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    I walked the length of a long corridor of a building designed by a man who held an unbelievable grudge against orphans. It was grim to the point of parody, and the woman who sat behind the government-issue steel desk as I entered her office looked congruent with the spectral glooms of the architecture.
    Among Roman Catholics of my generation, we play a parlor sport that is mean-spirited and partisan in nature but guaranteed to elicit laughter and to cause blood to pool in our collective memories: we tell nun stories. We have no shame in it, as any religion that flaunts those plaster-of-Paris murdered saints in their sanctuaries and crucifix effigies that seem to compete for the most barbarous slaughter of Jesus, the living God, could certainly produce communicants who could invent atrocities for the women of the veil who whomped our souls into shape in preparation for eternal life. Some of the nuns of our youth in the fifties and sixties ranked among the finest women we would ever encounter. But the nun with the black heart and the most merciless imagination stamped her brand most indelibly. I once had a nun who stood up her class whenever we heard fire sirens pass our school, then led us in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer that it was not a Catholic home on fire. Another nun would put clothespins on our ears if we acted up in school, and our parents would know by the purple bruises, the dead giveaway that we had displeased the good sister. Like eastern diamondbacks, you could always hear the approach of nuns by the rattling of the sinister beads of their rosaries.
    In second grade I had passed a surreptitious note between two boys who were best friends, and the three of us were marched to the front of the room to accept our punishments in full view of the class. Sister Veronica never hit any of her students, but her retaliations were fiendish and inventive. Standing us by the blackboard, she ordered us to hold out our arms like the crucified Christ. In ten minutes this punishment seemed benign. But after an hour Joe McBride burst into tears, his triceps quivering in agony. In contempt she said to Joe, “Jesus had to hold his arms out on the cross for three hours.”
    Joe answered through tears, “But Sister! Jesus had help. He had nails.” And the class howled with helpless, forbidden laughter.
    That morning at the orphanage, my old fear of nuns formed bile in my throat as I said, “Good morning, Sister Mary Polycarp.”
    “Hello, Leo. I taught you, didn’t I? First or second grade?”
    “It was third.”
    “You were very slow, if I remember correctly.”
    “That’s me, Sister.”
    “But very polite. You can always tell the ones from good families,” she said. “I read the papers when you were kicked out of Bishop Ireland.”
    “Yes, Sister, I made a bad mistake.”
    “Didn’t you go to jail or something?”
    “No. They put me on probation,” I said, uncomfortable with this subject, this situation, and this particular nun.
    “I didn’t think you were very smart,” she said. “But I never thought you would be a convict.”
    “Probation. Not jail, Sister.”
    “Same difference to me.” She studied two files on her desk. “Did your mother tell you about our big problem?”
    “No, Sister. She told me to meet two kids who would be rising seniors, and help them make the adjustment to their new high school.”
    “Did she tell you they are both thieves, liars, criminals, and runaways? Add to my list of complaints, the diocese is sending over five colored orphans this afternoon.”
    “No, Sister. She didn’t tell me any of that.”
    “Since you’ve spent time in prison and reformed yourself, I thought you might be good for them. Lead them in the right direction, so to speak. But I warn you, they’re very clever and both are natural-born liars. They are from the North Carolina mountains, way up in the hills, and there’s no kind of white trash like mountain trash. That’s a sociological