The Guineveres (46 page)

Sister Connie brushed past me, and she picked up the baby, slung her over her shoulder like a dishrag, and gently patted her bottom. As she did this, she stared out at the crowded Sick Ward, directing Sister Magda. “No, not that one,” she said. “Yes, yes.
That
one. No, no. Not like that.” Her hair had come untucked from her cap. Droplets of blood were splattered across her apron. “I'll be there in just a moment,” she snapped, frazzled. She bounced up and down with the baby, who would not cease her screaming.

“Here, let me,” I said. I took the baby from Sister Connie, cradling the tiny girl in my arms like the Piet
à
. “Shh, shh, shh,” I whispered, and her pink-rimmed eyes flicked up at me but could not focus. “I'm here. Don't worry.” She smelled like newness, like nothing bad had ever happened to her. I swayed back and forth, moved by an imaginary breeze. Her breathing calmed, her eyes drooped, and then she fell asleep, a bundle of warmth and weight in my arms. That's when I took her to meet My Boy.

I perched on the edge of his bed, pressed up against his legs, angled my body so he could see us, should he awake. I swear I saw his lids pulse, his lashes flutter; I'm certain he struggled to open his eyes. But he couldn't. Sleep overruled his desires, and so we sat, the three of us, a pocket of silence in the clamoring of the Sick Ward. How long I sat like that, I could not say. I sat until dinner trays were delivered and removed. I sat until the setting sun beamed long orange rectangles onto the linoleum. I sat until Sister Connie came back with a warm bottle.

“Do you want to feed her?” she asked.

I nodded.

A few days later, Sister Fran called me to her office. She closed the door and motioned for me to take a seat on the bench. Instead of retreating to the chair behind her desk, she sat down beside me, hip-to-hip, the way The Guineveres used to sit. She smelled like incense and the cafeteria, and like lavender soap. She removed her veil to reveal her slipshod hair, white and wiry, pinned back by an assortment of bobby pins. She looked so small without her veil, like a regular old lady I might see in church. She picked up my hand from my lap and squeezed it. Her hands were papery and warm, and I liked the feel of it, so I let her rest her palm in my own.

“The joy of God is the innocent, Guinevere,” she said. She squeezed my hand once more. I didn't respond, because no question had been asked of me. Instead, I leaned against the wall, head bowed, as though I were praying.

In a way, I suppose you could say I was praying. Or I was thinking, anyway, about how this wasn't the ending I had expected when my mother left me here. That sometimes we can't predict the ending, that the cost of loving someone too much is the pain we feel when we lose them.

“I am responsible for you. This is my earnest duty. I was trusted with your care.” Sister Fran released my hand and turned her spindly body to face me. “Now listen to me,” she said. Her voice was gentle, low, had lost some of its edge and authority. She cleared her throat. “There's a family, from the parish. They have a daughter just a few years older than you, a son who's away in the War. They've agreed to take you in, so you can have a proper home life. You'll go to school. And you'll live with them, of course. You'll still attend mass on Sundays. They've promised to maintain your proper spiritual education, and I have no doubt they'll do just that. They're a good family, and this is an unusual circumstance. Do you understand what I'm saying, Guinevere?”

It's amazing how many thoughts can run through one's mind in only a fraction of a moment, how time can extend. I sat there, numbed through my body, as if someone had swapped the air for chloroform. I tried to think about what life would be like on the outside, with a family, in a house. I wondered if I'd have my own bedroom, and if so, what it would look like. I wondered how many students went to the school, and if they'd like me, and if the teacher would collect homework, and if they'd hold me back on account of the fact that it'd been so long since I'd been in a real school. I didn't even know what I didn't know anymore. I wondered what I'd wear to school, or if the family had hand-me-down clothes from their daughter that I could fit into. I wondered if they'd seen me before in church, serving on the altar, and I wondered if I'd seen them, one of the familiar faces in the rows of pews. I wanted so badly to be part of something. A family.

“Guinevere?” Sister Fran said softly, waking me to alertness again.

“Yes, Sister?”

“What do you have to say?”

