The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  And wasn’t there wonderful work being done for the lepers in Hawaii by the Sisters of St. Francis out of Syracuse? Sister Dymphna kept a scrapbook of inspirational things. Annie was shown a folded newspaper clipping that mentioned Mother Marianne Cope. Most of the article was about Father Damien, the priest to the lepers who had first invited the Sisters to Molokai, but Sister Dymphna had underlined in black ink every good word about the nun. There was a photo of a young girl with leprosy—she had a ruined face, a monstrous face, but she wore a cunning skirt and jacket, as good as you’d see on Fifth Avenue. All Mother Marianne’s doing, the article said. The nun, the article said, had a flair for fashion.

  Wouldn’t Annie be proud to see her own child bringing beauty to these suffering souls?

  A consensus arose among the Sisters in the convent—perhaps because they had seen the girl helping Sister Illuminata up and down the basement stairs—that Sally would do well with the old folks. The French Little Sisters of the Poor—the order Sister Jeanne herself had once intended to join—did marvelous work in this regard. And the Sisters of Charity had a home for aged domestic workers, immigrants mostly, men and women who had outlived their usefulness and their employers’ largesse—faithful servants of the city’s faithless titans. Wouldn’t Sally be great with them?

  Or indigent widows. The Carmelites were mentioned. They had a place on Staten Island.

  And then there were the missionary orders to consider: the Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic, the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, of Our Lady of Victory, of the Most Precious Blood. There were the Charity nuns as well, who seemed to be everywhere, doing everything. There were the teaching orders. There were the contemplatives and cloistered, although none of the nuns in the convent believed that such a life would suit Sally—who, they had observed, still fidgeted in the chapel, played with her hair at Sunday mass. Who, even now, despite her call, had to be hushed by her mother when her giddy laughter rose up the basement stairs.

  One of the walking orders, then, like their own. An order that would get her out among the poor, out in the air. She might help to care for orphans, childlike as she was. The Sisters of Charity ran the Foundling Home in Manhattan. (“Aren’t they a busy bunch?” Annie asked Mrs. Tierney.) Given her youth and her innocence, her spark of mischief, Sally might, as a Sister, inspire and uplift certain fallen women. The Good Shepherd Sisters had a place for them.

  “Give her to the prostitutes,” Annie told Mrs. Tierney. “Send her to China or Africa. Or to Hawaii with the lepers. That’s what they’re proposing. Let her work in an orphanage, they’re saying, after everything I’ve done to keep her out of one.”

  When Sally’s high school days were drawing to a close, Sister Lucy ran her yellow eyes over the girl and then told Annie, “Let her follow me for the week. Let her get a glimpse of the work.”

  On that early morning in June, mother and daughter entered the convent through the front door rather than the back. They waited for a moment, feeling like visitors in the hushed hallway, until Sister Lucy swung toward them, sweeping down the corridor from the kitchen. She wore her cloak and carried her black satchel. She produced a white postulant’s veil. “Wear this,” Sister Lucy said. “You don’t want to look like a tourist.” And smiled thinly at her own joke. “Come with me,” she said.

  Annie helped her daughter fasten the veil and then kissed the smooth top of it as she sent her off. Sally took small, hurried steps, following behind Sister Lucy, as if a long skirt bound her ankles—not her own gait at all. Her mother wondered which of the nuns she was imitating now. She turned. Sister Illuminata was there in the hallway, standing before the basement door, leaning on her cane.

  “Baptism by fire,” Sister Illuminata said.

  Sister Lucy

  SALLY TOUCHED THE NEW VEIL, once, twice, three times, as she followed behind Sister Lucy. On the avenue she turned her head briefly, trying to capture her own reflection in the various shop windows—watery, she looked, in the morning light. She could barely glimpse her face through the flash of new sun. She’d worn her simplest dress and sensible oxfords from school, but she wanted to see herself with the veil on her head. Wanted to study the transformation. At a corner, she glanced around, hoping to find someone she knew, someone to witness who she had become. “Stop your gaping,” Sister Lucy said as the light changed and she forged on. Sally followed, her head bowed.

  At a gray, four-story apartment building, they turned in. The steps were brick, chipped with wear, a pane in the front door was cracked and repaired with brown tape. The door was unlocked. There was a dirty perambulator in the vestibule, its undercarriage full of rust. A knotted plywood board covering its bed. A smell of cats and damp plaster. Sister Lucy climbed the bare stairs, Sally behind her.

