The Ninth Hour

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The Ninth Hour Page 11

by Alice McDermott


  She said, her keen eyes on the girl, “I will never encourage the vocation of a young woman who comes to us just after seeing a sister or mother die in childbirth. No woman should enter the convent out of fear.”

  Sister Lucy said that the best of men—Mr. Costello came to mind—sought the Sisters’ help when their wives took ill in this way. They stood in the doorway looking lost and afraid while the nuns sailed in to assess the limp woman on the bed.

  “Anemia, you’ll often find,” Sister Lucy said. “Pallor. Weakness. From the Greek this time, anaimia, lack of blood.”

  You can douse her with castor oil, Sister Lucy said, and then send the husband, or one of the children, off to the butcher for a piece of liver while you do your best with the place. Send the filthy laundry to Sister Illuminata, bathe the children, comb the nits out of their hair, open the windows, beat the rugs. Feed the family a decent meal, after which, perhaps, the mother will stir herself to sit up at the table and chew some small pieces of the liver.

  The life might return to her then, iron restored to her bloodstream. Or it might not.

  Sister Lucy told Sally that never having had a lazy mother herself, she might not know that there was a distinction between the wife who was sick and then recovered and the wife who was recovered but not yet willing to give up the pleasures of being sick.

  “Never waste your sympathy,” Sister Lucy said. They were going into Mrs. Costello’s once again. “Never think for a minute that you will erase all suffering from the world with your charms.”

  “The poor we will always have with us,” Sister Lucy said more than once in the week that Sally followed her. She said it without kindness or even resignation. She seemed only annoyed. “If we could live without suffering,” Sister Lucy said, “we’d find no peace in heaven.”

  * * *

  THEY WERE ON THEIR WAY BACK to the convent at the end of a long day, when Sister Lucy, walking ahead of Sally, stopped abruptly. There was a small girl on a stoop, wearing what looked like a bigger sister’s nightgown, a pair of rough shoes on her bare legs. As Sally caught up, she heard Sister Lucy asking her severely why she wasn’t in school. She called the girl by name, Loretta. Little Loretta said she hadn’t gone to school today because her sisters couldn’t take her. And when Sister Lucy asked why that was, the girl lowered her chin to her raised knees. Sister had to say, “Speak up, child.”

  The little girl spoke up reluctantly, all in a rush. “Charlie got mad at us this morning because we were laughing too much,” she said. “He locked up Margaret and Tillie and wouldn’t let them out.”

  Sister Lucy looked to the building behind the girl. “They’re still inside?”

  And the girl, big-eyed and tangle-haired, nodded slowly.

  Sister Lucy shook back her sleeve and, without another word, climbed the stairs. Wordlessly, Sally and the little girl followed.

  This was a nicer building. There was carpet on the stairs. A radio playing gentle music somewhere. The smell of floor polish. At the door of the little girl’s apartment, Sister Lucy raised her fist to rap, and then, with hardly a pause for a reply, reached for the knob and let herself in. There was a long corridor with little light, airless and hot. At the end of the corridor, a pretty room with dark furniture trimmed in knotted tassels, a table draped with a velvet shawl, a large gilded mirror. A small pile of schoolbooks was spilled across the plush seat of a chair.

  Sister Lucy stood for a moment to call out, “Girls?” but then turned down another, shorter corridor to a closed door. Again she knocked, and again she reached for the knob without a pause. She opened the door and said, “Glory be to God.”

  Sally looked over the nun’s shoulder into the dim room. She saw two girls about her own age sitting at either end of a rumpled bed. One, somewhat bigger, was in a skirt and a satin slip; the other, thinner and younger, wore a white nightgown like Loretta’s. Both were tied to the iron bedposts by dark leather belts that crossed and recrossed their wrists. The girls struggled to sit up when they saw the nun. As she rushed toward them, they both began to cry piteously, saying together, “Oh, Sister.” It was clear from their faces that they had been crying all day. There was a smell of urine in the airless room. The smell of sweat.

