Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  She had once thought a husband was secondary to so much else in life, but when she saw the way Lawrence and Babs looked at each other, laughed with each other, Nora understood that she had been wrong. All around her, young people seemed to have love like that, a kind of love she hadn’t known existed outside of a movie screen. She was furious with her father for making her come. Furious with herself. She never should have agreed to it. Her reason for being with Charlie was gone, and her distaste for him mounted with every bad joke, every booming laugh. Nora’s stomach cramped whenever he mentioned a wedding. Mrs. Quinlan said she couldn’t understand why they were dragging their feet. She didn’t feel right having an unmarried couple living under her roof, even if they were on separate floors. Still, Nora delayed and delayed, claiming homesickness, and later nerves about everyone looking at her.

  She knew that she would leave him. She could even convince herself that it was the kindest thing. There was nothing wrong with Charlie. He could find another girl, a better girl. He claimed he wanted Nora. But she didn’t believe he thought there was anything so special about her. It was just that a plan had been put in place and he would look foolish if it didn’t come to pass.

  Nora knew she couldn’t leave yet. But she fantasized that one day, after Theresa was settled, teaching, she might just slip off after work and disappear. She was twenty-two. She could have a different life.

  She reminded herself to try to be grateful in the meantime. Her sister was doing well in school and would soon be a teacher. Theresa had only gotten the chance because of Charlie. They lived with his people, worked for his people.

  When Kitty told them about the mess Theresa had gotten herself into, everything changed at once. Nora saw her sister in the bedroom that night, looking the same as ever, and wanted to slap her. Her rage frightened her. She was afraid to speak. All that she had done, she had done for Theresa. How could this be the result?

  Nora’s anger was a shield, staving off the guilt that threatened to consume her. Theresa was in this country because of her. She had wanted Nora to go to the dances, and Nora had refused for her own selfish reasons. A sailor. Imagine it. If she had gone along, none of it ever would have happened.

  For a short time, she convinced herself they could go on, with nothing but a slight delay in their plans. But the day she brought Theresa to Saint Mary’s, as they sat in that too-hot office, looking up at the nun who would be Theresa’s warden, Nora was struck. It was the way the nun spoke of the good Catholic family who would take the baby. Until then, she had only been thinking of her sister, herself. Now she saw that there was a child coming.

  She was ashamed to have brought Theresa to such a place. If their mother was looking down on them, what would she think of Nora now? The nun’s words seemed to have no effect on Theresa. She only cared about Walter, about putting all this behind her and returning to him.

  Nora wished she could be as selfish, as irresponsible as her sister. Just let the baby go. Let them both go. She had given enough of her life over to caring for other people’s children. But she sobbed in the car on the way home. Hysterical in a way Charlie had never seen her.

  “I never should have come here,” she said. “I hate this city, I hate everything about it. I hate all the people.”

  She stopped just short of saying she hated him.

  Charlie gave her a sad smile. “Isn’t there anything you like about Boston?”

  Nora thought it over. “Brigham’s vanilla ice cream,” she said. “That’s it.”

  Charlie said he would find Walter, convince him to do the honorable thing. And so they learned that Walter McClain was married, that he had a child of his own.

  Nora couldn’t sleep for thinking about her mother, about her guilt. About the regret Theresa would feel later if she let this happen.

  She wept over it, but she knew what she had to do. There was only one way.

  She approached Charlie before breakfast.

  “I’ll marry you now,” Nora said. “Under one condition.”

  To her astonishment, he agreed.

  The nuns didn’t like the idea. They said it was unorthodox, that a family had already been selected.

  “There’s the issue of the fee we would collect from them,” Sister Bernadette said.

  “We’ll pay it, whatever it is,” Nora said.

  They were married at the church the next morning, with only the custodian for a witness. Later, they told everyone that Nora’s shyness wouldn’t have allowed for anything more extravagant. Standing at the altar in a simple blue Sunday dress, she could only look at the priest, not at Charlie. She thought of Lawrence and Babs, inseparable on their wedding day. Babs shrieking with delight at the sound of champagne being uncorked for a toast.

