Just where she had come from and why she had appeared remained uncertain. “Upstate,” we were told. “Because she is old,” we were told. She was given the guest room, and directed by our father, we followed her halting journey up the stairs with our hands poised at her elbows or at her hips. She trembled, we recall, either because of her great age or because of her delight at our elaborate courtesies.
The guest room on the third floor of the old Hempstead house was narrow beneath the eaves, painted yellow, white curtains at the window.
Downstairs again, our father told the story of Great-aunt Rose and Red Whelan. Up in Poughkeepsie this was, he said. Just after the Civil War. A knock at the door when the family was at dinner. Rose only a small child. A man invited in: red hair, red skin, scarred red flesh from neck to ear as if a plow had scraped his face. One leg and one arm, so that he, too, Red Whelan, made a halting climb to the upstairs room—tap of crutch on each stair tread, on the attic’s bare wood. Patrick, our great-grandfather, a young schoolteacher by then, standing silently in the room’s narrow doorway as Red Whelan was shown the bed, the washstand, a small desk, and a wide wing chair, all the family had done to prepare the place for him. The room where he would live out his days.
And Great-aunt Rose, still a child, holding his dinner in a covered dish.
When we were teenagers, brooding in our bedrooms, brooding or hungover, or just sleeping through an afternoon, as our mother used to do, our father would complain, his voice annoyed, bordering on angry, but amused also, because he, too, had been a reader, a brooder, and the phrase had been his own father’s refrain—“Hibernating up there like Red Whelan.”
Any redheaded, fat-faced, freckled Irishman was a regular Red Whelan.
Any houseguest who stayed too long was threatening to become a Red Whelan.
Any mention of old Aunt Rose’s long and lonely life included the forty-odd years she had devoted herself to Red Whelan, her brother’s substitute in the Civil War. A widowed spinster, our father called her. A married nun.
We carried the tea things upstairs. We carried her sparse dinner, only small bowls of mush: soups and applesauce and creamed farina. In the third-floor room, she blinked at us from her bed or from her chair, her face always dusted with powder, although it seemed to us then that she was dusted with dust.
And the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor standing by. “Aren’t you good?” they told us when we brought in the old lady’s tray or took it away. Sister Jeanne among them. Our favorite.
We knew them well, the Little Nursing Sisters. The order of nuns our mother had thought to join until—our father liked to say—she thought better of it.
We knew them from our own fevered mornings: waking to find their pale hands to our foreheads and to our cheeks, or seeing through our crusted eyes their serious faces within the white bonnets as they put a thermometer between our lips, commanded us not to bite it. We watched them float around our sickbeds, tugging and pulling with their short, clean hands until our night-tangled blankets and sheets were transformed into something clean again, and cool.
We knew them from all the long afternoons when we came home from school, hand to the glass knob of the battered side door, and found a nursing nun standing like a black-and-white beacon in the kitchen—her finger to her lips because our mother had once more taken to her shaded room to sleep off what they called her melancholy.
They arrived by taxi in those days, before their habits were amended to allow them enough peripheral vision to drive themselves. Our father scurried out to the curb to pay the fare.
For years we believed we were not unusual in this. For years we believed the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, appeared in every household whenever crisis or illness disrupted the routine, whenever a substitute was needed for She Who Could Not Be Replaced.
Sister Jeanne was our favorite.
She was an old woman then. Shorter than we were. Child-sized inside her habit. When she made us tea, she warmed the milk, and she carried in her black satchel a sleeve of biscuits we have never found since. Coated with chocolate, we recall, with a thin, summery taste of strawberry jam.
When she spoke to us—and not all the Little Sisters spoke to us so easily—her voice was always wry—“It’s all silliness, isn’t it?”—so that we never knew if we would be hushed into sacred silence by what she said or if her voice would suddenly curl up like a grin and we would see that inside her white bonnet and her dark veil she was shaking with laughter.
She said, “I knew your mother since before she was born. Same as I know all of youse.”
