The Patron Saint of Liars

“Did something bad happen to you?”

“My husband died,” I said.

Angie began to giggle a little, and she covered her mouth with her hand. “I sure hope you didn’t tell Mother Corinne that.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s what everybody says, stupid. Everybody says they had a really great husband but he died, in a car crash or something. Except now girls say he got shipped out to Vietnam and stepped on a land mine. Usually one of the older girls tries to tip you off before your interview. They say it’s best if you just look down at your hands and act all sad and penitent.”

“Great.”

“Don’t feel bad, you figure things out here in no time. I’ve only been here eight days and it already seems like my whole life.”

I tried to think of that, being here my whole lifetime. It made my head hurt worse. “So what do I need to know?” I said tiredly.

“Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena are the ones you want to go to if you’ve got something on your mind. Sister Evangeline is sweet but she’s older than time and pretty much blind. Sister Loyola is a snitch. She seems nice enough when you meet her, but she takes everything from your lips right to Mother Corinne’s ears.”

“And Mother Corinne?”

“Well, you already met her. And you can bet that anything you thought about her was right on the money.” Angie looked at me. “I wish you’d stop crying,” she said.

What I couldn’t understand was why, in a place with nearly a hundred rooms and only twenty-five girls, we had to have roommates at all. I asked it carefully, making sure Angie understood it wasn’t her I minded, I was just wondering. She told me that years ago they used to have the whole place set up like a hospital ward, with all the girls in rows of beds in the grand ballroom, but then one girl got the pox and they couldn’t control the spread at all. “All those little babies born blind or missing arms,” she said. “Can you imagine just waiting on that? All the girls in front of you having crippled babies and you know you will too but all you can do is sit around and wait for it to happen. After that they put people in rooms. They say we can’t have our own rooms ’cause of the heating costs, that they don’t like to open the whole place up, but really it’s because they don’t like for us to be alone, or they ‘don’t think it’s natural,’ as Mother Corinne likes to say.”

I had never shared a room with anyone but Thomas.

I put on a clean dress. Billy’s mother had washed and ironed the few things I had before I left Arkansas. The only vestige of the days of the grand Hotel Louisa was that people still met on the front porch at five o’clock in the warm months. The bourbon and sodas were strictly forbidden, but we went there as if pulled by tradition, just to sit in the chairs and look out over the Clatterbucks’ back pasture.

“You’ve got to be respectful to the girls ahead of you,” Angie told me as we were walking downstairs. “The farther along a girl is, the nicer everyone will be, like fixing her plate at supper and giving up chairs. It’s only right, you know, we’re all going to graduate sooner or later. There are three girls now, Charlotte and Nora and Lolly, who are already two weeks late. That’s a lot to have late at the same time. Everybody’s real nervous about it.”

The stairwell was lined with grand paintings, mostly of a beautiful, dark-eyed woman I later learned was Louisa herself. Louisa with her hair up, standing in front of the fireplace. Louisa with her hair down, walking through the gardens. Louisa with Lewis, his hand resting gently against her shoulder. I don’t imagine she had time to do much else but sit for paintings. At the bottom of the stairs was a small dish of holy water nailed up to the wall. Angie dipped in her fingers without looking down and crossed herself, and after thinking about it for a moment, I did the same.

We walked onto the porch in the late August afternoon of Habit, Kentucky. It was hot, but not like Flagstaff and Amarillo and Oklahoma City. There had been good rains all summer and the grass in the pasture was heavy and dark. I had never seen such thick banks of trees, such softness growing from every surface of a field. Kentucky was another country, and in that country, Saint Elizabeth’s was a country unto itself, where on the porch of a grand hotel, twenty-five pregnant girls drank sweaty glasses of iced tea and watched the sun set west while their loose dresses blew around their hips and pressed against their huge stomachs. I couldn’t imagine which ones were two weeks overdue. They all seemed two weeks overdue to me. I watched their faces carefully; they looked like they had forgotten themselves and maybe for a moment thought their husbands were upstairs changing in the room, and would soon come onto the porch and kiss them and look proudly over the beginnings of their family. Every now and then a girl broke away from the group and walked down the front steps and into the field, where she could imagine herself to be the only woman in the world about to have a child.

