“What I wanted to tell you is this,” Sister Jeanne said softly, cautiously. “Here’s redemption, see? Here’s forgiveness. Through his child. Through her vocation. Here’s the forgiveness of sin.”
Annie raised her eyes to look over her friend’s bowed head, looked to the winding vines above her. For a moment, an image of him trapped, his body trapped in the tangled shade, flitted across her eyes. A glimpse of his pale forehead, his dark brows, the black corner of his grin.
He’d lost a tooth in the days before he died—how long since she remembered this? His teeth were always trouble to him.
What greater torment for a man whose sin was suicide than to be trapped forever in the body he’d sought to shed?
The sun moved through the leaves. She felt it touch the top of her head, her throat. The pale skin beneath the opened buttons of her blouse. Jim, too, had put his warm cheek to her breast, even on the last night of his life. Sally inside her then, no bigger than a heart.
She took her hand from Sister Jeanne’s. Sat up straighter, looking out across the yard.
“What you’re telling me,” she said. And paused. Sister Jeanne’s face was attentive but weary. It was full of affection. They had been friends for a long time. “What you’re saying is that I haven’t suffered enough.” She paused again. The perspiration was once more beaded on Sister Jeanne’s pale lip. A drop of it, the size and shape of a tear, gathered at her temple, rolled down her cheek. “These eighteen years,” Annie said. “You’re saying they haven’t brought me suffering enough. Loneliness enough. You’re saying I should lose my daughter, too. My own. So that God can forgive him.”
Only a narrow ray of sun, filtered through the black leaves of ivy, caught Sister Jeanne’s white bonnet. Inside its depths, shadow and light, she was smiling, her eyes sunken and drawn and the perspiration sparkling on the fine hairs above her lip. It was the way she might smile at a misbehaving child—the reprimand hardly outlasting the fond absolution. She reached again for Annie’s hand, took it in both of hers. “Oh no,” she said. “Not Jim. I’m not talking about Jim. He’s a lost soul, poor man.” She paused. “I’d never have seen him here if there was any hope of heaven for him.” And she shook her head—resigned to the fact, but still not without pity. “What I’m saying is, it’s so you can be forgiven, see?” And she bit her lip, as if to suppress a laugh, to suppress her own wonder and delight at this turn of good fortune. “It’s your sin I mean. Your soul.”
It was the first Annie ever knew that Sister Jeanne had made note of how she spent her afternoons.
Overnight
IN LATE SEPTEMBER, Sally went with her mother and Sister Jeanne to Pennsylvania Station. An overnight train. There was no money for a Pullman, so she would have to sit up in the open coach, but she was young, as the Sisters were always reminding her. She would be fine.
Her nearly new valise was on the rack above her head. It was secondhand but quite lovely: lacquered beige rattan with caramel leather trim, a gold clasp repaired, free of charge, by the shoemaker who served the convent. It contained only what the Sisters at the motherhouse had required her to bring: six pairs of stockings, six pairs of knickers, three muslin nightgowns without ornamentation, four chemises, woolen gloves, black shoes.
Sally had five dollars in her wallet and fifty pinned to the lining of her purse, to be turned over to the Sisters in Chicago when she arrived.
She sat on a bench seat beside the window. Looked out to see her mother on the platform, her arm through Sister Jeanne’s. They were leaning together, the two of them, Sister Jeanne coming only to her mother’s shoulder. Her mother looked nice in her hat and her gray Sunday suit. The unaccustomed scent of the face powder and lipstick she donned only for a trip to Manhattan lingered on Sally’s cheek. They could have been something from a movie, her mother and Sister Jeanne, they both looked so polished and clean. Sally waved and blew a kiss, and her mother touched her gloved hand to her heart, then lifted it, the way you might release a bird into the air.
Sally looked around the train, felt the energy of its silent engines, poised to move. People were settling themselves. She did the same.
The windowsill was not grimy in the way of subway cars. The upholstery was plush. It was all very lovely. Her mother had packed her a sandwich for dinner and a roll for breakfast. A pear and a chocolate bar. The Sisters had told her that if she waited until the tail end of the dinner hour, she could go to the dining car for a nice cup of tea. She had three books with her: her missal, The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse, and the novel the Tierney twins had given her as a going-away gift. She looked out again. Her mother and Sister Jeanne were still on the platform. The engine gave up a tremendous sigh and then the trainman cried out. The train began to move and the movement thrilled her. Goodbye, goodbye, she cried silently, as if it were a prayer. Touching her gloved hand to the window until the two women had passed out of its frame.
A plump lady with two bulky shopping bags made her way down the aisle, bound, Sally could tell, for the seat beside her. She watched the woman back into it, big rump and dark coat and short struggling arms. Sally smiled up at her, weighing her disappointment at not having the seat to herself for the long ride against the promise of companionship. She was thinking of the Thunderbolt in Coney Island, when the man in charge sometimes lifted a stray kid into your car. The Tierney twins always resented this, but Sally preferred to feel even a stranger’s shoulder against her own as the roller coaster began its climb.
The woman took some time getting herself arranged. She wedged the shopping bags between her knees and the seat in front of them, sat back to observe the arrangement, and then leaned forward to fuss with them again. Each time she moved, her clothes gave off the smell of artificial violets and, just behind it, cooking oil. Then she sat back again. She was breathing heavily, but with an odd rhythm—not the rhythm of a woman catching her breath after running for the train, but the quick, deep, agitated panting of an animal in distress.