Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

She said, her keen eyes on the girl, “I will never encourage the vocation of a young woman who comes to us just after seeing a sister or mother die in childbirth. No woman should enter the convent out of fear.”

Sister Lucy said that the best of men—Mr. Costello came to mind—sought the Sisters’ help when their wives took ill in this way. They stood in the doorway looking lost and afraid while the nuns sailed in to assess the limp woman on the bed.

“Anemia, you’ll often find,” Sister Lucy said. “Pallor. Weakness. From the Greek this time, anaimia, lack of blood.”

You can douse her with castor oil, Sister Lucy said, and then send the husband, or one of the children, off to the butcher for a piece of liver while you do your best with the place. Send the filthy laundry to Sister Illuminata, bathe the children, comb the nits out of their hair, open the windows, beat the rugs. Feed the family a decent meal, after which, perhaps, the mother will stir herself to sit up at the table and chew some small pieces of the liver.

The life might return to her then, iron restored to her bloodstream. Or it might not.

Sister Lucy told Sally that never having had a lazy mother herself, she might not know that there was a distinction between the wife who was sick and then recovered and the wife who was recovered but not yet willing to give up the pleasures of being sick.

“Never waste your sympathy,” Sister Lucy said. They were going into Mrs. Costello’s once again. “Never think for a minute that you will erase all suffering from the world with your charms.”

“The poor we will always have with us,” Sister Lucy said more than once in the week that Sally followed her. She said it without kindness or even resignation. She seemed only annoyed. “If we could live without suffering,” Sister Lucy said, “we’d find no peace in heaven.”

THEY WERE ON THEIR WAY BACK to the convent at the end of a long day, when Sister Lucy, walking ahead of Sally, stopped abruptly. There was a small girl on a stoop, wearing what looked like a bigger sister’s nightgown, a pair of rough shoes on her bare legs. As Sally caught up, she heard Sister Lucy asking her severely why she wasn’t in school. She called the girl by name, Loretta. Little Loretta said she hadn’t gone to school today because her sisters couldn’t take her. And when Sister Lucy asked why that was, the girl lowered her chin to her raised knees. Sister had to say, “Speak up, child.”

The little girl spoke up reluctantly, all in a rush. “Charlie got mad at us this morning because we were laughing too much,” she said. “He locked up Margaret and Tillie and wouldn’t let them out.”

Sister Lucy looked to the building behind the girl. “They’re still inside?”

And the girl, big-eyed and tangle-haired, nodded slowly.

Sister Lucy shook back her sleeve and, without another word, climbed the stairs. Wordlessly, Sally and the little girl followed.

This was a nicer building. There was carpet on the stairs. A radio playing gentle music somewhere. The smell of floor polish. At the door of the little girl’s apartment, Sister Lucy raised her fist to rap, and then, with hardly a pause for a reply, reached for the knob and let herself in. There was a long corridor with little light, airless and hot. At the end of the corridor, a pretty room with dark furniture trimmed in knotted tassels, a table draped with a velvet shawl, a large gilded mirror. A small pile of schoolbooks was spilled across the plush seat of a chair.

Sister Lucy stood for a moment to call out, “Girls?” but then turned down another, shorter corridor to a closed door. Again she knocked, and again she reached for the knob without a pause. She opened the door and said, “Glory be to God.”

Sally looked over the nun’s shoulder into the dim room. She saw two girls about her own age sitting at either end of a rumpled bed. One, somewhat bigger, was in a skirt and a satin slip; the other, thinner and younger, wore a white nightgown like Loretta’s. Both were tied to the iron bedposts by dark leather belts that crossed and recrossed their wrists. The girls struggled to sit up when they saw the nun. As she rushed toward them, they both began to cry piteously, saying together, “Oh, Sister.” It was clear from their faces that they had been crying all day. There was a smell of urine in the airless room. The smell of sweat.

Sister Lucy was already untying the belt that held the bigger girl to the head of the bed. Sally fumbled, pulling at the belt that bound the other—two belts, in fact, one a man’s long belt with a solid buckle, the other the thin strap that might have held the schoolbooks in the living room. Both were wrapped tightly around the peeling iron rail and the girl’s thin wrists. Both belts had raised fiery stripes on her skin, turned her fingertips purple.

Through their tears, the girls told Sister Lucy that they had laughed too much this morning, getting ready for school, and made their brother angry. They rubbed their wrists. The younger girl had wet through her nightgown and blushed in shame. The older, in a gabardine school skirt but no blouse, only her satin slip, cupped her hand to her neck. Sally saw she was trying to hide a bruise there—it looked like a rosebud, a small coin. She saw that Sister Lucy, too, was assessing the mark. Her eyes narrowed. Sally wondered if it wasn’t a bit of ringworm on the girl’s throat.

As they moved off the bed, still whimpering, Sally followed the nun’s sharp eyes to the series of raised red welts on their calves and their thighs. Strap marks.

Sister Lucy said, “Where is your mother?”

“Working,” the girls said together. Gone with her family, they said, the family she cooked for, to their summer place for the week. They said Charlie was in charge.

Sally saw the anger pull at Sister Lucy’s lips and at the corners of her eyes. She imagined it rising up like something awful, undigested, from her throat, from that knot of fury in her chest.

Sister Lucy told Sally, “Take Loretta to the kitchen. See if there’s anything for her to eat. Wash her hands and face while you’re at it.”

The little girl drew back as Sally reached for her. “Do as I say, child,” Sister Lucy said. Cold. Insistent.

Sister Lucy closed the door behind them as they left. Sally heard her say, “Let me see your neck.”

The kitchen was large, neat and charming, although the remnants of a breakfast were still on the table: half-eaten eggs in egg cups, dregs of milk, and crusts of cold toast. The laughter that had angered their brother must have begun here.

The table itself was covered with a clean linen cloth decorated with cross-stitched flowers in blue thread. There were crisp blue curtains at the window. A pretty ceramic kettle on the stove. A nicer apartment altogether, Sally noticed, than her own, but, she gathered, a widow’s apartment nonetheless. Another mother who went out to work. The icebox was well stocked with milk and cheese and a small ham. While Sally made the girl a sandwich, Loretta explained again that Charlie was her brother and he was in charge whenever their mother went away. Her mother was a cook for a family in New York City. Charlie, Loretta said, spanked her sisters when they were bad, but never her. She was his favorite, she said happily.

Suddenly the little girl paused, kneeling on her chair, her chin in the air. Some uncertainty, or perhaps fear, crossed her small face. Sally heard footsteps in the long hall, and then the boy himself appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was a tall, dark-haired boy no older then she, in a white school shirt rolled at the sleeves, a loosened school tie. He said to her, only a little surprised, “Hello, Sister,” even as Loretta flew into his arms, her bare legs going around him. “Hiya, pipsqueak,” he said. His arms beneath the rolled-up sleeves were brown and muscular. He was as big and broad as a grown man.