The Patron Saint of Liars

[3]

I GAVE Interstate 40 up in Nashville. When you don’t have a home, it’s easy to get attached to things, people, highways. Wherever you are the longest starts to feel like the place you’re supposed to be, and I had been on 40 since California. Now I was on 65 going north. Then the Green River Parkway up toward Owensboro. I had good directions. You’d think I would have known by then that all roads are more or less the same, but as I pulled off the exit for Habit I started to think there was a lot out there I hadn’t seen, and I wondered if maybe I should.

I found a gas station off the highway and went in to ask about Saint Elizabeth’s. I knew how to get to the town but not more than that. There was a woman sitting in front of the station, sunning herself while three children who I guessed were hers sat dully in a small inflatable swimming pool half full of water. They were dark-haired and tan and they all three looked to be about the same size. It was hard to tell because they were sitting down. One of them tried to splash me as I walked by, but the water fell short, making a little muddy spot in the dust.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman. I was waking her up. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“Ma!” one of the children screamed. “Somebody wants gas.”

The woman blinked her eyes open and pulled up the top of her blouse, which she had down below her shoulders to get some color on her chest. She looked exactly like the children in the pool. They were only smaller, tanner versions of their mother. She shook the sleep off of her. “Sorry,” she said. “I drifted off.”

“No,” I said. “It’s so hot. I know.”

She stood up and stretched her arms over her head. I imagined she didn’t do a lot of business. She looked over to the pool. One of the girls was trying to hold another girl’s face under the water, but there really wasn’t enough water to do it right. The boy sat on the edge, watching. “Stop that,” the woman said to them without much enthusiasm.

“What I need are directions, really,” I said. “I’m looking for Saint Elizabeth’s.”

The woman’s expression changed. She looked back at her children again and then back at me. “Up there,” she said, her voice flat. “Three miles past town. On the left.” Then she turned around and headed inside the station.

“Can I get some gas?” I said. I had half a tank, but I didn’t want to have woken her up just for directions.

“You got enough to get you there,” she said, and went inside.

“Boo,” one of the girls in the swimming pool said.

It wasn’t until I was back in the car and driving again that I realized what had happened. That just by saying where I was going she would know all of my business. She didn’t like it, either.

If I drove through a town, I didn’t see it. Habit was nothing but two stores and a dozen or so houses that were closer together than the others. Saint Elizabeth’s, on the other hand, would have been nearly impossible to miss. I came over the top of a hill and there it was, sitting back from the road. It was giant and white and looked more like a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon, than a home for unwed mothers. I guess there was nothing peculiar about it as a building. It was beautiful because it was impressive; spires and latticework, jutting balconies, arched windows. It was just so completely out of place. Kentucky had been all mountains and fields of tobacco so far. I couldn’t imagine who would have built a place like this here. Who would have looked all over and come to the top of this hill in Kentucky, driven down the first stake and said, here’s the place we’re putting it.

But I got my answer soon enough. I pulled the car up near the front steps and got out to read a brass historical marker. That’s where I first heard the history of Saint Elizabeth’s, the Hotel Louisa and the spring. It told the story of how the Clatterbucks and the Nelsons came together, about a child named June falling ill and the wealthy horse breeder who built a hotel for a spring that eventually dried up. The letters were tiny and they managed to pack a lot of information on the sign. When I finished, I looked up to the massive front double doors and felt a sinking feeling all the way down to my feet. There was no more time, no more traveling. I had arrived. I read the sign again and then again. I thought about getting back into my car.

I must have made a sorry picture standing there, taking such an incredible interest in the hotel’s history. The suitcase beside me was so small it looked like something a child would take to spend the night with a friend. I rubbed my ankle up against it.

“It’s an interesting history,” a woman said. I turned and found a nun beside me, one who was obviously skilled in moving quietly from place to place. She wasn’t much more than five feet tall and was completely covered in white cloth, head to foot. She was clearly of a different breed than the nuns I was used to seeing in California. “You’ve come to stay with us?” she said, keeping her eyes on the sign, possibly so as not to frighten me off.

