Now she pulled off the stethoscope and stashed it angrily, as was her ordinary way, into her little black bag. “Mr. Costello returns around ten. Eleven at the latest. No one will blame you if you don’t want to run into him. But stay a while and let Sister Jeanne catch her breath.”
She lifted her bag, looked around the room. “Take a dust rag to those lampshades,” she went on, “and to the baseboards. There’s bread and butter in the kitchen. Some boiled eggs, applesauce. Get Jeanne to eat something, too. And put the kettle on. Bring them both a nice cup of tea. Fortify it with plenty of milk and sugar.” And then Sister Lucy was out the door.
Sally still wore her coat and hat, and her pocketbook was still on her arm. She stood in the room, briefly uncertain. The nuns had the two lamps turned on and the light in the kitchen as well. New, if gray and muted, sunlight was streaming into the bedroom from the one window. It was nearly 7 a.m. The radiator against the far wall was hissing and ticking, but the draft left by Sister Lucy’s exit swept the room, hollowing out the warmth. Sally shivered. In her purse was the violet handkerchief she had picked up from the floor of the tearoom. Tied into it, like a hobo’s pack, was a good handful of alum.
Sally put her purse on the slipcovered chair. She took off her coat and her hat and placed them over it. Then she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. While it boiled, she went back to the living room and picked up her purse. Now she put it on the small kitchen table. She set out on the counter two of Mrs. Costello’s teacups, spooned tea into the silver tea ball, and placed it inside the tin pot. When the water boiled, she poured it in. She went to her purse, easily found the violet handkerchief.
She untied the knot and shook the alum into the empty cup. She poured the tea over it and immediately the water grew cloudy. The faint odor that arose was redolent of Sister’s Immaculate’s laundry. She added sugar and milk and then tasted the mixture from the spoon. There was the bitter sharpness of what was not tea. In the cupboard over the sink, Mr. Costello kept a bottle of whiskey. Sally had seen it before. Quickly she reached up for the bottle and poured a splash into the tea, briefly recalling the Bronx girl on the train. She tied up the handkerchief again and returned it to her purse. She snapped the purse closed, and the sound of the lock reverberated. It echoed, she was certain.
She carried the teacup on its saucer, the spoon rattling, into the bedroom. Mrs. Costello was propped in the bed as she had been. Sister Jeanne was taking her pulse.
“Sister Lucy said to bring her some tea,” Sally whispered. “There’s some waiting for you in the kitchen, too.” She kept her hand over the cup, as if to contain the scent of what she had done. She felt her palm grow damp with steam. There was something painful rising to her throat. She knew she could always drop the cup. Mrs. Costello’s eyes fluttered open, that meaningless blue of them. “I don’t want it,” she whispered. “Go away.” She coughed weakly and tried to move down into the bed.
Sister Jeanne was adjusting the pillows behind her head. “It’s better for your lungs if you can sit up a bit, dear,” she said gently. Sally could tell Sister Jeanne had said this many times before. “I know you are tired, Mrs. Costello, but it’s better if you can give your lungs some room.”
Mrs. Costello coughed again and then narrowed her eyes like an angry child. “I’m tired of you,” she said.
Sister Jeanne said, “You’re tired in general, Mrs. Costello. A little tea. Something to eat, and you’ll start feeling stronger.”
She signaled to Sally to come around the bed. “Just a spoonful,” she whispered. “A spoonful at a time. I’ll bring some food.”
Sally’s hand was trembling as she held the cup, and the cup was rattling against the saucer. The alum was at the bottom. Her plan was to give Mrs. Costello some sips of liquid, and then to spoon up the wet alum from the bottom of the cup and fill her mouth with it. Stop her throat with it. Stop her breath.
Her plan was to exchange her own immortal soul for her mother’s mortal happiness.
It was a ridiculous plan. Even this far along, she knew it was ridiculous. She knew it was ridiculous when she first conceived of it—walking home from the hotel on that bitter night, thinking lilac and stephanotis, a wedding in June, and considering how only a miserable woman, blood and stink and complaint, bird bones and pale skin, stood in the way of her mother’s happiness, her mother’s place in heaven.
She knew it was ridiculous just yesterday when she coaxed Sister Illuminata up the stairs for the three o’clock prayers. (“Wouldn’t you rather pray in the chapel, Sister?” she had asked. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “How long has it been since you’ve spent the afternoon hour away from your ironing board?”) And then filled the violet handkerchief with Sister’s alum—meant, Sally knew, for making flameproof the nuns’ veils, the donated infant clothes, the kitchen curtains. Telling herself all the while her plan was ridiculous. She would never do it. Never find the nerve.
And then waking so early this morning in her bed in the Tierney house. The mad sounds of the morning routine echoing through the walls. Feet pounding on the stairs and Mr. Tierney pounding on the bathroom door. The girls complaining they needed to get in there, too. A refrain of “Can I wear your … Can I borrow…” passed among the four of them. And Patrick calling to Michael, and Mrs. Tierney calling to the twins. Mr. Tierney singing wordlessly in his lovely baritone as he passed her doorway, going down the hall. The whistle of the kettle and the snap crack of bacon frying in the pan. Toast burning. And smelling again that moment when she believed, stupid and dumbfounded but, still, full of belief, that her father had returned in her absence, had returned to restore her mother’s happiness, her bright laughter, her life. To keep her from being entirely alone.
A ridiculous plan, she knew, even as she got up in the cold room and dressed and then, lying, told Mrs. Tierney she was going to see her mother at the convent. The lie itself, spoken out loud, making her ridiculous plan, her terrible plan, just that much more possible, the first step toward what she wanted to do. She told her lie and left the house, and suddenly her scheme was not merely a flight of her imagination but something possible. Something she might actually accomplish in the world: her mother’s life, her mortal life and her eternal life, restored.
“Going by the convent to see my mother,” she had said, lying so smoothly, leaving the house, and instead climbing the stairs to Mrs. Costello’s apartment. Letting herself in. The good handful of alum in her purse, wrapped in the fragrant handkerchief.
And now here she was, standing alone with it at the edge of Mrs. Costello’s bed.