Christine Falls: A Novel

by Benjamin Black

  The door was opened by a young nun she did not recognize. Her name was Sister Anne. She would have been pretty but for her buckteeth. She led them across the wide entrance hall and down the corridor toward Sister Stephanus’s office. The familiar smells—floor polish, carbolic soap, institutional cooking, babies—stirred in Claire an excited mixture of emotions. She had been happy here, or not unhappy. Somewhere high above, a choir of children was signing a hymn in ragged unison.

  “You used to work here, didn’t you?” Sister Anne asked. She had a South Boston accent. She had avoided looking at Andy, made shy, Claire guessed, by his cowboy’s good looks. “How do you like being a lady of leisure?” It was said good-naturedly.

  Claire laughed. “Oh, I really miss the place,” she said.

  Sister Stephanus looked up as they entered. She was seated at her desk, with a stack of papers before her. Claire suspected the pose was deliberate, but then chided herself for the bad thought.

  “Ah, Claire, here you are. And Andy, too.”

  “Good morning, Sister.”

  Andy said nothing, only nodded. He had put on a sulky look that was supposed to cover up his anxiousness. Despite herself, Claire experienced a brief surge of exultation: this was her place, not his; her moment.

  Sister Stephanus invited them to sit, and Andy brought up a second chair from the six around the table.

  “You must be very excited, both of you,” the nun said, leaning forward with her clasped hands resting on the papers on the desk. She smiled brightly from one of them to the other. “It’s not every day you become a parent!”

  Claire smiled and nodded, her lips pressed tight. Beside her Andy shifted his legs, making the chair creak. She was not sure how she was expected to take the nun’s words. Such a strange thing to say, straight out like that. In all the years she had spent here—first as an orphan after Ma died and her daddy had run off, then working in the kitchens and later in the nursery—she could never figure out Sister Stephanus, or the other nuns, either, for that matter, never could quite get onto their way of thinking. They had been good to her, though, and she owed them everything—everything except Andy, that is: him she had got by herself, this dark-eyed, drawling, dangerous, lean-limbed young husband of hers. Trying not to, she pictured him as she had glimpsed him in the mirror while he was getting dressed that morning, the neat, unblemished, honey-colored back and the taut line of his stomach where it ran down into darkness. Her man.

  Sister Stephanus opened flat before her on the desk a brown cardboard file and put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles, pushing the earpieces in at the stiff sides of the wimple almost as if, Claire thought, she were giving her face a double injection. Claire blushed a little; the strange things that came into her head! The nun riffled through the papers in the file, now and then stopping to read a line or two, frowning. Then she looked up, and this time fixed on Andy.

  “You do understand the position, Andy, don’t you?” she said, speaking slowly and separating the words carefully, as if she were talking to a child. “This is not an adoption, not in the official sense. St. Mary’s, as Claire can tell you, has its own…arrangements. The Lord, I always say, is our legislator.” She glanced between them with eyebrows lifted, awaiting acknowledgment of the quip. Claire smiled dutifully, and Andy shifted his legs again, crossing them first one way and then the other. He had not said a word since they had come into the room. “And you understand too, both of you,” the nun continued, “that when the time comes it will be Mr. Crawford and his people who will decide on what education is suitable for the child, and so forth? You’ll be consulted, of course, but all those decisions will be theirs, in the end.”

  “We understand, Sister,” Claire said.

  “It’s important that you do,” the nun said, in the same grave, unrelenting voice that sounded like a voice on the radio, or something that had been recorded. Although she was from South Boston she had an Englishwoman’s accent, or what Claire thought an Englishwoman’s accent would be, refined and crisp. “All too often we find that young people forget where their child came from, and who it is that has the final say in his or her upbringing.”

