Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [7]
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 passageways.
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 passed 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. After years of scaffolding, the stone, once sepia with dirt, is bone white. Balustrades 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 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 Masses and felt banners with cheery New Testament sayings.
I was never hit with a ruler, never taught the rosary