Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “My mother died when I was a child,” Nora said, as if Bridget might not know.

  “Right.” She was making a mess of this. “I just meant you must have missed her then. You never talked about her much.”

  “I never had a lot of time to think about it,” Nora said. “I suppose that was a good thing.”

  “Maybe. I’ve been thinking a lot about mothers and daughters. Well, mothers and babies, I guess. Because…”

  Nora looked annoyed now. “I was trying to tell you something.”

  “Oh. Okay. Go ahead.”

  “Well.” Nora tapped the tips of her fingers against her thumbs. “What was it? Oh yes. Do you remember my sister?”

  “What?”

  “My sister. Theresa. She goes by some other name now.”

  She said it all as if Bridget had merely forgotten.

  Bridget tensed. “What are you talking about? You don’t have a sister.”

  “Yes I do.”

  Her mother was having a breakdown. Or maybe this was the beginning of dementia, triggered by grief.

  Bridget spoke slowly. “No, Mom, you only had a brother. Martin, in Ireland. He died. Remember?”

  “I haven’t lost my mind, Bridget,” Nora said. “I’m trying to tell you something. I had a sister. Or, I still do have one.”

  “Back in Ireland?”

  “No. She’s here. We came over from Ireland together. She’s a nun. She lives in a convent in Vermont.”

  Bridget looked toward the doorway. It was too strange an admission. She didn’t know what to think. She wanted to get up and leave, or shout for John or Natalie to come in and tell her how she ought to feel.

  Instead, she asked, “Why have I never heard of this person?”

  “I took you to see her once, when you were kids.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  Nora frowned. “We had a falling-out years ago. But I called her yesterday and it seems she may be coming here today. I just wanted you to be prepared.”

  Bridget sat back in her seat.

  She had long known that in this family, the truth got revealed belatedly, accidentally, drunkenly, or not at all. But still, she felt hurt. She remembered now, the image her father had put in her head, a strange sort of untruth that had been more real to her than the flesh and blood mother standing across the room. A young Nora on a boat to America. So courageous. Alone completely.

  But Nora hadn’t been alone.

  Bridget thought of what Patrick had once said about their mother. She has secrets of her own worse than that. She hadn’t asked him what he meant by it. Maybe she didn’t want to know. She wished he were here now to tell her. That letter she had found in the basement as a kid resurfaced, as if it were folded in her lap.

  “A sister,” she said.

  Nora seemed relieved to be understood.

  “Yes.”

  Bridget felt protective of her mother. Why would this sister want to show up now, at Nora’s lowest moment? The fact of her coming didn’t seem to be a comfort. And yet Nora said she had called her. Bridget wanted to ask what happened between them. But from her mother’s tone, she could tell that there would be no more discussion. Nora giveth, and Nora taketh away.

  Conversations with her children had never been a way of explaining the complexities of life or instilling vital wisdom, but rather the shortest possible means of shutting them up. When they were kids, if they had a problem, be it a splinter or a broken arm, she’d tell them to offer it up. If Bridget complained that one of her brothers, or someone at school, had wronged her, her mother would say only, “God is not your lucky rabbit foot.”

  Once, John asked why they hadn’t seen their uncle Matthew and aunt Joanne in months. Nora laughed, as if it should be obvious. “They live all the way in Saint William’s and we’re in Saint Margaret’s.” No one said out loud that the parishes were both in Dorchester, a mile apart.

  Sex was the greatest mystery of all. It never got mentioned in any way.

  When Nora was pregnant with Brian, Bridget asked where babies came from.

  Her mother didn’t even glance up. “You buy them at the store.”

  Bridget thought this explained a lot about the Rafferty children. Why Brian had never introduced any of them to a girl, not even his prom date, whom he insisted on picking up alone without allowing Nora to take a single photograph. Patrick always had a different woman by his side but never the same one twice. And he never brought them home. Only John did that—a long line of acceptably preppy Catholic girls, ending with Julia, the child of two agnostics, something Bridget knew must plague her mother, though Nora never said so.

