocals.

The Rosary boarders slept in one large dormitory room. The beds were arranged by age with the youngest girl’s (mine) closest to the bathroom and the oldest girl’s on the other side of the room. The room’s windows were close to the ceiling. No one could see in or out.

That first night, I lay awake, unable to sleep. I clutched Ruthie tight against my chest and curled myself into a ball while the hated new doll sat on the cabinet by my bed. I wore my favorite pajamas, pink with little dark pink roses on the yoke’s ruffle. My head lay on my bunny pillow toy, the one with the big floppy ears and a pink pocket in the back. Margie had shown me how to put my pajamas into the pocket in the morning so they’d stay neat during the day. Although my sleeping things were with me, I didn’t have Margie and I didn’t have my own bed. I wanted to be at home so Margie could read me a Peter Rabbit story, rub my back, tuck me in, and give me a Kleenex to put under my pillow.

As I lay in bed, listening to the sounds of the other girls sleeping, I couldn’t understand why my mother and aunt didn’t want me to stay at home with them. I decided that I needed to try harder to be a good girl so that my mother would love me, then all three of us could live together.

At some point during the night, I fell asleep because I woke to the sound of ringing. Through a brain fog, I saw Sister Mary Joseph, moving a small bell up and down as she walked between the rows of beds.

“Time to get up, Anne Marie,” she said over my head.

I sat up, confused. Girls were going in and out of the bathroom, toothbrushes in hand. Others were slowly dressing by their beds, their backs to the room. All wore identical cotton undershirts, underpants, and full slips; those further dressed had donned blue uniforms.

“You’ll want to visit the bathroom first,” Sister Mary Joseph explained.

I inched out of bed and stood up. Sister Mary Joseph took my hand and walked me over to the bathroom. The other girls giggled but stood aside as she led me into the long room with its row of six sinks opposite a row of toilet stalls. She told me to go into a stall and shut the door behind me. I could see her feet under the door, waiting. When I emerged, she led me to a sink and showed me how to mix hot and cold water in the sink so I wouldn’t burn myself. There were no bathtubs here; the bathing room was down the hall. Back at my bed, she told me to find some clothes in my cabinet, get changed, and fold and store my pajamas. While I was doing this, she told one of the older girls to make my bed. Sulking, the girl did as told. I noticed she didn’t make it smooth and neat the way Margie always did, but I didn’t complain.

“Hurry, Anne Marie,” Sister Mary Joseph said. “You have to get to the cafeteria in five minutes.”

I couldn’t imagine eating anything now. My stomach felt like a big fist was squeezing it shut—no food could get through that stricture. But I sped up my actions because I wanted the sister to like me. The buttons on the back of my dress gaped open—my arms were too short to reach them. I didn’t yet know how to tie my shoes, so I left the shoelaces loose. My hair remained tangled on one side of my head.

“Jane, take Anne Marie down to the cafeteria,” Sister Mary Joseph said. Another older girl walked over to my bed. She said nothing as she escorted me down the long, dark staircase. As we descended to the bottom floor, sounds of girls’ chatter swelled and acrid smells of overcooked oatmeal and powdered eggs grew stronger. I stopped.

“Please,” I whispered, “don’t make me go down there.”

“Come on,” urged the girl. “Sister told me I have to bring you downstairs. I’ll get in trouble if I don’t do it.”

“I feel sick,” I moaned.

She dragged me down the stairs even as I begged her to let me go back up. Once at my assigned seat at the little girls’ table, I couldn’t eat. I could barely look at the neon yellow scrambled eggs or the congealed brown oatmeal the girl put on a tray for me.

“You’d better eat or Sister will paddle you,” she said.

With this threat, I lost what control I had over my stomach and spit up bile onto my lap. An old nun appeared quickly, gave me wet dishrags to clean myself, then told me to go back upstairs. Feeling very ashamed, I climbed the stairs. Sister Mary Joseph took one look at me, told me to get changed, and then brought me down to my new classroom. She barely spoke to me. I thought she must be mad at me and hoped she wouldn’t hit me.

This reaction to food at Rosary repeated itself daily, and I threw up most mornings, sometimes before breakfast, sometimes afterward. I would proudly inform Sister Mary Joseph on the rare mornings that I didn’t get sick.

