Mrs. Costello looked at her. That small, finely shattered face. “Better?” Mrs. Costello asked. “How?”
Her nose was running. Sally put the bowl of broth on the dresser and stood to collect another handkerchief from Mr. Costello’s drawer. “How am I better?” Mrs. Costello called after her. “Sitting here all alone day after day.”
“I’m here,” Sally said, returning. “You’re not alone.” She put the handkerchief to the woman’s nose.
“Abandoned and alone,” Mrs. Costello said beneath it. And then, whining, “I have a pain.”
Sally folded the handkerchief, wiped at her face again. She had a sudden impulse to stuff it into the woman’s mouth.
“I know you do,” she said dully. “I know.”
Mrs. Costello’s troubles were endless. The care of her was endless.
Sally took the bowl of broth from the dresser. The two balled handkerchiefs, full of snot, the yellow towel soaked in linseed, were still on the floor around her. There was straightening up to do. There were still hours to go before she could leave for her shift in the tearoom.
Mrs. Costello squirmed in her chair, broke wind, coughed delicately.
She seemed on the verge of tears again, but then her gaze turned to the window, to the bright cold light of the late morning, and she sank once more into that wide and vacant stare. Sally listened to the traffic in the street. Heard a brush of wind against the building. Her legs and arms ached with the impulse, electric, insistent, to flee. Her own Saint Vitus Dance. “I’m going to leave now,” she said.
She went quickly to the kitchen. In the sink, a cockroach darted into the drain, and she poured what remained of the broth after it. In her own household, her mother’s household, lost to her now, no food was ever left out in the open, uncovered, but still Sally left the pot with the nuns’ soup on the stove. Why shouldn’t Mr. Costello clean it up when he came home, his stomach filled with her mother’s ham and eggs and toast and tea? Why shouldn’t he care for his own wife?
She left the unwashed bowl in the sink. Took her coat from the chair in the living room and slipped it on. Put on her hat and her gloves, and saw as she did how her hands were shaking.
Mrs. Costello called from the bedroom, “Are you there?” Sally could hear the mucus in her voice. The woman coughed and then asked again, beginning to cry, “Is anyone there?” She let out a single moan—childish, despairing, startling in its sudden volume—and then said, angrily, all to herself, “Damn them to hell.”
Sally slipped out the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Mrs. Costello,” she called weakly, understanding the woman couldn’t hear her at all.
Gaining the cold street, Sally felt the weight of her desertion. She had failed in her fine intentions once again. It was like a thumb pressed into her chest, a smudged shadow on her soul. She breathed deeply, as if to dislodge the discomfort. The winter sun, bouncing off windshields and tenement windows and pale brick, made her squint. But it was delightful, nonetheless, to walk unencumbered in the cold air. To be out of that stifling room.
And then she remembered the aspirin Sister Aquina had left, for the woman’s fever. To be stirred into Mrs. Odette’s applesauce, the smooth part of it, anyway. She thought of the heat that had risen from Mrs. Costello’s scalp. It was an unnatural heat, the sickroom heat of a fever. She imagined how it might continue to burn as Mrs. Costello sat in her chair, crying out uselessly, her temperature rising and rising, sweat running down her small face, mixing with the mucus that covered her lips. She imagined the sound of her voice tangled with phlegm.
And Sister Aquina returning to the apartment, or perhaps Mr. Costello himself, to find cockroaches in a black line across white enamel of the stovetop. Mrs. Costello lifeless in her chair, her face scorched.
Sally reached the hotel two hours early for her shift. She used the service entrance and took the stairs down to the locker room, but then went the long way around, through the basement labyrinth. She could feel the change in the air—scent of bleach, a touch of steam—as she approached the wide doors of the laundry. The humid air throbbed with the banging of the machines. After the cold outside, the sudden heat made her fingers burn inside her gloves. She pulled them off. The big steel doors of the laundry were open, thrown back against the tile walls. She walked past. Inside, the men in their white clothes were busy with their work, pushing baskets, loading sheets into the big machines. They all seemed the same size and shape. Some wore white brimless caps. Two or three had long black braids down their backs. There were four large steam presses on the far side of the room, the size of gray coffins. They belched steam in a way that made the workers surrounding them seem, briefly, to disappear. There were two ironing tables, with men—she still thought this a comical sight—wielding large electric irons whose cords ran upward, to the ceiling.
