Everything was as the prioress had promised: steel door with a sheen of moonlight, wide stone step for the leaving of deliveries, donations, and foundlings. Crank like the handle on a pepper mill below a plaque that bore the duplicitous suggestion turn. As my grandfather raised his hand to knock, a bolt slid back and the door swung inward. In the open doorway, surrounded by shadow, a round face hung pale and disembodied, a full moon painted on a theater drop.
“Mother Mary Joseph?”
The face twisted with amusement, annoyance, or disdain. Its owner drew back a step, and my grandfather saw that she was barely out of her teens and likely nobody’s mother in any sense of the word. It was the flowing brown scapular that had made her face seem to hang bodiless in the dark. The scapular gave off a clean smell of lavender and steam. The young nun invited him in with an awkward chopping gesture, like someone trying to wave away a bee. He stepped over the threshold of the Carmel.
Snow shovels, sandbags, a hand truck, rolls of strapping tape, some old bicycles, all labeled, everything stacked on shelves or hung from hooks. A menagerie of overshoes, Wellingtons, and galoshes. And a second nun, an ancient woman, swarthy and whiskered and crooked like a finger. The moment my grandfather came through, this tiny personage hurled herself at the heavy door and shoved it to, and the young nun drove home the deadbolt. With the breach sealed, the air in the Carmel’s basement corridor seemed to thicken with silence. It was like putting in a pair of earplugs. You could hear yourself swallowing, the click of your neck bones. The nuns slid past him, keeping their eyes downcast, away from the service entry.
“I’m here to see my wife,” my grandfather said.
His voice was a blare, a racket. He started to apologize, but the nuns were moving away from him down a hallway of painted cinder block. Bare bulbs, a green and white chessboard of linoleum polished to a high shine, as from constant sweeping by the hems of habits. The nuns were heading toward a stairwell at the far end. They went with a kind of slow urgency, like they were carrying iron kettles full of boiling water. At the bottom of the stairwell they stopped. This was as far as they planned to travel in my grandfather’s company. The old nun unbent one gnarled hand and uplifted its palm. My grandfather nodded; pointlessly, since they had yet to look at him. He started up the stairs. The unspoken apology lingered at the tip of his tongue.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he reached the first-floor landing.
The prioress was waiting for him, a handsome woman tented in a great volume of brown serge like a pylon planted in the doorway to block his path. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper yet not the least bit soft. It carried. It expected to be heard.
“Are you now?” she said. “And why would that be?”
She had three inches and thirty pounds on him, and she looked him right in the eye. She wore a pair of men’s eyeglasses, circular black frames with thick lenses.
“For the intrusion,” my grandfather said. “For the late hour.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. I told you to come.”
He followed her down another hallway. The flooring here was some kind of hardwood, spotless and redolent of beeswax. Her habit trailed the same good smell of serge freshly laundered and ironed. She led him past unmarked doors, a radiator, a statuette of some naked martyr in ecstasy or torment, a framed portrait of a beautiful nun interrupted, while writing in a book with a quill pen, by the appearance of a giant human heart in the blue sky over her head. The airborne heart was being pierced by a giant arrow; maybe she was writing about that. The pipes of the radiator rang with steam hammers, and the hallway was uncomfortably warm. Down toward the end of the hall was a door with a tin plaque that read infirmary, black letters on white enamel.
“Wait,” the prioress said. Again she interposed her body between my grandfather and the place where he needed to go. She opened the infirmary door enough to look in, and gave a little grunt, somewhere between enlightenment and annoyance. She closed the door and turned to face my grandfather. Behind the lenses of her eyeglasses, the look in her eyes was compassionate without being friendly. “Come with me, please.”
“Is she in there?”
“Yes. Come with me.”
“Sister—”
“Please.” She was pointing to the next door down the hall. It stood ajar. “You have a decision to make and right now too little information for making it.”
By chance or instinct, she had hit on the type of reasoning that could move my grandfather. After a moment of hesitation, he gave in and followed her into the room next to the infirmary. It was unmarked. She switched on a bare light overhead, revealing a desk and two bentwood chairs, a tall shelf crowded with dull-looking texts, an empty mesh wastebasket, and a metal filing cabinet. The surface of the desk was bare but for a blotter, a dreadnought telephone of the 1930s, and a framed photograph of that era’s pope sitting smugly on a throne, wearing a hat that looked like a white yarmulke. My grandfather took the seat across from hers.
“It’s a very long time, I’ve no doubt, since a man set foot in this room,” she said, her tone disapproving and a touch melancholy. “Ordinarily you and I ought to be separated by a screen of some kind.”
“Is that the information I’m going to need to make my decision?”
The smart remark seemed to take them both a little by surprise. The prioress looked at him through half-lowered eyelids. “Maybe so,” she said mysteriously after a moment. “Now, I gave your wife some tea.”
“You mentioned that.”
“Valerian tea. It has sedative properties.”
“Yes.”
“And now she’s gone and fallen asleep.”
“Ah.”
“She was wrung out. I know you’re anxious to see her, my friend. But tonight we must let her sleep.”
“Sister—”
“Of course it’s inconvenient, you came all the way over here, and I’m sure you’re very concerned. Of course you are. I see it on your face. But you’ll agree, won’t you, that it would be an unkindness to wake her? Please. Go home. Come back in the morning or as soon as you can tomorrow. We’ll look after her until then.”
“Sister, I, uh, truly, I appreciate the concern and the care you’ve already taken with her. But I just want to take her home. Tonight. Now.”
“I see. And are you sure that she’ll want to go home with you?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Don’t take offense, please. I may be a nun, but I am also a woman and thus very sure that I know much more about men in general and husbands in particular than you do. My question was reasonable. If she wants so very much to be at home with you, then why isn’t she there at home with you right now?”
It was a fair question, he had to admit.
“She went out, she, uh, left. She was upset.”
“Friend, let me tell you something. Your wife wasn’t ‘upset.’ She was out of her cotton-picking mind.” She seemed to listen to the echo of the phrase as it faded. She looked satisfied by the sound of it. “Did you actually see her, did you witness her behavior, at any point this evening?”
“No.”
“Did you hear her? Did you hear the language that came flying out of her mouth?”
“I was at work,” my grandfather said. “When I got home, she had already left, I didn’t realize right away.”
“I see,” the prioress said. “Listen, do you know how I found you tonight? How I happen to know your name, how I came to have your telephone number?”
“I assumed . . . I figured she asked you to call.”
“She did not say one word about you, as a matter of fact. Not in my hearing. I knew your name because, hmm, when was it, maybe two or three months back, your wife left a check for five hundred dollars in our charity box. Drawn on your joint checking account. I never cashed it. It was so much money. I felt it might be taking advantage. In any case, I kept the check. Your name was printed on it. That’s how I knew how to reach you.”
“You’re saying she’s been here before.”
“Your wife has been coming to our special ‘Sisters in Prayer’ service, it’s open to all women of faith, one Sunday a month for, oh, it must be a year now.”
The compassion that had never entirely left her eyes, even when she was exercised and aggravated with my grandfather, now seemed to give way to outright pity.
“You didn’t know,” she said.