Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

For years we believed we were not unusual in this. For years we believed the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, appeared in every household whenever crisis or illness disrupted the routine, whenever a substitute was needed for She Who Could Not Be Replaced.

Sister Jeanne was our favorite.

She was an old woman then. Shorter than we were. Child-sized inside her habit. When she made us tea, she warmed the milk, and she carried in her black satchel a sleeve of biscuits we have never found since. Coated with chocolate, we recall, with a thin, summery taste of strawberry jam.

When she spoke to us—and not all the Little Sisters spoke to us so easily—her voice was always wry—“It’s all silliness, isn’t it?”—so that we never knew if we would be hushed into sacred silence by what she said or if her voice would suddenly curl up like a grin and we would see that inside her white bonnet and her dark veil she was shaking with laughter.

She said, “I knew your mother since before she was born. Same as I know all of youse.”

She said, “youse,” which delighted us. She said “pernt” for point, “erl” for oil. She was years out of Brooklyn by then, at the Old Age Home the Sisters ran out on Long Island, as an aide, not a patient. Although she must have been nearly as old as many of the women she cared for.

She asked us, “Who’s the dumbest boy in your class?”

Reaching under her bonnet, she tapped her freckled forehead. She touched her white bib between the chain of her cross, as if her heart was centered there. She said, “Because God put the knowledge in you before you were born, see? So you’d know He intends to be fair.”

She tagged her sentences with “see?” like a Hollywood gangster, and this delighted us, too.

Sister Jeanne told us that she had meant to join another order altogether, another order of nuns also called Little Sisters, but went to the wrong address. Where Sister St. Saviour simply shrugged and said, “God’s will.”

Sister Jeanne said, “I knew your mother before she was born because Sister St. Saviour introduced us.”

She said, “No one called for her, but still she appeared. That was the miracle, see? God saw the need. There was an accident with the gas. God saw your mother and your grandmother’s need, and so Sister St. Saviour appeared.”

We were sitting at the dining room table in the long, hushed hours of those still afternoons when our mother slept off her sadness, or when Great-aunt Rose was in the upper room. It might have been any season: there were blossoms on the apple tree at the window behind her head. There was a squall of fat snowflakes.

She told us, “There was a lovely smell of roses when Sister St. Saviour died. She opened her eyes for just a moment, she hadn’t opened them in days, and then she closed them again and sighed. It was a very deep sigh. But no weariness in it, see? No sadness. I would say it was a satisfied sigh. And after that, it was like a thousand roses had been brought, special delivery, into the room. It was just a glimpse of where her soul had gone. A whiff of it. As if a door had opened for a moment, just to let her in, and all of us still stuck here on earth got a glimpse. Because a glimpse is all the living can bear. All we can bear of heaven’s beauty.”

She said, her eyes to the ceiling, “It’s not for me, you know. That beauty. But never mind. You’ll see it, for truth. Your old aunty, too.”

How long did Great-aunt Rose stay with us? A few weeks, a month, maybe two? On a warm afternoon, we came in from school to find the guest room empty. Our mother, up and about on that day, had opened the windows to let in the air. The white curtains stirred, the mattress was bare.

Our father said later that because our mother was delicate, given to melancholy, it seemed best that old Rose go off to a nursing home for her final days. For expert care, he said. The nursing home was run by yet another order of nuns, not our own Little Nursing Sisters, whose numbers were diminishing even then. Whose Bishop had cast an acquisitive eye over their elegant convent, even then.

Great-aunt Rose, we were told, was gone to spend her last days in a nursing home run by the very order Sister Jeanne hadn’t joined, an order that specialized in old people who had come to the end of their time. In a town called Valhalla.

“Of all things,” our father said.

“If that’s not a sure sign she’s going to heaven,” he said, well satisfied that his obligation to the old lady had been met, “I don’t know what is.”

A FOX STOLE WITH A BROKEN CLASP found among the donated clothes, a lady’s velvet chapeau, some elbow-length kid gloves, torn at the seams, and Sally transformed herself into Mrs. McShane, the elegant and imperious woman (Brooklyn hoi polloi, Annie said) who organized the Ladies Auxiliary’s annual tea and Christmas Bazaar to raise funds for the convent. Sally brought the stole to her chin, extended a wavering arm to Sister Illuminata, and said in Mrs. McShane’s studied, drawling way, “Our good Little Sisters.” Said to her mother, the gloved fingers spread across her cheek, “But, Annie, my dear, where are the petits fours?”

She shimmied into a discarded housedress, slipped one of the nuns’ bibbed aprons over her head, and pantomimed Mrs. Odette’s kitchen dance—lifting imaginary pot lids, peeling imaginary apples held right before her squinting eyes, whispering “ Herregud ” under her breath until her mother and Sister Illuminata, laughing, were begging her to “Shush.”

A babushka and a moth-eaten coat with a lambskin collar, an expression of peering curiosity, dawning disapproval, and there was Mrs. Gertler just as she looked every evening, watching the street from her parlor-floor window.

Once, when Annie was out at the shops, the organ grinder stopped on the street outside the convent, turning his squawking box and singing his off-key Italian. It was a hot day and the basement windows were open behind the grills. “For the love of God,” Sister Illuminata muttered, “couldn’t he play an Irish tune?” Sally—quick as a sprite—moved a coal box beneath the window, hopped onto it, and, grabbing the iron bars, shouted, in Sister Illuminata’s own brogue, “Play us an Irish tune, for the love of God.”

The poor man, searching the air for the source of the voice, cried out, “Yes, Sister,” and attempted to sing some mangled, halfhearted version of “The Wearing of the Green.”

“Good man,” Sally cried when he had come to a halting finish.

The child, Sister Illuminata said, was a born mimic.

THE DAYS IN THE LAUNDRY grew longer for the two women when Sally started school, but when she returned, she brought her mother and the nun tales from what they called the wider world. She could capture her classmates’ broken English, or their solid Brooklynese, with perfection. She had the pastor’s nasally Latin down to a T. She was a good and quiet child in the classroom, polite and shy on the street, but in the basement laundry of the convent, every impulse toward silliness, every outlandish pantomime or adolescent misfiring of elbows and feet, not to mention wickedness and wildness, was set free, and utterly indulged by her mother and the nun, provided—they were always reminding her—that she kept her voice low.

Provided, it was understood, that proper decorum was re-established whenever she went “upstairs,” which meant into the whole of the universe above the convent laundry.

Perhaps because of this indulgence, the girl, as she grew, chose to linger with Sister Illuminata whenever her mother went out in the afternoons—to do her shopping, to catch her breath—rather than follow her or join the other girls playing in the street. When Sister Jeanne came down the stairs, Sally kissed the little nun but, more and more, begged off their old routines. Sister Illuminata hid her pleasure in this. She turned to her ironing, sighed heavily to disguise a thin smile. Sister Jeanne’s sweet goodness was best spent on younger children, she thought. On innocents. An older child, an older child with some spunk like Sally, like her own Mary Pat Shea, might prefer a little devilment in her friends.