At six o’clock the one that Angie said was Sister Loyola stepped onto the porch and rang a small bell. The girls hoisted one another up from their chairs with exaggerated effort and laughed. “That damn bell of hers,” Angie whispered to me. “You think she could just say that supper was ready.”

As I turned to go in I saw a man walking up toward the hotel. He was the only man I had seen since my arrival, and I wondered for an instant if he was coming to get someone. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Son,” Angie said, and waved to him. He waved back to her and smiled. He was a giant man, maybe six foot six. He wasn’t fat, but as big and broad as an oak. His arm swept through the air like the branch of a tree. “He fixes things. Everybody’s in love with Son.”

I didn’t know how she meant that, really in love, or as a kind of joke, but she had gone into dinner before I could ask her.

We said our prayers standing beneath chandeliers, Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts.

At dinner we sat with girls who were closest to our class. Your class was the month you were due in, so I was the class of February. Charlotte, Lolly, and Nora, the class of August, sat at the head table with a couple of girls who were due any day. It made an odd kind of sense, their not wanting to get too close to the ones who were just coming in. By the ninth month, they were saturated with the things they were going to have to give up: their friends, their home, their child. They had no cause to take on new alliances. We sat with a girl named Regina, who was due in January, and Beatrice, who was due in December. Beatrice was a big-boned, strong-looking girl who claimed to work in the mines alongside the men in eastern Kentucky.

“I bet you worked ‘long side the men,” Angie said, laughing at her own joke. I was surprised at how bold she was, having been here only eight days herself. Beatrice was clearly a girl who could give you trouble if she was so inclined. But she laughed a little herself and poured another glass of milk. She was showing nearly as much as the girls in the class of October.

“Twins run in my family,” she said, and smiled to show her big white teeth, which were miraculously straight and even. “My grandmother was a twin.”

“What a nightmare,” Angie said.

“If I have two,” Beatrice said, “I might just take a mind to keep one for myself.” But no one laughed at that, and Regina, who was quiet anyway, turned her head. Even at the end of my first day I knew enough to know that keeping a baby wasn’t something to be joked about. None of us would. That’s why we were here.

We ate the rest of our meal quiedy. The food was not good, vegetables were overcooked, the meat sat in thin pools of grease, but there was a limitless amount of everything. “Sister Evangeline does the cooking,” Beatrice said to me in a low voice, as if that would explain everything.

I pushed back my plate, suddenly unable to go on. “Eat, eat, eat,” Angie said cheerfully. “That’s the war cry around here. I’ve gained four pounds in a week. ‘The success of a girl can be measured in the pounds gained,’ that’s what Sister Loyola says.”

She looked so thin to me, all knees and elbows. I couldn’t imagine where she put those four pounds.

“Can’t you just see what this place must have been like?” Beatrice said. “I mean, with white tablecloths and white napkins and fancy china that all matched. There must have been a guy in a white coat coming around with little bowls of water, asking you if you wanted to rinse off your hands. My sister ate dinner in a real fancy restaurant once, down in Lexington. She said that’s what you do.”

“That’s crazy,” Angie said. “Everybody washes their hands before they go to dinner.”

“Hey, she ate there, not you,” Beatrice said, helping herself to another slice of bread.

“Well, I like to think about what I’d wear, you know, if this was still a fancy hotel. Something low-cut with little pink beads on it. Something that kinda caught the light when I walked through the room.”

“I’d wear black,” Beatrice said. Her hair was thick and black and her eyes were nearly black. It would look nice on her. “I wanted to make myself a black dress once, and my mother nearly threw a fit. ‘Why do you want your one nice dress to be something you can only wear to a funeral?’ she said.”

“Black is very stylish,” Angie said. Then all at once all three of the women looked at me. “How about you, Rose. What would you wear?”

But somehow I just couldn’t get into the spirit of things. The idea of a pretty dress in a beautiful restaurant made me want to cry. We were all through with pretty things. We were all through turning heads, being young. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t care. I’d just wish it was a little darker in here.”

