“Who sent you the package?” Sister Bernadette asks as she rocks toe to heel, the white sneakers peeking from underneath her habit. Months earlier, I had made a mental note to ask her if she wanted me to take hers to Sister Humilita for hemming; Sister Humilita mends the habits and orders new ones when she decides they need replacing. Sister Bernadette’s are all an inch too long, but I forgot to mention it, and I almost wish she’d trip to detract attention from my package. She waits for me to show it to her.
Do you know who has come for you?
“An old . . . an old friend.”
“A gift?” she asks with excitement.
There is no use hiding objects. The Sisters find out sooner or later if there are any new items in your room, even if your room is in the basement. Purchases are noted, gifts from friends and family brought out for others to see, especially during the holidays. They are considered tokens of love and goodwill. Blessings that should be acknowledged. Books are frequently shared, as well as any item deemed to have communal benefits, like bread makers or coffee percolators, sewing machines, board games or decks of cards, large packages of baked goods or canned preserves. When Sister Katherine’s brother sent her an electric typewriter, she immediately offered it up for the church’s use. This is proper procedure. Only thoughts can be concealed, and I’ve hidden my share. Enough for two, enough for this innocent Sister Bernadette. I remove the box from the bed, the weight resting on my forearms, and she approaches me eagerly.
“It’s a little heavy,” I tell her. “You’ll have to lift the tissue paper.”
Her fingers move delicately, as if she realizes the solemnity of the gift. If initially I wanted to hide the candle holder, now, equally desperately, I want someone to touch it, leave fingerprints on it. Prove the object is made of matter. That it won’t disappear or crumble when taken out into the light.
She takes it out of the box, relieving my burden, cradling the silver in her arms like a baby, her eyebrows arched in appreciation. A strong rain pounds against the windowpane. The afternoon has grown dark under the threat of a storm. Normally there should be snow this time of year, but rain and autumn have won out. My window leaks and the drops come down, some caught by a coffee mug kept for that purpose on the inner ledge. I shiver, anticipating another cool night.
“It’s beau-ti-ful,” Sister Bernadette hums.
That it is. I often thought so back then, before everything else began. I had coveted that very silver candle holder or one exactly like it twenty-five years ago. It spoke of another world, with its crafted austere elegance, sitting attentively on Rachel M.’s bookshelf. It was a gift from her father, purchased on a downtown street in Rio de Janeiro, where he’d vacationed. He had brought her back silver necklaces and chocolates, thin cotton dresses and wooden-faced black dolls with haunting orange circles around their eyes, but she asked for the candle holder. Made of real silver and quite valuable, her father told her to be careful with it. The features are the same as I remember: a square base with four squat legs, its body vertically converging to the mouth where a candlestick would be inserted. There is a wick melted onto the silver. At the four bottom corners are black burned etchings, intriguing but foreign, strokes in a language I don’t know how to read: a loop swallowing itself, a type of cross with two horizontal arms, a star with a jagged edge, and an oval like the outline of an eyeball. When polished, the candle holder’s shell reflects like a mirror. In the dark, lit by a single wax candle, it dominates the room, the light contained but threatening to break. The days at St. X. School for Girls were like that shell. The nights were like that light.
I could lie and tell you I’ve never thought of those days until the arrival of the silver candle holder, but I won’t. I’ve thought of my time at St. X. School for Girls every single day, and if a day does pass and it occurs to me that I haven’t thought about it, then for the next couple of days I’ll be haunted by little else. The gift is no surprise, but a sign I have been waiting for these twenty years in this small convent in Ottawa. At least I can bless the fact that it has finally come.
