When he was thirty-six, Mr. Costello had married a pretty, blue-eyed girl. Rheumatic fever as a child had left her with a weak heart. The case of Saint Vitus’ Dance that followed left her isolated and strange. Not a year into their marriage, Mrs. Costello was bitten by a stray dog that was foraging in the tangled backyard of one of the tenements. Infection set in. She lost her leg. There followed a nervous collapse, a touched brain, an invalid’s cosseted routine. The Sisters called it a sad case.
Because they had been so often inside his home, the nuns knew there was no pretense in Mr. Costello. They knew he kept his place in manly order—few knickknacks, just a pair of Mrs. Costello’s porcelain-faced dolls on the dresser in the bedroom, a statue of St. Joseph on the mantel—and that he did as much dusting as a man could be expected to do: the top of a bureau, but not the legs; the base of a lamp, but not the shade. They knew the apartment’s one closet was arranged with military precision and the kitchen cupboards were neatly spare—one bottle of bootlegged whiskey, used only for toothaches or colds (the visiting Sisters checked it daily). He kept house, all the Sisters agreed, like a fastidious bachelor. No hint of anything unseemly to indicate otherwise. Or to tell them he was something less than the good, unfortunate man he appeared to be.
The intimacies of bathing and feminine hygiene Mr. Costello left to the nuns, but he cooked his wife a dinner every night and there was never a dish left in the sink or a crumb left on the tablecloth when the Sisters arrived every morning to wake her and give her breakfast. Caring for Mrs. Costello, who was childish, sometimes churlish, thin as a rail, light as a feather, was an easy enough bit of duty, easily dispensed. Because Mr. Costello was up and gone well before dawn, the Sisters could arrive as early as the day required, spend an hour, and then leave the poor woman, refreshed and well-fed, in her chair by the front window, a small sandwich and a glass of milk and a chamber pot all within easy reach. A Sister might stop in at lunchtime or, if Mr. Costello was going to be delayed—if he’d told the nuns that morning, sometimes via only a note left among their milk bottles, that he was driving up to the dairy that afternoon or attending a union meeting in the city—they might bring an early dinner as well, and then get her ready for bed, knowing that the clean linens and the soothed wife that would greet Mr. Costello at the end of his long working day was the Sisters’ own way of telling him that he had their admiration.
*
ANNIE FIRST SPOKE to him in the convent kitchen early on a deeply gray morning with a rain so cold and steady it had kept him behind in his deliveries. He had paused in too many doorways, looking for a break in the low clouds. He had lingered in conversation with a complaining old woman he usually hoped to avoid. Against his preferred routine, he had smoked a morning cigarette in his cart, watching the steam rise from the flanks of the patient horse, reluctant to turn up his collar once more, to head out once more with his milk crate into the storm.
Annie, for her part, had come to the convent earlier than usual, just as the Sisters were going in to morning prayer. The rain had woken her before dawn—no walk with Mrs. Tierney today, and the lack of it made her wonder if she had the wherewithal to get herself out of bed. Sally was three years old, fast asleep beside her. Annie listened to the rain against the windows until the room had gathered enough light to see by, and then she got up carefully—the child was easily woken—and made her way into the kitchen. She meant to put the kettle on, to warm both herself and the room, but when she pressed her nose to the window to see if there would be any relief in the weather, the old smoky odor of the catastrophe arose again. She smelled it on the wet glass and the damp sill, on the twice-repainted kitchen walls, as if the odor of fire and sorrow was contained in the soaked brick of the building itself.
She glanced down into the backyard. Still too dark to see anything but her own reflection. She imagined opening the window to lean out into the rain. Imagined that if she did so, she would feel the sure pressure of Jim’s hand on her waist, easing her away, whispering into her ear in the wordless way of ghosts. And what would he say? Would it be an apology? A pledge? A stumbling excuse, or the smiling, wheedling endearments he had spoken to her so often in the past, from this kitchen table, from their warm bed: “Oh, let me stay where I am a while longer.”
On the day she buried him, they rode out to the cemetery in Mr. Sheen’s hearse. Annie and the undertaker and Sister St. Saviour, wrapped in her black cloak. The nun was as monolithic, as sunken-eyed, as a defeated general.
Defeat was all about them as they passed through the dark streets. Early morning it was, rain and snow. Jim, the empty shell of him, riding behind them in the long car.
What had God been to her until that bitter morning? Father, guardian, comforter, king. All Annie seemed capable of remembering as they drove was a lifetime of negotiations, of pleas—so many of them, until that morning, about Jim. That he would smile at her, that he would come to call. Please God: that he would cross to New York in safety. Please God: that he’d be there to meet her when she followed him.
That he would get up out of bed.
It seemed the single prayer of her married life: that he would get out of bed, go to work, come home—come home with something brighter on his face than that hooded scowl, please God. Please God, let him put an end to those long breaths through distended nostrils, to the sinking into himself, fists closing, for conversations she couldn’t hear. Let him recount for her something that had happened throughout his day that was not an insult, an affront. Let him lose his contempt. Let him keep his job. Let him get up out of bed and be on time for a change.
That cold morning, the cemetery trees were like black lines etched in window frost, the ground brittle with icy spears of grass. The casket was pulled from the hearse. When a plot was available, they would put him in it. She didn’t ask where his body would stay until then. With Sister’s help, she had money enough only for this. She was going to save the deed to Calvary for herself alone.
She touched the coffin, coated now with the fat drops of melted snow. Sister St. Saviour waved a vial of holy water and said a prayer. The three blessed themselves—Annie and Mr. Sheen and the nun—and then climbed back into the car with their clothes damp.
She didn’t hold it against the Church: the miserable morning, the cold, unconsecrated ground, the refused funeral mass, not even the money she’d lost on the double grave at Calvary. She well understood that there would be no rules at all if there were no punishment for the failure to follow them. Like any good mother, the Church had to cuff its children when they misbehaved. Make the punishment fit the crime.
He’d murdered himself and murdered something in her as well.
Who could argue for leniency? Who could expect absolution?