by Tricia Dower
“I can’t go to lunch until I say more prayers to release my father from Purgatory.”
“Was he truly penitent before he died, worthy of Purgatory’s fires?”
“And for what would he need be penitent?”
Father Shandley sighs as though the air has been punctured out of him. He stares out toward the giant crucifix hanging above the altar and waits. He’s good at that. His silence behind the confessional grille often feels like an invisible hand reaching out to seize her secrets. He asks her, every time, to tell God how Cian came to be. Every time she responds that, if God is all-seeing, he already knows. He tells her she’s young; God will forgive her for having been seduced into sin if she is contrite. She says she wasn’t seduced. He asks on how many occasions she and her father sinned. Each time she assures him that she and James did not sin.
Today he smiles. “The sisters claim that if Saint Peter bars you from the pearly gates, Mary will let you in the back. Maybe your prayers will open Heaven’s back door for your father.”
Miranda realizes he’s joking—she’s getting better at that—and a tiny smile inside her expands. She pictures Heaven’s gates as the tall wrought-iron ones Doris and Nolan’s car passed through the day they delivered her and Cian to St. Bernadette’s. She imagines James going round to the kitchen door with the stray cats, petitioning Sister Ernestine.
“On Wednesday,” Father Shandley says, “I will say three Masses in honor of the dead, including those who, it is said, still ‘groan’ in Purgatory. If you make a full confession”—he gives her a pointed look—“and take Holy Communion at All Saints Mass the day before, you might gain an indulgence for your father’s soul. In fact, I guarantee it.”
It’s more than coincidence that the dark half of a new year begins soon. At the precise moment when the Dark Moon of Samhain blocks starlight, time will belong to neither the old year nor the new and the dead will find it easier to wander among the living. On Samhain Eve—Doris calls it Halloween—she and James left plates of food for departed souls and built a fire in the hearth to warm them. She thought she could will her mother to rise out of the flames simply by wanting it badly enough. James said it would require years more study and practice before she was open for communing with the dead. And even then, it might not happen. His mother and grandmother bled through each year, but never Eileen. Miranda wonders now if her mother was trapped between worlds with no one to pray for her.
“Will you wear black?” she asks.
“I will.” He laughs. “You ask the most … Remind me which saint you chose for your confirmation name.”
“Maura.”
“Ah, yes. You ask the most interesting questions, Miranda Breege Maura Haggerty.”
“Sister Bonita thinks not. She says curiosity wastes God’s time.” Miranda doesn’t tell him that some girls laugh at her questions about things they take for granted: hissing radiators, the walking and talking photographs of television, water in fountains bubbling up like tiny dancing balls. Say goodnight, Gracie, they croon.
“Does she? Well, you can waste my time. Nobody’s mistaken me for God yet.” He stands and extends a hand to help her up. With a warm thumb, he traces a firm sign of the cross on her forehead. “Now, to lunch, please. If need be, tell the sisters I kept you.”
Miranda feels a quiver of hope, then fear. She will invite James to the Mass of the dead, but what must she confess to deliver him there?
1:35 PM. Haggerty’s desk was pocked with cubbyholes stuffed with boring shit: mostly papers, some with date stamps and fancy seals. Only a moron wouldn’t have known that the two removable compartments shaped like books were fake. The one on the right held a bunch of sealed envelopes. The heavier and harder-to-slideout one on the left was stuffed with rubber-banded rolls of bills. She thought they were Russian until she unwrapped a roll and recognized the ones, fives and tens. She’d never seen a twenty or a fifty before. She dumped the rolls onto the bed, pulled off the rubber bands and started counting. When she lost track, she made piles of a hundred bucks each. They took up so much of the bed she made piles of five hundred, then a thousand. Nine piles. Enough to buy nine thousand sacks of White Castle burgers? She must’ve goofed. She started over and ended up with the same number.
Plopping down hard on the bed, she gawked at the money and told her heart to take it easy. She’d figured Haggerty was poor. Everybody had. The rundown house, the scruffy clothes. People had seen him sift through garbage cans, beg scraps at the fish market and greengrocer. Just goes to show, Ma would’ve said.
