The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  WHEN SALLY WAS STILL SMALL and lifted down from the carriage in order to accommodate another of Mrs. Tierney’s serial infants, she gripped her mother’s skirt as they made their way along the streets. Under the rough cloth, the movements of her mother’s hips and legs was always firm, without hesitation, and even as a small child, Sally felt the confidence of those quick steps as if her own feet drove them. When her mother reached for her hand because the crowds on the street were growing dense or the sun was setting and the streetlights coming on, or because there was something, or someone, they had to hurry past, the broad, strong grip of her fingers was not reassuring—it was solid assurance itself.

  All her life, Sally had known that assurance.

  She had watched her mother’s hands dispatch a pile of piecework in an evening’s time. Seen them transform a knot of jumbled linen into a tall straight stack ready for the cupboard, architectural in its beauty. Her mother could set a springing mousetrap in a flash, dispose of the broken varmint—out the back window into the yard—and then light a match with the flick of her thumb to disperse the sweet and sickly dead-mouse smell.

  Her mother could deftly wring a chicken’s neck, pluck and wash and baste and serve it. She could mix a poultice, a bucket of wallpaper paste, a batter for bread, a batter for cake.

  Her mother could soothe a torrent of tears with the brush of her rough thumb. She could send her daughter into an infant’s deep sleep with the gentle drumming of her fingertips all along the girl’s spine.

  In the basement laundry, Sally watched her mother pluck potions from Sister Illuminata’s tall shelves, handling with ease even those brown bottles that bore what Sister called the devil’s mark: a nightmarish skull and crossbones.

  She watched her mother sew—thumb and forefinger moving quickly, lightly, up and down, the other three slim fingers extended elegantly, flashing silver needle and the winking gold of her wedding band—her quick, sure hands, and stitches so fine, so even, you’d think the cloth (Sister Illuminata once said) had healed itself.

  Sister Illuminata, glancing up from the ironing board or the scrub brush or the mangle, observed her mother at work. The nun’s admiration went mostly unspoken, and yet, in their quiet underworld, Sally saw it.

  She saw as well how Sister Jeanne lifted her chin at the sound of her mother’s laughter, as if to catch a warm sun. How approvingly Sister Dymphna, Sister Eugenia, any of the nuns, scanned her mother’s secondhand suit, beautifully altered and repaired, or Sally’s own donation-basket Sunday clothes, whenever they met on the street after mass. From behind their horse-blinder bonnets, the nuns’ admiration was palpable and clear.

  And even fearless Mrs. Tierney sat back in her chair in pure amazement as her mother related a tale of how she had spoken up: when the butcher had his finger on the scale or the hot water at home was running tepid or the insurance man failed to properly mark his note. “You spoke up,” Mrs. Tierney would say, flabbergasted, admiring, proud, and her mother would reply, all strength and assurance, “I certainly did.”

  Mother and daughter still shared the same bed, as they had done since Sally was born. They woke together, and together went down the apartment stairs just after dawn. The early-morning strolls with Mrs. Tierney ended when all the children were swept into school, but Annie’s impulse toward routine was strong and still she stopped most mornings to see her friend—often in yet another, only slightly larger apartment; the six Tierney children growing so quickly that the new place was always immediately tighter still. Chaos and mess, as always, in Liz Tierney’s place. And then the walk to school, the Tierney children swarming. And Sally coming down the basement stairs just after three, swinging her books, a story to tell. And then, when the day was done, mother and daughter returning home at dusk, under Mrs. Gertler’s watchful eye, to the small dinner they would eat together at the dining room table. Then the cleaning up and the hour on the couch, Annie with piecework and the radio, Sally with her books or the newspaper or, if the paper bore bad news or the day had been dark, a rosary said together in alternating voices.

  The repeated prayers, handed off between mother and daughter, always spoken clearly and loudly, as if to reach someone in the next room.

