But what she could not understand was how that strange magnetism accounted for what went on between her mother and Mr. Costello in the bedroom that used to be her own. How it—“a hunger,” Sister Illuminata said—was enough to allow her mother to choose this milkman, to call him “dear,” to live in what the Sisters, who even now were mostly tight-lipped about the situation, knew was mortal sin.
Her mother lived in mortal sin, skimmed the precipice of perdition with every step she took, every breath. Down the stairs she went in the morning, alone now, out into the teeming street, trolleys and trucks, cars veering, mad strangers jostling her at every corner, and no daughter beside her to serve as extra eyes. This was how her dangerous days now ran. Over to the convent, down another set of stairs. Furnace moaning. Mangle rattling. And what if fire or flood should trap her there? Boiled water scald her? What if the poison on Sister Illuminata’s shelves should find its way into her tea? Or pneumonia, tuberculosis, flu, transfer itself to her lungs from the putrid wash water of a dying woman’s linen? And the days growing darker now. And the way home sometimes slick with rain. The stolen afternoon with Mr. Costello, ham and eggs and the tumbled bed in the cold and waning light, black sin upon black sin. And then the long night with no one else in the apartment—did her mother check that the oven was turned off, as they always used to do when Sally was young, because of Jim? Was she careful stepping down from the chair when she reached up to the transom above the door? Would anyone hear her if she cried out in the night, clutching her heart?
The devil waited at her mother’s heels, his pointed fingertips rimmed with grime, waited to catch her as she moved through her dangerous days, a fruit ripe for the plucking (she had heard the expression in a sermon once). Her mother was in a state of mortal sin, and if she were to die now, nothing would keep her from falling forever into the devil’s arms.
And what then of Jim, Sally thought—as if devising an argument no one had asked her to deliver—Jim, who waited for her in heaven?
Nothing to keep her mother from perdition except, perhaps—perhaps—the indulgence earned for her by her good daughter, swallowing her panic and her pride, her desire to be anywhere else (an urge that made her nerves coil and twitch), in order to remain with Mrs. Costello in her lonely late-morning hours, listening to her nonsense, absorbing her scorn, watching these spare and empty rooms—the heart of her own troubles—fill up with mid-morning light that was the color of urine, the color of bile.
The situation was clear: her mother would not change her ways. Mr. Costello was her “dear,” and even the Sisters seemed helpless before her blithe determination to keep him. Someone had to do penance for her, for the sin she would not give up. Who else but the daughter who loved her above everything?
*
THE NUN WHO WAS HERE THIS MORNING, Sister Aquina, had left Mrs. Costello in her chair, wrapped tightly in Mr. Costello’s woolen dressing gown. She’d told Sally to be sure she didn’t throw it off. Mrs. Costello was chilled and running a fever, Sister Aquina had said. Sally watched the nun stir cream of tartar into Mrs. Costello’s morning tea—to help with the constipation, Sister Aquina explained. And then the nun placed a flannel soaked in linseed oil on the woman’s chest. Before she left the apartment, Sister ground two aspirins with a mortar and pestle and instructed Sally to mix them into some of the applesauce she’d brought from the convent so that Mrs. Costello in her weakened state would not have to struggle to swallow them whole. “Just the smooth part of the applesauce, please,” Sister Aquina said. “Not the chunks and peels.”
Sister Aquina was a short, fat tomboy of a nun, with the broad face and the matter-of-fact authority of a cop on the street. Her small black eyes were slightly crossed. She was new to the convent, and so she assumed that Sally came to Mrs. Costello’s apartment every morning to learn something about nursing.
“What we want to avoid in these cases is aspiration,” she said. She was spooning applesauce into a teacup, and then fishing out myopic Mrs. Odette’s famous bits of peel. “And I don’t mean aspiring to find yourself a good-looking husband,” she added. She laughed at her joke, knowing nothing of Sally’s situation. Seeing only her willingness to serve. “We want to be careful that our patient doesn’t get food in her windpipe, doesn’t choke and breathe it in. Aspirate.” Sister Aquina traced a line down her bib, to her dark tunic, indicating her own lungs by drawing a circle under her shapeless breast. “That’s how infection can set in. Lung infection. Pneumonia. We don’t want that.”
Sister Aquina did not stay long. It was late January. All the Sisters were busy in this frozen season. With her cloak on, she put a hand to Sally’s arm, moved her head as if to catch the girl fully with her disparate eyes. “Aren’t you good?” she said, standing at the apartment door. “To be here like this.”
And Sally bowed her head in the old way—the way she might have accepted the praise last year, before her trip to Chicago—as if Sister Aquina’s ignorance of the situation, of the penance Sally was doing and the circumstance that required it, had restored her innocence. As if Sister Aquina’s ignorance made Sally’s goodness, her work of mercy, uncomplicated once more.
While Mrs. Costello napped in her chair, her breaths uneven, tangled with phlegm, Sally made another circuit of the cramped bedroom. The air in the room was a dirty yellow, the ceiling marred by mustard-colored water stains, the seams of the faded wallpaper grown pale brown. Behind the drawn lace curtains, the shades were the brittle color of old paper. The constant hiss and rattle of the radiator was like the gurgle of muddy street water going down a rusted drain.
Sally walked quietly around the bed, which Sister Aquina had left neatly made, around the narrow hope chest at its foot. Casually, she paused to open the chest a few inches—a breath of cedar, the glimpse of folded linen—and then closed it again when she heard Mrs. Costello stir.
She walked to the dresser. The two china-faced dolls were slumped together. They wore similar dresses, long-sleeved and full-skirted, yellowed lace at the neck and sleeve and a vague stripe woven into the faded fabric, one blue, one purple. The doll in the purple dress had an eye pushed back into its skull. The faces of both were shattered with small cracks. Sally picked up the purple one and was surprised to find that its limbs were heavy with sawdust or sand.
Something of Mrs. Costello herself in the doll’s limp weight.
It occurred to Sally, just out of her own girlhood, that with only the slightest act of imagination she could bring the doll to life—poor thing, sweetly smiling, lonely here with her sister on the shelf. But some distaste, for the age of the doll, for the rolled-back eye, made her resist her own girlish impulse to animate the thing, to offer it her sympathy.
“Put that down,” Mrs. Costello said. Her voice, weakly petulant, was full of congestion. “That’s not yours.”