Grab Bag (17 page)

I got through the two hours easily, glad to be back in the musty-smelling old building I had been so glad to leave twenty-seven years before. Whoever was in charge of the North Branch these days had been sadly neglectful about reading the shelves. I managed to get quite a lot of the nonfiction straightened out as not many borrowers came in and only three or four teenagers giggled halfheartedly at the reference tables. I went home thoroughly tired and quite pleased with myself.

That night I had no trouble falling asleep, but I was awakened sometime after midnight by the nuns’ little lights flickering on my ceiling. I tried to ignore them but I suppose I was too keyed up after my whirlwind day. Anyway, I got out of bed again and went to look. There they were, each with her candle, moving around in that same aimless, wavery circle.

Knowing nothing about Catholic orders, I was free to speculate. Maybe this was one of those cloistered convents where nobody spoke. They weren’t speaking now, anyway, the sound would have carried up to me. Maybe they weren’t allowed out in the daytime. To be sure, I saw nuns around town fairly often, but perhaps they were from a different convent, or perhaps some could go and others had to stay. It seemed odd, but the whole concept of the religious life is beyond me. I gave up wondering and idly counted them again. Fifteen. One more than the night before. Unless I’d counted wrong.

I had not. Every night after that, I witnessed the same performance. Every night there was one more nun in the yard. It got to be a sort of game. I dropped off about half-past ten, fully expecting to be wakened roughly two hours later. When the lights started to flicker on the ceiling, I got up, counted the number of candle flames—this was easier than trying to sort out the black shapes of the nuns themselves—and went back to bed. As soon as I was back under the covers, the lights would disappear from the ceiling. It was as though I controlled the amount of time those poor creatures were allowed to spend in the yard, and I must admit it gave me a queer feeling.

What with these nightly interruptions, my job, and keeping up the apartment, I found I was always tired, and I must have looked it. Miss Harcourt spoke to me.

“I hope the work here isn’t too much for you, Anna.”

“Oh no,” I said. As a matter of fact, it was nothing compared to when Henry was alive. “It’s just that I haven’t been getting enough sleep on account of the nuns.”

“The nuns?” She stared at me, quite startled. “Whatever do you mean?”

I explained about the nightly perambulations and the lights on my ceiling. She shook her head.

“That is strange. I’ve lived here all my life, and I never heard of such a thing.”

“I thought perhaps they couldn’t go out during the day or something,” I ventured.

“No, that can’t be it. They are a working order. A number of them teach at the parochial school. You must have seen them in here about the Catholic book lists. Some of the others run the thrift shop and that little place beside it that sells religious statues and whatnot. I believe they also go around visiting shut-ins and taking food to the needy. This is a poor parish, you know, since the mill closed down.”

She didn’t have to tell me that. One had only to walk down our main street and look at the dirt-streaked store windows, many of them empty except for torn paper signs with maybe a flyspecked cardboard display or a forgotten paper coffee cup, and see the women shuffling along in cheap, thin old coats with the hems dragging and sleazy kerchiefs tied over their curlers.

“I simply cannot understand what they’d be doing out there at that hour of the night,” Miss Harcourt was still fussing. “Perhaps if you spoke to the Mother Superior, she could have them use the other side of the yard.”

“How many are there?” I asked her.

“I really couldn’t say for sure. Quite a large group, I believe, many of them fairly old. They were brought here not long after the war, when things were booming, and apparently just stayed on. Nowhere else to go, I suppose, like the rest of us.” She sighed and went back to her dingy office, leaving me to cope with the week’s circulation records.

Over the weekend it wasn’t so bad, as I could sleep late both mornings. There was also the pleasure of refusing Martha’s invitation to Sunday dinner. She and my brother-in-law took the news of my job as I had expected, pleased that they now had an excuse not to bother with me, annoyed because I’d taken the step without consulting them. I didn’t care. Already my life was taking on a pattern in which they would have no part.

I did think of dropping a gentle remark to my brother-in-law that life next door to a convent was less rosy than he’d painted it, but I refrained. He might feel it his duty to take steps, and I did not want him interfering. After all, if the nuns chose to exercise in their own garden, whose business was it but their own?

