The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

  Sally poured the tea and the pale dregs of sugar and alum into the sink. She scraped the applesauce into the sink as well and saw the large pieces of apple and apple peel hesitate at the mouth of the drain. She pushed them through with the spoon, running the water until all of it was washed away. She could not think of the future. She could not think of the next hour. And all of the recent past seemed faded and unreal. She could barely recall her ridiculous plan. What had she wanted, exactly? Why was she here?

  She took the dust rag and the broom from the corner and returned to the living room, where she ran the rag along the two faded lampshades, then across the mantel of the sealed fireplace. Over the statue of St. Joseph with his hammer in his fist, his hand to his heart. From the bedroom, she could hear the two nuns moving about; there was the swish of the water in the basin, the clean scent of the soap, the occasional exchange of brief words, “Another towel, Sister,” “Thank you, Sister,” “If you’ll just hold her there…”

  Sister Jeanne emerged from the room with the basin full of soapy water, but her head was bent and Sally could not see her face. She heard her empty the water and put a few things away. And then she passed through the room again. She touched Sally’s arm and looked up at her. Sally could see that her eyes were bloodshot and her face was drained of color, gray against her white coif and the white brim of her bonnet. Her small mouth was drawn. “Come in for a prayer,” she whispered.

  Reluctantly, Sally leaned the broom against the mantel, placed the dust rag beside it. She ran her damp palms over her skirt. Sister Jeanne waited for her at the door of the bedroom, and then put her arm out as Sally approached, to indicate that the girl should go ahead of her. Sally recalled the way Sister Jeanne had put out her arm as she’d tried to near Mrs. Costello’s bed, blocking her way.

  The room held a new light. At first Sally thought the day outside had cleared, sunlight breaking through the clouds and the window shades, but then she saw that two candles were lit on the dresser. The smell of the new flame mixed pleasantly with the fresh linen on the bed and the lingering scent of the soap they had used to bathe her. Mrs. Costello was as she had been. Her body still and narrow under the counterpane, the slope of her knee, the space of her missing leg. Her hands were now crossed over the breast of her fresh nightgown, small wisps of damp hair prettily framing her face. Her face was as pale as ever, but there was a new grayness to her lips, and her features had grown sharper, more finely honed.

  The china-faced dolls on the dresser were terrible.

  Sally began to cry. She lowered her head. She gave herself over to it freely. She thought of nothing at all, not the last hour or days or weeks, nothing of the hours ahead. Sister Jeanne put an arm around her waist. Sally felt the nun’s small hand press itself into her side, clutching and letting go. Everything she had planned, imagined, hoped for, all her fraught negotiations with herself, with God, with the future and the past, were nothing before this stillness. She could not trace, for the moment, what had brought her here, could not parse, for a moment, what it meant. She simply cried. The scent of candle flame and soap and Sister Jeanne’s habit, the fresh handkerchief the little nun placed gently into her hands. Sister Lucy. The sound of rain on the windows, rattling in the gutters. The still figure on the bed and the scent, too, of death, animal death, a dead mouse behind the wall, encroaching on the room.

  Sister Lucy said, whispering—Sally had never heard her whisper before—“Mr. Costello will be home shortly.” Which meant Sally should go.

  She returned to the living room with Sister Jeanne, still drying her tears. She put on her hat and her coat—it seemed a lifetime since she had taken them off—and then had to return to the kitchen for her purse. Sister Jeanne followed her. She said, “Take a drink of water before you go. Put a little cold water on your face,” and Sally went to the sink to obey. And then as she turned, Sister Jeanne handed her the pocketbook. The clasp was open. Sister held on to the strap for just the extra second it took for her to raise her head, to meet Sally’s eyes. Sister Jeanne said, “You did no harm, dear. Whatever you’d thought to do.” She said, “God is fair. He knows the truth.”

