Ashes of Fiery Weather (27 page)

Reliable wasn't his real name, of course. When Jarlath came over, he tried to find work but nobody would hire him. When Jarlath asked one man why this was, the man, a foreman at some factory, told him the Irish were not reliable. When he learned what it meant, he made it his name. Jarlath had started as an apprentice to a cabinetmaker who also built coffins, typical back then. He soon took over all the coffin making and eventually opened his own shop.

His wife, an Italian with a name I loved to say aloud,
Paola,
had died giving birth to their daughters. They were sixteen now. From the time they were young, the twins worked with him in the shop. The parish said, Girls doing work like that! He'll never get them married. I doubted Jarlath cared about his daughters finding husbands.

Jarlath only ever moved his narrow lips in the direction of a smile, and he did so now. His pale blue eyes seemed to haunt his narrow face.

“Annie-Rose,” he said, “I know Paddy's not here because I passed the lads on the way, but your mother?”

I stepped aside so he could come in. He might think her sewing was for him. He paid her to make shrouds, but she didn't charge when it was a child or the victim of a fire. I helped with the hemming, but I had clumsy hands. My attention wandered. I pricked my fingertips and they bled.

Jarlath charged the rich a lot of money and used it to bury the poor. Many well-off or outright wealthy came from Manhattan to Jarlath's small shop. Some had parents or grandparents from Ireland. Others, according to my father, didn't know why they wanted the coffins except that they cost a lot and had a memorable name. Coffins weren't made by furniture makers anymore but by machines in factories, and then the undertakers bought them. Not Jarlath. He was not an undertaker and never had been.

Jarlath accepted the whiskey my mother offered him.

Bridie said, “You shouldn't be out in this.”

The firelight smoothed her wrinkles, did away with the shadows beneath her eyes. Bridie lost ten years in the firelight. She offered him my seat. I hovered, waiting to be sent from the room. He did look tired, but no more than usual. After he sipped his whiskey, he said,

“Your one is dying.”

“Is she?” Bridie asked.  “Are you going?”

“I'll be in after, to bring her out.”

Bridie nodded and frowned at the same time. “When?”

“Tonight, maybe tomorrow, not much longer than that, from what Una told me.” Jarlath sighed and stood. “I'll wait downstairs for Paddy. We'll have a drink for the end of Brooklyn.” He paused. “You should bring your girl.”

My mother turned in her chair to study me. I remained still through her inspection. Whatever she was looking for in me, she found, because on that, the last night of the City of Brooklyn, we went out in the rain and wind to the cloister on Cross Hill Avenue.

Some houses were dark, but in others the bright windows told of people waiting for the new year. I walked beside my mother, trying to match her step for step. The convent was a ten-minute walk from the firehouse. Though I wanted to ask questions, I said nothing. The reward for my silence came when we were almost there. I had walked by the convent hundreds of times, but I had never gone inside to ask for an intention. The women of the parish did that.

We came to the black gate. A statue of Saint Maren stood in the front yard. She wore a long robe with a shawl around her shoulders. She gripped the shawl with one hand and a rosary was draped over her fingers. The other hand was extended, palm up, as if she was about to accept a small gift.

My mother didn't stop at the gate as I thought she would, and I had to run a bit to catch up to her. She went down the street that ended at the cemetery and then stopped at the gardener's door, built into the stone wall. She put her hand in her pocket and it emerged with a key, startling me. The door opened soundlessly.

The garden, in hibernation. I wanted to walk along the pathways, bare now but surely in every other season hemmed by flowers. In a set of three evergreens that formed a half circle, I saw a small crèche. Mary and Joseph and the Christ child, the shepherds, awaiting the wise men who would arrive in five days' time.

I followed my mother to a back door and she produced another, more delicate key. She fitted it into the lock and I seized her sleeve with both my freezing hands.

“We can't go in!” I said.

“I lived here,” she said.

