The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  She was dressed in white wool: bonnet, coat, and leggings, which was a flaw in the memory, since it must have been high summer. He stared at her, she stared back with wide eyes. He said to himself, There’s the girl I’ll marry.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE NUNS who got the two mothers walking together. Or Sister Lucy did, anyway. Sister Lucy, who could insist.

  She had finagled a lovely baby carriage from a well-to-do couple on President Street, an older couple whose first and only child hadn’t lived past infancy. Then she went with Sister Jeanne to 314, to the doorman’s wife, to say there’s a widow down the street with a new baby. “Put on your hat and go pay her a call.” Still standing at the threshold, Sister Lucy cast an assessing eye around Mrs. Tierney, to the cluttered apartment behind her, then to the chapped cheeks of the baby on her hip, then over the woman herself, who was dressed in a bungalow apron of pale percale, a damp stain, mother’s milk perhaps, on her chest. There was a baby bawling in another room. “Fix yourself up,” Sister Lucy added, “and have a nice visit.”

  Mrs. Tierney smiled. She asked for the lady’s name and address. Said she would be certain to visit her sometime soon.

  Sister Lucy said, “Why not now? We’ll watch the children while you go.”

  At the nun’s side, Sister Jeanne blushed apologetically, shrugged, and then held out her hands to the little boy in Mrs. Tierney’s arms. Mrs. Tierney felt his body, the weight of him, tilt toward the nun as if a magnet drew him.

  And then she laughed. Invited the Sisters in.

  * * *

  GOING TO AND FROM THE PARK—hot weather or cold, snow or stifling humidity, only a hard rain ever kept them indoors—the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses. Together, they returned Elizabeth Tierney’s boys and the twin girls to her apartment and then together carried both unwieldy carriages up the steep stone steps. Let other mothers park their baby carriages in alleyways and courtyards, beside garbage cans and under stairs. Not these two.

  Compared to Annie’s sparse rooms, Mrs. Tierney’s place was a carnival of cribs and trundle beds, clothes and washbins and dirty plates. Each morning, the dining room table was filled with sticky glasses and piled saucers and ashtrays crowded with cigarette butts and cigar stubs, because Michael, her husband, liked a gathering of men in the evening. “His cronies,” Mrs. Tierney called them—his coworkers mostly, doormen and bellhops and waiters who hailed, she said, from “all corners of the earth.” “The more the merrier,” she said. Despite the mess of glasses and plates, the lingering smell of cigar smoke that competed with the odors of wet laundry and dirty diapers, she said it with the same amused, eye-rolling fondness that she applied to everything that had to do with her husband, who was no immigrant himself but the well-spoken son of a schoolteacher from up near Poughkeepsie. Whose family had disowned him, she said, for “coming down in the world” to marry her.

  With the two big black carriages secured in the narrow hallway of Elizabeth Tierney’s apartment and her babies settled into them once more, Annie and her daughter left the jumbled household each morning for the peace and the order of the Little Nursing Sisters’ convent, where she had been given work in the basement laundry.

  Sister St. Saviour had arranged it. Before her last illness, the old nun had slipped a note beneath the feet of the Virgin—via her statue in the convent’s front garden—requesting that sufficient funds be found to pay the girl’s salary. “Somehow, dear Mother.” The women of the convent’s Ladies Auxiliary found the note—they checked the statue daily—and presented the petition to their members. The Ladies Auxiliary of the convent of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, consisted mostly of idle Catholic women married to successful men. As Sister St. Saviour well understood, they felt a particular there-but-for-the-grace-of-God affinity for impoverished young widows.

  Out of the funds the Ladies Auxiliary provided, the nuns paid Annie eighteen dollars a week, and fed her, and her daughter when she was weaned, a breakfast and a lunch. It was, all agreed, a fine situation for a widow with an infant. A wicker basket was fitted with towels and a pillowslip, and the baby slept at her mother’s feet while she washed and sewed and helped Sister Illuminata with the ironing.

