The Day's Heat Page 17

  If the nun stood still, the old priest’s rounded back was still, but with each step, each squeak, he flinched slightly, visibly. At one particularly loud twist of shoe leather against floor, he jerked as if stuck by a pin. At last, with a final call on the Almighty, Sister Ellen lowered her arm.

  Father Kennedy stood at once, ready to speak, but too soon; the old nun continued on with a prayer. The old priest remained standing, holding one elbow, stroking his face, during Ellen’s long plea for heavenly direction. At last the nun went to sit beside Father Palmer.

  The old priest smiled, a long-toothed, hairy smile, his color high and his head tremors more noticeable. “How easy it is to see things clearly, dear Sister Principal, especially a cause.”

  Why he might as well call her a bad name as “dear Sister Principal,” Lee thought.

  “And how hard it is to go slow, to not tear down before we know what we’re building up. Why not give the children and their parents at Queen of Peace in Lakeland a choice in the matter? Next year they can get up an hour earlier and be driven into St. Anthony’s to be with all the dear little white children if they want, or they can still go to their own school. Why not give them at least another year? The Sisters say they will gladly keep the school open.”

  Sister Ellen was on her feet with only two slight squeaks, which caused the old priest’s eyelids to quiver.

  “This is a new day, Father Kennedy.” The nun’s voice was soft, hardly above a whisper, like milky water flowing. “The blacks don’t want separate but equal any longer.”

  Lee remembered how Algebra’s lids had lowered, how her mouth had turned down at the word “black,” almost like the priest’s did at the shoe squeaks.

  “Oh, I’m not believing that St. Anthony’s school is anywhere equal to Queen of Peace, dear Sister Principal. Test scores have always been higher with the Sisters of Mercy. I’m just believing we should wait and see what the colored people want. My family never sent me to school with the English, even though I’m sure those West Brits thought they were better than the lot of us Irish trash, and thought they had the better schools, too.”

  Sister Ellen with a twist of her arms under the black gown and another squeak of shoe leather sat back down.

  Mrs. James Elridge, President of the Home and School Association, thick as a eunuch in aqua polyester, turned on the metal chair behind the head table, and looked anxiously from priest to nun and back again to see if their exchange—which she seemed not to understand a word of—was over. Then, as if reading from a script, she said, “Let us table this discussion until the next meeting and get on with our reports. First, school business.”

  Lee listened, but her concentration was fixed on the soutaned width of David’s shoulders. She stood to give her report on the hamburger lunch program, from the typed page that Bettysue, the woman in charge, gave her each month, and realized that there were no colored people at the Home and School meeting. But she told herself it would change next year when the two schools were combined. Poor old Father Kennedy, why was he so stubborn? He might as well give up on that go-slow suggestion.

  At 9:15 p.m., Mrs. Eldridge adjourned the meeting and like their children during the day, the parents rushed away from the auditorium. Lee always wondered at the urgency, exactly like after Mass. A few people loitered, but everyone else pushed forward as if escaping. Not at all like at St. Jerome’s where everyone stayed on the grounds, stood around and talked, and no one left except the white people.

  The causeways along the outsides of the classrooms were lighted, making bright roofed tunnels into the dark, and Lee headed to where the light ended and she would have to walk slowly to cross the unlevel asphalt parking lot to her car under the pecan trees. She’d lost sight of David Palmer as soon as everyone stood to leave and was not able to even exchange a glance with him.

  Sister Ellen, black material brushing, zipped past, the nun in even more of a rush than the others, saying, “Good evening, Mrs. Bettlemain.” Lee compared her to the white rabbit—a black rabbit actually. Cassie and Lill had a player with a little plastic record from Alice in Wonderland. The song played over and over had a refrain “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date,” which now seemed very appropriate for the elderly nun as she scurried into the dark on her way to the convent. Lee wanted to call out, “Slow down, or you’ll fall and break your hip,” but she didn’t, having herself come to the edge of the sidewalk and the end of the light.

