The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  In fact, Sally said nothing at all.

  Mrs. Tierney straightened up, brought her hands forward, drying them, although they were not wet, on her apron. “You are always welcome here, of course,” she said. “You can stay as long as you like. But no one would wonder if you want to leave us now to go back to your own place.”

  She smoothed her apron over her skirt, her voice taut with the emotion she could not conceal. “Your mother is there by herself now,” she said. “Entirely alone.”

  Still

  THE LAMPS WERE ALL ON in Mrs. Costello’s apartment, although daylight was at the bedroom window. A funereal hush about the place as the two nuns—Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy today—bustled silently about. Sister Jeanne was putting the clean laundry in drawers and cupboards when Sally arrived. Sister Lucy was just turning from Mrs. Costello in the bed, her stethoscope around her neck, black against her silver cross and her white bib. Mrs. Costello’s small face was wan. She was, Sister Lucy told Sister Jeanne, “weak as a kitten.” In the corner by the window, there was a bullet-shaped oxygen tank beside a folded oxygen tent that was ghostly pale.

  Sister Lucy glanced up at Sally as she stood in the door of Mrs. Costello’s bedroom, and then she said, indifferently, “Good. You’re here.”

  She brushed down her sleeve with her crooked hand. Then reached into her pocket for her wristwatch on its worn leather strap. “All right, I’m off,” she said. She took Sally by the arm and steered her out of the room. “Are you here for the duration or just stopping in?” she asked. Her eyes were moving and her mouth indicated that she was already certain no answer would satisfy. “Because I’ve been told you’ve abandoned this particular work of mercy,” she went on, “which is fine, you’re not obliged. You were never obliged to be here. But Jeanne’s exhausted. She could use some help until Mr. Costello gets home. The missus is recovering, but slowly.” She squinted a bit from the distance of her bonnet. “Mr. Costello will be home as soon as he can get here. Every morning now. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Sally said, “I know.”

  Sister reached for her cloak, which was still damp and sparkling with the morning’s rain. She swept the cloak over her shoulder, the stethoscope around her neck, tangled now with the chain of her cross. “Mrs. Costello will live,” she said, as if she were merely ticking off the day’s obligations. “Her husband will mend his ways.” She smiled her thin-lipped smile, reaching back to adjust her veil. “I’ve never believed our God is a bargaining God, but men do. It’s nonsense. While he was praying for her to live, she was praying to die. Which one of them struck the bargain?”

  Sister Lucy sniffed disdainfully. “We kept her alive,” she said. “God knows it.”

  Now she pulled off the stethoscope and stashed it angrily, as was her ordinary way, into her little black bag. “Mr. Costello returns around ten. Eleven at the latest. No one will blame you if you don’t want to run into him. But stay a while and let Sister Jeanne catch her breath.”

  She lifted her bag, looked around the room. “Take a dust rag to those lampshades,” she went on, “and to the baseboards. There’s bread and butter in the kitchen. Some boiled eggs, applesauce. Get Jeanne to eat something, too. And put the kettle on. Bring them both a nice cup of tea. Fortify it with plenty of milk and sugar.” And then Sister Lucy was out the door.

  Sally still wore her coat and hat, and her pocketbook was still on her arm. She stood in the room, briefly uncertain. The nuns had the two lamps turned on and the light in the kitchen as well. New, if gray and muted, sunlight was streaming into the bedroom from the one window. It was nearly 7 a.m. The radiator against the far wall was hissing and ticking, but the draft left by Sister Lucy’s exit swept the room, hollowing out the warmth. Sally shivered. In her purse was the violet handkerchief she had picked up from the floor of the tearoom. Tied into it, like a hobo’s pack, was a good handful of alum.

  Sally put her purse on the slipcovered chair. She took off her coat and her hat and placed them over it. Then she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. While it boiled, she went back to the living room and picked up her purse. Now she put it on the small kitchen table. She set out on the counter two of Mrs. Costello’s teacups, spooned tea into the silver tea ball, and placed it inside the tin pot. When the water boiled, she poured it in. She went to her purse, easily found the violet handkerchief.