  * * *

  SALLY WENT DOWN THE NARROW STAIRS of Mrs. Costello’s building and walked the sixteen blocks to the hotel. The streets crackled with the sound of rain, and voices, and cars and trucks. Someone shouted, some girls in a shop doorway laughed, a procession of solemn faces under raised umbrellas passed her by, some looking at her, some looking away, and all unaware—she believed, briefly—of the stillness that would overtake them. Overtake their features, their gesturing arms and hands, their moving mouths and chests. She reached the hotel and saw the hurrying figures, coming in and out, making the glass doors flash, Mr. Tierney himself in his beige uniform, a whistle to his lips, his hand in the air, the black street shining like patent leather at his feet. His laughing mouth and thick mustache—as a coin was slipped into his hand, slipped into his pocket—all unaware of the paralysis that would come to them, the sudden stillness, final, irrevocable. She went inside, down the elevator to the employees’ room. She imagined as she changed each of the girls who chatted around her with her head limp, caught in the gentle crook of a dark arm, eased down to a pillow, still. She saw in the tearoom, the calm hush of the place—gentle rattle of cups and saucers and spoons, soft mouthing of cakes and sandwiches, murmured conversation—the dumb oblivion of the human race. A terrible stillness would overtake them all, come what may. A terrible silence would stop their breaths, one way or another, and yet they spooned sugar into their cups or leaned back to take a watch from a waistband or pressed a linen napkin to their pink lips.

  She walked home after work, in the cold darkness, under streetlamps encircled with fog. How would she live, having seen what she had seen? It had been one thing to refuse the convent, to say, “I’ve thought better of it,” after the long train ride showed her the truth of the dirty world, showed her that her own impulse was to meet its filthy citizens not with a consoling cloth, but with a curse, a punch in the face. But now it was life itself she wanted to refuse, for how could she live knowing that stillness, that inconsequence, that feral smell of death, was what her days were aiming her toward?

  Each church she passed was faintly lit at this odd hour of the day. Lent had begun. She knew the statues inside were covered in purple shrouds. Something familiar in their wet stone and shadow as she passed them. Dampness and cold rock. Familiar but comfortless. She walked to the convent. Here the lamplight at the windows seemed dim as well. The nuns would be praying at the weary end of their hard day. She walked to her own apartment—her mother’s apartment—and saw the light was on in the bedroom window. Was her mother in there entirely alone, or was it Mr. Costello returned to her? She had not thought of him all afternoon. Or of her mother’s life ahead. Lilac, lily of the valley. June weather. Now they were free to wed. She tried to let the notion, something about happiness, about the brightness of the coming days, flood her bones, her nerves—the way prayer could sometimes relieve that electric itch to move. But no thoughts of summer could soothe her recollection of Mrs. Costello gone still.

  The violet handkerchief with the remnant of the alum was still in her purse.

  Her intentions, her murderous, ridiculous scheme, struck her as childish now, naïve and innocent. She had wanted to save her mother’s soul even if it meant the death of her own. But she hadn’t known, childish, naïve as she was, what any of it meant.

  Her father knew. Had known it all along, lying in his hollowed-out place underground: a stillness no prayer, no wish, no imagining, no sacrifice could overcome. Of course he would never return to them.

  She let herself into the Tierney kitchen. She had been walking for hours. Tom and Patrick were at the kitchen table under a single bulb, books and papers spread before them. They were both taking night classes. They looked up with sibling indifference when she came in. “We were wondering what happened to you,” Tom said. “Ma thought you’d gone back to you
r mother’s.”

  Once more she slipped out of her hat and her coat, which were now heavy with rain, and hung them on the hooks by the door. She put her purse on the floor and came into the dim light of the kitchen.

  “You look like a drowned rat,” Patrick said blithely, and then, without standing, pulled out the chair beside him. “Take a load off,” he said. “Have a glass of milk.” He leaned back to get a glass from the drain board and filled it from the bottle already on the table. He put it before her as she sat, and then, in the way of siblings, the two ignored her completely as they went back to their studies. She had never in her life been so weary, not even after her two sleepless nights on the train.