  There was silence then in the room for a long, solemn moment. Faintly from outside came the children’s voices, singing. Sweet heart of Jesus, fount of love and mercy! Claire felt her mind begin to fidget in that way it did sometimes, when her thoughts seemed to be flying asunder like the parts of a machine breaking up under pressure. Please, God, she prayed, don’t let me have one of my headaches. She forced herself to concentrate. She had already heard all these things that Sister Stephanus was saying. She supposed they had to make sure that everything was clear so no one could come back later and say the conditions that they laid down had not been properly explained. The nun was reading in the file again and now she turned once more to Andy.

  “There was something else I wanted to mention,” she said. “Your work, Andy. It must take you away from home for long periods?”

  Andy looked at her warily. He began to speak but had to clear his throat and start again. “It can be a few days,” he said, “on a run up to the border, a week or more if I go across to the Lakes.”

  The nun was impressed. “That far?” she said, sounding almost wistful.

  “But I make sure to call home every day,” Andy said. “Don’t I, sweetheart?” While he was saying it he turned his face full toward Claire, boring his eyes into hers, as if he thought she might deny it. She would not think of denying it, of course, even though it was not strictly true. She loved the way that Andy spoke—Doanah, sweet-hawt?—like she imagined the winds out on the western plains would sound.

  Sister Stephanus too seemed to have caught that lovely, lonesome note in his voice, and now it was she who had to clear her throat.

  “All the same,” she said, not so much turning to Claire as turning away from Andy, “it must be hard for you, sometimes?”

  “Oh, but it won’t be, anymore,” Claire said in a rush, and then bit her lip; she knew she should have denied ever having found life with Andy anything less than sweet and easy; she hoped he would not pick up on it, later. “I mean,” she finished lamely, “with the baby for company.”

  “And when we get the new place she’ll have a whole passel of new friends,” Andy said. He had found his confidence now, and was playing up the cowboy act and the crooked, John Wayne smile—after all, the nun was a woman, Claire found herself thinking, with a faint sourness, and there was nothing Andy could not do with a woman, when he put his mind to it.

  “Yet I wonder,” the nun said thoughtfully, as though speaking to herself, “if there might not be a possibility of some other kind of work, some other kind of driving. A taxicab, for instance?”

  That put a stop to Andy’s smiling, and he sat up as if he had been stung.

  “I wouldn’t want to stop working for Crawford Transport,” he said. “With Claire giving up her job here, and then the baby…well, we’ll need all the cash we can get. There’s the overtime, and bonuses for them long draws up to Canada and the Lakes.”

  Sister Stephanus leaned back in her chair and made a steeple of her fingertips and studied him, trying to judge, it seemed, if his tone was one of genuine concern or guarded threat. “Yes, well,” she said, with a faint shrug. Her eyes drifted to the file again. “Perhaps I might speak to Mr. Crawford about it…”

  “That’d be real good,” Andy said, too eagerly, he knew, and she gave him a quick, sharp glance that made him blink and sit back in his chair. He forced himself to relax then and resumed his cowpoke’s easy grin. “I mean, it’d be good if I had a job nearer home and the baby, and all.”

  Sister Stephanus went on studying him. The silence in the room seemed to creak. Claire realized that all this time she had been clutching a handkerchief, and when she opened her fist now it was stuck there, a damp lump in her palm. Then Sister Stephanus shut the file with a snap and stood up.

  “All right,” she said. “Come along.”

&
nbsp; She led them briskly to the door and out.

  “You haven’t been down here before, have you?” she said to Andy over her shoulder, stopping at the end of a corridor and throwing a door wide to reveal a long, low room, painted a dazzling white, with rows of identical cribs facing each other along two walls. Nuns in white habits moved about, some bearing swaddled babies in the crooks of their arms with a sort of cheery, practiced negligence. Something fierce and zealous came into Sister Stephanus’s smile. “The nursery,” she announced. “The heart of St. Mary’s, and our pride and joy.”

  Andy stared, impressed, and barely stopped himself producing a whistle. It was like something out of a science fiction movie, all the little aliens in their pods. Sister Stephanus was looking at him expectantly, her head thrown back.

  “Lot of babies” was all he could say, in a faint voice.