  She untied the knot and shook the alum into the empty cup. She poured the tea over it and immediately the water grew cloudy. The faint odor that arose was redolent of Sister’s Immaculate’s laundry. She added sugar and milk and then tasted the mixture from the spoon. There was the bitter sharpness of what was not tea. In the cupboard over the sink, Mr. Costello kept a bottle of whiskey. Sally had seen it before. Quickly she reached up for the bottle and poured a splash into the tea, briefly recalling the Bronx girl on the train. She tied up the handkerchief again and returned it to her purse. She snapped the purse closed, and the sound of the lock reverberated. It echoed, she was certain.

  She carried the teacup on its saucer, the spoon rattling, into the bedroom. Mrs. Costello was propped in the bed as she had been. Sister Jeanne was taking her pulse.

  “Sister Lucy said to bring her some tea,” Sally whispered. “There’s some waiting for you in the kitchen, too.” She kept her hand over the cup, as if to contain the scent of what she had done. She felt her palm grow damp with steam. There was something painful rising to her throat. She knew she could always drop the cup. Mrs. Costello’s eyes fluttered open, that meaningless blue of them. “I don’t want it,” she whispered. “Go away.” She coughed weakly and tried to move down into the bed.

  Sister Jeanne was adjusting the pillows behind her head. “It’s better for your lungs if you can sit up a bit, dear,” she said gently. Sally could tell Sister Jeanne had said this many times before. “I know you are tired, Mrs. Costello, but it’s better if you can give your lungs some room.”

  Mrs. Costello coughed again and then narrowed her eyes like an angry child. “I’m tired of you,” she said.

  Sister Jeanne said, “You’re tired in general, Mrs. Costello. A little tea. Something to eat, and you’ll start feeling stronger.”

  She signaled to Sally to come around the bed. “Just a spoonful,” she whispered. “A spoonful at a time. I’ll bring some food.”

  Sally’s hand was trembling as she held the cup, and the cup was rattling against the saucer. The alum was at the bottom. Her plan was to give Mrs. Costello some sips of liquid, and then to spoon up the wet alum from the bottom of the cup and fill her mouth with it. Stop her throat with it. Stop her breath.

  Her plan was to exchange her own immortal soul for her mother’s mortal happiness.

  It was a ridiculous plan. Even this far along, she knew it was ridiculous. She knew it was ridiculous when she first conceived of it—walking home from the hotel on that bitter night, thinking lilac and stephanotis, a wedding in June, and considering how only a miserable woman, blood and stink and complaint, bird bones and pale skin, stood in the way of her mother’s happiness, her mother’s place in heaven.

  She knew it was ridiculous just yesterday when she coaxed Sister Illuminata up the stairs for the three o’clock prayers. (“Wouldn’t you rather pray in the chapel, Sister?” she had asked. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “How long has it been since you’ve spent the afternoon hour away from your ironing board?”) And then filled the violet handkerchief with Sister’s alum—meant, Sally knew, for making flameproof the nuns’ veils, the donated infant clothes, the kitchen curtains. Telling herself all the while her plan was ridiculous. She would never do it. Never find the nerve.

  And then waking so early this morning in her bed in the Tierney house. The mad sounds of the morning routine echoing through the walls. Feet pounding on the stairs and Mr. Tierney pounding on the bathroom door. The girls complaining they needed to get in there, too. A refrain of “Can I wear your … Can I borrow…” passed among the four of them. And Patric
k calling to Michael, and Mrs. Tierney calling to the twins. Mr. Tierney singing wordlessly in his lovely baritone as he passed her doorway, going down the hall. The whistle of the kettle and the snap crack of bacon frying in the pan. Toast burning. And smelling again that moment when she believed, stupid and dumbfounded but, still, full of belief, that her father had returned in her absence, had returned to restore her mother’s happiness, her bright laughter, her life. To keep her from being entirely alone.

  A ridiculous plan, she knew, even as she got up in the cold room and dressed and then, lying, told Mrs. Tierney she was going to see her mother at the convent. The lie itself, spoken out loud, making her ridiculous plan, her terrible plan, just that much more possible, the first step toward what she wanted to do. She told her lie and left the house, and suddenly her scheme was not merely a flight of her imagination but something possible. Something she might actually accomplish in the world: her mother’s life, her mortal life and her eternal life, restored.

  “Going by the convent to see my mother,” she had said, lying so smoothly, leaving the house, and instead climbing the stairs to Mrs. Costello’s apartment. Letting herself in. The good handful of alum in her purse, wrapped in the fragrant handkerchief.

  And now here she was, standing alone with it at the edge of Mrs. Costello’s bed.

