The Patron Saint of Liars (13 page)

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

C
HRISTMAS
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."

Angie gave me a sweater she had knitted herself. It was the color of the ocean at night, and there was a single pearly button at the neck. "It's going to be too small for you now," she said. "But I thought, hey, you're not going to be pregnant forever."

"When did you do this?" I held the sweater up over my stomach. It was beautiful, as fine and stylish as a green cocktail hat.

"I worked on it while you were asleep, or in the kitchen. A couple of times I was knitting on it right in front of you and you never even noticed."

From the ladies of Saint Vincent de Paul I got a hardbound copy of
The French Chef Cookbook,
which I was happy to have.

June came over for Christmas Eve dinner. She came into the kitchen, stamping the slush off her boots. I had invited her. I knew there were plenty of people who liked June, but 1 wasn't sure that any of them asked her to Christmas Eve dinner. The little family she had left was far away now. I had told her I would come over and get her, but she said no, the walk would do her good.

"Merry Christmas, girls," she said to Sister Evangeline and me.

We wished her a Merry Christmas. I had never seen June at Saint Elizabeth's. "When was the last time you were here?" I asked her. I was thinking a couple of months. Maybe it had just been last week and I had missed her.

"Not since they took the old nuns away," she said, hanging her coat up on a hook by the door.

"That's more than thirty years," I said.

"That isn't so, June," Sister Evangeline said. "You came over when Sister Mary Joseph and I first came. You brought us a pie. Don't you remember that?"

June nodded. "Maybe I did," she said. She looked around the kitchen, let her eyes wander over every pot and pan hanging against the walls.

"It's still pretty much the same," she said. "The refrigerator, that's new."

"Stoves, too," Sister said. "Bunch of the burners died out on us in 1955."

It didn't make any sense to me. We were so close. We were literally in her own back yard. "Why don't you come over?" I said.

June picked up a cookie, looked at it, and set it back on its plate. She shrugged. "I never came here. I did when they were building it, and then maybe a couple of times after that. Opening parties, you know. We weren't so welcome here, the Clatterbucks."

"But you're welcome here now," I said.

"Old habits are hard to break." She laughed a little. "That's what we used to call the old folks in town when I was growing up. Old Habits. Guess I'm an old Habit now. I'll tell you, though, I used to go to the edge of the woods at five o'clock and watch the folks come out and have their drinks on the porch. This is way back, when it was the Hotel Louisa. I used to think that they would all be sick people come to drink from the spring and there they'd be, all decked out like a fashion magazine. High-heeled shoes, suit jackets. Healthiest-looking group of sick people I'd ever seen. I guess it kind of burned me. I just stayed away."