More happiness than any of us can imagine, Sister Jeanne said. More beauty than any of us on earth can bear.
I’ll never see it, she said. But all of youse will.
The point to remember, Sister Jeanne said—pernt, she said—is that truth finds the light. Lies, big or small, never stay hidden. She pushed the air with the palm of her hand—a comic gesture that said Go on with you— So don’t even bother telling lies, she said.
Truth reveals itself. It’s really quite amazing.
God wants us to know the truth in all things, she said, big or small, because that’s how we’ll know Him.
In all her simplicity, old Sister Jeanne told us, “It’s really that simple.”
A Tonic
ON HER FIRST AFTERNOON at the sanatorium upstate, Sister Illuminata left the porch where the patients were lined up like bolts of linen and wandered through the wings of the cottage. She wanted only solitude. She had already endured the crowded crossing in steerage, the filth and the sickness. She had endured the constant entreaties from every poor Catholic on board, and had brushed from her veil and from the hem of her skirt the traces of spit that had been directed at her from those who were not. She stood in the knocking crowds on Ellis Island, elbow to elbow. And although her habit earned her only a cursory stethoscope to her lungs—through her bib, no less—from a harried and blushing doctor, she’d had barely a night alone in her convent room when Dr. Hannigan, less afraid and more thorough than the government doctor had been, sent her to the sanatorium.
When a nurse there—a Sister of Mercy herself—tried to stop her from going off alone, Sister Illuminata said, lying, that it was a stipulation of her own order that she say her afternoon Office on her feet. She wouldn’t be long.
So it was that she found herself drawn by the luxury of silence to a section of the cottage that was not currently in use—the back of the house, where a winter sunroom she had seen from the drive had now, in midsummer, been given over to storage. Her beads in her hand, she turned from the darkened hallway into the bright space. The air here was hazy, full of dust motes and vague sunbeams, stiflingly hot. There were bed frames and wicker chaises piled haphazardly. A green-and-white linoleum floor that was glazed with sunlight. The dull silence was exactly what she had sought. But then a human sound disturbed it: a long sigh that rippled across the stifling air like breath on water.
In an instant, her eyes found them: a man and a woman, half kneeling, half crouching. They were pressed together in a corner of the hot room, pressed up against each other, behind an iron bedstead that seemed to enclose them. Both had slipped their white robes from their shoulders. Both moved with the same slow, stuttering rhythm. Sister could see the woman’s bare throat, corded and straining, the white flesh of her breasts and the brown of her nipples. She could see the man’s shoulder blades, the short bones of his spine as they pressed themselves against the paper-thin skin. He rose up over her, she arched herself toward him. He was an old man, white hair on the back of his head, across his shoulders, and all along his skeletal arms.
Briefly, Sister thought there was something angelic about their pale struggle, the winged shoulder blades, the tangled bodies, the soft folds of their white robes, and the dusty, streaming sunlight. But then she saw how their mouths were wide open, black and straining. Opened helplessly as if in sudden reflex—as if to expel the short, ragged breaths they were taking. Precious breaths in this place.
Sister Illuminata saw them for only a moment before she turned away. There is a hunger, she thought.
The woman was a young mother from a wealthy family—Sister Illuminata’s own age. She died within the month. The old man was a doctor from Syracuse, New York, who went home with his family the same week Sister Illuminata returned to the convent—both of them, he said, with lungs forever scarred by their ordeal.
There is a hunger. It was a lesson she had learned and then forgotten across the years she had labored in the convent laundry. But she remembered it again when Sally returned from Chicago and Sister Lucy explained to a small coterie of the nuns: Illuminata and Jeanne, Sister Eugenia and old Sister Miriam, what the girl had discovered.
They were in what the Sisters humbly called the refectory; it was, in fact, the rich man’s former drawing room. It was elegant still, high-ceilinged, paneled, with the same thick silk draperies he had paid for. It was where the Sisters took their simple meals, but it was also the site for card parties and ladies’ teas, Christmas gatherings for the neighborhood poor, visits from the Bishop. A room the nuns used to impress both the indigent and the hoi polloi.
