Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

The woman was struggling to get up on her elbows. Her long hair was tied into an awkward, uneven braid, and her white, browless face, misshapen from sleep, was small, heart-shaped, finely creased. “I know you always know,” she was saying, her voice thin and childish, childishly exasperated. “But I don’t know how you always know. Who is this?” Sally smiled with Sister Jeanne’s smile, but it didn’t warm Mrs. Costello’s expression. Despite the woman’s pallor, her face conveyed a hot disdain. “Why is it always another one coming into my room?” she asked, and thrust out her lower lip. “One of you in here is enough.”

Sister Lucy made no reply, but bustled. With a sweep of her arms, she opened the drapes, then the shades, and then moved a cane-backed wheelchair from a corner of the room to the side of the bed. “Were you well through the night?” she asked.

“No,” the woman said, still looking unhappily at Sally. “Not at all. Terrible pains in my stomach and not a bit of sleep the entire night.”

Sister Lucy said, “Then you were awake when Mr. Costello went out.”

“Heavens, no,” Mrs. Costello said, petulant. Plucking at the blankets even as Sister Lucy began to draw them away. There was a brief tug of war. Sister Lucy won. The woman’s voice became shrill: “Do you have any idea what time my husband must leave in the morning, Sister? Who would be awake at that hour?”

Neatly, Sister Lucy removed the edge of the counterpane from Mrs. Costello’s grasp. Neatly, she folded down the blankets. The woman’s nightgown had risen above her knees. Her legs were chalk white, furred with pale hair. Both the full leg and the shortened one looked lifeless. The woman seemed determined not to move. Suddenly, without preliminaries, Sister Lucy bent down and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Costello, lifted her from her pillow, moved the one full leg to the edge of the bed and then the other. Underneath the blue nightgown, the dull stump of her amputated leg, shining with scars, seemed to thrash about on its own. Sally found herself turning away.

“That accounts for your stomach pains,” Sister Lucy said. Sally looked again. There were bloodstains on the white sheet, blood on the hem of the nightgown.

“Oh bother,” Mrs. Costello said.

Sister Lucy turned to Sally. “Go run a bath,” she said. “Heat some water on the stove.”

Everything about the small apartment was neat and spare. The bathtub was in the kitchen, draped with a clean white tablecloth that made it look like an altar. A wooden milk box stood beside it, where Sally found the soap and a scrub brush and a box of Epsom salts. She found a cast-iron pot and filled it with water, lit the flame beneath it. She had only begun to run the water for the tub when Sister Lucy wheeled the woman through the doorway.

Mrs. Costello was still in her nightgown, her loose braid over her shoulder. She held a pair of thin towels on her lap. Sister Lucy, with practiced motions, pushed the chair back and forth until she had gotten it over the threshold and, to her satisfaction, beside the claw-footed tub. She added the hot water from the stove, tested it, added a splash more. She took the towels from Mrs. Costello’s lap, handed them to Sally, and then, in an instant, lifted the nightgown over the woman’s head. Sally turned away, but Sister said, “Get cold water on those stains.” Sally dropped the towels onto the floor and brought the nightgown to the kitchen sink. She ran cold water over the streaked blood. At the sound of Mrs. Costello’s cry, she looked over her shoulder to see Sister Lucy with the naked woman struggling in her arms. The contrast of the nun’s broad black back, solid and shapeless in her veil, and the woman’s thin, bare, flailing white extremities was grotesque, startling. They might have been two distinct species: an ostrich in the arms of a great black bear, a grasshopper in the beak of an enormous raven. Over the nun’s shoulder, Sally could see Mrs. Costello’s mouth opening and closing. She was making a shrill, piping sound, and as she struggled, she caught Sally’s eye with her helpless, panicked own. Her torso was bucking. She seemed determined to knock away Sister’s bonnet, to climb over the nun’s head. There were long tufts of pale hair, the color of smoke, under her outstretched arms, and again between her thin thighs. “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she was crying, and she glanced down at the tub as if it were a wall of fire. Sister Lucy said harshly, “Stop it now. Stop your nonsense,” but lowered the woman into the water with amazing gentleness, making hardly a splash. Her sleeves caught briefly on the edge of the tub, but her veil was expertly tied back with a black ribbon—when had she done that?

Once she was immersed, Mrs. Costello quieted. There was only a whispered, sucking kind of sobbing. Sister Lucy looked around and then barked, “Take those towels off the dirty floor.”

Sally obeyed—although she noticed with some resentment that the worn wooden floor was not at all dirty—and then stood with the two rough towels clutched to her chest. The woman, naked in the water, was awful to see, and yet Sally could not draw her eyes away. She had, on occasion, glimpsed her mother’s solid body in the bath, but she had never before seen another human being so exposed. The woman’s throat and arms and small puckered breasts were thin, raked, as if the flesh had been scraped away by a dull knife, whittled from Ivory soap. Mrs. Costello’s one full leg floated, the other flailed weakly as she moved, now, suddenly, placid, rubbing the soap between her hands, leaning forward to let Sister Lucy wash her back. The tail of her braid was dark with water. A fine pink stain rose into the bath from between her thighs.

“Stand watch,” Sister said, straightening up, and then left the room.

Once more Mrs. Costello turned her blue eyes on Sally. Her eyes were sunk into her skull, and the surrounding flesh had a dark hue, but the irises themselves were vivid. Her pale nakedness made them more striking still. Sally smiled at her. She could think of nothing to say. Expressionless, the woman stared for what might have been a full minute, and then turned her attention to the soap. The word brazen —her mother’s word—came to mind: there was no impulse on the woman’s part to cover herself, to apologize, to beg forgiveness for her sorry state.

When Sister Lucy returned, she had Mrs. Costello’s clothes in her arms. A simple dress, wool stockings, underwear. She had a white cloth on top of it all, four safety pins in her mouth. Expertly, Sister pinned the napkin to the inside of the underpants, and then took the towels from Sally’s arms. She placed one on the seat of the wheelchair, threw the other over her shoulder. She lifted Mrs. Costello smoothly out of the tub—now the woman was as trustful as an infant—placed her in the chair, and dried her flesh with a vigorous rub. She dressed her, lifting and pushing. At one point, Mrs. Costello began to sob again, but Sister hushed her and she remained hushed. Then, with an abrupt tilt of her head, Sister Lucy told Sally to follow her back into the bedroom, where she maneuvered the chair to the window so Mrs. Costello would be facing out. She lifted the hairbrush from the dresser and handed it to Sally. “Do a nice job” was all she said. Then she stripped the linen from the bed and left the room.

The woman’s long fair hair was coming out of its tangled braid. Even Sally could tell this was the clumsy work of a man. She pulled the damp braid apart as gently as she could while Mrs. Costello fidgeted in her chair, leaning forward abruptly, turning her head to look up and down the street. “Is it a nice day out there?” she asked, and Sally told her it was. She sat back abruptly. “My husband will carry me down this evening,” Mrs. Costello said. “We’ll sit in the park for a while.”