  Just one more thing she didn’t say.

  It was why Bridget couldn’t say what she needed to now. Maybe she shouldn’t need the approval of someone who refused to see her or to let her in. It was easier to forge ahead with your mother’s blessing but insane to delay your life waiting for it, if the chances were good that it was never going to come. Loving and knowing weren’t the same.

  “What did you want to tell me?” Nora said after a while.

  “Nothing. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Part Six

  1975–1976

  16

  ON TUESDAY MORNINGS while the children were at school, Nora attended the Legion of Mary until eleven-thirty. But on the first Tuesday in May she decided to skip it just this once to get an early start on her shopping.

  She was to host a christening party the following Sunday and there was lots to do. The babies, twins—a boy and a girl—belonged to Charlie’s cousin Fergal and his wife. Fergal had lived with Nora and Charlie when he first came to America at eighteen. He and Nora had gotten into it a time or two, when he stumbled in drunk on a Saturday night, riling up the boys, telling them ghost stories, daring them to sneak a slice of cake from the kitchen.

  But now Fergal was twenty-five. All grown. He had found himself a lovely girl.

  Everyone said Nora would be well within her rights to sit this party out, since she herself was seven months along. She wondered if that was all of it, or if they were thinking too that she had her hands full enough with Patrick.

  She insisted, of course. She had once been so shy, a stranger in her husband’s family. But in time, she had found her place. When Mrs. Quinlan got too tired for the job, Nora took over as the hostess, the one who always had her refrigerator stocked and her front door open. In the early days, something usually went wrong—she overcooked the turkey, or the freezer gave out and the ice cubes melted. But now she could throw a party with her eyes shut. During Lent, she ran the fish fry at the church on Friday nights. She planned the Easter egg hunt for all the children in the parish. Nora hosted birthdays and Christmas Eve. So many evenings, when she had planned to get the children bathed and into bed early, dissolved into hours of singing and drinking in the kitchen, Charlie’s people filling every corner.

  There were moments when she longed for quiet. Nora dreamed of a house far from here. Every Sunday, she looked at the real estate offerings in Hull. Months ago, she tore a listing from the newspaper and taped it to the bedroom mirror. A black-and-white picture of a black-and-white colonial, a sprawling front porch. Four bedrooms, three baths. A sliver of an ocean view from the window at the top of the attic stairs. The house on Peachtree Street was like something from a movie. It spoke to her of a certain promise of American perfection, of Donna Reed and apple pie. She checked every weekend that it was still for sale. As she got ready each morning, Nora thought, Maybe someday. It was only a daydream. They could never afford it.

  Since they were married, they had lived as frugally as they could manage. They never went out to dinner or took a vacation. Her children brought a tuna-fish sandwich to school each day, even though they begged her for fifty cents to buy the hot lunch. They only had the one car. When Charlie finished work, he would phone home, let it ring three times, and then hang up to save the price of the call. Having received the signal, No
ra would retrieve him.

  Now there would be another child and all the costs that went along with that.

  Nora was embarrassed when she found out she was pregnant again. She was almost forty. She had no business having another baby. She had been positive Bridget was their last. She gave away the crib, the mobile, the pram. It had been ten years since she’d washed baby clothes, since she’d smelled the bitter loveliness released by a bowl of Pablum as she stirred warm milk into the papery flakes.

  The doctor who delivered John and Bridget had retired. Nora went to see his replacement. When the man walked into the room, she assumed he must be someone’s teenage son. Once he introduced himself as the doctor, she considered running away.

  “Before we take a look, I’ll ask you just a few questions,” he said. “When was your first pregnancy?”

  Nineteen sixty-three, she thought.

  “Nineteen fifty-eight.”

  “Seventeen years ago!” he said. “A lot has changed since then. And you have three children altogether, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “All born here at Beth Israel?”

