Outside, there were only small bits of light, moth holes, as she thought of them, in the heavy darkness. The taste of the sweet tea, the aftermath of the alcohol, lingered at the back of her throat, made her eyes ache. She leaned her head against the window.
The stations they pulled into were a relief at first, golden and bustling, but as the hour grew late and she woke from a shallow sleep to see them, they offered only a yellowed, nightmare tableau of weary shadows: a lonely stationmaster lifting a heavy arm, a single passenger with a suitcase and an abandoned air, a newspaper blown against a wall. Weary shadows that were quickly lost again as the train moved on, into the cavernous night.
Her father was a trainman on the BRT.
All her life, as she moved over bright sidewalks and green grass, he had been in his coffin, the narrowest of corridors—of lightless tunnels meant to keep out rock and stone and damp earth. Why had she never thought of this before? Why had she never pictured him there as she blithely went up and down the subway stairs, rode nonchalantly through the darkness. A trainman on the BRT, now long returned to the place where he had plied his trade: the damp underground, the dirt and carved stone, the brittle dark.
At one point, she woke to see the little boy standing in the aisle again. Her companion slept lifelessly beside her. He swayed with the movement of the train. Even in the dimmed light, now thick with smoke, she could see the goose egg on his bald skull. As he shifted with the train’s shuddering, she could see a line of dried blood on his cheek just below it. She had only half her chocolate bar left, but she found it in her purse and handed it across the bulk of her seatmate to the child. He took it from her and then, wraithlike, walked on. His mother’s head was slumped into the window.
She was going to give her life to others, in the name of the crucified Christ and His loving mother. She was going to join the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, Congregation of Mary Before the Cross, Stabat Mater, which Sister Jeanne thought the most beautiful name of all the orders. Because it reminded us all, Sister Jeanne said, that love stood before brutality in that moment on Golgotha and love was triumphant. Love applied to suffering, as Sister Illuminata put it: like a clean cloth to a seeping wound.
Sally had understood the image in the basement laundry of the convent, when she watched Sister Illuminata put a hot iron to the nuns’ clean clothes—perfume of starch and of soap, of the heavy linen itself, dried in the courtyard’s sun. A clean cloth—immaculate and pure—to place against mankind’s wounds. She had felt, the fragrant steam rising, the joy of it, the rightness of it. No help in putting a soiled, sullied thing to what was itself debased and infected. One kept oneself, one made oneself, pure—dressed in these immaculate clothes, moved about these simple rooms, prayed the Hours, spoke softly, kept still one’s idle hands and kept gentle one’s thoughts, to offer relief to the wretched world, to assuage the seething wound, the lesion, laesio, of human suffering. The suffering that all things mortal were heir to, Sister Illuminata had said.
In her lovely habit, she wanted to be that pure antidote to human pain.
But she wanted, too, in some equal, more furious way, not to be mocked for it; not to be fooled. Sister Lucy had told her, Don’t think you can end all suffering with your charms.
The next time she got up to use the toilet she had to climb over the solid bulk of her sleeping companion. As Sally awkwardly crossed her lap, trying to step over the brown bags at her feet, she felt the woman grab at her hip and then poke a dirty finger at the seat of her skirt. Sally cried out, nearly tumbled, but swiftly caught her breath as she gathered herself in the aisle. She looked back at the woman, who had once more closed her eyes. The man on the aisle reached out to steady her, and briefly, although she didn’t need to, she gripped his hand. Warm and broad and very strong. She said, “Thank you.”
In the toilet, the odor of someone’s bowel movement was overwhelming. She stumbled out, walked to the thin corridor between the cars to get some air. Out here, the rattling echo of the steel over the tracks seemed to bounce off the darkness that surrounded them, as if the darkness itself were made of black stone. As if they had once more gone underground.
She saw a man approaching from the yellow light of the next car, a sleeping car—she could see a porter moving behind him. The porter was buttoning down the curtains on each berth, securing whoever was inside for the night. The girl from the Bronx, asleep on the money Sally’s mother had labored to earn. The man approaching seemed to smile at her, and, afraid, she stepped back inside just ahead of him. He followed her, even reached over her head to hold the door, pressing—was he pressing?—himself into her back. He went into the toilet and she made her way down the aisle. A card game was going on among four smoking men. They looked up indifferently as she passed. One of the men held the black stump of a cigar between his fingers; the end of it, blacker still, was wet. Everything reeked. Of smoke and sweat and the human gas seeping from these mounds of flesh. She put the back of her hand to her nose and her own flesh reeked.
Unsteadily, she walked past her seat, to the end of the car—“pee cans,” the dirty woman had said, vulgar—and then she turned around and walked back again. Here in the dim and smoky light were, for her consideration, a sampling of “the others” she was giving her life to: vulgar, unkempt, ungrateful. Pale, sleeping faces with gaping, distorted mouths, sprawled limbs, a hollow-eyed soldier looking out into the night, a khaki rucksack clutched to his chest, a yellow-skinned old man folded into himself, gazing forward with a murderous look. A young woman in a jaunty hat, chewing gum ferociously, reading a magazine, picking her nose and then flicking her fingertips into the aisle.
She passed the seat in front of hers, where the little bald boy now slept pressed up against his mother’s back, which was turned to him. His hands were between his knees, as if for warmth. He looked like the bums who slept beneath the elevated, like a little hobo curled against the concrete wall of a warehouse. There was a dirty, bloodstained handkerchief on the floor at his feet.