The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  Through her tea-induced tears, Sally saw the girl smiling at her. She had a pleasant, square face. Sally thought of the stationery Mrs. Tierney used for the notes she sent to school when one of the Tierney children was sick—lovely white stationery marked with the address of the St. Francis Hotel. “Purloined paper,” Patrick Tierney called it, teaching Sally and his sisters the meaning of the word.

  Sally took a third sip. The taste was the taste of her mother’s warm finger, dipped into a capful of whiskey and rubbed against her gums.

  The girl said she just walked out of her mother’s apartment this morning, tried to pawn her wedding ring (she held up her ringless hand), which turned out to be gold-plated, not gold. She shrugged. She went back to her mother’s place and looked around. Her mother had a silver tea service they never used. Never. Not once. Just sitting there. She took the tea service back to the pawnshop and got enough to buy her ticket. And here she was.

  “I bet you think I’m something awful to steal from my own mother,” she said from behind her teacup. “But I know I’m going to send the money back as soon as I can. And I swear to you on a stack of Bibles, my mother never once used that teapot.”

  “I don’t think you’re awful,” Sally said softly.

  The girl was saying she had a very nice sleeping berth, and asked if Sally had a sleeping berth, clucking her tongue sympathetically when she said no. She was a pretty girl with a small face, pale brown hair, a tiny mouth that hung open when she wasn’t talking. She seemed puzzled when Sally told her she was on her way to the novitiate, and then shrugged when Sally explained this meant she was going to be a nun.

  “I’m not Catholic,” the girl said, suddenly dull-eyed, without interest.

  When the white-jacketed waiter brought the checks, the girl reached across the table and took Sally’s wrist. She began to speak urgently across the small space. Once more, Sally wondered if she had misjudged a stranger’s age. “Help me out,” the girl said. “I haven’t got any more money. Now they’ll throw me off the train.”

  Sally had the five dollars in her wallet, the fifty more pinned to the lining of her purse, meant to be given to the Sisters on her arrival. She smiled as Sister Jeanne would have smiled and put two bills on the little silver tray to cover the girl’s dinner.

  But then the girl took her wrist once again.

  “If you’ve got a little more,” she said, and paused, and then said in a rush, “What I mean is, if you could lend me a little more. If you’ve got it.” Her grip tightened. “See, I don’t know how I’ll get to the hotel. Maybe there’s a subway or something. I don’t know. And if my husband isn’t there, I don’t know what I’ll do. Where I’ll stay. What if I can’t find him? What will happen to me? I’ll be out on the street.”

  The girl pressed her fingertips into Sally’s flesh. Her nails were bitten.

  “I’m sure your husband will be there,” Sally said, trying to soothe her. It was the voice she had used with Mrs. Costello. “He sent you the letter.” But she was thinking of Mrs. Tierney’s purloined stationery.

  The girl leaned even farther over the small table, pressing her breasts against the narrow wood. The ripped veil of her hat seemed to rise up, to reach out imploringly, a beggar’s thin hand. “But what will I do if he’s not?” she said. “Can’t you just lend me something? A little more?” She eyed Sally’s purse. “I swear I’ll pay you right back,” cooing it. And now her voice grew to a whine. “What will I do out on the street?”

  Sally recognized, reluctantly, what was happening here: her vocation was being tested. First the dirty woman with her vulgar talk, and now this girl. It hardly seemed fair that God would measure her worth so soon. She thought of Sister Lucy, who had wanted a contemplative’s life. Who did not refuse.

  Unhappily, Sally said, “All right.” She extricated her hand from the girl’s clammy grip. She opened her pocketbook and reached into the slim tear behind the satin lining, felt for the safety pin, aware of the girl studying her all the while. She knew she should have the grace to give the girl all she had, as Christ would have done. Certainly as Sister Jeanne would have done. She knew the Sisters in Chicago would applaud her generosity. But she knew, too, that she didn’t want to. Didn’t want to give up what her mother had so carefully saved. Didn’t want—even more fiercely—to be mocked by another dirty stranger. She slid out two ten dollar bills and passed them across the table, fighting her own regret even as she gave them up. “That’s everything I have,” she said piously. Stubbornly. “That’s all I own.”