She said, “youse,” which delighted us. She said “pernt” for point, “erl” for oil. She was years out of Brooklyn by then, at the Old Age Home the Sisters ran out on Long Island, as an aide, not a patient. Although she must have been nearly as old as many of the women she cared for.
She asked us, “Who’s the dumbest boy in your class?”
Reaching under her bonnet, she tapped her freckled forehead. She touched her white bib between the chain of her cross, as if her heart was centered there. She said, “Because God put the knowledge in you before you were born, see? So you’d know He intends to be fair.”
She tagged her sentences with “see?” like a Hollywood gangster, and this delighted us, too.
Sister Jeanne told us that she had meant to join another order altogether, another order of nuns also called Little Sisters, but went to the wrong address. Where Sister St. Saviour simply shrugged and said, “God’s will.”
Sister Jeanne said, “I knew your mother before she was born because Sister St. Saviour introduced us.”
She said, “No one called for her, but still she appeared. That was the miracle, see? God saw the need. There was an accident with the gas. God saw your mother and your grandmother’s need, and so Sister St. Saviour appeared.”
We were sitting at the dining room table in the long, hushed hours of those still afternoons when our mother slept off her sadness, or when Great-aunt Rose was in the upper room. It might have been any season: there were blossoms on the apple tree at the window behind her head. There was a squall of fat snowflakes.
She told us, “There was a lovely smell of roses when Sister St. Saviour died. She opened her eyes for just a moment, she hadn’t opened them in days, and then she closed them again and sighed. It was a very deep sigh. But no weariness in it, see? No sadness. I would say it was a satisfied sigh. And after that, it was like a thousand roses had been brought, special delivery, into the room. It was just a glimpse of where her soul had gone. A whiff of it. As if a door had opened for a moment, just to let her in, and all of us still stuck here on earth got a glimpse. Because a glimpse is all the living can bear. All we can bear of heaven’s beauty.”
She said, her eyes to the ceiling, “It’s not for me, you know. That beauty. But never mind. You’ll see it, for truth. Your old aunty, too.”
How long did Great-aunt Rose stay with us? A few weeks, a month, maybe two? On a warm afternoon, we came in from school to find the guest room empty. Our mother, up and about on that day, had opened the windows to let in the air. The white curtains stirred, the mattress was bare.
Our father said later that because our mother was delicate, given to melancholy, it seemed best that old Rose go off to a nursing home for her final days. For expert care, he said. The nursing home was run by yet another order of nuns, not our own Little Nursing Sisters, whose numbers were diminishing even then. Whose Bishop had cast an acquisitive eye over their elegant convent, even then.
Great-aunt Rose, we were told, was gone to spend her last days in a nursing home run by the very order Sister Jeanne hadn’t joined, an order that specialized in old people who had come to the end of their time. In a town called Valhalla.
“Of all things,” our father said.
“If that’s not a sure sign she’s going to heaven,” he said, well satisfied that his obligation to the old lady had been met, “I d
on’t know what is.”
The Convent Child
A FOX STOLE WITH A BROKEN CLASP found among the donated clothes, a lady’s velvet chapeau, some elbow-length kid gloves, torn at the seams, and Sally transformed herself into Mrs. McShane, the elegant and imperious woman (Brooklyn hoi polloi, Annie said) who organized the Ladies Auxiliary’s annual tea and Christmas Bazaar to raise funds for the convent. Sally brought the stole to her chin, extended a wavering arm to Sister Illuminata, and said in Mrs. McShane’s studied, drawling way, “Our good Little Sisters.” Said to her mother, the gloved fingers spread across her cheek, “But, Annie, my dear, where are the petits fours?”
She shimmied into a discarded housedress, slipped one of the nuns’ bibbed aprons over her head, and pantomimed Mrs. Odette’s kitchen dance—lifting imaginary pot lids, peeling imaginary apples held right before her squinting eyes, whispering “Herregud” under her breath until her mother and Sister Illuminata, laughing, were begging her to “Shush.”