I told her I was.

“We always know the girls who are coming to stay,” she said. “Of course, sometimes you can just tell, but even when you can’t, they’re the ones who read the sign. We used to wait for them to come inside themselves, but they could read this sign for hours. Once a girl stood here halfway through the night, then she just went away and we never saw her again.” She reached down and picked up my bag. “Didn’t bring much, did you? Well, that doesn’t matter. Clothes are the one thing we have plenty of.” She asked me my name.

“Rose,” I said, “Martha Rose Clinton.”

“I’m Sister Bernadette,” she said, and then she stopped and looked at me. She tilted back her head, so that the light fell under her visor. She was possibly thirty herself, with small, bright eyes. She reached up and pushed some hair that had fallen into my face back in place behind my ear. “Mother Corinne hates to see girls with hair in their eyes. And you have such a pretty face, Rose.” She touched my cheek for a moment and smiled at me. “You’ll be glad,” she said.

I wondered what I would be glad about, having the baby, giving the baby away, coming here at all. None of them seemed like particularly joyful things. I followed her up the stairs and into the main lobby, keeping my eyes on the long black rosary that swung in and out from the folds of her skirt. Then I looked up and saw a sea of pregnant girls.

If you see a pregnant girl on the street, maybe you notice. There could be some brief registration in your mind about her or her child, and then it goes. But this room was full of girls, sitting on sofas, reading magazines, talking quietly among themselves, and each was more pregnant than the last. One girl’s size served only to exaggerate another’s. Their bellies were so uniformly large they overwhelmed the room, so that it wasn’t the girls you saw at all, only a gathering of distended abdomens, overinflated balloons from which small wisps of girls were attached. I felt that surely I had come to the wrong place, that whatever these girls had was not what was wrong with me. I was thin, flat, tall, and when they looked up at me, you could tell that was the very thing they were thinking. Or possibly they were thinking, wait and see.

Sister Bernadette pulled me through without introductions. I must have looked pale, and I felt pale. I knew now what was coming, my body was going to rebel, take on a life of its own, make decisions without me. All of this leaving, this sadness, this driving, had been about having a baby. I was going to have a baby. Until that exact moment I hadn’t understood this fact at all.

We went behind the elaborately carved registration desk, where a hundred wooden boxes stood without keys. Sister Bernadette knocked lightly on a door that read OFFICE. “Mother?” she said.

The nun who answered the door was as tall as I was but three times my size. She was a big woman in every sense, heavy-boned with weight besides. Her face was soft and red and a tuft of iron gray hair jutted coarsely from beneath her wimple. Her breasts were as noticeable and as awkward as the stomachs of the girls who filled the lobby. They created a shelf that ensured that anyone meeting her would have to keep their distance. I couldn’t help but think a nun must be embarrassed by such breasts.

“What have we here?” she said, as if I was another delivery, a carton of milk, a sack of flour.

“This is Martha Rose Clinton,” Sister Bernadette said.

“Yes, of course, from California.”

“California!” Sister Bernadette said. “What a long way to come.”

Mother Corinne made a strange movement, almost as if she was bowing her head for a moment, and Sister Bernadette was silent. She left as quietly and completely as she had arrived. “Come in, Miss Clinton,” she said, and I followed her into the office.

It must have been Lewis Nelson’s office. There was still a picture of a horse on the wall, along with paintings of Saint Elizabeth and the Sacred Heart. It was an office built by a man who was playing at running a hotel. The desk was big enough to sleep on, the chairs were leather, the big picture window looked out to the place where water once came from the ground.

“So you know Father O’Donnell?” she said.

“Yes, in San Diego. Did his letter come?”

“No, there’s been no letter, but he called. He had several interesting things to say about you.” She toyed absently with a silver cross that hung around her neck.

“What did he have to say?”

“That would be between Father O’Donnell and myself,” she said, opening up a file I couldn’t see. The distance created by the desk was formidable. She kept her eyes on the paper in front of her.