I recognized the kindergarten room where my mother and Margie had left me the day before and I looked around, hoping to see them. Before I could register my disappointment, a lady in a blue dress walked over to me.

“You must be Anne Marie,” she said. “I’m Mrs. O’Doyle. I’ll be your teacher.” She smiled as she looked at me. With her brown hair pulled up into a bun on top of her head, she looked like the picture of Cinderella from the book Margie read to me, all dressed up for the ball.

“Come meet the other children,” she said.

She took me by the hand and led me over to a table where three other girls sat. Each chair had a piece of paper with letters written on it.

“That’s your name, Anne Marie,” she said. “This will be your seat. And these girls are Nancy, Diane, and Maria.”

The morning went quickly. We colored, listened to the teacher’s songs, colored again, played at recess on the concrete playground, and heard a story. At 11:30 A.M., the teacher told us to clean our places and get our lunchboxes. Then she gave everyone a little carton of milk with a straw. I still didn’t feel hungry, but I wished I had a lunch and lunchbox like the other girls at my table. Seeing that I had no food, the teacher told me I’d eat in the cafeteria. I wanted to heave the milk I’d just drunk.

Soon, several ladies arrived. As each walked in the door, a child would get up and run over to her. Usually the lady would bend down and either give the child a hug or pick her up. A couple of ladies had big bellies, so they just reached down to rub their child’s hair. I watched as each mother-child pair walked out the door. I stayed, wondering when my mother or Margie would arrive—but they never came.

“Oh, Anne Marie,” said the teacher. “One of the older boarder girls will come by soon to get you for lunch.”

“But I want my mommy or Margie to come get me.”

The teacher squatted down until her face was in front of mine. “I know, dear. But you’ll soon have lots of friends among the boarders. And today you’ll have a nice lunch waiting for you in the cafeteria.”

Finally an older girl arrived at the door.

“I’m supposed to bring her to the cafeteria,” she said, pointing to me.

“You’re fifteen minutes late. Next time you need to get here on time.”

After we were out of the teacher’s sight, the big girl pinched my arm.

“Ow,” I cried.

“That’s so you don’t tell on me,” said the girl. “Or next time I’ll pinch you harder.”

I arrived at the cafeteria in tears.

“What’s wrong with her?” asked the nun who monitored the lunchroom.

The girl shrugged.

I wasn’t averse to all food at Rosary. I coveted the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches that another kindergartner, Marie, brought each day. Her mom cut off the bread crusts for her, which made the sandwiches even more enticing. One day Marie gave me a quarter of her sandwich—she must have noticed my hunger. The taste was even better than I had imagined. The next weekend, I asked my mother to make me a sandwich like Marie’s.

“Cream cheese is Jew food. We don’t eat cream cheese.”

I didn’t know what Jew food was. She made me cottage cheese and jelly sandwiches instead, and she didn’t cut off the crusts. The bread was soggy, and little curds fell out the back of the sandwich when I took a bite.

My morning sickness at Rosary wasn’t an early case of bulimia—my fingers were too short to reach the back of my throat. No, this was real, honest-to-goodness heaving my guts out, like I was trying to exorcise something evil inside myself, something that made my mother banish me. I don’t recall lunches or dinners at Rosary, but I must have eaten very little. Over the next several months I steadily lost weight and soon looked like a skeletal version of myself. I was starving to death.

I learned in medical school that pediatricians refer to this experience as “failure to thrive.” With just basic needs met—food, shelter, and loving caretaking—most kids will eat, grow, gain weight, and develop cognitive and emotional skills. Failure to thrive occurs when something goes very wrong, and it can be deadly: children raised in orphanages with minimal human touch have an increased risk of dying. The nomenclature is unfortunate, implying culpability on the child’s part. More appropriate would be to label the adult with “failure to parent” or “failure to care.”

The nuns must have been concerned about my not eating and weight loss because they began to give me a sandwich each afternoon in the dormitory when the older girls were still in class. Sister Mary Joseph cut it into quarters just the way I liked it. Sometimes it would be spread with molasses, which made me gag, but other times it would be filled with peanut butter and honey, which I liked. None of the other girls were given food in the dormitory. I knew they would have been jealous.