She stepped inside. Ordinarily, she would just walk past, glance in, breathe the familiar air, gather the details to bring back to the convent—how many sheets did they wash in a day, how many towels and tablecloths, Sister Illuminata loved to speculate—but today she stepped over the threshold. One of the Chinese men looked up immediately, shouted something over the din, and waved her away. She grinned back at him, but stayed where she was. He shrugged and returned to his work. She wondered if Sister was right. Would they put a knife in her if they could? What would her mother say then?
To her left there was a shelf, taller and longer than Sister Illuminata’s but as well stocked as hers was with boxes of detergent and bottles of bleach, tubs of Borax and bluing and salt and lime. A tiny skull and crossbones on a bottle of ammonia. Sister Illuminata had called it the devil’s mark when Sally was a child. A way to scare her into keeping her hands off.
Sister’s Illuminata’s sainted mother, Sally knew, had once saved the life of a little boy, the child of another laundress. The boy had swallowed a fistful of alum, and his silly mother, in her panic, had poured water down his throat. The boy would have choked to death or drowned right there on dry land, Sister Illuminata said, if her own dear mother hadn’t pushed the woman away and then reached her pinky into the boy’s mouth, unstopping him.
That boy grew up to be a priest, Sister Illuminata always said at the end of this tale, well satisfied.
Impulsively, Sally reached up and touched the devil’s mark. Again, one of the Chinese men shouted at her, waved her away with a towel as if she were a duck to be chased. She pulled back her hand and noticed as she did a bit of brown grime beneath her fingernails. She could smell Mrs. Costello’s stink, even here, where the air was filled with soap and bleach.
She lifted the bottle of ammonia from the shelf and turned quickly, out the door, down the narrow hallway. She went around a corner, through the door of the ladies’ room the employees shared. She put the stopper into one of the sinks and filled it with water as hot as it would run. She poured the ammonia into it—the scent rising, stinging her sinuses. Another tearoom girl, a broad, motherly sort, was at the other end of the washroom. She wrinkled her nose as she approached the sink where Sally stood. She asked, “What’s going on?” with a slow, bovine curiosity, and then watched open-mouthed as Sally plunged her hands into the water.
It wasn’t hot enough to scald, but the ammonia burned her bitten cuticles and she gasped a little. The smell of the ammonia was pricking her nose, crawling up into her eyes. She turned her head, holding her breath, but kept her hands where they were.
“Is this a rule now?” the girl asked with a little more urgency. She pinched her nose. She wore her dark hair cut straight across her high forehead, which made her look stupid. “Are they making us do this now?”
Sally nodded and then, forced to exhale, laughed. She said, yes, all the tearoom girls were now required to wash their hands in ammonia. She said something about the health inspector. She listened to herself tell this lie, amused, but not surprised, to find that she was capable of such a small cruelty. She stirred her hands in the quickly cooling water. Ran one nail under the other an
d stirred her hands again. “There’s a lot of sickness going around. They want us to be careful.”
The girl considered this. She was a big girl with wide, droopy breasts beneath her street clothes, a woolen dress, an ill-fitting coat. It occurred to Sally that she looked far better in her tearoom uniform, cleaner, even smarter, in her apron and her cap. A face and body made for service.
Sally saw the girl eye what was left in the bottle of ammonia.
“Help yourself,” Sally said.
Side by side, the two of them bathed their hands, scooping up the sharply scented water and pouring it out again.
Telling it later, our mother said, “Like a pair of Pontius Pilates.”