  They put out the lights, checked the stove. In winter, Annie stood on a chair to pull tight the transom above the door. In summer, she stood to open it. Mother and daughter undressed together—routine eliminating all self-consciousness, if not the demure turning away—and then climbed into bed, Annie always on Jim’s side. They held hands beneath the covers, or spooned, or merely put fingertips to the other’s shoulder or arm. A whispered exchange in the dark: Let’s remember the rent money, those dresses from the donation box that will surely fit the Tierney twins, a dime for the missions, darning thread for the Sisters’ stockings. Let’s remember first Friday tomorrow—no breakfast.

  Mrs. Gertler took to saying when she saw them in the hall, “More and more like sisters than mother and child,” and both of them blushed, reluctant to decide which was preferable.

  They had dinner at the Tierneys’ apartment, Christmas and Easter for certain, but any number of Sundays in between, and Mr. Tierney, Sally saw, was a smiling man with a thick mustache, the source of much of Mrs. Tierney’s conversation on weekday mornings when he wasn’t there, but, in the flesh, hardly presence enough to make a difference. He sat at the head of the long table, he carved the turkey or the ham, he was gracious to her mother and included Sally whenever he addressed his daughters, but once the meal was over, he retreated behind his newspaper or stood out on the fire escape with a cigar or disappeared into the bedroom for so long that Sally was always startled to see him back again, sometimes dressed in his regal doorman’s uniform like an actor on a stage, epaulettes and fringe, the cap tucked under his arm. “No rest for the weary,” he said. And then he would be gone, the crowded household unchanged by the loss of him.

  As a child, Sally believed she would marry a uniformed man and preside over a crowded apartment like the Tierneys’, but the appeal of the dream had nothing to do with the lack of a male presence in her life. She felt no such lack. The dream arose merely out of what she recognized as her mother’s pleasure in the Tierneys’ bustling, comical household—the music and the drama of the talk, the argument, the settling of scores. Her mother took the Tierney children into her arms, the younger ones especially, as if they were her own. She brushed her lips against their hair or rode them on her knee. In Sally’s experience, the Tierney household was the only place on earth where her mother agreed to take a drop. Where her cheeks flushed red with laughter. As a girl, Sally took pleasure in imagining herself someday presiding over a household like the Tierneys’—if only because of what a fine gift such a crowded, restful life would make for the mother she loved beyond all reason

  * * *

  “ARE YOU ALREADY THINKING about how you’ll leave me?” her mother asked her in the familiar darkness of the room they’d always shared.

  There were tears in her mother’s voice, and the sound of them brought tears to her own eyes. The truth was, she hadn’t thought of her mother at all in that moment when the holy card sunlight fell over her head, or in the hours since.

  “There’s no room for novices here,” her mother said. “They’ll send you to the motherhouse in Chicago.”

  Sally said, “I know.”

  “It’s a dirty town, I think,” Annie said.

  Sally said, “I’d like to see it.”

  “You’ll have to study nursing. Is that what you want?”

  “It is,” the girl whispered.

  “And then you’ll have to go where they send you. No guarantee you’ll come back home.”

  “Yes,” Sally said.

  “You’ll leave the world behind,” her mother said.

  “I know.” Placid.

  “You’ll leave me behind.”

  In the pale darkness of the room, Annie turned her head on the pillow. Streetlight shone through the worn shades, so she could j
ust make out the tears that were welling in her daughter’s eyes. She saw them spill—a shining, gray, liquid light—and knew in an instant that her words had only honed her daughter’s vague resolve.

  It was the same mistake her own widowed mother had made when she raised every good objection to Annie’s leaving home to follow Jim. He had no job, no prospects, and no promise of marriage had been made. He was—her mother’s word—peculiar: laughing and charming in one minute, gone blackly silent the next. His mother, too, was strange.

  Sensible, sensible, everything she said against him. But at the core of every reasonable argument the old woman made, Annie heard her fear. Her need. Annie’s two sisters were in London. One brother was in Liverpool. Her elder brother lived just down the road, but he had a brace of small children of his own. Her mother wanted to keep her last unmarried daughter for herself—a stay against the loneliness of her final years.

