The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  “Tomorrow!” Sister Lucy said again. “Calvary—she’s got it all arranged.” She shivered a bit, wrapped her cloak around her more tightly, and dropped her mouth into a longer frown. “And why is she rushing him into the ground?”

  There was a yellow tint to her pupils, which were darting back and forth as they took in the rooftops and the icy snowflakes. “I’ll say only this,” Sister Lucy declared. “You can’t pull strings with God.” She leveled her gaze and pulled again at her cloak. Sister Jeanne thought of a painting she had seen, maybe in the courthouse or a post office, of a square-jawed general in the snow—was it George Washington?—his cloak drawn about him just so.

  “You can’t pull the wool over God’s eyes,” Sister Lucy said.

  Sister Jeanne, the bucket in one hand and the broom in another, and the cold, for the first time this morning, whipping into her open cloak, turned somewhat gratefully to a woman who was passing on the sidewalk and saying, “Good morning, Sisters.” She was a young woman bundled against the weather, a dark blue shawl wrapped around her broad hat, another thrown over her shoulders. She was pushing a baby carriage. A thin line of snow had gathered on the hood of the carriage, and there was a frosting of snow on the knuckles of her black gloves as well. She was pregnant under her man’s overcoat. The nuns said, “Good morning,” with a bow, and Sister Jeanne moved to peer into the carriage. She felt Sister Lucy, reluctantly, bending to look as well. The baby inside was so swaddled in plaid wool there were only two placid eyes and a tiny nose and the dash of a pursed, thoughtful mouth. “Oh, lovely!” Sister Jeanne cried. “Snug as a bug in a rug.”

  “He likes the snow,” the mother replied. She was rosy-cheeked herself.

  “He’s watching it come down, isn’t he?” Sister Jeanne said.

  Sister Lucy also smiled. It was only a small, tight smile, but mighty, considering the weight of the anger it had worked itself out from under. She turned the smile toward the child and then the mother. Once more, the snowflakes began to gather in her yellow lashes, and she narrowed her eyes against them. “Is your husband good to you?” she asked.

  Sister Jeanne briefly closed her eyes. Her cheeks grew warm. The young mother gave a short, startled laugh. “Yes, Sister,” she said. “He is.”

  Sister Lucy raised her bare hand, one red finger in the air, and Sister Jeanne thought of General Washington again—or perhaps it was Napoleon. “Has he got a good job?”

  “He does,” the mother said. She straightened her spine. “He’s a doorman at the St. Francis Hotel.”

  Sister nodded, barely placated. “Do you live nearby?” she asked.

  “Yes, Sister,” she said. She nodded over her shoulder. “Just at 314. Since last Saturday.”

  Now Sister Lucy turned the finger toward the woman’s heart. “You come to see me,” she said, “if ever he’s not good to you.”

  “He’s good to me,” the girl said again, laughing.

  “We’re in the convent on Fourth. I’m Sister Lucy.” She swung her hand. “This is Sister Jeanne. You come see us if need be.”

  The woman gave a little curtsy, but began to move the carriage nonetheless. “I will,” she said. “Good morning, Sisters.”

  The woman was only a few feet away when Sister Lucy said, “If he was good to her, he might let her catch her breath before starting another child.” She blinked at the snowflakes that were trying to cover her eyes. “He might think of her health instead of his pleasure.”

  All joy was thin ice to Sister Lucy.

  Sister Jeanne bowed her head and studied for a minute the tips of their identical shoes. Under the skim of cold on her cheeks she could still feel the rising heat.

  “I’ll go in, then,” Sister Jeanne whispered, and turned to the steps.

  “I’ll try to get the word out,” Sister Lucy called after her. “I’ll talk to Mr. Hennessey, who knows all the motormen. But there’s hardly time to gather a decent crowd, the way she’s rushing things. And only one night for the wake.”

  Sister Jeanne nodded without turning, going up the steps. She had quite forgotten God was in the snow around her, in the cold and the wide sky; she had quite forgotten her pleasure in the day’s work ahead. She was thinking instead that they were well rid of Sister Lucy.

