A fatherless girl, a convent child in white wool. The girl he always knew he would marry.
Growing old ourselves, we indulged him. We listened to the same stories told again and kept silent about the truth: that our mother’s midlife melancholy was clinical depression, unspoken of in those days.
That Great-aunt Rose’s happy tremor as we guided her up the stairs was surely the Parkinson’s that had visited us as well.
That the holy nuns who sailed through the house when we were young were a dying breed even then. The Bishop with his eye on their rich man’s mansion even then. The call to sanctity and self-sacrifice, the delusion and superstition it required, fading from the world even then.
We asked, And how much would they have paid him—Red Whelan—because it was history we were talking about so comfortably, here at the end of our father’s days and the new waning of our own. History was easy: the past with all loss burned out of it, all sorrow worn out of it—all that was merely personal comfortably removed.
How much would it have cost his grandfather to hire a substitute during the Civil War?
We did a search. From the computer on our father’s desk we read out: The Conscription Act of 1863 … we read out, three hundred dollars … an option available only to the well-off.
And Lincoln, too, had a substitute, we discovered. Who knew? A young man recruited to serve in Lincoln’s stead. Brought to the White House, given the Commander’s blessing. Given a short war, it turned out. An article in an old New York Times about a statue proposed to honor the young man in his own hometown, the young man who had agreed to serve as Lincoln’s substitute in the Civil War.
Although not at Ford’s Theatre, we said, laughing about it. We said he’d have done the President more good if he’d served as his substitute at Ford’s Theatre.
Our father said, “My father told his old man, ‘One life’s already been given to save your skin.’ And never forgave himself for the cruelty of it.”
He said, “It was all a very long time ago.”
Scrolling down—the black newsprint quaintly askew—we saw on the same page: SUICIDE ENDANGERS OTHERS.
“That would be the man,” our father said when we read it to him. “That would be Jim, your mother’s father. A suicide then,” he said sadly. “A suicide in the family.”
He said, “Thank God your mother never knew.”
We thought of the hushed afternoons of our childhood, our mother sleeping off her melancholy, the nuns sailing in—standing in for She Who Could Not Be Replaced—keeping her in the world. Keeping her for us.
We marveled to think of it: how much went unspoken in those days. How much they believed was at stake.
“Well, the truth’s out now,” our father said.
Endless Length of Days
SISTER JEANNE asked us, “Have you ever worn an itchy old coat? The wool’s too rough and it’s tight in the sleeves. And you can’t run in it too well because it binds here and there, across your hips. You’ve outgrown it, see? Maybe you put it on in the morning cause it’s all you’ve got, and maybe it’s a dark morning and cold, but then the sun goes up in the sky—even on a cold and cloudy day, the sun goes up, doesn’t it, day after day—so by three o’clock, when you’re walking home from school, there’s sunlight hitting you on the head, feeling like a big hand pressing down, or maybe a sledgehammer. It’s heating up your shoulders and your back, and you’re starting to feel prickly inside that stiff old coat. You’re feeling all perspiry, see, and prickly hot.”
She hunched her shoulders in their dark serge to demonstrate our discomfort. Inside her bonnet she was smiling at us. Behind her in the frame of the dining room window, the long shadows of a golden afternoon or a descending dusk, a snow squall or spring blossoms, maybe a gray rain.
“And what will you do the minute you come through that door?” She pointed over our heads to the kitchen door, and we turned as if we would see ourselves, evoked by her words, coming into the house as we always did: hand to the glass knob, shoulder to the peeling paint.
“Don’t I know what you’ll do? Didn’t I do it myself as a girl? You’ll shimmy and shake and fight and jiggle until you get that old coat off. You’ll pull the sleeves inside out.”
Inside the white bonnet she closed her deep-set eyes. She raised her clasped hands to her chin—a round, protruding chin, brushed with rosacea, like the sun blush of a laborer from the field—and touched the steeple of her two index fingers to her small mouth. She said, her eyes closed, “When you finally get the old thing off, the air in this house will feel as cool and as sweet as silk on your skin, won’t it? It will feel like cool water on the back of your neck and on your wrists.” She opened her eyes again and we saw that they were bright with tears. “It will be like when your mother’s sheets are out on the line, maybe on an afternoon in the fall or in the spring, and you walk through them when nobody’s watching. You let those sheets brush over your face and slide over your head and then fall down your back, don’t you? And then you turn around to do it again. I’ve seen you. Sweet-smelling, they are. And clean.”
She laughed, her eyes shining. “That’s how good the air feels when you’ve shucked off that old coat, isn’t it?”
She said, “That’s how you’ll feel when you get to heaven, see? A long time from now for you, please God. Very soon for your old aunty.”
And then a shadow passed across her face, although her back was to the bright window, although there was no telling its source. Her skin looked gray, her eyes lost their laughter. “But it’s not for me,” she said, “that relief. Never for me. That beauty.”
She said, “I lost heaven a long time ago.” She put her hand on the chain that held the crucifix around her neck, gripped it against her white bib. “Back when your mother was still a girl. All of eighteen, I think.” She paused, thoughtful. “Out of love, I lost it. Which sounds funny, doesn’t it? You’d think you could only lose heaven out of hate.” She shrugged, always girlish. “But I lost it all the same.”
Above us, our mother was sleeping off the melancholy that claimed her, even in the midst of our bright and happy childhoods. Old Aunt Rose, already a figure from a long ago past, was dusted with dust in our attic room.
Sister Jeanne touched her fist to her breast. Behind her, a swarm of blossoms, of yellowing leaves, of snow or frozen rain. “I gave up my place in heaven a long time ago,” she said. “Out of love for my friends.”
Inside her white bonnet, her small eyes, an old woman’s fading eyes, were moving over us. Briefly, something affectionate, even joyful, overcame the sorrow in them, but only briefly. When that gray shadow returned, we recognized it not as a passing light, no more than the blink of an eye, but as a grief that had always been there in her dear old face. “God knows my heart,” she said. “So I don’t ask for His forgiveness, see?”