Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Jeanne Jugan was already in heaven with Our Lord.

What in the world would she care about a plaque on an old building in the country of France? Whatever glory was taken from her here on earth had already been restored a hundred times, a million times, and more.

More happiness than any of us can imagine, Sister Jeanne said. More beauty than any of us on earth can bear.

I’ll never see it, she said. But all of youse will.

The point to remember, Sister Jeanne said— pernt , she said—is that truth finds the light. Lies, big or small, never stay hidden. She pushed the air with the palm of her hand—a comic gesture that said Go on with you — So don’t even bother telling lies, she said.

Truth reveals itself. It’s really quite amazing.

God wants us to know the truth in all things, she said, big or small, because that’s how we’ll know Him.

In all her simplicity, old Sister Jeanne told us, “It’s really that simple.”

ON HER FIRST AFTERNOON at the sanatorium upstate, Sister Illuminata left the porch where the patients were lined up like bolts of linen and wandered through the wings of the cottage. She wanted only solitude. She had already endured the crowded crossing in steerage, the filth and the sickness. She had endured the constant entreaties from every poor Catholic on board, and had brushed from her veil and from the hem of her skirt the traces of spit that had been directed at her from those who were not. She stood in the knocking crowds on Ellis Island, elbow to elbow. And although her habit earned her only a cursory stethoscope to her lungs—through her bib, no less—from a harried and blushing doctor, she’d had barely a night alone in her convent room when Dr. Hannigan, less afraid and more thorough than the government doctor had been, sent her to the sanatorium.

When a nurse there—a Sister of Mercy herself—tried to stop her from going off alone, Sister Illuminata said, lying, that it was a stipulation of her own order that she say her afternoon Office on her feet. She wouldn’t be long.

So it was that she found herself drawn by the luxury of silence to a section of the cottage that was not currently in use—the back of the house, where a winter sunroom she had seen from the drive had now, in midsummer, been given over to storage. Her beads in her hand, she turned from the darkened hallway into the bright space. The air here was hazy, full of dust motes and vague sunbeams, stiflingly hot. There were bed frames and wicker chaises piled haphazardly. A green-and-white linoleum floor that was glazed with sunlight. The dull silence was exactly what she had sought. But then a human sound disturbed it: a long sigh that rippled across the stifling air like breath on water.

In an instant, her eyes found them: a man and a woman, half kneeling, half crouching. They were pressed together in a corner of the hot room, pressed up against each other, behind an iron bedstead that seemed to enclose them. Both had slipped their white robes from their shoulders. Both moved with the same slow, stuttering rhythm. Sister could see the woman’s bare throat, corded and straining, the white flesh of her breasts and the brown of her nipples. She could see the man’s shoulder blades, the short bones of his spine as they pressed themselves against the paper-thin skin. He rose up over her, she arched herself toward him. He was an old man, white hair on the back of his head, across his shoulders, and all along his skeletal arms.

Briefly, Sister thought there was something angelic about their pale struggle, the winged shoulder blades, the tangled bodies, the soft folds of their white robes, and the dusty, streaming sunlight. But then she saw how their mouths were wide open, black and straining. Opened helplessly as if in sudden reflex—as if to expel the short, ragged breaths they were taking. Precious breaths in this place.

Sister Illuminata saw them for only a moment before she turned away. There is a hunger, she thought.

The woman was a young mother from a wealthy family—Sister Illuminata’s own age. She died within the month. The old man was a doctor from Syracuse, New York, who went home with his family the same week Sister Illuminata returned to the convent—both of them, he said, with lungs forever scarred by their ordeal.

There is a hunger. It was a lesson she had learned and then forgotten across the years she had labored in the convent laundry. But she remembered it again when Sally returned from Chicago and Sister Lucy explained to a small coterie of the nuns: Illuminata and Jeanne, Sister Eugenia and old Sister Miriam, what the girl had discovered.

They were in what the Sisters humbly called the refectory; it was, in fact, the rich man’s former drawing room. It was elegant still, high-ceilinged, paneled, with the same thick silk draperies he had paid for. It was where the Sisters took their simple meals, but it was also the site for card parties and ladies’ teas, Christmas gatherings for the neighborhood poor, visits from the Bishop. A room the nuns used to impress both the indigent and the hoi polloi.

The small bulbs in the chandelier above the polished table where the nuns now sat reflected prettily in the dark wood, like starlight on a pond. As Sister Lucy spoke about the arrangements she had made to remove Sally from the scene of her mother’s “indiscretion,” Sister Illuminata recalled that she had seen such a pond, such dancing starlight, at the sanatorium upstate. She recalled the pond, the bracing cold night, the tall black pines in the distant darkness, and the flavor of pine on the air. She became aware once more of the ache in her scarred lungs. She recalled the old doctor.

She remembered the lesson she had learned on her first afternoon at the sanatorium, had learned but forgotten: There is a hunger.

Now Lucy was speaking of the property that was to be left to the Sisters, an estate out on Long Island. A rambling house the order would convert to an old folks’ home, the acreage that might accommodate a hospital someday. This was a realm of convent business Sister Illuminata had little to do with—upstairs business was how she referred to it—the stuff, as she saw it, of ambition and vanity as much as it was a part of the Sisters’ mission to serve the sick poor. There was goodness in it, of course, and the generosity of the Catholic family who had left the Sisters the land. Sister Lucy said the property would not come to them free and clear. But the motherhouse in Chicago would work with the diocese here. The Bishop approved. Some of the good ladies of the Auxiliary had volunteered their husbands, Wall Street men, bankers, men of the world.

There was goodness in it all, of course, but there was greed, too. Sister Illuminata heard it in Lucy’s eager voice: acreage and a house and banks and mortgages, the Bishop, the Cardinal.

More good, Sister Lucy said, than any one Sister could do on her own, going door to door.

It was the kind of worldly ambition, Sister Illuminata thought, that well suited Sister Lucy’s mannish face. And then prayed to be forgiven for the unkindness.

This was no time, Sister Lucy was saying, to disturb the ladies in the Auxiliary, or to stir gossip in the neighborhood, by throwing out onto the street a widow known these nearly twenty years as the laundress in the convent.

Sister Illuminata raised her eyes from the electric starlight reflected in the dining table’s shine. She felt that old ache in her lungs. And in her swollen knees. She knew the time would come, soon perhaps, when the trip down to the laundry, the trip back up again, would be impossible for her. She was well aware that even now, without Annie’s help, she could not manage half the tasks, most of the tasks, the convent needed her to do. If Annie was to be dismissed, no doubt another, younger nun would be assigned to take her place, or perhaps another needy widow from the neighborhood. The long hours Sister Illuminata spent in her chair beside the ironing board, sometimes—with Annie’s good indulgence—just dozing, would be exposed. Sister Illuminata, all other usefulness gone, would be brought every morning to an office lobby or a drafty subway entrance or to the vestibule of some busy store, a woven alms basket to hold on her lap. The cane she now used an extra added attraction.