* * *
IN THE TEAROOM that afternoon, there was a lovely couple—a mother and a daughter. They were conferring like businessmen about the daughter’s wedding reception here at the hotel, come June. The mother was an elegant lady with her veil drawn down over her eyes. The daughter wore a lovely suit with wide white lapels and a cinched waist. They both gave off a soft perfume. They spoke together, heads bent: orange blossom, she heard them say, stephanotis, lilac, lily of the valley. She heard them say June weather, vanilla cake, iced lemonade.
When they were gone, Sally found a linen handkerchief beneath their table, neatly folded, of a pretty, pale violet shade. It carried the women’s perfume. She put it in her purse.
As she changed out of her uniform at the end of her shift, she was still repeating the words in her head, like the refrain of a song, like the words of a prayer: stephanotis, lilac, iced lemonade.
It was dark and bitter cold when she returned to the street. She had thrown her gloves away, and now she kept her raw hands plunged into her pockets, aware of the scent of ammonia that lingered on her skin.
Orange blossom and lily of the valley. Stephanotis. Iced lemonade. It occurred to her as she walked that if Mrs. Costello had died in her chair this afternoon, abandoned and alone, her mother and Mr. Costello would be free to marry. Come June, perhaps.
Holy
MRS. TIERNEY SAID, “Good for you,” when Sally told her the next morning, through her bedroom door, that she was sleeping in. “Sure the Sisters can get along fine without you. Get your rest.”
Liz Tierney was happy to think that the girl was growing somewhat weary of all her good works: all the holiness and the loneliness and the sacrifice.
Mrs. Tierney understood only that Sally, having had a false start on her vocation, was once again spending her mornings following the nuns. Getting her courage up to try again. The estrangement between her and her mother, Liz Tierney believed, was another matter altogether.
On the following morning, when Sally announced at breakfast that she would not be helping the nuns at all anymore, Mrs. Tierney smiled. She told her own daughters, who were sitting right there with the girl at the kitchen table, that it was now their duty to make sure Sally had “a little fun at last.” She said, sympathetic and forgiving, “It’s an awful lot they ask of you, the Sisters. It’s a difficult life.” She said, “God’s not going to hold it against you if you’re something less than a blessed saint. Aren’t we all human? Aren’t we all doing the best we can?”
Elizabeth Tierney was full of admiration for the Sisters, who moved through the streets of the city in their black and white, doing good where it was needed, imposing good where they found it lacking.
She never failed to greet them as they passed—“Good morning, Sisters,” “How are you, Sister?”—or to put a penny or two in their baskets whenever she saw them begging. And although she sympathized with Annie’s disdain for the society ladies who raised money for the nuns, still Mrs. Tierney went to the bazaars and the card parties at the various convents and spent her husband’s money lavishly on aprons and raffle tickets and crocheted blankets, for the sake of the Sisters.
The nuns did more good in the world than any lazy parish priest, she liked to say, especially in arguments with her husband, especially after he learned that she had squandered the week’s household funds on euchre and bridge at some convent, or had given what he called “more than their fair share” to some plucky little Sister bound for pagan lands.
The priests were pampered momma’s boys compared to these holy women, Liz Tierney would argue. “Princes of the Church, my eye,” she would say—if only to get his goat—“Spoiled children they are. It’s the nuns who keep things running.”
Liz Tierney loved the nuns—adored them, she said—but she also harbored in her heart the belief that any woman who chose to spend a celibate life toiling for strangers was, by necessity, “a little peculiar.”
Mrs. Tierney was a devout Catholic, but the kind of Catholic, she knew, who preferred the noise and humidity of the street after mass to the cool dampness of the sacristy, preferred conversation to prayer, sunlight to flickering shadow.
She was a Catholic woman who was more moved by the miraculous blood that colored the cheeks of her six children as they fidgeted in the pew than she was by any injunction from the pulpit regarding the watery stuff that flowed from His pierced side for the salvation of all men.