  As the child grew, the nuns added a donated crib, and then a small Persian rug, another donation, to cover a bit of the damp basement floor. There were scraps of cloth and empty spools for the child to play with, and the ducks and dogs Sister Illuminata carved from Ivory soap—an annoyance for Annie, since she had to remain vigilant in order to keep the girl from putting them into her mouth or her eyes, but nothing she could refuse, given Sister Illuminata’s pride in her own whittling and the child’s delight each time the nun produced a new figure from her robes.

  The work itself was endless. Every day, donated clothing arrived at the convent, clothing for the poor, which had to be sorted and washed and mended. There were as well the stained bedclothes of the sick: sheets and blankets and pillowcases, diapers, towels, handkerchiefs, all brought home from the households where the Sisters were nursing. In any idle moment, there were bandages to make, worn bed sheets to be sterilized and rolled and placed neatly into the satchels each Sister carried to her casework.

  There was also, every week, the routine washing and ironing of the convent linen and the Sisters’ habits, the black serge tunics and short capes—the application of thick starch and the heated iron to their bibs and their bonnets. Whatever troubles the Sisters encountered in their daily work were illustrated by the stains on an apron or a sleeve—the odor of vomit on wool, a spattering of blood across a white bib. What troubles the Sisters’ mortal bodies produced of their own accord were evident in the unending menstrual rags and long johns stained yellow at underarm or crotch. When Annie arrived in the morning, her first task was to empty the overnight soaking bin—the water pink with blood. And then the trip upstairs to the convent kitchen, to boil some water for the first wash, and while she waited, a cup of tea and a bun and a pleasant time of day with Mrs. Odette, the convent’s cook, another widow from the neighborhood, or, if she’d arrived early enough, a laugh or two with Mr. Costello, the milkman.

  In the basement, the low-hanging light was dim, the dark brick walls clammy to the touch. All day long there was the sound of agitated wash water, of the wringer’s torturous crank and squeak, the hiss and thud of Sister Illuminata’s black iron. In winter there was as well the bump and moan of the convent’s fiery furnace. In summer, through the high opened windows, the chants of jump-rope songs, the organ grinder, the cries of boys playing ball in the street.

  In every season, the changing daylight found its way into all corners of the cellar. Sometimes it was a discouraging gray in the morning, but a buoyant display of yellow and gold by the time the chapel bell was rung at three. Sometimes only the earliest hours illuminated the place, and when evening came a muffled darkness pressed against the electric lights.

  At various times there was the smell of wet wool, bleach, vinegar, turpentine, pine soap, and starch.

  On damp days, they hung the clothes and the linens from lines strung between the basement’s iron support beams. When the weather was fine, they brought the wash out to the convent yard.

  There was, each day, the clear and certain restoration of order: fresh linens folded, stains gone, tears mended.

  Sister Illuminata was a wizard with a hot iron and starch, with scrub brush and bleach. On four dark shelves in a corner of her basement domain, she kept a laboratory’s worth of vital ingredients: not merely the store-bought Borax and Ivory and bluing agents, but the potions she mixed herself: bran water to stiffen curtains and wimples, alum water to make muslin curtains and nightwear resist fire, brewed coffee to darken the Sisters’ stockings and black tunics, Fels-Naptha water for general washing, Javelle water (washing soda, chloride of lime, boiling water) for restoring limp fabric. She had an encyclopedic understanding of how to treat stains. Tea:
Borax and cold water. Ink: milk, salt, and lemon juice. Iodine: chloroform. Iron rust: hydrochloric acid. Mucus: ammonia and soap. Mucus tinged with blood (which she always greeted with a sign of the cross): salt and cold water.

