And Then There Were Nuns Read Online Free PDF Page A

walk away, still bewildered, and then asked, “What about a key, you know, to the room?”
    Sister Anne let out a high-pitched giggle, as if that was the most insane thing anyone had ever said to her. “We don’t use keys. Your things are safe here.”
    I lugged my suitcase up a stairwell, turned left at the top, and followed a narrow white corridor carpeted in dark gray to the door marked “St. Elizabeth.”
    My cell didn’t look like what you would refer to as a “cell.” Sun was streaming in through a large window, and like the reception area, the room was bright, airy, and modern. Measuring about ten feet by twelve feet, it easily accommodated the essentials: a tall chest of drawers, a desk and chair, and a bedside table all made from the same blond wood. An Eames-style chair, a footstool, and a pole lamp tucked to one side filled the area in front of the window. To the right of the window, a single bed was stacked with crisp white linens. There was a note instructing me to make up the bed. The bedside table held a small lamp, a digital clock, and a Bible. On the other side of the room, near the door, white towels hung from a chrome rod next to a small wall-mounted sink. The walls were white and bare except for a small mirrored-front medicine cabinet above the sink, a watercolor of a Muskoka landscape above the desk, and a small, slim crucifix that faced the bed. The large closet contained a clothing rail with a motley assortment of hangers—wire, wood, plastic, and crocheted.
    I parked my suitcase at the end of the bed, then picked up a black binder from the desk. Its cover displayed an icon of St. Elizabeth of Hungary.
    Coincidentally, my grandmother was Hungarian and was also named Elizabeth; in fact, we nicknamed her St. Elizabeth because she was such a devout and saintly creature, constantly baking or sewing something for her church and for a variety of charitable organizations.
    I flipped to the short biography of St. Elizabeth inserted into the binder.
    She was born in 1207, a princess, the daughter of Andrew II of Hungary. At the age of fourteen she married Ludwig IV, who had just been crowned king of Thuringia, a region of modern-day Germany. By all accounts it was a happy marriage, and with her husband’s encouragement and support, Elizabeth not only cared for their own growing brood but also established homes for the elderly, the orphaned, and the abused. The marriage was only into its sixth year when Ludwig, en route to join the Sixth Crusade, died of the plague. Elizabeth joined the Franciscans as a lay associate and adopted a life of poverty while she continued to work in the hospices she founded. At the incredibly young age of twenty-four, she died from a combination of overwork and a virus. Four years later, in 1235, the church declared her a saint.
    St. Elizabeth’s feast day, I noted from the bio, was the same as my grandmother’s birth and death dates.
    Coincidence? Is this a sign that I’m on the right path? I wondered what my Roman Catholic grandmother would have made of her argumentative Anglican granddaughter coming to a nunnery. Maybe she was smiling benignly down at me, pleased that I had embraced my faith so seriously. Or maybe she was appalled that I had breached sacred territory: I could hear her admonishing me in her broken English, “You shame yourself!”
    ( 2:ii )
    FOR SOMEONE with the title Reverend Mother, Sister Elizabeth Ann did not fit my image of a convent’s mother superior. She was a few years younger than I, with short, wiry ginger hair and a freckled face that displayed a warm, mischievous smile. Nor was she dressed in a habit, unless the sisterhood’s habit happened to be a beige khaki A-line skirt with matching jacket worn over a sage T-shirt. She had Birkenstocks on her feet and a pager on her hip. She greeted each of us with a happy nod as we entered the room.
    Nine of us, ranging in age from early thirties