  Sister Stephanus gave a ringing laugh that was supposed to be rueful but sounded a little crazed instead. “Oh,” she said, “this is only a fraction of the poor mites in the world in need of our care and protection!”

  Andy nodded doubtfully. It was something he did not like to think of, all those lost and abandoned kids screaming for attention and shaking their fists and kicking their legs in the air. The nun had led them into the room, and Claire was looking about eagerly in that jerky, rabbity way he hated; it even seemed to him sometimes when she was excited that the edges of her pink and nearly transparent nostrils twitched.

  “Is…?” she said, and did not know how to finish. Sister Stephanus nodded and said: “She’s having a last checkup before she starts out on her new life.”

  “I wanted to ask,” Claire began tentatively, “if the mother—” but Sister Stephanus held up a long, white hand to silence her and said: “I know you’d want to know something about the baby’s background, Claire. However—”

  “No, no, I was only going to ask—”

  But the nun was unstoppable. “However,” she continued, in a voice edged like a saw, “there are certain rules we must abide by.”

  The wadded handkerchief in Claire’s fist was hot and hard as a boiled egg. She had to persist. “It’s only that,” she said, and took a gulping breath, “it’s only that when she’s growing up I won’t know what to tell her.”

  “Oh, well,” the nun said, closing her eyes briefly and giving her head a dismissive little shake, “you must decide, of course, when the time comes, whether she should know you’re not her natural parents. As for the details…” She opened her eyes and this time for some reason it was Andy she addressed. “Believe me, in certain matters not knowing is best.—But ah, here’s Sister Anselm now!”

  A short, square-shaped nun was approaching. There was something wrong with her right side, and she walked with a wrenching movement, dragging her hip after her like a mother dragging a stubborn child. Her face was broad, her expression stern but not unkind. A stethoscope hung about her neck. She had a baby in her arms, wrapped like a larva in a white cotton blanket. Claire greeted her in a rush of relief—Sister Anselm was the one who had looked after her from her earliest days here at St. Mary’s.

  “Well now,” Sister Stephanus said with forced brightness, “here we are, at last!”

  Everything seemed to pause then, as in the Mass when the priest lifts the Communion host, and from a distance somehow Claire saw herself reach out, it might have been across a chasm, and take the baby in her arms. How solid a weight it was, and yet no weight at all, no earthly weight. Sister Stephanus was saying something. The baby’s eyes were the most delicate shade of blue, they seemed to be looking into another world. Claire turned to Andy. She tried to speak but could not. She felt fragile and in some wonderful way injured, almost as if she were really a mother, and had really given birth.

  Christine, that was what Sister Stephanus was saying, your new little daughter, Christine.

  WHEN SHE HAD SEEN THE STAFFORDS OFF AT THE FRONT DOOR SISTER Stephanus walked back slowly to her office and sat down behind the desk and lowered her face into her hands. It was a small indulgence she allowed herself, a moment of weakness and surrender and of rest. Always after another child had gone there was an interval of empty heaviness. She was not sad, or regretful in any way—in her heart she knew she had no very deep feeling for these lost creatures that passed so briefly through her care—only there was a burdensome hollowness that took a little time to fill. Drained, that was the word: she felt drained.

  Sister Anselm came in, without bothering to knock. She limped to the window nearest Sister Stephanus’s desk and sat back on the sill and fished in a pocket under her habit and brought out a pack of Camels and lit up. Even after all these years the nun’s habit fitted her ill. Poor Peggy Farrell, onetime terror of Sumner Street. Her father had been a longshoreman, Mikey Farrell from County Roscommon, who drank, and beat his wife, and knocked his daughter down the stairs one winter night and left her maimed for life. How vividly I recall these things, Sister Stephanus thought, I, who have trouble sometimes remembering what my own name used to be. She hoped Peggy—Sister Anselm—had not come to deliver one of her lectures. To forestall the possibility she said:

  “Well, Sister, another one gone.”

  Sister Anselm expelled an angry jet of smoke toward the ceiling. “Plenty more where that one came from,” she said.