“Candlelight,” Angie said softly. “We forgot about the candles.”

Then there was a commotion in the front of the room, and Lolly stood up and then sat back down again. Then other girls stood up and came to her table, and then the sisters came out, taking quick steps, their habits sailing out behind them, telling everyone to sit down and be quiet. A girl from the table in front of ours leaned over and whispered to us. “Water broke.”

“I can’t believe this is happening on your first night here,” Angie said. “I’ve been here eight days and nothing like this has happened to me before.”

In fact, it was happening to everyone. My throat closed up in such a panic I thought it was me they were coming to take away. As we watched Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena guide Lolly out of the dining room, we knew what was ahead of us. Lolly passed right by me, so close I could have touched her. She was younger than I was. She had a wide pink satin ribbon in her hair. Her hands were shaking. The back of her dress was soaked through.

“They’ll take her to Owensboro,” Regina said in a dreamy voice. It was the first time she’d said a word all evening. “I used to live in Owensboro.”

“What will happen?” I asked Angie that night when we were both in our beds. The room was dark, as dark as anything I had ever seen before in my life. The town was too far away for the lights to come to us, no streetlights, very little moon.

“They’ll take her to the hospital, that’s almost an hour away, and she’ll have the baby. The sisters stay with you the whole time. They’ll even go in the room with you and hold your hand if you want them to. Then after, they give you something to make you sleep, and in the morning you wake up and the baby is gone.”

“Doesn’t anybody ever keep it?”

“Hardly ever. Lots of girls say they’re going to, right before their time, they say they’re going to get married and all sorts of crazy stuff. Everybody always says they’re going to have their baby without making any sound, get through their whole labor right here at Saint Elizabeth’s without any of the sisters finding out. That way they’d have to call for an ambulance and you could ride all the way up to Owensboro holding your baby. But no one’s ever pulled it off. They get scared about something going wrong or they can’t keep from calling out, and so they wind up going and having the baby in the hospital.”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean, then what? Then you go home.”

“I don’t understand, if you had to come to a place like this, I’d think you wouldn’t have a home to go back to.”

Angie sighed, like she was tired of girls from California being so stupid. “When you leave you tell everyone a lie. You tell them you’re going to take care of your sick aunt, or you won a trip to Europe or something, then you come back six months later and get back your job and have dinner at your parents’ house and see your old boyfriend and everything’s just the way it was. Just exactly the way it was.”

[4]

“GIRLS AT SAINT ELIZABETH’S are the recipients of charity,” Mother Corinne informed me. “But that does not mean they are not expected to work so long as they are able.”

Clearly I was able. I kept my discomforts to myself. When I was sick, I was sick quietly and privately, so that even Angie commented that I wasn’t like the other girls. I was sent to work in the kitchen with Sister Evangeline. It was a job that few people were able to keep for long, as the smell of food sent them reeling sooner or later, but I found it comforting somehow. The kitchen was huge, with long steel tables for preparation, twenty-six gas burners and half a dozen ovens. Giant copper pans hung from the ceiling, and the bone handles of good knives jutted up from wooden blocks. The kitchen was the one part of the hotel which had maintained its glamour.

It was a room Sister Evangeline rarely left. She tied the middle of her habit with a piece of string to keep it from falling into the food and rolled up her white sleeves past her doughy elbows. Even when the meal was prepared, she wandered back and forth, touching things, moving the cinnamon back into line, checking the produce in the giant walk-in refrigerator. She was somewhere around seventy-five, and gravity had pulled at her through the years, making her heavier and closer to the ground with every step she took. Often her glasses would steam so badly while she was working that it was impossible to see her eyes. But Sister Evangeline, whose prescription had been out of date for years, didn’t seem to notice. When she was tired, she would sit in a chair next to the stove or next to the freezer, depending on the season, and say her rosary until she fell asleep.

I was not much of a cook in those days, but the kitchen inspired me. At night I would bring the heavy cookbooks back to my room and read them in bed while Angie talked dreamily about her favorite foods from home. I knew that even if I made mistakes, I could still do better than Sister Evangeline. She was nearly blind and very good-natured, so she never minded, or saw, when I slipped pans off the fire and went to work on them myself.

