Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Sister Lucy was saying, “If Sister Illuminata will have her.”

They all directed their eyes toward Sister Illuminata.

Caught by surprise, she only nodded gravely.

“I suggest we keep her here, then,” Sister Lucy said. “Whether she amends her life or no.”

And then they called Annie into the room. She stood with her hands folded before her, her back straight. “No” was the answer.

ONCE MORE, the cathedral light, the light of painted holy cards, streamed from the high windows to touch the girl’s shoulders and her bowed head. Sally was crouched on the floor beside the nun, leaned into her lap. The Ninth Hour prayers had just ended. Sally visited now only when her mother was out—at the shops, they continued to say, as if the truth of what her mother was up to on these afternoons could not assail the custom of their belief, their determined innocence.

There is a hunger, Sister Illuminata told the girl.

“A hunger to be comforted” was how our mother recalled it.

But the nun’s language in these matters—matters of the body, of the flesh, what went on between women and men—was limited. Her experience limited as well.

She put her hand on the girl’s head. Leaned as close to her familiar, sweet-scented hair as the starched bonnet would allow. “We can pray for your mother’s soul,” she said. “We can offer up our work, the way we do for the souls in purgatory.” She paused. Felt the old assurance of words she understood. “Maybe there are some extra works of mercy you could do. Something you can offer up to God in the name of your mother.”

“I don’t like nursing, Sister,” Sally said. Stubborn. “I’m no good at it.”

“It doesn’t have to be nursing,” Sister Illuminata said. “It doesn’t have to be religious life.” Sally was leaning against her lap, looking up at her warily. Sister could feel the quick impatience in the girl’s young bones. A coiled energy that had been there since her childhood, that Sister only now was willing to acknowledge was proof of Lucy’s assessment that marriage might settle her.

“You could simply do some good in your mother’s name,” she said. “Until your mother’s ready to do something for herself.”

Sally narrowed her eyes, as if to see Sister’s point. Her plain lovely face was not as childish as it once had been. Today she wore some face powder that obscured her fading freckles. Some rosy color on her chapped lips as well. Mr. Tierney had found her a small job in the tearoom at the hotel, three afternoons a week. Sister Illuminata took the makeup to mean the end of the girl’s vocation.

“A kind of penance,” Sister said. “A way to gain some indulgence for her. For her soul.”

Above them, the sound of the Sisters’ footsteps as they were leaving the chapel. Only a few of the nuns had returned to the convent today, most had stayed out on casework, need being what it was in the neighborhood.

“Maybe we can find some poor creature you can help. Maybe an old woman who would love your companionship. Maybe a young mother nearby who needs help with her children. We can ask the Sisters. We can find you some good you could do. For your mother’s sake. You can offer it up. For the salvation of her soul.”

Sister Illuminata heard Sister Jeanne’s light step on the basement stairs. Sally placed her cheek on the nun’s wide lap. “She won’t,” she said. And Sister heard Annie’s own determination in the girl’s voice. “She won’t change. She calls him ‘dear.’”

“We’ll find some good work for you to do,” Sister Illuminata said once more, raising her voice, hoping that Sister Jeanne would hear her, even as she understood the vanity of this, this long, silly competition for the girl’s affection. “Prayer and good work together will surely move Our Lord to grant you what you ask for.”

Sally raised her head again. Sister Illuminata was surprised to see there were no tears—only, in her searching brown eyes, what would have been, when she was young, the prelude to mischief. “Mrs. Costello,” Sally whispered. She said, “Sister Lucy thinks she’s a faker, but I don’t. I could go sit with her when she’s all alone. She hates being alone.” She raised her pale brows, her eyes full of childish mischief. “I could sit with Mrs. Costello while her husband’s away,” Sally said. “What would my mother think of that?”

Sister Illuminata was about to object—the notion both confused and dismayed her—when she looked up and saw Sister Jeanne leaning over the banister. In the bright afternoon sunlight Sister Jeanne was mostly silhouette, her hand to her heart.

Sister Illuminata placed her arm around Sally’s shoulders. She touched the girl’s soft hair. It was sinful, the way she competed with Jeanne—a sin she could never confess or define. Her need to be the girl’s favorite, to be loved beyond all the other nuns in the convent by this confused and mortal child, was inexplicable, even to herself. A hunger.

“That’s a fine idea,” Sister Illuminata said.

THE LAUNDRY at the St. Francis Hotel was a far cry from the dark and efficient realm of the convent basement, but Sally felt herself drawn to it nevertheless. She passed it by in the afternoon when she arrived at the hotel and made her way toward it at the end of the day, just to smell the steam and to observe the noisy industry of the workers—mostly Chinese men who only glanced up at her when she wandered past, glanced up quickly and then looked away.

She had a mean and accurate version of the way they argued, which she had already performed for Sister Illuminata. The nun had not been amused. “Stay away from those men,” Sister had told her. “They’d as soon put a knife in you.”

The job Mr. Tierney had found for her was in the tearoom, helping to serve three days a week, from two in the afternoon to six in the evening. It was the best he could get for her for now. She wore a smart gray dress and a white apron, a cap and a hairnet and solid black shoes, and the outfit, given to her in the basement locker room where the workers gathered and dressed, immediately told her everything she needed to know about how to behave upstairs. She was a quick study, the supervisor said. A lovely girl.

Mornings, she waited on the steps of Mrs. Costello’s apartment house.

When the Sister arrived, Sally followed her up the stairs, then made herself useful in the neat and barren household, and then lingered after the Sister’s work was done, keeping Mrs. Costello company through those lonely hours of the late morning and early afternoon, the hours that filled her with such fear.

Hours during which Mrs. Costello chatted aimlessly, sometimes scolded her, sometimes drifted to sleep in her chair by the window.

On those days, while Mrs. Costello dozed in the silence that followed the Sister’s busy presence, the small apartment filled with an awful light—the color of bile. Wherever Sally’s eyes fell, there was something to make her shudder. Mr. Costello’s hairbrush on his dresser, threaded with his dull black hair. A poorly tatted bureau scarf Mrs. Costello had made at the Sisters’ urging: work for idle hands. The wedding picture. A dark sock turned in on itself, forgotten beneath the nightstand—was its partner beneath her mother’s bed? The man’s underpants and long johns—she opened drawers while Mrs. Costello slept—and handkerchiefs tucked into neat rows, a worn missal placed among them. The dresser itself was stained a dark, nearly black, mahogany, but the interior of each drawer was pale, startlingly pale—like something you should turn your eyes from—and redolent of fresh-cut wood. Her nightgowns and stockings and underclothes carefully folded. A marriage license in a brown envelope. Twenty years they had been married. Mrs. Costello’s baptismal certificate from St. Charles. She was forty-two years old. A cemetery deed for Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. A paper, many times folded, and with a gold seal like something from a classroom, that said Mr. Costello was a citizen of the United States.