The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  She had encountered Leni only a handful of times in the decade of her marriage to Jacob, all of their meetings fraught and awkward. For the first few years Marina had lived with Jacob, Leni was a ghostly presence, revealed to her only in fragments. Whispered tales from Leah while they were washing the dishes together on Friday evenings, the odd photograph that Rose would flip quickly past in the album, Jacob’s own shaky recounting. There was Leni’s signature in Ben’s homework diary, the name tags she sewed into the collars of his school shirts, the sandwiches Marina found uneaten at the bottom of his school bag. She would hold the grease-paper-wrapped package in her hands knowing that across the city, standing in her own kitchen that morning, Leni had made these sandwiches; had cut off the crusts and folded the bread into the neat twists of paper for her son. She and Leni held so much shared knowledge between them: the precise consistency that Ben liked his boiled eggs, his hatred of tomatoes, his insistence on flannel sheets – all these small domestic details. It was an odd thing to share a child like this, to shuttle him back and forth between their homes and yet never to speak of him together.

  Following her return from London, Leni became an efficient mother. She did the things that were required of her, managing Ben’s life briskly and competently. Tennis games, elaborate birthday parties, carefully planned holidays – she could not be faulted for her commitment to her son. And yet she could never redeem herself for those lost three years. Nothing that came after could stand against her decision to leave.

  Leni had held a mysterious fascination for Marina in the early days of her marriage to Jacob. In the photographs of her in Rose’s albums she was impenetrably beautiful. It was a cold kind of beauty, Marina had always thought, one that allowed no one close to it. Jacob looked back on that part of his life with a sorrowful bafflement. Sometimes he would refer to Ben as ‘our son’, meaning his and Marina’s. She was touched by his generosity the first time he said it; his desire to share the joy of Ben fully with her. It was a tempting fantasy to slip into, an easy leap, but it made Marina feel uneasy too, this wistful revision of the past. Leni could never be excised from their lives like that.

  Ben rarely spoke of his mother when he was with them. He knew that his life with Leni and Michael had a terrible power to wound his father. He had learned this very early on. It grieved Jacob, the idea that his son had to navigate this sort of complexity, had to hold within himself an awareness of his father’s vulnerability. Jacob would have stayed with Leni, Marina believed. If she had not left him, he would have stayed. Out of hope, out of loyalty. But mostly because of his love for Ben, his desire for him not to be harmed.

  Alma wanted to study medicine, Ben told Marina, offering up this aspiration hopefully, proudly, as if it might redeem everything else.

  ‘She’s incredibly clever. She taught herself English from magazines and books. She’d be a brilliant doctor.’

  ‘But she’s here illegally?’

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Marina regretted them. How many times had Leah railed that human beings were not illegal, that it shouldn’t be illegal to seek refuge? Undocumented. It was the word she should have used. Marina remembered the official immigration document that Constance had presented to her when she first asked her where she had come from, the solemn way that the girl had produced it. The legitimacy that had been conferred on one of these young women, but not the other.

  Ben did not answer her question, as if he knew it was unworthy of her.

  There was a storm that night. It seemed to last for hours, the bedroom windows rattling in the gale. Marina lay awake beside Jacob, who slept on, oblivious to the roar and shudder of the skies. She had not told him about the strange day with Constance and Gabriel, or about meeting Alma. He had come home late, pale and tired, and she had not wanted to alarm him. Now it felt as if all these things were secrets kept from him. She thought of Alma’s white dress, of Ben’s hand on the small of her back. And Gabriel. Marina recalled the little boy’s look of timid surprise when she had picked him up from the floor, the weight of his head against her shoulder. Gabriel. She whispered it quietly, testing out the sound. An angel’s name. It was a name she might have chosen for her own child.

