Letters

We all wore the same navy school uniform, covered with black smocks during classroom activities. We wore the same canvas belts in the color of our class, the matching ribbon around our necks, with the ivory cross lying on our chests, where we presumed our hearts were beating.

We wore a black veil to everyday Mass, and the white veil on Sundays. Every morning, we reported to our homeroom Mother the number of good deeds we claimed to have performed the day before.

We sang the “Giovinezza,” ending with “ … a per Benito Mussolini, ea, ea allala!” and we thrust our right arms forward, straight, palm down, fingers pointing toward the Italian flag.

We did all the same things, ate the same food, said the same prayers, wore the same clothes. But assimilation did not mean acceptance into that exclusive group of girls who had long known each other, but had not known me.

When I found my best friend, the girls suddenly brought me into their inner circle: They shared the latest rumor — our mere superieure was a Roman princess who had entered the novitiate after a romance gone wrong!

My savior was Elli Gentili, who found me. She was bigger than any of us, four years older and in a higher grade. She had unruly blonde curls, gray-blue eyes that never looked in the same direction at the same time; her mouth was always ready to break into giggles at the latest mischief she had gotten me into. And she spoke German.

And so, what assimilation alone had failed to achieve, the adoption by an older girl, from a higher class, and one whose record of mischiefs, unparalleled in the history of the Notre Dame, was the open sesame to the closed circle of my classmates.

Decades later, when my daughters were 10 and 12 years old, I took them on a tour of “my Europe.” In Trieste, we went to the Notre Dame de Sion. A nun shepherding preschoolers greeted us. Sister Anna Maria Stradiotto had been there when I was at the Notre Dame.

The hall of our monthly “assemblee generale” had been given to the University of Trieste; our chapel, to the community; our park and our historic buildings had been replaced with towering condos blocking the view of the harbor.

I was told Sister Anna Maria had heard that I had twin sons in New York City. “Una vera figlia del Nostra Dama,” she said. She mailed me my onori: the class belt and the ribbon for the neck. The ivory cross of yesteryear was plastic.

We saw Elli Gentili that evening — but that’s for another time.

Evelyn Konrad

Attorney at law

Southampton