Patron Saint of Liars

  "Let me," I said, and took the child from her cold arms. Angie slipped away, stumbled toward the front of the hall, and was gone without a word. It was, perhaps, the only truly good thing I had ever done in my life, because now the pain was mine and I wanted it not to be. The baby wasn't more than a month old, and somewhere far away I heard the woman talking about her long labor. That sweet face. The domes of the cheeks. The milky smell. I ached to put its hand inside my mouth, my face on its chest. It was as if I had never held a child before. "Please," I said finally, wanting her to take it, wanting her to never take it.

  "They get heavy awfully fast," she said. "Come back here to me," she said.

  I said something, made sounds, and went toward the doors where the air was. I felt broken.

  "I want to get completely fucked up," Angie said once I found her outside. "Goddamn ladies. Goddamn Incarnation charity cases. Fuck them." Her hands were shaking as she reached in her huge purse and took out her bracelets and long earrings, which Mother Corinne would not let her wear inside. She turned and faced the church. "Fuck you," she said.

  There were no bars in Owensboro, Kentucky. The town was dry. If there had been one, it wouldn't have been open on Sunday anyway. It had been a long time since I'd had a drink, but if we'd found a bar that Sunday we would have taken down the town.

  After the social we were given an hour and a half to walk around town and spend whatever money we had. We were given a small allowance from the sisters, and some of the girls got money from home every now and then. I still had part of my travel money, which I kept safe in the trunk of my car in case I ever had to leave again in the night. Not much was open on Sunday, a Woolworth's, the drugstore, a small grocery. Two or three other stores would open up for us for that time and we would wander up and down the aisles, just happy to look at things, pick them up and smell the store-bought smell. I tried to remember the I. Magnin's where my mother worked, one whole department for purses and scarves and gloves. A hundred different pairs of gloves, every color, kid or cotton or satin that went up to your shoulder. There was a woman there who asked you what size your hands were. Some days I would pick my mother up from work and we would go and try on the hats. I remember a jade green cocktail hat with two feathers that came down along one side of my face, a little wisp of veil. My mother pinned it into place and said it looked so perfect that she would buy it for me with her discount. "Even if you never have a place to wear it, everyone should own a hat like that once in their lives." But I didn't let her. It seemed too far beyond me.

  Now I was looking at a rack of mittens and stocking caps, warm and practical, thinking about those two green feathers. I would have liked to have that hat, maybe wear it alone in the bathroom while I brushed my teeth, just to have a beautiful thing.

  How each girl spent her money changed over time. Beatrice, who bought detective magazines at first (the kind she loved the most, the kind the ladies from Incarnation never sent in their monthly boxes), now spent her money on cocoa butter and hand creams. Angie, who used to buy lipstick and perfume, now spent every cent on yarn and embroidery floss. I didn't change, though. All I ever bought were postcards to send to my mother, which I wrote on and then tore up later. We all bought candy. We all said we would make it last through the month, but inevitably it was nearly gone by the time the bus pulled back into Saint Elizabeth's.

  Angie and I were both in bad moods that Sunday coming back. We'd gone through the stores quickly, picking up a few things we didn't want: a spool of black thread, a package of emery boards, paste. Then we spent the rest of our time sitting on a park bench in silence. In a few days we would be full of regret, think of a half dozen things we needed, but for the time we felt too hurt to enjoy such luxuries as shopping. Holding that baby had hurt us, made us angry and full of longing. I looked out the bus window and watched the Kentucky landscape speed by. It was the first Sunday of December, and the trees were black and bare and wet along the road. In southern California, such a day would have been unimaginable, but in Kentucky, it was the beginning of winter like the beginning of every winter. The air hung over the fields like a heavy gray marsh; you'd have to cut it to get through. If I was going to buy anyone anything for Christmas, I would have needed to do it that day, and I had forgotten. I had wanted something for Sister Evangeline, for June, for Angie.

  "You have a car," Angie said. "Why don't you go later? You could go all the way to Louisville if you wanted."

  But that was the point. I could go all the way to Louisville, or Lexington, or Cincinnati. I was afraid if I went anywhere, I wouldn't be able to stop going. I was nearly seven months by then and the baby was kicking me hard. I shifted my weight around in the seat.

  Beatrice leaned over the aisle and offered us some of her Junior Mints. She was so huge that her stomach nearly touched the seat in front of her. The doctor said it was one baby, one giant baby, but Beatrice swore it was twins, and Sister Evangeline backed her up. "That's four feet in there," Beatrice said, "not two."

  I let the candy dissolve slowly in my mouth, and in truth it cheered me up a little. It was a time in my life when a Junior Mint could mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness.

  "I want you two to help me," Beatrice whispered.

  "Help you what?"

  "I've made up my mind. I'm going to have the babies at Saint Elizabeth's."

  "You're crazy," I told her.

  "No I'm not. I can take pain. I broke my arm once, clean through, and I didn't cry out at all. I want to see these babies, you know, for a little while. It takes a good hour to get to Owensboro. That's all the time I need."

  "Beatrice," Angie whispered, "if you're so sure you're having two, then don't you think you ought to go to the hospital?"

