The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  His name, too, then, a kind of contraband. Jim was, Jim preferred, Jim told me once. But down here in the convent laundry, she spoke it as casually as she might have done if he still stirred about in the world upstairs. As if she were still a woman with an exasperating husband, no widow alone with a child. And Sister Illuminata listened, sympathetically, as any maiden friend of a married lady might do.

  Sally was six years old when, looking up from a set of paper dolls that had arrived in the donation basket, she asked, “Who’s Jim?”

  She was nine when it occurred to her to wonder where her father was buried. Her mother only put her hand to her heart and said, “Here.”

  She was nearly eleven when she came home from school with the delightful tale of a schoolmate’s visit to a father’s grave—a trolley ride, a lovely picnic on the green grass. Her mother threw back her head and said, laughing, “Let him come to us.”

  The sound of her mother’s laughter always startled and thrilled the girl. She smiled, put her hand to her mother’s broad cheek. Mistook the joke for a promise.

  The Ninth Hour

  IN THE HORARIUM OF THE CONVENT’S LIFE, afternoon prayers were said at three. Any Sisters who were not tied up with casework or alms-seeking returned to the convent then.

  Much later, when the arthritis in her knees got the best of her and her days were spent in a chair behind the ironing board, Sister Illuminata would only raise her eyes to the ceiling and, blessing herself, silently pray, but in the years of Sally’s childhood, she stopped what she was doing at the sound of the bell, dried her hands, rolled down her sleeves, and ponderously climbed the wooden stairs. Annie, finishing up some folding or mending, listened for the sound of the nuns’ prayers, the psalms, the hymn, then for the sound of Sister Illuminata’s return—breath short, beads clacking. And then, as Sister Illuminata settled back into her work, Annie would listen again, hopeful, for another, lighter step on the stairs. On the best days, she would look up to see Sister Jeanne bending over the banister, laughing like a child to find them there.

  “Reprieved!” Sister Illuminata would declare whenever the young nun appeared. There was no keeping the resentment out of her voice. “Curfew will not ring tonight,” she would add, pouting and jealous, but also, with the next thought, forgiving the two young women their clear delight in one another. Like is drawn to like, after all, and Sister Illuminata had been young once herself, arm and arm with one narrow, grimy, funny girl, Mary Pat Shea. She could recall the strong grip of Mary Pat’s arm, the boggy smell of her, the freckles and dirty fingernails and shining green eyes, the muscular, lithe, little body beside her own. Sister Illuminata had, in another lifetime, known that same delight.

  “Do you need a breath of fresh air?” Sister Jeanne might ask. Or, “Do you want to run out and get yourself a soda?” “Do you want to do some shopping?”

  This routine, too, had begun at Sister Lucy’s insistence. In the early days of Annie’s work at the convent, when Sally was still an infant, Sister Lucy put her eyes on Sister Jeanne as they left the chapel after the Ninth Hour prayer. “If you’re free this afternoon, go downstairs and take over with the baby,” she told her. Sister Lucy could insist. “Let the mother go out and catch her breath.”

  “Do you mind?” Annie always asked, looking up at the little nun, laughing despite the way Sister Illuminata, jealous and pouting, was abruptly rolling back her sleeves or sucking her scarred fingertip.

  And Sister Jeanne would skip down the stairs. “Do I mind?” as if the question couldn’t be more absurd.

  With her clasped hands to her heart, holding back her crucifix, Sister Jeanne peered into the wicker laundry basket where Sally slept or, as the child grew, hiked up her skirt to join her on the floor for whatever game she had devised out of soap animals and scraps of cloth and empty spools of thread.

  The girl delighted her. In fact, every child delighted Sister Jeanne. She was a practical nurse without formal training, and what skills she had were sometimes limited by her size and her strength, but her way with children was astonishing. Perhaps because, even in full habit, she seemed to be one of them: small and soft-spoken and easily given to laughter or tears, but also with a kind of sly skepticism in her eyes whenever she raised her chin to attend to some tall adult. A skepticism it seemed only the children could perceive, and share. Sister Jeanne need only turn her face from some serious, long-winded grown-up, a parent, a priest, a doctor, even one of the other nuns, to the child in the room and some understanding was established. It’s all silliness, isn’t it?—her eyes alone could convey. Let’s not let them know we know.

