Then Came Heaven (14 page)

“Oh,” he said, unsure of how to deal with her. “Well...”

He began eating, feeling self-conscious when he’d never felt that way around her before.

“If you have a nickel for each of their school dinners, I’ll tie them in their hankies.”

“Oh... sure...” He cocked one hip and reached into his pants pocket, then handed her the coins. It was uncanny: the woman knew every single nuance of their morning routine.

Out of the blue, Lucy declared, “I want to eat noon dinner at home today. We’re having creamed peas at school and I hate them and Sister Mary Charles always makes me eat them. She says the children in China are starving, so I have to clean up my plate.”

Anne asked, “Where’s China, Daddy?”

“On the other side of the world.”

“Then how could they eat Lucy’s creamed peas?” Eddie caught Irene’s eye and they both suppressed grins.

“Sister Mary Charles is just trying to teach you not to waste food.”

“I’m scared of her.”

“There’s no need to be scared of her.”

“She gives the bad boys lickings in the flower room. I’ve heard them howling in there. She hits them with a rubber strap that she leaves laying on the fern stand. I’ve seen it! It’s made out of floor tile.”

“Well, be good, then she’ll never use it on you.”

Anne said, “I thought you said that we didn’t have to be scared of her.”

Eddie polished off his coffee, set down the cup and evaded the issue. “Got to go ring the first bell,” he said, pushing up from the table.

“What about my creamed peas, Daddy?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to do your best to eat them because you have to eat noon dinner at school from now on.”

“You mean 
every
 day?” Lucy’s face scrunched up in dismay.

“I’m afraid so, dumpling.”

It struck her that her mother wouldn’t be there to fix it, and she looked at her aunt. “Can’t Auntie Irene fix dinner for us?”

His glance veered to Irene, then he got busy making preparations to leave. “Auntie Irene has to go back home.”

“Oh.”

He hugged the girls, taking extra time today, kissing their thin necks that smelled like Forever Spring. How he hated leaving them in Irene’s care, not because she wouldn’t do a good job of getting them ready—unless he missed his guess, she’d do just as good a job as Krystyna—but because he was stepping into a new routine without Krystyna in it. He was striding forward with his life as he must, but each step he took made him feel as if he was betraying her by carrying on this farce of feigned normalcy.

Yet he didn’t know what else to do.

________

Irene was dressing the children when the first bell rang at seven-thirty. At the sound of it, her hands fell still as she pictured Eddie in the church vestibule alone, hauling on the rope. 
Poor Eddie,
 she thought. 
Poor lonely Eddie.

She made sure the girls had brushed their teeth, washed their faces and behind their ears, then she fussed with their hair, and tied their sashes in back with big, perfect bows. When they were ready to walk out the door she handed them their hankies with the nickels tied into the comers, and gave them hugs and firm kisses on the cheek. “Would you like me to be here when you get back home from school?” she asked.

“Well... I guess so,” Anne replied.

Lucy asked, “You mean you’d stay here all day?”

“No, I’m going back out to the farm as soon as I wash the breakfast dishes and slick up the house a little bit.”

“Oh.”

“But I can come back in at four o’clock when school is out, if you’d like.”

Lucy deferred to her older sister.

Anne said, “We can be by ourselves for a little while. We’re not babies.”

“No, of course you’re not. I just thought...” She patted Anne on the shoulder. “Well, in any case, I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Take your sweaters now. There’s a chill in the air.”

A minute later the two little girls started out for school, each with a navy blue sweater over her dress, Anne dutifully taking Lucy’s hand as they crossed the street and headed up the alley.

“Is Auntie Irene going to be our new mother?” Lucy asked as they walked up the twin worn tracks with the grass strip up the middle.

“How can she be our mother when she’s our aunt?”

“I don’t know.” Lucy shrugged. “She’s doing everything that Mommy did, so I just thought she was going to be.”

“She’s just our baby-sitter, that’s all.”

“Oh.”

