The Patron Saint of Liars (11 page)

"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 sleep. 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.

"I'm sure that anyone who went to the trouble of adopting a baby would go to the trouble of buying clothes for it," I said. "I'm not keeping it. I'm not going to fool myself." Angie's face darkened and she wrapped her hands tightly around her work, pressing it into a ball. "Oh, God. Don't look like that. Honey, all I'm saying is you do what's right for you and I'll do what's right for me."

But it was too late, she was already crying. It wasn't a bad thing. We all cried at the drop of a hat in those days. Our emotions were tripped by the simplest things. A sentimental commercial on TV could leave us sobbing for hours. I put down my brush and went and sat beside her on her bed. She put her arms around my neck and buried her face in my hair, crying like a rainstorm. I held her. She was still so thin. Her back all but disappeared beneath my arms. I kissed her hair. It was like holding a bird, a little life.

"This is all I've got," she said, her voice breaking on every word.

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

"I can't not," she said. "I can't not."

"I know." I rocked her and laid my cheek against her head until she started to settle down. Maybe that was all we wanted. Maybe that was why we cried, so someone would scoop us up and hold us in the soft cup of her arms. "The cap is so pretty," I whispered. "She'll have the nicest things of any baby in the world."

Angie took a couple of deep breaths and I handed her a Kleenex. She rubbed her eyes and blew her nose. "I'm such a waste," she said, and laughed a little. The storm had blown over as quickly as it had come in. "Can you imagine me being a mother?"

"You'd cry every time the baby cried."

"The two of us sitting on the floor, howling at the top of our lungs."

"Not a pretty thought," I said.

"But this baby's going to have one hell of a mother," she said, sniffing a little. "I dream about her. She has blond hair. She's a real big woman, you know, big-boned like Beatrice and tall as you. All she's ever wanted in her life is my baby."

"And the father is a doctor."

"Exactly," she said, so happy that I was going along for once. She stayed close to me on the bed, held my hand. "But he's home a lot. Crazy about kids."

"They have a swimming pool."

She thought about this for a minute. "Not just yet. They'll build one later, you know, when she's old enough."

I was pleased by her foresight. I wouldn't have thought of that. "That's good," I told her.

"And what about you? Do you think about your baby's mother?"

"Yes."

"And?"

I thought bout her all the time, her good sense, her unfailing patience, her little quirks. The way she would sing when she washed the baby's hair. "She's my mother," I said.

Angie nodded, understanding completely. "And the father?"

But there hadn't been a father. In all of my daydreams, he was gone. "I don't know," I said, "I'll have to think on that."

On one hand, our days were so relentlessly the same they were barely worth mentioning. We ate, we slept, we went for walks. Now that the weather was cold we drank our tea in the main lobby and clustered near the windows to look outside. On the other hand, the world changed every minute. I had seen three months of classes leave, almost every one of them in the night without good-byes. Girls simply were not at breakfast the next morning and were replaced with other girls, their rabbit eyes round with fear as they walked past us the first time. They pressed their suitcases against their stomachs. They looked away. Then slowly they blended in, grew to fit us, took their seat at the back table and began to move up. I didn't know them well. I kept to my own class, the girls a month ahead of me or a month behind. After three and a half months I'd nearly forgotten what had brought me there in the first place, and when, from time to time, I felt my wedding ring, which I had slipped into the lining of my purse, I had to stop to remember what it was, what it meant.

More and more I spent my time in the kitchen, and the girls who had been there awhile commented often on the fact that the food had gotten better. Whenever I saw Sister Bernadette in the hall she would stop and take my hand happily inside both of hers. "You're going to make me fat, Rose," she said. "I worry, I don't want Sister Evangeline to think that we haven't appreciated her cooking all these years, but I have to tell you, that chicken. What was that chicken?"

"Piccata."

"A wonder," she said. "God has given you a talent."

"Thank you, Sister."

"Rose," she said quietly, looking around a little over her shoulder, "you seem to be awfully good at the desserts. Do you know how to make napoleons?"

"I think 1 could figure it out."

"My mother," she said softly, "made napoleons. I haven't had one in years."

"Then you leave it to me," I said. I always had a special fondness for Sister Bernadette because she had been so good to me the first day I arrived. Nothing would have pleased me more than to make a napoleon for her. It was almost as if I could see her roll my promise around in her mouth.

"Thank you," she whispered.

As for anyone worrying that Sister Evangeline's feelings were being hurt by the sudden popularity of the food, nothing could have been further from the truth. She just didn't get it, and no one would have been so unkind as to explain it to her. She reveled in her newfound attention. Suddenly the kitchen was full again. After every meal a stream of pregnant girls poured through, all generous in their praise. Girls came by to help, or sometimes just to sit on one of the long steel tables and talk while we worked. After all of Sister Evangeline's years of exile in the kitchen, Saint Elizabeth's had finally rediscovered her.

