They listened to their parents’ voices for a while longer and then fell asleep again under the first cool breezes of the morning. An hour later, when they woke, their father was sitting at the kitchen table in his Sunday shirt and pants, his work clothes. They were at Momma’s place by noon.
SEPTEMBER BROUGHT a single morning of suddenly cooled air and temporary amnesia that made the children forget, as they washed their faces and combed their hair and slipped into new shoes, new white shirts and gabardine pants or jumpers, that by afternoon the world would be as hot as it was in July and school would no longer seem an adventure.
But on this single morning the blank notebooks were new, as were the book bags and the pencils, and all the streets had been rinsed with rain. The four hundred children who crowded into the basement cafeteria (grades two through five) or the auditorium/gym (grades five through eight) were aware of the smell of paint and new textbooks, and they obeyed the command for silence with a jolly eagerness that even the most experienced teachers failed to recognize as something neither teacher nor student would see again this school year.
Both upstairs and downstairs the microphones whined and were tapped (by the principal downstairs, by the most terrifying eighth-grade teacher above) and blown into before the nun behind each said, “Hello. Can you hear me?” and the children shouted a happy “Yes, Sister!” (The sound of their merry voices pocked here and there with the year’s first hint of trouble, a smart-aleck “No, no.”)
“Welcome back,” both teachers said, although upstairs the eighth-grade nun said it with only the smallest of smiles because she had read the lips of two of the naysayers, one a redhead and easy enough to remember, the other destined for her own class, and downstairs the principal said it without meeting the children’s eyes because in a summer-long state of weariness with the world she had defied a school tradition and avoided two weeks of messing with class rosters by declaring that this year each grade would move on to the next in the same class group it had formed the year before. Not the best thing for the children, some of her subordinates had whispered, using the vocabulary of gangsters (you’ve got to shake them up, they said, break them up, get them to see things differently), but, Dear God, Sister thought as she read her instructions into the wavering microphone, what harm?
“Third-graders in Mrs. Shaw’s class last year will be in Sister Miriam Joseph’s fourth-grade class this year.”
At the head of the long center aisle that divided the rows of lunch tables, Sister Miriam Joseph held out both arms and snapped her fingers like a Greek dancer. “Come up here, little ones. Come, come, come.” She was tall and dark and slim and beautiful. She swung around to take the class list from the principal’s hand and then swung back again, her beads clicking, to say, “Come along, come along,” to the children, who had risen unsteadily from their seats and were now staggering toward her, their large empty book bags and new lunch boxes catching on every hip and chair leg.
Maryanne, the younger girl, reached her first, or was drawn reluctantly into first place by the nun’s thin hand on her head. “Every little one line up behind this little one,” she said. She was twenty-six years old and had entered the convent at nineteen. Under her white scapular, which swung close enough to brush Maryanne’s forehead, her waist was defined by a man’s black belt, fastened at the last notch, and her stomach was flat and taut between the bones of her hips. She seemed to move constantly, even as she stood to read out the name of each child, her free hand still placed on Maryanne’s head (so that when the child said, “Here,” her voice was muffled by the woman’s robes) and her scent of starched wool and soap and sharp cinnamon rising in short puffs from the various breezes the movement of her garments sent across the child’s cheek.
When the last name had been read, Sister Miriam Joseph lowered the paper and raised her hand and with another snap of her fingers said, “Come along.” She turned. The pale tile floor was newly waxed but it might have been ice the way she spun and glided, her black shoes flashing as she led them across the front of the cafeteria, past the shining silver lunch counter behind which the three fat lunch ladies nodded and smiled in their own September amnesia, loving their jobs, and then out into the hallway.
She swung around constantly to look over her shoulder and to say again, “Come along,” and Maryanne, who had spent last year under the care of Mrs. Shaw, a chubby, middle-aged woman with pearls and perfume and six children of her own, realized for the first time how much she had missed the daily proximity of a nun, gazing up at her tall black veil and down to the flash of her black stockings and heels with all the grateful nostalgia of a penitent returned to the flock.
