Элис Макдермотт - The Ninth Hour

Out of the funds the Ladies Auxiliary provided, the nuns paid Annie eighteen dollars a week, and fed her, and her daughter when she was weaned, a breakfast and a lunch. It was, all agreed, a fine situation for a widow with an infant. A wicker basket was fitted with towels and a pillowslip, and the baby slept at her mother’s feet while she washed and sewed and helped Sister Illuminata with the ironing.

As the child grew, the nuns added a donated crib, and then a small Persian rug, another donation, to cover a bit of the damp basement floor. There were scraps of cloth and empty spools for the child to play with, and the ducks and dogs Sister Illuminata carved from Ivory soap—an annoyance for Annie, since she had to remain vigilant in order to keep the girl from putting them into her mouth or her eyes, but nothing she could refuse, given Sister Illuminata’s pride in her own whittling and the child’s delight each time the nun produced a new figure from her robes.

The work itself was endless. Every day, donated clothing arrived at the convent, clothing for the poor, which had to be sorted and washed and mended. There were as well the stained bedclothes of the sick: sheets and blankets and pillowcases, diapers, towels, handkerchiefs, all brought home from the households where the Sisters were nursing. In any idle moment, there were bandages to make, worn bed sheets to be sterilized and rolled and placed neatly into the satchels each Sister carried to her casework.

There was also, every week, the routine washing and ironing of the convent linen and the Sisters’ habits, the black serge tunics and short capes—the application of thick starch and the heated iron to their bibs and their bonnets. Whatever troubles the Sisters encountered in their daily work were illustrated by the stains on an apron or a sleeve—the odor of vomit on wool, a spattering of blood across a white bib. What troubles the Sisters’ mortal bodies produced of their own accord were evident in the unending menstrual rags and long johns stained yellow at underarm or crotch. When Annie arrived in the morning, her first task was to empty the overnight soaking bin—the water pink with blood. And then the trip upstairs to the convent kitchen, to boil some water for the first wash, and while she waited, a cup of tea and a bun and a pleasant time of day with Mrs. Odette, the convent’s cook, another widow from the neighborhood, or, if she’d arrived early enough, a laugh or two with Mr. Costello, the milkman.

In the basement, the low-hanging light was dim, the dark brick walls clammy to the touch. All day long there was the sound of agitated wash water, of the wringer’s torturous crank and squeak, the hiss and thud of Sister Illuminata’s black iron. In winter there was as well the bump and moan of the convent’s fiery furnace. In summer, through the high opened windows, the chants of jump-rope songs, the organ grinder, the cries of boys playing ball in the street.

In every season, the changing daylight found its way into all corners of the cellar. Sometimes it was a discouraging gray in the morning, but a buoyant display of yellow and gold by the time the chapel bell was rung at three. Sometimes only the earliest hours illuminated the place, and when evening came a muffled darkness pressed against the electric lights.

At various times there was the smell of wet wool, bleach, vinegar, turpentine, pine soap, and starch.

On damp days, they hung the clothes and the linens from lines strung between the basement’s iron support beams. When the weather was fine, they brought the wash out to the convent yard.

There was, each day, the clear and certain restoration of order: fresh linens folded, stains gone, tears mended.

Sister Illuminata was a wizard with a hot iron and starch, with scrub brush and bleach. On four dark shelves in a corner of her basement domain, she kept a laboratory’s worth of vital ingredients: not merely the store-bought Borax and Ivory and bluing agents, but the potions she mixed herself: bran water to stiffen curtains and wimples, alum water to make muslin curtains and nightwear resist fire, brewed coffee to darken the Sisters’ stockings and black tunics, Fels-Naptha water for general washing, Javelle water (washing soda, chloride of lime, boiling water) for restoring limp fabric. She had an encyclopedic understanding of how to treat stains. Tea: Borax and cold water. Ink: milk, salt, and lemon juice. Iodine: chloroform. Iron rust: hydrochloric acid. Mucus: ammonia and soap. Mucus tinged with blood (which she always greeted with a sign of the cross): salt and cold water.

In Sister Illuminata’s unyielding routine, each item received two washings: inside out and then right side out, then a pass through the mangle, then another soaping, a boiling, another rinse, another wringing. If the garments were to be blued, then a rinse again in cold water to avoid rust stains. Wrung again, then starched, then hung to dry. Sister Illuminata would not allow the courtyard clothesline to be left out in the weather; she tied it up each morning and took it down again at the end of every bright day. She washed the clothespins themselves once a month. With sacred solemnity, Sister Illuminata demonstrated for Annie how a garment should be properly shaken and hung (chemises and shirts by the hem, pillowslips inside out and by the seam, with the wind, never against it). She demonstrated the precise way to sprinkle and roll what was newly dried, and how to pound the rolled fabric in order to distribute the moisture. The ironing was Sister Illuminata’s special domain. She had four different irons of various sizes, which she washed on occasion in soap and water, then rubbed with sandstone and polished, lovingly, with beeswax.

Sister Illuminata was shrill in her demands, unbending in her routine; any washing Annie attempted during her first few weeks in the nuns’ employ was dismissed as a mere “lick and a promise.” Sister Illuminata had never asked them to send her an assistant.

She was a solid, plain, wide-bottomed woman. The pale skin of her cheeks and her forehead and her chin was crepe-thin; it hung like crepe over the edge of her white coif. Her hands were always a raw, bright red, her right index finger marked with the shining oval of a testing-the-iron scar. Except for the time she spent in the chapel, Sister Illuminata was always moving, her sleeves rolled up, her veil tied back. She was bending over the washbasin or feeding wet clothes into the cranking wringer, or ironing, ironing—this was the area of her greatest expertise—throwing her whole body into it, elbows and back and hips.

SISTER ILLUMINATA flicked her wet fingers over the cloth as if to douse a sinner. She thumped the black iron against the wooden board, thumped and lifted and thumped and shook—the steam rising—as if each piece she pressed involved some feat of determination and strength, a mortal struggle. Her elbows flared in the wide sleeves, her nostrils flared in her beaked nose. She called sharply to Annie to say, “Come here and learn something. This is a trick my mother had…” She ran the point of the iron—“See, like this”—along a perfect seam. “My mother,” she said, “was a marvel.”

Her mother, she said, had been a laundress in Dublin. A profession the Sisters of Mercy had found for her when she first came to the city as a young girl. She died of cancer when Sister Illuminata was just twenty. In her last suffering months, it was the nursing Sisters of the parish who offered comfort and care. Sister Illuminata entered their noviate a year later and emigrated to the States at thirty. But a bout of tuberculosis put an end to her own nursing days. She spent eight months at a sanatorium upstate, and when she returned, she was left to live out her vocation “down here.”