And Great-aunt Rose, still a child, holding his dinner in a covered dish.
When we were teenagers, brooding in our bedrooms, brooding or hungover, or just sleeping through an afternoon, as our mother used to do, our father would complain, his voice annoyed, bordering on angry, but amused also, because he, too, had been a reader, a brooder, and the phrase had been his own father’s refrain—“Hibernating up there like Red Whelan.”
Any redheaded, fat-faced, freckled Irishman was a regular Red Whelan.
Any houseguest who stayed too long was threatening to become a Red Whelan.
Any mention of old Aunt Rose’s long and lonely life included the forty-odd years she had devoted herself to Red Whelan, her brother’s substitute in the Civil War. A widowed spinster, our father called her. A married nun.
We carried the tea things upstairs. We carried her sparse dinner, only small bowls of mush: soups and applesauce and creamed farina. In the third-floor room, she blinked at us from her bed or from her chair, her face always dusted with powder, although it seemed to us then that she was dusted with dust.
And the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor standing by. “Aren’t you good?” they told us when we brought in the old lady’s tray or took it away. Sister Jeanne among them. Our favorite.
We knew them well, the Little Nursing Sisters. The order of nuns our mother had thought to join until—our father liked to say—she thought better of it.
We knew them from our own fevered mornings: waking to find their pale hands to our foreheads and to our cheeks, or seeing through our crusted eyes their serious faces within the white bonnets as they put a thermometer between our lips, commanded us not to bite it. We watched them float around our sickbeds, tugging and pulling with their short, clean hands until our night-tangled blankets and sheets were transformed into something clean again, and cool.
We knew them from all the long afternoons when we came home from school, hand to the glass knob of the battered side door, and found a nursing nun standing like a black-and-white beacon in the kitchen—her finger to her lips because our mother had once more taken to her shaded room to sleep off what they called her melancholy.
They arrived by taxi in those days, before their habits were amended to allow them enough peripheral vision to drive themselves. Our father scurried out to the curb to pay the fare.
For years we believed we were not unusual in this. For years we believed the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, appeared in every household whenever crisis or illness disrupted the routine, whenever a substitute was needed for She Who Could Not Be Replaced.
Sister Jeanne was our favorite.
She was an old woman then. Shorter than we were. Child-sized inside her habit. When she made us tea, she warmed the milk, and she carried in her black satchel a sleeve of biscuits we have never found since. Coated with chocolate, we recall, with a thin, summery taste of strawberry jam.
When she spoke to us—and not all the Little Sisters spoke to us so easily—her voice was always wry—“It’s all silliness, isn’t it?”—so that we never knew if we would be hushed into sacred silence by what she said or if her voice would suddenly curl up like a grin and we would see that inside her white bonnet and her dark veil she was shaking with laughter.
She said, “I knew your mother since before she was born. Same as I know all of youse.”
She said, “youse,” which delighted us. She said “pernt” for point, “erl” for oil. She was years out of Brooklyn by then, at the Old Age Home the Sisters ran out on Long Island, as an aide, not a patient. Although she must have been nearly as old as many of the women she cared for.
She asked us, “Who’s the dumbest boy in your class?”
Reaching under her bonnet, she tapped her freckled forehead. She touched her white bib between the chain of her cross, as if her heart was centered there. She said, “Because God put the knowledge in you before you were born, see? So you’d know He intends to be fair.”
She tagged her sentences with “see?” like a Hollywood gangster, and this delighted us, too.
Sister Jeanne told us that she had meant to join another order altogether, another order of nuns also called Little Sisters, but went to the wrong address. Where Sister St. Saviour simply shrugged and said, “God’s will.”
Sister Jeanne said, “I knew your mother before she was born because Sister St. Saviour introduced us.”
She said, “No one called for her, but still she appeared. That was the miracle, see? God saw the need. There was an accident with the gas. God saw your mother and your grandmother’s need, and so Sister St. Saviour appeared.”
We were sitting at the dining room table in the long, hushed hours of those still afternoons when our mother slept off her sadness, or when Great-aunt Rose was in the upper room. It might have been any season: there were blossoms on the apple tree at the window behind her head. There was a squall of fat snowflakes.
She told us, “There was a lovely smell of roses when Sister St. Saviour died. She opened her eyes for just a moment, she hadn’t opened them in days, and then she closed them again and sighed. It was a very deep sigh. But no weariness in it, see? No sadness. I would say it was a satisfied sigh. And after that, it was like a thousand roses had been brought, special delivery, into the room. It was just a glimpse of where her soul had gone. A whiff of it. As if a door had opened for a moment, just to let her in, and all of us still stuck here on earth got a glimpse. Because a glimpse is all the living can bear. All we can bear of heaven’s beauty.”
She said, her eyes to the ceiling, “It’s not for me, you know. That beauty. But never mind. You’ll see it, for truth. Your old aunty, too.”
How long did Great-aunt Rose stay with us? A few weeks, a month, maybe two? On a warm afternoon, we came in from school to find the guest room empty. Our mother, up and about on that day, had opened the windows to let in the air. The white curtains stirred, the mattress was bare.
Our father said later that because our mother was delicate, given to melancholy, it seemed best that old Rose go off to a nursing home for her final days. For expert care, he said. The nursing home was run by yet another order of nuns, not our own Little Nursing Sisters, whose numbers were diminishing even then. Whose Bishop had cast an acquisitive eye over their elegant convent, even then.
Great-aunt Rose, we were told, was gone to spend her last days in a nursing home run by the very order Sister Jeanne hadn’t joined, an order that specialized in old people who had come to the end of their time. In a town called Valhalla.
“Of all things,” our father said.
“If that’s not a sure sign she’s going to heaven,” he said, well satisfied that his obligation to the old lady had been met, “I don’t know what is.”
The Convent Child