  In Sister Illuminata’s unyielding routine, each item received two washings: inside out and then right side out, then a pass through the mangle, then another soaping, a boiling, another rinse, another wringing. If the garments were to be blued, then a rinse again in cold water to avoid rust stains. Wrung again, then starched, then hung to dry. Sister Illuminata would not allow the courtyard clothesline to be left out in the weather; she tied it up each morning and took it down again at the end of every bright day. She washed the clothespins themselves once a month. With sacred solemnity, Sister Illuminata demonstrated for Annie how a garment should be properly shaken and hung (chemises and shirts by the hem, pillowslips inside out and by the seam, with the wind, never against it). She demonstrated the precise way to sprinkle and roll what was newly dried, and how to pound the rolled fabric in order to distribute the moisture. The ironing was Sister Illuminata’s special domain. She had four different irons of various sizes, which she washed on occasion in soap and water, then rubbed with sandstone and polished, lovingly, with beeswax.

  Sister Illuminata was shrill in her demands, unbending in her routine; any washing Annie attempted during her first few weeks in the nuns’ employ was dismissed as a mere “lick and a promise.” Sister Illuminata had never asked them to send her an assistant.

  She was a solid, plain, wide-bottomed woman. The pale skin of her cheeks and her forehead and her chin was crepe-thin; it hung like crepe over the edge of her white coif. Her hands were always a raw, bright red, her right index finger marked with the shining oval of a testing-the-iron scar. Except for the time she spent in the chapel, Sister Illuminata was always moving, her sleeves rolled up, her veil tied back. She was bending over the washbasin or feeding wet clothes into the cranking wringer, or ironing, ironing—this was the area of her greatest expertise—throwing her whole body into it, elbows and back and hips.

  * * *

  SISTER ILLUMINATA flicked her wet fingers over the cloth as if to douse a sinner. She thumped the black iron against the wooden board, thumped and lifted and thumped and shook—the steam rising—as if each piece she pressed involved some feat of determination and strength, a mortal struggle. Her elbows flared in the wide sleeves, her nostrils flared in her beaked nose. She called sharply to Annie to say, “Come here and learn something. This is a trick my mother had…” She ran the point of the iron—“See, like this”—along a perfect seam. “My mother,” she said, “was a marvel.”

  Her mother, she said, had been a laundress in Dublin. A profession the Sisters of Mercy had found for her when she first came to the city as a young girl. She died of cancer when Sister Illuminata was just twenty. In her last suffering months, it was the nursing Sisters of the parish who offered comfort and care. Sister Illuminata entered their noviate a year later and emigrated to the States at thirty. But a bout of tuberculosis put an end to her own nursing days. She spent eight months at a sanatorium upstate, and when she returned, she was left to live out her vocation “down here.”

  Down here, in the basement of the convent, amid the dampness and the rising steam, the baby asleep in her crib, the sheets or long johns hung out on the line, Sister Illuminata called to Annie to say, Come and learn something. She said, My mother was a marvel at this … or, My mother had a trick. She told Annie, Here’s how my mother turned a collar, mended a cuff, starched linen, sized, stretched, bleached … my mother did it this way … my mother taught me this.

  The phrase giving way to the stories, as the weeks and months went by: and then my mother left the farm and made her way to the city, where the Sisters of Mercy took her under their wing … and then it was my mother they called on, his Lordship himself being the one whose britches were in need of repair …

  And then my mother found herself a widow with a small child, just like you … and then she took me into the laundry with her, just like you do.

  Down here, Annie knew, the words were a kind of contraband. None of the Sisters, in those days, spoke of their lives before the convent, in what they dismissively called the world. To take their vows was to leave all else behind: girlhoods and families and friends, all of love that was merely personal, all of life that required a backward glance. The white horse-blinder bonnets they wore did more than limit their peripheral vision. They reminded the Sisters to look only at the work at hand.

