I had heard that the Poor Clares slept in their coffins, with stones under their heads. I had been told that they were measured for their coffins the first day they entered the convent and that they never knew any other bed afterward. My mother liked to throw cold water on this story, but I could not forget it. I used to wonder if they had separate cells for sleeping, with a coffin in each cell, or if they slept in a dormitory, and if they had sheets and blankets and pillowcases, and, if so, how they made their beds in the morning. Also, I wondered, what about the coffin lids? Where were they kept? On the floor alongside the coffin? Or leaning, like hockey sticks and bicycles, against the wall? I knew that the nuns never slept more than a couple of hours at a time and that they arose at intervals during the night, even in the dead of winter, to go to their chapel and pray. It was a picture to dwell upon.

I asked my mother many questions about the nuns, but her answers were never satisfactory. One time that I remember asking her about them, her younger brother, my Uncle Matt, was lounging about the room. We were in the front sitting room, and she was trying to coax one of her precious ferns to twine itself around a long bamboo cane that she had stuck into its pot.

Q: Do the Poor Clare nuns have any other convent besides the one here in Dublin?

A: I think they have another convent somewhere in Ireland, and I believe they have one in England.

Q: If nobody is allowed to see them, what happens when they’re moved from one convent to another?

A: How would I know? I suppose a car, a little van, maybe, backs up to the convent door, and the nun gets in and shuts herself in.

Q: Would she bring her coffin with her?

A: I wish you’d stop all this nonsense about the nuns sleeping in their coffins.

(UNCLE MATT: Of course she’d bring her coffin with her. Doesn’t she have to get her sleep, like anybody else? She’d carry it under her arm like a music roll. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never seen a nun walking along the street with her coffin under her arm?)

Q: What if a Poor Clare gets sick and has to have the doctor?

A: I don’t know.

Q: What about if they’re dying, and the priest has to come?

A: I don’t know. Besides, that would be different. A priest would be different.

Q: What about if they talk in their sleep? Would that be a sin for them?

(UNCLE MATT: Well, of course, it would depend what they said.)

A: That’s enough of that, now. I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you.