WE MOVED TO OTTAWA because my mother was ill. The long straight hair my sister Christine and I inherited had thinned upon her scalp to strands of black thread. Her eyes, circled with dry patches and puffy as blisters, were most of the time wan and dazed. She applied lotion to the skin on her face three or four times a day, and she wore rose-tinted glasses to shield her hazel eyes from the sun, the only thing the doctors had ordered that seemed to help. My father loaded us into a rented van, and my mother slumped in the front seat like one of our hastily packed bags. She slept most of the way, her weak groans drowned out by the classical radio station she had requested for the trip. “Ave Maria,” sung by young boys with high girlish voices, propelled us forward through the farmland and small towns with family-run grocery stores and cheap gas stations where we would all get out, except Mother, to stretch our legs and take another look at the map. Three hundred miles of driving that took all afternoon, the exhaust from the van filtering into our noses, my mother coughing, her head and mouth against the glass, my father’s foot at intervals solid, then teetering on the pedal, changing our speed.
Christine was excited by the possibility of city life, pointing at the signs announcing the number of miles left, pronouncing the names of the towns we didn’t drive through, rocking in the seat beside me, ritualistically eating a single potato chip from her bag each time we reached a new town name. I wanted to be back in my bed, the one my father had made from the trees on our property shortly after I was born. Eventually, my feet fell a couple of inches over the edge of the red oak frame, but I refused to let him build me a new one. I had crawled underneath and etched my initials into the wood. I felt the bed and I were a part of each other, even if I’d outgrown it. We left it for sale like all his other handiwork: rocking chairs and shelves made of oak and pine, birch dressers and maple chests, cabinets and sewing tables. My haven of privacy, where I would lie under the covers reading or daydreaming about when I would be married and have a house of my own, was abandoned like our home. I made a fuss to my father about it, wringing my hands and crying, holding onto the bedposts as if they were part of the family and couldn’t possibly be left behind.
“We’ll get a new one, Angela.”
“No! I want this one!” I had cried.
Generally a gentle man, my father shocked me, clamping my shoulders in his large arms and pulling me up, my feet dangling above the floor. I was afraid he was going to hit me. My eyes shut, his cracked voice blurted in my ears: “I can make a new one! Don’t you understand? I can make you a new one! I can’t make you a mother! Do you hear me?”
He dropped me and left the room, slamming my bedroom door, a few hangers on the doorknob falling to the ground, tinkling. I pushed against the headboard, beating the wood with my fists. The bed, like our home, like our farm property, was going to remain without us. We would go on without the things we had come to rely on, and I knew instinctively that once we left, nothing would be the same. What I didn’t know then was that I would never sleep again in a bed that was solely my own.
When we entered the city limits, the highway twisting down into a concrete valley with high-rises and numerous bright street-lights, Christine, ten years of age, four years younger than me, let out a childish squeal, slapping her now empty bag of potato chips across her knees.
“Stop it, Chrissy,” Father silenced her.
Mother, startled, woke up. She shifted her weight on her seat and I could feel it against my knees, the top of her head peeking out of the headrest.
“Joe, I can’t see. I can’t see,” she panicked, her hands fumbling over the glove compartment in front of her and onto the windshield.
“It’s dark, Anna,” my father told her, veering the vehicle to the curb and stopping, covering my mother’s shaking hands with his own, eyes searching hers for recognition. “It’s night. Only night. See, I’ll turn on the light.”
He flicked on the small
reading light located on the roof of the van and waited as my mother, the instant tears which had come with her fear drying upon her cheeks, put on her rose-coloured glasses and waited for the shadows to adjust.
“Oh, Joe, your eyes,” she exclaimed. “Your eyes!” And then she slumped back down in her seat, breathing heavily.
My father took longer to recover, unfolding the map again, tracing the route we had taken with a pencil, periodically staring blankly out the windows at the new signs. Cars were passing us, their headlights on, anticipating arrivals, and I wondered how many drivers or passengers knew where they were headed on this night or if there were others like us, finding bearings in a new place.
“Daddy, do you know where this new house is?” I asked, while Christine busily pointed to a row of pine trees along the roadside.
“Look at them, they’re all so small!” she cried. The ones on our old property were three times the size and could only be decorated outside at Christmas, being far too large to fit in our living room.