They continued up the alley, which was as familiar to them as their own yard. It ran behind the deep back lots of the businesses on Main Street—Myman’s Ford, Sam Berczyk’s blacksmith shop and Wangler’s jewelry shop. Between the businesses were some empty lots, where Anne and Lucy had picnics on hot summer noons and played hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids in the mosquitoey after-supper hours on sticky summer evenings, and where they often found things to explore—old grindstones knee-deep in quack grass; the skeletons of rusting farm machinery whose purposes they could not name; short stacks of lumber, which, when overturned, revealed fat pink angleworms that made good gifts for their dad who said he liked to go fishing, though he never seemed to find the time. There were sheds, too, holding old trucks that nobody ever seemed to drive, and chicken crates and cordwood piles and tilting outhouses with shovels and scythes leaning against them, and heavy steel chains and rusty automobile axles, and up behind Nauman’s Plumbing, a creaky back door that was never locked, leading to a basement so full of salamanders that it made them shriek with fright and pound back up the steps every time they sneaked down there to shine a flashlight in the salamanders’ eyes. Those eyes turned green as lime Popsicles when the light hit them, and were the most deliciously scary things in the entire world. Sometimes Brenda Nauman charged kids a penny to take them down and see.

On the other side of the alley, directly across from Anne and Lucy’s house, was Frank Plotnik’s blacksmith shop and the backyards of small houses with clotheslines and gardens and sheds. In a couple of those houses lived old women who were related to their grandparents, though neither Anne nor Lucy quite understood how.

At the end of the alley they came to a T
 
with a street that had no name, and across the street, the fancy fence surrounding Father Kuzdek’s house and the churchyard. They loved the churchyard. It was filled with life-sized statues carved in glistening white stone, and the fishpond where they sometimes came to drop bits of bread for the goldfish to eat. Every year on the feast of Corpus Christi they were dressed in white with veils on their heads, and they strewed peony petals before Father Kuzdek, who said Mass at four small altars that their mother had helped set up all around the lawns and decorated with flowers from her own garden.

Walking the perimeter of the churchyard, Lucy said, “ ’Member when we got to dress all up and carry flowers for Father Kuzdek? What was that called again?”

“Kurpius Christi,” Anne answered, mistakenly pronouncing a family name she’d heard around Browerville her whole life.

“Yeah, that’s right. Kurpius Christi. Well, who’s going to make our white dresses for that and for Easter and stuff?” The many occasions when church ceremony called for white dresses and veils had seemed like playing movie star to Lucy.

“I don’t know. You’ll probably wear my hand-me-down one from last year.”

“I always have to wear your hand-me-downs,” Lucy replied with a pout.

“You do not. Mommy made you lots of dresses of your own.”

“I know, but she promised me that she’d make me a brand-new one for Easter, and I for sure don’t want to wear your hand-me-down then. So who’s gonna make it?”

“Well, I don’t 
know
 who’s gonna make it!” Anne was having difficulty keeping her lip from trembling, and the result was a spate of irritation.

Lucy halted, jerked her hand out of Anne’s and abruptly started to cry. They happened to be smack in front of church, and she sat down on the bottom step and howled, openmouthed, without even covering her face. “I don’t want Mommy to be dead! I want her to make my Easter dress! I’m goin’ back home!”

She got up and would have run back the way they’d come, but Anne grabbed her hand. “You can’t go back home. Nobody’s there.”

“Auntie Irene is there.”

“She said she was going home.”

Lucy stood in the middle of the sidewalk and bellowed, “I want my mommeeee!”

Anne, who wanted her mommy, too, was forced to act as consoler. She put her arms around Lucy and petted her hair the way their mother would have. “Come on, Lucy, we have to go to school. Let’s go see Sister Regina and she’ll know what to do. Where’s your hanky? Here, get it out and blow your nose.”

Sister Regina was writing on the blackboard when they came in: 
September 12, Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary.
 For each day that celebrated a particular saint, she wrote the name of that saint on the board and taught the children about him or her. Some of her students had already arrived and were mingling around the desks when Sister heard the cloakroom door open and close and Lucy sniffling as the two sisters came into the schoolroom.

“Good morning, Sister,” Anne said.

Lucy tried to say the same thing, but it came out choppy as she cried.

“Good morning, children. Oh, my goodness, Lucy, what is it?” Sister said sympathetically, setting down her chalk and turning to the children.

