Sally nodded and then, forced to exhale, laughed. She said, yes, all the tearoom girls were now required to wash their hands in ammonia. She said something about the health inspector. She listened to herself tell this lie, amused, but not surprised, to find that she was capable of such a small cruelty. She stirred her hands in the quickly cooling water. Ran one nail under the other and stirred her hands again. “There’s a lot of sickness going around. They want us to be careful.”
The girl considered this. She was a big girl with wide, droopy breasts beneath her street clothes, a woolen dress, an ill-fitting coat. It occurred to Sally that she looked far better in her tearoom uniform, cleaner, even smarter, in her apron and her cap. A face and body made for service.
Sally saw the girl eye what was left in the bottle of ammonia.
“Help yourself,” Sally said.
Side by side, the two of them bathed their hands, scooping up the sharply scented water and pouring it out again.
Telling it later, our mother said, “Like a pair of Pontius Pilates.”
*
IN THE TEAROOM that afternoon, there was a lovely couple—a mother and a daughter. They were conferring like businessmen about the daughter’s wedding reception here at the hotel, come June. The mother was an elegant lady with her veil drawn down over her eyes. The daughter wore a lovely suit with wide white lapels and a cinched waist. They both gave off a soft perfume. They spoke together, heads bent: orange blossom, she heard them say, stephanotis, lilac, lily of the valley. She heard them say June weather, vanilla cake, iced lemonade.
When they were gone, Sally found a linen handkerchief beneath their table, neatly folded, of a pretty, pale violet shade. It carried the women’s perfume. She put it in her purse.
As she changed out of her uniform at the end of her shift, she was still repeating the words in her head, like the refrain of a song, like the words of a prayer: stephanotis, lilac, iced lemonade.
It was dark and bitter cold when she returned to the street. She had thrown her gloves away, and now she kept her raw hands plunged into her pockets, aware of the scent of ammonia that lingered on her skin.
Orange blossom and lily of the valley. Stephanotis. Iced lemonade. It occurred to her as she walked that if Mrs. Costello had died in her chair this afternoon, abandoned and alone, her mother and Mr. Costello would be free to marry. Come June, perhaps.
Holy
MRS. TIERNEY SAID, “Good for you,” when Sally told her the next morning, through her bedroom door, that she was sleeping in. “Sure the Sisters can get along fine without you. Get your rest.”
Liz Tierney was happy to think that the girl was growing somewhat weary of all her good works: all the holiness and the loneliness and the sacrifice.
Mrs. Tierney understood only that Sally, having had a false start on her vocation, was once again spending her mornings following the nuns. Getting her courage up to try again. The estrangement between her and her mother, Liz Tierney believed, was another matter altogether.
On the following morning, when Sally announced at breakfast that she would not be helping the nuns at all anymore, Mrs. Tierney smiled. She told her own daughters, who were sitting right there with the girl at the kitchen table, that it was now their duty to make sure Sally had “a little fun at last.” She said, sympathetic and forgiving, “It’s an awful lot they ask of you, the Sisters. It’s a difficult life.” She said, “God’s not going to hold it against you if you’re something less than a blessed saint. Aren’t we all human? Aren’t we all doing the best we can?”
Elizabeth Tierney was full of admiration for the Sisters, who moved through the streets of the city in their black and white, doing good where it was needed, imposing good where they found it lacking.
She never failed to greet them as they passed—“Good morning, Sisters,” “How are you, Sister?”—or to put a penny or two in their baskets whenever she saw them begging. And although she sympathized with Annie’s disdain for the society ladies who raised money for the nuns, still Mrs. Tierney went to the bazaars and the card parties at the various convents and spent her husband’s money lavishly on aprons and raffle tickets and crocheted blankets, for the sake of the Sisters.
The nuns did more good in the world than any lazy parish priest, she liked to say, especially in arguments with her husband, especially after he learned that she had squandered the week’s household funds on euchre and bridge at some convent, or had given what he called “more than their fair share” to some plucky little Sister bound for pagan lands.
The priests were pampered momma’s boys compared to these holy women, Liz Tierney would argue. “Princes of the Church, my eye,” she would say—if only to get his goat—“Spoiled children they are. It’s the nuns who keep things running.”
Liz Tierney loved the nuns—adored them, she said—but she also harbored in her heart the belief that any woman who chose to spend a celibate life toiling for strangers was, by necessity, “a little peculiar.”
Mrs. Tierney was a devout Catholic, but the kind of Catholic, she knew, who preferred the noise and humidity of the street after mass to the cool dampness of the sacristy, preferred conversation to prayer, sunlight to flickering shadow.
She was a Catholic woman who was more moved by the miraculous blood that colored the cheeks of her six children as they fidgeted in the pew than she was by any injunction from the pulpit regarding the watery stuff that flowed from His pierced side for the salvation of all men.
Liz Tierney had nothing against the salvation of all men. She was as grateful for the fact of heaven as she was sure of her path toward it. She counted the Blessed Mother as first among her confidantes. She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church—the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation—ordered her disorderly children.
But holiness bored her.
She liked chaos, busyness, bustling. She liked a household strewn with clothes and dust and magazines and books, jump ropes, baseball bats, milk bottles. She liked the sight and the smell of overflowing ashtrays, of a man who’s had a few drinks, of tabletops crowded with cloudy glasses. She loved falling into an unmade bed at the end of the long day, falling in beside her snoring husband—with maybe a child or two snagged in the covers—and never reaching, because sleep overtook her, the part of the Hail Mary that said: Now and at the hour of our death.
It was at the end of everything the Church had to say, in her opinion: Death was. And while she understood the need and logic of this, she had never found the subject of much interest.