She loved her. She loved her even before they reached the classroom door and, stepping back, Sister Miriam allowed Maryanne to be the first to see the long, black chalkboard filled to every corner with butterflies and flowers and Snoopys and Charlie Browns, drawn in such a variety of colored chalks—the first colored chalk Maryanne had ever seen used in this school—that each letter of Welcome, Sister Miriam Joseph, O.P., and Class 4-A had been written in a different shade. She loved her before she had a chance to study her lovely face, her dark eyes and her long lashes and the cheekbones that her white wimple made ever more pronounced. It was dazzling when Sister Miriam smiled but Maryanne loved her even before she’d seen the white teeth and the flashing eyes and the dimples, before she realized that her accent was a city accent and that, as Sister erased part of the board for the first lesson, she was cracking a small piece of gum between her back teeth. Loved her even before, at the end of this first day, Sister Miriam closed the classroom door and distributed to her class of thirty-eight one piece each of Dentyne gum which she allowed them to chew for three minutes by the clock and then collected on two pieces of lined paper, saying now that she had let them chew their gum in class they couldn’t hold it against her when she chewed hers, printing out the word HYPOCRISY on the one cleared board.
Maryanne loved her immediately, as did six or seven of the other little girls in the class, but unlike them her love did not imply emulation. While the other little girls told themselves I will be a nun, I will be a nun, as Sister leaned over them at their desks, brushing their arms with her robes, placing her long, thin hand with its single gold band on their desks, Maryanne whispered instead, “I have the saddest thing in the world to tell you.”
Her intention was not to emulate but to charm, to be admitted into the young woman’s life as no other student or friend or other nun had ever been, to become for Sister Miriam Joseph the very wonder that the nun was for her.
Sister took the thin fountain pen from the girl’s hand—the first lesson of the year had been, had always been, in penmanship—capped it and placed it in the small well on the desk. She took her hand, eyes and only slightly raised heads following them, and led her to the corner between the window and the desk. She crouched down before the child. Maryanne could see the way the starched white crown of her habit bit into her forehead, pressing against her brows, and later would see when Sister pushed it back with her thumbs how the edge of it had turned her dark skin red. “What is it, little one?” she whispered. There was gold in her dark irises.
Maryanne told the story as only a child would: “My aunt got married this summer and four days later she died,” but it was story enough to make Sister Miriam Joseph put a hand to her heart. “Ah,” she said as if she had indeed felt some pain. “I’m so sorry.” Her own sister, more beautiful than she, had been married that summer as well and so it was natural that she imagined a slim young bride in a white dress and lace mantilla, white lace covering the backs of her hands.
“Was it an accident?” the nun asked and Maryanne shook her head. She could only repeat what she had been told. “Something burst inside her.”
Sister Miriam touched the child’s arm and looked to her right, to the black perforations of the radiator cover that ran the length of the wall under the window, and then across the black sill to the hedge and the
lawn and the white statue of Christ with his robed arms extended toward the traffic and his back to the school.
Some months from now, she will tell her class why she entered the convent. On their desks in front of them they will have their catechisms opened to the chapter on Holy Orders, to a two-panel illustration, one of a woman serving her family their dinner—“This is good” printed beneath—and the other of a nun receiving Communion from a priest: “This is better.” She disliked the illustration and in order to offset it told her class every year that as a little girl she had liked parties and playing with dolls and pretending to be a bride. In high school she’d gone to eleven different proms and on the night before she left for the convent she kissed her current boyfriend goodbye and told him, “That’s it for me. It’s been fun.” She loved her family—three brothers and two sisters, Italian and Irish, everybody close—and became a nun not because she thought this was good but this is better (her long finger on the open page) but because despite her own happiness and good fortune she was aware of the fact that the world was littered with pain, unbearable pain, pain that took so many forms it seemed impossible to stop. Cure polio, she said, her class of astonished fourth-graders gazing up openmouthed as her voice grew louder, and you’ve got cancer. Cure cancer and a plane crashes. Feed the hungry—she might have gone on were it not for their small, astonished faces—and an earthquake topples their city. Spend an hour every day, your high-school lunch hour, for instance, visiting the sick, comforting the elderly, and then stumble upon the homeliest boy in your school weeping bitterly against his locker.
