by Alice Nelson
There was a ripple to the air in Harlem then, something fire-blown and desperate, all hard edges. She felt that people wanted a hiss of anger, a turning of her back, a stumble from her to prove that the sisters in their brownstone were not so far above them, after all. Such complex deciphering was required. Their spiky accents and street lingo and tinny music. The projects. The rage. The grief. The missions in Mexico and South America were more straightforward. The sad smiles and dark eyes of the faithful lined up with their babies tied to their backs. ‘Madre’, they called the sisters, ducking their heads to kiss the nuns’ hands. They loved the nuns, those faithful women; did not snicker or spit or rage against them.
Still, she had never wanted to leave Harlem. Not for South America or India or back to Ireland, or anywhere else. Certainly not Narrowsburg. She did not like it here. The shabby countryside, the unravelling townships with trailers gathered at their fringes, clapboard farmhouses cut off from the river by new roads. There was a heavy weight over it, a lost prosperity. Harlem was where she belonged, was where she had done her work. It was the place she wanted to die.
‘The Lord will gather you in.’ Vera liked the ring of the words. That was the work left to her now, to gather in the old, the dying nuns. Close up the houses and the half-empty convents in Philadelphia, in Worcester, in Dobbs Ferry. Move out the last few sisters, sell off the properties, sign her name on a hundred documents. A sad business: the moving trucks, the cleaners, the brown-suited broker with his leery grin. ‘Say a prayer for me, Sister.’
Every decision was a betrayal. Which house to sell first. Where they would live. How much help they could afford. What services to stop. What they could bring with them to Narrowsburg. They blamed her, the other nuns. Of course they blamed her – she was the instrument of their dispossession. Each of them was ready with one grievance or another. The tears over leaving behind an old flowered armchair, or a brass bedframe. Sixty years of prayers by the side of that bed, one sister had sobbed, the gush and heave of her crying making Vera want to walk out of the room.
Nothing holy could be discarded. The crucifixes and icons, the plaster statues of Mary, the endless rosary beads and the bottles of water from Lourdes were packed away in cardboard boxes in the basement. All the trappings of faith, none of its serenity left to her. No immense design anymore. When Vera packed up her own home, the brownstone across from the park in Harlem, she left the wooden crucifixes fastened to the walls. She had come to that house as a postulant nearly half a century before. Nineteen years old and the first time she had left Donegal. Eight brothers and sisters lined up on the sagging porch to say goodbye, the little boys running after the car, her mother crying into her apron. A waste, they had all said. In another time, another family, it might have been a fine thing, an honour. A child for the Church. But not for the Dohertys. Vera was the family beauty. They did not want her wasted on God. She could have made a good marriage, could have helped them that way. But she had been full of the fire of faith, the bright sure certainty of it. All the nuns had. So many lifetimes of good works. The Bronx, Harlem, El Salvador, Brazil, the Mexican border. How far they had roamed.
What were they now? The hollowed-out core, the weary faithful huddled in their armchairs around a gas heater. Twenty-four frail old women, all of them flaxy grey and watery. Threadbare skin and bruised veins, a powderiness to their cheeks, a looseness to their bodies. Sometimes she slipped in behind the other sisters during compline, the night prayers. They wore their nightdresses, bending creakily down on the old wooden kneelers, rosary beads twisted through their fingers. Limbs shifting and failing, wheel-chairs and walking frames lined up at the back of the room, a soft, drifting scent to their bodies. Vera could have picked up her guitar and accompanied them in the hymns, but she let their voices rise and quaver on their own. She was too tired. Sixty-seven, and the youngest of them by nearly two decades. She wondered sometimes where she had hidden herself, what had happened to the kind, faithful fire of her.
The Lord grant us a quiet night and a perfect end. Twenty-four deaths for her to preside over. Hands to hold, bed linen to change, pills to administer, consoling words to murmur to faraway relatives. ‘Gone to God.’ Space for them all in the small convent cemetery on the side of the hill.
Some nights she sat for hours going over the accounts, the ledgers reaching back through the decades. Their empty coffers. How could they have believed that they could pay for the upkeep of all those half-empty old houses for so long? The heating, the roof repairs, the rewiring. The Lord did not provide. Deus absconditis. She had studied it once at a theology seminar in Rome.
The grizzled old retriever, Lily, stretched out under the desk, resting her muzzle on Vera’s foot. The dog had belonged to the sisters in Philadelphia, had slunk in off the streets five years earlier and they had no heart to turn her out. Vera had not wanted to bring her to Narrowsburg when they sold the Philadelphia convent. There was no money to care for an animal and she did not want to be responsible for one more living thing. She had told Sister Grace to give the dog away or take it to an animal shelter. What a ruckus that had caused. They had all banded against Vera, even the ones who had no love for animals. Someone had slipped a quote from St Francis under her door: ‘If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.’ Pointed, that, Vera thought.
Sometimes she felt that they were not her sisters, these old women, but her children. Let the dog come, she said in the end, let the damn thing come. Grace was dead now, a heart attack at the end of the summer, and the dog had taken to following Vera from room to room, her toenails clicking softly on the floorboards as she padded along the halls. A shelter of compassion and pity. It sounded like a lovely thing. She wished that someone would make one for her.
