Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Sally slipped out the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Mrs. Costello,” she called weakly, understanding the woman couldn’t hear her at all.

Gaining the cold street, Sally felt the weight of her desertion. She had failed in her fine intentions once again. It was like a thumb pressed into her chest, a smudged shadow on her soul. She breathed deeply, as if to dislodge the discomfort. The winter sun, bouncing off windshields and tenement windows and pale brick, made her squint. But it was delightful, nonetheless, to walk unencumbered in the cold air. To be out of that stifling room.

And then she remembered the aspirin Sister Aquina had left, for the woman’s fever. To be stirred into Mrs. Odette’s applesauce, the smooth part of it, anyway. She thought of the heat that had risen from Mrs. Costello’s scalp. It was an unnatural heat, the sickroom heat of a fever. She imagined how it might continue to burn as Mrs. Costello sat in her chair, crying out uselessly, her temperature rising and rising, sweat running down her small face, mixing with the mucus that covered her lips. She imagined the sound of her voice tangled with phlegm.

And Sister Aquina returning to the apartment, or perhaps Mr. Costello himself, to find cockroaches in a black line across white enamel of the stovetop. Mrs. Costello lifeless in her chair, her face scorched.

Sally reached the hotel two hours early for her shift. She used the service entrance and took the stairs down to the locker room, but then went the long way around, through the basement labyrinth. She could feel the change in the air—scent of bleach, a touch of steam—as she approached the wide doors of the laundry. The humid air throbbed with the banging of the machines. After the cold outside, the sudden heat made her fingers burn inside her gloves. She pulled them off. The big steel doors of the laundry were open, thrown back against the tile walls. She walked past. Inside, the men in their white clothes were busy with their work, pushing baskets, loading sheets into the big machines. They all seemed the same size and shape. Some wore white brimless caps. Two or three had long black braids down their backs. There were four large steam presses on the far side of the room, the size of gray coffins. They belched steam in a way that made the workers surrounding them seem, briefly, to disappear. There were two ironing tables, with men—she still thought this a comical sight—wielding large electric irons whose cords ran upward, to the ceiling.

She stepped inside. Ordinarily, she would just walk past, glance in, breathe the familiar air, gather the details to bring back to the convent—how many sheets did they wash in a day, how many towels and tablecloths, Sister Illuminata loved to speculate—but today she stepped over the threshold. One of the Chinese men looked up immediately, shouted something over the din, and waved her away. She grinned back at him, but stayed where she was. He shrugged and returned to his work. She wondered if Sister was right. Would they put a knife in her if they could? What would her mother say then?

To her left there was a shelf, taller and longer than Sister Illuminata’s but as well stocked as hers was with boxes of detergent and bottles of bleach, tubs of Borax and bluing and salt and lime. A tiny skull and crossbones on a bottle of ammonia. Sister Illuminata had called it the devil’s mark when Sally was a child. A way to scare her into keeping her hands off.

Sister’s Illuminata’s sainted mother, Sally knew, had once saved the life of a little boy, the child of another laundress. The boy had swallowed a fistful of alum, and his silly mother, in her panic, had poured water down his throat. The boy would have choked to death or drowned right there on dry land, Sister Illuminata said, if her own dear mother hadn’t pushed the woman away and then reached her pinky into the boy’s mouth, unstopping him.

That boy grew up to be a priest, Sister Illuminata always said at the end of this tale, well satisfied.

Impulsively, Sally reached up and touched the devil’s mark. Again, one of the Chinese men shouted at her, waved her away with a towel as if she were a duck to be chased. She pulled back her hand and noticed as she did a bit of brown grime beneath her fingernails. She could smell Mrs. Costello’s stink, even here, where the air was filled with soap and bleach.

She lifted the bottle of ammonia from the shelf and turned quickly, out the door, down the narrow hallway. She went around a corner, through the door of the ladies’ room the employees shared. She put the stopper into one of the sinks and filled it with water as hot as it would run. She poured the ammonia into it—the scent rising, stinging her sinuses. Another tearoom girl, a broad, motherly sort, was at the other end of the washroom. She wrinkled her nose as she approached the sink where Sally stood. She asked, “What’s going on?” with a slow, bovine curiosity, and then watched open-mouthed as Sally plunged her hands into the water.

It wasn’t hot enough to scald, but the ammonia burned her bitten cuticles and she gasped a little. The smell of the ammonia was pricking her nose, crawling up into her eyes. She turned her head, holding her breath, but kept her hands where they were.

“Is this a rule now?” the girl asked with a little more urgency. She pinched her nose. She wore her dark hair cut straight across her high forehead, which made her look stupid. “Are they making us do this now?”

Sally nodded and then, forced to exhale, laughed. She said, yes, all the tearoom girls were now required to wash their hands in ammonia. She said something about the health inspector. She listened to herself tell this lie, amused, but not surprised, to find that she was capable of such a small cruelty. She stirred her hands in the quickly cooling water. Ran one nail under the other and stirred her hands again. “There’s a lot of sickness going around. They want us to be careful.”

The girl considered this. She was a big girl with wide, droopy breasts beneath her street clothes, a woolen dress, an ill-fitting coat. It occurred to Sally that she looked far better in her tearoom uniform, cleaner, even smarter, in her apron and her cap. A face and body made for service.

Sally saw the girl eye what was left in the bottle of ammonia.

“Help yourself,” Sally said.

Side by side, the two of them bathed their hands, scooping up the sharply scented water and pouring it out again.

Telling it later, our mother said, “Like a pair of Pontius Pilates.”

IN THE TEAROOM that afternoon, there was a lovely couple—a mother and a daughter. They were conferring like businessmen about the daughter’s wedding reception here at the hotel, come June. The mother was an elegant lady with her veil drawn down over her eyes. The daughter wore a lovely suit with wide white lapels and a cinched waist. They both gave off a soft perfume. They spoke together, heads bent: orange blossom, she heard them say, stephanotis, lilac, lily of the valley. She heard them say June weather, vanilla cake, iced lemonade.

When they were gone, Sally found a linen handkerchief beneath their table, neatly folded, of a pretty, pale violet shade. It carried the women’s perfume. She put it in her purse.

As she changed out of her uniform at the end of her shift, she was still repeating the words in her head, like the refrain of a song, like the words of a prayer: stephanotis, lilac, iced lemonade.

It was dark and bitter cold when she returned to the street. She had thrown her gloves away, and now she kept her raw hands plunged into her pockets, aware of the scent of ammonia that lingered on her skin.

Orange blossom and lily of the valley. Stephanotis. Iced lemonade. It occurred to her as she walked that if Mrs. Costello had died in her chair this afternoon, abandoned and alone, her mother and Mr. Costello would be free to marry. Come June, perhaps.