  Patrick was explaining some diagram to Tom, something he had already drawn on notebook paper. Tom was running his hand through his hair, making it stand on end, resisting the explanation.

  “Water seeks its own level,” Patrick said. “Don’t you get it?”

  Tom said impatiently, “No, I don’t get it. And saying it over and over again isn’t going to make any difference. What does it mean? Are you telling me water has a brain, a pair of eyes? Does it go about with its arms stuck out like a blind man? It’s nonsense.”

  Patrick leaned over the page. “What it means is…,” he said, and moved his finger across the paper. “Just try to follow. Here’s the aqueduct. Here’s the water tower. There’s the conduit. There’s the valve. Are you following?”

  “I’m listening,” Tom said. “But I’m not following.” In the dim kitchen light, his features were shadowed. He was taller than his brother, and heavier as well. There was a hooded look about his eyes. He was slow-witted and Patrick was quick. This was a given in the family. The source of many jokes, the brunt of which was equally divided between them: Tom for the mistakes he made out of ignorance, Patrick for the mistakes he made out of arrogance.

  “Well, then,” Patrick went on, “water seeks its own level,” and before he could continue, Tom was on his feet. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m through.” He turned to Sally. “You can talk to this parrot if you like. What I seek is some sleep.” He stabbed a hand at the wide kitchen sink. “Turn on the tap if you want to find out what the water is seeking.”

  He walked out of the kitchen, and then they heard his footsteps on the stairs. Patrick shrugged, took back his diagram, and slipped it into one of his books. He began to straighten his papers. Awkward in the sudden silence. “Would you like some more milk?” he asked her. She hadn’t touched the glass he’d poured.

  “No, thank you,” she said. He emptied the bottle into his own glass and then looked at it unhappily, shook his head, annoyed, as if someone else had poured it. As if, with his glass now full, he was forced to remain at the table with her. He lifted it and drank.

  “My mother thought you’d gone back to your own place tonight,” he said, putting it down again and wiping his lip. “When you didn’t come in.”

  Sally said, “No.”

  Cautiously, he added, “She says you’re going back to your mother’s, though.”

  Sally said, “I don’t know.” She was uncertain what Patrick understood about her mother’s situation. She imagined very little. It was hardly something Mrs. Tierney would discuss with a grown son. Hardly something a young man like Patrick would have any interest in. For the past few months, the family merely pretended, by some unspoken agreement, that Sally had taken their spare room in order to be closer to the hotel, although Mr. Tierney had gotten her the job in the tearoom only after Sister Lucy had brought her here, not before.

  She put her hand on the tall glass of milk on the table. She said, “The lady I sometimes visit in the morning, Mrs. Costello,” and paused, “she passed away today while I was there.”

  Patrick slumped in his chair, as if he had absorbed a soft blow. He blessed himself. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Was she ill?”

  “She had pneumonia,” Sally said. And then added, “She was a one-legged woman. They had to take off her leg when a dog bite became infected. This was years ago. It made her somewhat touched.” And she touched her temple so he would understand.

  Patrick drank from his glass again, and then lowered it reluctantly. He searched his memory for something, alighted on it, and then asked her, “Is this the milkman’s wife?” as if he had just put two and two together. He gestured toward the bottle on the drain board. It was clear from his expression that he was immediately uncertain if this was the proper question to ask.

  Sally said, “That’s right.”

  He nodded again. Resolved to set the conversation on a better track. Said, “My mother mentioned how nice you were to go sit with her. It couldn’t have been easy. One-legged and touched in the head, like you said.” And was pleased with himself.

  Sally said, “No, it was not. Not always.”

  Then they sat in silence. Two flights up, his father was snoring. Mr. Tierney could raise the roof on some nights. She saw Patrick glance at her, gauging her appreciation for the sound, embarrassed by it. It occurred to Sally that he was incapable of keeping anything out of his face, his eyes—clever as he was, you could read his every thought if you watched him carefully.

