La Madone Noire

In my family, a convent in Lucerne, Switzerland loomed legend large. It’s name is “La Madone Noire” (the Black Madonna) and according to my mom, it is a “finishing school” where captious girls, who lied or who wouldn’t behave, were sent to live with and be schooled by nuns. It was, from all reports, a terrible and stern place where there was never any ice cream or bedtime stories and the toys, when there were any, were made of straw. Most of the time it was my older sister Annick getting the dark Poe-like lectures, but I was there, in my high chair, listening wide-eyed. The very idea that Annick could be snatched up, for some infraction, and sent off to the nuns horrified me to the point that my heartbeat seemed to come through my whole body. Eventually, as we grew, “Lucerne” became a shorthand for “shape up or else,” and oddly, it never lost Its potency. Hmm, you know, come to think of it - there was no equivalent monastery for my brother.