Quoting her, our father sometimes said, “Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?”
Liz Tierney preferred the bright distractions of living. She liked a good fight. She liked a long talk with plenty of gossip in it. She liked her husband when his passions were at high tide, and her children when they were rocking the boat: running, or laughing, full of outrage, full of schemes. She liked the sound of many voices in her house—liked it better still when they rose in a chorus of song. She liked stories of sin far better than tales of virtue. She liked the salty taste of contradiction on her tongue. She hated idleness. And long silences. She hated to see anyone doing anything alone.
When Sister Lucy appeared at her door for the second time in nearly twenty years, Sally all bedraggled beside her, not gone to the convent after all, Mrs. Tierney was quietly delighted by the news of Annie’s stolen afternoons—with the milkman, no less.
“You spoke up,” she wanted to tell her friend, spoke up against the lousy certainties life had given her: a husband dead, a daughter to raise alone, daily labor, daily loneliness, dull duty. She said, in fact, when next she and Annie met, “An hour or two of an afternoon isn’t much of a sin.”
And so on the morning that Sally told her, still in her dressing gown and with the breakfast plates and cups and crusts still on the kitchen table, “I’m not following the Sisters anymore,” Mrs. Tierney could only smile. It was a cold, dark morning and an icy rain was hitting the courtyard outside the window. Liz Tierney was delighted to know that the girl wouldn’t be going out into such weather, even to comfort the sick. “Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning,” Mrs. Tierney said, singing it, as she brewed another pot of tea. “But it’s nicer to stay in bed.”
And then, not two weeks later, Mrs. Costello came down with pneumonia and Mr. Costello decided to amend his life. Annie told Liz Tierney this news without shedding a tear. She seemed to love the man all the more for it. He’d broken it off with her and then made a good confession, and, Annie said, “That’s that.”
“And you?” Liz Tierney said. “Have you made a good confession, too?”
Annie hushed her—they were walking arm-in-arm through the cold and leafless park. She said it was hardly a subject she would bring up in church, with a holy priest, no less. Wouldn’t the poor man die of embarrassment?
They leaned together, laughing. But knowing, too, faithful as they were, that an immortal soul was at stake. “You could make a quick confession,” Liz told her. “You wouldn’t have to go into detail.”
But Annie, stubborn, shook her head. “There’s not a thing I’m sorry for,” she said.
*
THAT NIGHT, a wet night in early February, Sally came back to the Tierneys’ after her shift at the hotel and went up to her room. She and the twins were going to the movies in an hour. She had barely taken off her shoes and stockings and was drying her hair with a towel when there was a light tap at the door. Mrs. Tierney entered, and then closed the door behind her, leaning back against it, her hands on the doorknob behind her substantial hips. Her cheeks were bright red, as if she had just come in from the cold herself.
“You should know,” Mrs. Tierney said, without preliminaries, “the situation has changed. For your mother.” She studied Sally, as if to see if there was more she needed to say. She seemed briefly disappointed to find there was. “She no longer has her visitor. His wife is ill. He believes that’s where his duty lies.” And then she raised her eyebrows to say, Do you understand me now? And then smiled in relief as if Sally had actually said, I understand.
In fact, Sally said nothing at all.
Mrs. Tierney straightened up, brought her hands forward, drying them, although they were not wet, on her apron. “You are always welcome here, of course,” she said. “You can stay as long as you like. But no one would wonder if you want to leave us now to go back to your own place.”
She smoothed her apron over her skirt, her voice taut with the emotion she could not conceal. “Your mother is there by herself now,” she said. “Entirely alone.”
Still
THE LAMPS WERE ALL ON in Mrs. Costello’s apartment, although daylight was at the bedroom window. A funereal hush about the place as the two nuns—Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy today—bustled silently about. Sister Jeanne was putting the clean laundry in drawers and cupboards when Sally arrived. Sister Lucy was just turning from Mrs. Costello in the bed, her stethoscope around her neck, black against her silver cross and her white bib. Mrs. Costello’s small face was wan. She was, Sister Lucy told Sister Jeanne, “weak as a kitten.” In the corner by the window, there was a bullet-shaped oxygen tank beside a folded oxygen tent that was ghostly pale.
Sister Lucy glanced up at Sally as she stood in the door of Mrs. Costello’s bedroom, and then she said, indifferently, “Good. You’re here.”
She brushed down her sleeve with her crooked hand. Then reached into her pocket for her wristwatch on its worn leather strap. “All right, I’m off,” she said. She took Sally by the arm and steered her out of the room. “Are you here for the duration or just stopping in?” she asked. Her eyes were moving and her mouth indicated that she was already certain no answer would satisfy. “Because I’ve been told you’ve abandoned this particular work of mercy,” she went on, “which is fine, you’re not obliged. You were never obliged to be here. But Jeanne’s exhausted. She could use some help until Mr. Costello gets home. The missus is recovering, but slowly.” She squinted a bit from the distance of her bonnet. “Mr. Costello will be home as soon as he can get here. Every morning now. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Sally said, “I know.”
Sister reached for her cloak, which was still damp and sparkling with the morning’s rain. She swept the cloak over her shoulder, the stethoscope around her neck, tangled now with the chain of her cross. “Mrs. Costello will live,” she said, as if she were merely ticking off the day’s obligations. “Her husband will mend his ways.” She smiled her thin-lipped smile, reaching back to adjust her veil. “I’ve never believed our God is a bargaining God, but men do. It’s nonsense. While he was praying for her to live, she was praying to die. Which one of them struck the bargain?”
Sister Lucy sniffed disdainfully. “We kept her alive,” she said. “God knows it.”