  She skimmed a mouthful of the tea and slowly moved it toward the woman’s lips. Mrs. Costello took it easily, swallowed, touched her lips together. But then shook her head. She coughed, put her whole body into the cough and said, “No more.”

  “A few more,” Sally said. She felt a fever flush, that unnatural heat, rise up into her collar, over her face. Mrs. Costello took another, listless sip. Her lips were dry, mean, and thin. Pale hairs sprouted along the length of them. The bones in her face, her cheeks and her chin, had grown prominent. She was thin and pale, barely a wisp of a body. Barely there. Hardly a real presence in the room at all: no chest and narrow hips and only one good leg under the sheet and the counterpane. And yet the impediment to so many things.

  Sally spooned up the mixture at the bottom of the cup.

  Now Sister Jeanne came into the room again. She, too, had a teacup in her hand, and a spoon. “If you would take a bite to eat, Mrs. Costello,” she was saying as she approached the bed. “Maybe a bit of applesauce.”

  Mrs. Costello, still coughing, delicately now, was repeating her small, piping “No.” Sinking again against her pillows. “Step aside, dear,” Sister Jeanne said to Sally. She placed herself between the two.

  Sally turned to the dresser and caught her own reflection in the mirror. She looked pale and disheveled, wild-eyed, ridiculous. A kind of madness in the way she clutched the delicate cup and saucer to her chest. A kind of madness in the very notion of it: to stop a woman’s throat. Stop her breath. To brush aside her thin and useless life, burdensome as it was, in order to get what she was seeking for the mother she loved above all else.

  She looked at the young faces in the wedding photo.

  Mrs. Costello’s two good feet were in satin shoes just under the lace hem of her dress. Mr. Costello’s black hair was thick and wavy, glistening with pomade.

  Weren’t they wild-eyed, too, looking out from the past?

  Mrs. Costello was coughing again. Sally glanced over her shoulder, and then, in the time it took her to turn fully, the cough seemed to change register. The woman had sunk lower still in the bed, but now, suddenly, her spine arched as she coughed and her head fell back. She lifted her face from the pillow like a swimmer breaking water. Blotches of red appeared on her cheeks and her neck—they had the scattered and arbitrary shapes of shattered pottery. Mrs. Costello pressed her palms against the mattress, as if to rise, and then the coughing took hold of her completely, her shortened leg flailing with it. Sally moved toward her and felt the tea rise up over the rim of the cup, wetting her blouse. She spun around to put the teacup down, and when she turned once again, it was into Sister Jeanne’s dark back. Sister had stepped away from the bed, although her white bonnet was still aimed toward Mrs. Costello. She still held in her hands the cup of applesauce and the poised spoon. The woman’s coughing changed register once more, no longer a battling out of air—a sound like the beating of laundry—but of sucking air in, deep and wounded and gulping. Her small mouth was open, and now so were her pale eyes, full of more expression than Sally had ever seen: panic, fear, pain, astonishment.

  Sally heard herself cry out. She took hold of the nun’s sleeve. “Help her, Sister. She’s choking.”

  Without turning her head, Sister Jeanne moved her arm, held it across Sally’s waist, the spoon still in her hand, showing the girl that she should keep her distance. Sister Jeanne held her arm steady, her eyes on Mrs. Costello. She was steadfast and calm.

  Sally apprehended only vaguely that Sister Jeanne knew it was better to wait, to stand back, to let the fit, the nonsense, pass.

  Mrs. Costello’s face was deeply purple now. The sound coming from her was like a braying, a tearing. Sally could see the woman’s tongue in her wet mouth, between her blue lips. Her chest was heaving, seeming to turn the wisp of her body inside out. Mrs. Costello curled herself against the racket her lungs were making, against the struggle to breathe, bringing her good leg up to her middle, bowing her head down as if to meet it. And then her coughing changed register again, falling off, suddenly subsiding. Sally could once again hear the rain rattling down the gutters of the building.