The kindergarten class was half-day. As the only boarder in that class, I was on my own in the afternoons. One winter day, I ventured on to the playground. I shivered in my coat and wool hat, as I sat on a wooden merry-go-round and idly pushed myself around with one foot. An image of a man scurrying away sticks in my mind. He wore a brown overcoat, a thick scarf, and a brown fedora pulled low on his head. Later, I’d tell my mother a boy put a stick into my bottom and it hurt to go to the bathroom. I wonder what really happened to me that day. Was the stick just a stick, or was it something else? Was the boy just a boy, or was it an older male? Whatever did or did not happen that day, it’s clear that I was vulnerable. No one was watching out for me.

Frequently, I wandered the hallways at Rosary, not sure what to do with myself, feeling lost. The nuns did have me take a nap in the afternoon, so someone must have tracked me down occasionally.

Sister Mary Joseph supervised the dormitory. At night she wore a white muslin gown with matching robe and cap. As with her daytime costume, a string of beads hung from a black rope around her waist. She told me these were rosary beads. I thought maybe they were named after the school and wondered if they hurt her legs when she slept on them.

The dormitory followed a bedtime ritual. The girls went in small groups to brush their teeth. Sister Mary Joseph stood outside the open bathroom door to make sure they were making progress, while also keeping an eye on the rest of the room. After all the girls finished in the bathroom, Sister Mary Joseph told us to kneel by our beds with our hands folded, our heads down, and our eyes closed.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art though amongst women . . .” After Sister Mary Joseph finished the Hail Mary prayer, she would be quiet for a few seconds, and then say, “Dear Lord, thank you for our blessings today. Please help us to be good and holy girls. Amen.”

“Amen,” the girls said in unison. I wasn’t sure what “amen” meant, but I said it too.

“Girls,” she said, “remember that nighttime is for sleeping. All lights need to be off now. If you have to go to the bathroom, be quiet and don’t turn on your light. The nightlights will be on, and you’ll be able to see your way. Be quick and then go right back to bed. No stopping to see your friends. If any of you need me in an emergency, you know where my room is, right at the end of the dormitory.”

It felt comforting to hear her say these things, but she didn’t come over to each girl’s bed to tuck us in. I didn’t dare get up because Sister Mary Joseph had said that we were supposed to stay in our beds unless it was an emergency. Some nights the bigger girls would sneak into the bathroom after Sister Mary Joseph’s room went dark. I’d hear them whisper and giggle. One night, through the open bathroom door, I could see them eating toothpaste. Sister Mary Joseph suddenly appeared.

“What are you girls doing up?” she asked. “You know you should be asleep.”

“We were hungry,” said the six-year-old whose bed stood next to mine.

“Come along now,” said the nun. “Breakfast will come soon enough. You need to make sure you eat all your dinner so you won’t be hungry at bedtime.”

I could understand why they were hungry. I’d barely tasted any of the congealed food the kitchen workers glopped onto the boarders’ trays. But even if the meals had been as good as at home, I wouldn’t have wanted them. My throat clamped up at the thought of eating there.

I lay awake most nights at Rosary. The nightlights around the room caused dark shapes and shadows to appear on the walls. I tried closing my eyes, but the darkness under my eyelids frightened me even more than the shadows. I could hear various noises: a bed’s springs squeaked as a girl tossed around in her sleep, an arm hit the wall, a doll’s head thudded on the floor, a girl called out “Mama.” In the months I spent there, my only deep sleeps were on the weekends at home.

On particularly bad nights, when I’d cry from terror, Sister Mary Joseph would take me to her room and let me sleep in her bed. She wasn’t Margie, but it was so comforting to have her nearby that I’d drop off to sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I doubt if Mother Superior would have approved. Maybe Sister Mary Joseph came from a large family, or maybe she’d learned over the years how challenging boarding school was for the little girls.

Looking back from the perspective of a mother and grandmother, I am grateful that Sister Mary Joseph cared for me on difficult nights. While I found it comforting, it could be a dangerous situation for a vulnerable child at a boarding school. If my mother knew about my sleeping in the nun’s bed, it didn’t seem to concern her.

In my thirties, on night call during medical training, I’d again sleep in strange institutional beds. It might be a cot in a dingy, dirty room with peeling paint; a bunk bed in a dorm; or even an empty intensive care unit bed. The difference was that I chose to undergo the rigorous training and was free to leave. I couldn’t leave Rosary—I was a prisoner.

