Annie smiled, but when she turned to Sister Iluminata, the old nun was hunched over her ironing.
“And what do you say, Sister?” Annie asked her when Sister Lucy was safely upstairs.
Sister Illuminata shook her head, shook the iron against the board. “I say give God what He asks for.”
Reparation
SISTER JEANNE FOUND ANNIE in the convent’s drying yard. She gestured that the two should sit, and Annie pinned the last cloth to the line and then joined her on the wrought-iron bench that had been tucked into this corner of the yard ever since the convent was a rich man’s house, elegant and new. The story in the neighborhood was that the house had been bequeathed to the Little Nursing Sisters in Chicago fifty years ago, when its owner washed up there, having lost his family’s fortune to drink and depravity. The story was that the man died in the Little Nursing Sisters’ care, and had asked on his deathbed that they take his house in Brooklyn in reparation for his sins.
Sister llluminata dismissed this tale when Annie asked about it. Said the house was a gift from a good man who wanted only to help the poor.
The bench was under a narrow arbor, now overgrown with honeysuckle vine and curling ivy, fitted with a statue of St. Francis. The folds of the saint’s robes were tinted green with oxidation; ivy had grown up around the creatures at his feet. The black leaves were repeated in the carvings on the bench, which were also touched with a blue-green dust. Annie made note to brush down Jeanne’s veil for her before they went inside.
The shade gave little relief from the day’s heat. Annie watched as the nun found her handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from her temples, from the pale down above her lip. That any of the nuns could bear their habits on these hot city days, could bear especially the starched linen at their throats and their chins, filled Annie with admiration—and some pride that she and Illuminata were able to keep most of them smelling sweet, at least through the first hours of these stifling mornings.
Annie had opened her own blouse three buttons more than was modest as she came out into the yard with the wet wash. With the clothespins in her mouth, she had glanced down at her breasts as she pinned the nuns’ summer shifts to the line. She recalled without irony or shame the pleasure of his cheek against her skin.
Poor Sister Jeanne had a sunken look about her. Broad creases were pressed into her face, just under her eyes. She had been out of the convent for a string of days, and she recounted her casework: a widow grown blind had been resettled in the French Little Sisters’ home for the aged, a young mother with milk fever was restored, her baby thriving once more. Those First Communion dresses Annie had bleached and mended were much appreciated by an Italian family of seven girls—four of their own and three orphaned cousins. Although one of the girls was determined to wear red shoes. Mr. Bannister, the old veteran, the old bachelor, had both Sister Jeanne and Sister Agatha with him as he went through his last agony, which had taken four long days. But he had not died alone.
Annie, for her part, said she’d met the new president of the Ladies Auxiliary, nicer and younger than Mrs. McShane. She wanted to raise money through a dinner dance at a fine hotel in the city, not the usual bridge party here at the convent. Both women pulled down the corners of their mouths and raised their eyebrows, their familiar, unspoken conspiracy against the society ladies who did so much good. Fancy-dancy, their expressions said.
Annie knew these women called her “that poor widow” when her back was turned. To her face they said “Annie, dear.”
“Have you had an afternoon to yourself all this while?” Sister Jeanne asked her.
And Annie nodded. “You know me,” she said. “I catch my breath when I can,” evoking Sister Lucy.
Sister Jeanne nodded. The unspoken forbearance the two afforded Sister Lucy was a joke they’d shared since the first days of their friendship.
They were in the shade of the narrow arbor, although bright sunlight was moving leisurely against the white shifts on the line. The back of the convent rose over the yard, the sky reflected in each of the convent’s windows. Sister Jeanne’s white hands were resting in her lap. Annie saw her own work on the edge of the nun’s worn sleeve, the black stitches small and neat. Both women wore gold wedding bands. Annie reached for Sister’s hand, patted it affectionately. Something miraculous about how familiar and smooth it was, despite the years of hard work.
They had been friends for a long time.
Annie nodded toward the building. “Which was St. Saviour’s room?” she asked, and Sister Jeanne looked up, smiling.
“First floor,” she said. “On the corner there.”
Annie knew she’d been told this before.
“When she died,” Sister Jeanne said softly, and with her childish amazement, “there was the most beautiful scent. Like roses it was. I know I’ve told you.”
Annie nodded again. She’d been heavily pregnant with Sally on the day St. Saviour died. Another hot day like this. Sister Jeanne had come to the apartment that morning as she always did, with fresh milk and clean linens and an alcohol rub to keep her cool. There were no tears between them, only laughter, as the little nun bathed her swollen ankles with cool water and the two considered St. Saviour in heaven, imperious and proud, all her pain ended.
It was Sister Jeanne who suggested Annie give her baby the nun’s name in baptism. A formidable patroness for the child.
Wide-eyed, Sister Jeanne had described for Annie that morning the nun’s last breath, the peace of it, and then the odor of sanctity filling the hushed room. The beauty of heaven in the scent, Sister Jeanne had said. Just the smallest notion of it—of what is promised. As much of heaven’s beauty, Sister Jeanne had said, full of wonder, as we on earth can bear.
Annie didn’t doubt the report. Sister Jeanne couldn’t tell a lie. But Annie was inclined to reconcile such miracles with the sensible world. Sister St. Saviour died in July. The windows were surely open—or, if they weren’t, Sister Jeanne, who held on to the old superstitions, would have opened one the moment the old nun passed. Surely roses bloomed somewhere in the neighborhood.
Annie imagined that St. Saviour, who disdained all superstition, would have said the same.
Looking up at the room—whose was it now?—Annie said, “You’re here to tell me I should let Sally go.”
Sister Jeanne said, “Let her try.”
“Did I ever believe I could stop her?”
Sister Jeanne laughed and lifted both their hands. She brought their entwined fingers to her lips, kissed Annie’s knuckles, her lips warm and dry, and then dropped their hands together into her lap. She looked up, tilting her chin so the sun that filtered through the ivy could reach her face.
“I was going to enter a teaching order,” she said, “but when I finished my novitiate, God asked that I go out among the poor, to nurse. My confessor suggested the French Little Sisters. But that’s not the address he wrote down.” She laughed. “He was busy with many things, Father was, I don’t blame him. And so I presented myself here. When I realized the mistake I’d made, Sister St. Saviour said, ‘God’s will.’ So I stayed where He’d brought me.”
“It wasn’t Chicago,” Annie said.
Sister Jeanne said, “It could have been the moon. I’d never been to this part of Brooklyn before. I grew up in the Bronx.”
Annie glanced at the nun. It was as much as Jeanne had ever said about her life in the world. She was no Illuminata, with her tedious childhood tales. Annie wondered where they were now—her people in the Bronx, a mother or a father surely, siblings perhaps—were they all dead or merely forever unspoken of? Was there a difference?
Annie cast her eye over Sister Jeanne’s small frame, the short lap, the childish black shoes, neatly tied, just touching the sparse grass at their feet. She wondered what had convinced her as a girl to be confined to this lonely life of hard labor. What had made her believe she was capable of such long sacrifice—tiny as she was, gentle as she was, no training, no idea what she w
ould find in this part of the world, much less in the hidden rooms of the city’s most desolate? What drove her to think she could endure this life?
“How did your mother feel about your vocation?” Annie asked her.
Sister Jeanne paused. And then said, tentative, “She was happy in heaven, I’m sure.” She raised her handkerchief again, delicately blotting her lips and her chin.
“If Sally goes to Chicago,” Annie said simply, “it will break my heart.”
Sister Jeanne turned her white bonnet toward the convent. The rattle and shout of the street reached them faintly. A garbage can falling. The grinding of gears. In an interval of quiet, Sister said, “I saw him. When Sally was young. Here,” and she bowed her head toward the convent’s windows, lit blue and white by the sky and the summer clouds. “Jim, I mean. In his brown suit. Looking like himself. Solid as stone.”
Annie nodded. Sister Jeanne could not tell a lie. “It was Jim?”
“It was,” Sister Jeanne said, full of regret.
“You never saw him alive,” Annie said.
And Jeanne shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“But you recognized him.”
She whispered, “I did. Poor man.” And she followed this with a sudden breath, taken through her teeth, as if in response to a sharp and sudden pain in her side. “What worse suffering can there be for a soul?” she said. “To be trapped forever in these bodies of ours. No relief.”
There was another spasm of street noise, and then Sister Jeanne turned Annie’s hand over in her own. She bowed her head and placed a finger into Annie’s palm, gently tracing a line as she spoke, like a child enumerating a fragile logic, giving it careful voice.
“What I wanted to tell you is this,” Sister Jeanne said softly, cautiously. “Here’s redemption, see? Here’s forgiveness. Through his child. Through her vocation. Here’s the forgiveness of sin.”
Annie raised her eyes to look over her friend’s bowed head, looked to the winding vines above her. For a moment, an image of him trapped, his body trapped in the tangled shade, flitted across her eyes. A glimpse of his pale forehead, his dark brows, the black corner of his grin.
He’d lost a tooth in the days before he died—how long since she remembered this? His teeth were always trouble to him.
What greater torment for a man whose sin was suicide than to be trapped forever in the body he’d sought to shed?
The sun moved through the leaves. She felt it touch the top of her head, her throat. The pale skin beneath the opened buttons of her blouse. Jim, too, had put his warm cheek to her breast, even on the last night of his life. Sally inside her then, no bigger than a heart.
She took her hand from Sister Jeanne’s. Sat up straighter, looking out across the yard.
“What you’re telling me,” she said. And paused. Sister Jeanne’s face was attentive but weary. It was full of affection. They had been friends for a long time. “What you’re saying is that I haven’t suffered enough.” She paused again. The perspiration was once more beaded on Sister Jeanne’s pale lip. A drop of it, the size and shape of a tear, gathered at her temple, rolled down her cheek. “These eighteen years,” Annie said. “You’re saying they haven’t brought me suffering enough. Loneliness enough. You’re saying I should lose my daughter, too. My own. So that God can forgive him.”
Only a narrow ray of sun, filtered through the black leaves of ivy, caught Sister Jeanne’s white bonnet. Inside its depths, shadow and light, she was smiling, her eyes sunken and drawn and the perspiration sparkling on the fine hairs above her lip. It was the way she might smile at a misbehaving child—the reprimand hardly outlasting the fond absolution. She reached again for Annie’s hand, took it in both of hers. “Oh no,” she said. “Not Jim. I’m not talking about Jim. He’s a lost soul, poor man.” She paused. “I’d never have seen him here if there was any hope of heaven for him.” And she shook her head—resigned to the fact, but still not without pity. “What I’m saying is, it’s so you can be forgiven, see?” And she bit her lip, as if to suppress a laugh, to suppress her own wonder and delight at this turn of good fortune. “It’s your sin I mean. Your soul.”
It was the first Annie ever knew that Sister Jeanne had made note of how she spent her afternoons.
Overnight
IN LATE SEPTEMBER, Sally went with her mother and Sister Jeanne to Pennsylvania Station. An overnight train. There was no money for a Pullman, so she would have to sit up in the open coach, but she was young, as the Sisters were always reminding her. She would be fine.
Her nearly new valise was on the rack above her head. It was secondhand but quite lovely: lacquered beige rattan with caramel leather trim, a gold clasp repaired, free of charge, by the shoemaker who served the convent. It contained only what the Sisters at the motherhouse had required her to bring: six pairs of stockings, six pairs of knickers, three muslin nightgowns without ornamentation, four chemises, woolen gloves, black shoes.
Sally had five dollars in her wallet and fifty pinned to the lining of her purse, to be turned over to the Sisters in Chicago when she arrived.
She sat on a bench seat beside the window. Looked out to see her mother on the platform, her arm through Sister Jeanne’s. They were leaning together, the two of them, Sister Jeanne coming only to her mother’s shoulder. Her mother looked nice in her hat and her gray Sunday suit. The unaccustomed scent of the face powder and lipstick she donned only for a trip to Manhattan lingered on Sally’s cheek. They could have been something from a movie, her mother and Sister Jeanne, they both looked so polished and clean. Sally waved and blew a kiss, and her mother touched her gloved hand to her heart, then lifted it, the way you might release a bird into the air.
Sally looked around the train, felt the energy of its silent engines, poised to move. People were settling themselves. She did the same.
The windowsill was not grimy in the way of subway cars. The upholstery was plush. It was all very lovely. Her mother had packed her a sandwich for dinner and a roll for breakfast. A pear and a chocolate bar. The Sisters had told her that if she waited until the tail end of the dinner hour, she could go to the dining car for a nice cup of tea. She had three books with her: her missal, The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse, and the novel the Tierney twins had given her as a going-away gift. She looked out again. Her mother and Sister Jeanne were still on the platform. The engine gave up a tremendous sigh and then the trainman cried out. The train began to move and the movement thrilled her. Goodbye, goodbye, she cried silently, as if it were a prayer. Touching her gloved hand to the window until the two women had passed out of its frame.
A plump lady with two bulky shopping bags made her way down the aisle, bound, Sally could tell, for the seat beside her. She watched the woman back into it, big rump and dark coat and short struggling arms. Sally smiled up at her, weighing her disappointment at not having the seat to herself for the long ride against the promise of companionship. She was thinking of the Thunderbolt in Coney Island, when the man in charge sometimes lifted a stray kid into your car. The Tierney twins always resented this, but Sally preferred to feel even a stranger’s shoulder against her own as the roller coaster began its climb.
The woman took some time getting herself arranged. She wedged the shopping bags between her knees and the seat in front of them, sat back to observe the arrangement, and then leaned forward to fuss with them again. Each time she moved, her clothes gave off the smell of artificial violets and, just behind it, cooking oil. Then she sat back again. She was breathing heavily, but with an odd rhythm—not the rhythm of a woman catching her breath after running for the train, but the quick, deep, agitated panting of an animal in distress.
Sally glanced at the brown bags, their handles tied together with dirty string, glimpsed the unconscious motion of the panting woman’s bosom, and felt the most peculiar brush of panic—like the wing-stroke of a bat against her hair. It was not, merely, a failure of courage at the start of her great adventure. It was a throat-catching, spine-
seizing fear, as startling as a dream’s sudden misstep, that reflexive start, that abrupt intake of breath.
She turned to the window. The train was making its way through the tunnel that would lead them out of the city, passing through flashing columns of darkness and light. Of course, she had been riding subways all her life. She was as accustomed to being underground as any New Yorker. But that wing-stroke of terror—she actually reached up to touch her hat as if it had been somehow altered—reverberated. It seemed to rattle through her bones. Never before, gone underground, had she thought to wonder about the capacity of the steel beams and the concrete, or the genius of the sandhogs and the engineers, to keep earth and rock and water from coming down on their heads.
She had never before considered the fearful, foolish miracle of moving through this hollowed-out place.
Never before equated its rushing darkness, its odor of soot and soil and steel, with the realm of the dead, the underside of bright cemeteries—the cemetery, for instance, where her father was, had always been, in sunshine and in rain, through all her bustling days as she went blithely down the subway steps or down into the convent basement …
She looked through the train window to the hollowed-out darkness.
She told herself the soul rose, of course, but until the last day, didn’t the body pass its time here, in this dark underside of the bright world? Why had she never thought of this before? Her father’s body waited down here, in stillness, looking much as it had when it last saw the sunlight: same clothing, same hair, the same patient, folded hands. No shoes—someone at school had told her this—and, slowly, of course, flesh fallen away from bone.
And then full daylight broke suddenly upon the train—explosive, thunderous. She may have jumped.
The woman beside her, leaning into her shoulder, breathing on her neck, said, “You headed for Chicago?”
Sally turned to her. “Yes,” she said, grateful for the daylight now at the windows, the orange hue of the late afternoon. “I am.”
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