  “My first was at Saint Margaret’s.”

  Everyone in Dorchester had her babies there. But Nora could never set foot in Saint Margaret’s after Patrick. Charlie’s family teased her for acting high and mighty, too good for the local hospital.

  The unwed mothers’ home where Theresa had spent all those months still stood on Cushing Avenue. Whenever she passed by, Nora held her breath the way she had when she passed a graveyard as a child.

  “Have you given any thought to Lamaze?” the doctor asked. “Most of our patients find it very relaxing.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” she said.

  “And your husband. He was with you for the delivery last time?”

  “My God, no.”

  “But this time he will be,” the doctor said, as if leading her to the conclusion.

  The thought of Charlie in the delivery room. He’d faint. He’d end up being admitted to the hospital himself.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she said.

  “Give it some thought. It’s what we recommend these days.”

  She laughed about it later with Kitty and Babs. But when she mentioned it to Charlie, he surprised her. He said he’d like to be there. Nora was still thinking it over. While she labored with Bridget, Charlie had been at the Eire Pub with his brothers. It seemed a better place for him.

  —

  Just as she was headed out the door to the market, the telephone rang. Nora realized she’d made a mistake picking up when she heard Babs’s voice on the line. Babs never stopped talking once she got started.

  Today she was on a tear about the busing.

  She and Lawrence had moved to South Boston years ago. They bragged about how wonderful a place it was, as if it were a foreign country, not just another section of the city, five minutes from where Nora and Charlie lived. They were so close together that Patrick was zoned for South Boston High School and went there now, with Babs’s oldest, Conor.

  “The school year is practically over, and they’re still out there, protesting,” Babs said. “Everyone needs to calm down. Those policemen, letting their horses just do their business right in the street, never bothering to pick it up. It’s unseemly.”

  Nora stifled a laugh. Boston caught up in a race riot, and Babs was worried about manure on her shoe.

  Though she knew it wasn’t funny. In the past year, she had seen this city at its worst. She had come to know it in a different way. Nora went and had lunch with Babs at her place on the first day of school and when she walked out, an angry mob had filled the streets. They were burning Judge Garrity and Mayor White in effigy, dummies made to look like them strung up on lampposts.

  Boys as young as her John was were out there throwing rocks at state troopers and buses full of children. Nora worried about Patrick. She prayed he would not get caught up in the fervor like so many others had, unaware what they were even fighting for.

  Babs wouldn’t have to worry about her Conor. Nora never told her about her fears. The only person she told was her sister.

  When she first learned that Theresa had gone to the abbey, Nora saw it as a pose, something she was hiding behind. When, after years of silence, Theresa asked her to bring the children there, Nora half assumed her sister had only invited her because she wanted to be talked out of staying, and that she would be leaving with Theresa in the passenger seat. The prospect had terrified her.

  But when she saw her in her habit, Nora was struck by it. That, and the way Theresa spoke. She seemed so mature. She seemed serene. The anger Nora had felt, the speeches she had given in her mind, were irrelevant. She wasn’t angry anymore. Selfishly, she felt relief. Her sister was no threat to her now.

  In the years since her visit to the abbey, they had written frequent letters. They talked in something close to the familiar way they once had. Nora looked forward to the envelope in her mailbox—the abbey’s signature image, the same one printed on the Miraculous Medal, stamped on the back in purple ink, a phrase in Latin looping around it.

  When Patrick was eleven, she made the mistake of telling Theresa that she was fed up with him. How the discipline that left Bridget and John quaking had no effect whatsoever on him.

  In her letter, she told Theresa how she was walking home with the shopping one evening when she heard laughter overhead. She looked up to see Patrick and Michael Ferguson running from one rooftop to the next, jumping the narrow distance between them. Her chest locked. She wanted to scream up at Patrick to stop, but she feared that her voice would startle him and he would lose his footing. Nora was trapped there on the sidewalk in a state of terror. As soon as he was on the ground, she dragged Patrick home and sent him to his room, where he was to remain for a week.