  Narrowsburg

  January, 2000

  The study was full of the steady, shadowless light of deep winter. On the crab apple tree outside the window Vera noticed a solitary red apple clinging to the bare, snow-brushed branches. Extraordinary, such tenacity. Snow had been falling against the house all week, sealing them in. She had never understood the enclosed orders, locked away from the world behind the convent walls. All that contemplation and no action. There were nuns like that in her childhood, lovely and drifting in the old garb. Veils and rosary beads, the quiet hum of prayers. The nuns of her school-days seemed to live under a great gauze of silence, everything about them hushed and quiet. The sweep of a hem along polished boards, softly falling footsteps, the gentle click of doors closing.

  Vera had been on a silent retreat once, many years before, at a centre in the Arizona desert. It was after a trip to South America, travelling on crowded buses out to tiny villages to visit the scattered sisters. It had exhausted her: the long, hot hours of travel, the damp decaying smell of the jungle always near. The tropics made her long for winter, for the mist of her breath in the mornings when she set out for work. In Bolivia she had contracted malaria and spent three weeks lying in a tiny bedroom, the walls shifting and spinning around her, a yellowed mosquito net tied to the bedposts, the smell of mildew on the pillow. Lord above, she had been sure she would die there in that little netted cage.

  When she had arrived at the retreat centre in the desert she was exhausted: shaky and weak, every part of her spent. The desert retreat had been an instruction not a choice. All Vera had wanted after South America was to come straight back to Harlem, to her own bed and her work. But they had decreed that she needed more rest. That the body might be better but the soul needed repose, too; something from Rilke about all things needing their just emphasis, about action not being the only way to save the poor, sullied world. Prayer just as powerful a force. Vera knew that the hierarchy of her order thought her maverick and too independent. There was only so far she could refuse them.

  So a month’s retreat was arranged. In the taxi from Phoenix Airport Vera had stared out of the window at the widening desert, the swathes of golden grass and the occasional swell of an orange mesa. She would think of it as a kind of limbo, she decided, a necessary waiting space before she could return to Harlem.

  The retreat centre was a cluster of adobe buildings in a dusty corral. When she arrived a thin young woman took the suitcase from her hands and led Vera to her bedroom. A narrow bed with a white coverlet, a cluster of yellow flowers in a glass on the bedside table, the high afternoon sun falling through the window. There was such care in the preparation of this room: the cotton blanket folded at the end of the bed, the pitcher of iced water left out for her on the tiny desk, those yellow flowers. Someone had picked them for her. Vera lay back on the bed, pulled the blanket over her shoulders and closed her eyes.

  She slept until late the next morning, waking only when the young woman, a Maryknoll novice, made her sit up in bed and drink some soup. Gradually Vera felt herself slipping into the silence of the place, the pure, clean quiet of it. And there was the relief of being tended to, as if she were a sick child. At first, every sound seemed magnified, with no rhythm of voices behind it. The flicker of an electric fan, the clang of a pot somewhere within the house, a chair scraping on the floor: everything felt more urgent and alive. At night the sounds seemed to double –the tap of the blind against the window, the rasp of the desert wind in the grasses, footsteps in the hall. But she succumbed to it after a while, as they said she would. The silence, the slow, pared-down rhythms of the day. Prayers, meals, more prayers, early nights, the pure darkness of the desert. One week and then two passed, and she began to think that, yes, perhaps she could exist in this spac
e forever. Not tucked away from life but at the very core of it, somehow. She imagined not returning to Harlem at all, but staying there in the desert.

  Her brother had been sent to the desert once by his order. A punishment. An exile. They had known about the drinking by then, though doubt was his greater crime. The drink was a weakness of the flesh; the lack of faith a failing of the soul. Far harder to remedy than a fondness for a little tipple. Lord knows it was common enough among the priests. No great sin, as long as it was kept out of sight.

  Colum had written letters to her from Arizona, a handful of red sand in one of the envelopes. Perhaps he had sat bent over the small desk in this very room. Her little brother. Only seven years old when she had left home. A deep blow for him. Their mother was already exhausted by the time he was born. Worn to the bone, she said, and indeed her face was so thin that her flesh seemed only a kind of fine draping over her skeleton. Her skin might well have worn away if she had had to scrub another floor. Her poor mother. Defeated by all those children and a drunken husband. Colum was another child it was not in her power to prevent. She had taken to bed for months after he was born. Vera had been terrified that she would die, that the burden of her mother would fall to her. Their mother could not even feed Colum, only weeping silently when they tried to fasten his mouth to her breast. It was Vera who had rocked the new baby and made his bottles, and held his hand as he learned to walk. Vera who had taken him to school and taught him to tie his laces, and read to him at night. And then she had left him.

