Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Sally had five dollars in her wallet and fifty pinned to the lining of her purse, to be turned over to the Sisters in Chicago when she arrived.

She sat on a bench seat beside the window. Looked out to see her mother on the platform, her arm through Sister Jeanne’s. They were leaning together, the two of them, Sister Jeanne coming only to her mother’s shoulder. Her mother looked nice in her hat and her gray Sunday suit. The unaccustomed scent of the face powder and lipstick she donned only for a trip to Manhattan lingered on Sally’s cheek. They could have been something from a movie, her mother and Sister Jeanne, they both looked so polished and clean. Sally waved and blew a kiss, and her mother touched her gloved hand to her heart, then lifted it, the way you might release a bird into the air.

Sally looked around the train, felt the energy of its silent engines, poised to move. People were settling themselves. She did the same.

The windowsill was not grimy in the way of subway cars. The upholstery was plush. It was all very lovely. Her mother had packed her a sandwich for dinner and a roll for breakfast. A pear and a chocolate bar. The Sisters had told her that if she waited until the tail end of the dinner hour, she could go to the dining car for a nice cup of tea. She had three books with her: her missal, The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse, and the novel the Tierney twins had given her as a going-away gift. She looked out again. Her mother and Sister Jeanne were still on the platform. The engine gave up a tremendous sigh and then the trainman cried out. The train began to move and the movement thrilled her. Goodbye, goodbye, she cried silently, as if it were a prayer. Touching her gloved hand to the window until the two women had passed out of its frame.

A plump lady with two bulky shopping bags made her way down the aisle, bound, Sally could tell, for the seat beside her. She watched the woman back into it, big rump and dark coat and short struggling arms. Sally smiled up at her, weighing her disappointment at not having the seat to herself for the long ride against the promise of companionship. She was thinking of the Thunderbolt in Coney Island, when the man in charge sometimes lifted a stray kid into your car. The Tierney twins always resented this, but Sally preferred to feel even a stranger’s shoulder against her own as the roller coaster began its climb.

The woman took some time getting herself arranged. She wedged the shopping bags between her knees and the seat in front of them, sat back to observe the arrangement, and then leaned forward to fuss with them again. Each time she moved, her clothes gave off the smell of artificial violets and, just behind it, cooking oil. Then she sat back again. She was breathing heavily, but with an odd rhythm—not the rhythm of a woman catching her breath after running for the train, but the quick, deep, agitated panting of an animal in distress.

Sally glanced at the brown bags, their handles tied together with dirty string, glimpsed the unconscious motion of the panting woman’s bosom, and felt the most peculiar brush of panic—like the wing-stroke of a bat against her hair. It was not, merely, a failure of courage at the start of her great adventure. It was a throat-catching, spine-seizing fear, as startling as a dream’s sudden misstep, that reflexive start, that abrupt intake of breath.

She turned to the window. The train was making its way through the tunnel that would lead them out of the city, passing through flashing columns of darkness and light. Of course, she had been riding subways all her life. She was as accustomed to being underground as any New Yorker. But that wing-stroke of terror—she actually reached up to touch her hat as if it had been somehow altered—reverberated. It seemed to rattle through her bones. Never before, gone underground, had she thought to wonder about the capacity of the steel beams and the concrete, or the genius of the sandhogs and the engineers, to keep earth and rock and water from coming down on their heads.

She had never before considered the fearful, foolish miracle of moving through this hollowed-out place.

Never before equated its rushing darkness, its odor of soot and soil and steel, with the realm of the dead, the underside of bright cemeteries—the cemetery, for instance, where her father was, had always been, in sunshine and in rain, through all her bustling days as she went blithely down the subway steps or down into the convent basement …

She looked through the train window to the hollowed-out darkness.

She told herself the soul rose, of course, but until the last day, didn’t the body pass its time here, in this dark underside of the bright world? Why had she never thought of this before? Her father’s body waited down here, in stillness, looking much as it had when it last saw the sunlight: same clothing, same hair, the same patient, folded hands. No shoes—someone at school had told her this—and, slowly, of course, flesh fallen away from bone.

And then full daylight broke suddenly upon the train—explosive, thunderous. She may have jumped.

The woman beside her, leaning into her shoulder, breathing on her neck, said, “You headed for Chicago?”

Sally turned to her. “Yes,” she said, grateful for the daylight now at the windows, the orange hue of the late afternoon. “I am.”

“Me, too,” the woman said. Her wide face was rough-skinned, well-powdered, scattered with coarse hairs. She was younger than she had first appeared. Something supple in her cheeks and chin, which gleamed softly with sweat, indicated this. She wore bright lipstick. There was lipstick on her small gray teeth as she smiled.

“Are you running away?” the woman asked.

“Oh no,” Sally said. It took an effort of will to meet the woman’s small eyes, not only because her face was so close, but because Sally so wanted to turn once again to the window, to the lovely light of dusk. They were no longer underground. But she had been raised to be polite. She had been trained by nuns to offer kindness to every stranger. “I’m going to a convent,” she said. “My novitiate. I’m going to be a nursing Sister.”

The woman sat back a little, moving her short arms, kicking the bags at her feet. Her hands, Sally noticed, were very small and plump, the short fingers all coming to little pale points. The woman smiled broadly, with real delight. “Mercy!” she said to the air above their heads, and laughed, a kind of rumbling, staccato laughter. “Mercy me. A nun.” Then she reached down again to adjust her shopping bags. “Well,” she said, “I’m sure that’s very nice for you, but I, for one, am running away.”

She straightened up again. “From my husband,” she added. There was something avian—was it pigeon or owl?—in the way she turned her head on her thick throat, moved chin and eyes in Sally’s direction. “He thinks I’m going to see my sister in Chicago, where I’m from, but I am going on through, all the way to California.” She nodded, smiling still. “He’ll never find me. He’ll never see my face again as long as he lives.” She raised her eyebrows, which were thick and wiry, all askew. “What does a little nun have to say about that?”

Sally hesitated. “I’m very sorry to hear it,” she said, imitating Sister Jeanne’s sunny sympathy. “I’ll pray for you.”

The woman smiled again. She was growing younger and younger in Sally’s estimation, growing closer to her own age, which seemed odd given how old she had first seemed. “We were married for six years,” the woman said. “I can hardly believe it. Six,” she said again. “Six years. I was just a girl.” She laughed again, moving from side to side in her seat. There was something sweetly unpleasant on her breath. A decayed tooth, perhaps. “And while I’m sure,” the woman was saying, “that a little baby nun would know nothing about these things, I can tell you with assurance that he had the tiniest penis known to man.” She held up her pale pinky. The nail, the flesh itself, came to a point and was rimmed with grime. And then the woman slipped the pinky into her mouth, pursed her lips around it. She widened her eyes as if in surprise. When she withdrew the finger, it was wet and stained at the base by her lipstick. Then she put her hand, with the fingers curled into her palm, over her wide lap. She wiggled the wet finger against the dark fabric of her skirt. “Can you imagine,” she said casually, “a girl the size of me spending her life riding a thing the size of that?”