With the two big black carriages secured in the narrow hallway of Elizabeth Tierney’s apartment and her babies settled into them once more, Annie and her daughter left the jumbled household each morning for the peace and the order of the Little Nursing Sisters’ convent, where she had been given work in the basement laundry.
Sister St. Saviour had arranged it. Before her last illness, the old nun had slipped a note beneath the feet of the Virgin—via her statue in the convent’s front garden—requesting that sufficient funds be found to pay the girl’s salary. “Somehow, dear Mother.” The women of the convent’s Ladies Auxiliary found the note—they checked the statue daily—and presented the petition to their members. The Ladies Auxiliary of the convent of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, consisted mostly of idle Catholic women married to successful men. As Sister St. Saviour well understood, they felt a particular there-but-for-the-grace-of-God affinity for impoverished young widows.
Out of the funds the Ladies Auxiliary provided, the nuns paid Annie eighteen dollars a week, and fed her, and her daughter when she was weaned, a breakfast and a lunch. It was, all agreed, a fine situation for a widow with an infant. A wicker basket was fitted with towels and a pillowslip, and the baby slept at her mother’s feet while she washed and sewed and helped Sister Illuminata with the ironing.
As the child grew, the nuns added a donated crib, and then a small Persian rug, another donation, to cover a bit of the damp basement floor. There were scraps of cloth and empty spools for the child to play with, and the ducks and dogs Sister Illuminata carved from Ivory soap—an annoyance for Annie, since she had to remain vigilant in order to keep the girl from putting them into her mouth or her eyes, but nothing she could refuse, given Sister Illuminata’s pride in her own whittling and the child’s delight each time the nun produced a new figure from her robes.
The work itself was endless. Every day, donated clothing arrived at the convent, clothing for the poor, which had to be sorted and washed and mended. There were as well the stained bedclothes of the sick: sheets and blankets and pillowcases, diapers, towels, handkerchiefs, all brought home from the households where the Sisters were nursing. In any idle moment, there were bandages to make, worn bed sheets to be sterilized and rolled and placed neatly into the satchels each Sister carried to her casework.
There was also, every week, the routine washing and ironing of the convent linen and the Sisters’ habits, the black serge tunics and short capes—the application of thick starch and the heated iron to their bibs and their bonnets. Whatever troubles the Sisters encountered in their daily work were illustrated by the stains on an apron or a sleeve—the odor of vomit on wool, a spattering of blood across a white bib. What troubles the Sisters’ mortal bodies produced of their own accord were evident in the unending menstrual rags and long johns stained yellow at underarm or crotch. When Annie arrived in the morning, her first task was to empty the overnight soaking bin—the water pink with blood. And then the trip upstairs to the convent kitchen, to boil some water for the first wash, and while she waited, a cup of tea and a bun and a pleasant time of day with Mrs. Odette, the convent’s cook, another widow from the neighborhood, or, if she’d arrived early enough, a laugh or two with Mr. Costello, the milkman.
In the basement, the low-hanging light was dim, the dark brick walls clammy to the touch. All day long there was the sound of agitated wash water, of the wringer’s torturous crank and squeak, the hiss and thud of Sister Illuminata’s black iron. In winter there was as well the bump and moan of the convent’s fiery furnace. In summer, through the high opened windows, the chants of jump-rope songs, the organ grinder, the cries of boys playing ball in the street.
In every season, the changing daylight found its way into all corners of the cellar. Sometimes it was a discouraging gray in the morning, but a buoyant display of yellow and gold by the time the chapel bell was rung at three. Sometimes only the earliest hours illuminated the place, and when evening came a muffled darkness pressed against the electric lights.
At various times there was the smell of wet wool, bleach, vinegar, turpentine, pine soap, and starch.
On damp days, they hung the clothes and the linens from lines strung between the basement’s iron support beams. When the weather was fine, they brought the wash out to the convent yard.
There was, each day, the clear and certain restoration of order: fresh linens folded, stains gone, tears mended.
Sister Illuminata was a wizard with a hot iron and starch, with scrub brush and bleach. On four dark shelves in a corner of her basement domain, she kept a laboratory’s worth of vital ingredients: not merely the store-bought Borax and Ivory and bluing agents, but the potions she mixed herself: bran water to stiffen curtains and wimples, alum water to make muslin curtains and nightwear resist fire, brewed coffee to darken the Sisters’ stockings and black tunics, Fels-Naptha water for general washing, Javelle water (washing soda, chloride of lime, boiling water) for restoring limp fabric. She had an encyclopedic understanding of how to treat stains. Tea: Borax and cold water. Ink: milk, salt, and lemon juice. Iodine: chloroform. Iron rust: hydrochloric acid. Mucus: ammonia and soap. Mucus tinged with blood (which she always greeted with a sign of the cross): salt and cold water.
In Sister Illuminata’s unyielding routine, each item received two washings: inside out and then right side out, then a pass through the mangle, then another soaping, a boiling, another rinse, another wringing. If the garments were to be blued, then a rinse again in cold water to avoid rust stains. Wrung again, then starched, then hung to dry. Sister Illuminata would not allow the courtyard clothesline to be left out in the weather; she tied it up each morning and took it down again at the end of every bright day. She washed the clothespins themselves once a month. With sacred solemnity, Sister Illuminata demonstrated for Annie how a garment should be properly shaken and hung (chemises and shirts by the hem, pillowslips inside out and by the seam, with the wind, never against it). She demonstrated the precise way to sprinkle and roll what was newly dried, and how to pound the rolled fabric in order to distribute the moisture. The ironing was Sister Illuminata’s special domain. She had four different irons of various sizes, which she washed on occasion in soap and water, then rubbed with sandstone and polished, lovingly, with beeswax.