A babushka and a moth-eaten coat with a lambskin collar, an expression of peering curiosity, dawning disapproval, and there was Mrs. Gertler just as she looked every evening, watching the street from her parlor-floor window.
Once, when Annie was out at the shops, the organ grinder stopped on the street outside the convent, turning his squawking box and singing his off-key Italian. It was a hot day and the basement windows were open behind the grills. “For the love of God,” Sister Illuminata muttered, “couldn’t he play an Irish tune?” Sally—quick as a sprite—moved a coal box beneath the window, hopped onto it, and, grabbing the iron bars, shouted, in Sister Illuminata’s own brogue, “Play us an Irish tune, for the love of God.”
The poor man, searching the air for the source of the voice, cried out, “Yes, Sister,” and attempted to sing some mangled, halfhearted version of “The Wearing of the Green.”
“Good man,” Sally cried when he had come to a halting finish.
The child, Sister Illuminata said, was a born mimic.
* * *
THE DAYS IN THE LAUNDRY grew longer for the two women when Sally started school, but when she returned, she brought her mother and the nun tales from what they called the wider world. She could capture her classmates’ broken English, or their solid Brooklynese, with perfection. She had the pastor’s nasally Latin down to a T. She was a good and quiet child in the classroom, polite and shy on the street, but in the basement laundry of the convent, every impulse toward silliness, every outlandish pantomime or adolescent misfiring of elbows and feet, not to mention wickedness and wildness, was set free, and utterly indulged by her mother and the nun, provided—they were always reminding her—that she kept her voice low.
Provided, it was understood, that proper decorum was re-established whenever she went “upstairs,” which meant into the whole of the universe above the convent laundry.
Perhaps because of this indulgence, the girl, as she grew, chose to linger with Sister Illuminata whenever her mother went out in the afternoons—to do her shopping, to catch her breath—rather than follow her or join the other girls playing in the street. When Sister Jeanne came down the stairs, Sally kissed the little nun but, more and more, begged off their old routines. Sister Illuminata hid her pleasure in this. She turned to her ironing, sighed heavily to disguise a thin smile. Sister Jeanne’s sweet goodness was best spent on younger children, she thought. On innocents. An older child, an older child with some spunk like Sally, like her own Mary Pat Shea, might prefer a little devilment in her friends.
A small table was borrowed from an upstairs hallway and carried to the cellar so that Sally could do her homework there, in Sister Illuminata’s company (the iron thumping and hissing), rather than, more sensibly, at the well-lit table in the convent kitchen or the dining room in her own home. For if a case of the giggles overcame her here, or if she recalled some incident from the schoolyard this morning that she longed to re-enact, or even if, bored with sums, she drifted to the donation baskets and tried on a few clothes, Sister Illuminata, fondly, would abide.
* * *
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON and her mother had gone to the shops. Sally was nearly thirteen. She was helping Sister Illuminata fold the last of the day’s clothes. One of the freshly ironed tunics belonged to Sister Jeanne, and Sally, laughing, held it up against her. The nun looked at the girl over her shoulder. Sally said, “Let’s fool my mother.”
It was not the first time she had dressed in the habit of the Little Sisters. It was a custom at her school to hold “vocation days,” when the students were asked to dress up as priests and nuns and to parade about the schoolyard as miniature ecclesiastics. Because of her status as a convent child, and because she was a good and quiet girl, Sally was chosen every year to represent the various orders of nursing Sisters in the modified habit that Sister Illuminata herself had made for her—and then altered each year as she grew. But on this afternoon, Sally eyed Sister Jeanne’s full habit, the clean, consecrated cloth. “Come on, Sister,” she said. “Just for fun.”
Against her better judgment, Sister Illuminata helped the girl into the tunic. Since she had no cincture handy, she tied a linen bandage around the girl’s thin waist and then brushed and smoothed the shoulders and the wide sleeves, shaking her head all the while at their transgression, but loving, too, the nearness of the girl, the coiled energy of her narrow body, the sweet buds of her breasts, the faint pattern of freckles on her nose that, this close, appeared to ride beneath the surface of her skin, as if under a milky veil.