  * * *

  A POLICEMAN AND A FIREMAN were conferring with another gentleman in the hallway by the stairs. They all turned and nodded to the young nun as she came through the vestibule. The door to the apartment was ajar and she let herself in. In full, if weak, daylight, the room seemed nicer than it had last night, if only because now, with the curtains in the big picture window opened, it had the view of the snow to make it cheerful. There was still the smell of smoke, but the smell of cleaning ammonia was now cut into it—the smell of the day going on. She crossed the living room and entered the narrow corridor that was lined with two portraits of dour peasants and found Sister St. Saviour in the tiny kitchen. Sister Jeanne placed the broom against the door and carried the bucket to the table where the old nun sat. The kitchen had been well scrubbed, the only trace of the lady’s interrupted dinner was the newspaper that had been folded beside her plate. Sister St. Saviour now had it wide open before her.

  Sister Jeanne poured the milky tea into a cup she borrowed from the cabinet and set it down. “It’s still awfully cold in here, Sister,” she said.

  Sister St. Saviour moved the cup closer without raising it. “The men have just been in to turn on the gas,” she said. “I asked them to carry out a few things that were damaged in the fire. They’re going to wash the walls for me as well. So we’ve made some progress.”

  Sister Jeanne took a plate from the cupboard, set out the buttered bread and jam.

  “Mr. Sheen will get the body from the morgue this morning,” Sister St. Saviour went on. “First thing the lady wakes, she’ll have to pick out his clothes. You can run them over for me. We’ve got a mass set for six tomorrow morning. Then the cemetery. The ground, praise God, isn’t frozen. It’ll all be finished before the new day’s begun.”

  “That’s quick,” Sister Jeanne said. She hesitated and then added, “Sister Lucy wonders why it’s such a rush.”

  Sister St. Saviour only raised her eyes to the top of the newspaper. “Sister Lucy,” she said casually, “has a big mouth.”

  She turned the opened newspaper over, to the front page, straightening the edges. Then she touched her glasses. “Here’s a story,” she said, and put her fingertip to the page. “Mr. Sheen mentioned it to me this morning. A man over in Jersey, playing billiards in his home, accidentally opened the gas tap in the room, with the pole they use, the cue, it says, and asphyxiated himself.” She raised her chin. “His poor wife called him for dinner and found him gone.” The glasses made her dark eyes sparkle. “Day before yesterday. Mr. Sheen mentioned it to me this morning. He was pointing out how common these things are. These accidents with the gas.”

  Sister St. Saviour moved her finger up the page. “And now here’s a story of a suicide,” she continued. “On the same page. Over on Wards Island. A man being treated at the hospital over there, for madness. It seems he was doing well enough, but then he threw himself into the water and disappeared. At Hell Gate. It says the water covered him up at Hell Gate.” She clucked her tongue. “As if the devil needed to put a fine point on his work.” She moved her arm once again. She might have been signing a blessing over the page. “And here’s another story of a Wall Street man gone insane. Same day. Throwing bottles into the street, bellowing. Carted off to the hospital.” She leaned forward, reading, her finger on the page, “‘Where he demanded to see J. P. Morgan and Colonel Roosevelt.’”

  Sister Jeanne leaned forward as well. “Is it true?” she asked.

  Sister St. Saviour laughed. “True enough.” Her smile was as smooth as paint. “The devil loves these short, dark days.”

  Sister Jeanne straightened her spine. She sometimes feared that Sister St. Saviour was wobbly in her ways. Hadn’t she once said, on Siste
r Jeanne’s first day in the convent, “Could you go tinkle for me?”

  “Mr. Sheen told me,” Sister St. Saviour went on, “that he could show the article about the billiard man to anyone in the Church, or at the cemetery, in case there was a question. To show how common these sorts of accidents are. And how easily they could be misinterpreted. This New Jersey man, after all, had come home early from work. And closed the door. Had he been a poor man, not a man with a billiard table at all, they might have made a different report out of it. The rich can get whatever they want put into the papers.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME MRS. GERTLER RETURNED to reclaim her apartment, Annie was up and dressed and sitting in a chair by the window with one of Sister Jeanne’s handkerchiefs clutched in both hands.

  The two nuns walked up the stairs with her, Sister Jeanne ahead and Sister St. Saviour just behind, her swollen ankles weighting each step with pain. At the apartment door, it was Sister St. Saviour who stepped back so the girl could enter with the young nun at her side.