  The girl reached for the money. “Write down your address,” she said, and took the receipt from the silver plate, pushing it toward her. “I’ll be there tomorrow to pay you back.”

  She was tucking the bills into her own purse when she suddenly looked across the table. “I didn’t know nuns were allowed to have money,” she said. It seemed a reprimand.

  As Sally was leaving the car, headed in the opposite direction from the Bronx girl, the white-jacketed waiter took her arm. “Pardon me, miss,” he said. “That lady a friend of yours?”

  And Sally, somewhat breathlessly, as if he had caught her in a lie, said, “Yes.”

  The man shook his head. He was a bald black man with large and sympathetic eyes. “I just hope she was no trouble to you,” he said kindly. “That’s all.”

  Sally said, “Thank you.” She was about to walk on when she added, abruptly, as if to return his kindness, “My father worked on a train, too. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit.” She was surprised to find her tongue had grown thick.

  The man smiled and nodded. This might have been something he already knew. “Is your father with you tonight?” he asked.

  And she said, “Oh yes,” the two words running together sloppily. She indicated the open corridor. “He’s just back there,” she said. And imagined him briefly, a man with a fedora pulled over his eyes.

  The porter said, “You both have a nice evening, then.”

  When she returned to her seat, her companion was once again chuckling inside her panting breath—no telling at what.

  Outside, there were only small bits of light, moth holes, as she thought of them, in the heavy darkness. The taste of the sweet tea, the aftermath of the alcohol, lingered at the back of her throat, made her eyes ache. She leaned her head against the window.

  The stations they pulled into were a relief at first, golden and bustling, but as the hour grew late and she woke from a shallow sleep to see them, they offered only a yellowed, nightmare tableau of weary shadows: a lonely stationmaster lifting a heavy arm, a single passenger with a suitcase and an abandoned air, a newspaper blown against a wall. Weary shadows that were quickly lost again as the train moved on, into the cavernous night.

  Her father was a trainman on the BRT.

  All her life, as she moved over bright sidewalks and green grass, he had been in his coffin, the narrowest of corridors—of lightless tunnels meant to keep out rock and stone and damp earth. Why had she never thought of this before? Why had she never pictured him there as she blithely went up and down the subway stairs, rode nonchalantly through the darkness. A trainman on the BRT, now long returned to the place where he had plied his trade: the damp underground, the dirt and carved stone, the brittle dark.

  At one point, she woke to see the little boy standing in the aisle again. Her companion slept lifelessly beside her. He swayed with the movement of the train. Even in the dimmed light, now thick with smoke, she could see the goose egg on his bald skull. As he shifted with the train’s shuddering, she could see a line of dried blood on his cheek just below it. She had only half her chocolate bar left, but she found it in her purse and handed it across the bulk of her seatmate to the child. He took it from her and then, wraithlike, walked on. His mother’s head was slumped into the window.

  She was going to give her life to others, in the name of the crucified Christ and His loving mother. She was going to join the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before th
e Cross, Stabat Mater, which Sister Jeanne thought the most beautiful name of all the orders. Because it reminded us all, Sister Jeanne said, that love stood before brutality in that moment on Golgotha and love was triumphant. Love applied to suffering, as Sister Illuminata put it: like a clean cloth to a seeping wound.

  Sally had understood the image in the basement laundry of the convent, when she watched Sister Illuminata put a hot iron to the nuns’ clean clothes—perfume of starch and of soap, of the heavy linen itself, dried in the courtyard’s sun. A clean cloth—immaculate and pure—to place against mankind’s wounds. She had felt, the fragrant steam rising, the joy of it, the rightness of it. No help in putting a soiled, sullied thing to what was itself debased and infected. One kept oneself, one made oneself, pure—dressed in these immaculate clothes, moved about these simple rooms, prayed the Hours, spoke softly, kept still one’s idle hands and kept gentle one’s thoughts, to offer relief to the wretched world, to assuage the seething wound, the lesion, laesio, of human suffering. The suffering that all things mortal were heir to, Sister Illuminata had said.

