Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

A small table was borrowed from an upstairs hallway and carried to the cellar so that Sally could do her homework there, in Sister Illuminata’s company (the iron thumping and hissing), rather than, more sensibly, at the well-lit table in the convent kitchen or the dining room in her own home. For if a case of the giggles overcame her here, or if she recalled some incident from the schoolyard this morning that she longed to re-enact, or even if, bored with sums, she drifted to the donation baskets and tried on a few clothes, Sister Illuminata, fondly, would abide.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON and her mother had gone to the shops. Sally was nearly thirteen. She was helping Sister Illuminata fold the last of the day’s clothes. One of the freshly ironed tunics belonged to Sister Jeanne, and Sally, laughing, held it up against her. The nun looked at the girl over her shoulder. Sally said, “Let’s fool my mother.”

It was not the first time she had dressed in the habit of the Little Sisters. It was a custom at her school to hold “vocation days,” when the students were asked to dress up as priests and nuns and to parade about the schoolyard as miniature ecclesiastics. Because of her status as a convent child, and because she was a good and quiet girl, Sally was chosen every year to represent the various orders of nursing Sisters in the modified habit that Sister Illuminata herself had made for her—and then altered each year as she grew. But on this afternoon, Sally eyed Sister Jeanne’s full habit, the clean, consecrated cloth. “Come on, Sister,” she said. “Just for fun.”

Against her better judgment, Sister Illuminata helped the girl into the tunic. Since she had no cincture handy, she tied a linen bandage around the girl’s thin waist and then brushed and smoothed the shoulders and the wide sleeves, shaking her head all the while at their transgression, but loving, too, the nearness of the girl, the coiled energy of her narrow body, the sweet buds of her breasts, the faint pattern of freckles on her nose that, this close, appeared to ride beneath the surface of her skin, as if under a milky veil.

Sitting on her ironing chair, Sister pressed the coif over Sally’s bent head, tugging the thing into place over her ears, tucking her hair away with a busy mother’s gentle brusqueness. Sally closed her eyes and placed her hands on Sister’s swollen knees. Her breath smelled of milk and crackers. She was laughing when they began, her crooked teeth catching at the cloth of the tunic as it went over her head, but now she grew solemn, her eyes closed, as Sister smoothed and tucked, moving her scarred fingertip gently along the girl’s forehead and her cheeks. She tugged the cloth into place and leaned back to look at Sally in the basement sunlight.

Sister shook her head, as if she disapproved of the charade and had no part in it, but what she was shaking off, in truth, was the bare beauty of the girl’s plain face inside the white linen, a face pure and ageless and as innocent as if it had just been formed. She pushed Sally away a bit, taking the weight of the child off her sore knees, and fitted the bonnet over the coif. Then she lifted Sister Jeanne’s black veil, newly ironed, and gently placed it over Sally’s head. Took a pin from her own veil to hold it in place.

When Annie came down the stairs just after five o’clock, winded and apologizing that she had taken longer than usual because she had just run home to drop off a few things, Sister Illuminata, in her chair beside the ironing board, said casually, “Oh, Sally’s already gone.”

“When?” Annie asked. “I didn’t see her on the street. When did she leave? I never passed her on the street.”

The girl stepped out from the shadow of the furnace, into some streaming light from the high basement window. In perfect imitation of Sister Jeanne, she had her hands tucked into her sleeves, her eyes cast down. Stepping forward, she ducked her head in Sister Jeanne’s own way, a way that implied tremendous shyness as well as some futile, last-ditch effort to suppress—like a lid on a boiling pot, Annie sometimes said—the rushing impulse to break into laughter.

The perfume of sunlight arose from Sister Jeanne’s clothes. The late-spring afternoon threw a shaft of gold into the high window. It landed at Sally’s feet.

With her head bowed, she could not see her mother, but she could hear her pause. “What in the world?” Annie whispered.

Sister Illuminata said, “Allow me to introduce a new member of our community. This is Sister St. Sally. Sister St. Sally of the Smelly Socks.”

The nun’s laughter was low and deep, and Annie’s, after a pause, was full of warm impatience. “You are a pair,” she said. She was slipping out of her spring coat. “The two of you. Is that Jeanne’s habit? Don’t you think it’s a sacrilege, Sister?”

Sally moved forward, just a step or two, into the full corridor of spring sunlight.

The golden sunshine through the high basement window was like the light in holy cards—Sally felt it fall on her the way the painted light in holy cards fell over the bowed heads of saints. She held out her arms and marveled at their elegance within the wide sleeves, her wrists so slim and white against the black serge. She was filled with what seemed Sister Jeanne’s own confidence and peace. Without a mirror to consult, with only her mother and Sister Illuminata’s silly laughter to guide her, she understood, nevertheless, that she had been transformed. That even her voice, muffled as it was by the linen over her ears, the voice the two had so often warned her to soften, was now something else altogether, something solemn and graceful and profound. She knew she was meant to be a nun.

That night, when Sally whispered her intentions to her mother, speaking into the darkness, in the bed they still shared, Annie wondered if she might do well to point out that her daughter’s ability to imitate to perfection snooty Mrs. McShane and harried Mrs. Odette, and even nosy Mrs. Gertler downstairs, was no proof at all that she was destined to become a city councilman’s wife or a convent cook or a Jewish landlady with a dozen wigs.

But with the girl’s bright eyes shining from the pillow beside hers, she resisted the impulse to tease.

She said instead, “Are you thinking already about how you’ll leave me?”

And never meant to sound so pained.

WHEN SALLY WAS STILL SMALL and lifted down from the carriage in order to accommodate another of Mrs. Tierney’s serial infants, she gripped her mother’s skirt as they made their way along the streets. Under the rough cloth, the movements of her mother’s hips and legs was always firm, without hesitation, and even as a small child, Sally felt the confidence of those quick steps as if her own feet drove them. When her mother reached for her hand because the crowds on the street were growing dense or the sun was setting and the streetlights coming on, or because there was something, or someone, they had to hurry past, the broad, strong grip of her fingers was not reassuring—it was solid assurance itself.

All her life, Sally had known that assurance.

She had watched her mother’s hands dispatch a pile of piecework in an evening’s time. Seen them transform a knot of jumbled linen into a tall straight stack ready for the cupboard, architectural in its beauty. Her mother could set a springing mousetrap in a flash, dispose of the broken varmint—out the back window into the yard—and then light a match with the flick of her thumb to disperse the sweet and sickly dead-mouse smell.

Her mother could deftly wring a chicken’s neck, pluck and wash and baste and serve it. She could mix a poultice, a bucket of wallpaper paste, a batter for bread, a batter for cake.