With nine thousand bucks, she and Ma could get away from Jimmy. Except he’d never give up the Chosen One, the fair-haired, fair-skinned copy of himself who read better than Tereza but couldn’t lie worth shit; Allen was doomed to do whatever he was told. Even if they could take him, Ma was too soft to leave Jimmy. “You don’t know how it was with no husband and a kid. I couldn’t support you proper. Jimmy was the only man who’d take us on.”
Besides, the money was Miranda’s. No getting around that. No finders, keepers. If Tereza left it in the desk, somebody else would come across it and gyp Miranda out of it. Would it be so awful if she used a little and found a way to repay it someday? Enough for a ticket somewhere far away, some food and clothes?
Whatever she did, nothing would be the same as it was before. In the basement, her idea had been to head downtown on Halloween dressed as a monk in the black robe and buy undies and dungarees with cash already in her pocketbook. After that, she’d ditch the robe and hitchhike on Route 1. Blow guys for meals and places to sleep. She’d charge big bucks to the first to pop her cherry. Vinnie said his cousin in Roselle paid for a week down the shore by auctioning hers off. If Tereza borrowed Miranda’s money, she wouldn’t have to hitchhike and she wouldn’t need any guy.
She thought about how Miranda had led her to this moment, and at some point the voices in her head stopped scrapping over whether to take the money. She’d made the decision to leave home for good before she found it. Had already chosen to save herself. She rolled up ninety wads of a hundred bucks each and stuffed them into the four black socks from the wardrobe. “Ho, ho, ho,” she said, her voice bouncing off Haggerty’s ceiling. An early Christmas: stockings sagging with dough instead of oranges and walnuts.
“MIRANDA!” Doris sounds out of breath as she crests the stairs to the hallway on St. Bernadette’s second floor. Miranda stands outside the visitors’ lounge, trying to quell the panic that has transformed her legs into rooted trees, not sure how they carried her from the nursery, where Sister Cameron said, “Someone was to have told you.”
Doris points to her watch, then holds her palms out in a gesture of helplessness. She unbuttons her black-and-white-checked coat, yanks a white kerchief off her unfazed tight black curls and hurries across the floor to where Miranda has stood for ten minutes on the same beige linoleum square murmuring over and over catechism words that still the clamor in her head and help her breathe without gasping: “How shall we know the things we are to believe?”
She considered going to Sister Celine, who sits behind the visitor registration table in the lounge. But what if Sister was supposed to have told her? Of all the nuns, she’s the most encouraging and understanding, treating Miranda practically as a teacher’s aide in deference to her age, praising her progress in subjects James didn’t assign. “If you ever want to talk to me about anything, know that you can,” she said one day, taking Miranda aside after school and looking at her hard, as if she could see into the girl’s heart.
Doris, smelling of baby and cold air, kisses Miranda’s cheek. “I’m late, I know. Bill was called out this morning and I had to wait for him to get back.” She laughs. “Leaving the kids with him is such a production. Gotta be sure Mickey’s diaper is dry—Bill sure as heck won’t change him—pump out four ounces of milk, leave a list of snacks Carolyn can have, the TV shows it’s okay for her to watch.”
A tear escapes and dribbles down Miranda’s cheek. Doris wip
es it away with her thumb. “Oh, sweetie, listen to me whine. Showing off how important I am. I wouldn’t miss visiting day for the world. You know that, don’t you?”
“Cian’s gone.”
Doris’s smile freezes. “What do you mean?”
“He’s been fostered out, he has.”
Doris slumps against the wall and closes her eyes for a second. “When?”
“Today. I went to collect him for your visit and he wasn’t there.”
“You didn’t meet the people? You didn’t give your approval?”
“I did not.”
Once a month couples visit the orphanage to consider children they might want to foster or adopt. They cluster in the lounge, perched on couch and chair edges, as inmates march past them. Their faces betray no emotion. Sister Celine assured Miranda that, if she kept Cian in her arms, prospective parents would know they were to go together. How often did Miranda parade, unaware, in front of the people who took Cian? A doctor and his wife, according to Sister Cameron: “Good Catholics with a weakness for babies in need of healing love.”
