The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  When Sister Vera told her this story about the frozen lake and the lamps in her childhood, Constance was afraid it would mean she would want Constance to talk about her own country. But Sister Vera never asked her. She did not wish to learn what Constance did not want to tell. Their talking was about the garden, the clothes that needed mending, the things they would plant in the spring, the worms that had got to the apples in the small orchard. Most of it was Sister Vera talking and Constance just listening.

  Constance stands by the front door with her coat on. It is the first day for a long time that it has not snowed. In between the snowing has been a hard, low rain. But now there is a pure blue sky. This morning, while the nuns were eating breakfast, a great sheet of snow slid from the roof, startling them. There is sun in the sky now, too, but not the warming kind. It will be many weeks before she feels that kind of sun on her face.

  When she leaves the house she dips her fingers into the small wooden bowl of holy water by the door. She doesn’t know how the water comes to be holy. What makes it so. A priest blessing it, Sister Vera told her once, but no priest has come for a long time. Now it is just water they fetch from the stream. Holy water put the devil to flight, Sister Cecile believed. When she was dying she asked Constance to sprinkle her with it. Sister Cecile had many holy things. A bottle of water from a magic spring that could cure you from sickness. Another glass bottle full of red sand from the place where Jesus was born, the country in the Bible. The Holy Land, they called it, which meant that the sand was holy, too. Sister Cecile had been there once many years before. Now that she is dead, Constance has the bottles, as well as Sister Cecile’s wooden rosary beads and a book of prayers that was hers when she was a little girl in Ireland. The book is very old and the pages are very fine, like the wings of the moths that cluster on the windows in the summertime. Cecile wanted her to have all these things, Sister Vera said, though Constance isn’t sure why. She has put them in the small wooden cupboard beside her bed. Sometimes at night she takes out the little book. A strange thing to think of Sister Cecile being a child and that book being there with her in Ireland so many years ago. And then here in Constance’s hands. In another country.

  All around outside is the feel of things melting. A trickle and seeping everywhere. Snow falls from the branches of the trees, hitting the ground with loud thuds. There is a brightness to the day, a hard white sparkle. Constance holds a plastic container full of the special food she has made for the birds. In the small library next to the room they used for a chapel she found a book called How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds. She can read now. Sister Vera said she must learn, made her write the letters out over and over until her eyes felt dizzy and her head ached. Most of the books in the library are holy books, but there are some books of poems sent to Sister Vera by her brother. A poem didn’t have to tell anything or mean anything, Sister Vera told her. It was just words made to sound pretty. She can’t find any sense in the poems, but she likes the book about birds. Birds can perish in winter from want of food. ‘Kind-hearted people have always taken pity on our feathered winter guests,’ the book said. There was a special kind of food you needed to make – a mix of melted fat and seeds, millet, dried meat and breadcrumbs. The paste should be painted over the branches of trees for the birds to find. The book gave very detailed instructions on how all this should be done, and there were pictures too.

  Sister Vera told her that this kind of feeding would spoil the birds. They would no longer be able to do their work in nature. Humans should not interfere with the lives of wild animals. It did them no service. But to Constance it seemed like a good thing to help them like this. The feathered winter guests. She wanted to do something for them.

  After she has painted the lower branches of the trees at the bottom of the path, she stands very still, watching to see if any birds will come. She can make herself stay quiet like this for a long time. If she does not move or speak it is as if she is not there at all. She could stay there longer if the cold were not so stinging. Still now she is not used to it. Sister Vera has shown her how to heat a brick on top of the stove and wrap it in a cloth so that she can put her feet against it in bed at night. That is another thing from Sister Vera’s childhood. Hot bricks in your bed.

  Constance wonders if this is something Marina does for the child, to keep him warm in the winter. If it is something all people do in cold places, or just in Ireland. She did not know to do this when they lived in the city. No one showed her. It was always too cold in the apartment. Mornings in winter she could see her breath in the air. When it was cold she made a nest out of blankets for the child. He slept under the small table in the kitchen, wrapped up, with not one part of him visible. Perhaps there was a safety he felt there. A hiding place. Sometimes she thought it was her he was hiding from. The second winter they slept buttoned into the thick coats that Marina bought for them. She still has that coat, though the child would be grown too big for his now. He would have another one, Constance is sure of it. He would have everything that he could need.

  No birds come for a long time. A drift of snow falls from a branch above her, brushing her shoulder. She hears Sister Vera calling her name from the window on the second floor. When she looks back towards the house she sees that every window is alight and the sky is dark already. The darkness looks like it is tucked in around the house. She can see herself in the glass of the downstairs window. There is a ripple to her face, like when she peers over and looks into the stream and sees herself there in the water. Sister Vera is calling her name again. They are going to make jelly from the last of the summer apples. Sister Vera is going to show her how. These are things her own mother taught her in Ireland: how to preserve fruit, make candles, roll pastry.