  She had shared it as just a story, the exasperation of motherhood. When she got a letter back, her hands shook as she read it.

  Dear Nora,

  Try not to be hard on him if you can manage. I know we have both sacrificed so much for Patrick, and that your love for him is enormous. Please know that I pray for him every day.

  Nora hadn’t realized until then that Theresa must still see Patrick as her own.

  She prayed for him. How nice.

  Nora wanted to write back that she prayed too. In addition, she had spent years changing diapers, tying shoes, stepping on the sharp edges of tiny toys, telling small people, and then not so small ones, what they could and could not do with their time. Motherhood brought with it so much repetition. She marveled at the sandwiches alone. She had made thousands by now. Tens of thousands.

  Her children were there in the dark half-moons beneath her eyes, a product of sleeplessness brought on by colic, by strep throat, by a teenage boy who’d snuck out of his room again. Her back ached from carrying infants and toddlers all over creation. On her right hand was a spot that looked like crinkled Saran Wrap, the remains of a burn from when Bridget knocked a scalding cup of tea over at breakfast. Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.

  After that letter, she was less forthcoming with Theresa for a while. Nora sent her sister Patrick’s school picture each fall, along with pictures of the other children. But she did not share the details of his life, besides the generic—she did not say that she made her sons wear jackets and ties for school picture day, even when they begged and cried and said no one else dressed up like that anymore. She said Patrick liked hockey and baseball; that his best subject was math; that she had baked him a birthday cake with a B in the middle and black and gold icing, a Bruins theme.

  They went on like this for years, Nora keeping the darker parts to herself.

  But when Patrick got thrown out of Saint Ignatius last year, she was so stunned that she ceased with the pleasantries and wrote to Theresa to say how worried she was. The priest in charge, Father McDonald, said he had never known a child so obstinat
e.

  Nora had walked in on them, seen the scuffle herself, or else she never would have believed it. She only drove to pick Patrick up that day because of the rain. He was getting over a cold. She didn’t want him walking in bad weather. She wasn’t planning to get out of the car. She had her foam rollers in, beneath a silk scarf.

  At three, she watched as the flood of emerging children turned to a trickle. No Patrick. Fifteen minutes later, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, Nora decided to go look for him.

  She climbed the steps, opened the school’s front door. She followed the long linoleum corridor toward the office, hoping she could ask the secretary to have him paged. There was no one at the desk, but there was a bowl of butterscotch candy. Nora was just reaching for one when, through a door that opened into an office, she saw the principal, Father McDonald, grabbing her son by the throat with both hands, holding him up so that his feet dangled off the floor.

  The priest’s face was covered in sweat.

  Nora ran in, and he released Patrick at once.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you what your son has done,” he said, wiping his hands on his slacks.

  Father McDonald said he had given Patrick detention and, in response, Patrick spat right in his face.

  “He’s lying!” Patrick yelled, and she was mortified. It was the first and only time since he was an infant that Nora thought, This boy is not my creation.

  Patrick was expelled on the spot.

  She didn’t dare tell Theresa that he spat in a priest’s face. Nora couldn’t bring herself to write the words. But she told her all the rest.

  Theresa called her on the telephone in response, for the first and only time. She was supportive and kind. She had become a good listener. She had grown up, Nora thought. Theresa said to remember that Patrick was a good boy; that she was talking to God on his behalf and all would be well in the end.

  Nora now told her sister things for her own sake, but she did it for Theresa’s as well. Theresa could never experience the simple pleasures of life. She had banished herself from the world as a sort of punishment. Sometimes Nora thought the right thing to do would have been to help her find a way to leave the convent. But Nora was too afraid. She couldn’t undo what had happened. She couldn’t give Patrick back. So instead, she tried to remind Theresa that all lives had their challenges.