  The key to the apartment door was on the ring of keys that was tied to the nun’s belt and stored deep in the pocket of her tunic. She fumbled not a bit, finding the right one, opening the door to a spare, neat room: two upholstered chairs, a table, a yellow light through the drawn shades. She spun a bit as she reached to remove her cloak, placed the cloak on one of the chairs, and called out at the same time, “Good morning, Mrs. Costello.”

  A small voice from the next room answered, “Good morning, Sister. I’m awake.”

  Now the nun was tying the apron she had pulled from her bag around her waist. She rolled up her sleeves as she passed through the living room, Sally following, and into a tiny bedroom—darker still, with drawn shades and drawn drapes—an odor of camphor. The woman was in the bed, stirring. Sally saw in an instant, and with a shudder, the absence under the coverlet, the leg gone below the knee.

  “I always know when you’re awake, Mrs. Costello,” Sister Lucy said, correcting her. “I wouldn’t call out if you were still asleep.”

  The woman was struggling to get up on her elbows. Her long hair was tied into an awkward, uneven braid, and her white, browless face, misshapen from sleep, was small, heart-shaped, finely creased. “I know you always know,” she was saying, her voice thin and childish, childishly exasperated. “But I don’t know how you always know. Who is this?” Sally smiled with Sister Jeanne’s smile, but it didn’t warm Mrs. Costello’s expression. Despite the woman’s pallor, her face conveyed a hot disdain. “Why is it always another one coming into my room?” she asked, and thrust out her lower lip. “One of you in here is enough.”

  Sister Lucy made no reply, but bustled. With a sweep of her arms, she opened the drapes, then the shades, and then moved a cane-backed wheelchair from a corner of the room to the side of the bed. “Were you well through the night?” she asked.

  “No,” the woman said, still looking unhappily at Sally. “Not at all. Terrible pains in my stomach and not a bit of sleep the entire night.”

  Sister Lucy said, “Then you were awake when Mr. Costello went out.”

  “Heavens, no,” Mrs. Costello said, petulant. Plucking at the blankets even as Sister Lucy began to draw them away. There was a brief tug of war. Sister Lucy won. The woman’s voice became shrill: “Do you have any idea what time my husband must leave in the morning, Sister? Who would be awake at that hour?”

  Neatly, Sister Lucy removed the edge of the counterpane from Mrs. Costello’s grasp. Neatly, she folded down the blankets. The woman’s nightgown had risen above her knees. Her legs were chalk white, furred with pale hair. Both the full leg and the shortened one looked lifeless. The woman seemed determined not to move. Suddenly, without preliminaries, Sister Lucy bent down and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Costello, lifted her from her pillow, moved the one full leg to the edge of the bed and then the other. Underneath the blue nightgown, the dull stump of her amputated leg, shining with scars, seemed to thrash about on its own. Sally found herself turning away.

  “That accounts for your stomach pains,” Sister Lucy said. Sally looked again. There were bloodstains on the white sheet, blood on the hem of the nightgown.

  “Oh bother,” Mrs. Costello said.


  Sister Lucy turned to Sally. “Go run a bath,” she said. “Heat some water on the stove.”

  Everything about the small apartment was neat and spare. The bathtub was in the kitchen, draped with a clean white tablecloth that made it look like an altar. A wooden milk box stood beside it, where Sally found the soap and a scrub brush and a box of Epsom salts. She found a cast-iron pot and filled it with water, lit the flame beneath it. She had only begun to run the water for the tub when Sister Lucy wheeled the woman through the doorway.

