A FOX STOLE WITH A BROKEN CLASP found among the donated clothes, a lady’s velvet chapeau, some elbow-length kid gloves, torn at the seams, and Sally transformed herself into Mrs. McShane, the elegant and imperious woman (Brooklyn hoi polloi, Annie said) who organized the Ladies Auxiliary’s annual tea and Christmas Bazaar to raise funds for the convent. Sally brought the stole to her chin, extended a wavering arm to Sister Illuminata, and said in Mrs. McShane’s studied, drawling way, “Our good Little Sisters.” Said to her mother, the gloved fingers spread across her cheek, “But, Annie, my dear, where are the petits fours?”
She shimmied into a discarded housedress, slipped one of the nuns’ bibbed aprons over her head, and pantomimed Mrs. Odette’s kitchen dance—lifting imaginary pot lids, peeling imaginary apples held right before her squinting eyes, whispering “Herregud” under her breath until her mother and Sister Illuminata, laughing, were begging her to “Shush.”
A babushka and a moth-eaten coat with a lambskin collar, an expression of peering curiosity, dawning disapproval, and there was Mrs. Gertler just as she looked every evening, watching the street from her parlor-floor window.
Once, when Annie was out at the shops, the organ grinder stopped on the street outside the convent, turning his squawking box and singing his off-key Italian. It was a hot day and the basement windows were open behind the grills. “For the love of God,” Sister Illuminata muttered, “couldn’t he play an Irish tune?” Sally—quick as a sprite—moved a coal box beneath the window, hopped onto it, and, grabbing the iron bars, shouted, in Sister Illuminata’s own brogue, “Play us an Irish tune, for the love of God.”
The poor man, searching the air for the source of the voice, cried out, “Yes, Sister,” and attempted to sing some mangled, halfhearted version of “The Wearing of the Green.”
“Good man,” Sally cried when he had come to a halting finish.
The child, Sister Illuminata said, was a born mimic.
*
THE DAYS IN THE LAUNDRY grew longer for the two women when Sally started school, but when she returned, she brought her mother and the nun tales from what they called the wider world. She could capture her classmates’ broken English, or their solid Brooklynese, with perfection. She had the pastor’s nasally Latin down to a T. She was a good and quiet child in the classroom, polite and shy on the street, but in the basement laundry of the convent, every impulse toward silliness, every outlandish pantomime or adolescent misfiring of elbows and feet, not to mention wickedness and wildness, was set free, and utterly indulged by her mother and the nun, provided—they were always reminding her—that she kept her voice low.
Provided, it was understood, that proper decorum was re-established whenever she went “upstairs,” which meant into the whole of the universe above the convent laundry.
Perhaps because of this indulgence, the girl, as she grew, chose to linger with Sister Illuminata whenever her mother went out in the afternoons—to do her shopping, to catch her breath—rather than follow her or join the other girls playing in the street. When Sister Jeanne came down the stairs, Sally kissed the little nun but, more and more, begged off their old routines. Sister Illuminata hid her pleasure in this. She turned to her ironing, sighed heavily to disguise a thin smile. Sister Jeanne’s sweet goodness was best spent on younger children, she thought. On innocents. An older child, an older child with some spunk like Sally, like her own Mary Pat Shea, might prefer a little devilment in her friends.
A small table was borrowed from an upstairs hallway and carried to the cellar so that Sally could do her homework there, in Sister Illuminata’s company (the iron thumping and hissing), rather than, more sensibly, at the well-lit table in the convent kitchen or the dining room in her own home. For if a case of the giggles overcame her here, or if she recalled some incident from the schoolyard this morning that she longed to re-enact, or even if, bored with sums, she drifted to the donation baskets and tried on a few clothes, Sister Illuminata, fondly, would abide.
*
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON and her mother had gone to the shops. Sally was nearly thirteen. She was helping Sister Illuminata fold the last of the day’s clothes. One of the freshly ironed tunics belonged to Sister Jeanne, and Sally, laughing, held it up against her. The nun looked at the girl over her shoulder. Sally said, “Let’s fool my mother.”
It was not the first time she had dressed in the habit of the Little Sisters. It was a custom at her school to hold “vocation days,” when the students were asked to dress up as priests and nuns and to parade about the schoolyard as miniature ecclesiastics. Because of her status as a convent child, and because she was a good and quiet girl, Sally was chosen every year to represent the various orders of nursing Sisters in the modified habit that Sister Illuminata herself had made for her—and then altered each year as she grew. But on this afternoon, Sally eyed Sister Jeanne’s full habit, the clean, consecrated cloth. “Come on, Sister,” she said. “Just for fun.”
Against her better judgment, Sister Illuminata helped the girl into the tunic. Since she had no cincture handy, she tied a linen bandage around the girl’s thin waist and then brushed and smoothed the shoulders and the wide sleeves, shaking her head all the while at their transgression, but loving, too, the nearness of the girl, the coiled energy of her narrow body, the sweet buds of her breasts, the faint pattern of freckles on her nose that, this close, appeared to ride beneath the surface of her skin, as if under a milky veil.
Sitting on her ironing chair, Sister pressed the coif over Sally’s bent head, tugging the thing into place over her ears, tucking her hair away with a busy mother’s gentle brusqueness. Sally closed her eyes and placed her hands on Sister’s swollen knees. Her breath smelled of milk and crackers. She was laughing when they began, her crooked teeth catching at the cloth of the tunic as it went over her head, but now she grew solemn, her eyes closed, as Sister smoothed and tucked, moving her scarred fingertip gently along the girl’s forehead and her cheeks. She tugged the cloth into place and leaned back to look at Sally in the basement sunlight.