  "It's only the first one that's hard. That's what my grandmother said. You pay the full price for the first one and the second one just comes out free. I got me a book on midwifing at the library," she whispered. "I read it through. If you read it, you'll know how to tie off the cord and all."

  "Don't say this," Angie said.

  "I am saying it. I'm going to do it. Regina can't help me, she'd be too afraid. I need you two."

  Regina was Beatrice's quiet roommate, who walked the halls at night in her sleep. Beatrice had taken to putting a chair in front of the door before they went to bed so that she could catch Regina before she got out and the nuns found her. Being found like that, asleep and lost, embarrassed Regina so badly that she wouldn't eat in the dining room for days. Beatrice was right in thinking she'd be no good in a crisis.

  "All right," Angie said, rifling through her purse. "We'll do it."

  "What?" I said.

  Angie kicked my shin, and Beatrice settled back in her seat. "Good," she said. "Thanks."

  Angie scribbled something on the back of a paper sack and handed it to me.

  "She won't do it," the note said. "No one does"

  Back at Saint Elizabeth's, Regina and another girl named Luanne waited for us on the porch. They were both from Owensboro and so they never came along on Sundays for fear of being seen. Everyone in Owensboro thought they were off visiting relatives somewhere. No one suspected they were in Habit, not even Luanne's aunt, who was a member of the Incarnation's Saint Vincent de Paul Society. They had their coats and hats on, as if they had meant to come along and had somehow missed the bus. Their faces looked chapped and cold. I wondered if they had been waiting outside the whole time.

  They stood at the door of the bus and waited for us to get off. Regina waited for Beatrice. You never saw Regina without Beatrice. If Beatrice was out alone, that meant that Regina was waiting for her in their room. I thought how hard those Sundays must have been for Regina, and how hard January would be, after Beatrice delivered and left her with a month to wait alone. Beatrice had brought her back the box of hairpins and the pad of drawing paper Regina had given her the money to buy, as well as six rolls of butterscotch Life Savers and two Clark bars as a present.

  I was tired
and restless. On the Sundays we were away we had a cold supper, which Sister Evangeline took care of by herself so I didn't even take off my coat and go inside. I set off through the back pasture, at first toward June's and then away from her, not really going anywhere but through the woods. The ground was frozen hard already. The first light snow had been that morning, just a little bit blowing around. I was up early, working in the kitchen, and by the time the rest of the girls got up it had already melted and gone. It was the first snow I had seen in my life, and I opened the window and put my arm outside, letting it fall on the sleeve of my sweater. Walking in the woods that evening I thought about what it might be like to be home, having Thomas make me dinner and put pillows under my feet, telling me I could do no work whatsoever, having my mother take the bus up from San Diego to stay with me in the final weeks. There would have been baby showers with party favors and long talks about names and somewhere my mother would have found the christening gown that had been my father's, and somehow that all seemed worse. Walking through the woods alone in northern Kentucky, wearing a man's overcoat that someone had donated to Saint Elizabeth's, I felt strangely better off.

  When it started to get dark I headed back to the hotel, taking a different path through the woods. I came upon the groundskeeper's cottage unexpectedly, turned into a clearing and found it there. It was small and square and smoke came through the chimney and made the air smell like fall. The light from the windows fell in long yellow lines across the ground and I could see Son sitting at a table. He looked as lonely as me. He wasn't reading or eating, just sitting there quietly, staring at his hands. He turned them over from time to time, and I watched him watch his long fingers, his broad palms. To be in a well-lit room at night is like being in a movie, and I could see him as clearly as if I were standing next to him, but he never saw me. Even if he had looked up, he wouldn't have been able to make me out in the night. I wondered about him. It was as if he had no life at all, that he fixed things during the day, took orders and did the work well, but at night went home and simply waited. Waited for the night to be over and morning to come, when he would be needed again. His face looked so empty and lost in the bright kitchen light that I wanted to touch it, not to be there with him, exactly, but just to be behind him for a moment and put my hand on his cheek. Sundays must have seemed endless to him, with no one to say his name.

  That night I wrote a card to Father O'Donnell back in San Diego and told him I was doing well. Then I wrote my mother and told her I missed her. I told her I was sorry not to be coming home for Christmas, but that I had a good job and couldn't get away just yet. "Don't think that I am gone forever," I told her, "I just need more time." Then I added, "I never drive at all anymore." One truth. I decided for once to mail them off and wrapped the postcards in a sheet of paper that said, "Please mail these." Then I put it all in an envelope and sent it care of the main post office, Chicago, Illinois. I hoped that no one was looking for me, but if they were, it would be better to have them look in Chicago than Habit.

  There was a weight to missing. It was as heavy as a child.

  6

  CHRISTMAS came and went. The sisters tried, even Mother Corinne was cheerful. They wound green tinsel boughs up the heavy banister in the main lobby, strung large colored lights across the windows. The Hotel Louisa had taken the holidays seriously, and the attic was laden with boxes marked "X-Mas." We had three full nativity scenes, each as complicated as a chess set. Kneeling lambs and wise men and camels spread across the tabletops. I was forever stepping on some little animal on the floor and putting it back in its place. June had Son cut down a big spruce from the edge of the property and sent it over to us with a red bow on top. But we all had our own way of decorating trees. There were the ones who thought it should be done right away, others whose families had always waited until Christmas Eve. We made popcorn and cranberry chains until our fingers bled from sticking the needles in them so often.

