The two nuns walked up the stairs with her, Sister Jeanne ahead and Sister St. Saviour just behind, her swollen ankles weighting each step with pain. At the apartment door, it was Sister St. Saviour who stepped back so the girl could enter with the young nun at her side.
At four o’clock, the black hearse pulled up. The three women watched from the bedroom window. Mr. Sheen, elegant in his long overcoat, left the cab first and was the first to appear upstairs. He was a tall man with the sharp nose and high cheekbones of an Indian chief, a pair of large, heavy-lidded eyes that couldn’t have been better suited to his profession. He swept off his hat and took the widow’s two hands into his own and, with a quick look around the sparsely furnished room, suggested the lady and the two nuns might want to wait in the bedroom while he made his preparations. Annie and Sister Jeanne sat together at the foot of the bed while Sister St. Saviour stood at the door. They could hear Mr. Sheen giving instructions. And then the unmistakable sound of the coffin being carried up the stairs, a bit of labored breathing, and the touch of the wooden casket against the doorframe. And then Mr. Sheen rapped on the bedroom door to say all was ready.
The husband’s face was pale and waxen, but it was, nevertheless, a lovely face. Boyish and solemn above the starched white collar, with a kind of youthful stubbornness about it as well. The look of a child, Sister St. Saviour thought, when met with the spoon of castor oil.
While Annie and Sister Jeanne knelt, Sister St. Saviour blessed herself and considered the sin of her deception, slipping a suicide into hallowed ground. A man who had rejected his life, the love of this brokenhearted girl, the child coming to them in the summer. She said to God, who knew her thoughts, Hold it against me if You will. He could put this day on the side of the ledger where all her sins were listed: the hatred she felt for certain politicians, the money she stole from her own basket to give out as she pleased—to a girl with a raging clap, to the bruised wife of a drunk, to the mother of the thumb-sized infant she had wrapped in a clean handkerchief, baptized, and then buried in the convent garden. All the moments of how many days when her compassion failed, her patience failed, when her love for God’s people could not outrun the girlish alacrity of her scorn for their stupidity, their petty sins.
She wanted him buried in Calvary to give comfort to his poor wife, true. To get the girl what she’d paid for. But she also wanted to prove herself something more than a beggar, to test the connections she’d forged in this neighborhood, forged over a lifetime. She wanted him buried in Calvary because the power of the Church wanted him kept out and she, who had spent her life in the Church’s service, wanted him in.
Hold it against the good I’ve done, she prayed. We’ll sort it out when I see You.
Only a few neighbors came to call, every one of them a little restrained in sympathy, given the unspoken notion that the son of a bitch could have taken them all with him. A trio of red-faced motormen stopped by, but stayed only a minute when no drink was offered. Later, the two nuns walked Mr. Sheen downstairs in order to give the girl some time alone with her husband. At the curb, he reached into the cab of the hearse and pulled out the day’s newspaper. He folded back a page and tapped a narrow article. Sister St. Saviour leaned forward to read, Sister Jeanne at her elbow. In the descending light of the cold evening, the blur of a misting rain and a rising fog, the two could just make out the headline: SUICIDE ENDANGERS OTHERS. It was followed by the full report of the fire and the man’s death by his own hand. “There’s nothing to be done, Sister,” Mr. Sheen whispered. “Now that it’s in the paper, there’s not a Catholic cemetery that will have him. I’ll have my head handed to me on a plate if I try to bring him into the church.”
To Sister Jeanne’s eyes, the black newsprint, especially the bold headline that seemed to swell and blur under the blow of each raindrop, briefly transformed the world itself into a thing made of paper, pocked by tears.
But Sister St. Saviour pushed the undertaker’s hand away. She thought of the rude young man with the milk tooth and the gray fedora. Her glasses flashed under the just-illuminated lamplight. “The New York Times,” she said, “has a big mouth.”
*
THE TWO NUNS climbed the stairs again. Sister St. Saviour was aware of how patiently little Sister Jeanne paused with her on each step, a hand raised to offer aid. Inside, they coaxed the sobbing girl up off her knees and into the bed. It was Sister Jeanne who took over then—no weariness in her narrow shoulders, no indication at all that she felt the tedium of too much sympathy for a stranger. With Annie settled, Sister Jeanne told Sister St. Saviour to go back to the convent to rest. She whispered that she would keep vigil through the long night and have the lady ready first thing in the morning.
“Ready for what?” Sister St. Saviour asked her, attempting to gauge how much the young nun understood—suspecting not much. “There will be no mass.” Her pain, her bone-through fatigue, made her voice sharper than she knew.
Young Sister Jeanne looked up at the nun, moisture once more gathering in her pretty eyes. She said, with childish determination, “I’ll have her ready for whatever’s to come.”
Sister St. Saviour left the two of them murmuring in the bedroom. At the casket, she paused again to look at the young man’s still face. She went to the window in the kitchen and looked down into that purgatory of the backyards. At this hour, there was nothing to be seen. All movement, all life, was in the lighted windows above: a man at a table, a child with a bedside lamp, a young woman walking an infant to and fro.
Of course, it was Sister Jeanne who would be here when the baby arrived come summer.
It was Sister Jeanne who had been sent for.
The old nun felt a beggar’s envy rise to her throat. She envied little Jeanne, true enough—a new sin for her side of the ledger—envied her faith and her determination and her easy tears. But she envied as well the coming dawn, Lauds, still so many hours away. She envied the very daylight, envied every woman who would walk out into it, bustling, bustling, one foot in front of the other, no pain weighting her steps, so much to do.
Confident of heaven—God knew her failings—Sister St. Saviour was, nevertheless, even now, jealous of life.
She turned from the cold glass, turned as well a cold shoulder to the God who had brought her here so that Jeanne would follow. It was the way a bitter old wife might turn her back on a faithless husband.
*
THE BABY, a daughter, was born in August, just three weeks after the old nun died. She was called Sally, but baptized St. Saviour in honor of the Sister’s kindness that sad afternoon. That damp and gray afternoon when the pilot went out. When our young grandfather, a motorman for the BRT whose grave we have never found, sent his wife to do her shopping while he had himself a little nap.
And Then