Doris takes long strides into the lounge and right up to Sister Celine. Miranda stops just inside the entrance to the big room that throbs with inmate and visitor conversations. Any other day, she would be at Doris’s heels. But entering now, without Cian, she’s self-conscious, as if everyone in the room knows of her loss. Did Father Shandley know all the while he sat with her?
“How can a child be fostered out without his mother’s permission?” Doris demands.
Sister Celine glances up at Doris, over at Miranda and then pointedly around the crowded room. In that low, first-warning voice she uses when someone in class misbehaves, she says, “This is not the time or place for such a discussion.”
“When is and where?” Doris’s voice is loud and shrill. Conversations stop. She leans toward Sister Celine, speaking as if she and the nun were equals or, even more astounding, as if Doris were superior. It took Miranda weeks to recognize that the twelve identically garbed sisters are not mirror images of each other. To see that Sister Celine has one blue eye and one brown, Sister Joseph a hairy mole on her chin and Sister Cameron a flat nose. Yet they are as one in their authority over her, their word not to be doubted, their orders not to be questioned.
Sister Celine strokes the silver crucifix over her heart and mutters too softly for Miranda to hear. Doris nods and backs away. Sister pushes herself from the table as smoothly as if the rigid wooden chair were on wheels. Doris crosses to Miranda and gives her a quick hug.
“She’s escorting me to Mother Superior,” she whispers, then laughs softly. “Pray for me.”
Sister Celine, smelling of soap and starch, leans into Miranda. “Would you mind sitting at the desk until I get back?” A kindness. Inmates ordinarily aren’t allowed in the lounge without a visitor. Some girls never have visitors, even those who are at St. Bernadette’s because their parents are unable to care for them. Sister Bonita says their parents don’t visit because the girls are bad. Sister Celine says it’s because the parents feel ashamed and guilty.
Miranda sits in Sister Celine’s chair and feels the warmth she left behind. She peers out into the room where conversations have resumed in hushed voices. Dice hit boards as inmates and visitors return to games of Monopoly, Parcheesi and Snakes and Ladders. She and Doris have played checkers with Cian, letting him move the pieces wherever he wants. Will he recall that if he never sees her again? Of her own mother she retains only the scent of tangerines.
The visitors are better dressed than the inmates, who select their clothes for the week from freshly laundered garments dumped onto a bed each Saturday. Inmates aren’t allowed to own anything that might make them proud and vain. They push and shove to avoid ending up with a too-long skirt or a too-tight blouse. Miranda’s mother’s dresses don’t fit most girls. Some say they wouldn’t be “caught dead” in them anyway, so she can usually count on them for herself.
She spots a dormitory mate, the crinkly-haired, fat-cheeked Rosalee, a bed-wetter. Sister Bonita forces Rosalee to march about with soiled sheets on her head. Public shame teaches humility, Sister Bonita claims, makes you more Christ-like. She will welcome Miranda’s shame over losing her child. And shame it is coursing through her now, along with shock and grief.
“Where did I go wrong, James?” she whispers, and waits in vain for the rush of warm air that will tell her he has heard.
Rosalee appears to whisper into the ear of a woman in a pale blue suit and matching hat with delicate veil. The woman glances over. Rosalee is one of the girls who follow Miranda around the playground at recess like flies, buzzing with questions: what’s it like to give birth, what does a penis feel like inside you? In the lavatory, they ask to see the hair between her legs. They want to compare their nascent breasts with hers as though their bodies were in competition. In Miranda’s dormitory room of fifth and sixth graders, she’s the only one who bleeds each month, something the others are anxious to experience, despite Sister Bonita’s telling them it’s a curse upon women for Eve’s mortal sin.
Miranda is torn between keeping her promise to James and sharing what she knows with the inquisitive girls whose acceptance she craves. But it’s unlikely they will one day lie naked, intoxicated from wine and chanting, while spirits possess their bodies.
The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, the angel said to Mary.
It wasn’t lust, she wants to shout at Sister Bonita and Father Shandley.
