Burch opens the narrative as an adult with his daughters at the zoo. He remembers how this zoo was “my source of refuge, my home” (1).

Jennings is a child walking with his mother in Brooklyn. She is tense, but he will not explain what is wrong. They enter an old building and are greeted by a nun. The nun talks alone with his mother, and his mother leaves him in a room filled with noisy children. She hugs and kisses him repeatedly, tells him she will be right back, and she leaves.

Jennings is left alone and uncomfortable as the rest of the children stare at him. He falls asleep, and an angry nun wakes him up and walks him past a long room filled with beds and barred windows to a bathroom. He is told to wash up, and when he cries, she strikes him across the face. She then shows him to his bed, number 27.

The next morning, he follows the other children as they line up and file into the dining room, directed by a nun named Sister Frances who uses a clicker to direct the children. When Jennings sits at the chair before she clicks the clicker, she pulls him up by his ear and chastises him.