They had reached the vestibule. Sister Lucy was sailing out the door.
Without turning, she said, “There are others with greater need.”
Out on the sidewalk, in the bustling light, Sally paused. She was aware of her white nurse’s veil, the glances of passersby. Sister Lucy was forging ahead. Sally had to call “Sister” twice to get her to turn. Sister Lucy stood for a moment with her satchel in one hand, a man’s watch on a black strap in the other. She thrust out her jaw, a formidable jaw above her white wimple. A question, an impatient one, crossed her masculine face. Slowly, Sally walked to meet her. She would speak up.
Two women passing said, “Good morning, Sisters.” A man touched his hat. “Sisters.” Sister Lucy nodded to the greetings.
“The poor woman,” Sally said. “An imaginary pain is still a pain, isn’t it, Sister?”
Sister Lucy said, “Don’t be proud,” with the swiftness of a slap.
She raised her crooked hand. “Suffering,” she said, “does not disguise a true nature. It only lays it bare.” Inside her bonnet, her eyes were narrowed. “Any woman who wants an excuse to take to her bed will surely find one.” She paused. She seemed to consider whether she should continue, and then, with the slightest shrug, continued, leaning so close to Sally that the starched edge of her bonnet nearly touched the girl’s cheek. “There are women who marry with no idea of what marriage entails,” she said. “Some of them suffer for it. Babies coming every year. Others impose the suffering on their men.” She stepped back as if to see if Sally understood. “If the dog that bit her had been drowned as a pup, still Mrs. Costello would have found an excuse. There’s a young woman on Baltic with a withered arm and six children.” She raised her eyebrows, which were flecked with gray. “A woman doesn’t need two feet to give her husband a child,” she said.
Then Sister Lucy turned on her heel, stashing the watch into her pocket. “I’m going in here,” she said, indicating another row house, another chipped stoop and battered door. “I’ll be with Mrs. Gremelli in the front room. She needs her dressing changed. Catch up with me there.”
Sally stood for a moment, all uncertain. Sister Lucy clucked her tongue and turned her gnarled finger to the laundry bag in the girl’s hand.
“Take those soiled bedclothes to your mother,” she said with exasperated patience. “Then hurry back.” Adding, as the girl turned away, “And keep your eyes off yourself if you possibly can.”
*
THIS MUCH BECAME CLEAR TO SALLY over the course of the next week: Sister Lucy lived with a small, tight knot of fury at the center of her chest.
It had formed itself—a fist clenching—when her mother died of peritonitis, caused by a burst appendix.
Sister Illuminata, Sally learned, was not the only one tempted to tell stories of her time in the world.
Sister Lucy’s mother had died of peritonitis brought on by a burst appendix when Sister Lucy was seven years old. Appendicitis, Sister Lucy said, is indicated by a terrible pain in the lower right abdomen, fever, vomiting. She told Sally: Waste no time getting the doctor in.
Sister Lucy said the appendix itself is useless. They were waiting for the trolley together. Sister Lucy did not believe in wasted time. “Why God put it there is a mystery,” Sister Lucy said.
The peritoneum, Sister Lucy said, is a membrane that covers the organs in the abdomen like a piece of fine silk. “Our Creator is fanciful, perhaps,” Sister Lucy said, not amused.
For three days Sister Lucy, seven years old, had run, sleepless and terrified, between the kitchen and the sickroom, bearing the wide bowl, empty and then filled, filled and then empty. Filled with a bitter fluid that grew thinner and darker as the days progressed, that smelled of salty bile, and then of blood. The terrible retching. The blackening of her mother’s skin.
It is a loss like no other, Sister Lucy said.
She said, Life itself is a bleak prospect to a motherless child.
She was seven years old.
In these matters, Sister Lucy said again—“Are you listening to me?”—when there’s pain in the abdomen, fever, vomiting, never hesitate getting the doctor in. “Sister St. Saviour, God rest her soul—your namesake”—Sister Lucy said—“knew how to put the fear of God into any physician who was dismissive of the poor.” They were negotiating the reeking hallways of another tenement house. “I’ll give her credit for that much,” Sister Lucy said unhappily, a little breathless.
Sister Lucy said her older brothers had already left home when her mother died. Her father was a county tax commissioner who had given them all a comfortable life. A good man, but a serious, withholding man, a man of his times. He brought his mother from Germany to raise his only daughter. Sister Lucy said she was a smart girl in school but mostly silent at home after her mother’s death: a clenched fist.
Her German grandmother told young Sister Lucy that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a tax collector to avoid the torments of hell. But it could be done, if she prayed for her father’s soul.
“So that’s what I set out to do,” Sister Lucy said. “Save my father’s soul. All of seven years old.”
A rare smile disrupted that straight tight line that was Sister Lucy’s mouth. The two were on a bench in the park, sharing the bread-and-butter sandwiches Sister Lucy had brought from the convent.
She and her grandmother visited nearly every church in Chicago, determined to save her father’s soul. She knelt patiently beside the old woman. She prayed patiently at those cold altar rails, hour after hour, until her knees grew numb. In the gloom, the gaslight and candlelight, her eyes drifted to the holy scenes and statues behind the altar or over her head. Her eyes grew keen.
As a child, Sister Lucy said, she came to know the beige hills behind the mount called Golgotha as if she had walked them herself. She knew the tufts of weeds in the far distance, the shape of a small enclave of tombs farther still. She knew the feel of the yellow skull at the base of the cross as if she had run her own fingers over its dome; knew the flavor of the dust that covered the ground beneath the horny feet of the centurion. She saw the pallor that engulfed the world the moment Our Lord took His last breath.
Kneeling beside her pious grandmother, young Sister Lucy studied, too, Mary’s assumption into heaven, not merely blue sky and upturned eyes and hands, but the certain fold of cloth at her girded waist, the delicate toe touching a cloud, the brown and gold of a seraphim’s curl.