By the following Wednesday afternoon, when I caught myself falling asleep over the books I was mending in the staff room, the mellow mood had worn off. My nightly count had reached twenty-two by then. The mailman had told me there were fifty—sisters, he called them—in residence at the convent. That probably meant I had twenty-three more nights of broken sleep to endure. Then, for all I knew, they’d be starting over again. Honestly, it was too much.

Glancing up from my work, I happened to see one of the daytime nuns passing toward the circulation desk. I got up and went out to intercept her.

“Good afternoon,” I said quite politely, all things considered. “I’m Mrs. Goodbody. I happen to be a neighbor of yours.”

“A neighbor?” She was an elderly woman as Miss Harcourt had said she’d be, good-natured and not particularly bright looking, wearing gold-rimmed glasses that had been clumsily mended with adhesive tape. “Oh, you mean you live in the house next to the convent. Then you must have known our dear Seraphine.” She beamed as though that made us friends.

“No, I’m afraid I never did,” I told her. “I moved in just after she died.”

I don’t think the nun heard me. “We all miss her so,” she went on, picking at the frayed edges of her sleeves. “She was so wonderfully kind to us.”

She made the sign of the cross and wandered on to join another of her order who was talking with Miss Harcourt at the desk. I didn’t like to go chasing after her again. Feeling defeated and cross, I went back to mending books. A few minutes later, Miss Harcourt came in.

“I asked Sister Marie Claire,” she said abruptly, “and she says they don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Sister says,” Miss Harcourt explained carefully in her precise librarian’s voice, “that the rules of the convent compel them all to be in their beds at half-past nine and not to leave their cells until six o’clock in the morning. She says none of them would dare disobey.”

“I don’t care what she says,” I replied too sharply. “I’ve seen them out there every night since I moved in.”

She looked at me for a moment without speaking, then went back to the desk. I knew what she was thinking. “The shock of losing her husband, poor dear.”

That evening I had the North Branch again. On my way into the house after I got off duty, I thumped at the door of my first-floor neighbors. Their television was blasting full force and I had quite a time making them hear. Finally one of the sisters, Miss Edith I believe it was, shuffled to the door.

“Come in, come in, Mrs. Goodbody. Helen, it’s Mrs. Goodbody from upstairs,” she screamed.

The other sister, who must have been ever deafer, smiled and nodded but didn’t turn away from the television set. She was watching a western and seemed to enjoy being able to hear the gunshots.

“I wanted to ask you,” I shouted over the racket, “if you ever see the nuns in the yard at night.”

Miss Edith nodded briskly. “Fine. Not a bit of trouble since I started the new treatment. What I say is, you can’t be too careful with all this—” I think the next word was
sickness.
Miss Edith had a trick of raising and lowering her voice between a bellow and a whisper without regard to the sense of what she was saying. Between that and the gunfire, I lost a great deal.

“—since she died. Though if you ask me, she plain wore herself to death sewing for those nuns.”

“Yes, the nuns,” I shrieked. “Do you ever—”

“Night and day. It was too much for a woman her age, but she was bound and determined. I never knew such a stubborn woman. Did we, Helen?”

Her sister smiled and nodded again, still not taking her eyes from the screen.

“We could hear that sewing machine of hers going at all hours. Some nights it kept us awake.”

She must have been talking about the late Seraphine Laberes, I decided. It seemed incredible that any noise whatsoever could disturb this pair. Perhaps the empty apartment between had acted as a giant sounding board. I tried once more.

“They’ve been keeping me awake.”

Surprisingly, she heard most of what I said, and gave me an odd look. “It can’t be her. She’s been dead for over a month.”

“Not Seraphine! The nuns.”

“That’s what I said. It was doing for those nuns killed her, you mark my words. Working all day at the tailor shop and all night for them. And never getting a penny for it, I know for a fact. She even bought the material herself. She told me so. ‘They’re old,’ she said. ‘They won’t give up their habits. But I can’t stand to see them going around in rags.’ I heard her,” Miss Edith finished proudly.