She shook me off and unlocked the door, the click as loud as a shout. My mother stopped and I stood beside her. The room was a kitchen. There was a long table in the middle of the room but no chairs. Several covered dishes sat on it, and the room smelled of fresh bread.

The fireplace was dark and there was a stove in one corner with a small pile of wood beside it. It was also not lit and the room was cold.

“We came in through the door in the wall. The sisters hadn't been here long yet. It was April or May. The garden was still wild.”

“You came
here,
” I said.

Bridie presented me with her profile. “What do you know about them?”

“They're a contemplative order,” I said, as though I were being quizzed at school. “After they take their final vows, they leave the world behind.”

We were taught the story at school.

In 1840, one of the nuns of the order traveled to the United States and founded a convent in upstate New York. Then, 1845, in Ireland. The potatoes died. There was nothing to eat. The starving Irish began staggering over the ocean. The sisters in Ireland and in New York agreed to break cloister. The Irish nuns went into the workhouses, what Americans would call poorhouses, and collected orphaned children. The New York nuns retrieved the children from the docks, often taking others who had not been orphans when they'd left Ireland, but were by the time they arrived in America. The intention had been to bring them out of close, dirty Brooklyn to the fresh air of the convent upstate, but the poor health of the children made traveling impossible. A benefactor working in America for famine relief in Ireland loaned his house to the nuns, he said, for “the duration of the crisis.”

After the blight disappeared, the sisters returned to seclusion. Their benefactor had gone to help in Canada, where ships were also landing from Ireland, and there he'd died. The nuns tried, it was said, to find his grave, but never could. He left the house to the Catholic Church. And so the nuns from upstate who'd come to Brooklyn stayed there. By the end of the Civil War, the Irish orphans were grown and gone.

I looked at my mother keenly. “You were one of the orphans? You lived here?”

“For seven years,” she said. “Seven.”

Bridie was silent for so long I didn't think she was going to continue.

“I learned English,” she said.

“And then?” I was brave to ask.

“They sent me into service.”

Domestic service, she meant.

“Mr. Reliable was one of them too, wasn't he?”

Bridie glanced at me and said, as though she thought I knew all this already, “Jarlath and myself came over on the same ship.”

Bridie walked across the room and I followed. She slid open a panel door and then we were in a short hallway. A stairway curved to the second floor. A crucifix hung on the wall and candles flickered in wall sconces. The air smelled of wax and incense.

She gestured to a set of double doors at the end of the hallway.

“That's the chapel. Two of them will be in there saying the rosary. The rest will be up at midnight.”

“For the new year?” I asked.

“They get up every night at fifteen minutes before midnight. Starting at twelve, they pray the Sorrowful Mysteries. Then they go back to bed until sunrise.”

Bridie began to move toward the stairs. The chapel door opened and we turned. A nun with a black veil over her face closed the door and came toward us. I stepped closer to my mother, but without touching her.

“Una.”

“You shouldn't call me that,” the nun said mildly.

Bridie said to me, “It's what we called her before she lost her head and joined them.”

I flinched. A nun receives a new name upon entering. She cuts her hair and becomes a bride of Christ.

“You know my name,” she said.

“I do,” Bridie said. “I don't know why you're walking around like that in the middle of the night.”

The nun touched the veil and turned to me. “We wear this when greeting outsiders. Usually it's only through the screen. We thought you'd come.”

“I'm an outsider now, then?” my mother said.

“You're not a nun. And neither is your daughter. This is your daughter? She must be,” the nun said.

“Annie-Rose,” Bridie said ungraciously. “Annie-Rose, this is
Sister Joseph.
”

“Thank you,” Sister Joseph said, and then, to me, “I knew your mother before. So she feels like she can talk to me any way she likes.”

Bridie laughed. “There is no before.”

Sister Joseph touched the rosary hanging from her waist.

“Has your one been asking for me?” Bridie asked.

“She was, day before yesterday. She hasn't spoken much since. She'll go home tonight.”

“All the way to Roscommon?” my mother asked.

“To the Lord.” Sister Joseph lowered her head for a moment.