  Nora and Charlie moved to the top floor of a three-decker on Crescent Avenue. The rent was a hundred dollars a month. Mrs. Quinlan collected hand-me-down furniture for them. Each object carried the odor of someone else’s home. The worn sofa smelled of pipe tobacco. The threadbare carpet was like an old dog.

  The families below were Charlie’s cousins. Mr. Fallon on the bottom floor owned the house. The Sheehans lived in the middle. The wife, Christine, was Mr. Fallon’s daughter. She had only been married five years and already she had four children. They kept the doors to their apartments open at all times. Whenever Nora went up or down the central staircase, she had to greet them again, smile at their jokes and their invitations to come for tea.

  The bathroom off her kitchen had been converted from a pantry. Nora shook from the cold when she stepped out of the tub. Their bedroom was off the kitchen too. There was a second bedroom down a long narrow hallway by the front door, across from the living room. They were to keep this open for family coming over from Ireland. And there was a small dining room, with pocket doors. “You can change it to a bedroom after the first baby comes,” Mr. Fallon said with a wink.

  Nora was careful not to look at her husband.

  From the first night, Charlie wanted to make love, but she refused. This marriage was for a purpose. The outcome of what he was asking was too uncertain. It might lead them into even more of a mess.

  “It’s what married people do,” Charlie said.

  “I know, but I can’t.”

  “We could have the lights on.”

  “Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “Or we could have them off!”

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  But the next day came and then the day after that, and she was no closer to being ready. Weeks passed. The longer they waited, the more tortured she felt.

  They slept in separate beds on either side of a nightstand. She lay there many nights, thinking of home, wishing she could go back. Not just to the house, or to her family, but to her girlhood.

  As soon as they were married, Nora began wearing the loose-fitting sack dresses Babs had worn throughout her pregnancy. At work, she complained to Mrs. Byrne of nausea. She placed a hand on her stomach, feigning absentmindedness, when she knew they were all looking. Nora sent Charlie alone to family parties, told him to make sure to say that she was tired lately and not feeling well.

  “Aunt Nellie asked if you’re expecting,” he reported one night, and she saw that her plan would work.

  She ran into Mrs. Quinlan at the chemist’s, and Mrs. Quinlan said, “Mrs. Byrne tells me you haven’t been well.”

  “I’m in bed every night by six,” Nora said. “I’ve been sick to my stomach ever since we were married.”

  “You need to see the doctor,” Mrs. Quinlan said with a knowing smile.

  Thou shalt not lie, she had been taught since childhood, and since then Nora had obeyed. But she had never known how easy it was. How one lie could lead to the next and the next and the next.

  Every time she visited Theresa and eyed her sister’s growing belly, Nora felt sick. She knew she had to tell her the truth—that Walter was married, that they would take the child. But it was so hard to say. Finally, they took Theresa to Hull,
a town on the beach, to break the news. It was such a lovely night and Theresa was in such good spirits that Nora couldn’t do it there. She waited until the last minute, just before Theresa was due back at Saint Mary’s. The car ride was agony, knowing what she would have to say when they stopped. Charlie was nervous, talking under his breath to Bobby Quinlan, who wasn’t there, but whose car they had borrowed for the evening.

  “Your tires are balder than your head, Bob,” he muttered.

  Nora told Theresa by herself. Up at the top of the stairs, beneath the porch light, before the sweeter of the nuns opened the door and said it was time for bed.

  Every night, Charlie flattered her. He begged, he made jokes, he stamped his feet.

  “It’s natural,” he said. “Everyone does it. Please. For the love of God.”

  Nora wanted to die when he raised the subject. She wanted to fall through the floor and land on Mr. Fallon’s fireplace and just disappear. She wanted to tell Charlie that she had never once heard a good thing about sex. Oona said it hurt terribly, and the nuns at the convent school said it ruined a woman. And just look at Theresa.