  Sister Lucy was already untying the belt that held the bigger girl to the head of the bed. Sally fumbled, pulling at the belt that bound the other—two belts, in fact, one a man’s long belt with a solid buckle, the other the thin strap that might have held the schoolbooks in the living room. Both were wrapped tightly around the peeling iron rail and the girl’s thin wrists. Both belts had raised fiery stripes on her skin, turned her fingertips purple.

  Through their tears, the girls told Sister Lucy that they had laughed too much this morning, getting ready for school, and made their brother angry. They rubbed their wrists. The younger girl had wet through her nightgown and blushed in shame. The older, in a gabardine school skirt but no blouse, only her satin slip, cupped her hand to her neck. Sally saw she was trying to hide a bruise there—it looked like a rosebud, a small coin. She saw that Sister Lucy, too, was assessing the mark. Her eyes narrowed. Sally wondered if it wasn’t a bit of ringworm on the girl’s throat.

  As they moved off the bed, still whimpering, Sally followed the nun’s sharp eyes to the series of raised red welts on their calves and their thighs. Strap marks.

  Sister Lucy said, “Where is your mother?”

  “Working,” the girls said together. Gone with her family, they said, the family she cooked for, to their summer place for the week. They said Charlie was in charge.

  Sally saw the anger pull at Sister Lucy’s lips and at the corners of her eyes. She imagined it rising up like something awful, undigested, from her throat, from that knot of fury in her chest.

  Sister Lucy told Sally, “Take Loretta to the kitchen. See if there’s anything for her to eat. Wash her hands and face while you’re at it.”

  The little girl drew back as Sally reached for her. “Do as I say, child,” Sister Lucy said. Cold. Insistent.

  Sister Lucy closed the door behind them as they left. Sally heard her say, “Let me see your neck.”

  The kitchen was large, neat and charming, although the remnants of a breakfast were still on the table: half-eaten eggs in egg cups, dregs of milk, and crusts of cold toast. The laughter that had angered their brother must have begun here.

  The table itself was covered with a clean linen cloth decorated with cross-stitched flowers in blue thread. There were crisp blue curtains at the window. A pretty ceramic kettle on the stove. A nicer apartment altogether, Sally noticed, than her own, but, she gathered, a widow’s apartment nonetheless. Another mother who went out to work. The icebox was well stocked with milk and cheese and a small ham. While Sally made the girl a sandwich, Loretta explained again that Charlie was her brother and he was in charge whenever their mother went away. Her mother was a cook for a family in New York City. Charlie, Loretta said, spanked her sisters when they were bad, but never her. She was his favorite, she said happily.

  Suddenly the little girl paused, kneeling on her chair, her chin in the air. Some uncertainty, or perhaps fear, crossed her small face. Sally heard footsteps in the long hall, and then the boy himself appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was a tall, dark-haired boy no older then she, in a white school shirt rolled at the sleeves, a loosened school tie. He said to her, only a little surprised, “Hello, Sister,” even as Loretta flew into his arms, her bare legs going around him. “Hiya, pipsqueak,” he said. His arms beneath the rolled-up sleeves were brown and muscular. He was as big and broad as a grown man.

  And then, over the child’s head, he asked, “What’s up?”

  Loretta whispered, “Sister Lucy is here again. She’s talking to the girls.”

  Charlie said, “Oh yeah?” He lowered the little girl to her feet and then looked at Sally. He was close enough that she could smell the perspiration from him. A scent she associated with the subway or the trolley, with the workingmen who bo
arded late in the day, carrying lunch pails. His eyes were dark blue, and one strand of his thick black hair fell across his forehead. Casually, he reached up to smooth it back. There was a deep dimple in his chin, the trace of a five o’clock shadow, handsome on a boy so young. He was handsome. “You a novice?” he asked her. She said she was just following Sister Lucy today. Learning things.

  He nodded. Put his hands in his pockets and then leaned in the doorway, one foot kicked up on its toe, still watching her. His shoulders were broad beneath the white shirt. He was tall, over six feet, she guessed. He cast his eyes around the room, smiling with straight white teeth. His eyes were the color of deep water. He was as handsome as a movie star. “Sister Lucy’s a pistol, ain’t she?” he said. “Six-shooter Lucy, I call her.”

  Sally saw Sister Lucy herself come through the room behind him. She was carrying her black bag. The two girls followed at some distance, cowering, it seemed, at the entrance to the short hall. They were both dressed now, their hair combed.