“She wants to go back home, but I told her Mommy isn’t there.”

Lucy stood dejectedly, rubbing her eyes, her words coming in jolts that were divided by residual sobs. “I w... want my m... mommy.” Some of their classmates turned to watch in fascination.

“Come with me,” Sister said, and reaching for both of their hands, led them through the cloakroom and into the flower room, away from the curious eyes of their classmates. Three tiers of varnished bleachers held plants of many varieties, and between two ferns Sister Mary Charles’s rubber strap waited. The girls eyed it fearfully and nudged closer to Sister Regina, gripping her hands tighter. Along one wall a short section of bookshelves held the school “library,” and against another a metal cot covered with an army blanket sufficed as a “nurse’s office.” Sister sat down on the cot and drew the children down beside her, tugging their hands against her black skirts until she felt them huddle against her, small and forlorn and trusting. In spite of the fact that Holy Rule disallowed it, she put her arms around them and drew them fast to her sides. Having had no children of her own, she’d rarely felt small bodies curl against her this way. Their shoulders reached the sides of her breasts which were bound firmly inside her habit, as if to deny the fact that she was female. The feel of the children gathered against her filled Sister Regina with an expansive rush of maternal love.

“Now what has made you cry on this beautiful new day?”

“She wants our mommy back.”

“Oh, Lucy, dear, so do we all. But let me tell you something. When you came into my schoolroom a minute ago, do you know what I was writing on the blackboard? I was writing down what today’s feast day is, just like I do every morning. And do you know what it is?”

Lucy, intrigued in spite of herself, looked up and wagged her head no, swiping the tears from beneath her eyes.

“Why, it’s the feast of the Holy Name of Mary. That means that if we ask the Blessed Virgin to intercede for us for anything today, we have a good chance of getting it. I think we should ask Mary if your mother is happy in heaven? Shall we do that?”

“I guess so.”

Continuing to hold the children tightly, Sister Regina shut her eyes and prayed aloud, “Dear Mary, most holy Virgin, mother of Jesus, who loved and cared for Him just as Krystyna loved and cared for her children, Anne and Lucy, we pray that you might ask our Lord to shed His grace on these two children who have a very special need of His help today. They wish to send a prayer that their mother’s soul be happy and abiding with Jesus. They want her to know that they will do their very best to persevere here on earth.”

Lucy whispered, “Sister?”

She looked down at the angelic face lifted to her. “Yes, Lucy?”

“What’s a ‘purse of ear’?”

“It means to do our best even when it’s hard. For you and Anne it means that you’ll go to school and continue to be the obedient children you’ve always been, and go to Mass every day, and help each other the way Anne helped you today. But just think, on the days when you wish you didn’t have to do any of those things, you’ll have special help not only from Jesus, but from your own mother who lives in heaven with Him now.”

“But how can she help me? Can she still make my Easter dress?”

“Well, no, she can’t, Lucy, but she’ll find a way for you to get one.”

“She will?”

“Of course she will.”

“How?”

“Well, your mommy’s an angel now, and you heard what Father Kuzdek said. Angels find a way.”

At the nun’s reassurance, Lucy offered a quavering smile.

“Now, do you know what?” Sister brightened her voice and returned the smile. “The other children have arrived and it’s time to line up and go to church for Mass. Your daddy will be ringing the bell in a minute and he’ll be watching for you. Would you like to go see him?”

Lucy was already climbing down, drying her cheeks with the backs of her freckled hands when something unexpected happened. Anne, too, slipped to her feet and before Sister could rise, swung around and flung up her arms in a spontaneous hug. She caught the nun around the neck and clung, pulling her veil taut against her head, holding on tenaciously, her warm cheek against Sister’s cool one. Within Sister Regina a bubble of joy burst and spread its goodness, as if the Angel Krystyna were, indeed, watching over all of them, giving them each a very precious gift in their newfound closeness. It was so unexpected, that hug, the kind of thing children do without compunction, the kind of thing a mother must get all the time and take for granted. But Sister Regina had never had such a hug before, and it incited her every maternal instinct, forcing it up into the light like a wildflower growing from the crevice of a rock.