The seamstress must have had stronger lungs than mine. I gave up and fell back, like Miss Helen, on smiles and nods.

“She made one a week, regular as clockwork. I’d meet her Sunday mornings going to the convent with a big black bundle over her arm. She didn’t care. ‘It’s the Lord’s work,’ she’d say to me. She meant to make one for everybody, but she only got thirteen of them done. They found the thirteenth finished on her machine the night she died. That was an unlucky number for her all right, as I said to Helen. Didn’t I, Helen?” These last words were spoken in a whisper.

“You certainly did, Edith,” replied Miss Helen.

I said good night and went upstairs.

That night I never shut an eye. I undressed and got into bed but all I could do was lie there waiting for those maddening pinpoints of light to appear.

Finally I could stand the suspense no longer. I got up, pulled on the first clothes that came to hand, grabbed my black coat and a head scarf, and went downstairs. I found myself tiptoeing so as not to wake the house, then feeling silly for doing it with only Miss Edith and Miss Helen below and nothing above but the empty flat where Miss Edith claimed Seraphine Laberes had worked herself to death sewing for the nuns.

The garden was still empty when I got down there. I walked over and stood close to the iron railings, beginning to wonder why I had come. After a few minutes, though, I saw a glimmer of light over in the far corner, then another and another. I counted them one by one until the twenty-third appeared. To my annoyance, however, they stayed huddled over in the corner.

“I wish they’d get started with whatever it is they do,” I thought crossly. I was getting chilly, standing there.

Immediately, as if I had turned on the power that moved them, the forms started moving around. Still they stayed away from me.

“Oh, come over here,” I muttered.

They came, all twenty-three of them in a silent semicircle, looming toward me through the railings. No hands held the candles. No faces showed beneath the cowls. The robes were empty.

I believe I must have fainted. The next thing I remember, I was pulling myself up by the cold iron spikes, picking dirt and leaves off my good wool coat, staring in at the barren garden, empty now in the bleak dawn. I was not frightened. I only knew I should never sleep again until I had finished what must be done.

I went back into the house and took down the card over the top mailbox that said
Seraphine Laberes, Dressmaking and Alterations.
I carried it upstairs and burned it in an ashtray. Then I bathed, dressed, and put on a felt hat I seldom wore. It was still very early, so I puttered around making my bed, dusting a little, brushing my coat where I had fallen, Out of habit I made coffee, but I didn’t drink any. As soon as the sky was decently light, I went next door and rang the bell.

The elderly nun who opened the door had on a neat, new habit.

“Seraphine made that,” I said.

“She … yes she did,” stammered the portress, quite startled by my brusque remark.

“She finished thirteen of them, I understand.”

“She did, and may the blessing of Mary rest forever on her soul.”

“But she still had how many to go?”

“Thirty-seven,” the portress replied promptly, as though she had the number stamped on her tongue. “Me being on the door,” she half apologized, “I got the first one.”

“What is the name of your order?”

“The Little Sisters of the Poor.”

Yes, it would be. I took out my checkbook.

Eyeing me with a mixture of hope and suspicion, she backed away from the door. “I’d better call Mother Superior. Will you step in, please?”

I don’t know what I expected a convent to be like. The room into which the nun showed me reminded me of a dentist’s waiting room. An elderly, not very successful dentist, like the ones in our town. One of those hideous pseudo-Renaissance tables stood in the middle with a couple of straight chairs drawn up to it. I pulled out one and sat down.

The Mother Superior didn’t keep me waiting. She bustled in, her long rosary swinging from her waist. I thought it proper to stand up. What on earth did one call her? “Mother Superior” sounded rather a mouthful and plain “Mother” hardly suitable from a non-Catholic close to her own age. I bowed and said nothing. She waved me back into my seat and took the other chair herself. The portress left the room, but I could see her black skirts just beyond the door. I got right down to business.

“I must apologize for coming so early, but I have to do this as soon as possible for my own peace of mind.”

The Mother Superior’s lips formed the word, “Soul.”

“My soul isn’t involved,” I said rather tartly.

“Oh, but the soul’s always involved, Mrs.—”