  It was difficult to think of such a face gone still.

  He said, “Did you ever hear my father’s story about Red Whelan? I mean, speaking of the one-legged among us.”

  She said no, and so he told it.

  He took the long way round with the tale, adding, as was his wont in those days when he was the brighter son, everything he knew about the history of the Civil War, the charms of the doorman’s trade, his parent’s storied romance, and that spring evening—dinnertime, the lilac bush at the dining room window not yet in bloom—when Red Whelan, his grandfather’s substitute in the war, knocked at the door.

  And he ended it all with a flourish, indicating with a sweep of his right hand the tin ceiling of the kitchen and the fine five-bedroom house above it, as if the house, the brick and stone of it, proved the validity of all he had told her. As if the tale itself, only talk, only breath on air, had nevertheless brought them both to this solid and irrefutable present where they were alone together in the middle of the night, alone and awake and—true for him, at least—in love.

  He gestured widely with his right hand at the end of all his talking, because in his left he held Sally’s thin fingers. They had, at long last, grown warm in his grip and he was reluctant to let them go.

  Grace

  OUR FATHER SAID, “After that, your mother’s life went from black-and-white to color. In my humble opinion.”

  Her mother’s wedding in June. Although it was a brief weekday ceremony in the empty church, still there was lilac and lily of the valley. And then the shedding of those two apartments—one thick with paint and repaint, the other as sparse as a monk’s cell. They bought a brownstone in Liz Tierney’s neighborhood. Mr. Tierney himself providing a generous loan out of his “reparations.” Then—“just under the wire,” our father said, “all kinds of wires”—Annie, at forty-eight, giving birth to another daughter on a bright morning. Grace, they called her.

  Sally pushed the child in the perambulator when Annie went back to the convent laundry to help out—there had been another young widow hired while Annie was in confinement, another young widow with a child who played on the floor.

  Patrick Tierney joined her in these walks whenever he could—reminiscing, even then, about the charmed lives they had led as children, taken out every morning by their two mothers. The two empresses, he called them. Sally told him those days, her days as a convent child, were a pale dream when compared to the life she now lived: in a tall house with a baby sister and a mother who knew some leisure. And a father of sorts. Mr. Costello never could look her straight in the eye, but the apology he seemed always on the verge of offering made him both tongue-tied and tender in her presence. He grew dear to her.

  The courtship that began on the long night that Patrick Tierney had talked and talked in his mother’s kitche
n didn’t end until Grace headed off to school, and he finally found the courage to propose.

  Sally was mourning the loss of the little girl’s steady presence in her days when he asked her, “How about some babies of your own?”

  As inelegant a proposal, our father said, as any man has ever made.

  * * *

  WHEN OUR FATHER WAS VERY OLD—we were growing old ourselves—he told again the story he had told her that wet night, the story of his grandfather’s funeral, the train ride, the Irish maid behind the screen.

  If your mother hadn’t come back from the nuns, our father said, that’s probably the girl I’d have married.

  He remembered once more his father’s chestnut mustache and his trim suit, his flask of whiskey. And then his father’s tears in the dark hours of that dreadful night. Love’s a tonic, his mother had said, not a cure.

  Old Red Whelan.

  We were gathered in our father’s room. His own lifetime across a dozen different tenements, a fine house with five bedrooms, the tumbledown site of our own happy childhoods, now compressed into a bedroom and a bath and a small kitchenette, his days now confined to the high-rise facility he had selected for himself after our mother died, selected with a bachelor’s care: something simple and sparse and his alone.

  He had begun to remind us, without the least prompting, that he’d had a good life, repeating the tales of his crowded childhood, his elegant father, his mother, who was as sharp as a knife.

  Our mother, who thought to be a nun, but then thought better of it. “St. Saviour, you know, was her baptismal name.”