I was thirteen in the summer of 1947 when the first sign of puberty happened: a single hair growing out of my chest, about an inch long. One Sunday I was at Rockaway Beach when Bobby Ferguson saw it and joined with a couple of other of my friends to pull it out. I was angry at first, but I said to myself, “There will be more coming.” And there were: a distinct crack in my voice, usually occurring on the first word out of my mouth; a slight growth of peach fuzz on my chin; and, of course, the inevitable pimples.

A couple of months later, I was back in St. Sylvester’s in 8B, the last grade in grammar school before high school. On the first day, I met our teacher, Sister Margaret, who was new to the school. We were her first class, and she had a tough job. She had to get us through the dreaded Regent Exams and make sure our applications for various Catholic high schools were in order.

Sister Margaret was different from the other nuns I’d had as teachers at St. Sylvester’s. I began with Sister Julia. On my very first day of school, she surveyed her thirty-five students and discovered that three of us were left-handed. She said to me, “Thomas, that will not do. We have to retrain you.”

She told me to take off my shoelace and tie it around my wrist. Then she tied my arm behind my back to my belt and put a pencil in my right hand. Try walking around like that all day every schoolday and you’ll convert from lefty to righty. In those days, some Catholics believed that left-handed people were sinister. In fact, in Latin “sinister” means both left and evil. I learned how to write with my right hand, though most other tasks I still did with my left.

For the next seven years, an assortment of nuns taught me. They came in different sizes and shapes and from different parts of the country, though most were from New York and New England. Some were good, some not so good, and some awful, both as teachers and as people interacting with young children. Some were smarter than others. Some of them hit the kids. They all wore eyeglasses and the same habit, and all of them prayed with their eyes closed and their hands clasped. Their rosary beads were anchored to a cotton cummerbund around their waists and dangled just two or three inches off the floor.

Sister Margaret was different. She was young, clear-skinned, and athletic, with blue eyes and very white teeth. She did not wear glasses. She was even-tempered and very intelligent. She was certainly the youngest nun in the school, and I was immediately attracted to her. Years later, I found out she was only nineteen, six years older than me—not that big an age gap.

In those first weeks of the school year, with an assist from my raging hormones, she became more and more attractive to me. I even found attractive the fact that her left eye was not in sync with her right (she had exotropia, which was commonly called “walleye”).

I became so attracted to Sister Margaret, I felt I had to bring it up in confession. I confessed every other week to Father O’Sullivan, who was in charge of altar boys. I was the head altar boy and served, in addition to four daily masses, at baptisms, marriages, and funerals (the Catholic sacraments frequently described as “hatched, matched, and dispatched”).

After the first month with Sister Margaret, I confessed to Father O’Sullivan that I had some “impure thoughts” regarding her. He gave me a penance of ten Hail Marys, five Our Fathers, and five Glory Be’s, absolved me of my sins, and sent me on my way, telling me not to do it again. If the devil entered my body and made me sin again, he said, I should resist him with all my might and bless myself with holy water several times a day.

Well, my obsession with Sister Margaret didn’t go away. It got worse. A month later I was back in the confessional. This time, Father O’Sullivan doubled the penance and again told me what to do to avoid these impure thoughts. A couple of weeks later, I had to go back to him and tell him his plan wasn’t working. He got angry and said that if I were not able to overcome this sin, he would have to report me to the diocese, and they had ways of dealing with this. I knew he was talking about an exorcism, and that was the last thing I wanted, so I stopped going to confession even though the impure thoughts continued.

I sensed that Sister Margaret really wasn’t cut out to be a nun, and I fantasized that she would someday drop out of the order, I would help her overcome the shame of dropping out, and we would spend a lot of time together—maybe marrying one day.

Being a nun was a hard life. Twenty-one nuns lived in two small houses, each with three small bedrooms, two full baths, and two half baths. No washing machine. No dryer. And not enough dining room tables, so only six nuns at a time could eat their meals. There was a chapel that held all twenty-one of them in one of the houses.

The nuns were completely covered in black. They wore a wool habit, wool winter and summer, with sleeves that came down to their knuckles, so you saw very little of their hands. A bonnet concealed their hair, and their legs were completely covered by the habit. Their shoes were well worn, with a slight heel.

Sister Margaret stood out among them because of her widow’s peak—a small triangular shape of hair that stands out at the forehead. It was this widow’s peak that gave me the most trouble.

When graduation day came, I said goodbye to Sister Margaret, but I never forgot her. Nearly sixty years later Norma came into my office and said, “Eileen Fitzgerald is on the phone.” Eileen was a grammar school classmate. I picked up the phone and heard her say, in her Brooklyn accent, “Tom, guess what? Sister Margaret is living up your way.”

She gave me the address of a Catholic retirement home. I immediately called the number and Sister Margaret answered. She was then about seventy-five years old. We chatted and caught up. She told me what she had done with her life. She had stayed in her order and earned two college degrees, which set her apart from almost all the other nuns.

I brought her to lunch at the Algonquin Club. She was out of the habit, in an ugly dress that looked to be about twenty years old. She told me to call her just Margeret. She looked at the menu and ordered. Then I asked her what she wanted to drink.

“What are you having?” she said.

“I usually have a Scotch with my appetizer.”

“That sounds good to me!”

And we talked and talked. About how, at the end of every academic term, the parish priests would hand out report cards while the nuns sat on little stools, making themselves as small as possible by putting their hands inside the sleeves of the habit and bending over so that they became like a little black ball. About how the report cards were handed out in order of the smartest kid to the dumbest and how everybody snickered. We talked about how some of the nuns hit the kids with their wooden pointers. About the Jewish boy in the class—the only one in the school—and how he had to recite, every day, Catholic prayers and listen to the story of how the “Jews killed Jesus Christ.” We talked about the visit each year from the feared Sister Clarissa, head of the order. About the opposition of priests to the nuns’ desire to get out of their habits. In a compromise with the priests, she told me, the nuns had to make their dresses out of material from their habits. They were all black and all ugly. She talked about one of the girls in my class who had a crush on her, wanted to be just like Sister Margaret, and ultimately joined the order before leaving after about ten years. When she said that I almost confessed my own first crush on her.

At the end of lunch, I asked her what I could do for her. She told me that she had everything she needed. She said that she was quite happy with the living arrangement in retirement. Some of the nuns complained about the quality of the food, but she was grateful to have the food and not have to wash dishes. She mentioned that the nuns liked movies; they had a VCR and rented one or two movies a week.

On our drive back to her retirement home, we stopped at the video store the sisters liked and I set up an account in her name. The store clerk asked if there would be any limit on the account, and I said, “No limits.” Sister Margaret looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Hmm. That is the first time in my life I have ever had no limit.”

That turned out to be the best thing I could have done for her. We had a couple of other “dates” after that, and she began sending me birthday cards and emails. Sometimes, when I wanted someone to talk to, she was always there, answering the phone on the first ring. She died peacefully in her eighties. We never talked about religion or politics. She never asked if I was a practicing Catholic, never asked about my wife or family. We were just two friends. And I never did tell her that the thirteen-year-old me had such a crush on her—somehow, I think she knew.

Oh. And I should say that the widow’s peak was still there. No longer black, though. Mostly grey.