  Sally had not realized that Sister Lucy was such a short woman, dumpy, even, in her dark habit, until she stood before Charlie and raised her crooked finger toward his face. He looked down at her.

  “You lay a hand on these girls again and I’ll have the police here,” Sister Lucy said.

  The boy only smiled. He seemed both kind and tolerant. “They were acting up,” he said patiently. “My mother told me to spank them when they act up. I’m in charge,” he added. “They have to learn to behave.”

  “Your mother told you,” Sister Lucy repeated sarcastically, hissing it. “I know your mother. She told you no such thing.” Her finger was trembling. Even her bonnet and her veil seemed to be trembling. She pumped her elbows in her dark sleeves: bellows to the fire of her indignation. “Locking them up all day,” she said, growing shrill. “Keeping them from school.” Her voice broke: “You’ve left welts on their flesh.” Even her jowls were trembling against the tight linen of her cowl. She closed her hand into a fist, shook it in his face. “I know what else you’ve done to these girls,” she said, nearly shrieking it. “Sinful.”

  Handsome Charlie shrugged, uncrossed his legs, folded his arms across his chest, stood even taller. “When my mother is away at work,” he said again, “I’m in charge here.”

  His smile was a kind of sneer, but it was lopsided, too, which made it boyish, even charming. His bare forearms were covered in dark hair. Above the casually rolled sleeves, there were muscles beneath the white cloth. His legs were long. His hips narrow. He said, “Lookit, Sister,” and then paused. He glanced at Sally, waved a hand in her direction. His eyes were deep blue. “These girls ain’t obedient, like this holy one. They need to be disciplined.” He shook his head sadly, amicably. Then he shrugged again and added, “I’m sorry to have to tell you what you don’t know.”

  Sally felt her cheeks burn.

  “You brazen boy,” Sister Lucy said evenly. She had gotten control of her voice. Little Loretta was at her brother’s side, looking up at the nun with big eyes.

  Glancing at the child, Sister Lucy said, “I’ll have the police here if you so much as touch these girls again.” She said, “I’ll go straight to the Monsignor.”

  Now there was no avoiding how helpless, how foolish, Sister Lucy seemed, shaking a fist at him, trembling with rage in her long black skirt and her silly bonnet.

  Charlie reached down to take little Loretta’s hand. “Okay, Sister,” he said easily. “Calm down now. I had to teach them a lesson and I did.” He narrowed his glistening eyes, still smiling. “You can go mind your own business now.”

  “Beast,” Sister Lucy whispered, turning away. She said, “Come,” to Sally, and Sally brushed past him to get through the door. He might have been laughing under his breath. Loretta said, “Bye-bye.”

  In the living room, the two girls were leaning together like victims from a storm. Sister Lucy told them, “If he puts another hand to you, you go over to the convent at St. Ann’s. Immediately.”

  The girls said they would, but Sally wondered how they would go over to the convent at St. Ann’s if they were tied with leather belts to their bedstead. “Don’t hesitate,” Sister added weakly, as if she understood this, too. Her eyes went to the elder of the two, whose hand was once again cupping the mark on her neck. “Don’t let him touch you,” Sister said.

  Going down the apartment house stairs, which were well tended, not a trace of cobweb or dust, Sister Lucy said, “If I were a man, I’d take a strap to him myself.”

  When they reached the street, Sister Lucy said, “Come,” once more, and then turned away from the trolley stop that would have taken them back to the convent. Sally followed her, walking rapidly—“Good evening, Sisters,” people whispered—four blocks, six blocks, until they came to a squat red church with a sprawling school. They passed them both, passed the empty playground, and then climbed the steps of a brown rectory. Sister Lucy rapped at the door and waited on the doorstep with her head down, her foot tapping impatiently. The woman who answered was plain and gentle-looking, her salt-and-pepper hair curled tightly to her head. She wore a calico apron over her dress.

  Sister said, “Hello, Trudy, is he in?” and the woman nodded, “Just upstairs,” and then added, as a warning, “He’s just about to sit down to his dinner. He’s got a Holy Name meeting at seven.”