  The ladies of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society sent a gift for every girl and the sisters decided what most suited each individual and wrapped them and put them under the tree. Sister Bernadette wrote our names on the gift tags with a flowing hand. Many of the girls got boxes from home, but they kept the presents upstairs in their rooms, hidden under the bed so they could drift away in a private moment and open them alone. In spite of the carols and the red candles, the tufts of holly at each place setting and the great exchange of cards, we were uniformly heartsick. We wanted to be home.

  My mother had a real tree for a long time after my father died, but every year it got smaller. Then one year, when I was twelve, it was only a little potted shrub, not even an evergreen, I don't think, and my mother and I laughed so hard trying to decorate it we couldn't see straight. We ate all the popcorn we meant to string and went out and bought an aluminum tree at the after-Christmas sales. We kept it in the hall closet of our apartment. With its branches folded down it looked like a large, prickly umbrella. My mother and I just didn't take it all very seriously. Christmas meant that I. Magnin's was closed for the day and my mother had a moment of peace between the last-minute shoppers and the people coming in to get cash refunds for sweaters that didn't fit. Christmas meant that I was out of school. After we went to mass we exchanged our gifts and went to the movies. One Christmas we saw four movies in a row and didn't get home until past midnight. It was a day we gave over to enjoying ourselves completely. We felt daring and wild, making so little out of the holiday, doing exactly what we wanted to do for the whole day. And the thing we wanted to do the most was be together.

  I didn't think much about the later years, when Thomas and I were married and my mother was with Joe. We all spent the morning together and then drove to Victorville to see his family. Of course, it wasn't the same. My mother relented and started buying a tree again and the day became normal and structured, a real dinner with a ham and pineapple sauce. But even then it was all right because my mother would look at me a thousand times and smile, as if to say, Remember when it was just the two of us? Remember when we ate the whole box of chocolates every employee of I. Magnin's received along with their bonus, and how we threw the ones we didn't like out the window, the jellies and the marshmallow creams, one corner bitten off?

  We were a family at Saint Elizabeth's, but on that day we seemed makeshift and uncomfortable to one another. We wanted our own families. One by one we would wander into another room and take deep breaths to try to keep from crying, or cry.

  I had a little pastry gun that pumped out perfect butter cookies. Sister Evangeline came behind me, doing whatever she wanted, pushing in red halves of maraschino cherries or dusting their tops with red and green jimmies.

  "Dammit," I said. The gun had clogged. It was the third time.

  "Don't swear," Sister Evangeline said, not looking up.

  "I can't work like this. I can't do my job if nothing works."

  "The cookies are fine," she said, so happy, so glad to be making Christmas cookies.

  "Don't be so nice," I said, suddenly choking up. "I can't stand it. Don't be so nice anymore." I put down the gun and held onto the counter.

  But she didn't come to me. I thought she would, touch my stomach and try to make me laugh. "Come on, Rose," she said. "Get back to work now." She handed me the gun. "Lots of girls out there wanting their cookies. Lots of girls who feel as bad as you. You're not the only one in the world who misses her mother at Christmas."

  I stared at her. I was nearly a full foot taller than she was and from where I stood all I could see was a white draped head bobbing up and down over the sugary lumps of dough. "Do you miss your mother?" I asked her.

  "Every day of my life," she said. "Every minute."

  The other thing that made Christmastime so tense was that we were all waiting on Beatrice. She had moved up to the head table, the first seat. She was so pregnant that her stomach seemed to tremble when she was sitting still. Two girls who were due after her went on ahead and delivered out of turn, one
going out on Christmas Eve.

  "I'd hate for my baby to be born on Christmas," Angie said. "You've got to know you'll never get any good presents if you're born on Christmas."

  The doctor swore that Beatrice was fine, not dilated, not even close to dilating. He drove down twice a month to check us all. One of the bedrooms had been set up with an examining table, and he brought his own nurse.

  "It's going to be a big baby," he told Beatrice.

  "It's two," she said.

  "Not this time." The doctor folded up his stethoscope and slipped it in his pocket. "Anyone else, I'd say we'd take it C-section, but you're a healthy girl." ('"Heavy girl' is what he meant to say," Beatrice told us when recounting the story later.) "You'll do just fine."

  The doctor said I was still looking like early February to him. He said this while I was lying on the table, staring at a single bulb on the ceiling with my knees spread open. That I looked like early February.

  Sister Evangeline gave me a holy card for Christmas. It looked to be as old as she was, but carefully preserved, not a single bent corner. On it was a picture of a beautiful woman, her chin tilted up toward heaven, a ring of stars in her hand, a swirl of clouds beneath her feet. "It's Saint Ann," she said, her face anxious, afraid I wouldn't like it. "The good mother. Don't show it to anyone for a while. I feel badly that I don't have something for all the girls."