Only weeks after my adoption had been finalized, I was whisked to the first day of first grade with a new first name – along with the new last one. The Catholic school in which I was enrolled recognized only the names of saints. This obliterated the only first name I’d ever known, “Honey,” and bumped up to first-name status my middle name, Elizabeth (Hebrew for “consecrated to God”).

My own biological parents had never married, and their own parents saw to it that they were released from parenthood so they could pursue their educations. I was properly delivered to the Guardian Angel Home in Philadelphia and subsequently placed in the arms of Mrs. Nana, an older woman who had worked at the Home for years. At the time, Father McMahon and the Home’s small staff were preoccupied with the upcoming County inspection of the facility. With new linoleum being laid, plumbing being updated, and generally everything being brought up to fire code, we orphans were in the way. The older children were temporarily transferred to the nearby Saint Joseph Home for boys without fathers. I was a constantly wailing infant girl, requiring ‘round-the-clock rocking and patting and cooing over, so Father McMahon accepted Mrs. Nana’s offer to take me to her house and keep me there until suitable adoptive parents could be found.

Weeks, then months passed with Mrs. Nana telephoning Father McMahon, regularly, to detail the trials of nurturing such a pathetically sick infant. She convinced Father that I should not be returned to the Home as scheduled. I might infect the other children with my screaming, spitting up, and refusing to sleep.

Years later when I read those notes in my long-lost file, I smiled with gratitude at Mrs. Nana’s convincing lies. She’d shared the truth with me as early as I can remember—that upon arrival in her house, I coiled into sleep, tight as a rose bud. I grew from birth to toddler, bringing her more delight than she’d ever known. “You were such a little flower,” she told me once, “I almost named you Rosie.” She decided that “Honey” more appropriately fit my sweet, but peppery disposition. And she and I became inseparably attached. Fortunately, Father McMahon never tried to come between us. In fact, he died without ever updating my file. He kindly allowed me to disappear from the system into Mrs. Nana’s imaginative and loving world.

By the time I was three years old, I’d learned to set a proper table for tea–damask rose cups, embroidered napkins, warm cream, raisin scones, sweet biscuits, butter, jam, and the New York Times. My table manners were as highly polished as museum furniture. I could pour and pass, and tweeze sugar cubes with silver tongs as gracefully as the Queen’s cronies. “Extend your pinkie finger when you stir,” Mrs. Nana reminded me. “Butterflies need a place to land.”

I was five years old when the error of my “misplacement” was accidentally discovered. The Guardian Angel Home had been closed by the County, and clerks from the state had been sent to glean the files. My birth certificate, buried in the stacks, generated an all-out search. One of the retired cooks recalled Mrs. Nana having taken home a baby.

The case worker told the judge in the Pennsylvania Orphans Court that when she arrived at Mrs. Nana’s house, it looked as though I’d been kept like a doll. She wrote in her file: “The child was fresh-faced and freckled, crinoline dresses and patent leather Mary Jane’s. The child said, ‘Yes, thank you, please’ and ‘may I,’ and asked if I’d like tea.” In another column, she noted that I had not attended pre-school or Kindergarten. “The child asked did I know that all God’s creatures were created equal, and that love was forever. She recited the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Three Little Pigs.’”

The judge granted Mrs. Nana a series of visits. He said it would soothe my separation anxiety. This set Mrs. Nana howling and roaring, and the judge hammering his gavel.

My new parents, Myrna and Brill, had originally wanted a clutch of kids. Their plan was that once Brill retired from management at Whitman’s Chocolate, in Philadelphia, we’d all move back to Bethel, Delaware and work his family’s farm. When I was their only child (their biological baby boy, Ray Dean, came shortly after my arrival), we drove down to Bethel on weekends. The two of them with their deep Delawarean accents talked loudly over the noisy engine of their truck. Occasionally they’d shout to me in the backseat where I was crammed between boxes of Whitman Samplers for Brill’s mother, Granny Hattie, and empty, prickly crates that on the return trip would brim with peaches, tomatoes and green beans from Hattie’s roadside stand.