One afternoon an eighth grade girl came over to my bed as I woke from my nap. She had short, curly, dark-blond hair and thick pink-rimmed glasses. Her royal blue school uniform blouse fit tightly around her arms. The top of my head reached to her waist.

“Come with me,” she said. “I’m supposed to give you a bath.”

She led me down the hall by the hand.

This bathroom looked as large as a ballroom. Like the dorm, the walls were white with dark wood wainscoting. Several overhead lights hung down with bare bulbs sticking out of silver cone fixtures. The black and white square floor tiles were several times larger than my feet. Little light got in through the narrow windows. A large, institutional bathtub sat in the middle of the room. A bar of Ivory soap lay in a silver tray near the water taps.

The girl turned on the water tap and helped me undress. She showed me where to hang my clothes on some hooks. She walked over to a metal cabinet and took out a white towel, which she placed on the floor near the tub. She turned off the water. Steam rose from the high surface of the water like the wisps of smoke from my mother’s and aunt’s cigarettes. I hugged my arms around my chest to warm myself in the cold air.

“Get in the tub,” the girl said.

I felt the water with my hand, the way Margie taught me to do at home.

“It’s too hot,” I said.

She swished her hand through the water.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Sister said to give you your bath or neither of us will get any supper.” Her voice was louder now. I thought she must be angry.

I couldn’t move, stiff like one of my dolls. I didn’t want to get into that hot water because I knew it would hurt me, but I was also afraid of this girl. On the other hand, the threat of missing supper didn’t bother me at all.

“It will burn me,” I cried.

Suddenly the girl picked me up and put me into the bathtub feet-first. I screamed from the pain of the scalding water, but she held me down. Her fingers dug into my arms as she struggled to push me farther into the burning water. I screamed, “Please, please, please let me out.”

The bathroom door crashed open. Sister Mary Joseph ran in, yelled at the girl to get away from me, and picked me up out of the water. She gently wrapped me in a stiff towel. She inspected my bright red legs, which stung the way my face did after my mother’s slap.

Still carrying me, Sister Mary Joseph rooted around in the metal cabinet draws and took out a big jar of Vaseline. She sat down on the floor, held me in her lap, and gently spread the Vaseline on my legs. I didn’t complain that it hurt every time she touched my skin because it felt so good to lean against her and have her take care of me. I almost felt safe.

If my mother noticed burn scars the next time I was home, it didn’t bother her enough to take me out of Rosary. It’s unlikely that Sister Mary Joseph reported the incident—the Catholic Church keeps such things secret. After this, though, only the nuns gave me my baths.

Medical school would help me realize how much I’d suffered as a child. I’d learn in a pediatrics lecture how to recognize the signs and symptoms of child abuse. I listened in a frozen state, remembering my own abuse at the hands of people who were supposed to take care of me.

I’d learn in microbiology about a condition called scalded skin syndrome, in which an infection with certain strains of Staphylococcus bacteria causes skin to blister and peel off, as if boiling water had been poured onto it. Until they heal, patients are vulnerable to dehydration and infection with other bacteria. After my scalding at Rosary, I felt exposed, as if my protective coating had been peeled away. Until I could escape that school, I was vulnerable to attack.

At Rosary, there were safe times of day and there were dangerous times. I felt safe with my kindergarten teacher and the other students in my class. Sister Mary Joseph wasn’t the cuddly type, but she had a kind voice and smiled frequently. But when I wasn’t around these people, I tensed with fear for stretches of minutes or hours.

One day I was walking down the hall from my classroom toward the girls’ bathroom. Two bigger girls approached from the other direction. I looked at the floor, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. Suddenly I was looking at two big pairs of black and white saddle shoes. I moved to the left to get around them, but they blocked my way.

“This is the little brat who told on me to Sister Mary Joseph,” said one of the girls.

I looked up and recognized the girl who had given me the scalding bath. Her face squished into a sneer. She pushed my chest with her fist.

“Know what happens to tattletales?” she asked.

I shook my head. She pushed me again.

“They get hurt, that’s what,” she said.

Finally they left me. Afraid to be alone in the girls’ bathroom, I ran back to the kindergarten room. The teacher asked me what was wrong. I stood there holding my legs together tightly, afraid I’d wet my pants. The teacher must have realized something was wrong because she called over to another classroom for a teacher to watch the kindergartners while she brought me to the lavatory. After this, the teacher took all the children to the bathroom at one time.