  At four o’clock, the black hearse pulled up. The three women watched from the bedroom window. Mr. Sheen, elegant in his long overcoat, left the cab first and was the first to appear upstairs. He was a tall man with the sharp nose and high cheekbones of an Indian chief, a pair of large, heavy-lidded eyes that couldn’t have been better suited to his profession. He swept off his hat and took the widow’s two hands into his own and, with a quick look around the sparsely furnished room, suggested the lady and the two nuns might want to wait in the bedroom while he made his preparations. Annie and Sister Jeanne sat together at the foot of the bed while Sister St. Saviour stood at the door. They could hear Mr. Sheen giving instructions. And then the unmistakable sound of the coffin being carried up the stairs, a bit of labored breathing, and the touch of the wooden casket against the doorframe. And then Mr. Sheen rapped on the bedroom door to say all was ready.

  The husband’s face was pale and waxen, but it was, nevertheless, a lovely face. Boyish and solemn above the starched white collar, with a kind of youthful stubbornness about it as well. The look of a child, Sister St. Saviour thought, when met with the spoon of castor oil.

  While Annie and Sister Jeanne knelt, Sister St. Saviour blessed herself and considered the sin of her deception, slipping a suicide into hallowed ground. A man who had rejected his life, the love of this brokenhearted girl, the child coming to them in the summer. She said to God, who knew her thoughts, Hold it against me if You will. He could put this day on the side of the ledger where all her sins were listed: the hatred she felt for certain politicians, the money she stole from her own basket to give out as she pleased—to a girl with a raging clap, to the bruised wife of a drunk, to the mother of the thumb-sized infant she had wrapped in a clean handkerchief, baptized, and then buried in the convent garden. All the moments of how many days when her compassion failed, her patience failed, when her love for God’s people could not outrun the girlish alacrity of her scorn for their stupidity, their petty sins.

  She wanted him buried in Calvary to give comfort to his poor wife, true. To get the girl what she’d paid for. But she also wanted to prove herself something more than a beggar, to test the connections she’d forged in this neighborhood, forged over a lifetime. She wanted him buried in Calvary because the power of the Church wanted him kept out and she, who had spent her life in the Church’s service, wanted him in.

  Hold it against the good I’ve done, she prayed. We’ll sort it out when I see You.

  Only a few neighbors came to call, every one of them a little restrained in sympathy, given the unspoken notion that the son of a bitch could have taken them all with him. A trio of red-faced motormen stopped by, but stayed only a minute when no drink was offered. Later, the two nuns walked Mr. Sheen downstairs in order to give the girl some time alone with her husband. At the curb, he reached into the cab of the hearse and pulled out the day’s newspaper. He folded back a page and tapped a narrow article. Sister St. Saviour leaned forward to read, Sister Jeanne at her elbow. In the descending light of the cold evening, the blur of a misting rain and a rising fog, the two could just make out the headline: SUICIDE ENDANGERS OTHERS. It was followed by the full report of the fire and the man’s death by his own hand. “There’s nothing to be done, Sister,” Mr. Sheen whispered. “Now that it’s in the paper, there’s not a Catholic cemetery that will have him. I’ll have my head handed to me on a plate if I try to bring him into the church.”

  To Sister Jeanne’s eyes, the black newsprint, especially the bold headline that seemed to swell and blur under the blow of each raindrop, briefly transformed the world itself into a thing made of paper, pocked by tears.

  But Sister St. Saviour pushed the undertaker’s hand away. She thought of the rude young man with the milk tooth and the gray fedora. Her glasses flashed under the just-illuminated lamplight. “The New York Times,” she said, “has a big mouth.”

  * * *

  THE TWO NUNS climbed the stairs again. Sister St. Saviour was aware of how patiently little Sister Jeanne paused with her on each step, a hand raised to offer aid. Inside, they coaxed the sobbing girl up off her knees and into the bed. It was Sister Jeanne who took over then—no weariness in her narrow shoulders, no indication at all that she felt the tedium of too much sympathy for a stranger. With Annie settled, Sister Jeanne told Sister St. Saviour to go back to the convent to rest. She whispered that she would keep vigil through the long night and have the lady ready first thing in the morning.

  “Ready for what?” Sister St. Saviour asked her, attempting to gauge how much the young nun understood—suspecting not much. “There will be no mass.” Her pain, her bone-through fatigue, made her voice sharper than she knew.

  Young Sister Jeanne looked up at the nun, moisture once more gathering in her pretty eyes. She said, with childish determination, “I’ll have her ready for whatever’s to come.”

  Sister St. Saviour left the two of them murmuring in the bedroom. At the casket, she paused again to look at the young man’s still face. She went to the window in the kitchen and looked down into that purgatory of the backyards. At this hour, there was nothing to be seen. All movement, all life, was in the lighted windows above: a man at a table, a child with a bedside lamp, a young woman walking an infant to and fro.