  She was prepared for the step into the shadows but not for the pair of hands that grasped, almost lifting, to pull her around the edge of the building into a cul-de-sac, a space, behind the decorative concrete blocks, that jutted out and was completely hidden.

  Only David Palmer’s low whisper, “Don’t be afraid. Be quiet,” kept her shriek down to a mouse’s protest.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “Yes, but I almost grabbed Sister Ellen by mistake”—he used Father Kennedy’s brogue—“the Dear Sister Principal herself. I didn’t see her pass you.”

  Lee giggled at the idea of the young priest adroitly pulling the old nun in her robes and her dignity in behind the blocks. “Then, I could have come along and said, ‘Ah ha, what have we here? A priest and a nun? Just as the Protestants have always suspected.’”

  “Spare me,” David Palmer said, holding her tighter.

  It was delicious, his arms around her, standing there in the unlighted corner, seeing out past his shoulder to the people and the headlights moving under the dark trees. Cars, their head beams like huge cats’ eyes, had already formed a line on the far side of the pecan grove and were starting to move, a few cars racing to cross the asphalt.

  David turned her face toward his and kissed her. The darkness, the passing lights, the secrecy swirled a conjurer’s soup into a spattering of light motes behind her eyes. The unexpected. She felt weak with happiness.

  At first the noise was indistinct from the sounds of the cars and the humming in her ears, what she thought was the bubbling of her own blood, and then it separated into a high-pitched call. Mrs. Elridge running, as much as she was able, calling for someone to come and open the school office. “Sister Ellen! Oh, Christ save us! Sister Ellen, she’s hurt!”

  David seemed aware sooner and pushed Lee farther back into the corner and stepped out into the light, pulling his keys from his pocket. Lee waited for a second and then followed, realizing that all the cars had stopped and people were getting out, leaving their lights on and their doors open to run ahead and stand in the tree-shadowed beams and make the sign of the cross.

  Sister Ellen was lying on the asphalt—in another few steps she would have been at the convent door. Father Kennedy was kneeling beside her, his hands extended in the headlights’ rays, making the sign of the cross on her forehead, on the white linen of the habit. The old nun’s eyes were closed, and she did not move.

  Some part of Lee’s mind said, “This can’t be.” Yet the tableau of priest and nun was there before her, the dark trees all around, the crisscrossed headlights, the whispered prayers rising up through the ghostly tree limbs.

  Father Kennedy was helped into the ambulance with Sister Ellen. At some time during the prayers, he had taken the nun’s hand and whether he or she would not let go was uncertain. The attendants maneuvered the stretcher and the priest into the ambulance with no trouble. The doors closed, and David took Lee’s elbow and guided her to his car. Without a word he started it and followed the line that took nearly the entire membership of St Anthony’s Home and School to the hospital. They rode in silence, as one rides in a cortege behind a hearse.

  Twenty minutes later, leaving the questioning people and the other nuns in the Emergency Room below—David’s hand back on Lee’s elbow—they found Father Kennedy on the second floor, standing in front of the gray metal doors of an operating room. The fluorescent lights cast the old priest in a bluish haze, but all Lee could see, practically from the elevator to where he stood, was the rusty black handbag
and wrinkled high-laced shoes the old man held in his hands.

  “They gave me these to keep for her,” Father Kennedy said, and pushed the purse and shoes into Lee’s hands. “Can you believe it? They gave me these.” One shoe fell, hollow-sounding as a chipped teacup on the hospital floor.

  Chapter 12

  Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.

  Emily Dickenson

  A doctor, dressed in pale-green scrubs, came out of the Operating Room, into the hall, and not meeting their eyes, said Sister Ellen was dead; said that she’d been knocked down by a car and died of a heart attack; said they could go in if they wanted.