I became a nun, she told her class every year until her last, when she could discover in her own explanation no reason to stay one, because a nun’s life is a prayer, and given the breadth of our sorrow, the relentlessness of our difficulties, prayer seemed the only solution.
Now, watching the traffic and the broad white shoulders of the stone-robed Christ, she began to form her prayer for the girl’s family, for the young husband and the parents and the sister and the brothers, for the soul of the bride herself. “What a sad time to die,” she said and then added because she suddenly saw the cruelty in it (and understood that if she were to keep her faith in God she could not call that cruelty fate), “I’m sure she went right to heaven.”
She looked at the child. “Tell your family that for me, won’t you? Tell them that God would have taken her right to heaven. I’m sure of it.”
The girl nodded and whispered, “Yes, Sister,” although for her by then the story of her aunt’s death was no longer true. That it had actually happened was beside the point; it was no longer true as a real event because it had become for her instead a means by which to win the sister’s attention, to secure her love, and once the child recognized this (it happened in that moment when Sister Miriam had leaned down over her desk and taken her hand and said, “Open up those e’s”), once she recognized that the story of her aunt’s death—not the fact but the story—could do this for her, it became something she could wield, something she could own and offer in a way that no real event would allow. It became pure story.
“Well, she was a nun once, too,” the child added, smiling, feeling as grateful for the detail as if it had come to her through divine inspiration alone, as if she had, brilliantly, made it up in order to catch again and carefully secure Sister Miriam’s complete attention. The nun’s face showed some surprise, some trace of the effort it took her to reimagine the dead bride and the bereft husband (both older, surely, he balding), to replace her sister’s face in its white veil with her own.
“Was she?” she said.
Behind them the class was growing restless. The sound of small whispering voices moved toward them like a dangerous animal approaching through dry grass. In another minute Sister Miriam would have to look up over the girl’s head and say with her mouth hanging open in the street-tough, arrogant way she had learned as a teenager in Bensonhurst, “Uhh, excuse me? Excuse me, please. Don’t you people have work to do?”
But for now Sister only watched the child as she spoke in a thrilled and breathless way that in other circumstance would have marked her a liar. “It was a long, long time ago. She got sick or something, so she couldn’t be a nun anymore. She had to leave.”
For now, Sister Miriam Joseph, in reimagining the tragedy, found herself turning over and over again each of the confounded hopes, the dashed expectations of this unknown woman’s life: the joy of submission when her vocation struck her as inevitable and clear, the realization of her worst fear when something as mundane, as preordained, as illness forced her to leave religious life; the redemption, some years later, that secular love would have offered: not God and all mankind to serve (this is better) but a husband and perhaps a child or two (this is good)—what is good, only good, at her age perhaps having become far preferable to what was both impossible and better. And then that snatched from her too, four days after she’d been a bride, slept with the man she loved for the first time, begun her life again.
Sister looked up over the child’s neat brown hair, the pale line of her scalp, and as she’d done as a teenager on city street corners raised her eyebrows and dropped her mouth open and said, “Ahh, excuse me? Excuse me?” She had never mustered the proper arrogance then, never perfected that scorn the less beautiful girls had adopted so easily, girls who would not bring the homeliest boy in the school to their prom because they had found him crying against his locker, or spend their lunch period smiling for a group of dying women in a dismal nursing home. She had gotten the tone right, back then, the raised voice and the opened mouth and the pained surprise in the eyes, but she hadn’t gotten the scorn until now as she squatted before the child in her white robes and her black veil on this morning of the first day of the new school year and now she turned both perfect arrogance and perfect scorn upon the small white faces of her fourth-grade class. Working the gum that kept her mouth from becoming so unbearably dry (the first symptom of her own illness), she said, “Excuse me please. Don’t you people have work to do?” with such arrogance and scorn that the children sensed for one second what it was that all their work would ever come to and sensing this they slumped in their chairs and lowered their eyes to the page of jumbled, smudged, imperfect words before them.