“I'll go then, and make my peace,” Bridie said.

“I hope—is that why you've come, Brigid?”

Even through the veil, I could sense the nun studying my mother's face.

“It is,” Bridie said.

I could see that she was lying, and I believed Sister Joseph did too. She briefly lowered her head again.

“We're going.” Bridie turned toward the staircase.

“I'm afraid Annie will have to wait in the turn room.”

“Annie-Rose.”

“Annie-
Rose.
”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Go with Una,” Bridie said to me. “I won't be long.”

I wanted to run after her but I followed the nun instead. We went back down the hall, passed the kitchen, and came to another door. Sister Joseph opened it and we were in the turn room, where people came in from the outside. Candles burned here too. The floor was uncarpeted and empty of furniture except for a church's pew against one wall.

The turn was built into the wall opposite the door that led to the outside. To the left of the turn was a prie-dieu set in front of a heavy screen, the kind confessionals had. From behind the screen the nuns greeted their visitors. Was this how Jarlath knew the nun was dying? Because he'd come and brought them something? I couldn't quite picture it.

Sister Joseph gestured to the church pew. I sat, unbuttoning my coat and straightening my skirt. I tried to smooth my hair, which was loose from its braid because of the wind.

Sister Joseph folded her hands at her waist. Then she sighed and lifted the veil. I flinched and then blushed at the small smile of amusement on her plain face.

I wanted to know if she was committing a sin by letting me see her, and I wanted to tell her that I was not worth it.

“I knew your mother would come tonight. She has a sharp tongue but a kind heart.”

“Yes,” I said doubtfully.

Sister Joseph touched the rosary beads at her waist. “Coming here was hardest on those who still had some family left. I didn't.” She crossed herself.

“Coming here?”

“When we came over, from Ireland.”

My hand wavered as I wondered if I should cross myself too, for whomever she was thinking of.

“She never told me,” I said.

“She wouldn't have,” Sister Joseph said.

“Why didn't—if there was somebody left, why didn't they come too?”

“The workhouses.” A shudder went through her. “The sisters in Ireland had to choose the ones they thought had the best chance to make it to America.” She paused. “A lot of them didn't anyway. Your mother had a sister left. The nuns chose not to bring her. She died in the workhouse.”

“My mother never told me,” I said, and wondered why she, Sister Joseph, would. The thought must have been on my face, because she smiled sadly.

“Imagine, Annie-Rose, if no one spoke about what Christ suffered.”

I tried to take that in, but couldn't. My mother was hardly Christ. “But—?”

“Nobody would pray for Him.”

I thought about it: if those who'd watched Jesus die on the cross had simply gone home. The crowd and the soldiers and Pontius Pilate himself and Simon who helped carry the cross and Veronica who wiped Christ's face, all of them not talking, as though it were a secret, then all of them, over the years, dying in the ways that people die, of old age and accidents and diseases, so one day nobody on earth knew about the crown of thorns, or the nails driven into His hands and feet, or the sword that pierced His side, or the wound Doubting Thomas put his hand into.

I folded my hands but I was too shy to pray in front of a nun. “Was her name Annie? Or Rose?”

Sister Joseph tilted her head to the side, as if I'd asked a very strange question. “Your mother never said her name. And I never saw her. She was in the room with the sick.” Sister Joseph looked at me with pity. “And now I have to go back to the chapel,” she said. “I've left Sister James on her own too long. It's our job to wake the others for midnight prayers.”

“Are you the one who stays up every night? ” I asked.

“No, each of the sisters takes her turn.”

“Do you know it's New Year's Eve?”

“Yes. We do keep a calendar.”

“Did my mother like it here?” I asked.

“That is something you'd have to ask her.”

“Where did she go?” I meant after she left here, but Sister Joseph misunderstood.

“To Sister Benedict's cell. The sister who is watching over her would have left when your mother went in. Even the ones who weren't here in the '40s would know that she must be one of the girls. Up the stairs, the fourth door along the hallway.”