  Didn’t she do as much for us?

  Because of her small size and her talent with little ones, more often than not the casework Sister Jeanne was given was very sad: sick children, failing newborns, toddlers neglected or abused or abandoned. Her expertise was in the eradication of scabies, ringworm, lice, the application of castor oil and poultices, the cleaning of ears and the soothing of tears. Sister Jeanne knew the route to the various Brooklyn orphanages, or to the Foundling Home in Manhattan, better than any of the others. It was often her task to accompany the children there, sometimes from the gate of a cemetery, sometimes from the court or the station house, sometimes from the very room where the poor mother, newly cold, still lay, the gamy odor of death already encroaching on the still air.

  Out on the street with her charges, Sister Jeanne could make the trip an enchantment for the trembling little ones, pulling sugar cubes from her deep pockets or leaning down to point out something, or someone, that would make them laugh. She could negotiate the subway stairs and the crowded streets with a sleeping newborn tucked into the crook of her arm. And always—always, the Sister who accompanied her would report to the others—Sister Jeanne made the trip back to the convent in snuffling tears.

  What Sister Jeanne struggled to keep in balance was the sorrow she felt at the suffering of the sick and her own perpetual wonder at the miracle of the healthy. Sally was healthy—nine pounds when she was born and strong-limbed and rosy-cheeked as a toddler and young girl—and Sister Jeanne looked forward to seeing her in the basement laundry after a sad day with a failing child or a grieving mother, if only to assure herself that God was, after all, as generous with good health as He was with bad.

  She would hike up her skirt and join the girl on the small Persian rug, relishing her plump hands and bright eyes, her cleverness—by four she knew the name of every nun in the convent—her rapid growth; reassuring herself that the consumptive girl whose death she had recently attended was now restored in heaven with this same robust beauty. Telling herself that the poor mother’s wailing sorrow would be transformed, not now, but soon—life was like the blink of an eye—into Annie’s same joy as she took her healthy daughter into her arms here in the streaming afternoon light and said, “I’ll be back in a jiff.”

  “Take your time,” Sister Jeanne would say or, quoting Sister Lucy, “Go catch your breath,” which made them both laugh.

  When Annie had gone, Sister Jeanne and the child climbed the stairs. (“No, I’ll be fine,” Sister Illuminata might call after them. “Still so much to do. You’ll have to send my supper down.”) They stopped into the pretty chapel to kneel together and say their prayers. They went to the kitchen for some biscuits and a glass of milk, or—if it was far enough before dinner preparations were to begin—to mix up a pudding or a fool. When the weather was fine, they’d go out to the convent yard, where they’d dig in the garden with a spade and an old spoon. When it rained, they sat in the elegant parlor and said a rosary—Sister Jeanne making a fairy story of sorts out of each of the Mysteries—the girl counting the nun’s beads and, more often than not, drifting to sleep beside her.

  It was on these damp afternoons, in their brief and unaccustomed idleness, that Sister Jeanne considered Jim.

  Sister Jeanne believed with the conviction of an eye witness that all human loss would be restored: the grieving child would have her mother a
gain; the dead infant would find robust health; suffering, sorrow, accident, and loss would all be amended in heaven. She believed this because, because (and she only possessed the wherewithal to explain this to children—trying to say it to angry or grieving or bitter adults only left her tongue-tied), because fairness demanded it.

  It was, to her mind, a simple proposition. The madness with which suffering was dispersed in the world defied logic. There was nothing else like it for unevenness. Bad luck, bad health, bad timing. Innocent children were afflicted as often as bad men. Young mothers were struck down even as old ones fretfully lingered. Good lives ended in confusion or despair or howling devastation. The fortunate went blissfully about their business until that moment when fortune vanished—a knock on the door, a cough, a knife flash, a brief bit of inattention. A much-longed-for baby slid into the world only to grow blue and limp in its mother’s arms. Another arrived lame, or ill-formed, or simply too hungry for a frail woman already overwhelmed. There was a child in the next parish with a skull so twisted his mouth couldn’t close, and every breath he took, every word he spoke, even his childish laughter, rattled through dry and swollen lips. Another with a birthmark like a purple caul. Blindness. Beatings. Broken or bent bones. Accident, decay. Cruelty of nature. Cruelty of bad men. Idiocy, madness.

