Poor Sister Jeanne had a sunken look about her. Broad creases were pressed into her face, just under her eyes. She had been out of the convent for a string of days, and she recounted her casework: a widow grown blind had been resettled in the French Little Sisters’ home for the aged, a young mother with milk fever was restored, her baby thriving once more. Those First Communion dresses Annie had bleached and mended were much appreciated by an Italian family of seven girls—four of their own and three orphaned cousins. Although one of the girls was determined to wear red shoes. Mr. Bannister, the old veteran, the old bachelor, had both Sister Jeanne and Sister Agatha with him as he went through his last agony, which had taken four long days. But he had not died alone.
Annie, for her part, said she’d met the new president of the Ladies Auxiliary, nicer and younger than Mrs. McShane. She wanted to raise money through a dinner dance at a fine hotel in the city, not the usual bridge party here at the convent. Both women pulled down the corners of their mouths and raised their eyebrows, their familiar, unspoken conspiracy against the society ladies who did so much good. Fancy-dancy, their expressions said.
Annie knew these women called her “that poor widow” when her back was turned. To her face they said “Annie, dear.”
“Have you had an afternoon to yourself all this while?” Sister Jeanne asked her.
And Annie nodded. “You know me,” she said. “I catch my breath when I can,” evoking Sister Lucy.
Sister Jeanne nodded. The unspoken forbearance the two afforded Sister Lucy was a joke they’d shared since the first days of their friendship.
They were in the shade of the narrow arbor, although bright sunlight was moving leisurely against the white shifts on the line. The back of the convent rose over the yard, the sky reflected in each of the convent’s windows. Sister Jeanne’s white hands were resting in her lap. Annie saw her own work on the edge of the nun’s worn sleeve, the black stitches small and neat. Both women wore gold wedding bands. Annie reached for Sister’s hand, patted it affectionately. Something miraculous about how familiar and smooth it was, despite the years of hard work.
They had been friends for a long time.
Annie nodded toward the building. “Which was St. Saviour’s room?” she asked, and Sister Jeanne looked up, smiling.
“First floor,” she said. “On the corner there.”
Annie knew she’d been told this before.
“When she died,” Sister Jeanne said softly, and with her childish amazement, “there was the most beautiful scent. Like roses it was. I know I’ve told you.”
Annie nodded again. She’d been heavily pregnant with Sally on the day St. Saviour died. Another hot day like this. Sister Jeanne had come to the apartment that morning as she always did, with fresh milk and clean linens and an alcohol rub to keep her cool. There were no tears between them, only laughter, as the little nun bathed her swollen ankles with cool water and the two considered St. Saviour in heaven, imperious and proud, all her pain ended.
It was Sister Jeanne who suggested Annie give her baby the nun’s name in baptism. A formidable patroness for the child.
Wide-eyed, Sister Jeanne had described for Annie that morning the nun’s last breath, the peace of it, and then the odor of sanctity filling the hushed room. The beauty of heaven in the scent, Sister Jeanne had said. Just the smallest notion of it—of what is promised. As much of heaven’s beauty, Sister Jeanne had said, full of wonder, as we on earth can bear.
Annie didn’t doubt the report. Sister Jeanne couldn’t tell a lie. But Annie was inclined to reconcile such miracles with the sensible world. Sister St. Saviour died in July. The windows were surely open—or, if they weren’t, Sister Jeanne, who held on to the old superstitions, would have opened one the moment the old nun passed. Surely roses bloomed somewhere in the neighborhood.
Annie imagined that St. Saviour, who disdained all superstition, would have said the same.
Looking up at the room—whose was it now?—Annie said, “You’re here to tell me I should let Sally go.”
Sister Jeanne said, “Let her try.”
“Did I ever believe I could stop her?”
Sister Jeanne laughed and lifted both their hands. She brought their entwined fingers to her lips, kissed Annie’s knuckles, her lips warm and dry, and then dropped their hands together into her lap. She looked up, tilting her chin so the sun that filtered through the ivy could reach her face.
“I was going to enter a teaching order,” she said, “but when I finished my novitiate, God asked that I go out among the poor, to nurse. My confessor suggested the French Little Sisters. But that’s not the address he wrote down.” She laughed. “He was busy with many things, Father was, I don’t blame him. And so I presented myself here. When I realized the mistake I’d made, Sister St. Saviour said, ‘God’s will.’ So I stayed where He’d brought me.”
“It wasn’t Chicago,” Annie said.
Sister Jeanne said, “It could have been the moon. I’d never been to this part of Brooklyn before. I grew up in the Bronx.”
Annie glanced at the nun. It was as much as Jeanne had ever said about her life in the world. She was no Illuminata, with her tedious childhood tales. Annie wondered where they were now—her people in the Bronx, a mother or a father surely, siblings perhaps—were they all dead or merely forever unspoken of? Was there a difference?
Annie cast her eye over Sister Jeanne’s small frame, the short lap, the childish black shoes, neatly tied, just touching the sparse grass at their feet. She wondered what had convinced her as a girl to be confined to this lonely life of hard labor. What had made her believe she was capable of such long sacrifice—tiny as she was, gentle as she was, no training, no idea what she would find in this part of the world, much less in the hidden rooms of the city’s most desolate? What drove her to think she could endure this life?
“How did your mother feel about your vocation?” Annie asked her.
Sister Jeanne paused. And then said, tentative, “She was happy in heaven, I’m sure.” She raised her handkerchief again, delicately blotting her lips and her chin.
“If Sally goes to Chicago,” Annie said simply, “it will break my heart.”
Sister Jeanne turned her white bonnet toward the convent. The rattle and shout of the street reached them faintly. A garbage can falling. The grinding of gears. In an interval of quiet, Sister said, “I saw him. When Sally was young. Here,” and she bowed her head toward the convent’s windows, lit blue and white by the sky and the summer clouds. “Jim, I mean. In his brown suit. Looking like himself. Solid as stone.”
Annie nodded. Sister Jeanne could not tell a lie. “It was Jim?”
“It was,” Sister Jeanne said, full of regret.
“You never saw him alive,” Annie said.
And Jeanne shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“But you recognized him.”
She whispered, “I did. Poor man.” And she followed this with a sudden breath, taken through her teeth, as if in response to a sharp and sudden pain in her side. “What worse suffering can there be for a soul?” she said. “To be trapped forever in these bodies of ours. No relief.”
There was another spasm of street noise, and then Sister Jeanne turned Annie’s hand over in her own. She bowed her head and placed a finger into Annie’s palm, gently tracing a line as she spoke, like a child enumerating a fragile logic, giving it careful voice.