Patron Saint of Liars

  "Stay with me awhile," she said. I sat on the edge of the bed and held onto her hand. "Tell me something," she said.

  "What do you want to know."

  "Anything," she said. "Tell me about your mother."

  It caught me off guard. My mother. It would be the thing she would think of now, the thing we all had in common. "My mother is beautiful," I said.

  "How is she beautiful?"

  "The way her hair smells, the way she crosses her hands over her knees, like this." I thought about it. I saw her sitting on the edge of the tub, laughing. "The way she always came home from work telling stories about something that happened that day."

  "And you miss her." Her voice sounded small. I reached over and took off her glasses and put them close beside her on the night table, near a glass of water.

  "Yes."

  "I know," she said, and squeezed my hand.

  I stayed there until I thought she was asleep. I looked out her window and saw fall coming up in the back pasture. I thought about my mother. I wondered if she would still be waiting for me to come home or if she would have given up hope by now. As much as I wanted her to be able to go on with things, the thought of her forgetting took my breath away. I stood up from the bed and started to go back to the kitchen.

  "Rose?" Sister Evangeline said.

  "Yes."

  "Sing me something."

  "I can't sing."

  "That's all right," she said.

  So I sang her a song, but I don't remember what it was now, and by the time I was finished she had fallen asleep.

  I was only responsible for working one meal that day, but I did all three. I chased the other girls away when they came in to take their turns. I was becoming more and more like Sister Evangeline. The only place I felt safe now was in the kitchen. 1 labored fiercely. I cooked with anger. I thought, damn you all, I'll feed you and make you strong, I'll feed you until you can't eat another bite, until you drop your forks and push your chairs away. I'll feed you until you want for nothing in your lives. I'll feed you until you're able to save yourselves. I pounded out the chicken with a spiked mallet until the breasts were thin as writing paper. I brought out frozen chunks of stock and melted them into soups. I filled the pots with potatoes and carrots and celery. I was careful to remove all the bay leaves, any tough ends. No one will choke on this food. No one will be hurt by what has come from my hands. I made rice pudding. I put in as many raisins as they might dream of having, made it sweet and warm, food to send you to sleep. Food to keep you safe.

  I'd hardly looked at my car since my arrival. I'd had enough of driving, but tonight I thought of getting in, driving everyplace, never coming back. I could drive back to California, see Interstate 40 with the sun setting ahead of me rather than behind. I could go into I. Magnin's, where my mother would be selling lipsticks, and stand on the other side of the counter in my big winter coat, which would be far too warm, and she wouldn't notice this baby. All she would see was her baby. The joy on her face. I closed my eyes and savored it. I wanted to never comfort. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted to be wrapped and held and kissed and rocked.

  I stayed in the kitchen. At five o'clock the residents of Saint Elizabeth's went onto the porch without me and drank their tea, even though the evening was turning cold, and pretended that someone was coming for them. They looked at the red leaves, on certain trees so bright already they made you look away, and thought of last fall. Where had these girls been then, with their flat stomachs, never thinking how much could go wrong? I stayed in the kitchen and made their dinner, sent it out to the table, and waited to wash their dishes. And when the last dish was put away, Mother Corinne came in and told me it was not up to me to decide who should have a day off from work and that we were to keep to the schedule and all I had to do was look at her, simply raise my eyes from the sink I was scrubbing out and meet her eyes, and she left without a word.

  When it was dark I went out to my car and got inside. I took a map out of the glove compartment and spread it over the seat, leaving the car door ajar for a little light. California was so far away. I wondered if Billy had told his parents. I thought maybe I would go to see him, sit at his bright kitchen table while his mother made coffee and cut us thick slices of cake. For a minute I thought about Thomas, and I wondered if things were easier for him by now, but then I stopped because I just couldn't. There was no place to go but away. I looked at the maps for a long time, tracing my finger along roads, trying to imagine that there would be someplace I could go and not know about Angie. Someplace I could go and not be pregnant, as the thing I wanted most to get away from was inside me.

  I got into the backseat of the car. I pulled the old wool blanket over my shoulders and fell asleep.

  I woke up to a tapping on the window. I could hear a man saying my name and in the darkness I thought it was Thomas. "Rose. Rose."

  I sat up and peered out the window. It was Son. He had a flashlight but was careful not to shine it in my face. I unlocked the door and slid over. An old habit, sleeping with the doors locked. He leaned inside.

  "They sent me to find you," he said.

  I nodded.

  "You're gonna freeze to death out here."

  "Is it late?"

  "Naw, only ten or so, but they don't like you just wandering off. Why're you sleeping in the car, Rose?"

  "I just wanted—" I stopped and rubbed my face. I was crying again. "I don't know," I said.

  "Wait here," he said, and headed back toward the hotel. I pinched the bridge of my nose and took deep breaths, trying to quiet myself down. After a while Son came back and handed me a heavy jacket. "I told them I found you. It's Sister Bernadette doing bed check. I told her you wanted to take a little walk."

  "I want to take a walk?" I said.

  "Come on. Come on out of the car."

