Sister Illuminata was shrill in her demands, unbending in her routine; any washing Annie attempted during her first few weeks in the nuns’ employ was dismissed as a mere “lick and a promise.” Sister Illuminata had never asked them to send her an assistant.
She was a solid, plain, wide-bottomed woman. The pale skin of her cheeks and her forehead and her chin was crepe-thin; it hung like crepe over the edge of her white coif. Her hands were always a raw, bright red, her right index finger marked with the shining oval of a testing-the-iron scar. Except for the time she spent in the chapel, Sister Illuminata was always moving, her sleeves rolled up, her veil tied back. She was bending over the washbasin or feeding wet clothes into the cranking wringer, or ironing, ironing—this was the area of her greatest expertise—throwing her whole body into it, elbows and back and hips.
*
SISTER ILLUMINATA flicked her wet fingers over the cloth as if to douse a sinner. She thumped the black iron against the wooden board, thumped and lifted and thumped and shook—the steam rising—as if each piece she pressed involved some feat of determination and strength, a mortal struggle. Her elbows flared in the wide sleeves, her nostrils flared in her beaked nose. She called sharply to Annie to say, “Come here and learn something. This is a trick my mother had…” She ran the point of the iron—“See, like this”—along a perfect seam. “My mother,” she said, “was a marvel.”
Her mother, she said, had been a laundress in Dublin. A profession the Sisters of Mercy had found for her when she first came to the city as a young girl. She died of cancer when Sister Illuminata was just twenty. In her last suffering months, it was the nursing Sisters of the parish who offered comfort and care. Sister Illuminata entered their noviate a year later and emigrated to the States at thirty. But a bout of tuberculosis put an end to her own nursing days. She spent eight months at a sanatorium upstate, and when she returned, she was left to live out her vocation “down here.”
Down here, in the basement of the convent, amid the dampness and the rising steam, the baby asleep in her crib, the sheets or long johns hung out on the line, Sister Illuminata called to Annie to say, Come and learn something. She said, My mother was a marvel at this … or, My mother had a trick. She told Annie, Here’s how my mother turned a collar, mended a cuff, starched linen, sized, stretched, bleached … my mother did it this way … my mother taught me this.
The phrase giving way to the stories, as the weeks and months went by: and then my mother left the farm and made her way to the city, where the Sisters of Mercy took her under their wing … and then it was my mother they called on, his Lordship himself being the one whose britches were in need of repair …
And then my mother found herself a widow with a small child, just like you … and then she took me into the laundry with her, just like you do.
Down here, Annie knew, the words were a kind of contraband. None of the Sisters, in those days, spoke of their lives before the convent, in what they dismissively called the world. To take their vows was to leave all else behind: girlhoods and families and friends, all of love that was merely personal, all of life that required a backward glance. The white horse-blinder bonnets they wore did more than limit their peripheral vision. They reminded the Sisters to look only at the work at hand.
Annie imagined how silently the days must have passed for Sister Illuminata during all the years she had labored down here in the convent basement alone, without an assistant, and, imagining this—recalling as well her own loneliness each silent, weary evening—she swallowed her anger at the nun’s shrill demands. She swallowed as well the woman’s insults—a lick and a promise—her implacable routines. Annie turned her face into her shoulder whenever Sister Illuminata was cross, when even a blessed saint would have been compelled to whisper, “Damn bitch.”
And she lied, saying in all innocence, “No, I never heard it,” when Sister Illuminata began again the story of how her mother repaired the britches of a magistrate or encountered a dray horse in the drying yard or saved the life of another laundress’s child who had swallowed a fistful of alum—forty, fifty years ago this was, although as fresh in Sister Illuminata’s telling, and retelling, as if it all had happened just this morning, just upstairs, in the world above their heads.
*
ON AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY SUMMER, when Sally was not yet two, Annie and the nun sat together in silence, the baby on the bit of rug between them. They were sorting through a collection of donated clothes, sorting, examining, determining what could be washed and mended and brought to the poor from what was bound for rags, or, if there was evidence of moths or lice, the incinerator. Because the nuns allowed Annie first choice in this—wasn’t she the poor, after all?—most of her daughter’s clothes came from these donation baskets, and not a few blouses and skirts for herself.
Which may well account for the white wool coat and leggings and bonnet our father so vividly recalled. A winter ensemble too fine to resist and too perfect a fit to save for cold weather.
Suddenly Sally let out a shriek and began to wail, a fist to her eye. Annie dropped the moth-eaten shawl she’d been holding up to the light and went to her knees beside the child. Sister Illuminata leaned forward. The girl was red-faced and screaming. “Something in her eye,” Sister said, and Annie tried to move the child’s fist away. Sally resisted. She was clutching something in her balled hand. “Let me see it, darling,” she coaxed. But the girl wouldn’t budge. She twisted her arm away from her mother, grew desperate, even as she screwed the balled fist against her face. It was a piece of white soap. Annie saw that the smallest of Sister’s carved ducks was on the rug beside the child, decapitated. The girl was pressing the tiny severed head into her eye. “Give it to me, darling,” Annie said. “You’re hurting yourself.” With some effort, she pulled the girl’s fist away from her face, but she could not coax her to open her hand. Sister Illuminata, meanwhile, was fetching a wet cloth. She handed it to Annie. On her mother’s lap, the child was still crying, but still clutching as well the offending piece of soap. Annie put the wet towel over the soap-stung eye. Gently, Sister Illuminata tried to take the soap from the girl’s fist, and once again the child pulled away. She would not give it up.
“Oh, she’s stubborn,” Annie whispered. “She’s not going to give in.” And then she added, “She gets that from Jim.”