Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Sister St. Saviour drew in her breath, blessed herself. “He fell asleep, poor man,” she said softly. “The pilot light must have gone out.”

The officer glanced over his shoulder, toward the bed, and then took the Sister’s elbow. He walked her out to the narrow hall. Now they stood in the kitchen doorway; the arrested tableau: the bitten bread, the dark gravy, the glass of reddish tea on a small wooden table, the chair pushed back (there had been an urgent knock on the door), the newspaper with its crooked lines of black ink.

“He killed himself,” the officer whispered, his breath sour, as if in reaction to the situation he was obliged to report. “Turned on the gas. Lucky he didn’t take everyone else with him.”

Accustomed as she was to breezing into the lives of strangers, Sister accepted the information with only a discreet nod, but in the space of it, in the time it took her merely to turn her cheek and bow her head, her eyes disappeared behind the stiff edge of her bonnet. When she looked up again—her eyes behind the glasses were small and brown and caught the little bit of light the way only a hard surface could, marble or black tin, nothing watery—the truth of the suicide was both acknowledged and put away. She had pried handkerchiefs from the tight fists of young women, opened them to see the blood mixed with phlegm, and then balled them up again, nodding in just such a way. She had breezed into the homes of strangers and seen the bottles in the bin, the poor contents of a cupboard, the bruise in a hidden place, seen as well, once, a pale, thumb-sized infant in a basin filled with blood and, saying nothing at all, had bowed her head and nodded in just such a way.

“What’s the girl’s name?” she asked.

The officer frowned. “Mc-something. Annie, they called her. Irish extraction,” he added. “That’s why I thought to call for you.”

Sister smiled. Those button eyes had dark depths. “Is that so?” she said. They both knew no one had called for her. She had been on her way home, merely passing by. She dipped her head again, forgiving him his vanity—didn’t he say, too, that he’d put out the fire himself? “I’ll go to her, then,” she said.

As she stepped away she saw the milk-toothed young man, still in his hat, approach the officer. “Hey, O’Neil,” the man shouted. No courtesy in him.

Inside the shadowed bedroom, the neighbor woman who stood at the bedside had her eyes elsewhere, on the gloaming at the far side of the cluttered room. She was a stout woman, about forty. No doubt there were children waiting to be put to bed, a husband to be placated. A woman with a family of her own, with troubles of her own, could not be expected to attend to the sorrows of another indefinitely.

The nun only nodded as the two exchanged places. At the door of the room, the woman looked over her shoulder and whispered, “Can I do anything for you, Sister?”

Sister St. Saviour recalled a joke she had once made, when a young nun asked her the same, in the midst of a busy morning. “Yes. Can you go tinkle for me?”

But she said, “We’ll be fine.” It was what she wanted this Annie Mc-something to hear.

When the woman was gone, Sister reached inside her cloak and took the small basket from under her arm. It was a flimsy thing, woven of unblessed palms, and much worse the wear for being crushed against her body so long. She straightened and reshaped it a bit, catching as she did the green scent that the warmth of her own flesh and the work of her hands could sometimes coax from the dried reeds. She placed the basket on the table beside the bed and untied the money pouch from her belt. It was all coins today, mostly pennies. She placed the pouch in the basket and then sat carefully on the side of the bed, her kidneys aching, her feet throbbing inside her shoes. She looked at the girl’s form, the length of her back and the curve of her young hip, her thin legs beneath the wide skirt. Suddenly the girl turned in the bed and threw herself into Sister’s lap, weeping.

Sister St. Saviour put her hand to the girl’s dark hair. It was thick, and soft as silk. A thing of luxurious beauty. Sister lifted the heavy knot of it that was coming undone at the nape of her neck and brushed a strand from her cheek.

This much the nun was certain of: the husband had cherished this girl with the beautiful hair. Love was not the trouble. Money, more likely. Alcohol. Madness. The day and time itself: late afternoon in early February, was there a moment of the year better suited for despair? Sister herself had had the very same thought earlier today, during her long hours of begging in the drafty vestibule. We’re all feeling it, she’d thought—we being all who passed along the street and in and out of the store, wet-shouldered, stooped, all who saw her and pretended not to, all who scowled and all (though not very many on this dank day) who reached into a pocket or a purse as they approached—we’re all feeling it, she’d thought, in this vale of tears: the weight of the low sky and the listless rain and the damp depths of this endless winter, the sour smell of the vestibule, the brimstone breath of the subway, of the copper coins, the cold that slips in behind your spine and hollows you out at the core. Six and a half hours she’d sat begging today, so weighted by the weather and the time of year that she’d been unable to stir herself from her perch to face the daily humiliation of making use of the store’s public stalls. And so she had left her chair an hour earlier than usual.

“What we must do,” she said at last, “is to put one foot in front of the other.” It was her regular introductory phrase. “Have you had your dinner?” she said. The girl shook her head against the nun’s thigh. “Are there relations we can call for you?” Again she shook her head. “No one,” she whispered. “Just Jim and me.” Sister had the impulse to lift the girl’s shoulder a bit, take the pressure of it off her own aching bladder, but resisted. She could endure it a little longer. “You’ll need a place to stay,” she said. “For tonight, anyway.”

Now the girl pulled away and raised her face to the dim light. She was neither as young nor as pretty as Sister had imagined. It was a plain, round face, swollen with tears, streaked with wet strands of the lovely hair. “Where will I bury him?” she asked. In her eyes the nun saw the determination—no result of the Sister’s admonition, but rather what the woman herself was made of—to put one foot in front of the other. “We’ve got a plot in Calvary,” she said. “We got it when we were married. But the Church will never allow it now.”

“Have you got the deed?” she asked, and the girl nodded.

“Where?”

“Upstairs,” she said. “In the sideboard.”

Gently, Sister touched the girl’s cheek. Not as young or as pretty as she had first imagined, but already the face was familiar: the arch of the heavy eyebrows, the slight protrusion of the upper lip, the line of beauty marks along the cheek. Despair had weighted the day. God Himself was helpless against it—Sister St. Saviour believed this. She believed that God held His head in His hands all the while a young man in the apartment above slipped off this gray life—collar and yoke—not for lack of love, but for the utter inability to go on, to climb, once again, out of the depths of a cold February day, a dark and waning afternoon. God wept, she believed this, even as she had gotten off her chair in the lobby of Woolworth’s an hour before her usual time, had turned onto the street where there was a fire truck, a dispersing crowd, the lamplight caught in shallow puddles, even as she had climbed the stone steps—footsore and weary and needing a toilet, but going up anyway, although no one had sent for her.