Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow
A WASH OF SLEET FELL on the buildings of the Guardian Angels Orphanage, blurring their outlines, making the place look hazy and gaslit, like the cover of some cheap gothic novel: A Dram of Poison. Secrets Can’t Be Kept. I passed by the larger building that housed the older children and went right for the baby house, the way I always did. In the baby house, the cribs were lined up in tidy rows, like gravestones. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to them, little cradles of life. The babies—chubby baby faces peeking out from the blankets, new baby eyes screwed up tight—slept like kittens, all shivers and fits. They cycled their legs and gnawed on their fists as if their hands had been smeared in honey. I visited each crib in turn. Hello, you baby, I said. Good morning, cupcake! Like everyone
else, sometimes they heard me, sometimes they didn’t. When they heard me, their tiny bud lips opened and closed and opened again, as if to tell me how hungry they were. And though I didn’t get hungry in the way they did, I knew hunger. I knew how it hurt. Soon, I told them. Soon the nuns will come, and they will feed you, and you won’t be hungry anymore.
Perhaps it was mean to lie. But they were only babies. They would discover the churning furnace of this world soon enough.
After I made the rounds of the baby house, I moved on to the other cottages, which was what the sisters called the dormitories where the children slept. They kept the boys and girls separate, so I visited the girls. The six-year-olds, sweaty hair pasted to sticky foreheads, the ten-year-olds, knotted up in their sheets like third-rate Houdinis, then the girls in their teens, heads studded with rag curlers, faces slack with dreams. I talked to them too, I told them that their hair was going to look lovely once they’d brushed it out, that one day, sooner than they could ever believe possible, someone would run their fingers through that hair and they’d wish it would never stop, never stop, don’t stop. As with the babies, sometimes they heard me, but mostly they didn’t. Every once in a while, a girl would wake up and stare right at me and I would think just for a second that she saw me, that I was there, solid and
real as anyone. Then the girl’s eyes would flutter, she would frown in confusion. Maybe she’d rub her temples or laugh at herself. Later, she would tell the other girls that she heard somebody muttering during the night in a voice that hissed and clicked like a radiator.
I was thrilled when they heard me. I would talk to that same girl the next night, and the next. I would pluck at her sheets, run a chill finger down her arm, poke at her feet. The nuns would want to know why she kept kicking off her covers, it was cold, did she want to get sick? And the girl would swear she wasn’t kicking anything anywhere, that somebody wouldn’t stop mumbling and poking, that the place was haunted. The nuns would cluck their tongues and proclaim that there were no ghosts but the Holy Ghost, only stories made up to scare harebrained children.
If anyone in the orphanage had woken up right then and seen what was huddled in the corner of the cottage, they’d have offered up a whole different sort of prayer, a back-of-the-hand-pressed-to-the-lips sort—Sweet Mary, Mother of . . .
It was a girl, like me, one I hadn’t seen before, slumped against the wall, rocking and moaning, hair ropy with blood. Who knew where she came from? Maybe she’d wandered in from the streets outside. Maybe she’d wandered up from the catacombs beneath the orphanage, a place even I
was scared to go. I would have asked her, but most of us were stuck in our last horrible moments, unable to communicate anything but our pain or our fear, and even the ones who could speak gave vague, cryptic answers that satisfied no one, themselves least of all. This one keened at nobody in particular, left cheek and eye socket shattered, jaw unhinged and hanging at a disconcerting angle, making it seem as if she were about to swallow something very large and awkward. Like a car.
I’d seen worse.
I turned my attention back to the living, who were starting to climb from their beds one by one. None of them heard the moaning from the corner, none of them noticed the rocking or unhinging. Certainly not Frankie, who was still fast asleep—not the sleep of the dead as much as the sleep of the half starved, half loved. As the sky outside brightened, as the other girls yawned and stretched, I stood at the end of Frankie’s bed, the sixth one in the row by the door, and waited.
The door creaked open, and Sister George stalked in. Sister wouldn’t wait a minute past five, Sister never did. She kicked over the mattress, taking Frankie right with it.
Frankie sat there in a puddle of blankets, sleepy gaze sharpening to a glare.
That was new. That glare.
