the cigarette she was holding in her fingers and frowned. “What am I doing?” she murmured to herself. “I don’t even smoke.”
“Did she tell you whose the child was-I mean, who the parents were, who the father was?”
She bent and placed the half-smoked cigarette on the tiles between her feet and trod it carefully under the sole of her shoe, then picked up the flattened stub and hid it away carefully in a pocket of her uniform, and Quirke briefly thought of red-haired Maisie whose child was probably born by now, and perhaps taken away from her, too, for all he knew.
“She said I didn’t need to know any of that, that it would be better if I didn’t know. I thought the father must be someone…you know, someone big, someone important.”
“Such as?”
She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked herself forward and back in the chair.
“I’m telling you,” she said, “I don’t know!”
“But you have a suspicion.”
Now she unwrapped her arms and banged her fists on her knees and glared at him.
“What do you want me to say?” she cried. “I don’t know who the father was.
He sat back in the chair, expelling a long breath, and a ripple of creaks and crackles ran through the woven canes. He said:
“When did Mr. Griffin arrange the job for you?”
She looked away.
“Early last summer.”
“Six months ago? More? And you didn’t tell me.”
Again she glared at him.
“Well, you didn’t ask, did you.”
He shook his head.
“All these secrets, Brenda. I’d never have thought it of you.”
She had stopped listening to him. She looked into the water, its surreptitious slap and sway.
“I did my best for him,” she said. For a second he did not know who it was she meant. She lifted her eyes from the surface of the pool and looked at him almost pleadingly. “Do you think Mr. Crawford was a bad man?”
Quirke turned up his empty palms and showed them to her.
“He was a man, Brenda,” he said. “That’s all. And now he’s gone.”
30
SISTER ANSELM WAS SURPRISED, NOT BY THE THING ITSELF BUT BY THE suddenness of it, the finality. Yet when the summons had come for her to go immediately-immediately!-to Mother Superior’s office she had known what to expect. She stood before the wide expanse of Sister Stephanus’s desk and felt like a novice again. All kinds of unexpected, stray things went through her head, scraps of prayers, lines from old medical texts, snatches of songs she had not heard in forty years. And memories, too, of Sumner Street, the games they played, the skipping ropes and spinning tops, the chalk marks on the pavements. Her father singing and then shouting. Her mother with her freckled arms plunged to the elbows in a tub of suds, her lower lip jutting out as she blew away from her face the strands of hair that had come loose from the bun she always wore. After her father had knocked her down the stairs she came back from the hospital with her leg in an iron brace and the kids on the block were first in awe of her but soon they were calling her names, Peg-leg, of course, or Peggy’s Leg after the candy stick, or Hopalong Farrell. The convent had been an escape, a sanctuary; she told herself, with bitter amusement, that everyone was crippled there and she would not be noticed among them. She had no vocation for the religious life, but the nuns would educate her, and an education was what she had set her heart on, since there would be nothing else for her. They sent her to college, and to medical school. They were proud of her. One of them got an uncle who worked at the
“I’m sorry,” Sister Stephanus said. She was doing that thing she did, her checklist, touching with her fingertips the lamp, the blotter, the telephone. She would not look up. “I got the call this morning from Mother House. They want you to leave right away.”
Sister Anselm nodded. “Vancouver,” she said tonelessly.
“St. James’s needs a doctor.”
“You need a doctor here.”
Sister Stephanus chose to misunderstand.
“Yes,” she said, “they’re sending someone. She’s quite young. Just qualified, I believe.”
“Well, that’s grand.”
The room was cold; Stephanus was mean about things like that, the heating in the place, hot water for baths, the novices’ linen. Sister Anselm shifted her weight from her aching hip. Stephanus had invited her to sit but she preferred to stand. Like that brave patriot-who was it? someone in an opera?-refusing the blindfold when he faced the firing squad. Oh, yes, lame Peggy Farrell, the last of the heroes.
“I’m sorry,” Sister Stephanus said again. “There really is nothing I can do. You know as well as I, you haven’t been happy here for some time now.”
“That’s right: I haven’t been happy with the way things are going here, if that’s what you mean.”
Sister Stephanus made a fist and struck the knuckle of her index finger sharply on the leather desktop.
“These matters are not for us to judge! We have our vows. Obedience, Sister. Obedience to the Lord’s will.”
Sister Anselm gave a low, dry laugh.
“And you’re confident you know what the Lord’s will is, are you?”
Sister Stephanus sighed angrily. She looked drawn, and when she bunched up her lips like that it made the gray bristles on her upper lip stand out. She was getting old, old and ugly, Sister Anselm thought, she who was once known as the loveliest girl in South Boston, Monica Lacey the shyster lawyer’s daughter whose family beggared themselves to send her to Bryn Mawr, no less, from where she came back a lady and promptly broke her father’s heart by declaring she had heard God’s call and wanted to be a nun. “Our bride of Christ, by Christ!” Louis Lacey cried bitterly and washed his hands of her. Now she looked up.
“You wear your conscience on your sleeve, Sister,” she said. “Others of us must live in the real world, and manage as best we can. It’s not easy. Now, I have work to do, and you’ll need to be packing your things.”
The silence drew out between them. Sister Anselm looked up at the window beside her and the winter sky beyond. What life did they get, in the end, either of them?
“Ah, Monica Lacey,” she said softly, “that it should have come to this.”
31
THE MORNING OF JOSH CRAWFORD’S FUNERAL DAWNED WHITE AND cold, and more snow was forecast. The burial had been delayed to await the arrival from Ireland of Sarah and Mal Griffin and the Judge. At the graveside Sarah in her black veil looked to Quirke more like a widow than a daughter. The Judge was rheum-eyed and vague. Mal in his dark suit and dark silk tie and gleaming white shirt had the air of an officiating presence, not the undertaker himself, perhaps, but the undertaker’s man, there to represent the professional side of death and its rituals, and Quirke pondered again the irony that such a funereal figure should in his true profession be an usher at the gates of life.
It was a day of solemn celebration for the Boston Irish. The Mayor was there, of course, and the Governor, and the Archbishop officiated at High Mass and later at the cemetery said the prayers over the coffin. The Cardinal had been expected, but at the last minute had sent his regrets only, confirming the rumor that he and Josh Crawford
