The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Reparation

SISTER JEANNE FOUND ANNIE in the convent’s drying yard. She gestured that the two should sit, and Annie pinned the last cloth to the line and then joined her on the wrought-iron bench that had been tucked into this corner of the yard ever since the convent was a rich man’s house, elegant and new. The story in the neighborhood was that the house had been bequeathed to the Little Nursing Sisters in Chicago fifty years ago, when its owner washed up there, having lost his family’s fortune to drink and depravity. The story was that the man died in the Little Nursing Sisters’ care, and had asked on his deathbed that they take his house in Brooklyn in reparation for his sins.

Sister llluminata dismissed this tale when Annie asked about it. Said the house was a gift from a good man who wanted only to help the poor.

The bench was under a narrow arbor, now overgrown with honeysuckle vine and curling ivy, fitted with a statue of St. Francis. The folds of the saint’s robes were tinted green with oxidation; ivy had grown up around the creatures at his feet. The black leaves were repeated in the carvings on the bench, which were also touched with a blue-green dust. Annie made note to brush down Jeanne’s veil for her before they went inside.

The shade gave little relief from the day’s heat. Annie watched as the nun found her handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from her temples, from the pale down above her lip. That any of the nuns could bear their habits on these hot city days, could bear especially the starched linen at their throats and their chins, filled Annie with admiration—and some pride that she and Illuminata were able to keep most of them smelling sweet, at least through the first hours of these stifling mornings.

Annie had opened her own blouse three buttons more than was modest as she came out into the yard with the wet wash. With the clothespins in her mouth, she had glanced down at her breasts as she pinned the nuns’ summer shifts to the line. She recalled without irony or shame the pleasure of his cheek against her skin.

Poor Sister Jeanne had a sunken look about her. Broad creases were pressed into her face, just under her eyes. She had been out of the convent for a string of days, and she recounted her casework: a widow grown blind had been resettled in the French Little Sisters’ home for the aged, a young mother with milk fever was restored, her baby thriving once more. Those First Communion dresses Annie had bleached and mended were much appreciated by an Italian family of seven girls—four of their own and three orphaned cousins. Although one of the girls was determined to wear red shoes. Mr. Bannister, the old veteran, the old bachelor, had both Sister Jeanne and Sister Agatha with him as he went through his last agony, which had taken four long days. But he had not died alone.

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