  There was no accounting for it.

  No accounting for how general it was, how arbitrary.

  Sister Jeanne believed that fairness demanded this chaos be righted. Fairness demanded that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insult and confusion find recompense and certainty, that every living person God had made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade.

  “You know what’s fair and what isn’t, don’t you?” Sister Jeanne would ask the sick child, the grieving orphan, Sally herself when she was old enough to understand the question. And us.

  “And how do you know?”

  Sister Jeanne would put a fingertip to the child’s forehead, to the child’s beating heart. “Because God put the knowledge in you before you were born. So you’d know fairness when you see it. So you’d know He intends to be fair.”

  * * *

  “WHO’S THE DUMBEST BOY IN YOUR CLASS?” she once asked us. This was in the Hempstead house where we were young. “And if the teacher’s dividing up sweets and gives him only one while everyone else gets two, what will he say? He’ll say it’s not fair, won’t he? If you call him out playing ball when everyone can see he’s safe by a mile, what will he say—dumb as he is in school? He’ll say it’s not fair, see? And how does he know? Did he learn what’s fair from a book? Did he take a test? No, he did not.”

  * * *

  ON THE NIGHT OF JIM’S WAKE, Sister Jeanne moved two chairs from the dining table to the side of his coffin. With Sister St. Saviour gone wearily back to the convent, she and Annie alone kept the long vigil. Sister Jeanne took out her beads, but she did not pray, and when Annie reached for her hand, Sister Jeanne found she could put no comfort in her grip. There was the newspaper article Mr. Sheen had held out for them to read, under the rain and the sad lamplight.

  There was the logic of redemption, all undone.

  Jim had not suffered the indignity of misfortune. He hadn’t caught a flu or stepped off the wrong curb, hadn’t had the pilot go out or the years wear him thin. He had endured no insult that God must amend. No accident. No illness. No unfortunate birth. He had been given his life and he had thrown his life away.

  In Sister Jeanne’s simple logic, the logic of her belief, fairness made no claim for him. His death was a whim of his own. His own choice. Who, in all fairness, could demand its restitution? The promise of the Redemption, the promise of everlasting life, of order restored in heaven, could hold no water, she believed, if it could not also be revoked by such willfulness, such arrogance. To gain heaven was no wonder if heaven could not also be lost.

  Through the long night—Annie’s hand in hers, her beads untold—Sister Jeanne studied his still and boyish face, cold stone. She could find no certainty in her heart, or in her imagination, that it would ever again know life.

  Now his child, his living flesh and blood, was stretched across the couch in the convent parlor, her arms flung wide, her little hands open, palms up, her fingers flickering with her dreams. She was growing quickly. Sister Jeanne had to struggle to catch the infant still in the fair brows and the closed eyes, gently lashed, the little mouth, so solemn in sleep. She felt—it was a flood, a filling up—how delightful it was to love this child, to find her here, day after day after day, a tonic for every sorrow. A restorative. A joy.

  She thought of Jim and what he had thrown away.

  The quiet convent parlor, in the hush of the rain, was tinged a kind of sepia—by the hour, by the weather, by the brown velvet of the couch and the room’s dark wainscoting. Mrs. Odette was murmuring to herself in the kitchen. The smell of cinnamon and apples was mixing with the convent’s own scent of incense and old wood. There was some rumble of traffic outside, muffled by the weather.

  And then a sudden sound—startling, like a bird hitting the window—and Sister Jeanne looked up to see the man himself, in his brown suit, watching her from the convent’s dim hallway. She knew that suit. She had run a horsehair clothes brush down its length, flicked a bit of lint from its shoulder before she carried it to Sheen’s funeral parlor. She knew the man. She knew that stubborn, solemn, lifeless face. It was lifeless still.

  Sister Jeanne by then had sat vigil with any number of bodies, newly dead. She recognized the feral odor that filled the room.