  Father Kennedy said, “Yes, we will,” and with those words he staggered, almost sank. Lee and David held him up between them, helped him through the metal doors. Down a hall, they followed the doctor to where Sister Ellen lay on a gurney with a sheet up to her chin, her white wimple and black veil still in place. The three stood by her side and great silent heaves shook the old man. From his pocket, he tried to extricate the black case that held the pyx and the oils, but in his shaking hands it fell to the tiled floor. David picked the case up and in Father Kennedy’s place said the final prayers over the body, did the final anointing. To Lee, the words sounded far off—like a calling over water—a waving good-bye to someone at a far distance, to someone beyond the reach of words.

  “If you, O Lord, mark our iniquities, Lord, who can stand? Come to her aid, O saints of God. Hasten to meet her, angels of the Lord. We commend the soul of your servant, Ellen, who having departed from this world, may live with you. Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord. And may the perpetual light shine upon her.”

  On the drive back to the school with David, Lee sat with the nun’s wrinkled shoes and the smooth heavy pocketbook in her lap, the weight of them growing, like a cat falling asleep on her legs. No one had taken the shoes or bag from her, and Father Kennedy and the nuns, Sister Borger, Sister Mary Felicity, Sister Rose, and Sister Anders, had stayed behind at the hospital to make the arrangements.

  “I have to see this through to the end, Lee,” Father Kennedy said, before she left him.

  Neither Father Palmer nor Lee spoke on the drive back to St. Anthony’s. Again he helped her from the car and walked with her to the convent. The door was open when David tried it, so there was no need to ring the bell.

  “I’ll leave her things in the living room,” Lee said, deciding to place the old nun’s shoes and purse on the entry table and not take them down to her cell and place them on her bed. It would be too much of a shock, she told Father Palmer, for someone to see them in her room, not knowing how they came there. The priest nodded, agreeing, as though he’d lost the power of speech. Also, the thought of Sister Ellen’s room, although Lee had never seen it—her nightstand, her small mementos, maybe pictures of her family—was impossible to face, having just seen the old nun at the end of a hospital hallway, on a narrow bed, her face whiter and smoother than the pillow beneath her head.

  David Palmer followed Lee’s car as she drove home, as if he were afraid she couldn’t make it. She got out of her car and David out of his, and he walked her to the front door, again holding her arm, only the white light of the television showing through the glass of the jalousies and the front windows.

  The priest took her hands. “God help us, Lee,” he said.

  “Yes,” Lee answered, and pulled her hands away, opening and closing the front door as quickly as possible.

  The priest stood outside in the dark for what seemed much longer than necessary. She could see the murky image of his stooped shoulders and head through the glass. Only when she was sure he was gone did she let Furlough in, thinking it funny how the dog had not barked at that solitary figure.

  Then, she turned off the television set. Charles roused long enough to ask what time it was, long enough to walk back to their bedroom and take off his blue jeans and crawl onto his side of the bed. Lee followed her husband and turned off the lamp on the nightstand beside him, noticing the small, tired lines around his eyes, his pale hair, how every strand stood separate, a thinly-sown field. Then she pulled off her dress and, chilly in her maternity slip, sat on the foot of the bed and looked out the window, seeing between the stucco houses the white dogwood trees that grew in the yards, seeing how the cross-shaped flowers, with their dark pink notches for the legendary nails, caught and reflected the moon’s pale light. In the next-door neighbor’s house, every room was ablaze with lamps and overheads, but the house was silent. Apparently a truce was on. Lee sat until she was shivering from a combination of being cold and tired. She got into bed and leaned against Charles’s large immovable body. He was warm but unconscious. Lightly, so as not to wake him, she put her arm across his great wide back, let his rasping snores lift and slide her into sleep.

  In the morning, seeing Charles off, she went back to sleep and missed the bus again. Miss three times and it would not stop at their house anymore. No matter, Lee thought. Dressing Cassie and Lill for the trip to school, touching their small feet and hands, pulling their arms that seemed thin tubes of flesh into sleeves, she whispered an incantation into their hair: “You’re alive, you’re alive.”

