Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

“You should know,” Mrs. Tierney said, without preliminaries, “the situation has changed. For your mother.” She studied Sally, as if to see if there was more she needed to say. She seemed briefly disappointed to find there was. “She no longer has her visitor. His wife is ill. He believes that’s where his duty lies.” And then she raised her eyebrows to say, Do you understand me now? And then smiled in relief as if Sally had actually said, I understand.

In fact, Sally said nothing at all.

Mrs. Tierney straightened up, brought her hands forward, drying them, although they were not wet, on her apron. “You are always welcome here, of course,” she said. “You can stay as long as you like. But no one would wonder if you want to leave us now to go back to your own place.”

She smoothed her apron over her skirt, her voice taut with the emotion she could not conceal. “Your mother is there by herself now,” she said. “Entirely alone.”

THE LAMPS WERE ALL ON in Mrs. Costello’s apartment, although daylight was at the bedroom window. A funereal hush about the place as the two nuns—Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy today—bustled silently about. Sister Jeanne was putting the clean laundry in drawers and cupboards when Sally arrived. Sister Lucy was just turning from Mrs. Costello in the bed, her stethoscope around her neck, black against her silver cross and her white bib. Mrs. Costello’s small face was wan. She was, Sister Lucy told Sister Jeanne, “weak as a kitten.” In the corner by the window, there was a bullet-shaped oxygen tank beside a folded oxygen tent that was ghostly pale.

Sister Lucy glanced up at Sally as she stood in the door of Mrs. Costello’s bedroom, and then she said, indifferently, “Good. You’re here.”

She brushed down her sleeve with her crooked hand. Then reached into her pocket for her wristwatch on its worn leather strap. “All right, I’m off,” she said. She took Sally by the arm and steered her out of the room. “Are you here for the duration or just stopping in?” she asked. Her eyes were moving and her mouth indicated that she was already certain no answer would satisfy. “Because I’ve been told you’ve abandoned this particular work of mercy,” she went on, “which is fine, you’re not obliged. You were never obliged to be here. But Jeanne’s exhausted. She could use some help until Mr. Costello gets home. The missus is recovering, but slowly.” She squinted a bit from the distance of her bonnet. “Mr. Costello will be home as soon as he can get here. Every morning now. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

Sally said, “I know.”

Sister reached for her cloak, which was still damp and sparkling with the morning’s rain. She swept the cloak over her shoulder, the stethoscope around her neck, tangled now with the chain of her cross. “Mrs. Costello will live,” she said, as if she were merely ticking off the day’s obligations. “Her husband will mend his ways.” She smiled her thin-lipped smile, reaching back to adjust her veil. “I’ve never believed our God is a bargaining God, but men do. It’s nonsense. While he was praying for her to live, she was praying to die. Which one of them struck the bargain?”

Sister Lucy sniffed disdainfully. “We kept her alive,” she said. “God knows it.”

Now she pulled off the stethoscope and stashed it angrily, as was her ordinary way, into her little black bag. “Mr. Costello returns around ten. Eleven at the latest. No one will blame you if you don’t want to run into him. But stay a while and let Sister Jeanne catch her breath.”

She lifted her bag, looked around the room. “Take a dust rag to those lampshades,” she went on, “and to the baseboards. There’s bread and butter in the kitchen. Some boiled eggs, applesauce. Get Jeanne to eat something, too. And put the kettle on. Bring them both a nice cup of tea. Fortify it with plenty of milk and sugar.” And then Sister Lucy was out the door.

Sally still wore her coat and hat, and her pocketbook was still on her arm. She stood in the room, briefly uncertain. The nuns had the two lamps turned on and the light in the kitchen as well. New, if gray and muted, sunlight was streaming into the bedroom from the one window. It was nearly 7 a.m. The radiator against the far wall was hissing and ticking, but the draft left by Sister Lucy’s exit swept the room, hollowing out the warmth. Sally shivered. In her purse was the violet handkerchief she had picked up from the floor of the tearoom. Tied into it, like a hobo’s pack, was a good handful of alum.

Sally put her purse on the slipcovered chair. She took off her coat and her hat and placed them over it. Then she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. While it boiled, she went back to the living room and picked up her purse. Now she put it on the small kitchen table. She set out on the counter two of Mrs. Costello’s teacups, spooned tea into the silver tea ball, and placed it inside the tin pot. When the water boiled, she poured it in. She went to her purse, easily found the violet handkerchief.

She untied the knot and shook the alum into the empty cup. She poured the tea over it and immediately the water grew cloudy. The faint odor that arose was redolent of Sister’s Immaculate’s laundry. She added sugar and milk and then tasted the mixture from the spoon. There was the bitter sharpness of what was not tea. In the cupboard over the sink, Mr. Costello kept a bottle of whiskey. Sally had seen it before. Quickly she reached up for the bottle and poured a splash into the tea, briefly recalling the Bronx girl on the train. She tied up the handkerchief again and returned it to her purse. She snapped the purse closed, and the sound of the lock reverberated. It echoed, she was certain.

She carried the teacup on its saucer, the spoon rattling, into the bedroom. Mrs. Costello was propped in the bed as she had been. Sister Jeanne was taking her pulse.

“Sister Lucy said to bring her some tea,” Sally whispered. “There’s some waiting for you in the kitchen, too.” She kept her hand over the cup, as if to contain the scent of what she had done. She felt her palm grow damp with steam. There was something painful rising to her throat. She knew she could always drop the cup. Mrs. Costello’s eyes fluttered open, that meaningless blue of them. “I don’t want it,” she whispered. “Go away.” She coughed weakly and tried to move down into the bed.

Sister Jeanne was adjusting the pillows behind her head. “It’s better for your lungs if you can sit up a bit, dear,” she said gently. Sally could tell Sister Jeanne had said this many times before. “I know you are tired, Mrs. Costello, but it’s better if you can give your lungs some room.”

Mrs. Costello coughed again and then narrowed her eyes like an angry child. “I’m tired of you,” she said.

Sister Jeanne said, “You’re tired in general, Mrs. Costello. A little tea. Something to eat, and you’ll start feeling stronger.”

She signaled to Sally to come around the bed. “Just a spoonful,” she whispered. “A spoonful at a time. I’ll bring some food.”

Sally’s hand was trembling as she held the cup, and the cup was rattling against the saucer. The alum was at the bottom. Her plan was to give Mrs. Costello some sips of liquid, and then to spoon up the wet alum from the bottom of the cup and fill her mouth with it. Stop her throat with it. Stop her breath.

Her plan was to exchange her own immortal soul for her mother’s mortal happiness.

It was a ridiculous plan. Even this far along, she knew it was ridiculous. She knew it was ridiculous when she first conceived of it—walking home from the hotel on that bitter night, thinking lilac and stephanotis, a wedding in June, and considering how only a miserable woman, blood and stink and complaint, bird bones and pale skin, stood in the way of her mother’s happiness, her mother’s place in heaven.