  Of course, it was Sister Jeanne who would be here when the baby arrived come summer.

  It was Sister Jeanne who had been sent for.

  The old nun felt a beggar’s envy rise to her throat. She envied little Jeanne, true enough—a new sin for her side of the ledger—envied her faith and her determination and her easy tears. But she envied as well the coming dawn, Lauds, still so many hours away. She envied the very daylight, envied every woman who would walk out into it, bustling, bustling, one foot in front of the other, no pain weighting her steps, so much to do.

  Confident of heaven—God knew her failings—Sister St. Saviour was, nevertheless, even now, jealous of life.

  She turned from the cold glass, turned as well a cold shoulder to the God who had brought her here so that Jeanne would follow. It was the way a bitter old wife might turn her back on a faithless husband.

  * * *

  THE BABY, a daughter, was born in August, just three weeks after the old nun died. She was called Sally, but baptized St. Saviour in honor of the Sister’s kindness that sad afternoon. That damp and gray afternoon when the pilot went out. When our young grandfather, a motorman for the BRT whose grave we have never found, sent his wife to do her shopping while he had himself a little nap.

  And Then

  OUR FATHER RODE sitting upright in the high baby carriage, like a boy in a small boat. It was his first memory. Displaced as he’d been from the shade under the perambulator’s hood, occupied now by yet another bundled infant, he spread out his arms and clutched the sides of the carriage: a boy in a storm-tossed rowboat. His mother, pushing the thing, was behind him. She navigated the broken sidewalks, the curbs, and the street crossings with a bangin
g determination that caused the whole contraption—high wheels and springs and the hard black body of the carriage itself—to shudder and quake, rearing at the curbs, bucking at the cobblestones, swinging left or right around poky pedestrians, dog droppings, the spilled contents of fruit markets, dry-goods stores, garbage cans. He rode every undulation, every swerve, with his spine straight, his arms outspread, and his hands fixed tightly around the gunwales of the carriage bed. He looked straight on. There were trees and cars, dustbins and lampposts on the left; on the right, buildings, gray stone and brick, with stoops and children and speared fence tops, but he kept his eyes glued to the horizon that began just above the arc of the black hood, focusing on the world ahead like a sea captain navigating an ice storm. He was petrified.

  At his back, his mother out for a stroll. Although the word hardly accommodated her perpetual haste, her determined plowing-through. Beside her, his brother trotted along, holding on to her skirt. She leaned her weight against the handlebar and brought the front of the carriage up in the air—he was tipped backward and the horizon became treed—and then she lifted the back wheels—tipping him forward, a hint of gray sidewalk aiming for his skull—as they mounted another curb. Now shade covered them all, as if there had been a lowering of clouds, and she slowed her pace. Smoothly, shadowy, another baby carriage, the silent black ghost galleon he knew somehow had been following them all the while, pulled alongside. He heard his mother’s voice, and the answering voice of another woman, as they passed into the smooth stream of the park. The conversation itself, an ongoing exchange, rippled with laughter, another smooth stream. It did not soothe him. He kept his back straight, his fingers locked on the edges of the carriage bed. He looked ahead, aware only peripherally of the other strollers, the passing trees and shade, the shadows of the perambulators and of the two women pushing them. He remained vigilant.

  There was the duet of the women’s voices, some birdsong, the faint cawing of a crow or a cat. Every once in a while, despite the curbless paths, the carriage beneath him shuddered abruptly—a jiggling, a pause, a jiggling again. He tightened his grip, braced his arms. He peered down a tarred lane of dappled sunlight, a busy sidewalk at the far end. And then the slowing of the wheels. The sound of cat or crow was not distant at all but rose from beneath the black hoods of the two carriages. In tandem, the women, his mother and her silhouetted friend, paused. His mother walked past him, his older brother still attached to her skirt. She leaned down to reach beneath the hood and lifted out a swaddled infant no bigger than a loaf of bread. The other woman did the same. Recently, his mother had been delivered of twins. And then, as she rocked this new scrap of child on her shoulder, and her friend did the same, he turned his head just a few inches more and was met, as if in mirror reflection, with the face of another child, sitting up just as he was, her small hands, as his were, gripping the sides of the black carriage, holding on, holding on. Vigilant like himself, he saw. Erect and terrified, like himself.