  She had not seen him again until she had visited Ireland nine years later. Her mother was dead by then and her little brother had grown into a tall, quiet young man, his head always in a book. Poor Colum. Perhaps doubt was sown deep in both of them. They had their father’s bad blood, after all. It was something their mother would say to them in anger.

  By the third week in Arizona Vera started to take walks out into the desert. Not far from the main road, she was not that foolhardy. Just small circles away from the retreat centre – north to the crumbling bus shelter, south to the sign that marked the beginning of the Navajo Nation. She asked to borrow the centre’s old station wagon so she could drive to the Painted Desert. Something about it reminded her of the sea. The vast quiet of it, the high sky and the strange rocks rising up from the dust. By her fourth week she was driving into the railroad town of Winslow every day, hungry for the world again. There were Ukrainian sisters in the town who worked with Navajo women; a domestic violence shelter with its own thrift shop and soup kitchen; a Jehovah’s Witness Hall. The world was where she had always wanted to be – not down on her knees praying.

  Something about the snow made Vera think of that time in the desert so many years ago. The safe, sealed-in space of it before she had stepped back into the world. In Narrowsburg she was trying for the same relinquishing, had prayed for some turning in her soul, an enlargening grace that would help her in her work here. Lord, grant me patience. It was something her own mother had said, eyes raised to the heavens, hands joined earnestly at her chest, when there was mischief with the younger children – a glass broken or a wild squabble.

  It surprised Vera how often childhood came drifting back to her here. Perhaps it was because so many of the nuns had slipped into the swirls and eddies of their own pasts. A childhood farm, a lost brother, a yearning for a toffee apple. All these slippages of the mind, the brittleness of memory. Vera was terrified that she would succumb to it, too, in time: the drift into unreason, the childlike confusion. Would she recognise it at once, Vera wondered, or would the failing be a slow glide, a barely perceptible relinquishing? It was harder, she had come to realise after these years in Narrowsburg, for the sisters who knew that their minds had begun to give way. Better that her body failed first, that a heart attack felled her swiftly. A merciful exit.

  Seven deaths since they had come here, three sisters gone just this winter. The week before, they had buried Sister Cecile, rain falling slant-wise at them as the coffin was lowered into the sodden ground. It had been just her and Constance and the priest by the graveside, holding their umbrellas. Afterwards, she found the girl bent over the sink in the laundry scrubbing her hands. It was Rwandan custom, Constance had told her when Vera railed at her about wasting water, to wash your hands after burying the dead. For the last weeks of Cecile’s life, Constance had slept in her room, curling up on a mat on the floor beside the old woman’s bed. Vera watched the girl standing silently by the sink, her hands still under the tap. Perhaps there would be some unstitching in her now. A loosening brought on by grief. Spare me any more of the sorrows of others, Vera had thought to herself and then immediately recoiled from the uncharitable turn of her thoughts these days. What kind of Christian was she?

  The other nuns stayed indoors during the funeral, clustered around the heater, crocheting blankets for poor babies. It gave them something to do, though the money for the wool was another stretch in Vera’s budget. The boiler had stopped working the day Cecile died. The wretched clacking and ticking of it had driven Vera mad all winter, until suddenly it fell silent and the nuns were plunged into frigid cold. The convent was too big to heat. What they needed was a wood-burning stove, an old Aga, perhaps. But then there would be wood to chop and lug in from the shed, kindling to forage for. More work for her and Constance. Still, a fire would be a comfort.