  Lill accepted this pronouncement as just another of her mother’s directives, but Cassie pulled back, asking, “What?” and then squinted her face up into a frown, uncomprehending.

  Each event of the previous day rose up in Lee’s mind in an unearthly light—the rectory and the death—almost as if the headlights from the night before were still shining through the dark branches of the pecan trees, still shining behind her eyes.

  At school, under the same trees but different now that it was daytime, she watched Cassie leave the car and run on flashing legs to the door of the kindergarten room. Lee, on the verge of crying, whispered, “Remember the day of your death, my little dear one.” Then came, strange and two-sided, the thought of David Palmer sitting at her feet, sliding his hand up the inside of her leg, and tears still in her eyes, she smiled.

  Returning home, she and Lill were hardly in the door when Ray called. At first the connection was so clear that Lee thought her sister might be at the airport.

  “No,” Ray told her, “I’m still in Phoenix!” her voice tight and exasperated.

  “But you sounded so close,” Lee said, for the second time.

  “Okay! So I sound close.”

  Ray wanted to get on with why she’d called so early—8:00 a.m. in Phoenix—and, Lee didn’t add, at full-day rates. What did an hour-long phone call from Arizona cost? Ray’s calls always ran long.

  “Angel and I are through, over, kaput! This time it’s final!”

  Lill went to get her paper dolls, and Lee sat on the floor next to the refrigerator and stared at the indistinct pattern in the blue and white tile. She wished Furlough were still inside, so that she could at least sit there and pet him.

  “Angel called me a slut. Accused me of giving blow jobs in the parking lot of the Realto.” Ray described the fight in detail. Lee listened and added comments in between the angry words, in between the long pauses. The pauses were for Ray to take a deep drag and hold on to what Lee had first thought were cigarettes but now knew to be marijuana joints.

  “Mother really should have switched to pot, Lee, years ago, given up the booze. It’s not addictive,” Ray said often, always after one of the pauses.

  These long telephone conversations had once been welcome—Lee’s only link to her family—and back in her first days in Strickland, the calls had come late at night, after Charles was asleep, so Lee could do handwork and talk. Now, Ray called anytime, seemingly only interested in her latest boyfriend, the cute outfits she wore, what luxury suite they spent the night in, what was ordered up from room service. Men friends she found and left in between arguments and reconciliations with Angel.

  Lee lay down on the cool tile and pressed her face and large belly against it, the telephone receiver on one ear. Soon it would be summer and everything s
he touched would be warm, soon she would have to close the door between the living room and the bedrooms and run the window air-conditioner. The backyard would bake in the heat.

  “Are you there?” Ray barked. Lee told her yes and then tried to explain how an old nun had died the night before, been hit by a car and died of a heart attack, but Ray listened for half a minute and then went back to Angel’s and her fight.

  If it were anyone but my sister, Lee thought, I’d make an excuse to hang up.

  When had these conversations become so one-sided, so ungentle? When had Ray started smoking pot every day? Was it when the envelope, which for months had arrived once a week with a twenty, had started coming once a month with a hundred? Each month, as the days slid past, Lee would think Ray had forgotten; think good, that’s enough. Each time on the phone, Lee would say, “Skip the money, Ray. I’m all caught up with the sewing, the bills. I have over $500 in savings.”

  But Ray would answer, “I’m loaded, kid. Gives me something to do with it.”

  And Lee couldn’t answer, changed by the secret of David Palmer, the secrets of him and from him. The deceit made glass walls, shutting her away: away from him, away from herself. I have no friends, she thought, no one to give me counsel. I can’t even talk to Father Kennedy anymore. God, what’s going on? she asked and hummed:

  What’s going on? What’s going on?

  God if you’re still up there,

  send me an answer soon.

  I don’t know what’s going on.