The small bulbs in the chandelier above the polished table where the nuns now sat reflected prettily in the dark wood, like starlight on a pond. As Sister Lucy spoke about the arrangements she had made to remove Sally from the scene of her mother’s “indiscretion,” Sister Illuminata recalled that she had seen such a pond, such dancing starlight, at the sanatorium upstate. She recalled the pond, the bracing cold night, the tall black pines in the distant darkness, and the flavor of pine on the air. She became aware once more of the ache in her scarred lungs. She recalled the old doctor.
She remembered the lesson she had learned on her first afternoon at the sanatorium, had learned but forgotten: There is a hunger.
Now Lucy was speaking of the property that was to be left to the Sisters, an estate out on Long Island. A rambling house the order would convert to an old folks’ home, the acreage that might accommodate a hospital someday. This was a realm of convent business Sister Illuminata had little to do with—upstairs business was how she referred to it—the stuff, as she saw it, of ambition and vanity as much as it was a part of the Sisters’ mission to serve the sick poor. There was goodness in it, of course, and the generosity of the Catholic family who had left the Sisters the land. Sister Lucy said the property would not come to them free and clear. But the motherhouse in Chicago would work with the diocese here. The Bishop approved. Some of the good ladies of the Auxiliary had volunteered their husbands, Wall Street men, bankers, men of the world.
There was goodness in it all, of course, but there was greed, too. Sister Illuminata heard it in Lucy’s eager voice: acreage and a house and banks and mortgages, the Bishop, the Cardinal.
More good, Sister Lucy said, than any one Sister could do on her own, going door to door.
It was the kind of worldly ambition, Sister Illuminata thought, that well suited Sister Lucy’s mannish face. And then prayed to be forgiven for the unkindness.
This was no time, Sister Lucy was saying, to disturb the ladies in the Auxiliary, or to stir gossip in the neighborhood, by throwing out onto the street a widow known these nearly twenty years as the laundress in the convent.
Sister Illuminata raised her eyes from the electric starlight reflected in the dining table’s shine. She felt that old ache in her lungs. And in her swollen knees. She knew the time would come, soon perhaps, when the trip down to the laundry, the trip back up again, would be impossible for her. She was well aware that even now, without Annie’s help, she could not manage half the tasks, most of the tasks, the convent needed her to do. If Annie was to be dismissed, no doubt another, younger nun would be assigned to take her place, or perhaps another needy widow from the neighborhood. The long hours Sister Illuminata spent in her chair beside the ironing board, sometimes—with Annie’s good indulgence—just dozing, would be exposed. Sister Illuminata, all other usefulness gone, would be brought every morning to an office lobby or a drafty subway entrance or to the vestibule of some busy store, a woven alms basket to hold on her lap. The cane she now used an extra added attraction.
Sister Lucy was saying, “If Sister Illuminata will have her.”
They all directed their eyes toward Sister Illuminata.
Caught by surprise, she only nodded gravely.
“I suggest we keep her here, then,” Sister Lucy said. “Whether she amends her life or no.”
And then they called Annie into the room. She stood with her hand
s folded before her, her back straight. “No” was the answer.
* * *
ONCE MORE, the cathedral light, the light of painted holy cards, streamed from the high windows to touch the girl’s shoulders and her bowed head. Sally was crouched on the floor beside the nun, leaned into her lap. The Ninth Hour prayers had just ended. Sally visited now only when her mother was out—at the shops, they continued to say, as if the truth of what her mother was up to on these afternoons could not assail the custom of their belief, their determined innocence.
There is a hunger, Sister Illuminata told the girl.
“A hunger to be comforted” was how our mother recalled it.
But the nun’s language in these matters—matters of the body, of the flesh, what went on between women and men—was limited. Her experience limited as well.
She put her hand on the girl’s head. Leaned as close to her familiar, sweet-scented hair as the starched bonnet would allow. “We can pray for your mother’s soul,” she said. “We can offer up our work, the way we do for the souls in purgatory.” She paused. Felt the old assurance of words she understood. “Maybe there are some extra works of mercy you could do. Something you can offer up to God in the name of your mother.”
“I don’t like nursing, Sister,” Sally said. Stubborn. “I’m no good at it.”