  Nora had never spent so much time alone with Charlie. His jokes grated on her, his need to talk all night when she might have liked some peace and quiet. She was embarrassed by his presence when she was wearing her nightgown, or brushing her hair, acts that had been private, before.

  Once or twice a day, he came close to giving her a heart attack with his screaming. He’d shout, and she’d run to his side, afraid that something horrible had happened. From the sound of him, she’d think he had chopped off a finger, when in fact he had stubbed his toe or read in a letter from home that his football team was out of the running for the season.

  If she could sit with Oona for a minute, Nora would ask her what marriage was supposed to feel like. If Oona felt the way she did. There was nobody here she could ask. Nora wondered if another man would please her more, or if she was just being picky. Maybe it was always this way when you got up as close to someone as she was to Charlie. She imagined a soft-spoken husband who brought her thoughtful gifts, who wanted only to be with her on a Friday night, not sweating in a room full of cousins, everyone laughing and drinking and talking too much as if they hadn’t seen one another the day before.

  The face she pictured belonged to Cillian, the boy who kissed her on the ship. He was shy like she was, or so he said. She knew that she didn’t know anything about him, really. But sometimes Nora wondered what he was doing, if he had found a girl to love, if he had stopped feeling homesick by now.

  —

  While Theresa was away, Nora often imagined her homecoming. Her sister, flush with gratitude for all they had done. But Theresa seemed angry most of the time. She didn’t seem to understand what any of it meant. She didn’t believe that it was settled, that the baby was Nora and Charlie’s now. Theresa said something that first afternoon home about how she and Patrick would board a bus and go away. As if they had anywhere to go. Nora rebuked her and then felt sorry for it. She said, “We will raise him together.”

  Charlie gave her a look that said she had made a mistake, saying a thing like that.

  Theresa thought his birth was a miracle. She talked nonsense about a vision of the Virgin Mary, how the Miraculous Medal the nurses had pinned to the baby’s diaper was a sign.

  Even for Nora, there was a sense of movement to it all at first, like it wasn’t quite settled yet. Like maybe they could fix it. They still hadn’t realized there was no way the arrangement could work.

  They put Patrick in the bedroom down the hall. They turned the dining room into Theresa’s room.

  “For now,” Nora said.

  Mrs. Quinlan insisted on hosting the christening party. Aunt Nellie said Nora would have to be churched ahead of it.

  “What’s churched?” Theresa asked.

  “A ceremony where a new mother is cleansed. The priest says a blessing that she made it through the birth. It’s private, but you should come to support your sister.”

  On a stifling hot Saturday morning, Aunt Nellie and Mrs. Quinlan met Nora and Theresa at the church. All four of them covered their heads with silk scarves.

  Theresa’s stomach still bulged out slightly beneath the light fabric of her dress. Her breasts were fuller than before. Nora wondered if the others noticed. She hadn’t known how of the body it all would be. She herself still wore the baggy dresses she’d been in for months. She was as slim as ever, and this people did comment on, praising her for the good fortune of having a figure that barely showed the strain of pregnancy, of birth.

  Nora sweated now. Her skirt clung to the backs of her legs. Kitty was watching the baby for an hour. It was the first time in three weeks that Nora had been apart from him. She felt as if she had escaped.

  They went up the church steps and into the vestibule. The lights were low. It was much cooler there than it was outside. Aunt Nellie opened the door that led into the church. Mrs. Quinlan and Theresa went through, but when Nora tried to follow, Aunt Nellie held out her hand.

  “No,” she said. “You wait here. That’s the point. You can’t come in until he’s purified you.”

  Aunt Nellie followed the others, the door closing behind her with a boom. A moment later, she returned.

  “Take this,” she said.

  She handed Nora a lighted candle and left again.

  Nora stood there, holding it, waiting.