  Constance turns and picks her way slowly back along the path to the house. Behind her the snow starts again, covering over her footsteps on the path.

  Harlem

  September, 1997

  Harlem softened in the fall, the blankets of leaves and the blue dusk muting the sharpness of the streets. The chill in the early mornings seemed miraculous after the long months of heat. Marina stood by the back door, imagining the glass branching with frost, the small garden glittering under snow. Ben had been downstairs before her and left a pot half-full of coffee on the stove.

  Once, Marina had spent a month at a writers’ colony in the south of France, not far from the Spanish border. It was Christmas time and she and an Australian essayist were the only writers-in-residence. The writers’ colony was housed in an enormous old manoir and she rarely crossed paths with the essayist. They each had their own floor of the house, meeting sometimes in the kitchen, or once on the path by the stream at the bottom of the valley.

  Every morning the Australian writer would make a pot of coffee and leave half on the stove for her. He was always awake before her, out walking in the mountains when it was barely light. He had spent that summer in northern Lapland, he told her during one of their conversations. He had lived for many years in London and longed to go somewhere there was always enough light: he wanted, just for a time, to escape the fretful bleakness that came with the late rising of the sun and its early disappearance. He looked very melancholy when he told her this and she wondered what sorrows his life had held. None of us is unscathed, Marina thought then, listening to the essayist speaking about the light in Lapland.

  It was a lovely kind of caring, the coffee made for two, a reminder that she was not entirely alone. In the mountains around the writers’ colony the walking paths were carefully marked with stripes of paint on trees or rock faces to show the way. Divergent paths, the ones that did not lead the right way or came to dead ends, were marked with a yellow cross to signify that the wrong fork had been taken. You could walk for miles following the small signs. This tending of the paths seemed to Marina to be another form of distant care. It sustained her through the long days of work, the only sound the peal of church bells, or a dog barking across the valley. Sometimes she could h
ear the Australian walking around the room above her, or his chair scraping across the old tiles.

  They did not keep in touch after their month together at the writers’ colony, but he became quite renowned in the years afterwards. She often saw his name in literary journals and newspapers. One year he came to the Brooklyn Book Festival to read from a new collection of essays. Marina was too shy to line up at the signing table after his reading, but she bought his book. The essays were beautiful, tender pieces, following the sweep of his wide-ranging thoughts. One was about that time in France, about the walks to the floor of the valley and the carefully marked paths through the mountains.

  Jacob was away for two months that fall, teaching a child psychiatry course at Harvard, and Marina fell into a pattern with Ben that reminded her of the time at the writers’ colony. Ben would leave for work early in the mornings, coming home when she was out walking, or at her desk. Several days might pass when they did not see each other. Late at night she would listen for the murmur of voices from upstairs. Ben brought Alma home more now that Jacob was away. Marina was not entirely sure if it was intentional, but he was withholding his relationship from his father. The one time that Jacob’s path had crossed with Alma’s on the front steps, Ben introduced her simply as ‘my friend’. Uncharacteristically, Jacob had not asked questions.

  One evening Marina cooked dinner for Ben and Alma, and they sat around the dining table with a bottle of wine. There was a calm attentiveness to the girl that appealed to Marina, a serene sort of watchfulness; her face looked so very young, though she was three years older than Ben. Besides the brother who had come with her to America, there were three younger sisters, all of them still in El Salvador.

  ‘Look at them,’ Alma said shyly, passing a photograph across the table. ‘Just look.’ Marina took the picture and examined it; Alma was watching her face very closely, she thought. It was as if by making Marina look at these children, Alma was forcing her to acknowledge their existence. Their peril. It reminded Marina of the way Gabriel would sometimes take her face between his hands if he sensed she was not paying full attention to him. He would twist her face around to look at him, holding her gaze for a long time.

  In Alma’s photograph three small girls in white dresses stared solemnly into the camera, as if they had been instructed by the photographer not to smile.

  ‘The little one,’ said Alma, ‘she has only four years. Her name is Providencia.’

  Marina wondered for a moment if the little girl was actually Alma’s own child. There seemed too large an age gap for her to be a younger sister. Marina had heard terrible stories from Leah. Children left behind while their mothers made risky journeys across the desert. Sometimes these women never saw their children again. ‘They are very beautiful.’ Marina handed the photograph back to Alma.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alma quietly, still watching her. ‘Very beautiful.’ She pressed the picture to her lips before putting it back in her bag.

