Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

She heard Sister Lucy say his name, Charlie. She said, “Tied by their wrists.”

Sally realized that she could not bring herself to imagine it, that handsome boy—how sweetly he had called his sister “pipsqueak”—wielding his belt like Simon Legree. She wondered if it could be possible, if there hadn’t been some misunderstanding. Perhaps the girls had been very bad.

The nun’s sibilant whispering into the priest’s big ear gave way to something more solid. “Tonight, Father,” she said, insisting. “I’d hate to have another morning go by. Their mother won’t be back until Sunday.”

The priest said, “All right, Sister.” Now he had his hand on her elbow, he was guiding her to the door. “I’ll go over there tonight,” he said. “Put the fear of God into him. As soon as I’ve had my dinner.”

Sister Lucy said, “Thank you, Father.” But Sally knew she was not appeased.

It was growing late as they walked back to the trolley stop. Although the sky was light blue, a sense of the coming night was already pooling at the feet of the people going by—“Good evening, Sisters”—pooling along the cobbled streets, along the silver trolley tracks, at curbs and in the alleyways. “A cruel and evil boy,” Sister Lucy said, shaking back her sleeve as they waited for the trolley. “Cool as a cucumber. Brazen.” She seemed to be trembling still, and Sally realized, standing beside her, that they were now shoulder to shoulder. That Sister Lucy, ramrod straight as she always was, as Sally had always known her, might even be shrinking.

Telling it later, our mother said, “Sister Lucy didn’t scare me so much after that.”

“If I were a man,” Sister Lucy muttered once more, “I’d wipe that smile off his face.” She added, over her shoulder, as they climbed the steps into the car, “And you standing there making eyes at him was no help to me at all.”

AT THE END OF SALLY’S WEEK with Sister Lucy—on a morning her mother let her stay in bed—the nun came halfway down the basement stairs, pausing when Sister Illuminata and Annie both looked up at her. “If there’s a vocation there,” Sister Lucy said, “I’ll eat my hat.” She shook her black sleeve and touched her back. Under her arm, the basket woven of unblessed palms. Sister Lucy would be taking her turn to beg today. A duty she despised, silently. “I love her like a daughter,” Sister Lucy said with no change in the harshness of her tone, as if love, too, was an unpleasant duty. “Marriage might settle her. Not the convent.”

Annie smiled, but when she turned to Sister Iluminata, the old nun was hunched over her ironing.

“And what do you say, Sister?” Annie asked her when Sister Lucy was safely upstairs.

Sister Illuminata shook her head, shook the iron against the board. “I say give God what He asks for.”

SISTER JEANNE FOUND ANNIE in the convent’s drying yard. She gestured that the two should sit, and Annie pinned the last cloth to the line and then joined her on the wrought-iron bench that had been tucked into this corner of the yard ever since the convent was a rich man’s house, elegant and new. The story in the neighborhood was that the house had been bequeathed to the Little Nursing Sisters in Chicago fifty years ago, when its owner washed up there, having lost his family’s fortune to drink and depravity. The story was that the man died in the Little Nursing Sisters’ care, and had asked on his deathbed that they take his house in Brooklyn in reparation for his sins.

Sister llluminata dismissed this tale when Annie asked about it. Said the house was a gift from a good man who wanted only to help the poor.

The bench was under a narrow arbor, now overgrown with honeysuckle vine and curling ivy, fitted with a statue of St. Francis. The folds of the saint’s robes were tinted green with oxidation; ivy had grown up around the creatures at his feet. The black leaves were repeated in the carvings on the bench, which were also touched with a blue-green dust. Annie made note to brush down Jeanne’s veil for her before they went inside.

The shade gave little relief from the day’s heat. Annie watched as the nun found her handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from her temples, from the pale down above her lip. That any of the nuns could bear their habits on these hot city days, could bear especially the starched linen at their throats and their chins, filled Annie with admiration—and some pride that she and Illuminata were able to keep most of them smelling sweet, at least through the first hours of these stifling mornings.

Annie had opened her own blouse three buttons more than was modest as she came out into the yard with the wet wash. With the clothespins in her mouth, she had glanced down at her breasts as she pinned the nuns’ summer shifts to the line. She recalled without irony or shame the pleasure of his cheek against her skin.

Poor Sister Jeanne had a sunken look about her. Broad creases were pressed into her face, just under her eyes. She had been out of the convent for a string of days, and she recounted her casework: a widow grown blind had been resettled in the French Little Sisters’ home for the aged, a young mother with milk fever was restored, her baby thriving once more. Those First Communion dresses Annie had bleached and mended were much appreciated by an Italian family of seven girls—four of their own and three orphaned cousins. Although one of the girls was determined to wear red shoes. Mr. Bannister, the old veteran, the old bachelor, had both Sister Jeanne and Sister Agatha with him as he went through his last agony, which had taken four long days. But he had not died alone.

Annie, for her part, said she’d met the new president of the Ladies Auxiliary, nicer and younger than Mrs. McShane. She wanted to raise money through a dinner dance at a fine hotel in the city, not the usual bridge party here at the convent. Both women pulled down the corners of their mouths and raised their eyebrows, their familiar, unspoken conspiracy against the society ladies who did so much good. Fancy-dancy , their expressions said.

Annie knew these women called her “that poor widow” when her back was turned. To her face they said “Annie, dear.”

“Have you had an afternoon to yourself all this while?” Sister Jeanne asked her.

And Annie nodded. “You know me,” she said. “I catch my breath when I can,” evoking Sister Lucy.

Sister Jeanne nodded. The unspoken forbearance the two afforded Sister Lucy was a joke they’d shared since the first days of their friendship.

They were in the shade of the narrow arbor, although bright sunlight was moving leisurely against the white shifts on the line. The back of the convent rose over the yard, the sky reflected in each of the convent’s windows. Sister Jeanne’s white hands were resting in her lap. Annie saw her own work on the edge of the nun’s worn sleeve, the black stitches small and neat. Both women wore gold wedding bands. Annie reached for Sister’s hand, patted it affectionately. Something miraculous about how familiar and smooth it was, despite the years of hard work.

They had been friends for a long time.

Annie nodded toward the building. “Which was St. Saviour’s room?” she asked, and Sister Jeanne looked up, smiling.

“First floor,” she said. “On the corner there.”

Annie knew she’d been told this before.

“When she died,” Sister Jeanne said softly, and with her childish amazement, “there was the most beautiful scent. Like roses it was. I know I’ve told you.”

Annie nodded again. She’d been heavily pregnant with Sally on the day St. Saviour died. Another hot day like this. Sister Jeanne had come to the apartment that morning as she always did, with fresh milk and clean linens and an alcohol rub to keep her cool. There were no tears between them, only laughter, as the little nun bathed her swollen ankles with cool water and the two considered St. Saviour in heaven, imperious and proud, all her pain ended.