Outside it had started to snow, the shiver of it clouding the maple trees. Once, the first snow of winter had felt like a benediction to her, the silence, the ceaseless soft energy. Snowmen in Mount Morris Park, the flushed, shiny faces of the neighbourhood children, the bright membrane of white over the streets. Here, snow was another hazard to overcome. Ice on the path, the sidewalk to dig out, a hard sting on her cheeks when she went to check the mailbox. But still there was something of the miracle to it.
Christmas night. The world hushed and holy again. Back in Harlem she would have earned a virtuous rest by now. Mass at dawn, the morning spent visiting the needy faithful, bestowing blessings, chocolates for the children. Climbing endless flights of stairs, bouncing a baby on her knee, slices of fruitcake and foil-wrapped tamales slipped into her bag. Then the Christmas lunch at the brownstone, the doors open to all who cared to come. Christmas carols in Spanish, the little Yemeni girls from the bodega in their velvet dresses, the noisy goodwill of the day. It all seemed so far away now. A life unimaginably distant from this one.
Another gong sounded downstairs. Meals, prayers, everything marked by bells, the day folded into discrete squares. There had been no time for all of that in Harlem. Just a quick prayer before daybreak when she was dressing and the slow turn of her thoughts in bed at night after the day’s work. Vera could not remember the last time she had been down on her knees, except at mass, before she came here. She waited to hear the opening and closing of doors, the slow shuffle along the corridors, the hum of voices.
There was a quiet tap at her door. Sister Joseph stood there with a tray tilting sideways in her hands: leftovers from their modest Christmas lunch. Joseph was wearing a habit and veil. The only one left who still wore the old things. The rest of them went about in plain clothes now: straight skirts and polyester blouses, cardigans, nurses’ shoes. It was harder for the older ones, all the changes that had come over the years. Twenty years her senior and Joseph’s face was tentative, almost a cringe. Were they really scared of her?
‘I thought you’d be wanting your supper up here, Sister,’ Joseph said hastily, placing the tray on the table and
backing out of the room. ‘I know how busy you are.’
She should eat with them. She should pick up the tray and walk downstairs and sit at the table with them. She should lead the prayers and put her hand over theirs and enquire about their chilblains, their aches, their poor sleep. It had been the state of their souls that had preoccupied them all once; now it was the body and its failings. No plenary indulgence to absolve them from that.
‘Thank you, Joseph. I’ll come downstairs for a cup of tea with you all later.’
‘You’re in our prayers, Sister.’ A tremble in her voice. Deferent, afraid. Just before the move to Narrowsburg, Joseph had copied out a verse from Kings in her quavering old copperplate and posted it to her. ‘I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart.’
Vera wanted to grasp the old woman’s hand. Her job was to console them. To bring a simplicity to things. They were her flock now. She should go down and let them make her a cup of tea. In ten minutes. In ten minutes she would go down to them.
She stared out of the window, the hum of the grace before meals drifting up from downstairs. The snow was coming more heavily now, the wet flakes dissolving when they hit the glass. Joseph had put a square of the dark chocolate Vera loved beside the plate. In spring there would be a flower, in fall a red maple leaf.
She had to be stern with them, turn her back on their confused sorrow. All that raging and crying and praying when she had cast them out of their homes, broken their little clusters of community and deposited them all up here, away from the world. Betrayed them. Perhaps she had done the wrong thing. But there had been no choice. Better that she turned them out than let the banks do it.
How many years would it be before they were all gone? Hard to imagine the long exile that might stretch out before her; a strange kind of suspension. There would be no return to Harlem. The house there had been sold to a family. Jewish, the broker had told her.
She stood up and slipped her feet back into her shoes. From the window she could see a figure turning off the road, pausing by the green letterbox, then walking slowly up the path towards the house, leaving wet footprints in the newly fallen snow. Vera stepped closer to the window. A single jet stream cut through the cold sky. Surprise moved through her. It was the African girl from Harlem, the one Cecile was always trying to befriend. What was her name? Something unlikely. Constance, that was it. What on earth was she doing here? The girl drew closer to the house and paused, looked up at the window where Vera stood. She wore a woollen hat pulled down low over her face. Just one canvas bag hung from her shoulder. No sign of her child.
Harlem, New York
July, 1997
Nearly a month passed before Marina saw the African girl and her little boy again. She and Jacob went to Fire Island, catching the train up to Long Island and then the tiny ferry from Sayville across the sound. A journey between islands, a slate-roofed cottage on a narrow slip of a sandbar out in the Atlantic. They came every summer. It had become part of the fabric of their year, this escape from the unreasonable heat of the city, these suspended weeks so predictable in their routines that it was sometimes difficult for Marina to separate one July from the others. The familiar traditions held a kind of enchantment: the chugging ferry ride, the trip to the general store for provisions, opening up the house to let the ocean air in. They always spent the mornings on the beach, walking up to the far curve of the bay, collecting clams and shells, lying under the old canvas umbrella that they carried down from the house. In the afternoons they rode their bikes along the wooden boardwalks or into the town, sometimes stopping for coffee or ice cream. In the evenings there were games of Scrabble and cards, hours sitting out on the deck with blankets on their laps, watching the stars and talking, the crash and heave of the ocean close to them. In the darkness the sounds seemed to magnify – the wild screech of an owl, the rattle of the windows in a sudden squall of wind.