  Alma and Ben took out the Scrabble board and plucked their letters from the velvet bag. Alma always insisted on the game – it was the best way for her to learn more English words, she said. She was sharp and diligent; insistent on perfecting her English, always asking questions about the particular meaning of a word or phrase. The girl’s presence sometimes made Marina feel a failure of nerve in herself. Alma was in peril. A different kind from those little girls back in El Salvador, but her situation here in New York was tenuous. She had no immigration status, she could not work legally or study. She could be deported at any time if she was discovered. It was easy, gathered around the dinner table or playing Scrabble together, to slip into the pretence that Alma was just another one of the bright, lovely friends that Ben had brought home over the years, their futures full of promise. But this was not so, and Marina could not help feeling that they should be doing more to help her, though she was not sure what kind of help they could offer. She had given money to Ben for the immigration lawyer Leah had organised, but the outcome of this was uncertain. Marina had not told Jacob about the money for the lawyer, just as she had not told him about the money she gave Constance. It was not the money itself that would alarm him; it was what he felt was, again, the recklessness of this involvement in the precarious lives of others. It was not their responsibility, he would say.

  That September Constance started a literacy program at one of the non-profit migrant agencies near the East River in Spanish Harlem. Leah found the course; she was always looking for ways that they might help Constance. Counselling, parenting classes, an art therapy course – everything that Leah suggested Constance refused with her usual indifference. She would barely glance at the pamphlets Leah brought over, placing them aside as if they were not meant for her. But, to Marina’s surprise, Constance had listened with what seemed to be a rare flicker of attention when she read the flyer about the literacy course to her. ‘Three mornings a week, beginners welcome, coffee and tea provided, childcare available.’ When Marina asked her if she would like to go to the classes, the girl made no reply, but before they had parted that day Constance had paused for a moment. ‘I do the lessons for writing,’ she murmured before she disappeared into the foyer of her building.

  Marina was trying, after her argument with Jacob, to make a more concerted effort with Constance. She needed to create a space for the girl to love her own child, Jacob had told her, and she was trying to do this. At the hospital she made Constance hold Gabriel while the doctor gave him a needle; on the train she placed him on his mother’s lap. But none of this made any difference. If anything, Constance seemed more detached from the child than before. She carried him on her back less and less, barely ever reached down to hold his hand. Constance expected Gabriel to follow her, and if he did not keep up, she would not wait for him.

  Marina collected Constance from the projects on the first morning of the literacy class. The course was run by elderly nuns, Leah told her. They would be kind to Constance. Marina was hopeful about the classes. She was doing what Jacob had suggested – helping Constance find her own way. This unexpected desire to learn could be the beginning of something; the girl’s first step back into the world.

  The tall brown cinder blocks of the projects loomed up above Marina, rusty air conditioners balancing in the windows. The place had the look of a shell-scarred fortress. The old men sitting in folding chairs outside the lobby seemed to be almost motionless, like some kind of decrepit sentries. They stared silently at her as she passed them. A slim boy in a puffy jacket pushed past her and ran up the stairs, his sneakers flashing silver and red. ‘Blancita,’ he called back to her in a low, jeering lilt, his laughter echoing in the darkness of the stairwell. She had been here several times now and still the place appalled her – the squalor of it, the reek of urine, the pressing sense of danger. She wished that she could find somewhere else for Constance and Gabriel to live.

  The girl and the child were both wearing the new coats Marina had bought for them. Gabriel tore towards her as soon as Constance opened the door, his small body pushing against her legs. She picked him up, his arms around her neck, the soft fuzz of his hair against her chin. When she kissed his cheek she held her lips there for a moment. The warmth of his skin, the weight of his body in her arms – it still shocked Marina, the fierceness of this hunger for him.

  Marina sat on the old flowered sofa as Constance fed the child breakfast. Brisk and efficient, the toast chopped into squares, Gabriel’s face scrubbed with a damp cloth. Always silence between them. The clink of a spoon, the hum of traffic, muffled shouting from the apartment above them. Constance slapped Gabriel’s hand when he reached out to pick up the knife, and took his plate away.

  They walked the nine blocks east in silence. A rainy wind blew in across the Hudson and the roads looked tarred, water flicking up at them when a bus or a truck lurched in close to the sidewalk. Gabriel pulled the hood of his red coat over his head.

  The waiting room of the agency was filled with young Mexican women, strol
lers and shopping trolleys jammed against the walls. There were small clusters of commotion, conversations in rapid Spanish, a child crying. Through an open door several women knelt on the floor, piecing together a brightly coloured quilt.

  It was food pantry day, the elderly nun at the front desk explained. Every Tuesday morning. Constance could take food, too, if she liked; bring a basket or a trolley next time she came. Rice, beans, oil, flour – they always had staples, sometimes fresh fruit. Marina saw the glint of a gold cross at the woman’s collar as she looked over the enrolment forms she had filled out for Constance. Had there been nuns in Constance’s country? Was this something that the young girl could understand, that would seem familiar to her? These sensibly clad, sturdy women on their missions of mercy.

  ‘Rwanda,’ the nun said, looking up at Constance. ‘We had sisters in Kigali once. And an orphanage in the south. Not for a while now, though. Where was your village?’