The Purple Nun, Part III

After Mrs. B told us about her weekend adventure with the Purple Nun, we learned from Mrs. A that the Nun's claim of having a son was in fact true.

Some time in the mid to late 1980s, not terribly long after Mrs. A had started working at the library, the Purple Nun and her son were regular patrons. I should say, the lady that would one day become the Purple Nun, because at that point she was not yet wearing the purple wimple. Her son was a very young child at the time, maybe one or two years old, and he and the future Nun would come in and spend all day sitting upstairs at the library. Mrs. A said he was a beautiful baby and seemed very happy. What Mrs. A learned later was that the local child services agency was actively trying to find the future Nun and her child. It seems that the two of them were living in a tent up on one of our local mountains, which is not the kind of environment that child services cares to hear of infants being subjected to for great lengths of time. So while C.S. was out combing the mountainside for her during the day, she was hiding out safely in the "liberry". It was a ruse that could only work for so long, though. Eventually she was found and deemed an unfit parent and her child was taken away from her. According to the Nun herself, she had spent the intervening years trying to get him back and felt that she was close to doing so. As you might expect, the situation likely contributed greatly to her Purple-Nunitization, but she may have had some help from good ol' Uncle Genetics too.

The Purple Nun, you see, is not alone in the land of the mentally ajar. She has four sisters and two brothers, many of whom still live in the area. I've met one of her brothers, who is a regular patron at the library and one of the nicest people you'd ever care to meet. I would not, however, classify him as a man without a few loose screws. His screws seem to be faily mild screws to have loose, mind you, but they still remain loose and in danger of being misplaced unless he remains somewhat medicated. From what I'm told, most of her siblings fall into this category to one degree or another. Most are terribly intelligent people, who were top of their class in school, went on to college and then, one by one, slowly started to go a little... odd. All except for the youngest, who moved away from the area entirely and was, last I heard, still on a very even keel. But you have to wonder what it's like to be the youngest member of a family who are one by one slowly going a bit wonky, in descending order of age, knowing you're quite probably next. It's a bit chilling.

Frankly, they're a lot like the Royal Tennenbaums, only with less money. They seem to get along with one another about as well too. On the few occasions I saw the Nun and her brother in the library at the same time, they didn't speak, or at the most said hello. No hugs, no kisses, no "How's it been goin?" Just hello.

As to my own relationship with the Purple Nun, I can't say that I had more than a handful of contact situations and barely an honest to god conversation with her. She was always very nice to me when she was in and never once attacked me. In fact, the only true evidence we have that she ever attacked anyone came from the Nun's own admission. Considering some of the other things she admits, it's at least questionable, though not out of the realm of possibility--particularly after what we learned later on.

One afternoon in August of 2002, her brother came into the library and asked me if I knew who the Purple Nun was and that she was his sister. I told him, I did.

"Well..." he said. "I just wanted to let you know that she passed away last Sunday."

Hearing this hit me pretty hard. I mean, we knew she had cancer but somehow we never thought she would succumb to it. It didn't seem right that this lady, who had been given (or cultivated, depending on your point of view) a fairly odd and difficult walk in life should be taken by cancer. The more I thought about it, though, the more I became convinced that this was probably for the best. Chances were not great that she would ever be able to regain custody of her son. Wimple or not she was still a strange-bird and barely able to support herself, let alone an adolescent. Would it really be better for her to go through more years of pain from being separated from her son? Perhaps God took her for a purpose.

A few days later, the local paper ran her obituary. In it we learned that the Purple Nun was born in 1955, she was valedictorian of her 1974 high school class, she had earned both a bachelors of science degree and a masters degree in psychology from the University of Virginia. She was also a black belt in karate.