Sister Illuminata leaned over them both, broad in her habit and her apron, which was slightly damp. She put a raw red hand to the child’s fine hair. “Jim,” the nun said firmly, “gets the credit, then. She’ll never be a pushover.”
Later that same day, when the smell of the Sisters’ dinner wafted down the stairs, Annie heard herself say, “Jim would never eat a turnip.” Later still, when a heat wave struck the city, “Jim was never a drinker, thank God, but he’d take a beer on a day like today.” When Sally, growing up, grew silent around strangers, “Jim had a shyness about him, too. The first time we met, I wondered if he was ever going to say a word.”
In the dank basement laundry of the convent, Annie said, “Jim had a good voice, but he preferred a silly song to a ballad, which drove me mad.” She said, “Jim had a friend who wore shoes like that.” She said, “Jim couldn’t abide a tight collar.” She said, Jim was, Jim preferred, Jim told me once.
Mrs. Tierney was full of fond stories about her exasperating husband, but on their morning walks, decorum and superstition kept both women silent about Annie’s loss. The people who had seen him in life, neighbors and friends, lowered their eyes whenever she passed them in the hallway or on the street. Sister St. Saviour was gone. And Sister Jeanne, who knew all, kept all in her heart.
His name, too, then, a kind of contraband. Jim was, Jim preferred, Jim told me once. But down here in the convent laundry, she spoke it as casually as she might have done if he still stirred about in the world upstairs. As if she were still a woman with an exasperating husband, no widow alone with a child. And Sister Illuminata listened, sympathetically, as any maiden friend of a married lady might do.
Sally was six years old when, looking up from a set of paper dolls that had arrived in the donation basket, she asked, “Who’s Jim?”
She was nine when it occurred to her to wonder where her father was buried. Her mother only put her hand to her heart and said, “Here.”
She was nearly eleven when she came home from school with the delightful tale of a schoolmate’s visit to a father’s grave—a trolley ride, a lovely picnic on the green grass. Her mother threw back her head and said, laughing, “Let him come to us.”
The sound of her mother’s laughter always startled and thrilled the girl. She smiled, put her hand to her mother’s broad cheek. Mistook the joke for a promise.
The Ninth Hour
IN THE HORARIUM OF THE CONVENT’S LIFE, afternoon prayers were said at three. Any Sisters who were not tied up with casework or alms-seeking returned to the convent then.
Much later, when the arthritis in her knees got the best of her and her days were spent in a chair behind the ironing board, Sister Illuminata would only raise her eyes to the ceiling and, blessing herself, silently pray, but in the years of Sally’s childhood, she stopped what she was doing at the sound of the bell, dried her hands, rolled down her sleeves, and ponderously climbed the wooden stairs. Annie, finishing up some folding or mending, listened for the sound of the nuns’ prayers, the psalms, the hymn, then for the sound of Sister Illuminata’s return—breath short, beads clacking. And then, as Sister Illuminata settled back into her work, Annie would listen again, hopeful, for another, lighter step on the stairs. On the best days, she would look up to see Sister Jeanne bending over the banister, laughing like a child to find them there.
“Reprieved!” Sister Illuminata would declare whenever the young nun appeared. There was no keeping the resentment out of her voice. “Curfew will not ring tonight,” she would add, pouting and jealous, but also, with the next thought, forgiving the two young women their clear delight in one another. Like is drawn to like, after all, and Sister Illuminata had been young once herself, arm and arm with one narrow, grimy, funny girl, Mary Pat Shea. She could recall the strong grip of Mary Pat’s arm, the boggy smell of her, the freckles and dirty fingernails and shining green eyes, the muscular, lithe, little body beside her own. Sister Illuminata had, in another lifetime, known that same delight.
“Do you need a breath of fresh air?” Sister Jeanne might ask. Or, “Do you want to run out and get yourself a soda?” “Do you want to do some shopping?”
This routine, too, had begun at Sister Lucy’s insistence. In the early days of Annie’s work at the convent, when Sally was still an infant, Sister Lucy put her eyes on Sister Jeanne as they left the chapel after the Ninth Hour prayer. “If you’re free this afternoon, go downstairs and take over with the baby,” she told her. Sister Lucy could insist. “Let the mother go out and catch her breath.”
“Do you mind?” Annie always asked, looking up at the little nun, laughing despite the way Sister Illuminata, jealous and pouting, was abruptly rolling back her sleeves or sucking her scarred fingertip.
And Sister Jeanne would skip down the stairs. “Do I mind?” as if the question couldn’t be more absurd.
With her clasped hands to her heart, holding back her crucifix, Sister Jeanne peered into the wicker laundry basket where Sally slept or, as the child grew, hiked up her skirt to join her on the floor for whatever game she had devised out of soap animals and scraps of cloth and empty spools of thread.
The girl delighted her. In fact, every child delighted Sister Jeanne. She was a practical nurse without formal training, and what skills she had were sometimes limited by her size and her strength, but her way with children was astonishing. Perhaps because, even in full habit, she seemed to be one of them: small and soft-spoken and easily given to laughter or tears, but also with a kind of sly skepticism in her eyes whenever she raised her chin to attend to some tall adult. A skepticism it seemed only the children could perceive, and share. Sister Jeanne need only turn her face from some serious, long-winded grown-up, a parent, a priest, a doctor, even one of the other nuns, to the child in the room and some understanding was established. It’s all silliness, isn’t it?—her eyes alone could convey. Let’s not let them know we know.
Didn’t she do as much for us?