I had nothing to say, because I had shifted my thinking to My Boy, to his warm body, a living statue in repose. As I sat against him in the Sick Ward, his daughter nestled in the crook of my arms, I could feel the rising and falling of his chest, each breath washing through me like water. I tried to hold on to the moment. I squeezed the girl tightly, and I kissed her downy head, and I leaned into My Boy so he'd know we were there. When I looked down at the sleeping baby, at her translucent lids fluttering just like her father's, I was overcome with gratitude, waterlogged with it.
They
were my family now, and I couldn't abandon them, even if I wanted to. They needed my protection, and besides, that's not what you do to the people you love.

“I can't,” I told Sister Fran.

“You can't? What do you mean you can't? Of course you can. This is your way out, dear,” Sister Fran said. Here she paused to place her veil on her head again, and when she did, her voice lost some of its tenderness, and primness returned to the corners of her vowels. “It's a chance for a good girl like yourself.”

“I mean I won't,” I said firmly. I hardly recognized the words coming out of my mouth. If I could have stopped myself, I would have, because part of me wanted to be as far away from the convent as possible, far away from the reminders of the people who had hurt me the most. But that's not the meaning of sacrifice. That's not how the saints would have acted. “I was sent here for a purpose. You told me yourself the day I arrived,” I said.

“And what purpose is that?” Sister Fran asked. “This is an extraordinary offer, Guinevere. These are extraordinary times.” She stood and straightened out her skirt. The tips of her black leather shoes peeked out from the hem, and I noticed they were worn at the seams. It wouldn't be long before they wound up in the courtyard, planted with geraniums so as to serve one last purpose of functionality.

I stood and I faced Sister Fran. We were nearly the same height. I'd grown taller in the years since I'd lived in the convent. I'd grown wiser, too. “My purpose is to serve.”

“In the convalescent wing?”

I shook my head.

“The War Effort?”

“With the baby,” I said. “She needs someone. She needs me.”

“With the baby,” Sister Fran repeated, flummoxed. She suctioned her cheeks and puckered her lips as if she were sucking poison from the air, and then she stepped backward, away from me. She turned and walked to her desk and, readjusting her habit, sat down behind it. “I don't know if you realize what that entails. It's a difficult job raising children, especially girls.”

I moved toward Sister Fran, placed my palms firmly on her desk, and, listing forward, mustered up the courage the saints must have needed in moments when their convictions wavered. “I know exactly what girls need, Sister.” I may have sounded angry—I didn't intend for my words to come out this way—and at that moment Sister Magda rapped hard-knuckled at the door, and she entered in haste.

“Excuse me, Sister,” she said, interrupting. Her nurse's hat was off-kilter, and long streaks on her apron resembled tea stains. “Another group of soldiers,” she said, catching her breath. Her hand clutched her chest as though monitoring her own heartbeat. “They've just arrived. About a dozen of them.”

Silence for a moment, and then Sister Fran spoke. “Do what we must. Phone the church to see if they have cots. If not, we'll bring some bunks down from the girls' room.”

“But where will I fit them? There's no space.”

“We can't very well turn them away, now can we?”

“No, Sister.”

“Well, then, make space.”

Sister Magda quickly scooted out of the room, and I turned toward Sister Fran again. Her head was tilted back and her mouth slightly parted, as though she were taking communion on her tongue.

“I can do it, Sister,” I said. “I can raise the baby. I want to do it. Please.”

Sister Fran leaned back in her chair, pressed her bony hands to her cheeks, and sighed. She gazed upward, toward the heavens, as if for an answer, then looked me square in the face. For the first time I noticed her eyes were blue, not like Gwen's but darker, like the deepest part of the ocean. She nodded slowly, perhaps a nod of resignation, but a nod all the same.

*   *   *

I named the baby Guinevere, after her mother. The Sick Ward was no place for her, so we moved into a room on the third floor, but not the Penance Room. I remember the way she felt in my arms when she was just a tiny thing, her fingers grasping at air like a wind-up toy, her eyes gleaming with innocence, and round, her skin so soft like her father's. What a miracle life is, an accumulation of history. Her eyes are green; her lips red, red, the way her mother would have liked. She has Win's untamable hair, and freckles, though not as many as Ginny. I prefer to think she looks a little bit like all of us.