  What quickly followed, before Sister Jeanne could even raise her hand to her heart, before she could decide whether to shield the child or offer her to him—a balm, perhaps—was Sister Lucy’s voice, just outside the convent door, unhappy with something, and another nun’s, Sister Eugenia’s, low and patient replies. There was a thump again, perhaps Sister’s toe against the heavy door. It opened, letting a blue-gray, late-day light into the elegant foyer along with the sound of the rain. The two nuns stepped inside, bustling, bustling, shaking their umbrellas and their cloaks. They were arguing. Sister Jeanne, weak-legged, stood and went to them, indicating with one hand the sleeping child, the other placed over her lips. She saw that her fingers were trembling.

  The gesture brought a brief pause to whatever the two nuns were fighting about, and in it, Sister Eugenia snatched the black satchel from Sister Lucy’s hand and, shaking her head, went down the hallway, muttering Dr. Hannigan’s name. Sister Lucy then drew her freed arm into her wet cloak and looked at Sister Jeanne with a raised eyebrow, an expression—quite familiar to all of them in the convent—that said, I am smarter than any of you. I am from better stock. That said, You women constitute my purgatory. That said, I will endure it, but not for your sake.

  It was well known in the convent that Sister Lucy would have preferred a contemplative’s life. Would have preferred to converse with God alone.

  Sister Lucy moved her impatient eyes to the child on the couch. “Her mother’s gone home?” she asked severely.

  “Not home,” Sister Jeanne replied. “Just out to the stores. Out to catch her breath.”

  Sister Lucy gave no indication that she knew she was being quoted. Her eyes, as was their wont, darted back and forth with her thoughts. “She’s here too much,” she said abruptly.

  “Annie?” Sister Jeanne said.

  Sister Lucy shook her jowls. “No, of course not. I mean the child.” Her eyes moved again. “A convent child,” she said, “is not the same as a convent cat. She isn’t a pet.” Looking down, she trained her eyes on Sister Jeanne. “She needs a proper home.”

  Sister Jeanne was still trembling with what she had seen. Had imagined. Had called forth. At the back of her tongue, something bitter lingered; not fear exactly—hopelessness, defeat.

  She knew herself to be a pagan at heart—superstitious, fanciful. It was her most confessed sin. Yet what terrified her now was not imagination but faith. The logic of fai
th that told her she had seen a soul denied rest.

  She touched Sister Lucy’s cloak, guilty and afraid, as if the nun, so serious and sensible, so full of disdain, could right her.

  “Her mother needs a proper home as well,” Sister Lucy was saying. “A proper husband.”

  Sister Jeanne said, “I’ll pray for it.”

  Sister Lucy gave a snort, and a kind of pity—although it was a cold, distant kind of pity, like a bit of cool shade offered by an outcropping of granite—swept across her yellow eyes. A kind of pain.

  Her hands remained clasped under her cloak. Sister Jeanne would later learn that Sister Lucy’s wrist had been broken that afternoon by a man with the DTs, that the argument she had been having with Sister Eugenia as they came in was about going straight to the hospital to get it set. Under her cloak, it was already swollen.

  Which explained why Sister Lucy did not raise her red finger in the air as she was wont to do whenever she said “Make note.” Sister Jeanne looked up at the nun to show she was making note anyway. “Next time you see Mr. Costello and our Annie in the kitchen,” Sister Lucy said, “make note of what their faces give away.”

  Alone

  MR. COSTELLO was a quiet, balding man with a ready grin. Polite and hush-voiced when he spoke to the Sisters, but loud and full of good humor when he called to people on the street. He was always offering the nuns extra pints of cream or discounts that he seemed to make up on the spot. Always admiring the “miraculous” cleanliness of the empty milk bottles they returned to him. At the invitation of the Sisters, he attended mass in the convent chapel every first Friday, sitting in the last row with his cap in his hands and his head bowed low.

  When he was thirty-six, Mr. Costello had married a pretty, blue-eyed girl. Rheumatic fever as a child had left her with a weak heart. The case of Saint Vitus’ Dance that followed left her isolated and strange. Not a year into their marriage, Mrs. Costello was bitten by a stray dog that was foraging in the tangled backyard of one of the tenements. Infection set in. She lost her leg. There followed a nervous collapse, a touched brain, an invalid’s cosseted routine. The Sisters called it a sad case.