  In her lovely habit, she wanted to be that pure antidote to human pain.

  But she wanted, too, in some equal, more furious way, not to be mocked for it; not to be fooled. Sister Lucy had told her, Don’t think you can end all suffering with your charms.

  The next time she got up to use the toilet she had to climb over the solid bulk of her sleeping companion. As Sally awkwardly crossed her lap, trying to step over the brown bags at her feet, she felt the woman grab at her hip and then poke a dirty finger at the seat of her skirt. Sally cried out, nearly tumbled, but swiftly caught her breath as she gathered herself in the aisle. She looked back at the woman, who had once more closed her eyes. The man on the aisle reached out to steady her, and briefly, although she didn’t need to, she gripped his hand. Warm and broad and very strong. She said, “Thank you.”

  In the toilet, the odor of someone’s bowel movement was overwhelming. She stumbled out, walked to the thin corridor between the cars to get some air. Out here, the rattling echo of the steel over the tracks seemed to bounce off the darkness that surrounded them, as if the darkness itself were made of black stone. As if they had once more gone underground.

  She saw a man approaching from the yellow light of the next car, a sleeping car—she could see a porter moving behind him. The porter was buttoning down the curtains on each berth, securing whoever was inside for the night. The girl from the Bronx, asleep on the money Sally’s mother had labored to earn. The man approaching seemed to smile at her, and, afraid, she stepped back inside just ahead of him. He followed her, even reached over her head to hold the door, pressing—was he pressing?—himself into her back. He went into the toilet and she made her way down the aisle. A card game was going on among four smoking men. They looked up indifferently as she passed. One of the men held the black stump of a cigar between his fingers; the end of it, blacker still, was wet. Everything reeked. Of smoke and sweat and the human gas seeping from these mounds of flesh. She put the back of her hand to her nose and her own flesh reeked.

  Unsteadily, she walked past her seat, to the end of the car—“pee cans,” the dirty woman had said, vulgar—and then she turned around and walked back again. Here in the dim and smoky light were, for her consideration, a sampling of “the others” she was giving her life to: vulgar, unkempt, ungrateful. Pale, sleeping faces with gaping, distorted mouths, sprawled limbs, a hollow-eyed soldier looking out into the night, a khaki rucksack clutched to his chest, a yellow-skinned old man folded into himself, gazing forward with a murderous look. A young woman in a jaunty hat, chewing gum ferociously, reading a magazine, picking her nose and then flicking her fingertips into the aisle.

  She passed the seat in front of hers, where the little bald boy now slept pressed up against his mother’s back, which was turned to him. His hands were between his knees, as if for warmth. He looked like the bums who slept beneath the elevated, like a little hobo curled against the concrete wall of a warehouse. There was a dirty, bloodstained handkerchief on the floor at his feet.

  “Excuse me,” she said to her companion when she returned to her seat. The woman was sprawled and did not move. The man on the aisle was watching, smiling still. “Excuse me,” she said again, and now the woman merely turned her face away with a small snort and bubble. The man across the way said, helpfully, “You might have to poke her.” She looked at him straight on for the first time. An older man with a five o’clock shadow, balding, almost handsome, some missing teeth in the side of his smile. A look of weariness about him, too, of course, at this hour, but a kind eye. Did she really want to go through life without a man to protect her? He reached across the aisle to touch the woman’s thick elbow. “Madam,” he said. And louder, “Madam.” Again someone in the car called, “Pipe down.”

  Sally, weary herself, screwed up her courage and shouted, “Excuse me!” She reached out—even to her own eye her movements had grown weird, as if weirdly weighted—and pressed a finger into the woman’s shoulder. The flesh beneath her coat seemed barely to give. Her wide thighs, straining against her dark skirt, twitched a bit, but continued to block the way. The man on the aisle said, “Madam,” once more.

