Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

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.”

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: