The devil waited at her mother’s heels, his pointed fingertips rimmed with grime, waited to catch her as she moved through her dangerous days, a fruit ripe for the plucking (she had heard the expression in a sermon once). Her mother was in a state of mortal sin, and if she were to die now, nothing would keep her from falling forever into the devil’s arms.
And what then of Jim, Sally thought—as if devising an argument no one had asked her to deliver—Jim, who waited for her in heaven?
Nothing to keep her mother from perdition except, perhaps—perhaps—the indulgence earned for her by her good daughter, swallowing her panic and her pride, her desire to be anywhere else (an urge that made her nerves coil and twitch), in order to remain with Mrs. Costello in her lonely late-morning hours, listening to her nonsense, absorbing her scorn, watching these spare and empty rooms—the heart of her own troubles—fill up with mid-morning light that was the color of urine, the color of bile.
The situation was clear: her mother would not change her ways. Mr. Costello was her “dear,” and even the Sisters seemed helpless before her blithe determination to keep him. Someone had to do penance for her, for the sin she would not give up. Who else but the daughter who loved her above everything?
* * *
THE NUN WHO WAS HERE THIS MORNING, Sister Aquina, had left Mrs. Costello in her chair, wrapped tightly in Mr. Costello’s woolen dressing gown. She’d told Sally to be sure she didn’t throw it off. Mrs. Costello was chilled and running a fever, Sister Aquina had said. Sally watched the nun stir cream of tartar into Mrs. Costello’s morning tea—to help with the constipation, Sister Aquina explained. And then the nun placed a flannel soaked in linseed oil on the woman’s chest. Before she left the apartment, Sister ground two aspirins with a mortar and pestle and instructed Sally to mix them into some of the applesauce she’d brought from the convent so that Mrs. Costello in her weakened state would not have to struggle to swallow them whole. “Just the smooth part of the applesauce, please,” Sister Aquina said. “Not the chunks and peels.”
Sister Aquina was a short, fat tomboy of a nun, with the broad face and the matter-of-fact authority of a cop on the street. Her small black eyes were slightly crossed. She was new to the convent, and so she assumed that Sally came to Mrs. Costello’s apartment every morning to learn something about nursing.
“What we want to avoid in these cases is aspiration,” she said. She was spooning applesauce into a teacup, and then fishing out myopic Mrs. Odette’s famous bits of peel. “And I don’t mean aspiring to find yourself a good-looking husband,” she added. She laughed at her joke, knowing nothing of Sally’s situation. Seeing only her willingness to serve. “We want to be careful that our patient doesn’t get food in her windpipe, doesn’t choke and breathe it in. Aspirate.” Sister Aquina traced a line down her bib, to her dark tunic, indicating her own lungs by drawing a circle under her shapeless breast. “That’s how infection can set in. Lung infection. Pneumonia. We don’t want that.”
Sister Aquina did not stay long. It was late January. All the Sisters were busy in this frozen season. With her cloak on, she put a hand to Sally’s arm, moved her head as if to catch the girl fully with her disparate eyes. “Aren’t you good?” she said, standing at the apartment door. “To be here like this.”
And Sally bowed her head in the old way—the way she might have accepted the praise last year, before her trip to Chicago—as if Sister Aquina’s ignorance of the situation, of the penance Sally was doing and the circumstance that required it, had restored her innocence. As if Sister Aquina’s ignorance made Sally’s goodness, her work of mercy, uncomplicated once more.
While Mrs. Costello napped in her chair, her breaths uneven, tangled with phlegm, Sally made another circuit of the cramped bedroom. The air in the room was a dirty yellow, the ceiling marred by mustard-colored water stains, the seams of the faded wallpaper grown pale brown. Behind the drawn lace curtains, the shades were the brittle color of old paper. The constant hiss and rattle of the radiator was like the gurgle of muddy street water going down a rusted drain.
Sally walked quietly around the bed, which Sister Aquina had left neatly made, around the narrow hope chest at its foot. Casually, she paused to open the chest a few inches—a breath of cedar, the glimpse of folded linen—and then closed it again when she heard Mrs. Costello stir.
She walked to the dresser. The two china-faced dolls were slumped together. They wore similar dresses, long-sleeved and full-skirted, yellowed lace at the neck and sleeve and a vague stripe woven into the faded fabric, one blue, one purple. The doll in the purple dress had an eye pushed back into its skull. The faces of both were shattered with small cracks. Sally picked up the purple one and was surprised to find that its limbs were heavy with sawdust or sand.
Something of Mrs. Costello herself in the doll’s limp weight.
It occurred to Sally, just out of her own girlhood, that with only the slightest act of imagination she could bring the doll to life—poor thing, sweetly smiling, lonely here with her sister on the shelf. But some distaste, for the age of the doll, for the rolled-back eye, made her resist her own girlish impulse to animate the thing, to offer it her sympathy.
“Put that down,” Mrs. Costello said. Her voice, weakly petulant, was full of congestion. “That’s not yours.”
Sally returned the doll to the dresser. “It must have been yours,” she said, approaching Mrs. Costello in her chair, “when you were a little girl.”
Mrs. Costello began to struggle out of her dressing gown, pulling at the lapels, reaching for the flannel on her chest. “I’m hot,” she said. “Take this off me.”
Sally moved to stay her hand. Over these many weeks of sitting with Mrs. Costello, the nuns had taught her that the woman was as easily distracted as a child. “They’re such pretty dolls,” Sally said, moving Mrs. Costello’s hand away from the dressing gown. She was aware of the thin wedding band, the bird bones of her pale fingers and arms, her flat, narrow chest under the thick gown and the heavily oiled cloth.
Mrs. Costello looked up at Sally. The tiny veins that fed her pale eyelids were vivid. “Those were my mother’s dolls,” she said softly. “She gave them to me.”
“Is your mother alive?” Sally asked, and heard herself imitating the voice of the dirty woman on the train. Imitating her pretend refinement. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She blushed at her own phony pleasantries.
Mrs. Costello shook her head. “Rheumatic fever,” she said. “I had it, too, but my mother died of it. I was only thirteen.”
“I’m sorry,” Sally said.
“After,” Mrs. Costello went on, whining, complaining, “I couldn’t go to school again. Couldn’t sit still. Always walking. Saint Vitus Dance. My father grew so weary of it all, he tied me to a chair.” She whimpered a little. “What else was the poor man to do?”
“And you never went back to school?” Sally asked.
“I couldn’t sit still,” Mrs. Costello said impatiently, aware that she was repeating herself, that Sally had been inattentive. “Even the nuns couldn’t get me to sit still. I’d walk and walk until the neighbors banged on the ceiling.” And then she pulled at the lapels of her dressing gown once again, and Sally once again stayed her hand.
“What’s the use?” Mrs. Costello said, her attention fading from the struggle. Her eyes went vacantly to the window. She shifted in her seat.
“I have a pain,” she said softly, her eyes without focus. “I’m in pain.”
Sally said, as any one of the Sisters would have said, “I know.” It was a familiar call and response. Nothing else to be done, the Sisters had told her. Nothing to be done for an imaginary pain, for a woman touched in the brain; a woman determined to take to her bed. “But you got better,” Sally said, aiming to distract her. “You got over the Saint Vitus Dance. You got married.”
Mrs. Costello seemed to consider this. Then she nodded, as if it took some effort to recall. “I did. I got better. I married the milkman. He ca
me to the door and my father said, ‘You’re welcome to her.’”
Mrs. Costello nearly smiled. Sister Aquina had parted the woman’s hair neatly this morning, had fixed two tight braids that fell over the shoulders of the brown robe. The braids made her look like a young girl—there was some trace of a delicate beauty. “We were married on December 8,” she said, and coughed. “In the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul,” and then coughed with more vigor, making her chair shake. Sally put her hand on one of the wheels to keep the chair from rolling. “It was a very cold day,” Mrs. Costello said, coughing through the words. “I was very happy.”
When the fit had passed, Mrs. Costello went limp, as if her arms and legs were weighted with sand. She dropped her chin, let her hands fall to her sides, and cast her eyes out over her thin lap in a wide and empty stare.
Sally had seen some of the more impatient nuns slap Mrs. Costello’s hand when this happened. Some would shake her shoulder and call out her name.
“None of your nonsense, now,” Sister Lucy would cry.
And always Mrs. Costello would quickly revive. Proof, perhaps, that the fit was a sham.
But today Sally waited in silence, a little afraid, but also curious about how long this vacancy would last. A few minutes, it turned out, although they were long, silent minutes, filled only with the sound of the hissing radiator and the traffic in the street, the faint trill of pigeons at the window. Mrs. Costello slowly raised her head again and her eyes regained their focus.
“I am abandoned and alone,” she said.
There was mucus bubbling in her nose.
“Let me get you a handkerchief,” Sally said softly.
She went to the dresser and took out one of Mr. Costello’s fresh handkerchiefs, ironed by Sister Illuminata. She held it to the woman’s nose, held the back of Mrs. Costello’s head as her own mother used to do when she said, “Blow.” Mrs. Costello sputtered into the cloth, childish herself in the way she took Sally’s wrist in both hands as she did so. The handkerchief filled with a wet warmth. Sally wiped the woman’s nose and folded the cloth over. Mr. Costello’s initials were embroidered in one corner. Her mother’s neat stitches.
It occurred to Sally that she and Mrs. Costello both were left out—left alone and abandoned—by the alliance Mr. Costello and her mother had made.
Impulsively, she bent and put her lips to Mrs. Costello’s neat part. The woman’s unwashed scalp was hot, the unnatural heat of a fever. The smell of linseed rose from under her clothes.
For a moment, Mrs. Costello sat still and uncomplaining under the caress.
As Sally straightened up again, she saw a pigeon’s shadow pass across the shade, behind the lace. She thought of her own sacrifice, her work of mercy flying to heaven to repair her mother’s sin.
And then Mrs. Costello’s belly rumbled and she gave up some gas.
“Take me to the toilet,” she cried. “Hurry up.”
Moving quickly, Sally backed the wheelchair away from the window and maneuvered it to the wooden commode, even as Mrs. Costello told her again to hurry, struggling to stand on her one good foot, disrupting the journey rather than aiding it. Once they were beside the bowl, Sally took the woman’s elbow, helped her up, then stooped to grab the hem of the dressing gown. As she leaned down, her ear at the woman’s waist, Mrs. Costello struck her back, saying, “Hurry, you, hurry.” Sally gathered up the heavy dressing gown and the flannel nightdress, raising both above the woman’s knees. The crossed scars at the base of Mrs. Costello’s amputated leg, the gross marks of the stitches, shone like silver. The flesh was puckered at the center, turned in like a balled sock. The bulk of the dressing gown was difficult to handle. It slipped once or twice as Sally tried to gather it up, and then the nightdress slipped down as well. Leaning into Mrs. Costello’s reeking chest, wrapping her arms around her thin frame, Sally managed to gather the skirts of both the dressing gown and the nightgown at the woman’s back, above her pale backside. She maneuvered the woman on her one, hopping leg. Mrs. Costello sat with a small crash and voided—Sally turned her face away from the smell and the sputter of it, still holding Mrs. Costello’s gathered nightclothes just behind her.
Mrs. Costello sat, slump-shouldered. “Sorry,” she said. And then grunted softly, pushing out another splash of urine and foul air.
Sally wiped Mrs. Costello’s pale bottom quickly, holding her breath, nearly bursting into tears herself when the rough paper broke and the wet feces streaked her fingers. She swatted at the mess on her hand with more paper, and then, not gently, stood the woman up, brushed down her skirts, and again guided her back into the chair, holding her breath all the while. She returned the chair to its place before the window.
She wanted only to flee. To plunge her fingers into a bowl of bleach.
“I’ll just go clean myself up,” Sally said. “Then I’ll bring you some broth.”
Mrs. Costello was reaching into her nightgown, pulling at the cloth Sister Aquina had made.
“Empty the commode first,” she said. Her chin was raised—it made her seem haughty. She was pulling up the sodden cloth, hand over hand. When she had freed it from her dressing gown, she put the limp flannel to her nose and then disdainfully dropped it on the floor beside her chair. Sister Aquina’s kind attention.
Then Mrs. Costello pulled the lapels of the dressing gown back up around her neck and said regally, “Don’t leave that mess in here.”
* * *
THE DOG—in this telling there was only one of them—got hold of her skirt, and when she tried to pull it from his jaw, he nipped her hand. She gave him a good kick and was turning to get away when he caught her foot. She cried out and struck him on the head and—snap snap, she said—he had hold of her ankle, her calf. She cried out again, falling into a pole, scraping her face, her poor cheek, she said, against the rough wood, but holding on to it for dear life as the dog tried to pull her down. She heard the women in the street come running. Shouting from the apartments above. A man in shirtsleeves and suspenders picked up a plank—the yard was a mess of junk—and threw it at the dog. Lifted her. All these years later she remembered his strong arms.
In her wheelchair by the window, Mrs. Costello began to cry again.
He carried her home, this man, jostling her raw cheek against his suspenders. Her stockings were soaked with blood. Her shoe was gone. A rush of women with towels and aprons followed them, they surrounded her in her own place. Linen tea towels and aprons of cambric and rough calico, a box of sterile cotton from somewhere. They tore off her stocking. The flesh was swollen and oozing, blood everywhere. The cotton sticking to her wounds. Someone fetched a basin. Someone poured peroxide from a bottle, and she howled. The marks foamed and flamed.
“That’s old news,” Sally said softly. “Let’s talk of something pleasant for a change.” The bowl of broth, grown cold, was on her lap.
Mrs. Costello shook her head. The leg throbbed, she said. Throbbed and throbbed. When her husband came home, he fell on his knees beside the couch where she lay. There were still a number of women in the room. They told him to leave it be, the bandaged leg. They swatted him away with their towels and aprons. The leg throbbed and throbbed and swelled up against the bandages made of torn rags. Swelled up like baking bread. Green pus oozed. The bandages darkened. Her toes grew black. The women flew about the room.
Early one morning, her husband lifted her, carried her downstairs. The milk cart was in front of the door. He put her on the seat. A stream of neighbors following, drawn by her cries of pain and humiliation.
When her husband brought her home again, he wheeled her through the streets in this very chair.
Sally knew Mrs. Costello’s moods. Sometimes the tale of her catastrophe caused her to flatten her lips against her teeth in bitter anger. Sometimes, as now, retelling the tale merely made her weep. Sometimes it was the neighborhood women she condemned. Sometimes it was her husband’s fault for standing back when they admonished him. Sometimes she shook her head
in sympathy and called him a good, unfortunate man—it was the doctors who cut off her leg without so much as a by-your-leave who were to blame. Sometimes there was only her seething humiliation that he had taken her to the hospital in a milk cart.
On this afternoon, Sally recalled Sister Lucy saying that if that dog had been drowned as a pup, still Mrs. Costello would have found an excuse. She had married without knowing the duties of married life. Duties, Sally knew, her own mother understood. Perhaps relished.
And there was some confused pride in this for the girl—another indication of her mother’s power, her endless expertise.
“Whose yard was it, where you found the dog?” she asked. The boredom and lethargy of these long hours was in her voice. She planned to repeat Sister Lucy’s taut reply: You should have minded your own business.
Mrs. Costello waved her hands. Sally saw that she had not resettled the woman’s clothes as neatly as the nuns would have done. Her dressing gown was twisted about her thighs. “I don’t know whose yard it was,” she said impatiently. “Some woman was looking for a man—a man who had beaten a child, tied a child to a pole and whipped him good. She and some others were on the street when I came along. We all went looking into the yards. But only I got bit.”
“Too bad,” Sally said. “But you’re better now.”
The Ninth Hour Page 18