SALLY TOUCHED THE NEW VEIL, once, twice, three times, as she followed behind Sister Lucy. On the avenue she turned her head briefly, trying to capture her own reflection in the various shop windows—watery, she looked, in the morning light. She could barely glimpse her face through the flash of new sun. She’d worn her simplest dress and sensible oxfords from school, but she wanted to see herself with the veil on her head. Wanted to study the transformation. At a corner, she glanced around, hoping to find someone she knew, someone to witness who she had become. “Stop your gaping,” Sister Lucy said as the light changed and she forged on. Sally followed, her head bowed.
At a gray, four-story apartment building, they turned in. The steps were brick, chipped with wear, a pane in the front door was cracked and repaired with brown tape. The door was unlocked. There was a dirty perambulator in the vestibule, its undercarriage full of rust. A knotted plywood board covering its bed. A smell of cats and damp plaster. Sister Lucy climbed the bare stairs, Sally behind her.
The key to the apartment door was on the ring of keys that was tied to the nun’s belt and stored deep in the pocket of her tunic. She fumbled not a bit, finding the right one, opening the door to a spare, neat room: two upholstered chairs, a table, a yellow light through the drawn shades. She spun a bit as she reached to remove her cloak, placed the cloak on one of the chairs, and called out at the same time, “Good morning, Mrs. Costello.”
A small voice from the next room answered, “Good morning, Sister. I’m awake.”
Now the nun was tying the apron she had pulled from her bag around her waist. She rolled up her sleeves as she passed through the living room, Sally following, and into a tiny bedroom—darker still, with drawn shades and drawn drapes—an odor of camphor. The woman was in the bed, stirring. Sally saw in an instant, and with a shudder, the absence under the coverlet, the leg gone below the knee.
“I always know when you’re awake, Mrs. Costello,” Sister Lucy said, correcting her. “I wouldn’t call out if you were still asleep.”
The woman was struggling to get up on her elbows. Her long hair was tied into an awkward, uneven braid, and her white, browless face, misshapen from sleep, was small, heart-shaped, finely creased. “I know you always know,” she was saying, her voice thin and childish, childishly exasperated. “But I don’t know how you always know. Who is this?” Sally smiled with Sister Jeanne’s smile, but it didn’t warm Mrs. Costello’s expression. Despite the woman’s pallor, her face conveyed a hot disdain. “Why is it always another one coming into my room?” she asked, and thrust out her lower lip. “One of you in here is enough.”
Sister Lucy made no reply, but bustled. With a sweep of her arms, she opened the drapes, then the shades, and then moved a cane-backed wheelchair from a corner of the room to the side of the bed. “Were you well through the night?” she asked.
“No,” the woman said, still looking unhappily at Sally. “Not at all. Terrible pains in my stomach and not a bit of sleep the entire night.”
Sister Lucy said, “Then you were awake when Mr. Costello went out.”
“Heavens, no,” Mrs. Costello said, petulant. Plucking at the blankets even as Sister Lucy began to draw them away. There was a brief tug of war. Sister Lucy won. The woman’s voice became shrill: “Do you have any idea what time my husband must leave in the morning, Sister? Who would be awake at that hour?”
Neatly, Sister Lucy removed the edge of the counterpane from Mrs. Costello’s grasp. Neatly, she folded down the blankets. The woman’s nightgown had risen above her knees. Her legs were chalk white, furred with pale hair. Both the full leg and the shortened one looked lifeless. The woman seemed determined not to move. Suddenly, without preliminaries, Sister Lucy bent down and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Costello, lifted her from her pillow, moved the one full leg to the edge of the bed and then the other. Underneath the blue nightgown, the dull stump of her amputated leg, shining with scars, seemed to thrash about on its own. Sally found herself turning away.
“That accounts for your stomach pains,” Sister Lucy said. Sally looked again. There were bloodstains on the white sheet, blood on the hem of the nightgown.
“Oh bother,” Mrs. Costello said.
Sister Lucy turned to Sally. “Go run a bath,” she said. “Heat some water on the stove.”
Everything about the small apartment was neat and spare. The bathtub was in the kitchen, draped with a clean white tablecloth that made it look like an altar. A wooden milk box stood beside it, where Sally found the soap and a scrub brush and a box of Epsom salts. She found a cast-iron pot and filled it with water, lit the flame beneath it. She had only begun to run the water for the tub when Sister Lucy wheeled the woman through the doorway.
Mrs. Costello was still in her nightgown, her loose braid over her shoulder. She held a pair of thin towels on her lap. Sister Lucy, with practiced motions, pushed the chair back and forth until she had gotten it over the threshold and, to her satisfaction, beside the claw-footed tub. She added the hot water from the stove, tested it, added a splash more. She took the towels from Mrs. Costello’s lap, handed them to Sally, and then, in an instant, lifted the nightgown over the woman’s head. Sally turned away, but Sister said, “Get cold water on those stains.” Sally dropped the towels onto the floor and brought the nightgown to the kitchen sink. She ran cold water over the streaked blood. At the sound of Mrs. Costello’s cry, she looked over her shoulder to see Sister Lucy with the naked woman struggling in her arms. The contrast of the nun’s broad black back, solid and shapeless in her veil, and the woman’s thin, bare, flailing white extremities was grotesque, startling. They might have been two distinct species: an ostrich in the arms of a great black bear, a grasshopper in the beak of an enormous raven. Over the nun’s shoulder, Sally could see Mrs. Costello’s mouth opening and closing. She was making a shrill, piping sound, and as she struggled, she caught Sally’s eye with her helpless, panicked own. Her torso was bucking. She seemed determined to knock away Sister’s bonnet, to climb over the nun’s head. There were long tufts of pale hair, the color of smoke, under her outstretched arms, and again between her thin thighs. “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she was crying, and she glanced down at the tub as if it were a wall of fire. Sister Lucy said harshly, “Stop it now. Stop your nonsense,” but lowered the woman into the water with amazing gentleness, making hardly a splash. Her sleeves caught briefly on the edge of the tub, but her veil was expertly tied back with a black ribbon—when had she done that?