  “Only a minute,” Sister Lucy said, and the woman, reluctantly, invited the two of them in.

  The vestibule was chilly, despite the June weather, and as dim as winter. There were two leather chairs, thin-backed and slim, flanking an icon of a glowering, dark-eyed male saint. There was a rich Persian rug over the tiled floor. The vestibule held the stone smell of a church, although there was a whiff as well of seared meat from the kitchen. Sister Lucy told Sally to sit, but she continued to stand. She paced, moving her free hand, flicking it back and forth as if she were dealing cards or quickly saying her beads, although the hand was empty.

  Sally had never before seen Sister Lucy expend so much energy on what seemed a pantomime.

  Beyond her, the doorway through which the housekeeper had disappeared offered promise of a warmer part of the house. There was a table with a Tiffany lamp in a narrow passage, and then a high-backed couch and a mullioned window. Sally glimpsed the turning of a staircase, and after what seemed more than a few minutes, she saw the black shoes and the cassock hem of a priest descending.

  The priest was another large man, perhaps even taller than Charlie. He filled the doorway when he appeared—large chest and big head and thick dark hair; a belly, covered by his black soutane, that seemed to precede him into the room. He looked as if he’d just finished shaving. His fair face was flushed around the jaw, a pinprick or two of fresh blood. He greeted Sister Lucy by name and gave a thin smile to Sally. There were black hairs on the backs of his big hands. His eyes were very small in his large face. Sister Lucy said, “A word,” and indicated the passageway behind them.

  The priest held out his arm, and Sister Lucy walked ahead only a few steps before she turned to look up into his face. Sally saw the priest bend to put his ear toward Sister’s bonnet. She saw him glance her way as Sister spoke. He may have winked. Sally looked away. This secrecy on Sister Lucy’s part seemed foolish since Sally had been there herself to see the girls with their wrists tied and the strap marks on their skin.

  She heard Sister Lucy say his name, Charlie. She said, “Tied by their wrists.”

  Sally realized that she could not bring herself to imagine it, that handsome boy—how sweetly he had called his sister “pipsqueak”—wielding his belt like Simon Legree. She wondered if it could be possible, if there hadn’t been some misunderstanding. Perhaps the girls had been very bad.

  The nun’s sibilant whispering into the priest’s big ear gave way to something more solid. “Tonight, Father,” she said, insisting. “I’d hate to have another morning go by. Their mother won’t be back until Sunday.”

  The priest said, “All right, Sister.
” Now he had his hand on her elbow, he was guiding her to the door. “I’ll go over there tonight,” he said. “Put the fear of God into him. As soon as I’ve had my dinner.”

  Sister Lucy said, “Thank you, Father.” But Sally knew she was not appeased.

  It was growing late as they walked back to the trolley stop. Although the sky was light blue, a sense of the coming night was already pooling at the feet of the people going by—“Good evening, Sisters”—pooling along the cobbled streets, along the silver trolley tracks, at curbs and in the alleyways. “A cruel and evil boy,” Sister Lucy said, shaking back her sleeve as they waited for the trolley. “Cool as a cucumber. Brazen.” She seemed to be trembling still, and Sally realized, standing beside her, that they were now shoulder to shoulder. That Sister Lucy, ramrod straight as she always was, as Sally had always known her, might even be shrinking.

  Telling it later, our mother said, “Sister Lucy didn’t scare me so much after that.”

  “If I were a man,” Sister Lucy muttered once more, “I’d wipe that smile off his face.” She added, over her shoulder, as they climbed the steps into the car, “And you standing there making eyes at him was no help to me at all.”

  * * *

  AT THE END OF SALLY’S WEEK with Sister Lucy—on a morning her mother let her stay in bed—the nun came halfway down the basement stairs, pausing when Sister Illuminata and Annie both looked up at her. “If there’s a vocation there,” Sister Lucy said, “I’ll eat my hat.” She shook her black sleeve and touched her back. Under her arm, the basket woven of unblessed palms. Sister Lucy would be taking her turn to beg today. A duty she despised, silently. “I love her like a daughter,” Sister Lucy said with no change in the harshness of her tone, as if love, too, was an unpleasant duty. “Marriage might settle her. Not the convent.”

 

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