  Mrs. Costello was still in her nightgown, her loose braid over her shoulder. She held a pair of thin towels on her lap. Sister Lucy, with practiced motions, pushed the chair back and forth until she had gotten it over the threshold and, to her satisfaction, beside the claw-footed tub. She added the hot water from the stove, tested it, added a splash more. She took the towels from Mrs. Costello’s lap, handed them to Sally, and then, in an instant, lifted the nightgown over the woman’s head. Sally turned away, but Sister said, “Get cold water on those stains.” Sally dropped the towels onto the floor and brought the nightgown to the kitchen sink. She ran cold water over the streaked blood. At the sound of Mrs. Costello’s cry, she looked over her shoulder to see Sister Lucy with the naked woman struggling in her arms. The contrast of the nun’s broad black back, solid and shapeless in her veil, and the woman’s thin, bare, flailing white extremities was grotesque, startling. They might have been two distinct species: an ostrich in the arms of a great black bear, a grasshopper in the beak of an enormous raven. Over the nun’s shoulder, Sally could see Mrs. Costello’s mouth opening and closing. She was making a shrill, piping sound, and as she struggled, she caught Sally’s eye with her helpless, panicked own. Her torso was bucking. She seemed determined to knock away Sister’s bonnet, to climb over the nun’s head. There were long tufts of pale hair, the color of smoke, under her outstretched arms, and again between her thin thighs. “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she was crying, and she glanced down at the tub as if it were a wall of fire. Sister Lucy said harshly, “Stop it now. Stop your nonsense,” but lowered the woman into the water with amazing gentleness, making hardly a splash. Her sleeves caught briefly on the edge of the tub, but her veil was expertly tied back with a black ribbon—when had she done that?

  Once she was immersed, Mrs. Costello quieted. There was only a whispered, sucking kind of sobbing. Sister Lucy looked around and then barked, “Take those towels off the dirty floor.”

  Sally obeyed—although she noticed with some resentment that the worn wooden floor was not at all dirty—and then stood with the two rough towels clutched to her chest. The woman, naked in the water, was awful to see, and yet Sally could not draw her eyes away. She had, on occasion, glimpsed her mother’s solid body in the bath, but she had never before seen another human being so exposed. The woman’s throat and arms and small puckered breasts were thin, raked, as if the flesh had been scraped away by a dull knife, whittled from Ivory soap. Mrs. Costello’s one full leg floated, the other flailed weakly as she moved, now, suddenly, placid, rubbing the soap between her hands, leaning forward to let Sister Lucy wash her back. The tail of her braid was dark with water. A fine pink stain rose into the bath from between her thighs.

  “Stand watch,” Sister said, straightening up, and then left the room.

  Once more Mrs. Costello turned her blue eyes on Sally. Her eyes were sunk into her skull, and the surrounding flesh had a dark hue, but the irises themselves were vivid. Her pale nakedness made them more striking still. Sally smiled at her. She could think of nothing to say. Expressionless, the woman stared for what might have been a full minute, and then turned her attention to the soap. The word brazen—her mother’s word—came to mind: there was no impulse on the woman’s part to cover herself, to apologize, to beg forgiveness for her sorry state.

  When Sister Lucy returned, she had Mrs. Costello’s clothes in her arms. A simple dress, wool stockings, underwear. She had a white cloth on top of it all, four safety pins in her mouth. Expertly, Sister pinned the napkin to the inside of the underpants, and then took the towels from Sally’s arms. She placed one on the seat of the wheelchair, threw the other over her shoulder. She lifted Mrs. Costello smoothly out of the tub—now the woman was as trustful as an infant—placed her in the chair, and dried her flesh with a vigorous rub. She dressed her, lifting and pushing. At one point, Mrs. Costello began to sob again, but Sister hushed her and she remained hushed. Then, with an abrupt tilt of her head, Sister Lucy told Sally to follow her back into the bedroom, where she maneuvered the chair to the window so Mrs. Costello would be facing out. She lifted the hairbrush from the dresser and handed it to Sally. “Do a nice job” was all she said. Then she stripped the linen from the bed and left the room.

  The woman’s long fair hair was coming out of its tangled braid. Even Sally could tell this was the clumsy work of a man. She pulled the damp braid apart as gently as she could while Mrs. Costello fidgeted in her chair, leaning forward abruptly, turning her head to look up and down the street. “Is it a nice day out there?” she asked, and Sally told her it was. She sat back abruptly. “My husband will carry me down this evening,” Mrs. Costello said. “We’ll sit in the park for a while.”

  “Won’t that be nice,” Sally said.

  Suddenly Mrs. Costello reached back, swatting at her hands. “Don’t pull.”

  “I’m trying not to, Mrs. Costello,” Sally whispered. She ran her fingers through the last tangles, loosening the braid, releasing the human odor of what her mother called “winter scalp.” Carefully, tentatively, she began to brush out the wet ends, her hand held beneath them so she would not pull.