  Annie imagined how silently the days must have passed for Sister Illuminata during all the years she had labored down here in the convent basement alone, without an assistant, and, imagining this—recalling as well her own loneliness each silent, weary evening—she swallowed her anger at the nun’s shrill demands. She swallowed as well the woman’s insults—a lick and a promise—her implacable routines. Annie turned her face into her shoulder whenever Sister Illuminata was cross, when even a blessed saint would have been compelled to whisper, “Damn bitch.”

  And she lied, saying in all innocence, “No, I never heard it,” when Sister Illuminata began again the story of how her mother repaired the britches of a magistrate or encountered a dray horse in the drying yard or saved the life of another laundress’s child who had swallowed a fistful of alum—forty, fifty years ago this was, although as fresh in Sister Illuminata’s telling, and retelling, as if it all had happened just this morning, just upstairs, in the world above their heads.

  * * *

  ON AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY SUMMER, when Sally was not yet two, Annie and the nun sat together in silence, the baby on the bit of rug between them. They were sorting through a collection of donated clothes, sorting, examining, determining what could be washed and mended and brought to the poor from what was bound for rags, or, if there was evidence of moths or lice, the incinerator. Because the nuns allowed Annie first choice in this—wasn’t she the poor, after all?—most of her daughter’s clothes came from these donation baskets, and not a few blouses and skirts for herself.

  Which may well account for the white wool coat and leggings and bonnet our father so vividly recalled. A winter ensemble too fine to resist and too perfect a fit to save for cold weather.

  Suddenly Sally let out a shriek and began to wail, a fist to her eye. Annie dropped the moth-eaten shawl she’d been holding up to the light and went to her knees beside the child. Sister Illuminata leaned forward. The girl was red-faced and screaming. “Something in her eye,” Sister said, and Annie tried to move the child’s fist away. Sally resisted. She was clutching something in her balled hand. “Let me see it, darling,” she coaxed. But the girl wouldn’t budge. She twisted her arm away from her mother, grew desperate, even as she screwed the balled fist against her face. It was a piece of white soap. Annie saw that the smallest of Sister’s carved ducks was on the rug beside the child, decapitated. The girl was pressing the tiny severed head into her eye. “Give it to me, darling,” Annie said. “You’re hurting yourself.” With some effort, she pulled the girl’s fist away from her face, but she could not coax her to open her hand. Sister Illuminata, meanwhile, was fetching a wet cloth. She handed it to Annie. On her mother’s lap, the child was still crying, but still clutching as well the offending piece of soap. Annie put the wet towel over the soap-stung eye. Gently, Sister Illuminata tried to take the soap from the girl’s fist, and once again the child pulled away. She would not give it up.

  “Oh, she’s stubborn,” Annie whispered. “She’s not going to give in.” And then she added, “She gets that from Jim.”

  Sister Illuminata leaned over them both, broad in her habit and her apron, which was slightly damp. She put a raw red hand to the child’s fine hair. “Jim,” the nun said firmly, “gets the credit, then. She’ll never be a pushover.”

  Later that same day, when the smell of the Sisters’ dinner wafted down the stairs, Annie heard herself say, “Jim would never eat a turnip.” Later still, when a heat
wave struck the city, “Jim was never a drinker, thank God, but he’d take a beer on a day like today.” When Sally, growing up, grew silent around strangers, “Jim had a shyness about him, too. The first time we met, I wondered if he was ever going to say a word.”

  In the dank basement laundry of the convent, Annie said, “Jim had a good voice, but he preferred a silly song to a ballad, which drove me mad.” She said, “Jim had a friend who wore shoes like that.” She said, “Jim couldn’t abide a tight collar.” She said, Jim was, Jim preferred, Jim told me once.

  Mrs. Tierney was full of fond stories about her exasperating husband, but on their morning walks, decorum and superstition kept both women silent about Annie’s loss. The people who had seen him in life, neighbors and friends, lowered their eyes whenever she passed them in the hallway or on the street. Sister St. Saviour was gone. And Sister Jeanne, who knew all, kept all in her heart.