It's been just the two of us up here on the third floor all these years. We've made a life of our own. Caring for Guinevere has changed me—for the better, I'd say. I'm no longer the fragile, skinny-legged girl I was when my mother left me. I've gained heft, of spirit and of body. I no longer wear my hair long or rub butter into it before bed for shine. I'm beyond all that. And Guinevere, she's grown into a thoughtful young girl. She's serious and imaginative, sensitive but quick to laugh. She's tall, all arms and legs, yet to fully grow into her body. Just recently, she rummaged through some old boxes in the storage room, and she found one marked with my name.

“Can I open it?” she asked me. I know she tires of convent life, but I've tried my best to see she's been afforded some freedom. I once bought her some makeup, but she wasn't interested in wearing it. Instead, she asks to take long walks in the woods that surround the convent. We've blazed paths through our favorite spots just by traipsing them again and again.

“Of course,” I said. When we hike through the woods, I like to observe her from up the path to see if I can detect some traces of her father. I imagine he is as curious as Guinevere. She can stand for hours just observing a tree, its five-fingered leaves that resemble hands, or the way its limbs knot, or the mushrooms that grow off the trunk like little shelves. When she crouches to observe a flower or a toad, I notice the curve of her spine, like a question mark, and I'm certain I'm seeing her father in silhouette. She looks up at me and laughs when she catches me staring at her like that, and it's My Boy's laugh I hear.

Inside the box she found my old clothing and shoes, the coat I never wore, moth-eaten in only a few spots. “It's like what they wore in the olden days,” she exclaimed, amused, then slipped the dusty coat on her small frame, but it was short in the sleeves.

Then she reached into the box and pulled out a packet of envelopes bundled with twine. I recognized the handwriting on the outside immediately. It was my own. They were the letters I'd written to my mother as a girl, the letters in which I'd begged her to come back for me, pleaded with her to, at the very least, write and let me know she was okay. Guinevere handed them to me, and I took them, flipped them over to see they'd been unopened. A red hand was stamped on the front, like the hand of Michelangelo's
David
himself.
UNCLAIMED
, it read.
RETURN TO SENDER
.

I shouldn't have been surprised. And really, I wasn't. But I can't say it didn't hurt a little, even years later. All those times I'd dropped an envelope into Sister Fran's burlap sack on Mail Distribution Day, I was sending letters to nowhere.

“Who are they from?” Guinevere asked. When she looked up at me, I swear I saw myself in the girl. She cocked her head to the side just slightly, then reached out for my hand as though she instinctively knew I could use the comfort. I wondered why Sister Fran had kept the letters, or why she hadn't told me that my efforts to reach my mother were in vain, that each time I poured out my soul on paper, it was like giving confession to a deaf priest. Perhaps she had nurtured my hope; in some way, I could rationalize the act as a gesture of kindness, though I guess I'll never know.

“Look at this,” I said, changing the subject, and I released her hand. I reached into the box and held up my mother's watch, my grandmother's before that. The band had oxidized; it was specked with black spots that resembled cigarette marks. I hadn't seen that watch since Sister Fran confiscated it on the day I arrived, all those years ago. As I laid it across my palm, I recalled my mother's promise that nothing bad would ever come to me if I wore it. I wound the dial and brought the watch to my ear: It still ticked. They don't make them like that anymore.

“It's pretty,” Guinevere said.

“It's yours now,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked. She hugged me, and she smelled of mothballs. My eyes began to water, and her thick hair that she insists on wearing down—no braids for her—clung to my cheeks.

“Now go ask Sister Vickie for some polish,” I said.

My mother, she never came back for me. Never called, never wrote. I can't say my heart aches for her—how can you limit it to just your heart? I would say I
am
her when I care for Guinevere, when I mend her clothes, or pray with her, or tell her the stories of the saints, those defiant young women who have gone before. I want a different life for her, one where she's not afraid, where she has choices, not like me. I tell her stories of my own youth, of The Guineveres and the times we walked these same chilly halls. They send postcards from time to time, or gifts around her birthday and Christmas. In this way, they still play a part in her life, so I don't think she views them as strangers. She's never asked about her mother, and so I've not told her. Not yet.