  I got out and put on the jacket. It was one of Son's and it came down to my knees. It was so heavy I put my hands in the pockets, thinking they must be loaded down with sand, but they were empty. The weight of it felt good, it seemed to push me into the ground. We walked straight across the back pasture, not out toward the road where I went for my walks in the mornings but out toward the bank of trees we watched from the front porch. Son was pulling in his steps, going slow so I wouldn't have to fight to keep up with him. He kept the flashlight in front of us. The dew was already starting to come up, and it soaked through my shoes and chilled my feet. When we got to the other side of the pasture, he showed me a break in the trees and we followed a path into the woods, the same path George Clatterbuck had taken the morning he found the spring. Son put his hand under my elbow, lightly, as if he were afraid he might frighten me, and led me over the fallen logs and around the blackberry branches. I was still half asleep, and it never occurred to me to ask where we were going, or to think there might be something unusual about the groundskeeper leading me off into the woods in the middle of the night. I just wanted to follow.

  When we got to the other side of the woods, I saw a small white farmhouse, all lit up. "I wanted you to meet a friend of mine," Son said.

  "Isn't it a little late to be visiting people?"

  "Miss June's always up," he said. "I've never been by here when she hasn't been up."

  He knocked on the door and sure enough, the woman who answered looked like she'd been expecting us. She was a thin woman of maybe sixty-five or seventy, with her hair done up in an elaborate twist on the back of her head.

  "Miss June," Son said, "this is my friend Rose. Rose, this is Miss June Clatterbuck."

  She took my hands and pulled me inside, saying how glad she was to meet me. "I can always count on Son to make my day. It used to be girls came down from the hotel all the time, but I'm starting to think that back pasture must be getting wider. No one comes to visit now, it's not like the old days at all." She put me down in an old flowered armchair and went off to get us some drinks.

  "So do you like living at the hotel?" June called out to me from the ki
tchen. I wasn't exactly awake yet. I wasn't sure what I was doing there at all.

  "It's fine," I said.

  "Not something a person could get very excited about, I suppose," she said happily. "Living in a home for unwed mothers and all."

  "No," I called back. "I suppose not." I shot Son a look. He nodded at me. I took it to mean that everything was all right.

  "Miss June owns Saint Elizabeth's," Son said.

  "I do not," she said.

  "Well, you sure own everything under it. It was criminal the way they took that place from you. If you ask me, they ought to at least be paying rent."

  "What am I going to do with rent from the church? It's not the kind of money a person can enjoy." She came back in, carrying a tray that she put down on the table. "When I'm dead," she said, "they'll find a way to get it once and for all." She seemed a little too bright about the proposition, like she'd cheerfully resigned herself to both facts: her death and the Catholic Church winning out. "You've just got to promise me, Son, you won't let them take down my sign."

  "Not while I'm around," he said, putting a couple of cookies on a napkin and handing them to me.

  "Oh, they hated that sign," she said, and laughed. "Did you see it?"

  "First thing when I came in," I told her. That's when I put it all together. This was June Clatterbuck, the little girl. She was the three-year-old whose father made her drink the water and saved her life. She was the reason Saint Elizabeth's was there at all.

  "I had that sign made after my mother died. Cost me a fortune, solid brass. I had it made up to look just like one of those historical markers the state puts up." She stopped and poured herself a Coke. "She wouldn't have liked it, my mother, she would've said I shouldn't do anything that might upset the sisters, but that was only because she was afraid of the big one. But I did it as soon as she was gone. They're fine over there, they do good by you girls, but no one likes to admit that Saint Elizabeth's used to be the Hotel Louisa, and that before that it used to be my father's field and my father's spring."

  "They were supposed to call the place the Hotel June," Son said. He was sitting on the couch, which was too small for him. His knees came up nearly to his shoulders.

  "There never would have been a Hotel June, I wouldn't have stood for that, even at seventeen. There aren't too many people who remember the spring anymore. I'm not saying it was any sort of miracle, mind you. It was a long time ago, maybe it wasn't anything at all. But it did put Habit on the map for a while, and I think folks ought to be respectful of that."

  "That's right," Son said.

  "Catholics think they've got the market cornered on miracles. Fatima, Lourdes, that's where they want to see their miracles. If something happens in their own back yard, which just happens to be a Baptist back yard, well then, that's really not worth a thing. When Lewis and Louisa Nelson first came here and they saw all the spring had to offer, the first thought in their heads was, let's make it Catholic. Sort of like America trying to get to the moon so we can say it's ours. I keep thinking, I just bet the Pope is doing a slow burn over this one. He'd like to send some priests up there and say the moon was Catholic." She looked at me and smiled. "Are you a Catholic, dear?"

  "I am, actually," I said.

  She put down her Coke on the table next to her. "I don't mean any offense," she said. "Why, some of my best friends are Catholic. Sister Evangeline, up at the hotel. Do you know her?"

  "Rose works in the kitchen," Son said for me. "She and Sister are thick as thieves."

  "You bring her by for me," she said. "It's getting hard for us to make the walk alone. I don't see her as much as I'd like to anymore. They keep her too busy over there."

  "Things are better for her," Son said. "She's got Rose now."

