The New York Times features a story of the half-century work of Sister Mary de Sales.By DAN BARRY
SISTER MARY DE SALES, 91, checks her wristwatch again. Yes, it might be best to head down to the chapel on the first floor. A priest friend was saying Mass at noon, and here she was on the 14th floor, at a time of day when the elevators at the New York Foundling Hospital move so slowly.
Sister de Sales “retired” in 1997, but to separate her from this city institution after a half-century would have been like separating her from the Sisters of Charity, whom she joined when Hoover was president. So she has stayed on, working in the Closed Records section, making unofficial rounds and dashing off now and then with three other nuns to play the 25-cent slots in Atlantic City.
“It’s just for the fun of it,” she says. “And to get out.”
Yes, Sister. Now back to the Foundling.
The elevator descends through the Chelsea building, past the maternity residences on 10 and 9, past the crisis nursery on 8. Sister de Sales stops at 7 to show off Blaine Hall, where 15 children – abused and now in city custody – are being evaluated. Sister Teresa Kelly, who oversees the program, says the children are in class right now, and aren’t those colorful comforters on their beds nice? Recent donations.
On the other side of doors that are often banged on by children, Sister de Sales and Sister Teresa live in a mostly empty “convent” with Sister Marilda Joseph, who at the moment sits in a chair with a crossword puzzle. Dressed in the black habit and bonnet that many others in her order abandoned decades ago, she confides that she has trouble keeping the habit’s white collar stiff. No starch, she says.
The nuns of this city, going, going – going to Atlantic City?
At least Sister de Sales is, on occasion. She says that a sister who is still able to drive will take this gambling-nun posse for a midweek stay at the Showboat, or some other casino where they can get adjacent rooms, eat and see a show. Sometimes they lose a little at the slots, sometimes they lose a little more.
But, as the good nun likes to say, “What is, is.”
Sister de Sales worked through the Roosevelt years as a grammar-school teacher in Brooklyn. Eventually, though, the order decided that she should earn a master’s degree in social work and dedicate herself to its foundling hospital, on the Upper East Side.
For many years she was the assistant director in the adoption department, working to match abandoned children with adoptive parents. She then became the tough-minded director of the maternity residence, and she remembers the whispers about the Foundling at the time: “Don’t go to the Foundling because they make you crochet a blanket for your baby.”
“I’m a great crochet person,” she says, with no hint of apology. “And I just felt that they should be doing something for their baby.”
SISTER DE SALES has been there. There in 1958, when she and others carried scores of babies out of the old building and into a new one. (“275 Infants Move to New Hospital,” shouted The Times. “The Sisters of Charity Take Their Charges Across 3rd Ave. in an Hour”.)
There in 1988, when the Foundling moved again, to Chelsea, where it continues to provide preventive and foster-care services to the children of the city.
There for the calls of frantic unwed mothers, of would-be parents, of adults trying to piece together their past. There for personal involvement in what she estimates to be more than 1,500 adoptions or placements in foster homes.
She remembers many specifics, too, from the newborn girl found in a telephone booth in 1965 to the 9-year-old girl who left with foster parents the other day, wearing the scarf that Sister de Sales had crocheted for her.
Dozens of her children keep in touch. One is a newspaper editor, another works with children up in Washington Heights. One, a police detective, stopped by a couple of years ago, carrying Christmas gifts for children. She approached the security guard and asked:
“Is Sister Mary de Sales still living?”
Finally, finally, the elevator reaches the first floor. A very small nun makes her way to the chapel for that Mass at noon. She is the last of the Collins family of the Highbridge section of the Bronx, her mother, father, sister and brother all gone. So many of her Sisters of Charity gone, too.
But that is O.K. She plays her slots, crochets her scarves, helps her children.
Speaking of which, here comes one now, through the doors, someone whose adoption she helped to arrange some 46 years ago. The priest.