Sister took two steps toward Frankie, her black habit making her look like a vampire out of a horror picture. One of the other sisters would have made a joke: “Oh, Frankie! Did I wake you?” Or “So nice of you to join us this beautiful morning!” Or “Jesus says rise and shine!” But not Sister George. Sister George never joked, Sister George never smiled.
The order of nuns that ran the orphanage was called the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, but some sisters served Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, and others simply caused perpetual sorrow for everyone else.
Sister growled, “Did you have something you wanted to say, Francesca?”
Frankie’s eyes spoke for her—the glare hot, so hot. But Frankie shook her head.
“I thought not.” Sister George marched away, looking for the next sleeping girl to dump from her bed. Sister would never admit it, not even in confession, but kicking over mattresses before Sunday mass was the most fun she’d ever had.
Frankie shoved the mattress back onto its frame, the fire in her gaze cooling a bit. At least Sister was in one of her good moods. Her bad ones were rather spectacular. Frankie tugged at her hair, a knuckle’s worth of fuzz around her head.
“Pulling at it ain’t gonna make it grow back any faster,” Stella Zaffaro said from the next bed over.
Frankie didn’t even glance at Stella. “Shut it, chooch.”
“Shut it, chooch,” Stella mimicked. Stella flipped her own hair, shiny and blond as any movie star’s. Stella never let the other girls forget that hair, never let them forget that her name meant “star” in Italian. Frankie liked her own dark hair just fine—at least, when she’d had some—and didn’t care what Stella’s name meant in Italian. Stella wouldn’t know a meatball from a baseball.
As soon as Frankie thought the word “meatball,” her mouth started to water. Meatballs were what Sundays were for. Visiting Sundays, anyway. You might think that the orphans at Guardian Angels had no parents, no family at all, but that wasn’t always true. More than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929, too many people were still reeling—out of work, homeless. Rather than watching their children go hungry, they gave the kids over to the care of the nuns. A few beatings and a whole lot of church seemed a small price to pay for food and shelter—at least, that was what the parents told themselves. Some of these parents would visit their “half orphans” every other Sunday. Frankie’s father never missed one. And the things he brought made Frankie feel
rich, feel like a daughter, at least for a few hours. Meatball sandwiches, with thick red tomato sauce soaking the bread. Spaghetti slippery with butter, just as good cold as it was hot. Shiny, crunchy apples. Sometimes he brought presents, like a pair of shoes he’d just made, the leather so clean and new that it didn’t seem right to wrap your feet in it—too special to touch the ground. And sometimes her father filled his pockets with rock candy or even a few wrapped chocolates. He would hide them behind his back so that Frankie, her sister, Toni, and her older brother, Vito, would fight over them, but only Toni was young enough for that. Frankie could almost taste the chocolate melting on her tongue.
I could almost taste it.
“What are you grinning about?” Stella said to Frankie.
“Are you still here? I thought you would have run off to Hollywood by now.” Frankie elbowed past her and followed the other girls to the washroom.
The washroom was a whole lot of room to wash, with six flush toilets, eight sinks, showers, a tub no one used, and cubbies for their “private belongings.” Funny, because none of them had many belongings and nothing was private. But they should have been grateful to have the bathrooms because there were still people with outdoor privies. Frankie liked the indoor
plumbing, but she didn’t like having to clean it. Her knees were always sore where the little bits of dirt cut into the skin when they scrubbed the floor, and her hands were raw and cracked because of the strong brown soap they used.
Once Frankie had begged her father to bring some hand cream on visiting day and he had, the fancy sort that smelled like roses and came in a heavy jar. The whole cottage teased her, said she was putting on airs, acting as if she was one of the swells. “Aw, look at Frankie,” they said. “Where are your silk stockings, Frankie? Where’s your gown?” Stella had the most to say. So Frankie sneaked the hand cream to supper and put a fat white ball of it on top of some cake. Told Stella that her father had brought it to her. Stella was so hungry that she ate two huge bites before she realized what Frankie had done.
I’d been coming to the orphanage for as long as I could remember, but when I saw Frankie scoop that hand cream on top of that cake and offer it to Stella, I started watching Frankie, really watching her. I liked to think that what she did, that trick—not humiliating enough to be truly cruel, but just cruel enough to be funny—was something that I would have done when I was still real enough to fight, a little harmless rebellion.
But, as my mother had often reminded me, I only looked harmless. That’s the problem with girls, she said. They trick you every time.