“It doesn’t have to be nursing,” Sister Illuminata said. “It doesn’t have to be religious life.” Sally was leaning against her lap, looking up at her warily. Sister could feel the quick impatience in the girl’s young bones. A coiled energy that had been there since her childhood, that Sister only now was willing to acknowledge was proof of Lucy’s assessment that marriage might settle her.
“You could simply do some good in your mother’s name,” she said. “Until your mother’s ready to do something for herself.”
Sally narrowed her eyes, as if to see Sister’s point. Her plain lovely face was not as childish as it once had been. Today she wore some face powder that obscured her fading freckles. Some rosy color on her chapped lips as well. Mr. Tierney had found her a small job in the tearoom at the hotel, three afternoons a week. Sister Illuminata took the makeup to mean the end of the girl’s vocation.
“A kind of penance,” Sister said. “A way to gain some indulgence for her. For her soul.”
Above them, the sound of the Sisters’ footsteps as they were leaving the chapel. Only a few of the nuns had returned to the convent today, most had stayed out on casework, need being what it was in the neighborhood.
“Maybe we can find some poor creature you can help. Maybe an old woman who would love your companionship. Maybe a young mother nearby who needs help with her children. We can ask the Sisters. We can find you some good you could do. For your mother’s sake. You can offer it up. For the salvation of her soul.”
Sister Illuminata heard Sister Jeanne’s light step on the basement stairs. Sally placed her cheek on the nun’s wide lap. “She won’t,” she said. And Sister heard Annie’s own determination in the girl’s voice. “She won’t change. She calls him ‘dear.’”
“We’ll find some good work for you to do,” Sister Illuminata said once more, raising her voice, hoping that Sister Jeanne would hear her, even as she understood the vanity of this, this long, silly competition for the girl’s affection. “Prayer and good work together will surely move Our Lord to grant you what you ask for.”
Sally raised her head again. Sister Illuminata was surprised to see there were no tears—only, in her searching brown eyes, what would have been, when she was young, the prelude to mischief. “Mrs. Costello,” Sally whispered. She said, “Sister Lucy thinks she’s a faker, but I don’t. I could go sit with her when she’s all alone. She hates being alone.” She raised her pale brows, her eyes full of childish mischief. “I could sit with Mrs. Costello while her husband’s away,” Sally said. “What would my mother think of that?”
Sister Illuminata was about to object—the notion both confused and dismayed her—when she looked up and saw Sister Jeanne leaning over the banister. In the bright afternoon sunlight Sister Jeanne was mostly silhouette, her hand to her heart.
Sister Illuminata placed her arm around Sally’s shoulders. She touched the girl’s soft hair. It was sinful, the way she competed with Jeanne—a sin she could never confess or define. Her need to be the girl’s favorite, to be loved beyond all the other nuns in the convent by this confused and mortal child, was inexplicable, even to herself. A hunger.
“That’s a fine idea,” Sister Illuminata said.
Mercy
THE LAUNDRY at the St. Francis Hotel was a far cry from the dark and efficient realm of the convent basement, but Sally felt herself drawn to it nevertheless. She passed it by in the afternoon when she arrived at the hotel and made her way toward it at the end of the day, just to smell the steam and to observe the noisy industry of the workers—mostly Chinese men who only glanced up at her when she wandered past, glanced up quickly and then looked away.
She had a mean and accurate version of the way they argued, which she had already performed for Sister Illuminata. The nun had not been amused. “Stay away from those men,” Sister had told her. “They’d as soon put a knife in you.”
The job Mr. Tierney had found for her was in the tearoom, helping to serve three days a week, from two in the afternoon to six in the evening. It was the best he could get for her for now. She wore a smart gray dress and a white apron, a cap and a hairnet and solid black shoes, and the outfit, given to her in the basement locker room where the workers gathered and dressed, immediately told her everything she needed to know about how to behave upstairs. She was a quick study, the supervisor said. A lovely girl.
Mornings, she waited on the steps of Mrs. Costello’s apartment house.
When the Sister arrived, Sally followed her up the stairs, then made herself useful in the neat and barren household, and then lingered after the Sister’s work was done, keeping Mrs. Costello company through those lonely hours of the late morning and early afternoon, the hours that filled her with such fear.