Some girls claim that the day they inhaled their first breath of St. Bernadette’s was the worst of their lives. Miranda’s mind hid in the giant sycamore inside the gates, her senses trembling like its leaves, as she watched herself carry Cian up the stone steps to the cold-faced red-brick building. That same day, however, was the first she stood under a night sky after Sister Nurse took pity on her. Miranda had cried until her eyes were nearly swollen shut because the moon did not appear in the infirmary windows and Sister Bonita had confiscated the only other way she could say goodnight to her mother: the picture of Ethleen. After midnight, Sister Nurse, in white skullcap and long white nightgown, led her down the two flights of stairs and out a side door, tiptoeing all the way. At the sight of a crescent moon floating amid no end of stars, Miranda fell to the ground and lay on damp grass, overwhelmed by the sensation of being sucked up into the black sky. She felt part of something vast and whole. Asked then, she might have declared it the best day of her life.
Joy and grief mingled in the cup, she thinks of it now.
From Sister Celine’s chair, she can see a bank of four windows. Out there, as vast as that starry night, lies the World into which Cian has vanished like an Eloi taken by Morlocks. Miranda is the Time Traveler, catapulted into an alien future she never imagined.
3:30 PM. Tereza decided to take the knife from the basement, in case anyone tried to mess with her, and the shell necklace as a souvenir. But when she put them in her pocketbook, their shapes remained on the dusty, faded black tablecloth. On the chance that somebody might enter the house after she split and notice that, she buried the cloth, animal’s horn, candle, jingle bells, wand, knotted yarn and goblet in boxes of old clothes. She took down the black drapes and the hand-drawn picture and packed them in a box with dolls, an old telephone and a radio. Shoved the table, pillars and harp in a corner so that they looked like just more old crap stored away.
Her stomach was griping. She hadn’t eaten all day, afraid she’d upchuck the booze. She sliced the Spam onto a plate, sprinkled canned corn like confetti over it and lit the candles on the table. “To the last night of my old life,” she said.
The hours turtled by. She’d never stayed away this long. Ma might be worried by now. Jimmy wouldn’t care. He’d be lost in his Sunday blahs. Ma said Tereza should try to understand that poison from the war kept seeping out of him and not make things worse by being so difficult. If he couldn’t help it, did it matter what Tereza did? She thought about Haggerty’s shotgun and how powerful she�
��d felt with its weight on her shoulder.
Just as well it was too big to take.
She might shoot Ma instead of Jimmy.
WHEN DORIS AND SISTER CELINE return, Miranda stands quickly.
“No visitors, Sister,” she says, searching her teacher’s eyes for reassurance but seeing only pity. Doris’s face looks scrubbed of emotion.
Doris and Miranda find a vacant couch and sit thigh to thigh. Doris seems uncomfortable, twisting her head this way and that as though she’s never been in the lounge before. “Mother Alfreda has a tiny office,” she says.
“Does it matter?” Miranda says, wondering whether the day James died could have been worse than this one. But if something happens that makes you want to stop living, does it matter if it’s better or worse than something else that made you feel the same?
Doris says, “No, of course not. I was surprised, that’s all. You can bet the Pope doesn’t work in a closet.” She leans forward and straightens the magazines on the low wooden table in front of them. Turns to face Miranda. “I’m very angry right now. Mother Alfreda showed me papers that make it perfectly legal for St. Bernadette’s to foster or adopt you and Cian out.
“Sister Cameron said I mustn’t be selfish. If the foster parents like Cian, they might adopt him. She says it could be his only chance for a real family.”
Doris’s eyebrows shoot up. “Baloney. I will not let strangers adopt him. I promise you.” She pulls Miranda to her and smoothes her hair. Miranda closes her eyes to stop her tears from spilling over and imagines herself and Cian in Doris’s house. Doris knows so much about the World. How will Miranda ever catch up?
“I nearly forgot,” Doris says. She opens her pocketbook. “I brought you and Cian treats for Halloween tomorrow.” She gives a rueful laugh. “I guess they’re both for you, now.” She pulls out two brightly wrapped candy bars named Baby Ruth.
“I won’t be allowed to keep them,” Miranda says softly, stealing a glance at Sister Celine.