“Do you know Father O’Donnell?” I said. It never occurred to me that he might know people here. But she didn’t answer my question. I got the feeling Mother Corinne was in the habit of asking questions, not answering them.

“Do you know for sure that you’re pregnant?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So you brought a medical report.”

“No, but why would I lie about a thing like that?”

Mother Corinne looked up at me and shrugged. “It’s happened. You’re not showing and people will lie about strange things. Most girls wait until they truly need our services before they arrive, so it’s quite easy to tell. Other girls are vagrants, looking for a place to stay for a while.”

It had been a long drive and I was dred enough to want to kill her, but at the time I remember thinking she looked like someone who would never die. “You spoke to Father O’Donnell?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then you know at least I’m not a vagrant.” I paused, wondering how to address the rest of it. “I’ll try to show as soon as possible,” I said.

“Don’t be fresh, Miss Clinton,” she said, marking something in the file and then closing it. “I’m here to look out for the welfare of all the girls, you included.”

I stared at the face of Saint Elizabeth, an older woman, so happy to be pregnant.

“About the father,” she said.

“Yes?”

“What became of him?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “It happened in a car.”

She sighed and shook her head, reopening the file and making yet another mark. “Dead,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

Then suddenly Sister Bernadette was back and leading me up the stairs to my room. What if he had been dead? That would make me a fairly sympathetic case, a pregnant girl with a dead lover, that deserved at least a few words. Sister Bernadette opened a door to what must have once been a lovely room. Now the worn bedspreads and thinning carpet seemed depressing. At least there was a bed, which meant I could sleep.

“You’ll be sharing a room with Angela,” she said. “She’s a sweet girl, you’ll do fine with her. You get some rest now, Rose. After a while I’ll bring you up a tray.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I was suddenly too tired to say anything, even to thank her.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, and patted my shoulder.

I dreamed of my mother at the cosmetics counter that afternoon, an endless line of women waiting as she tiredly told each of them how to apply their make-up. When I woke up I was crying, as I would do for many years whenever I dreamed about my mother, and there was a dark-haired girl sitting on the edge of the twin bed opposite mine, watching me cry.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “You okay?”

I wiped my eyes on the corner of the sheet.

“You don’t need to do that. Here, look here.” She handed me a box of Kleenex and I took one. “I’m Angie,” she said. “I’m your roommate. Did you have a bad dream, or are you just crying?”

“It was a dream,” I said, and blew my nose, but I couldn’t seem to stop crying. It wasn’t anything much, but it wouldn’t stop.

“I wake up that way sometimes,” she said, “lately, you know. I didn’t used to.” She leaned across the gap of our two beds. “It makes me feel a little crazy, like there’s all this stuff going on in my head that I don’t know about. It seems like a person ought to at least know what was going on in their own head.”

“It seems that way,” I said, and sat up. This was two times in a row now I’d woken up with someone watching me. I was starting to think that I was more interesting in my sleep.

“You’re not showing at all,” she said, looking at my stomach. “I’m not much, but you can see it.” She pulled her thin dress tight across her stomach to show me the little roundness that was there. “We must be pretty close together. That’s how they decide on who rooms with who. If they put a real pregnant girl in with a new girl, the new girl freaks out when the other one leaves, or she gets real scared about having the baby and all. Someone said that once a girl tried to do herself when her roommate had her baby.”

“Kill herself?”

“No, no, kill the baby, you know. She drank a whole bottle of castor oil. Can you believe that?”

I said I couldn’t.

“Well, who knows what’s true around here. The stories you hear. They told me your name was Martha.”

“It’s Rose.”

“That’s just the kind of thing I’m talking about. Rose. That’s a lot prettier. Where did you come from before?”

“California.” My head hurt, and I had that feeling that I’d been having lately, like the room was rocking.

“California? Well, why did you come all the way out here? Don’t they have places like this in California?”

“I wanted to get away,” I said. I wasn’t quite up to being questioned. I wasn’t quite up to anything, so I lay back down on the bed.