“You’re going to have a baby,” she said to me one day after I had been there several weeks.

I told her I was.

“Well, let me see it,” she said, and motioned with a big wooden spoon for me to come toward her.

I dried my hands on my skirt and walked over to her. There wasn’t much to see, but there was something. Proof had pushed against my skin and made me nearly as round as Angie. She covered my stomach with her hands and began to knead me gently like a delicate dough.

“It’s a girl,” she said, and smiled hugely, so pleased about the news. She leaned over and pressed her ear to my belly. “Oh, you sweet girl,” she said. “I love little girls. All God’s children, but little girls are so nice.”

She straightened up and pulled down my head so she could kiss me. Her face felt cool against my cheek. “God’s blessed you, Rose, just like Elizabeth.” Then she said in a whisper, “Mother Corinne doesn’t like me to tell the girls about their babies. That’s why she put me back here in the kitchen. But I used to be mother superior.” She smiled and put her hand back on my stomach, as if she couldn’t get enough of it. “So I say, if a girl comes into my kitchen I can tell her what I want.”

I felt uneasy. “You can’t really tell, can you?”

“Oh, don’t you doubt it for a minute. I’ve never been wrong, not even one time. It’s God’s gift to me, that I can hear the babies. I was born in Kentucky, you know, the only sister here who was. When I was growing up, folks liked to say we were the only Catholics in the whole state. People were afraid of Catholics back then, thought we were witches. Then here I come along, telling everybody about their babies and then they’re sure, like it’s all no good. But my mama never bade me stop. She knew I was with God and she was proud of me. She was a listener herself, heard voices in the garden sometimes. Folks grow up around here, they know things, like your baby’s going to know things.”

I didn’t like to think about the baby that way. I didn’t like to think about it all. The more that it was just something taking up space in my body, the easier it would be. If I thought of it as being something, a girl, a boy, mine, Thomas’, it all became too confusing.

“Never you mind, dear.” She rubbed my stomach like a lucky charm. “You’ve got a good girl. You’ll do right by her.”

“I’m giving her up,” I said quiedy. “I’m not keeping her.” I didn’t like it. Her. It made me shiver.

Sister Evangeline laughed and headed off toward a pot of something boiling. “Not you, Rosie. Everybody else, but not you.”

That night in bed I tried not to think about it. I had never thought about it, what it might be like to keep this baby. I whispered to Angie in the darkness what Sister Evangeline had said.

“Lord,” she said back quietly. We had to keep our voices down, as the halls were checked for sounds, stray words seeping out underneath the doors.

“Do you think she knows anything?”

“They say she does. They say she knows about babies. I didn’t know about her being mother superior though. That’s something.”

I was always happy to be able to give Angie a piece of news she didn’t have before. “I wish I didn’t know about the baby.”

“I’d love to know. A boy or a girl. You could picture what it was going to look like once it grew up. You could know for sure what you’d name it. What would you name it?”

“I don’t think about it.”

“You can’t keep yourself from thinking of things. It used to be if I had a girl I was going to name her Sharon, just because it’s a beautiful name.” She stopped for a minute. “But now I’d name her Rose of Sharon. Maybe I’d just call her Sharon, but her name would be Rose of Sharon.”

It was all talk. Angie and I would never name our children, but her saying that put such a tightness in my throat I couldn’t reply.

“And if it was a boy I’d name it for my boyfriend at home.”

“Who’s that?” I whispered.

She was quiet for a long time and I could hear her steady breathing. She wasn’t crying, because no matter how softly she did that, I could always tell. “Duane,” she said.

“That’s the father?” There were girls who told stories about the fathers. They were the ones who said he was away and would come back and marry them the day the baby was born, but no one ever really told the truth. The truth, I imagined, was almost uniformly the same, someone who said he loved you but didn’t, someone who loved you but got scared. Within that truth were an endless number of stories, each so personal that no one could believe theirs was like anyone else’s, as I believed mine was like no one else’s. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, we were so careful not to ask things, but in that dark room I felt like a girl telling secrets.