  Sometimes it felt to Vera that with every passing month they all slid further back into older times, cut off from the world up here in the mountains. They rarely went into town anymore. There was a doctor who came to the house, a guiltily lapsed Catholic who felt sorry for the decrepit band of old nuns in their straitened circumstances. The supermarket delivered to them once a week, and they grew a great deal of what they needed now that the garden was so established. In the warmer months it flourished, and she and Constance would spend hours out there on their knees among the rows of vegetables, weeding and tending. The girl was not afraid of work, Vera could certainly say that for her.

  She could see Constance now, making her way down the front path, swathed in her coat and scarf, a plastic container in her hands. Even bulked up in her winter gear the girl looked like a beanpole. Far too skinny. Faithful old Lily ambled after her, picking up her feet on the treacherous path. A blue jay flitted past the barberry bushes, and the girl and dog both turned to watch its path. Those bushes would have to be cut back in the spring. Their nearest neighbour, an old farmer down the end of the road, had told her that the barberries were a magnet for deer tick. He shook his head sorrowfully as he gazed out at the wild tangle of bushes, his face full of pity for the foolish old nuns. All summer they had checked their arms for burrowing creatures. Instead of divine revelation, the knowledge that came to her now was about practical things, Vera thought. Ticks and planting and mending. Perhaps it was a better way to love God. Tilling the soil. Reaping and sowing.

  She watched Constance spreading a sticky paste over the branches of the trees with a small paintbrush. The dog stayed close to her. The paste that Constance was applying so carefully was some concoction she had made to feed the birds. She wanted to help them, the girl had said when Vera told her that this kind of feeding was an interference with the natural world. The branches seemed stark against the white of the sky. Her work done, Constance stood very still on the snow-covered grass by the trees. Waiting for birds to come, Vera supposed. She remembered a winter in the city, perhaps three or four years ago, when she had come home to the brownstone to find Constance standing on the sidewalk with Cecile and one of the other sisters, her hand outstretched to the falling snow, alarmed confusion on her face.

  ‘It’s Constance’s first snow,’ Cecile had said excitedly. ‘I showed her a snowdome at the beginning of winter but now she can see the real thing.’ Constance and the child stood there on the sidewalk in stunned bewilderment, the snow spiralling in the wind, the fall of it becoming slowly heavier. The little boy looked stricken, the expression on his face not wonder at all; closer to terror.
How odd, Vera had thought, that something that might have been a novel delight should cause this incipient fear. What had happened to them?

  Cecile had been sure that she would eventually reach the girl back in those days. She had tried so hard. Constance’s name was always on the prayer list they kept pinned to the refrigerator in the Harlem kitchen. And the child’s name, too.

  Vera wondered sometimes if she had done the right thing in allowing Constance to stay with them in Narrowsburg. Should she have turned her back into the world? But the truth of it was that they could not survive here now without her help. Cecile and the others had fretted about Constance when they had left the city. The girl seemed so unmoored. She knew no one, had refused resolutely to engage with any service that could have helped her. Taciturn, Vera had thought back then, though that was hardly fair. God alone knew what she had been through in Rwanda.

  Cecile had written to Constance every week in the first months after they had moved here. Vera would watch the old nun walking slowly down the path to the letterbox, flicking up the little plastic flag for the postman. Perhaps there would be someone who could read the letters to her, Cecile had said, and even if there was not, at least the girl would feel them as a kindness. She would know she was in somebody’s thoughts. Cecile had pressed flowers to send to Constance, sketched the curve of the mountains, folded scarlet leaves between the pages. Sometimes she copied out psalms. There was never any reply.

  Watching Constance from the window, Vera wondered what had become of those letters. Had they been a comfort to the girl, or merely baffling – another thing about the world that Constance failed to understand? Had anyone read them to her? When Vera had commented on Constance’s expensive new winter coat and boots, the girl said that a friend had bought them for her. Hard to imagine what kind of friend the girl could have had to lay out so much money. Had this person read Cecile’s words to Constance? Whatever the answer, the letters had brought Constance here to Narrowsburg after her child died. When she arrived three winters ago she was clutching one of the envelopes, the address of the convent clearly written in Cecile’s looping hand.