Liz Tierney had nothing against the salvation of all men. She was as grateful for the fact of heaven as she was sure of her path toward it. She counted the Blessed Mother as first among her confidantes. She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church—the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation—ordered her disorderly children.
But holiness bored her.
She liked chaos, busyness, bustling. She liked a household strewn with clothes and dust and magazines and books, jump ropes, baseball bats, milk bottles. She liked the sight and the smell of overflowing ashtrays, of a man who’s had a few drinks, of tabletops crowded with cloudy glasses. She loved falling into an unmade bed at the end of the long day, falling in beside her snoring husband—with maybe a child or two snagged in the covers—and never reaching, because sleep overtook her, the part of the Hail Mary that said: Now and at the hour of our death.
It was at the end of everything the Church had to say, in her opinion: Death was. And while she understood the need and logic of this, she had never found the subject of much interest.
Quoting her, our father sometimes said, “Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?”
Liz Tierney preferred the bright distractions of living. She liked a good fight. She liked a long talk with plenty of gossip in it. She liked her husband when his passions were at high tide, and her children when they were rocking the boat: running, or laughing, full of outrage, full of schemes. She liked the sound of many voices in her house—liked it better still when they rose in a chorus of song. She liked stories of sin far better than tales of virtue. She liked the salty taste of contradiction on her tongue. She hated idleness. And long silences. She hated to see anyone doing anything alone.
When Sister Lucy appeared at her door for the second time in nearly twenty years, Sally all bedraggled beside her, not gone to the convent after all, Mrs. Tierney was quietly delighted by the news of Annie’s stolen afternoons—with the milkman, no less.
“You spoke up,” she wanted to tell her friend, spoke up against the lousy certainties life had given her: a husband dead, a daughter to raise alone, daily labor, daily loneliness, dull duty. She said, in fact, when next she and Annie met, “An hour or two of an afternoon isn’t much of a sin.”
And so on the morning that Sally told her, still in her dressing gown and with the breakfast plates and cups and crusts still on the kitchen table, “I’m not following the Sisters anymore,” Mrs. Tierney could only smile. It was a cold, dark morning and an icy rain was hitting the courtyard outside the window. Liz Tierney was delighted to know that the girl wouldn’t be going out into such weather, even to comfort the sic
k. “Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning,” Mrs. Tierney said, singing it, as she brewed another pot of tea. “But it’s nicer to stay in bed.”
And then, not two weeks later, Mrs. Costello came down with pneumonia and Mr. Costello decided to amend his life. Annie told Liz Tierney this news without shedding a tear. She seemed to love the man all the more for it. He’d broken it off with her and then made a good confession, and, Annie said, “That’s that.”
“And you?” Liz Tierney said. “Have you made a good confession, too?”
Annie hushed her—they were walking arm-in-arm through the cold and leafless park. She said it was hardly a subject she would bring up in church, with a holy priest, no less. Wouldn’t the poor man die of embarrassment?
They leaned together, laughing. But knowing, too, faithful as they were, that an immortal soul was at stake. “You could make a quick confession,” Liz told her. “You wouldn’t have to go into detail.”
But Annie, stubborn, shook her head. “There’s not a thing I’m sorry for,” she said.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, a wet night in early February, Sally came back to the Tierneys’ after her shift at the hotel and went up to her room. She and the twins were going to the movies in an hour. She had barely taken off her shoes and stockings and was drying her hair with a towel when there was a light tap at the door. Mrs. Tierney entered, and then closed the door behind her, leaning back against it, her hands on the doorknob behind her substantial hips. Her cheeks were bright red, as if she had just come in from the cold herself.
“You should know,” Mrs. Tierney said, without preliminaries, “the situation has changed. For your mother.” She studied Sally, as if to see if there was more she needed to say. She seemed briefly disappointed to find there was. “She no longer has her visitor. His wife is ill. He believes that’s where his duty lies.” And then she raised her eyebrows to say, Do you understand me now? And then smiled in relief as if Sally had actually said, I understand.
The Ninth Hour Page 19
