Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

It was Sister Jeanne who suggested Annie give her baby the nun’s name in baptism. A formidable patroness for the child.

Wide-eyed, Sister Jeanne had described for Annie that morning the nun’s last breath, the peace of it, and then the odor of sanctity filling the hushed room. The beauty of heaven in the scent, Sister Jeanne had said. Just the smallest notion of it—of what is promised. As much of heaven’s beauty, Sister Jeanne had said, full of wonder, as we on earth can bear.

Annie didn’t doubt the report. Sister Jeanne couldn’t tell a lie. But Annie was inclined to reconcile such miracles with the sensible world. Sister St. Saviour died in July. The windows were surely open—or, if they weren’t, Sister Jeanne, who held on to the old superstitions, would have opened one the moment the old nun passed. Surely roses bloomed somewhere in the neighborhood.

Annie imagined that St. Saviour, who disdained all superstition, would have said the same.

Looking up at the room—whose was it now?—Annie said, “You’re here to tell me I should let Sally go.”

Sister Jeanne said, “Let her try.”

“Did I ever believe I could stop her?”

Sister Jeanne laughed and lifted both their hands. She brought their entwined fingers to her lips, kissed Annie’s knuckles, her lips warm and dry, and then dropped their hands together into her lap. She looked up, tilting her chin so the sun that filtered through the ivy could reach her face.

“I was going to enter a teaching order,” she said, “but when I finished my novitiate, God asked that I go out among the poor, to nurse. My confessor suggested the French Little Sisters. But that’s not the address he wrote down.” She laughed. “He was busy with many things, Father was, I don’t blame him. And so I presented myself here. When I realized the mistake I’d made, Sister St. Saviour said, ‘God’s will.’ So I stayed where He’d brought me.”

“It wasn’t Chicago,” Annie said.

Sister Jeanne said, “It could have been the moon. I’d never been to this part of Brooklyn before. I grew up in the Bronx.”

Annie glanced at the nun. It was as much as Jeanne had ever said about her life in the world. She was no Illuminata, with her tedious childhood tales. Annie wondered where they were now—her people in the Bronx, a mother or a father surely, siblings perhaps—were they all dead or merely forever unspoken of? Was there a difference?

Annie cast her eye over Sister Jeanne’s small frame, the short lap, the childish black shoes, neatly tied, just touching the sparse grass at their feet. She wondered what had convinced her as a girl to be confined to this lonely life of hard labor. What had made her believe she was capable of such long sacrifice—tiny as she was, gentle as she was, no training, no idea what she would find in this part of the world, much less in the hidden rooms of the city’s most desolate? What drove her to think she could endure this life?

“How did your mother feel about your vocation?” Annie asked her.

Sister Jeanne paused. And then said, tentative, “She was happy in heaven, I’m sure.” She raised her handkerchief again, delicately blotting her lips and her chin.

“If Sally goes to Chicago,” Annie said simply, “it will break my heart.”

Sister Jeanne turned her white bonnet toward the convent. The rattle and shout of the street reached them faintly. A garbage can falling. The grinding of gears. In an interval of quiet, Sister said, “I saw him. When Sally was young. Here,” and she bowed her head toward the convent’s windows, lit blue and white by the sky and the summer clouds. “Jim, I mean. In his brown suit. Looking like himself. Solid as stone.”

Annie nodded. Sister Jeanne could not tell a lie. “It was Jim?”

“It was,” Sister Jeanne said, full of regret.

“You never saw him alive,” Annie said.

And Jeanne shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

“But you recognized him.”

She whispered, “I did. Poor man.” And she followed this with a sudden breath, taken through her teeth, as if in response to a sharp and sudden pain in her side. “What worse suffering can there be for a soul?” she said. “To be trapped forever in these bodies of ours. No relief.”

There was another spasm of street noise, and then Sister Jeanne turned Annie’s hand over in her own. She bowed her head and placed a finger into Annie’s palm, gently tracing a line as she spoke, like a child enumerating a fragile logic, giving it careful voice.

“What I wanted to tell you is this,” Sister Jeanne said softly, cautiously. “Here’s redemption, see? Here’s forgiveness. Through his child. Through her vocation. Here’s the forgiveness of sin.”

Annie raised her eyes to look over her friend’s bowed head, looked to the winding vines above her. For a moment, an image of him trapped, his body trapped in the tangled shade, flitted across her eyes. A glimpse of his pale forehead, his dark brows, the black corner of his grin.

He’d lost a tooth in the days before he died—how long since she remembered this? His teeth were always trouble to him.

What greater torment for a man whose sin was suicide than to be trapped forever in the body he’d sought to shed?

The sun moved through the leaves. She felt it touch the top of her head, her throat. The pale skin beneath the opened buttons of her blouse. Jim, too, had put his warm cheek to her breast, even on the last night of his life. Sally inside her then, no bigger than a heart.

She took her hand from Sister Jeanne’s. Sat up straighter, looking out across the yard.

“What you’re telling me,” she said. And paused. Sister Jeanne’s face was attentive but weary. It was full of affection. They had been friends for a long time. “What you’re saying is that I haven’t suffered enough.” She paused again. The perspiration was once more beaded on Sister Jeanne’s pale lip. A drop of it, the size and shape of a tear, gathered at her temple, rolled down her cheek. “These eighteen years,” Annie said. “You’re saying they haven’t brought me suffering enough. Loneliness enough. You’re saying I should lose my daughter, too. My own. So that God can forgive him.”

Only a narrow ray of sun, filtered through the black leaves of ivy, caught Sister Jeanne’s white bonnet. Inside its depths, shadow and light, she was smiling, her eyes sunken and drawn and the perspiration sparkling on the fine hairs above her lip. It was the way she might smile at a misbehaving child—the reprimand hardly outlasting the fond absolution. She reached again for Annie’s hand, took it in both of hers. “Oh no,” she said. “Not Jim. I’m not talking about Jim. He’s a lost soul, poor man.” She paused. “I’d never have seen him here if there was any hope of heaven for him.” And she shook her head—resigned to the fact, but still not without pity. “What I’m saying is, it’s so you can be forgiven, see?” And she bit her lip, as if to suppress a laugh, to suppress her own wonder and delight at this turn of good fortune. “It’s your sin I mean. Your soul.”

It was the first Annie ever knew that Sister Jeanne had made note of how she spent her afternoons.

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, Sally went with her mother and Sister Jeanne to Pennsylvania Station. An overnight train. There was no money for a Pullman, so she would have to sit up in the open coach, but she was young, as the Sisters were always reminding her. She would be fine.

Her nearly new valise was on the rack above her head. It was secondhand but quite lovely: lacquered beige rattan with caramel leather trim, a gold clasp repaired, free of charge, by the shoemaker who served the convent. It contained only what the Sisters at the motherhouse had required her to bring: six pairs of stockings, six pairs of knickers, three muslin nightgowns without ornamentation, four chemises, woolen gloves, black shoes.