Through the long night—Annie’s hand in hers, her beads untold—Sister Jeanne studied his still and boyish face, cold stone. She could find no certainty in her heart, or in her imagination, that it would ever again know life.
Now his child, his living flesh and blood, was stretched across the couch in the convent parlor, her arms flung wide, her little hands open, palms up, her fingers flickering with her dreams. She was growing quickly. Sister Jeanne had to struggle to catch the infant still in the fair brows and the closed eyes, gently lashed, the little mouth, so solemn in sleep. She felt—it was a flood, a filling up—how delightful it was to love this child, to find her here, day after day after day, a tonic for every sorrow. A restorative. A joy.
She thought of Jim and what he had thrown away.
The quiet convent parlor, in the hush of the rain, was tinged a kind of sepia—by the hour, by the weather, by the brown velvet of the couch and the room’s dark wainscoting. Mrs. Odette was murmuring to herself in the kitchen. The smell of cinnamon and apples was mixing with the convent’s own scent of incense and old wood. There was some rumble of traffic outside, muffled by the weather.
And then a sudden sound—startling, like a bird hitting the window—and Sister Jeanne looked up to see the man himself, in his brown suit, watching her from the convent’s dim hallway. She knew that suit. She had run a horsehair clothes brush down its length, flicked a bit of lint from its shoulder before she carried it to Sheen’s funeral parlor. She knew the man. She knew that stubborn, solemn, lifeless face. It was lifeless still.
Sister Jeanne by then had sat vigil with any number of bodies, newly dead. She recognized the feral odor that filled the room.
What quickly followed, before Sister Jeanne could even raise her hand to her heart, before she could decide whether to shield the child or offer her to him—a balm, perhaps—was Sister Lucy’s voice, just outside the convent door, unhappy with something, and another nun’s, Sister Eugenia’s, low and patient replies. There was a thump again, perhaps Sister’s toe against the heavy door. It opened, letting a blue-gray, late-day light into the elegant foyer along with the sound of the rain. The two nuns stepped inside, bustling, bustling, shaking their umbrellas and their cloaks. They were arguing. Sister Jeanne, weak-legged, stood and went to them, indicating with one hand the sleeping child, the other placed over her lips. She saw that her fingers were trembling.
The gesture brought a brief pause to whatever the two nuns were fighting about, and in it, Sister Eugenia snatched the black satchel from Sister Lucy’s hand and, shaking her head, went down the hallway, muttering Dr. Hannigan’s name. Sister Lucy then drew her freed arm into her wet cloak and looked at Sister Jeanne with a raised eyebrow, an expression—quite familiar to all of them in the convent—that said, I am smarter than any of you. I am from better stock. That said, You women constitute my purgatory. That said, I will endure it, but not for your sake.
It was well known in the convent that Sister Lucy would have preferred a contemplative’s life. Would have preferred to converse with God alone.
Sister Lucy moved her impatient eyes to the child on the couch. “Her mother’s gone home?” she asked severely.
“Not home,” Sister Jeanne replied. “Just out to the stores. Out to catch her breath.”
Sister Lucy gave no indication that she knew she was being quoted. Her eyes, as was their wont, darted back and forth with her thoughts. “She’s here too much,” she said abruptly.
“Annie?” Sister Jeanne said.
Sister Lucy shook her jowls. “No, of course not. I mean the child.” Her eyes moved again. “A convent child,” she said, “is not the same as a convent cat. She isn’t a pet.” Looking down, she trained her eyes on Sister Jeanne. “She needs a proper home.”
Sister Jeanne was still trembling with what she had seen. Had imagined. Had called forth. At the back of her tongue, something bitter lingered; not fear exactly—hopelessness, defeat.
She knew herself to be a pagan at heart—superstitious, fanciful. It was her most confessed sin. Yet what terrified her now was not imagination but faith. The logic of faith that told her she had seen a soul denied rest.
She touched Sister Lucy’s cloak, guilty and afraid, as if the nun, so serious and sensible, so full of disdain, could right her.
“Her mother needs a proper home as well,” Sister Lucy was saying. “A proper husband.”
Sister Jeanne said, “I’ll pray for it.”
Sister Lucy gave a snort, and a kind of pity—although it was a cold, distant kind of pity, like a bit of cool shade offered by an outcropping of granite—swept across her yellow eyes. A kind of pain.
Her hands remained clasped under her cloak. Sister Jeanne would later learn that Sister Lucy’s wrist had been broken that afternoon by a man with the DTs, that the argument she had been having with Sister Eugenia as they came in was about going straight to the hospital to get it set. Under her cloak, it was already swollen.
Which explained why Sister Lucy did not raise her red finger in the air as she was wont to do whenever she said “Make note.” Sister Jeanne looked up at the nun to show she was making note anyway. “Next time you see Mr. Costello and our Annie in the kitchen,” Sister Lucy said, “make note of what their faces give away.”
Alone
MR. COSTELLO was a quiet, balding man with a ready grin. Polite and hush-voiced when he spoke to the Sisters, but loud and full of good humor when he called to people on the street. He was always offering the nuns extra pints of cream or discounts that he seemed to make up on the spot. Always admiring the “miraculous” cleanliness of the empty milk bottles they returned to him. At the invitation of the Sisters, he attended mass in the convent chapel every first Friday, sitting in the last row with his cap in his hands and his head bowed low.