Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Down here, in the basement of the convent, amid the dampness and the rising steam, the baby asleep in her crib, the sheets or long johns hung out on the line, Sister Illuminata called to Annie to say, Come and learn something. She said, My mother was a marvel at this … or, My mother had a trick. She told Annie, Here’s how my mother turned a collar, mended a cuff, starched linen, sized, stretched, bleached … my mother did it this way … my mother taught me this.

The phrase giving way to the stories, as the weeks and months went by: and then my mother left the farm and made her way to the city, where the Sisters of Mercy took her under their wing … and then it was my mother they called on, his Lordship himself being the one whose britches were in need of repair …

And then my mother found herself a widow with a small child, just like you … and then she took me into the laundry with her, just like you do.

Down here, Annie knew, the words were a kind of contraband. None of the Sisters, in those days, spoke of their lives before the convent, in what they dismissively called the world. To take their vows was to leave all else behind: girlhoods and families and friends, all of love that was merely personal, all of life that required a backward glance. The white horse-blinder bonnets they wore did more than limit their peripheral vision. They reminded the Sisters to look only at the work at hand.

Annie imagined how silently the days must have passed for Sister Illuminata during all the years she had labored down here in the convent basement alone, without an assistant, and, imagining this—recalling as well her own loneliness each silent, weary evening—she swallowed her anger at the nun’s shrill demands. She swallowed as well the woman’s insults—a lick and a promise—her implacable routines. Annie turned her face into her shoulder whenever Sister Illuminata was cross, when even a blessed saint would have been compelled to whisper, “Damn bitch.”

And she lied, saying in all innocence, “No, I never heard it,” when Sister Illuminata began again the story of how her mother repaired the britches of a magistrate or encountered a dray horse in the drying yard or saved the life of another laundress’s child who had swallowed a fistful of alum—forty, fifty years ago this was, although as fresh in Sister Illuminata’s telling, and retelling, as if it all had happened just this morning, just upstairs, in the world above their heads.

ON AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY SUMMER, when Sally was not yet two, Annie and the nun sat together in silence, the baby on the bit of rug between them. They were sorting through a collection of donated clothes, sorting, examining, determining what could be washed and mended and brought to the poor from what was bound for rags, or, if there was evidence of moths or lice, the incinerator. Because the nuns allowed Annie first choice in this—wasn’t she the poor, after all?—most of her daughter’s clothes came from these donation baskets, and not a few blouses and skirts for herself.

Which may well account for the white wool coat and leggings and bonnet our father so vividly recalled. A winter ensemble too fine to resist and too perfect a fit to save for cold weather.

Suddenly Sally let out a shriek and began to wail, a fist to her eye. Annie dropped the moth-eaten shawl she’d been holding up to the light and went to her knees beside the child. Sister Illuminata leaned forward. The girl was red-faced and screaming. “Something in her eye,” Sister said, and Annie tried to move the child’s fist away. Sally resisted. She was clutching something in her balled hand. “Let me see it, darling,” she coaxed. But the girl wouldn’t budge. She twisted her arm away from her mother, grew desperate, even as she screwed the balled fist against her face. It was a piece of white soap. Annie saw that the smallest of Sister’s carved ducks was on the rug beside the child, decapitated. The girl was pressing the tiny severed head into her eye. “Give it to me, darling,” Annie said. “You’re hurting yourself.” With some effort, she pulled the girl’s fist away from her face, but she could not coax her to open her hand. Sister Illuminata, meanwhile, was fetching a wet cloth. She handed it to Annie. On her mother’s lap, the child was still crying, but still clutching as well the offending piece of soap. Annie put the wet towel over the soap-stung eye. Gently, Sister Illuminata tried to take the soap from the girl’s fist, and once again the child pulled away. She would not give it up.

“Oh, she’s stubborn,” Annie whispered. “She’s not going to give in.” And then she added, “She gets that from Jim.”

Sister Illuminata leaned over them both, broad in her habit and her apron, which was slightly damp. She put a raw red hand to the child’s fine hair. “Jim,” the nun said firmly, “gets the credit, then. She’ll never be a pushover.”

Later that same day, when the smell of the Sisters’ dinner wafted down the stairs, Annie heard herself say, “Jim would never eat a turnip.” Later still, when a heat wave struck the city, “Jim was never a drinker, thank God, but he’d take a beer on a day like today.” When Sally, growing up, grew silent around strangers, “Jim had a shyness about him, too. The first time we met, I wondered if he was ever going to say a word.”

In the dank basement laundry of the convent, Annie said, “Jim had a good voice, but he preferred a silly song to a ballad, which drove me mad.” She said, “Jim had a friend who wore shoes like that.” She said, “Jim couldn’t abide a tight collar.” She said, Jim was, Jim preferred, Jim told me once.

Mrs. Tierney was full of fond stories about her exasperating husband, but on their morning walks, decorum and superstition kept both women silent about Annie’s loss. The people who had seen him in life, neighbors and friends, lowered their eyes whenever she passed them in the hallway or on the street. Sister St. Saviour was gone. And Sister Jeanne, who knew all, kept all in her heart.

His name, too, then, a kind of contraband. Jim was, Jim preferred, Jim told me once. But down here in the convent laundry, she spoke it as casually as she might have done if he still stirred about in the world upstairs. As if she were still a woman with an exasperating husband, no widow alone with a child. And Sister Illuminata listened, sympathetically, as any maiden friend of a married lady might do.

Sally was six years old when, looking up from a set of paper dolls that had arrived in the donation basket, she asked, “Who’s Jim?”

She was nine when it occurred to her to wonder where her father was buried. Her mother only put her hand to her heart and said, “Here.”

She was nearly eleven when she came home from school with the delightful tale of a schoolmate’s visit to a father’s grave—a trolley ride, a lovely picnic on the green grass. Her mother threw back her head and said, laughing, “Let him come to us.”

The sound of her mother’s laughter always startled and thrilled the girl. She smiled, put her hand to her mother’s broad cheek. Mistook the joke for a promise.

IN THE HORARIUM OF THE CONVENT’S LIFE, afternoon prayers were said at three. Any Sisters who were not tied up with casework or alms-seeking returned to the convent then.

Much later, when the arthritis in her knees got the best of her and her days were spent in a chair behind the ironing board, Sister Illuminata would only raise her eyes to the ceiling and, blessing herself, silently pray, but in the years of Sally’s childhood, she stopped what she was doing at the sound of the bell, dried her hands, rolled down her sleeves, and ponderously climbed the wooden stairs. Annie, finishing up some folding or mending, listened for the sound of the nuns’ prayers, the psalms, the hymn, then for the sound of Sister Illuminata’s return—breath short, beads clacking. And then, as Sister Illuminata settled back into her work, Annie would listen again, hopeful, for another, lighter step on the stairs. On the best days, she would look up to see Sister Jeanne bending over the banister, laughing like a child to find them there.