Hours during which Mrs. Costello chatted aimlessly, sometimes scolded her, sometimes drifted to sleep in her chair by the window.
On those days, while Mrs. Costello dozed in the silence that followed the Sister’s busy presence, the small apartment filled with an awful light—the color of bile. Wherever Sally’s eyes fell, there was something to make her shudder. Mr. Costello’s hairbrush on his dresser, threaded with his dull black hair. A poorly tatted bureau scarf Mrs. Costello had made at the Sisters’ urging: work for idle hands. The wedding picture. A dark sock turned in on itself, forgotten beneath the nightstand—was its partner beneath her mother’s bed? The man’s underpants and long johns—she opened drawers while Mrs. Costello slept—and handkerchiefs tucked into neat rows, a worn missal placed among them. The dresser itself was stained a dark, nearly black, mahogany, but the interior of each drawer was pale, startlingly pale—like something you should turn your eyes from—and redolent of fresh-cut wood. Her nightgowns and stockings and underclothes carefully folded. A marriage license in a brown envelope. Twenty years they had been married. Mrs. Costello’s baptismal certificate from St. Charles. She was forty-two years old. A cemetery deed for Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. A paper, many times folded, and with a gold seal like something from a classroom, that said Mr. Costello was a citizen of the United States.
The man’s trousers and shirts were in the small closet. Mrs. Costello’s few dresses hung beside them. Her two felt hats on the shelf above, side by side with his straw boater and a fedora—further proof, if any was needed, that these two were husband and wife.
Mr. Costello’s white milkman’s jacket, once, on a hook behind the bedroom door—it was slumped at the shoulders, collar raised, as if the man himself had turned from her, his head hung in shame.
What Sally knew of the physical relations between men and women in those days was vague enough, only words—hastily spoken—when her mother told her �
�what she needed to know.” Only the words some girls at school, and the rough boys who shouted in the street, had added to that mix. Penis. Backside. Tush. Bowels. Down below. The writhing pinky of the woman on the train.
When she was young, she had caught, now and then, and only for the short time it took her mother to hurry her past, a man—drunk, her mother always said—holding himself and splashing his water in the street. She had glimpsed last summer as she followed Sister Lucy more bare flesh than she had ever seen before—backsides and limbs and breasts and chests, baby boys with pink tulip bulbs between their legs, old ladies plucked hairless, their privates as puckered as their toothless mouths. She gathered that an odd magnetism drew human eyes to even the palest, the foulest, the saddest of uncovered skin. Sister Lucy, giving a sponge bath to an old man, running a soapy cloth over a wretched turkey neck pillowed on two bloated sacks the color of a bruise, shouted, “Turn away,” when she saw Sally gaping. “This is not a sight for you.”
But what she could not understand was how that strange magnetism accounted for what went on between her mother and Mr. Costello in the bedroom that used to be her own. How it—“a hunger,” Sister Illuminata said—was enough to allow her mother to choose this milkman, to call him “dear,” to live in what the Sisters, who even now were mostly tight-lipped about the situation, knew was mortal sin.
Her mother lived in mortal sin, skimmed the precipice of perdition with every step she took, every breath. Down the stairs she went in the morning, alone now, out into the teeming street, trolleys and trucks, cars veering, mad strangers jostling her at every corner, and no daughter beside her to serve as extra eyes. This was how her dangerous days now ran. Over to the convent, down another set of stairs. Furnace moaning. Mangle rattling. And what if fire or flood should trap her there? Boiled water scald her? What if the poison on Sister Illuminata’s shelves should find its way into her tea? Or pneumonia, tuberculosis, flu, transfer itself to her lungs from the putrid wash water of a dying woman’s linen? And the days growing darker now. And the way home sometimes slick with rain. The stolen afternoon with Mr. Costello, ham and eggs and the tumbled bed in the cold and waning light, black sin upon black sin. And then the long night with no one else in the apartment—did her mother check that the oven was turned off, as they always used to do when Sally was young, because of Jim? Was she careful stepping down from the chair when she reached up to the transom above the door? Would anyone hear her if she cried out in the night, clutching her heart?
The Ninth Hour Page 17