  She asked Mrs. Costello, “Would you like a braid or a bun?” glancing up as she did, catching in the window before them the faint image of Mrs. Costello’s face and, hovering above it, herself, being so kind.

  Mrs. Costello said, thoughtfully, “Oh my.” She bowed her head. “What do you like?” This was a new voice entirely, gentle and demure.

  “I’ll braid it first,” Sally suggested. “Then I’ll coil it nicely. I do this for my mother sometimes.” Which wasn’t true. Her mother did her own hair. She couldn’t have said why she lied.

  With more confidence now, she gently ran the brush over the woman’s scalp. Mrs. Costello’s head was small and her hair was thin—not like Sally’s own, she thought, not without vanity, which had a nice wave, or her mother’s, which was Irish thick and dark still, her crowning glory, she sometimes said. The brushing stirred the oil on Mrs. Costello’s scalp so that the roots of her hair began to grow as dark as the ends that were still wet from her bath. There were gray strands mingled with the blonde and Sally remembered Mr. Tierney last Christmas singing to his wife, “Darling, you are growing older, silver threads among the gold.” Three sheets to the wind, Mrs. Tierney had said, turning away from him as he tried to kiss her—his thick mustache and his wet lips—all of them laughing.

  Mrs. Costello bowed her head as the brush ran through it. She seemed to purr a little, a pleasant humming in the back of her throat. There were hairpins in a dish on the dresser. Sally reached for them, glancing at the mirror as she did, at her own face under the short veil. There was a small wedding picture on the doily that covered the dresser top. Mrs. Costello was seated in a chair, two feet beneath her lace skirt. There was a bouquet of silk flowers on her lap. Her husband stood beside her, his bowler hat in the crook of his arm. It was a slimmer, darker version of the milkman she knew. Both of them were somewhat wide-eyed, serious, and maybe afraid. He looked very young. She looked somehow lifeless in her solemn beauty, like one of the china dolls that were slumped together on the dresser. The dolls’ faces, too, were finely shattered. One had a glass eye askew.

  Sally turned back to the woman. Mrs. Costello was sitting calmly now, her hands in her lap. Sally felt a surge of pride: she was doing very well here. She coiled the thin braid into a golden bun and pinned it carefully. She patted it with her palms and then stepped around the wheelchair
to look at the woman straight on. She bent down, smiling at her.

  “You look very nice,” she said.

  Mrs. Costello raised her head slowly, almost coyly. Her blue eyes sought Sally’s, and Sally stepped back a bit to smile at the woman, but then Mrs. Costello’s gaze slipped away, to the rooftops across the street. Her eyes grew distant and then glistened with tears.

  “I have a pain,” Mrs. Costello whispered, and she pointed to the place where her foot should have been. “I’m in pain.” And then she looked at Sally straight on. Her mouth crumpled the way a child’s will when it can no longer resist its tears. Sally felt her own lips turn down in sympathy.

  “I am abandoned and alone,” Mrs. Costello said.

  Sister Lucy shouted “Nonsense” as she came into the room with the breakfast tray. She glanced at what Sally had done with the woman’s hair, but said only, “Step aside.” She placed the tray on the dresser, opened a small tea table that had been leaning beside the radiator. Sister’s bustling seemed to bring the woman back to herself. She narrowed her eyes.

  “Have you told this girl what happened to me?” Mrs. Costello asked.

  Sister Lucy was placing a tea towel over the woman’s chest. “What happened to you?” She seemed only vaguely interested.

  Mrs. Costello indicated her missing leg with an abrupt, angry gesture. “My foot,” she cried. “My leg.” She looked at Sally. “I was bitten by a mad dog, in a yard. I startled him and he came after me. He might have gone for my throat.”

  Sister Lucy was stirring sugar into Mrs. Costello’s tea. “That’s ancient history,” Sister Lucy said placidly.

  But Mrs. Costello was now focused on Sally, appealing to her as she spoke. “I grabbed the pole so the devil wouldn’t drag me down. I scraped my cheek.” She touched her face. “They heard me cry out, the other women in the street did. They came running. A big man was with them. He beat the dog away and carried me home.” Mrs. Costello raised her two hands. “Oh, there was terrible blood.”