“No,” she said, “that was Mr. Price. He owned the drugstore where I worked. I mostly worked the fountain, making sundaes and milkshakes and stuff like that. Sometimes I worked up front.” She rolled over onto her side to face me and pulled the blanket way up over her shoulders. Angie got cold when it wasn’t cold at all. I put my face right to the edge of the bed and listened.

“Duane’s my boyfriend. We’ve been dating pretty steady since I was fifteen and everybody thought me and Duane would get married. I guess we probably will. He’s a really good guy, you’d like Duane. But we never, you know, did anything, ’cause we were going to wait.” After that she just trailed off, and for a while I thought she might have gone to sleep.

“What about Mr. Price?” I whispered.

She reached her hand out and touched the edge of my mattress, ran her fingers back and forth along my sheets. “You won’t ever tell?”

“Promise.” And I wouldn’t, we were friends. It all happened so fast it hardly made sense to me. I had never had a girlfriend like this before. But that’s the way it was at Saint Elizabeth’s. It was like the army. It was like the war. You stuck with people because your life depended on it.

She tucked her hand back inside her covers. “Mr. Price was older. He was a little older than my dad, and he was married. I went to school with his daughters. We all went to the same church. That’s why he gave me the job, but later he said he gave me the job because he liked my ass. He’d say things like that to me, you know, after. He told me I was beautiful. He said I wasn’t like any other woman in the world. God, nobody ever said something like that to me before. I felt so daring, so … so, grown up. The first time, it was a slow day. I’d been working there for months already and he was always real professional, like he didn’t notice me at all even though he was always polite. There was no one in the store and he came up behind me and put his hand on my chest. Didn’t say a word, just touched me. I was so scared I couldn’t move, I didn’t pull away from him. I just stood there, so then he ran his hand under my sweater and went inside my bra and then he sort of pressed me back against him. Anybody could have walked in, his wife, his daughters, but he didn’t seem to care. I guess I’d always had a sort of crush on him. He was smart and good-looking, but I never really thought about it. Duane was so good to me, and there I was, letting Mr. Price put his hands in my clothes. It didn’t even happen that time. He never said anything to me about it. It made me so nervous, I kept thinking I should just quit the job, but that feeling, it didn’t leave me. Every time he’d tell me to do something he’d stand real close and I could feel him breathe on my neck, I’d think I was going to pass out.

“The next time I was behind the back counter. I was waiting on somebody, and he came up behind me, crawling, and he starts running his tongue along the backs of my knees. He was licking my knees. I thought I was going to buckle, fall over on the floor. There’s a customer right there and everything. Then he pulled down my underwear and started touching me, real lightly. Duane had never tried to touch me there, I wouldn’t have let him, but Mr. Price was. When that woman left he kept going, running his hand all over me. I never told anyone this. I never said it in confession: he had his head up under my skirt.

“The crazy part is neither of us said a word about it, it just kept happening, until one day he says he has to leave early and he wants me to close the store for him. He left, and at five o’clock I changed the sign and turned out all the lights and locked the front door. It was winter then, so it was nearly dark outside. We always went in and out the back way, but when I get back there he’s waiting for me. He was leaning up against one of the storage shelves, all those bottles of pills, and he tells me to take my sweater off, just like he would tell me to ring up an order or take out the trash, he says, ‘Angie, take off your sweater now.’ And I did it. Then he told me to take off my shoes and stockings. He didn’t make a move, he just watched me. He told me piece by piece, until I wasn’t wearing anything, and then he came over and put his arms around me and kissed me and said my name and that was it. He had never kissed me before. We did it right there, in front of a half a dozen different brands of birth control.”

“And that’s when it happened?”

“Not the first time. We went on like that for a while. I wonder sometimes what I could have been thinking about. I sure wasn’t thinking about Duane or Mrs. Price or my family. I’m not even so sure I was thinking about him. It was more just me, the way I felt. I’d been such a goody-goody, you know, but all of a sudden I was walking around town and I’d think, none of you know what I’m doing. I thought I was such a big damn deal. I thought I was so in love.”