“And where were you this afternoon?” my father asked me.

“I went to confession, Daddy.”

“And what penance did you get this time?”

“Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, this time,” I said.

“Well,” remarked my father, “you’re going up in the world. I wonder what you had to tell, to get that size of a penance.”

I hardly heard him. The minute the words were out of my mouth, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. Burning with guilt and shame, I stared at my mother. She was looking back at me in a way that confounded me still further, because although her expression was serious, I knew she was not angry. I was very sorry and very sad. I was ready to yell with anguish.

“Oh, Maeve,” she said at last, “my poor child, why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?”

“What’s going on around here now?” my father asked, bewildered.

He got no answer.

The Devil in Us

__________

I WAS PEACEFULLY APPROACHING the end of my thirteenth year when I was startled out of all placidity by an unanswerable question that still returns sometimes to puzzle my mind. I was at a convent boarding school in Kilcullen, a village in the County Kildare. There were sixty or more girls at the school, and we used to be taken for long crocodile walks into the flat and spiritless countryside that surrounds the village. There were several shops in Kilcullen, but the only building I ever entered there was the church, where we occasionally went to confession. Most of the time, we went to confession in the convent chapel, which we approached on tiptoe through the darkened main hall of the nuns’ quarters. We wore navy blue uniforms, with long black wool stockings and black slippers, and before entering the chapel for confession, or for morning Mass or Sunday-afternoon Benediction, we covered our heads with white net veils. By the end of my first term, my veil was so full of the chapel’s dark and musky fragrance — of incense and flowers and snuffed-out candles — that I was afraid to wash it, for fear of committing sacrilege.