  Annie grew bolder with every good warning her mother spoke. Her resolve swelled, feeding not on the perfect sense her mother made but on her own new disdain for the woman’s weakness. Her selfishness. Annie had, until then, thought her mother stronger than that. More capable of great sacrifice for the sake of her child’s happiness.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw a crone’s hand reaching up as if from a grave, reaching up to catch the skirt of a girl who had already danced away.

  “Oh, we’ll see each other again,” Sally said calmly, into the darkness. “Life is like the blink of an eye.”

  Of course, it was Sister Jeanne’s voice entirely.

  * * *

  SOON ENOUGH, the wider world had the child bound for sanctity. Annie saw how the Tierney kids, always rough and ready and full of mischief, began to change in Sally’s presence, to gentle themselves, as Annie thought of it, to hush their voices, smiling at her shyly. Soon the Tierney girls began to encircle Sally as they walked to and from school, as if she were the plaster Madonna in a processional. Now the boys, Tom and Patrick, hung back, newly hesitant, nearly awestruck, although—Annie made note—they bumped and elbowed their sisters still.

  Annie heard from Sally’s teachers how the girl had begun to spend her recess in the church, not the play yard. How she led the eighth grade in the rosary but refused, all modesty, to crown the statue of Mary in May—gave the floral crown, in fact, to a deaf child in one of the lower grades, a child friendless and shy.

  “Overdoing it,” Annie told Mrs. Tierney.

  That fall, when Sally moved to the high school, the Tierney girls reported to their mother that some nasty boys had called her “Sister”—and Sally had disarmed them all by saying, “That’s right. Sister St. Sally of the Smelly Socks.”

  She eased away with gentle explanations the few boys who pursued her in those years—mostly serious or unpopular boys who hadn’t gotten word of her vocation—and rose above the romantic dramas of the other girls—young Matilda Tierney had an operatic heartbreak at sixteen—with benign sympathy, her hands tucked into her sleeves.

  “Promised to Christ,” Sister Illuminata said over her ironing board, full of admiration. Annie silenced the turning mangle, put her wet hands to her hips. “What man accepts a promise from a girl so young?”

  A beautiful newcomer passed briefly through the convent—Sister Augustina, elegant and thin, olive-skinned, sunken-eyed, gone back to her family with a collapsed lung in three weeks’ time—and Annie saw how quickly Sally adopted the doomed nun’s ethereal glide. She knew a romance was brewing in her daughter’s brain, the tale of a girl called by God and a selfish widowed mother who barred the door. It was a tale straight out of the Lives of the Saints—the young female saints, anyway, who were always met with opposition by parents or suitors, or who went to their deaths—eyes raised—in their stubbornness to heed the Lord’s call. Jesus Himself playing the part of the lovely-eyed beau, dangerous and strange and so alluring. Jim.

  Sister Illuminata understood the case Annie made against her daughter’s vocation. She understood the logic of mere mimicry. Who among the Sisters knew better than she how Sally’s true nature leaned toward silliness and laughter? But Sister Illuminata had also seen the holy light pass through the basement window. She had seen the girl’s face transformed. She told Annie, “My mother used to say, ‘A friend’s eye is a good mirror.’”

  Now, on her afternoons alone with Sally, while Annie was out at the stores, Sister Illuminata whispered her encouragement. She told the girl that it was not sacrifice that had driven her own vocation, not the sacrifice of life and family and the world—“giving up this and that and whatnot” was how she put it, dismissive. It was the notion that Christ Himself had called her to become, in a ghastly world, the pure, clean antidote to filth, to pain.

  All things human bend toward it, Sister Illuminata said. They were alone in the basement in the waning afternoons. Because of original sin, she told the girl, all things human bend toward filth, decrepitude, squalor, stink. She pointed to the basement’s high windows. “Look out there, if you have eyes to see.”

  All things mortal bend toward ruin, Sister said, which means toward pain, toward suffering. It had always been the devil’s intention, she said, to convince human beings they were no more than animals, never angels. Which is why there’s nothing like pain to turn a person into a howling beast. Nothing like disease to wear a soul thin. Stink to discourage us. Dirt to drag us down.

  The life of a nursing Sister is the antidote to the devil’s ambitions. A life immaculate and pure.