  Oh, dear. Sister Stephanus turned her attention pointedly to the papers on her desk. “Isn’t it well, then, Sister,” she said mildly, “that we’re here to take care of them?”

  But Sister Anselm was not to be put off so lightly. This was the Peggy Farrell who had overcome all handicaps to win a first-class medical degree and take her place among the men at Massachusetts General before Mother House ordered her to St. Mary’s. “I must say, Mother Superior,” she said, putting an ironic emphasis on the title, as she always managed to do, “it occurs to me that the morals of the girls of Ireland today must be very low indeed, considering the number of their little mistakes that come our way.”

  Sister Stephanus told herself to say nothing, but in vain; Peggy Farrell had always known how to provoke her, starting back in the days when they had played together, the small-time lawyer’s daughter and Mikey Farrell’s girl, on the front stoop on Sumner Street. “Not all of them are little mistakes, as you call them,” she said, still pretending to be absorbed in her paperwork.

  “By the Lord Harry, then,” Sister Anselm said, “the mortality rate among mothers over there must be as high as the unmarried ones’ morals are low, to produce that number of orphans.”

  “I wish, Sister, you wouldn’t talk like this.” Sister Stephanus kept her voice low and even. “I wouldn’t want,” she continued, “to have to institute disciplinary procedures.”

  There was silence for a long moment, then Sister Anselm with a grunt pushed herself away from the sill and came forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray on the desk and heaved herself across the room to the door and was gone. Sister Stephanus sat motionless and stared at the hastily squashed cigarette butt, from which there poured upward a thin and sinuous thread of heaven-blue smoke.

  9

  IN THE PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT IT WAS ALWAYS NIGHT. THIS WAS ONE of the things Quirke liked about his job—the only thing, in fact, he often thought. Not that he had a particular taste for the nocturnal—I’m no more morbid than the next pathologist, he would insist in the pub, to raise a groaning laugh—but it was restful, cozy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city’s busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light.

  Quirke had given the Dolly Moran job to Sinclair, he was not sure why—certainly he entertained no squeamish scruples about cutting up the corpse of someone he had briefly known. Sinclair had assumed he was only to assist but Quirke had pressed the scalpel into his hands and told him to get on with it. The young man was suspicious at first, fearing he was being put to a test
or led into a professional trap, but when Quirke went off into his office muttering about paperwork that needed catching up on he set himself to the task with enthusiasm. In fact, Quirke ignored the pile of papers requiring his attention, and sat for an hour with his feet on his desk, smoking and thinking, while he listened to Sinclair out in the dissecting room, whistling as he plied the knife and saw.

  Quirke had decided to assume, for reasons most of which he did not care to examine, that Dolly Moran’s murder had no connection with the business of Christine Falls. True, it was suspiciously coincidental that she had died only a few hours after his second visit to Crimea Street. Had she known she was in danger? Was that why she had refused to let him in? Something she had said to him through the door kept slithering through his mind like an insistent worm. Not caring how foolish he might look to anyone watching from that row of lace-curtained windows on the other side of the street, he had leaned down to speak to her through the letter box, demanding, out of an anger for which he could not quite account—true, he had been a little drunk still from the wine at Jammet’s—that she tell him about Christine Falls’s child and what had become of it. “I’ll tell you nothing,” Dolly Moran had hissed back at him—her voice, it struck him now, might have been coming through a vent in the lid of a coffin—“I’ve said too much already.” But what was it she had told him, in the smoky pub that evening, that would have constituted the too much she seemed to think she had revealed? While he was leaning there, shouting into the letter box, had he been watched? He wondered now.

  No, he told himself, no: he was being fanciful and ridiculous. In his world, the world he inhabited up in the light, people did not have their fingernails broken or the soft undersides of their arms scorched with cigarettes; the people whom he knew were not bludgeoned to death in their own kitchens. And what had he known of Dolly Moran, except that her tipple was gin and water and that she had worked for the Griffin family long ago?