THE CITY in autumn seemed, like the children themselves in the unaccustomed bulk of last year’s woolen clothes, only changed by the new season, not renewed or refreshed. The odors were still the same when they emerged from the subway on the first school holidays and the voices of the men and women in the street seemed no less strident and incomprehensible for their cardigans and dry brows. The cool air carried less decay, perhaps, and the smell of incinerator fires had become more marked, there was a breeze in the air whose source might not have been underground, but still it was the same place in every detail, and after the suburban conflagration of autumn trees, the amended routine of school that had for now made summer seem as irrational a dream as July had once made of October, this sameness struck them as oddly dismaying; timelessness offering no appeal to the children, since everything they wanted was in the future.
Aunt Agnes had placed a sheaf of corn on the door that May opened with her usual feigned surprise at seeing them there. May had pinned a paper ghost to the mirror above the sealed fireplace. Over cocktails Veronica said, her hand in the youngest girl’s hair, “The same thing again and again and again,” or Aunt Agnes told them that she, for one, could not warm her heart with the attentions of a mailman.
At dinner the sisters plied them with roast beef and boiled potatoes and the dark descended long before there was a hope that their father might knock at the door.
From her chair Momma said, “Your father,” and the four sisters, the children too, held their breath. It was autumn then, too, she said, and it had not yet grown dark when she got home, which was why she’d been surprised when the door below her rattled and, looking over the railing, she saw their father enter the vestibule. She was on the third floor,
talking with a neighbor in the hallway. She asked, “Are you all right?” and he climbed the two flights before he answered. His face was deathly white. “This head of mine again,” he said and the woman beside her murmured, “Poor man.”
“Go up, then,” she told him. “I’ll be right along.” And not a minute later a cry of sorrow like she’d never heard, and by the time they reached him he was gone.
In fall the windows behind her darkened and filled with squares of yellow light before the plates were cleared, and strangers at their own dinners could be seen moving briefly through these squares. In the living room, on the coffee table before the sealed fireplace, were a dozen red roses—black red roses with thick leaves and brown thorns that thinned at their sharp points to the dull white color of fingernails. Entering the apartment this morning, their mother had had a brief, silly notion that they’d come for her, and along with the blinding pleasure the thought had given her there came, too, a sure resolve to change her life: for surely if he’d sent a dozen roses to her here he was not the man she’d married.
“From Fred,” Aunt May had whispered. “He bought them for me.”
Out on the street with her, with orange marshmallow pumpkins half-eaten in their hands, the children studied him more carefully when he paused to lift his blue/gray cap and to admire once again her two nieces and her nephew. He said, “Saturday evening, then?” when they parted, and in the cool sunlight on the opposite side of the street Aunt May lifted both girls’ free hands and rubbed them pinky to thumb against each other and then for a moment tucked their outspread arms beneath her own.
“Isn’t your brother a handsome boy?” she said suddenly and the boy lowered his closely cropped head, only the history of his affection keeping him from despising her at that moment. “You are your mother’s treasures,” she said. “You three.” But then she let up on that (one of the best things about her, the boy thought, was that she knew when and how to let up on such things) and she allowed the girls to take back their hands and their arms and to continue walking as they had been before the mailman had appeared on the opposite corner and, leaving his cart with its brown leather satchel filled with magazines and letters behind him, quickened his pace to meet them.
At Weddings and Wakes Page 6