“Of course I do,” Father assured me. “Can you girls just relax and let me alone ’til we get there? Please,” he added, feeling my mother’s forehead beside him for temperature. “Your mother needs her sleep.”
“She’s always sleeping,” Christine muttered, pressing her hand against the window, outlining the dusty print it made with her fingers.
“Shut up,” I told her.
“You’re no better, always moping around. Can’t anyone have some fun?” She leaned forward, jutting her head into the front of the van. “Can’t we have some fun, Daddy?”
My father reached back with his right hand and ruffled the bangs of her hair. He was probably at the end of his tether, but he adjusted the rear-view mirror to offer us both a sympathetic smile and then started the engine again. “Soon, Sweetheart. Let Daddy drive now.”
Christine leaned back into her seat and, astonishingly, was asleep within minutes. I always envied her ability to meld into her surroundings, no matter how foreign or strange. Her ability to adapt. My eyes remained open the whole trip, keeping watch over Mother’s breath, Father’s erratic driving, the scenery passing us, as if I might be able to find my way back if needed. Reflected in the window, my face was as grave as the dark pines we were passing. I did not like this city, this new house, before we ever arrived. The air, thick like gas, and the smell of burning pulp from the paper mills in the town we had driven through just a half-hour earlier had left me nauseated. The city’s being rose up like an animal out of a hole. How does it breathe, I wondered, under all this dirt? Then it started to rain.
Ashbrook Crescent, a street with grey concrete curves that wound around the houses as if protecting the lights in living rooms with drawn curtains, possessed humble homes with one-door garages and short, stubby driveways, almost all split-level bungalows made of red or grey brick, townhouses, split into two. The autumn foliage was the only hint of nature’s stubborn intrusion. The windows were untrimmed, the backyards hidden by fences, the front entrances ornamented modestly with dried cornhusks or wooden plaques. Three streets earlier a park with a miniature baseball diamond and a neglected plastic playground had stood vacant, with crossing signs that read “Watch Out for Children,” though none were playing there, and I didn’t see any on the streets as we drove. Not a single person was outside when we arrived. Our new street, though worn with age, had the appearance of being temporarily erected, a place to recuperate between moves, not a place to move to.
When our new home came into view, with the fresh rain slipping down the windows, I saw it first like that, as though through a veil of tears. From that moment on, I think my own eyes took on the vision of that glass, with single-second moments of clarity, but mostly a view lacking in focus, causing me to venture with caution. We had a corner lot near the end of the winding road. Obviously the bungalow had been abandoned quickly: cardboard boxes on the curb, many of the window shutters open, a single porch light at the entrance hanging in vigil, the scuff marks on the red bricks exposed. The street numbers painted in gold, however, were apparently new, and glittered against the peeled skins of the plaster and stone. The number 40, the exact age of my mother, hung oddly unattached, removable like the plastic ones we had pressed into her birthday cake two months earlier. Christine had blown out the candles for her.
After my father and I got out of the car, shielding the rain from our heads with our hands, we helped lift my mother out of the front seat. She had lost weight over the last year, had become brittle in her bones, and the slightest bump or nudge left bruises on her skin. Three days before we finished packing, she’d stumbled on a stair and hit the banister. A purple bruise, the shape of a plum, was still visible on her arm. Christine, who had woken up when we stopped, jumped along the driveway, her feet splashing in and out of puddles, her coat, flattened from the long trip, flying open and rising in the wind. She was eager to open the locked front door, and pulled at the handle.
“Stop her, Joseph, she might get sick,” my mother feebly managed as my father covered her with his jacket, his white shirt plastered from the rain, curly brown chest hairs tight against the thin fabric. He moved like a man delivering a fragile package, with short steps, her body held up in his arms. My father too had transformed over the last year, his hair a shade darker from store-bought dye, his face pinched, his torso firm. His body was so taut it appeared to be conserving space. At the top step, he pointed to the mailbox, where Christine found the key in an envelope soaked with rain.