  A Sister makes herself pure, Sister Illuminata said, immaculate and pure, not to credit her own soul with her sacrifice—her giving up of the world—but to become the sweet, clean antidote to suffering, to pain.

  “You wouldn’t put a dirty cloth to an open wound, would you?” Sister Illuminata said.

  Sitting on her chair beside the ironing board, her knees beneath the black tunic swollen with arthritis, she cocked her bonnet toward the pile of white handkerchiefs, newly ironed and stacked like cards, as if they illustrated her point. Sally, knowing the routine as she knew every ritual of the convent laundry, took the handkerchiefs from the end of the ironing board and set them carefully in the wicker basket on her mother’s sewing table. Her mother would carry them upstairs when she returned, distribute them to each narrow dresser in each of the Sisters’ narrow rooms.

  She lifted the basket of linen tablecloths and napkins her mother had taken in from the line before she went out. In the hierarchy of her tasks, Sister Illuminata always saved any household ironing for the end of the day, in case her energy flagged. Her best work was done in the morning and was dedicated to the Sisters’ habits, or to whatever was going back to the homes of the sick, or to the refreshed donations meant for the poor. Her own habit she washed and ironed on rare occasions. “The last shall be first,” she said then.

  “It’s been a long time since I was out nursing,” Sister Illuminata said as Sally helped her to spread the wide tablecloth over the ironing board. It was a plain rough-spun cotton meant for everyday use, redolent now of the line. “But down here the work’s the same, isn’t it? A kind of healing.” And she chuckled at the thought, and then shook her head as if to dispel her own vanity. She directed Sally to fetch the broader, old-fashioned iron that was sitting on the furnace grate. “Down here, we do our best to transform what is ugly, soiled, stained, don’t we? We send it back into the world like a resurrected soul. We’re like the priest in his confessional, aren’t we?” And chuckled again at her own fancy. Sally’s vocation had made her expansive.

  Sister Illuminata sprinkled the cloth. These days she used an old Coca-Cola bottle with a perforated rubber stopper. She licked her scarred fingertip and tested the iron. Attacked the cloth in broad strokes, her elbow pumping. “We send the Sisters out each morning immaculate, don’t we? A clean cloth to apply to the suffering world.”

  Standing on the other side of the ironing board, Sally said softly, “It’s true.”

  The two worked together in silence, mov
ing the tablecloth across the board, folding it carefully, Sister pressing the hot iron along each of the folded seams. Finally, when the ironing was finished, Sister said, “There’s a name for you.” She was arranging the still-warm cloth over Sally’s forearm, to be carried to the dining room upstairs and laid out in the bottom drawer of the server. “Mary Immaculate,” she said, still a little breathless from her work. “There’s a lovely name for a woman. A great name for a nun.”

  Orders

  THERE WERE the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, the Little Sisters of the Assumption, the Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor of the Congregation of the Infant Jesus, the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis, the Dominican Sisters of the Sick Poor of the Immaculate Conception, the Poor Clares, the Little Company of Mary. There were the Sisters of Divine Compassion, of Divine Providence, of the Sacred Heart. There were the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor of the Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, Stabat Mater, their own order.

  But there were also the Daughters of Wisdom. The Daughters of Charity. The Sisters of Charity. The Benedictine Sisters, the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Sisters of Reparation of the Congregation of Mary. There were the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart. The Visitation Nuns. The Presentation Nuns. The Handmaids of the Holy Child. The Sister Servants of the Holy Spirit.

  Sister Eugenia admired the Sisters of Mercy. Their foundress—“like our own,” she told Annie, as if courting her native pride—was an Irish woman, a daughter of wealth, called by God to serve the sick poor, first in Dublin, then all over Ireland, England, America. “A wonderful order,” Sister Eugenia said. She named the hospitals they ran, the schools, the very sanatorium upstate where Sister Illuminata had been cured.

  Sister Joseph Mary, who kept the convent’s small library, mentioned St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer, right across the river and run by the Dominican Sisters of St. Rose of Lima. Their founder was the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sister Joseph Mary said proudly. Not a Catholic himself, she explained to Annie, but a great writer nonetheless.