On Friday mornings, Sister Mary Joseph would tell me to come up to the dormitory after school to pack for the weekend at home. I would be so excited during the school day that I couldn’t concentrate. The nuns often found me wandering the halls outside of the kindergarten classroom as if I were trying to go home early.

Several of the girls didn’t leave on weekends. Some of them lived too far away for their parents to make two trips each week. Some, my mother told me later, were so wild that they had been sent to Rosary because their parents couldn’t handle them. I felt sorry for these girls but thought they must be really bad if their parents wouldn’t let them come home at all. They had a haunted look on Friday afternoons as we lucky ones packed up our weekend suitcases and laundry bags.

Not much happened at home on the weekends, but I loved being there all the same. After enrolling me in Rosary, my mother and aunt moved to the first-floor apartment of a brick duplex in Watertown. My mother and Margie worked, so weekends were for housecleaning. I loved helping with the cleaning because I got to follow Margie around.

On Sundays we went to 8:00 A.M. Mass. Afterward, my mother made Sunday dinner, which we ate around two o’clock. Then it would be time to get ready to go back to Rosary. As soon as my mother put my suitcase on my bed, I’d feel sick to my stomach. She called it “butterflies in my tummy,” but it didn’t feel like butterflies to me. It felt like I was going to throw up all the Sunday dinner I’d just eaten.

One weekend late in December, my mother didn’t tell me it was time to go back to Rosary. She didn’t bring me back on Monday, nor on Tuesday. I knew that Christmas was coming soon because Margie had put up our few decorations—antique ornaments she hung on a tree and an old crèche. Three personalized Christmas stockings my mother had knitted lay across the cherry veneer coffee table because we had no fireplace. Tuesday night Margie told me that Santa would bring me presents that night.

“What do you want for Christmas, Anne?” she asked.

“To stay here forever with you and Mommy,” I replied.

Margie bit her lip but said nothing. I don’t remember what presents I received but I loved being at home with Margie, who took the week off as vacation time. After a breakfast of French toast, we’d walk to the local park. Margie loved the seesaw and swings as much as I did. After a couple hours of play, we’d drag ourselves home for a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. Then I’d cuddle next to Margie on the couch while she read me a story. She’d tuck me in my bed for a nap and give me a little back rub to help me relax.

My mother was home during part of the Christmas break. I loved seeing her too, although I could never figure out why she got so mad at me. I wanted her to love me so she wouldn’t send me away again, but I couldn’t figure out how to make her love me. Too soon it was Sunday afternoon again. When my mother said it was time to get ready, I burst into tears.

“I don’t want to go back to Rosary!” I cried.

“You have to go. I don’t have a choice,” said my mother, firmly. She stood tall, hands on hips.

“But why can’t I just stay here?”

“Don’t be difficult, Anne. You have to go back to school. I can’t stay home with you. I have to work.”

“Margie could stay home with me.”

“Margie doesn’t want to stay with you. She’s not your mother. Now, go to your room and open up your suitcase so we can pack it.”

“Please don’t make me go.” I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up in my eyes and pouring down my cheeks.

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Anne, if you don’t stop this bawling I’ll really give you something to cry about.”

My mother didn’t wait long; before I could catch my breath, she swatted me across my face. Then she did it again and again until I stopped crying. I went to my room, opened my suitcase, and threw up into it. My mother rushed in, and after she saw what I’d just done, slapped me even harder. That made me sick again, but I still had to return to Rosary.

My mother and Margie never visited me at Rosary, even though they lived within a couple of miles of the school. Sister Mary Joseph helped me compose a weekly letter to my mother. I told her what I wanted to say, and she printed it on a piece of paper. Then, I copied it over carefully onto another piece of paper. She put it in an envelope, let me lick the envelope and stamp, and mailed it for me. I don’t remember receiving any letters from either my mother or aunt, but on Valentine’s Day my mother did send me a card printed on a puzzle. Sister Mary Joseph read the message: “To my daughter, please be my Valentine. Love, Mom.” I loved pulling the puzzle apart and putting it together, over and over again. I had the message memorized and pretended to read it every time I assembled the puzzle. It was as if I was trying to piece together my fractured family, attempting to make sense of my life.