Every summer Ben strode around the small white house with the green shutters, which they always rented, inspecting for any changes, irked that a painting had been taken down, the old couch under the window replaced. Their first summer on the island, when he was ten years old, he proposed solemnly to them that they should leave New York and come to live here in the cottage. Marina remembered his cross face when they laughed, the flash of his thin legs as he ran off to the beach. Such a little boy he had looked, down there at the edge of the water, leaning over to peer at something in the sand.
It was on the same stretch of beach, several summers later, that Ben suddenly seemed to her to have become a man. It happened all at once, an unexpected metamorphosis. Seventeen years old, striding out of the surf and shaking the water out of his hair, wrapping a striped towel around his waist. It struck her that there was hardly anything of the child about him anymore. How odd that it had crept up on her unawares like that; she saw him every day and yet suddenly there he was, this tall, graceful man.
It was strange not to have Ben there with them that summer. Marina knew that the time would come when he would be drawn away by other things: travel, work, a woman. But this was far harder than she had imagined. That he would simply refuse to come with them. Every time she walked past his bedroom, with its single bed and small window looking over the garden, a flutter of unease moved through her. What was he doing now? Was he still going to work? Was he eating?
The evening before they had left the city, Jacob had stopped him as he slipped out of the kitchen, his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘Come with us,’ he said. Marina could see how hard Jacob was trying not to make it sound like a plea, to keep a lightness in his voice. Ben ducked from his father’s reach and walked towards the door. ‘I have work.’
‘Surely you can get out of it. Come to the island, and then you can go back to school in the fall. Come on, Ben, you need to snap out of this.’
A long silence. At the kitchen sink, her back turned to them, Marina realised she was holding her breath.
‘I’d rather stay here,’ Ben said quietly and left the room, the stairs creaking as he walked up to the top floor.
When she and Jacob set out for the station the next morning, Ben was already gone. She had heard the clatter of the door as he left the house before dawn for an early shift at the supermarket. It felt like a cruelty, what he was doing, but she knew it was not. He had just stepped back to where nobody could reach him.
One afternoon when Jacob headed out to cycle to the far end of the island, Marina walked into Ben’s room and sat down on the bed. The nightlight he had used as a child was on the bedside table. Illuminated, it cast a scattering of stars across the ceiling. She remembered Ben’s frustration that the constellations were not marked correctly, that the projection of stars did not accurately reflect the night sky. For a long stretch of his childhood he had wanted to be an astronomer. On many of the clear summer nights here on the island, he would sit on the deck for hours watching the stars through the telescope they had bought him for his twelfth birthday. Several mornings they had found him asleep out there, wrapped in a blanket, his laminated star charts spread around him. He had tried to explain the Harvard Spectral Classification system to her once. ‘Many stars are classified by the circumstances surrounding their deaths,’ Ben said. She had written that line down in her journal, thinking it strangely poetic. So often, listening to Ben’s intensely relayed facts, she was reminded of her brother, of Dov’s own sweet earnestness. She thought of her brother’s silk star-map tucked away in a chest, the buttons he had painstakingly sewn to mark the constellations.
It had always been there in Ben, this desire for things to be done properly, this serious questing for knowledge. A few days before they left for Fire Island Marina had stopped by the supermarket and found him stacking the shelves. He had calculated the arrangement of bottles of seltzer water precisely, he told her, so that he knew exactly how many would fit on each shelf. A slip of excitement in his voice as he spoke of vectors and angles, his old love for mathematics still there. I
t was just a glimmer of hope, but a quiet sort of relief flooded through her as she walked home. There was still something he cared about. He would come good, she was sure of it.
Marina lay down on Ben’s bed. The pillow smelled of old lavender. Their second summer here she had brought the old volume of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and it had become a tradition for her and Jacob to sit on Ben’s narrow bed and take it in turns to read him a story. It would strike her every evening they read together how very strange it was to have this reconstituted tableau. Dov and her mother gone, but this man and child here with her, the same old book held up to a circle of light, the sea wind buffeting the shutters as they read to each other, an easy banter between them.
Ben’s favourite story was the one about a bright shepherd boy who thought of clever answers to a king’s riddles. He asked for the story again and again, even though he knew it by heart. So many of the stories were like this, Marina thought; about children who had to rely on their own resources. Clever, imperilled boys and girls, who had to outsmart those who would do them harm and secure their own survival. ‘Where are the parents in these stories?’ Ben asked her once. ‘When the shepherd boy gets adopted by the king because he’s so smart, what happens to his own parents? Didn’t they want to keep him?’ She could see his younger face vividly, the high forehead, the clear brown eyes. Even then, the presence of something unknowable in him. ‘I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know where the parents are.’