  Struggling to keep her balance in the aisle, Sally looked at her empty seat on the other side of this fleshy obstacle. She had never in her life so desired a single destination. She wanted only to curl into it, turn her face to the cool window. She wanted only to be left alone. Suddenly, in a kind of desperation, she reached down and slid the shopping bags off the woman’s feet and into the aisle. One of them toppled, an orange and a gold compact and a bit of bright silk, a scarf or a slip or a nightgown, spilling from the top, causing, at last, the woman to stir. She reached out her spiked hands in the startled way of sleepers, and in an instant of fear and rage, Sally swung her fist into the woman’s palm, made contact with it, and then swung again, striking this time the inside of her fat wrist, touching the bone beneath the ringed flesh. And then, it seemed all the same, continuous motion, although in truth it was choppy and abrupt, like pounding laundry, she swung again—the woman tried but failed to raise her elbow in defense. Sally felt the hard surface of the woman’s dry teeth against her knuckles, felt, too, the tacky lipstick and the humid breath.

  “Keep your damn hands to yourself,” Sally said, stepping over the woman’s feet, kicking the greasy bags with her heel. “Stay away from me.”

  She cleared the woman’s lap and drove herself into the seat, her heart pounding. Turned her face to the window.

  There was an astonished pause, and then the woman shouted, “Mercy!” Panting more forcefully. Or not panting now, but sobbing. Sally glanced briefly over her shoulder. The woman, her awful fingers pressed delicately against her mouth, was now leaning out into the aisle to retrieve the bag. The man across the way had bent down to help her, and the little bald boy appeared, handing her the escaped orange and the thick gold compact. An act of betrayal on both their parts, Sally thought. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she heard the woman say as she wept. “Thank you, kind sir.” She told them, “You’d think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

  Sally turned her face to the window. Once again, she felt the woman’s breath on her neck. “A fine Sister you’ll make,” she hissed.

  Sally raised her shoulder against the sound, against the woman’s breath. She was now the one who was panting. Her anger a clenched fist in her chest. And yet there was pride, too. She had, after all, spoken up.

  “You’re a devil,” the woman said into her ear. Without turning to face her, Sally bared her teeth at her own reflection and whispered, “You are.”

  The windowsill of the train was now as sooty as any subway’s.

  The smell of soot, in fact, was lofting through the car. She put her forehead to the glass to see if there was a refinery outside, a house fire, a blazing garbage dump. Fire and brimstone. It seemed the right smell for this hellish train, this terrible journey that could
not have taken her farther from the convent’s clean laundry and the pretty joy she had felt just this afternoon about the consecrated life she was called to.

  There was only darkness beyond the train window, her own vague reflection passing over it. She wondered how many miles they had gone and, with the thought, felt the flood of tears she had not realized she’d been keeping at bay, had been keeping at bay since she last glimpsed Sister Jeanne and her mother through this very glass. She put her fingertips to the window. Her mother and Sister Jeanne had once stood framed within it. The tears came, bitter and unrelenting. Life a bleak prospect to a motherless child.

  At her back, she heard the dirty woman say, “Serves you right.”

  It was three in the morning.

  By the time the train came into the station in Chicago, she had done her calculations: she had the money in her wallet, and the remaining bills pinned to the lining of her handbag. She also had a dollar in each shoe—following the Tierney twins’ advice. She would get herself a sleeping car for the journey home.

  There was the scent of morning air inside the beautiful station—the familiar scent of early-morning city air that made her feel for just a moment that she had not arrived but returned. There was something lovely in the bright beams that poured in from the skylights, touching down here and there on the wide floor.

  There was the bustle of many busy people, the trailing presence of the dirty woman, whose breath she could still taste. She saw the two nuns who were there to meet her, their clean and simple forms, arms folded, idle hands tucked into their sleeves. One was young, one older. They both smiled as she approached. Their skin, after the heavy powder of the woman on the train, looked pure, newly formed, despite the peach fuzz and wrinkles on one and the scattering of blemishes on the other. She recognized the smell of sunlight and starch on their habits. She recognized the offer of friendship in the younger one’s shy brown eyes.

  She would love the companionship of nuns for the rest of her life.