One afternoon in May of 1958, I woke up on a couch in Mother Superior’s office. The sun streamed in the windows and hurt my eyes. My head throbbed the way your hand hurts after being caught in a drawer. I desperately wanted to sleep, but a nun shook me each time I nodded off. I wished she would just leave me alone. To my surprise, my mother’s voice appeared at the edge of my consciousness. Maybe I’m dreaming, I thought. One of my knee socks was bunched around my ankle. I wanted to pull it up but didn’t dare move.

“She’s hurt her head, Doctor,” I heard my mother say. She must have been using Mother Superior’s phone. “The nuns couldn’t wake her up for an hour.”

There was a pause, then she added, “I don’t know why they didn’t call you sooner. They called me first to come over. I had to wait for a taxi to pick me up at work.”

Then there was another pause until she said, “Okay, I’ll bring her right in.”

Slowly, my memory cleared like a cloud-filled sky making a slit for the sun to push through. I’d climbed the ladder to the top of Rosary’s playground slide. I’d sat down at the top of the slide and carefully arranged my wool skirt under my legs. I gave myself a gentle nudge down. The third grade girl behind me, impatient at my cautiousness, bore down on me without waiting. She body-slammed me a third of the way down the slide, sending me over the side, headfirst onto the concrete. No nuns patrolled the playground—perhaps they were at afternoon prayers. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back on Mother Superior’s couch with two nuns looking down at me as if I were a science lab specimen.

A yellow taxi took us to our doctor’s office in Brookline. The doctor asked me all sorts of silly-sounding questions: What is your name? Where are we? Who is this lady here (pointing to my mother)? How old are you?

I must have gotten the answers right because he smiled and patted my head. Then he examined me. My head still hurt, and I wanted to curl up and sleep. But I felt less groggy than I had in the Mother Superior’s office.

“How long has she been at Rosary?” he asked my mother.

“Since September,” she said.

“I saw her last August, when she was four.” He looked at his notes. “She weighed forty-five pounds then. Today she’s only thirty-five. What the hell have you been doing to her for nine months?”

“Nothing, doctor. She says she feels sick a lot.”

“Didn’t you notice that she’s lost weight? She looks like a goddamn concentration camp survivor.”

“It’s not my fault. I can’t help it if she doesn’t eat at Rosary.”

The doctor looked at her over his glasses.

“Is she at Rosary on the weekends?”

“No, we take her home on the weekends.”

“Does she eat at home then?”

“Yes, she seems to enjoy eating. Except on Sundays, when we have to get her ready to go back to Rosary. She’ll often throw up her Sunday dinner.”

“Jesus Christ, I’ve never seen such neglect. You need to take her out of Rosary immediately.”

“But what am I going to do? I can’t take care of her. I have to work.”

“I don’t know what you’re going to do. But, if you send her back to Rosary, I’ll have no choice but to call social services. I’ve a good mind to do that anyway. They could take her away from you, and you could get arrested for child neglect.”

My mother was sobbing now, but she agreed to follow the doctor’s instructions and took me out of the school. I never returned to Rosary. The doctor insisted on seeing me each week. Sometimes my mother or Margie brought me to his office, and sometimes he made a home visit. He always weighed me and asked what I was eating. He asked who was taking care of me and seemed satisfied when my mother told him about the various ladies who watched me during the day. After about a month, he started to smile when he read the numbers on the scale.

I could have died that year at Rosary, yet I had no medical problems to account for my nausea, vomiting, reduced eating, and subsequent weight loss. I was just sad. So I wasted away. In my medical school psychiatry class, I’d learn that loss of appetite and weight loss can be signs of severe depression. My sadness at Rosary was starving me.

Years later, my mother told me that her decision to send me to Rosary was financially driven. It was less expensive to board me there than to send me to a day school and pay for after-school care. It seems that in those days the Catholic Church, with money to spare, had special interest in holding children captive round-the-clock. The Church subsidized the indoctrination of its children. And for my mother it was a welcome relief not to have to deal with me on weeknights.

Soon after I left Rosary to live in the Watertown flat with my mother and aunt, I found myself standing alone outside our front stoop, face-to-face with three brilliant red tulips. I was struck at being able to see such beauty so close. Usually, I had to crane my head up to see something pretty, such as gilded statues at Church or a lady’s necklace. The sun beamed down and warmed me while it released a faint fragrance of spring from the tulips. It felt good to be home.