  And then Sister Lucy was in the room like night descending. She was still in her dark cloak, which seemed to be sailing, her black veil sailing, too. Both sparkled with drops of rain. Briefly, the room was infused with the smell of rain. Sister Lucy was on the bed, hovering over the bed, Mrs. Costello, light as a feather, in her arms, so easily and familiarly it seemed the woman moved of her own accord, gave herself over to Sister Lucy’s embrace. And now Sister Jeanne was at the edge of the bed as well, holding the woman’s shoulders as both nuns swiftly sat her up, slapped her wrists, and pounded her back. And then, gently, like a mother with a small child, Sister Lucy cradled Mrs. Costello’s head in the crook of her dark sleeve. Time passed. The woman seemed soothed. The two Sisters eased her down again. Sally saw Mrs. Costello’s long braid, neatly done, swing forward. She was limp, her mouth was gaping, and then Sister Lucy’s cloak covered her face as the nun brushed her forehead with her thumb, brushing away some perspiration or a tear. Sally saw Sister Jeanne bless herself. Sister Lucy did the same.

  And then a strange silence, barely broken by the rain at the window. The two nuns began to move about the bed with such grace and assurance that Sally imagined they were enacting a long-established routine. Sister Lucy cupped the woman’s head in her hand, lifting her skull to adjust the pillows underneath. Then she gently placed it down again. Sister Jeanne had pushed back the sheet and blanket and was arranging her nightgown over her legs, gently moving the good one, which had become bent in her ordeal, to a straighter, more comfortable position, moving the pliable shortened one into alignment. Then she pulled the skirt of her nightgown down to her ankle.

  Without a word, the two nuns lifted the twisted bed linens, up into the air and then down again, refreshed and smoothed. They tucked her in neatly. Sister Lucy moved the thin rope of Mrs. Costello’s braid to her shoulder and then, with a handkerchief from her deep pocket, wiped the scattered spittle of applesauce, the smooth part, from her lips. She returned the handkerchief to her pocket while Sister Jeanne went to the window to let in some cool air.

  It wasn’t until they both knelt, side by side in the lamp-lit room, that Sally understood Mrs. Costello was dead.

  On the dresser was the teacup with the concoction she had stirred together, it seemed hours and hours ago now. The tea had splattered when she placed it down. Threw it down. There was the smell of whiskey. Beside it, too, was the cup and spoon Sister Jeanne had brought in to feed the woman. Sally had not seen her put it down. Inside the cup, Mrs. Odette’s applesauce, with its lumps and bits of
peel.

  It all struck her as senseless now: food and drink carried in just a moment ago, carried in to feed a body now lifeless. An absurdity.

  Slowly, with nothing to hold on to, Sally sank to her knees behind the two nuns. Behind their dark veils and skirts and the worn, upturned soles of their black shoes. They were saying the Hail Mary. Sally sat back on her heels. The rug here was a worn Persian, not unlike the rug in Sister Illuminata’s laundry, where she had played as a child. It was clean enough, Sally thought, but perhaps threaded here and there with street sand or mud. Whatever Mr. Costello brought in on his big farmer’s feet. It was February. No doubt the rug had been swept often in these last few months, but not taken out for a beating since spring.

  Now Sister Lucy was standing, slowly, leaning on Mrs. Costello’s bed to get to her feet. Mrs. Costello’s body moved slightly in response to the pressure on the mattress. Sister Jeanne knelt still, her head bent. Sister Lucy, towering over them all now, looked down at Sally and tilted her head to indicate that she should leave the room. “Pick up those cups,” Sister Lucy said, her voice weary. Sally had never before heard weariness in Sister Lucy’s voice. Obediently, she picked up the cup and saucer with the poisoned tea and ran her finger through the ring of the cup of applesauce. She held both close to her chest. On her way out, Sister Lucy stopped at the dresser, opened a drawer, and removed one of Mrs. Costello’s neatly folded nightgowns, the one Sister Jeanne had put away just minutes ago. She put it on the top of the dresser and went out.

  Sally followed the nun into the kitchen. Sister Lucy lifted the teakettle and then filled it at the sink and put a flame under it on the stove. She went to the kitchen cupboard and found a tin washbasin. She poured the warmed water into the basin and then, as if just remembering something—she let out a “tut” and shook her head—she went back into the living room. And quickly returned with her cloak taken off and her apron over her habit, her veil tied back with a black ribbon. She poured the rest of the water into the basin, took a bar of soap from the milk box beside the draped tub, placed it in the water. She lifted the basin and walked out. Pausing as she did to look Sally up and down, the two cups and the saucer still clutched to her chest. She saw Sister Lucy’s eyes look into the cup of applesauce, saw her eyebrow rise. But Sister Lucy only said, “Clean up, won’t you?”