  Finally, the priest came in. Nora had smiled at him many times after a Sunday Mass, in this very room, Charlie shaking his hand. But now he bore a solemn expression. She knew somehow that she was not to say a word.

  He wore all white and held a golden chalice. He dipped his finger into it and made a cross on her forehead, the cool holy water dripping down her nose.

  “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” he said. “Enter thou into the temple of God, adore the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary who has given thee fruitfulness of offspring.”

  It was too intimate a moment, the smell of his breath in her face. Nora thought this might be her only chance to say that they had lied. It was one thing to lie to the family, quite another to lie to God Himself. But she couldn’t say it.

  He offered her the edge of his robe, and she took hold of it. The priest led her into the church, cold and dark and empty but for the three heads in the first pew, the flickering votives at the back of the room. In silence, he led Nora to the altar, and then he instructed her to kneel. As he prayed over her, she looked out and saw her sister’s eyes glowing in the candlelight.

  —

  Nora had to leave her job to stay home with the baby. There were days when she spoke to no one but the coal man and others when Charlie’s cousins from Ireland overtook the rooms of her apartment. They were teenagers, mostly. Their first time away from home. They expected her to cook for them, to clean up their messes. When their boisterous conversations made Nora feel like the odd man out in her own kitchen, she journeyed to Hull in her mind. That night with Theresa, the last time she had seen her sister happy. The beach and the cinema and the roller coaster, the houses crowded on the hills like teeth, the people inside them deciding for themselves how to pass the time.

  She could cry for hours, letting her resentments unspool. During the day, she thought of how her sister’s life hadn’t changed at all. Nora was the one making the sacrifices. She was the one to suffer for Theresa’s sins.

  Her life in the house was a world away from what people knew of her in the street.

  “Nora, he’s beautiful,” they said when she pushed the baby in his pram. “That dark hair! Those eyes!”

  She smiled and thanked them, knowing just who the child resembled.

  Women talked about good babies and fussy ones. Nora couldn’t tell the difference. Patrick cried all day. She wasn’t any good at soothing him. The baby, if not her baby, was her family. She ought to love him more. But she couldn’t help thinking of him as a child she was minding, waiting for the moment whe
n he was no longer her concern.

  In the evenings, Theresa cared for him. Nora knew far better what to do with an infant, but Theresa knew her own baby best, or anyway, he wanted her most.

  Every night, several times, Nora was awakened by his cries. Right away, she would hear Theresa’s footsteps padding down the hall. She heard her sister singing to him, talking to him. She felt the deepest sadness then, for all of them. For herself and for Charlie, that this had been thrust upon them. For Patrick, who might only ever know a mother who didn’t love him. Most of all for her sister, who loved the child so much, who was only a child herself.

  —

  One morning in early November, the toaster went up in flames. Nora screamed and dumped a sack of flour on it to put out the fire. White dust wafted through the kitchen like snow, landing on every surface—the floor and the table and the baby’s eyelashes. It took her half an hour to clean it up, Patrick wailing all the while. They had a new washing machine in the cellar but no dryer. Earlier, Nora had hung all their clothes out as she usually did. She went back to fetch them in the afternoon, while the baby slept, and found that they had frozen solid on the line. She gathered them up anyway, stormed up the stairs in a state.

  When she reached the door to her apartment, Mrs. Quinlan stood there, her cheeks wet with tears. For a moment, Nora thought their secret had been discovered. But then Mrs. Quinlan blinked and said, voice trembling, “My mother’s died.”

  She held a small rectangular box.

  “Her prayer cards,” Mrs. Quinlan said. “I think she would have liked for Theresa to have them. She was the only one who ever showed an interest. My mother is so fond of you girls. Was so fond.”

  Nora took the box. She had often seen Aunt Nellie spreading the cards out on the dining room table in the evenings. It seemed impossible that she could be gone.

  “I’ll give them to her,” Nora said. “I’m so sorry. Do you want to come in? I can help with anything you need.”