We said it was something.
But all the while good Jeanne Jugan was busy doing her work, the priest who had advised her was off scheming. He went to Rome and told them he was the one who started the order. He said he was the one who found the first blind widow on the street and he was the one who told Jeanne Jugan to take care of her. He was the one who invited the other women to help out. And the priests in Rome fell for it. They made him the head of the order. And they put up a plaque on Jeanne Jugan’s house that said HERE FATHER SO-AND-SO FOUNDED THE LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR.
And that wasn’t the worst of it, Sister Jeanne said.
There was a very young nun in the order, and this priest liked her better than Jeanne Jugan. He put her in charge and told Jeanne she could no longer go around with her basket. She could just stay inside, do some housekeeping, train some novices. Jeanne said to the priest, “You have taken my work from me.” And then she said, “But I gladly give it to you.” And that’s how she lived the rest of her life. Staying inside.
As the years went by, people forgot that Jeanne was the founder of the order.
But, listen, Sister Jeanne said, life is like the blink of an eye.
The young nun the lying priest had put in charge became an old woman herself, and as death approached, she knew she had to set the record straight. An investigation was made, and sure enough, the plaque on Jeanne’s house was changed to say HERE JEANNE JUGAN FOUNDED THE LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR.
Sister Jeanne sat back in her chair, the light of the fading afternoon just behind her. We sat back, too, satisfied, as children will be, at any tale that is resolved with the restoration of order. Children who know, without instruction or study, what is fair.
But then we saw that old Sister Jeanne was laughing inside her bonnet. It’s all silliness, she said. Don’t you see?
Jeanne Jugan was already in heaven with Our Lord.
What in the world would she care about a plaque on an old building in the country of France? Whatever glory was taken from her here on earth had already been restored a hundred times, a million times, and more.
More happiness than any of us can imagine, Sister Jeanne said. More beauty than any of us on earth can bear.
I’ll never see it, she said. But all of youse will.
The point to remember, Sister Jeanne said—pernt, she said—is that truth finds the light. Lies, big or small, never stay hidden. She pushed the air with the palm of her hand—a comic gesture that said Go on with you— So don’t even bother telling lies, she said.
Truth reveals itself. It’s really quite amazing.
God wants us to know the truth in all things, she said, big or small, because that’s how we’ll know Him.
In all her simplicity, old Sister Jeanne told us, “It’s really that simple.”
A Tonic
ON HER FIRST AFTERNOON at the sanatorium upstate, Sister Illuminata left the porch where the patients were lined up like bolts of linen and wandered through the wings of the cottage. She wanted only solitude. She had already endured the crowded crossing in steerage, the filth and the sickness. She had endured the constant entreaties from every poor Catholic on board, and had brushed from her veil and from the hem of her skirt the traces of spit that had been directed at her from those who were not. She stood in the knocking crowds on Ellis Island, elbow to elbow. And although her habit earned her only a cursory stethoscope to her lungs—through her bib, no less—from a harried and blushing doctor, she’d had barely a night alone in her convent room when Dr. Hannigan, less afraid and more thorough than the government doctor had been, sent her to the sanatorium.
When a nurse there—a Sister of Mercy herself—tried to stop her from going off alone, Sister Illuminata said, lying, that it was a stipulation of her own order that she say her afternoon Office on her feet. She wouldn’t be long.
So it was that she found herself drawn by the luxury of silence to a section of the cottage that was not currently in use—the back of the house, where a winter sunroom she had seen from the drive had now, in midsummer, been given over to storage. Her beads in her hand, she turned from the darkened hallway into the bright space. The air here was hazy, full of dust motes and vague sunbeams, stiflingly hot. There were bed frames and wicker chaises piled haphazardly. A green-and-white linoleum floor that was glazed with sunlight. The dull silence was exactly what she had sought. But then a human sound disturbed it: a long sigh that rippled across the stifling air like breath on water.
In an instant, her eyes found them: a man and a woman, half kneeling, half crouching. They were pressed together in a corner of the hot room, pressed up against each other, behind an iron bedstead that seemed to enclose them. Both had slipped their white robes from their shoulders. Both moved with the same slow, stuttering rhythm. Sister could see the woman’s bare throat, corded and straining, the white flesh of her breasts and the brown of her nipples. She could see the man’s shoulder blades, the short bones of his spine as they pressed themselves against the paper-thin skin. He rose up over her, she arched herself toward him. He was an old man, white hair on the back of his head, across his shoulders, and all along his skeletal arms.
Briefly, Sister thought there was something angelic about their pale struggle, the winged shoulder blades, the tangled bodies, the soft folds of their white robes, and the dusty, streaming sunlight. But then she saw how their mouths were wide open, black and straining. Opened helplessly as if in sudden reflex—as if to expel the short, ragged breaths they were taking. Precious breaths in this place.
Sister Illuminata saw them for only a moment before she turned away. There is a hunger, she thought.
The woman was a young mother from a wealthy family—Sister Illuminata’s own age. She died within the month. The old man was a doctor from Syracuse, New York, who went home with his family the same week Sister Illuminata returned to the convent—both of them, he said, with lungs forever scarred by their ordeal.
There is a hunger. It was a lesson she had learned and then forgotten across the years she had labored in the convent laundry. But she remembered it again when Sally returned from Chicago and Sister Lucy explained to a small coterie of the nuns: Illuminata and Jeanne, Sister Eugenia and old Sister Miriam, what the girl had discovered.