“We’ll find some good work for you to do,” Sister Illuminata said once more, raising her voice, hoping that Sister Jeanne would hear her, even as she understood the vanity of this, this long, silly competition for the girl’s affection. “Prayer and good work together will surely move Our Lord to grant you what you ask for.”
Sally raised her head again. Sister Illuminata was surprised to see there were no tears—only, in her searching brown eyes, what would have been, when she was young, the prelude to mischief. “Mrs. Costello,” Sally whispered. She said, “Sister Lucy thinks she’s a faker, but I don’t. I could go sit with her when she’s all alone. She hates being alone.” She raised her pale brows, her eyes full of childish mischief. “I could sit with Mrs. Costello while her husband’s away,” Sally said. “What would my mother think of that?”
Sister Illuminata was about to object—the notion both confused and dismayed her—when she looked up and saw Sister Jeanne leaning over the banister. In the bright afternoon sunlight Sister Jeanne was mostly silhouette, her hand to her heart.
Sister Illuminata placed her arm around Sally’s shoulders. She touched the girl’s soft hair. It was sinful, the way she competed with Jeanne—a sin she could never confess or define. Her need to be the girl’s favorite, to be loved beyond all the other nuns in the convent by this confused and mortal child, was inexplicable, even to herself. A hunger.
“That’s a fine idea,” Sister Illuminata said.
Mercy
THE LAUNDRY at the St. Francis Hotel was a far cry from the dark and efficient realm of the convent basement, but Sally felt herself drawn to it nevertheless. She passed it by in the afternoon when she arrived at the hotel and made her way toward it at the end of the day, just to smell the steam and to observe the noisy industry of the workers—mostly Chinese men who only glanced up at her when she wandered past, glanced up quickly and then looked away.
She had a mean and accurate version of the way they argued, which she had already performed for Sister Illuminata. The nun had not been amused. “Stay away from those men,” Sister had told her. “They’d as soon put a knife in you.”
The job Mr. Tierney had found for her was in the tearoom, helping to serve three days a week, from two in the afternoon to six in the evening. It was the best he could get for her for now. She wore a smart gray dress and a white apron, a cap and a hairnet and solid black shoes, and the outfit, given to her in the basement locker room where the workers gathered and dressed, immediately told her everything she needed to know about how to behave upstairs. She was a quick study, the supervisor said. A lovely girl.
Mornings, she waited on the steps of Mrs. Costello’s apartment house.
When the Sister arrived, Sally followed her up the stairs, then made herself useful in the neat and barren household, and then lingered after the Sister’s work was done, keeping Mrs. Costello company through those lonely hours of the late morning and early afternoon, the hours that filled her with such fear.
Hours during which Mrs. Costello chatted aimlessly, sometimes scolded her, sometimes drifted to sleep in her chair by the window.
On those days, while Mrs. Costello dozed in the silence that followed the Sister’s busy presence, the small apartment filled with an awful light—the color of bile. Wherever Sally’s eyes fell, there was something to make her shudder. Mr. Costello’s hairbrush on his dresser, threaded with his dull black hair. A poorly tatted bureau scarf Mrs. Costello had made at the Sisters’ urging: work for idle hands. The wedding picture. A dark sock turned in on itself, forgotten beneath the nightstand—was its partner beneath her mother’s bed? The man’s underpants and long johns—she opened drawers while Mrs. Costello slept—and handkerchiefs tucked into neat rows, a worn missal placed among them. The dresser itself was stained a dark, nearly black, mahogany, but the interior of each drawer was pale, startlingly pale—like something you should turn your eyes from—and redolent of fresh-cut wood. Her nightgowns and stockings and underclothes carefully folded. A marriage license in a brown envelope. Twenty years they had been married. Mrs. Costello’s baptismal certificate from St. Charles. She was forty-two years old. A cemetery deed for Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. A paper, many times folded, and with a gold seal like something from a classroom, that said Mr. Costello was a citizen of the United States.
The man’s trousers and shirts were in the small closet. Mrs. Costello’s few dresses hung beside them. Her two felt hats on the shelf above, side by side with his straw boater and a fedora—further proof, if any was needed, that these two were husband and wife.
Mr. Costello’s white milkman’s jacket, once, on a hook behind the bedroom door—it was slumped at the shoulders, collar raised, as if the man himself had turned from her, his head hung in shame.
What Sally knew of the physical relations between men and women in those days was vague enough, only words—hastily spoken—when her mother told her “what she needed to know.” Only the words some girls at school, and the rough boys who shouted in the street, had added to that mix. Penis. Backside. Tush. Bowels. Down below. The writhing pinky of the woman on the train.
When she was young, she had caught, now and then, and only for the short time it took her mother to hurry her past, a man—drunk, her mother always said—holding himself and splashing his water in the street. She had glimpsed last summer as she followed Sister Lucy more bare flesh than she had ever seen before—backsides and limbs and breasts and chests, baby boys with pink tulip bulbs between their legs, old ladies plucked hairless, their privates as puckered as their toothless mouths. She gathered that an odd magnetism drew human eyes to even the palest, the foulest, the saddest of uncovered skin. Sister Lucy, giving a sponge bath to an old man, running a soapy cloth over a wretched turkey neck pillowed on two bloated sacks the color of a bruise, shouted, “Turn away,” when she saw Sally gaping. “This is not a sight for you.”