Sitting on her ironing chair, Sister pressed the coif over Sally’s bent head, tugging the thing into place over her ears, tucking her hair away with a busy mother’s gentle brusqueness. Sally closed her eyes and placed her hands on Sister’s swollen knees. Her breath smelled of milk and crackers. She was laughing when they began, her crooked teeth catching at the cloth of the tunic as it went over her head, but now she grew solemn, her eyes closed, as Sister smoothed and tucked, moving her scarred fingertip gently along the girl’s forehead and her cheeks. She tugged the cloth into place and leaned back to look at Sally in the basement sunlight.
Sister shook her head, as if she disapproved of the charade and had no part in it, but what she was shaking off, in truth, was the bare beauty of the girl’s plain face inside the white linen, a face pure and ageless and as innocent as if it had just been formed. She pushed Sally away a bit, taking the weight of the child off her sore knees, and fitted the bonnet over the coif. Then she lifted Sister Jeanne’s black veil, newly ironed, and gently placed it over Sally’s head. Took a pin from her own veil to hold it in place.
When Annie came down the stairs just after five o’clock, winded and apologizing that she had taken longer than usual because she had just run home to drop off a few things, Sister Illuminata, in her chair beside the ironing board, said casually, “Oh, Sally’s already gone.”
“When?” Annie asked. “I didn’t see her on the street. When did she leave? I never passed her on the street.”
The girl stepped out from the shadow of the furnace, into some streaming light from the high basement window. In perfect imitation of Sister Jeanne, she had her hands tucked into her sleeves, her eyes cast down. Stepping forward, she ducked her head in Sister Jeanne’s own way, a way that implied tremendous shyness as well as some futile, last-ditch effort to suppress—like a lid on a boiling pot, Annie sometimes said—the rushing impulse to break into laughter.
The perfume of sunlight arose from Sister Jeanne’s clothes. The late-spring afternoon threw a shaft of gold into the high window. It landed at Sally’s feet.
With her head bowed, she could not see her mother, but she could hear her pause. “What in the world?” Annie whispered.
Sister Illuminata said, “Allow me to introduce a new member of our community. This is Sister St. Sally. Sister St. Sally of the Smelly Socks.”
The nun’s laughter was low and deep, and Annie’s, after a pause, was full of warm impatience. “You are a pair,” she
said. She was slipping out of her spring coat. “The two of you. Is that Jeanne’s habit? Don’t you think it’s a sacrilege, Sister?”
Sally moved forward, just a step or two, into the full corridor of spring sunlight.
The golden sunshine through the high basement window was like the light in holy cards—Sally felt it fall on her the way the painted light in holy cards fell over the bowed heads of saints. She held out her arms and marveled at their elegance within the wide sleeves, her wrists so slim and white against the black serge. She was filled with what seemed Sister Jeanne’s own confidence and peace. Without a mirror to consult, with only her mother and Sister Illuminata’s silly laughter to guide her, she understood, nevertheless, that she had been transformed. That even her voice, muffled as it was by the linen over her ears, the voice the two had so often warned her to soften, was now something else altogether, something solemn and graceful and profound. She knew she was meant to be a nun.
That night, when Sally whispered her intentions to her mother, speaking into the darkness, in the bed they still shared, Annie wondered if she might do well to point out that her daughter’s ability to imitate to perfection snooty Mrs. McShane and harried Mrs. Odette, and even nosy Mrs. Gertler downstairs, was no proof at all that she was destined to become a city councilman’s wife or a convent cook or a Jewish landlady with a dozen wigs.
But with the girl’s bright eyes shining from the pillow beside hers, she resisted the impulse to tease.
She said instead, “Are you thinking already about how you’ll leave me?”
And never meant to sound so pained.
* * *
The Ninth Hour Page 7