“Haunnie, how’s it back there? Yo’r awful quiet.”

Myrna complained that I was unresponsive. She’d been bending over backwards to reach me with an array of nicknames–“Kutchie,” “Stinkey,” “Boop, “Bibbie,” “Bip,” “Brat,” “Snippity-pie,” and finally “Miss Mouthy.” I held “Honey” in my heart.

One morning she was braiding my hair. Against my tugging, twisting and shouting, she was hurting me. “That’s it,” she yelled, “No more gettin’ away with murder. You’re gone t’ Catholic school.”

I didn’t know what that meant but it made me shiver.

Ordinarily, on the first day of school, Myrna would have walked me and probably prepared me better for my renaming, but she was in the late stages of birthing labor in the Nazareth Hospital on the other side of town. Brill followed her strict orders to spit shine my oxfords, fasten my uniform necktie, and hold my hand, tight, all the way. The hand holding was a first for father and me. My pretzel-stick fingers in his doughy palm freed me from the worry of approaching another new environment.

We passed the Guardian Angel Home, which had been re-opened as the Holy Innocents Youth Center. In front of the ranch-style structure was a row of swing sets splayed in a dusty patch. The swings had leather seats and long chains, the kind if you pumped hard in the upswing, would let you dip your toes into the sky.

“I’d like to swing there, someday,” I said.

“You oughten never want t’see that place again,” father said. That’s where Mrs. Nana got a hold ya.”

Hearing Mrs. Nana’s name brought on the missing feeling, the one that caused my rough crying and the wailing that sliced the inside of my throat, shredded my words and pin-pricked my lungs, airless.

“No crocodile tears,” father said. “Swallow hard. We all got pain ta bear.” He patted my back. “There’s nothin’ a little singin’ won’t cure,” he said, and he broke into the Kingston Trio’s, “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley.”

I’d learned that crying and pleading wouldn’t bring back Mrs. Nana. It usually made things worse with either Myrna trying to rock me with her sweaty hands, or father unbuckling his belt to threaten the tears back inside me.

By the time father and I reached the schoolyard on the border of the old, Italian cemetery, I’d quickly absorbed his cheer, and the two of us were belting out the chorus:

“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley

Hang down your head and cry

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley

Poor boy, you’re bound to die.”

A young nun greeted us at the wrought-iron gates of the school. With the white box of her nun’s habit squeezing her head and framing her full-moon face, she looked like a living TV. Her matching plastic collar extended up and around her neck and forced her to bend and turn with a mechanistic stiffness. Yet, she moved gracefully and when she spoke it was soft like the sound inside a whelk. Her hands waved breezily, and her skin glowed pink like faded cherry blossoms. In my mind, she became Sister Cherry, and next to Mrs. Nana, I would cherish her most.

While I saw Sister Cherry everyday for the next six years, my court-approved time with Mrs. Nana decreased. At first, Mrs. Nana had been invited to the important functions in my life–Confirmation, first Communion, and first May procession to honor Mary, the Blessed Mother of Jesus. But when it was time for Mrs. Nana to leave, the phantom cutting in my throat would return. The sobbing would shift to a rattling in my chest, the hoarse coughing would simmer to breathlessness, and someone would unpeel me from around Mrs. Nana’s waist or ankles and drag me away where I’d drop into exhausted sleep.

“Children forget quick,” Myrna told Mrs. Nana, patting her out the front door.

In third grade, Sister Cherry invited me to the convent for lunch. She sliced tomatoes and spread mayonnaise on toast with salt and pepper. We carried the sandwiches to the sun porch and pulled cushioned wicker chairs to the piano stool which doubled as a table. Sister listened to my chatter. I said I couldn’t memorize “Lincoln, Blinken and Nod.” I had my own rhymes and my own version of the poem. She dabbed the toast crumbs with her pointer finger, the way Mrs. Nana had done when she was intent on listening. Sister hummed, agreeing and understanding.