  "I like nuns," she said. "Of course, not all of them. That would be like saying you liked all people flat across the board, and that would be foolishness. We used to have a lot of nuns around here, back when Saint Elizabeth's was a retirement home. They were the best thing that spring ever brought here, not that you girls aren't fine, but I loved those old nuns." She paused and thought about it all. "Sometimes I think that maybe I'll become a Catholic and become a nun, just so I could retire with women like them. Course, with my luck, Mother Corinne would retire in the bed right next to mine."

  We stayed for a while, but I was tired. June had enough energy to burn a hole in the carpet. It wore me out to think a woman three times my age was wide awake past midnight.

  "Best stay with us," she said at the door.

  "I've got to get her home," Son said. "I shouldn't have kept her out this long."

  "Listen to me," she said, and took my hand, "'cause this is important. You come back here. You visit me."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said.

  "I'll watch for you, from this window right here." She kissed us both good night, and Son led me back through the woods, toward the Hotel Louisa.

  "She's a live one," I said. "I'm glad you took me there."

  He stopped before we got to the front steps. He looked up at the hotel, like he was trying to get what he wanted to say exactly right in his mind. "They'll have you thinking that what's going on right now is the only thing happening in the world, but there were all those other people living here before you, and there'll be a lot of them here after you. Go on now," he said. "Go on up to bed." And then he headed off toward his house, the beam of his flashlight cutting a path into the darkness.

  I went up to my room. Suddenly I was so tired I could barely make it up the stairs. I got into bed without taking off my dress.

  "Where have you been?" Angie said.

  "I fell asleep in the car."

  "What were you doing in the car?"

  "I don't remember."

  "Well, Lord, I've been wanting to talk to you all day. I got so excited about what Sister Evangeline told me, about the baby being Rose of Sharon. A girl, we're both going to have girls."

  "Yes," I said softly.

  "She seemed awful depressed about the whole thing, though. Sister Evangeline, that is. I thought maybe she goes into some kind of trance or something when she's talking to the baby. Was she that way with you, too?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Well, good. I was a little worried at first."

  "Don't be," I said.

  "Good night, Rose," she said.

  "Good night, Angie."

  "Sleep well," she said.

  But I didn't sleep at all.

  5

  I DID NOT KNOW my own body. I thought of all those years I hadn't known my mind, didn't come close to understanding what I wanted, but my body was completely my own. I knew how to glance up at a man for just a second and then look away. I knew the weight of my hair and how it would fall against my neck when I turned my head. I knew the way my hand looked holding a glass and how my shoulders looked when I stretched. Through movement I could bring people toward me or make them turn away. I understood the way I worked, but in six months all of that was gone.

  My breasts were the first to defect, swelling over the neck of my dress, as if trying to warn me of what was ahead. They were followed out by my stomach. Every day it was harder to ignore, harder to think this child did not concern me. It kicked and pressed against my back, my sides. It went back and forth like a Channel swimmer. I was a tenement building, a place to live. It made me hungry and tired and sick. It made my hair thick and my skin pink. At night I would lie on my back and run my hands tentatively across the great expanse of my skin. It wasn't my own life anymore, it was a life splintered off from mine. It would grow beyond me. It would need so badly to grow it would leave my body and go into the arms of that good mother who would raise it, watch over it, turn on night-lights, wait for its cry. It would reach for her breasts instead of mine.

  "Why won't you talk about it?" Angie said to me. She was sitting on her bed cross-legged, her stomach resting in her lap. She was crocheting a baby cap, but she never looked down at her hands. She knew the movements in her s
leep. The needle dipped mechanically in and out of the thin pink yarn.

  "There's nothing to talk about."

  "Look at yourself, Rose! Don't you ever look in the mirror? Don't you ever look down? God, sometimes I think you must take your baths with your clothes on, if you don't mind me saying so. This is supposed to be a happy time. The baby picks up on that, all your thoughts, everything. It goes right to her. Right along with the blood and the food and that stuff. You've got to act like you're excited about this. I mean, if you're not, then fake it or something."

  "If the baby knows what I'm thinking, then don't you think it would know if I was faking it?" I was brushing my hair, which had become somewhat of an obsession with me. The consolation prize for the end of beauty was that my hair had become as thick as a horse's tail and nearly as long.

  "It's not that specific and you know it. You've just got to act pregnant every now and then. Knit something, do something." Her crochet hook kept up its rapid pace. She never slowed down for a minute. She'd already made a dozen sweaters, tiny socks, embroidered the collars of sleepers with rosebuds ("For my Rose of Sharon," she would say). "Right now, I'm her mama. I'm all she knows in the whole world. I've got to do right by her. What do you think?" She held up the pink cap, which dangled from a strand of yarn. "It's so much more fun now that I know she's a girl. I can get the colors right. Do you like this one?"

  "It's nice," I said.

  "I'll make one for you."

  I shook my head.

  "Jesus, you don't think you could send your baby girl out into the world with a few things?" Angie was putting together a box which she planned to leave with the head nurse at the hospital. I did my best to never think of Angie's baby not surviving, never getting to wear those clothes. If I thought about it, I found I couldn't talk to her at all, about anything, for fear of it coming out somehow. I could not stand to think about it.