Because of her small size and her talent with little ones, more often than not the casework Sister Jeanne was given was very sad: sick children, failing newborns, toddlers neglected or abused or abandoned. Her expertise was in the eradication of scabies, ringworm, lice, the application of castor oil and poultices, the cleaning of ears and the soothing of tears. Sister Jeanne knew the route to the various Brooklyn orphanages, or to the Foundling Home in Manhattan, better than any of the others. It was often her task to accompany the children there, sometimes from the gate of a cemetery, sometimes from the court or the station house, sometimes from the very room where the poor mother, newly cold, still lay, the gamy odor of death already encroaching on the still air.
Out on the street with her charges, Sister Jeanne could make the trip an enchantment for the trembling little ones, pulling sugar cubes from her deep pockets or leaning down to point out something, or someone, that would make them laugh. She could negotiate the subway stairs and the crowded streets with a sleeping newborn tucked into the crook of her arm. And always—always, the Sister who accompanied her would report to the others—Sister Jeanne made the trip back to the convent in snuffling tears.
What Sister Jeanne struggled to keep in balance was the sorrow she felt at the suffering of the sick and her own perpetual wonder at the miracle of the healthy. Sally was healthy—nine pounds when she was born and strong-limbed and rosy-cheeked as a toddler and young girl—and Sister Jeanne looked forward to seeing her in the basement laundry after a sad day with a failing child or a grieving mother, if only to assure herself that God was, after all, as generous with good health as He was with bad.
She would hike up her skirt and join the girl on the small Persian rug, relishing her plump hands and bright eyes, her cleverness—by four she knew the name of every nun in the convent—her rapid growth; reassuring herself that the consumptive girl whose death she had recently attended was now restored in heaven with this same robust beauty. Telling herself that the poor mother’s wailing sorrow would be transformed, not now, but soon—life was like the blink of an eye—into Annie’s same joy as she took her healthy daughter into her arms here in the streaming afternoon light and said, “I’ll be back in a jiff.”
“Take your time,” Sister Jeanne would say or, quoting Sister Lucy, “Go catch your breath,” which made them both laugh.
When Annie had gone, Sister Jeanne and the child climbed the stairs. (“No, I’ll be fine,” Sister Illuminata might call after them. “Still so much to do. You’ll have to send my supper down.”) They stopped into the pretty chapel to kneel together and say their prayers. They went to the kitchen for some biscuits and a glass of milk, or—if it was far enough before dinner preparations were to begin—to mix up a pudding or a fool. When the weather was fine, they’d go out to the convent yard, where they’d dig in the garden with a spade and an old spoon. When it rained, they sat in the elegant parlor and said a rosary—Sister Jeanne making a fairy story of sorts out of each of the Mysteries—the girl counting the nun’s beads and, more often than not, drifting to sleep beside her.
It was on these damp afternoons, in their brief and unaccustomed idleness, that Sister Jeanne considered Jim.
Sister Jeanne believed with the conviction of an eye witness that all human loss would be restored: the grieving child would have her mother again; the dead infant would find robust health; suffering, sorrow, accident, and loss would all be amended in heaven. She believed this because, because (and she only possessed the wherewithal to explain this to children—trying to say it to angry or grieving or bitter adults only left her tongue-tied), because fairness demanded it.
It was, to her mind, a simple proposition. The madness with which suffering was dispersed in the world defied logic. There was nothing else like it for unevenness. Bad luck, bad health, bad timing. Innocent children were afflicted as often as bad men. Young mothers were struck down even as old ones fretfully lingered. Good lives ended in confusion or despair or howling devastation. The fortunate went blissfully about their business until that moment when fortune vanished—a knock on the door, a cough, a knife flash, a brief bit of inattention. A much-longed-for baby slid into the world only to grow blue and limp in its mother’s arms. Another arrived lame, or ill-formed, or simply too hungry for a frail woman already overwhelmed. There was a child in the next parish with a skull so twisted his mouth couldn’t close, and every breath he took, every word he spoke, even his childish laughter, rattled through dry and swollen lips. Another with a birthmark like a purple caul. Blindness. Beatings. Broken or bent bones. Accident, decay. Cruelty of nature. Cruelty of bad men. Idiocy, madness.
There was no accounting for it.
No accounting for how general it was, how arbitrary.
Sister Jeanne believed that fairness demanded this chaos be righted. Fairness demanded that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insult and confusion find recompense and certainty, that every living person God had made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade.
“You know what’s fair and what isn’t, don’t you?” Sister Jeanne would ask the sick child, the grieving orphan, Sally herself when she was old enough to understand the question. And us.
“And how do you know?”
Sister Jeanne would put a fingertip to the child’s forehead, to the child’s beating heart. “Because God put the knowledge in you before you were born. So you’d know fairness when you see it. So you’d know He intends to be fair.”
*
“WHO’S THE DUMBEST BOY IN YOUR CLASS?” she once asked us. This was in the Hempstead house where we were young. “And if the teacher’s dividing up sweets and gives him only one while everyone else gets two, what will he say? He’ll say it’s not fair, won’t he? If you call him out playing ball when everyone can see he’s safe by a mile, what will he say—dumb as he is in school? He’ll say it’s not fair, see? And how does he know? Did he learn what’s fair from a book? Did he take a test? No, he did not.”
*
ON THE NIGHT OF JIM’S WAKE, Sister Jeanne moved two chairs from the dining table to the side of his coffin. With Sister St. Saviour gone wearily back to the convent, she and Annie alone kept the long vigil. Sister Jeanne took out her beads, but she did not pray, and when Annie reached for her hand, Sister Jeanne found she could put no comfort in her grip. There was the newspaper article Mr. Sheen had held out for them to read, under the rain and the sad lamplight.
There was the logic of redemption, all undone.
Jim had not suffered the indignity of misfortune. He hadn’t caught a flu or stepped off the wrong curb, hadn’t had the pilot go out or the years wear him thin. He had endured no insult that God must amend. No accident. No illness. No unfortunate birth. He had been given his life and he had thrown his life away.
In Sister Jeanne’s simple logic, the logic of her belief, fairness made no claim for him. His death was a whim of his own. His own choice. Who, in all fairness, could demand its restitution? The promise of the Redemption, the promise of everlasting life, of order restored in heaven, could hold no water, she believed, if it could not also be revoked by such willfulness, such arrogance. To gain heaven was no wonder if heaven could not also be lost.