Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

She walked to the dresser. The two china-faced dolls were slumped together. They wore similar dresses, long-sleeved and full-skirted, yellowed lace at the neck and sleeve and a vague stripe woven into the faded fabric, one blue, one purple. The doll in the purple dress had an eye pushed back into its skull. The faces of both were shattered with small cracks. Sally picked up the purple one and was surprised to find that its limbs were heavy with sawdust or sand.

Something of Mrs. Costello herself in the doll’s limp weight.

It occurred to Sally, just out of her own girlhood, that with only the slightest act of imagination she could bring the doll to life—poor thing, sweetly smiling, lonely here with her sister on the shelf. But some distaste, for the age of the doll, for the rolled-back eye, made her resist her own girlish impulse to animate the thing, to offer it her sympathy.

“Put that down,” Mrs. Costello said. Her voice, weakly petulant, was full of congestion. “That’s not yours.”

Sally returned the doll to the dresser. “It must have been yours,” she said, approaching Mrs. Costello in her chair, “when you were a little girl.”

Mrs. Costello began to struggle out of her dressing gown, pulling at the lapels, reaching for the flannel on her chest. “I’m hot,” she said. “Take this off me.”

Sally moved to stay her hand. Over these many weeks of sitting with Mrs. Costello, the nuns had taught her that the woman was as easily distracted as a child. “They’re such pretty dolls,” Sally said, moving Mrs. Costello’s hand away from the dressing gown. She was aware of the thin wedding band, the bird bones of her pale fingers and arms, her flat, narrow chest under the thick gown and the heavily oiled cloth.

Mrs. Costello looked up at Sally. The tiny veins that fed her pale eyelids were vivid. “Those were my mother’s dolls,” she said softly. “She gave them to me.”

“Is your mother alive?” Sally asked, and heard herself imitating the voice of the dirty woman on the train. Imitating her pretend refinement. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She blushed at her own phony pleasantries.

Mrs. Costello shook her head. “Rheumatic fever,” she said. “I had it, too, but my mother died of it. I was only thirteen.”

“I’m sorry,” Sally said.

“After,” Mrs. Costello went on, whining, complaining, “I couldn’t go to school again. Couldn’t sit still. Always walking. Saint Vitus Dance. My father grew so weary of it all, he tied me to a chair.” She whimpered a little. “What else was the poor man to do?”

“And you never went back to school?” Sally asked.

“I couldn’t sit still,” Mrs. Costello said impatiently, aware that she was repeating herself, that Sally had been inattentive. “Even the nuns couldn’t get me to sit still. I’d walk and walk until the neighbors banged on the ceiling.” And then she pulled at the lapels of her dressing gown once again, and Sally once again stayed her hand.

“What’s the use?” Mrs. Costello said, her attention fading from the struggle. Her eyes went vacantly to the window. She shifted in her seat.

“I have a pain,” she said softly, her eyes without focus. “I’m in pain.”

Sally said, as any one of the Sisters would have said, “I know.” It was a familiar call and response. Nothing else to be done, the Sisters had told her. Nothing to be done for an imaginary pain, for a woman touched in the brain; a woman determined to take to her bed. “But you got better,” Sally said, aiming to distract her. “You got over the Saint Vitus Dance. You got married.”

Mrs. Costello seemed to consider this. Then she nodded, as if it took some effort to recall. “I did. I got better. I married the milkman. He came to the door and my father said, ‘You’re welcome to her.’”

Mrs. Costello nearly smiled. Sister Aquina had parted the woman’s hair neatly this morning, had fixed two tight braids that fell over the shoulders of the brown robe. The braids made her look like a young girl—there was some trace of a delicate beauty. “We were married on December 8,” she said, and coughed. “In the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul,” and then coughed with more vigor, making her chair shake. Sally put her hand on one of the wheels to keep the chair from rolling. “It was a very cold day,” Mrs. Costello said, coughing through the words. “I was very happy.”

When the fit had passed, Mrs. Costello went limp, as if her arms and legs were weighted with sand. She dropped her chin, let her hands fall to her sides, and cast her eyes out over her thin lap in a wide and empty stare.

Sally had seen some of the more impatient nuns slap Mrs. Costello’s hand when this happened. Some would shake her shoulder and call out her name.

“None of your nonsense, now,” Sister Lucy would cry.

And always Mrs. Costello would quickly revive. Proof, perhaps, that the fit was a sham.

But today Sally waited in silence, a little afraid, but also curious about how long this vacancy would last. A few minutes, it turned out, although they were long, silent minutes, filled only with the sound of the hissing radiator and the traffic in the street, the faint trill of pigeons at the window. Mrs. Costello slowly raised her head again and her eyes regained their focus.

“I am abandoned and alone,” she said.

There was mucus bubbling in her nose.

“Let me get you a handkerchief,” Sally said softly.

She went to the dresser and took out one of Mr. Costello’s fresh handkerchiefs, ironed by Sister Illuminata. She held it to the woman’s nose, held the back of Mrs. Costello’s head as her own mother used to do when she said, “Blow.” Mrs. Costello sputtered into the cloth, childish herself in the way she took Sally’s wrist in both hands as she did so. The handkerchief filled with a wet warmth. Sally wiped the woman’s nose and folded the cloth over. Mr. Costello’s initials were embroidered in one corner. Her mother’s neat stitches.

It occurred to Sally that she and Mrs. Costello both were left out—left alone and abandoned—by the alliance Mr. Costello and her mother had made.

Impulsively, she bent and put her lips to Mrs. Costello’s neat part. The woman’s unwashed scalp was hot, the unnatural heat of a fever. The smell of linseed rose from under her clothes.

For a moment, Mrs. Costello sat still and uncomplaining under the caress.

As Sally straightened up again, she saw a pigeon’s shadow pass across the shade, behind the lace. She thought of her own sacrifice, her work of mercy flying to heaven to repair her mother’s sin.

And then Mrs. Costello’s belly rumbled and she gave up some gas.

“Take me to the toilet,” she cried. “Hurry up.”

Moving quickly, Sally backed the wheelchair away from the window and maneuvered it to the wooden commode, even as Mrs. Costello told her again to hurry, struggling to stand on her one good foot, disrupting the journey rather than aiding it. Once they were beside the bowl, Sally took the woman’s elbow, helped her up, then stooped to grab the hem of the dressing gown. As she leaned down, her ear at the woman’s waist, Mrs. Costello struck her back, saying, “Hurry, you, hurry.” Sally gathered up the heavy dressing gown and the flannel nightdress, raising both above the woman’s knees. The crossed scars at the base of Mrs. Costello’s amputated leg, the gross marks of the stitches, shone like silver. The flesh was puckered at the center, turned in like a balled sock. The bulk of the dressing gown was difficult to handle. It slipped once or twice as Sally tried to gather it up, and then the nightdress slipped down as well. Leaning into Mrs. Costello’s reeking chest, wrapping her arms around her thin frame, Sally managed to gather the skirts of both the dressing gown and the nightgown at the woman’s back, above her pale backside. She maneuvered the woman on her one, hopping leg. Mrs. Costello sat with a small crash and voided—Sally turned her face away from the smell and the sputter of it, still holding Mrs. Costello’s gathered nightclothes just behind her.