Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Annie grew bolder with every good warning her mother spoke. Her resolve swelled, feeding not on the perfect sense her mother made but on her own new disdain for the woman’s weakness. Her selfishness. Annie had, until then, thought her mother stronger than that. More capable of great sacrifice for the sake of her child’s happiness.

In her mind’s eye, she saw a crone’s hand reaching up as if from a grave, reaching up to catch the skirt of a girl who had already danced away.

“Oh, we’ll see each other again,” Sally said calmly, into the darkness. “Life is like the blink of an eye.”

Of course, it was Sister Jeanne’s voice entirely.

SOON ENOUGH, the wider world had the child bound for sanctity. Annie saw how the Tierney kids, always rough and ready and full of mischief, began to change in Sally’s presence, to gentle themselves, as Annie thought of it, to hush their voices, smiling at her shyly. Soon the Tierney girls began to encircle Sally as they walked to and from school, as if she were the plaster Madonna in a processional. Now the boys, Tom and Patrick, hung back, newly hesitant, nearly awestruck, although—Annie made note—they bumped and elbowed their sisters still.

Annie heard from Sally’s teachers how the girl had begun to spend her recess in the church, not the play yard. How she led the eighth grade in the rosary but refused, all modesty, to crown the statue of Mary in May—gave the floral crown, in fact, to a deaf child in one of the lower grades, a child friendless and shy.

“Overdoing it,” Annie told Mrs. Tierney.

That fall, when Sally moved to the high school, the Tierney girls reported to their mother that some nasty boys had called her “Sister”—and Sally had disarmed them all by saying, “That’s right. Sister St. Sally of the Smelly Socks.”

She eased away with gentle explanations the few boys who pursued her in those years—mostly serious or unpopular boys who hadn’t gotten word of her vocation—and rose above the romantic dramas of the other girls—young Matilda Tierney had an operatic heartbreak at sixteen—with benign sympathy, her hands tucked into her sleeves.

“Promised to Christ,” Sister Illuminata said over her ironing board, full of admiration. Annie silenced the turning mangle, put her wet hands to her hips. “What man accepts a promise from a girl so young?”

A beautiful newcomer passed briefly through the convent—Sister Augustina, elegant and thin, olive-skinned, sunken-eyed, gone back to her family with a collapsed lung in three weeks’ time—and Annie saw how quickly Sally adopted the doomed nun’s ethereal glide. She knew a romance was brewing in her daughter’s brain, the tale of a girl called by God and a selfish widowed mother who barred the door. It was a tale straight out of the Lives of the Saints—the young female saints, anyway, who were always met with opposition by parents or suitors, or who went to their deaths—eyes raised—in their stubbornness to heed the Lord’s call. Jesus Himself playing the part of the lovely-eyed beau, dangerous and strange and so alluring. Jim.

Sister Illuminata understood the case Annie made against her daughter’s vocation. She understood the logic of mere mimicry. Who among the Sisters knew better than she how Sally’s true nature leaned toward silliness and laughter? But Sister Illuminata had also seen the holy light pass through the basement window. She had seen the girl’s face transformed. She told Annie, “My mother used to say, ‘A friend’s eye is a good mirror.’”

Now, on her afternoons alone with Sally, while Annie was out at the stores, Sister Illuminata whispered her encouragement. She told the girl that it was not sacrifice that had driven her own vocation, not the sacrifice of life and family and the world—“giving up this and that and whatnot” was how she put it, dismissive. It was the notion that Christ Himself had called her to become, in a ghastly world, the pure, clean antidote to filth, to pain.

All things human bend toward it, Sister Illuminata said. They were alone in the basement in the waning afternoons. Because of original sin, she told the girl, all things human bend toward filth, decrepitude, squalor, stink. She pointed to the basement’s high windows. “Look out there, if you have eyes to see.”

All things mortal bend toward ruin, Sister said, which means toward pain, toward suffering. It had always been the devil’s intention, she said, to convince human beings they were no more than animals, never angels. Which is why there’s nothing like pain to turn a person into a howling beast. Nothing like disease to wear a soul thin. Stink to discourage us. Dirt to drag us down.

The life of a nursing Sister is the antidote to the devil’s ambitions. A life immaculate and pure.

A Sister makes herself pure, Sister Illuminata said, immaculate and pure, not to credit her own soul with her sacrifice—her giving up of the world—but to become the sweet, clean antidote to suffering, to pain.

“You wouldn’t put a dirty cloth to an open wound, would you?” Sister Illuminata said.

Sitting on her chair beside the ironing board, her knees beneath the black tunic swollen with arthritis, she cocked her bonnet toward the pile of white handkerchiefs, newly ironed and stacked like cards, as if they illustrated her point. Sally, knowing the routine as she knew every ritual of the convent laundry, took the handkerchiefs from the end of the ironing board and set them carefully in the wicker basket on her mother’s sewing table. Her mother would carry them upstairs when she returned, distribute them to each narrow dresser in each of the Sisters’ narrow rooms.

She lifted the basket of linen tablecloths and napkins her mother had taken in from the line before she went out. In the hierarchy of her tasks, Sister Illuminata always saved any household ironing for the end of the day, in case her energy flagged. Her best work was done in the morning and was dedicated to the Sisters’ habits, or to whatever was going back to the homes of the sick, or to the refreshed donations meant for the poor. Her own habit she washed and ironed on rare occasions. “The last shall be first,” she said then.

“It’s been a long time since I was out nursing,” Sister Illuminata said as Sally helped her to spread the wide tablecloth over the ironing board. It was a plain rough-spun cotton meant for everyday use, redolent now of the line. “But down here the work’s the same, isn’t it? A kind of healing.” And she chuckled at the thought, and then shook her head as if to dispel her own vanity. She directed Sally to fetch the broader, old-fashioned iron that was sitting on the furnace grate. “Down here, we do our best to transform what is ugly, soiled, stained, don’t we? We send it back into the world like a resurrected soul. We’re like the priest in his confessional, aren’t we?” And chuckled again at her own fancy. Sally’s vocation had made her expansive.

Sister Illuminata sprinkled the cloth. These days she used an old Coca-Cola bottle with a perforated rubber stopper. She licked her scarred fingertip and tested the iron. Attacked the cloth in broad strokes, her elbow pumping. “We send the Sisters out each morning immaculate, don’t we? A clean cloth to apply to the suffering world.”

Standing on the other side of the ironing board, Sally said softly, “It’s true.”

The two worked together in silence, moving the tablecloth across the board, folding it carefully, Sister pressing the hot iron along each of the folded seams. Finally, when the ironing was finished, Sister said, “There’s a name for you.” She was arranging the still-warm cloth over Sally’s forearm, to be carried to the dining room upstairs and laid out in the bottom drawer of the server. “Mary Immaculate,” she said, still a little breathless from her work. “There’s a lovely name for a woman. A great name for a nun.”