*
SALLY WENT DOWN THE NARROW STAIRS of Mrs. Costello’s building and walked the sixteen blocks to the hotel. The streets crackled with the sound of rain, and voices, and cars and trucks. Someone shouted, some girls in a shop doorway laughed, a procession of solemn faces under raised umbrellas passed her by, some looking at her, some looking away, and all unaware—she believed, briefly—of the stillness that would overtake them. Overtake their features, their gesturing arms and hands, their moving mouths and chests. She reached the hotel and saw the hurrying figures, coming in and out, making the glass doors flash, Mr. Tierney himself in his beige uniform, a whistle to his lips, his hand in the air, the black street shining like patent leather at his feet. His laughing mouth and thick mustache—as a coin was slipped into his hand, slipped into his pocket—all unaware of the paralysis that would come to them, the sudden stillness, final, irrevocable. She went inside, down the elevator to the employees’ room. She imagined as she changed each of the girls who chatted around her with her head limp, caught in the gentle crook of a dark arm, eased down to a pillow, still. She saw in the tearoom, the calm hush of the place—gentle rattle of cups and saucers and spoons, soft mouthing of cakes and sandwiches, murmured conversation—the dumb oblivion of the human race. A terrible stillness would overtake them all, come what may. A terrible silence would stop their breaths, one way or another, and yet they spooned sugar into their cups or leaned back to take a watch from a waistband or pressed a linen napkin to their pink lips.
She walked home after work, in the cold darkness, under streetlamps encircled with fog. How would she live, having seen what she had seen? It had been one thing to refuse the convent, to say, “I’ve thought better of it,” after the long train ride showed her the truth of the dirty world, showed her that her own impulse was to meet its filthy citizens not with a consoling cloth, but with a curse, a punch in the face. But now it was life itself she wanted to refuse, for how could she live knowing that stillness, that inconsequence, that feral smell of death, was what her days were aiming her toward?
Each church she passed was faintly lit at this odd hour of the day. Lent had begun. She knew the statues inside were covered in purple shrouds. Something familiar in their wet stone and shadow as she passed them. Dampness and cold rock. Familiar but comfortless. She walked to the convent. Here the lamplight at the windows seemed dim as well. The nuns would be praying at the weary end of their hard day. She walked to her own apartment—her mother’s apartment—and saw the light was on in the bedroom window. Was her mother in there entirely alone, or was it Mr. Costello returned to her? She had not thought of him all afternoon. Or of her mother’s life ahead. Lilac, lily of the valley. June weather. Now they were free to wed. She tried to let the notion, something about happiness, about the brightness of the coming days, flood her bones, her nerves—the way prayer could sometimes relieve that electric itch to move. But no thoughts of summer could soothe her recollection of Mrs. Costello gone still.
The violet handkerchief with the remnant of the alum was still in her purse.
Her intentions, her murderous, ridiculous scheme, struck her as childish now, na?ve and innocent. She had wanted to save her mother’s soul even if it meant the death of her own. But she hadn’t known, childish, na?ve as she was, what any of it meant.
Her father knew. Had known it all along, lying in his hollowed-out place underground: a stillness no prayer, no wish, no imagining, no sacrifice could overcome. Of course he would never return to them.
She let herself into the Tierney kitchen. She had been walking for hours. Tom and Patrick were at the kitchen table under a single bulb, books and papers spread before them. They were both taking night classes. They looked up with sibling indifference when she came in. “We were wondering what happened to you,” Tom said. “Ma thought you’d gone back to your mother’s.”
Once more she slipped out of her hat and her coat, which were now heavy with rain, and hung them on the hooks by the door. She put her purse on the floor and came into the dim light of the kitchen.
“You look like a drowned rat,” Patrick said blithely, and then, without standing, pulled out the chair beside him. “Take a load off,” he said. “Have a glass of milk.” He leaned back to get a glass from the drain board and filled it from the bottle already on the table. He put it before her as she sat, and then, in the way of siblings, the two ignored her completely as they went back to their studies. She had never in her life been so weary, not even after her two sleepless nights on the train.
Patrick was explaining some diagram to Tom, something he had already drawn on notebook paper. Tom was running his hand through his hair, making it stand on end, resisting the explanation.
“Water seeks its own level,” Patrick said. “Don’t you get it?”
Tom said impatiently, “No, I don’t get it. And saying it over and over again isn’t going to make any difference. What does it mean? Are you telling me water has a brain, a pair of eyes? Does it go about with its arms stuck out like a blind man? It’s nonsense.”
Patrick leaned over the page. “What it means is…,” he said, and moved his finger across the paper. “Just try to follow. Here’s the aqueduct. Here’s the water tower. There’s the conduit. There’s the valve. Are you following?”
“I’m listening,” Tom said. “But I’m not following.” In the dim kitchen light, his features were shadowed. He was taller than his brother, and heavier as well. There was a hooded look about his eyes. He was slow-witted and Patrick was quick. This was a given in the family. The source of many jokes, the brunt of which was equally divided between them: Tom for the mistakes he made out of ignorance, Patrick for the mistakes he made out of arrogance.
“Well, then,” Patrick went on, “water seeks its own level,” and before he could continue, Tom was on his feet. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m through.” He turned to Sally. “You can talk to this parrot if you like. What I seek is some sleep.” He stabbed a hand at the wide kitchen sink. “Turn on the tap if you want to find out what the water is seeking.”
He walked out of the kitchen, and then they heard his footsteps on the stairs. Patrick shrugged, took back his diagram, and slipped it into one of his books. He began to straighten his papers. Awkward in the sudden silence. “Would you like some more milk?” he asked her. She hadn’t touched the glass he’d poured.