Even Son started having his dinners in the kitchen. At first he came by just as we were finishing up, leaning back against the counter and talking about the shingles or the paint until we asked him if he'd like something to eat. Then after a while it became so regular I fixed a plate for him and set it aside. "Why don't you eat in the dining room like everyone else?" I asked him. He didn't eat until we were finished, until I was back washing dishes and putting things away. It wasn't right.

"I didn't know I was hungry before," he said, running a piece of bread across his plate.

"This is every night for two weeks now," I said.

He brought his plate to the sink and washed it carefully. "If you've got plenty, then I'm much obliged to eat here. If you don't, I'll head home."

"It doesn't have anything to do with the amount of food. You know that."

"Good," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow, then."

I asked Sister Evangeline about it. "He's not a dog," I said. "He shouldn't be waiting until everyone else finishes to pick up the scraps."

"And there would be no other cause for him to want to wait and eat in the kitchen?" she said.

But there was no cause I could think of.

Now that her kitchen was full, Sister Evangeline had more time to do what she loved best, which was talk to the babies. "Oh," she said, taking a spoon of white clam sauce from the pot. "Oh, taste this," and she took it to Clara, eight months, and slipped it in her mouth. "This baby likes fish, anything from the water. He'll go to sea someday." She tapped Clara's huge stomach with her finger. "You wait and see."

Sister had a good sense of who wanted information on her pregnancy and who didn't. To some girls she told long stories, whole lives, to some she would merely say boy or girl, and to others, nothing at all. What was said in the kitchen remained in the kitchen, that was the policy. "Think of me out there mowing lawns," she would say. The only thing Sister never seemed to grasp, or at least would never speak of, was that we were all giving our children away.

"Rosie," she told me one night when we were washing dishes, "we're a team. You and me, we work the best together."

"I think so," I said. We weren't alone as often anymore, and when we were I found myself staying close by her side. She was the only other person who knew about Angie's baby, and while we had never discussed it again, after that first day, it gave me comfort to have one secret I did not bear alone. But it was more than that: we cared for each other. I liked the way she held my arm when we went on walks. I took her to see June Clatterbuck in the afternoons as I had promised. They went to each other like long lost girlfriends, not two women separated by a short field.

"Why haven't we been together every day?" June said.

"Time gets away from us," Sister said.

Sometimes I would stay with them for a while. I liked to sit and listen while they talked about the way Kentucky had been when they were girls.

"Things were better back then," June said. "Folks came to the house all the time. People looked out for you. Now, some days, it feels like a person could just get lost in the world."

I couldn't imagine how June's life had changed at all. There she was, still living in the same house she'd been in since she was born. The view out her window was the same, same trees, same pasture. She hadn't had to watch highways or shopping malls go up beside her.

"Her family's gone," Sister Evangeline explained to me later. "That's more change than anyone should have to bear."

They liked to watch their soap opera together and cluck their tongues over moral indiscretions. "That Blaire," June would say, "wearing a dress like that in the middle of the afternoon. You know she's up to no good. Four husbands just since I've been watching." They never considered the drama that lay just across the pasture in a hotel full of unwed mothers.

We had quietly switched our places, Sister Evangeline and I. Now she was shelling peas and stirring soups while I put things together. Some days she would be my mother, and on other days I was hers.

"You know how to cook," she said. "You don't just read the books, you understand food. Me, I never really got it, not entirely. Of course, nobody knew, but your talent is in food, the same way mine's with the babies. That means you go with God."

I took eight chickens out of the freezer and put them into the refrigerator to thaw slowly overnight. "I've been thinking," I said to her. "Maybe I could get a job as a cook once I get out of here." As far away as my departure seemed to me, I knew it would come. I had left Thomas so I could begin my life, and I knew it was high time I figured out what it was I should do with myself. Unlike the other girls, I couldn't just go back, flat-stomached and full of innocence, as if nothing more had happened than I had temporarily lost my mind and run away. I would have to drive again, find a place, live my life.

"Oh, you'll work as a cook all right." She laughed to herself and started throwing the silverware randomly into different drawers. I always had to come down in the morning and sort out what she had put away.

"Don't get all psychic on me," I said. "If you've got something to tell me, just tell me."

"You don't want to know," she said, "you don't like knowing. Besides, you're a young girl, you should have some surprises in your life. The excitement of just finding out." She closed her eyes and nodded her head. "I remember that, when I was young, not having any idea what was going to happen." She smiled and reached up to pat my cheek, a gesture that had become less of a pat and more a series of short slaps the longer I knew her. "Boy, that was something, not knowing. I used to go around waiting for God to tell me what to do. Do I join the sisters or marry Timmy? I used to ask that every morning when I woke up."

"Timmy who?" I said. I'm sure it was possible, but it was hard to believe.

"Timmy somebody or other. I don't remember exactly."

"So what happened?"

She spread out her arms, as if to say, have you not noticed these black beads, this white dress, which was, at the time, smeared with a red sauce.

"But how did you know?" I asked her.

She cocked her head, sure that a question so easy must be some kind of a trick. "My sign from God," she said.