I was in charge of bringing in the sleeping bags. Our first night at 40 Ashbrook Crescent would be spent in the living room, the small brick fireplace burning damp wood and crinkled newspaper, the thermostats defrosting after having been shut down for a couple of days. The floor was orange-brown, carpeted, and dusty. Mother spent most of the night coughing, keeping us half-awake. The previous owners had left various things in the home: a plastic table in the kitchen, mismatched bowls and cutlery, a broom in the linen closet, an end table, a painting of a sailboat left crookedly attached to a nail in the living room, a pail under the kitchen sink, and a couch with a large stain and an offensive odour that Father had to drag outside to the curb with the rest of the garbage before we could sleep. I noticed nervously as we unrolled the sleeping bags that there were only two bedrooms and one bathroom off the hallway adjacent to the living room and kitchen doors. There weren’t enough rooms for us to live as we had before; I didn’t want to share a bedroom with Christine. My sister slept curled up in a ball, my father’s face close to hers, my mother’s angled towards the hallway. I resigned myself to the corner, near a single window slapped with rain, asking myself dumbly what this place would offer me, counting the half-dying embers of the fire.
It was two days later that I was told about St. X. School for Girls. My mother had since been put up in the larger of the two bedrooms on a fold-out cot made comfortable by unmatched sheets and blankets, her dry face peeking out amidst the colours, her short hair flattened to her scalp with bobby pins. Her usual pitcher of water sat on the carpeted floor. We had made sure to keep it handy in the van for when we arrived. I knelt beside her while my father, who had made the arrangements, spoke to Christine in the kitchen. I had already grown weary that no attempt had been made to set up the other bedroom, and no one had mentioned who was to sleep there. Father had filled it with unopened boxes while the three of us continued to sleep in our bags in the living room.
“You will have your own room there,” my mother told me calmly. “And your father’s new work will be taking up too much time, and you know I can’t get around like before.”
Her breath was laboured, wheezing in and out like an old fan, her lips chapped, matching the white creases on her forehead and cheeks. She sweated continually, the mildest movement, however delicate, acting against the desire of her body to keep still. “At least it isn’t her mind,” I overheard Father say to a nurse at the clinic we had visited in the nearest city to our old home. The nurse nodded back, squ
eezing his arm comfortingly, and exited the room to escort an older man with a cane in for tests. My mother was too young for such a place, I thought, the room filled with grey hair and wrinkled faces, signs in large print. Yet, relegated to her cot, she did seem old in her body, and I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have preferred to trade a little of her mind for a piece of her younger body back. She was slowly being erased. I feared if I left her, she would simply disappear.
“I could help out here, Mommy, please.” I held her hand in mine, tracing her knuckles, the fine bones delicate as the beads in her rosary she kept beside her pillow, a plain silver chain with tiny white beads, the silent companion of her hours, a Confirmation gift from the nuns she had lived with in Ireland when she was a girl. The Sisters of Mercy. They had taken her in as a toddler after her parents were killed in an automobile accident. The grandparents had disowned her mother for marrying a Northerner. However, she had been baptized and the nuns welcomed the young girl. “They were strict women,” my mother told me. “But they did good work. They saved me from a destitute life. They gave me a sound education and moral values. I owe them more than I can ever repay.”
“No, God will watch over me, Angela. You must have faith in Him. You must get an education. The school is very good, well worth the money—”
“It’s too expensive,” I begged. “Daddy hasn’t sold all the woodwork yet. I heard him—”
“That’s not your concern,” she replied sternly, taking a deep breath, the air struggling into her lungs as she removed her hand from mine and motioned to the window. I rose and opened it. A gust of wind shoved itself against my neck.
“You be a good girl for your mother. I’m too tired to argue with you,” she added, as if she were the one defeated in our argument. “It isn’t far and we’ll see you on weekends when your father is home. It’ll be like the school I went to when I was a young girl. It will be an important time in your life, Angela. Trust me.”
The Divine Economy of Salvation Page 2