At that moment, Frankie was harmless. She wasn’t concerned about Stella’s name or her blond hair. She wasn’t thinking about her own hair, either, or the fact that her tan skin made some of the nuns mutter about her mother’s blood, or why nobody warned her to stay out of the sun the way they did Stella. She wasn’t even thinking about the orphanage, about how so many people thought it was so sad and so terrible to live here, while Frankie understood that though things could be better, they could also be worse.
Instead, Frankie jostled with the other girls at the sink, trying to get a little room to splash water on her face. She toweled off, wondering what her father was going to say this afternoon. He had something important to tell Frankie and her brother and sister, the nuns had informed her. Something that could change their lives. Frankie doubted it. Along with his flair for meatballs, Frankie’s father had a flair for drama. He’d once announced a move to a new apartment as if he were taking up residence in a French castle.
(What he had not needed to announce: that the new apartment had had no room for his children. That they shouldn’t ask if it did.)
Frankie didn’t expect much from her father; in her experience, fathers weren’t particularly reliable. All Frankie could hope was that her father wouldn’t bring what’s-her-name with him again. Visiting Sundays weren’t the same when
she came along. When she showed up, her father never had shoes, he never had chocolate. She made him cheap. She turned him into a whole different man.
Frankie brushed her teeth hard enough to hurt. Who wanted to think about her? Nobody. Not even her own kids probably, who were here at the orphanage too, somewhere in the other cottages. Frankie didn’t know their names, she didn’t know what they looked like, and she hoped she never would.
“Snickers,” hissed the girls in the hall. And then, all through the cottage, the girls passed it down the line: “Snickers, snickers, snickers.” Nuns coming back, shut it, move it.
Frankie pulled on her Sunday dress and her coat just in time for Sister George to wave them out the door. The cottage wasn’t really a cottage, just a big room that opened out onto a bigger corridor. The girls from other cottages marched in line down the hall, their footsteps echoing so loudly that it was almost like there were more girls marching on the ceiling above. There were boys at the orphanage too, but their cottages were in another building. They’d see one another across the aisle in church. Shorn as a sheep, Frankie would have been happier not to see any boys, unless it was her older brother, Vito. She barely saw him as it was. Even brothers and sisters were separate at the orphanage.
Up at the front of the line, Sister George opened the door to the outside. The girls kept their heads down and their traps shut as they stepped outside and trudged toward the church. It was sleeting hard, and the girls tried to cover their hair. For a minute, Frankie was happy she didn’t have any. And then she saw the boys walking toward the church too, a few of them laughing and pointing at her, and was sorry again. Frankie was fourteen in October of 1941, which might sound young to some, but wasn’t, not for a nation on the cusp of another war, not for an orphan, not for Frankie. She was just three years younger than I was. Am. Was. A—
Anyway, it was no fun having boys laugh at you for something you couldn’t help, laugh at you for something that had been done to you. Especially if none of the boys were your brother and some of the boys were filled out just enough to be called handsome.
They reached the church and filed inside, sitting in their regular pews. The whole orphanage wasn’t there yet, only the cottages with Sunday confession day. One at a time, they marched into the confessional. Most of the orphans were out almost as fast as they went in, mumbling Hail Marys and Our Fathers to repent for whatever sins of deed or thought. A few kids took longer.
Poor Father, Frankie thought. She hoped he’d had his coffee this morning.
Frankie and the other girls hadn’t had anything. They wouldn’t have breakfast till after morning mass, and that meant another hour and a half at least. Frankie clamped a hand over her rumbling stomach as she walked to the confessional. She sat in the booth and pulled the curtain closed behind her.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been a week since my last confession.”
She couldn’t see him very well through the mesh, but she could hear the rustling of the pages in his Bible. Father Paul said, “How blessed is anyone who rejects the advice of the wicked and does not take a stand in the path that sinners tread, nor a seat in company with cynics.” Frankie didn’t know what a cynic was, but it didn’t sound so bad in Father’s Irish accent.
He said, “Do you have something to confess?”
Frankie’s tongue was salty with hunger. She wanted to turn the question around—“Do you have anything to confess, Father?” But she was too obedient for that, and also too jaded. She thought about telling him about taking the Lord’s name in vain or thinking vicious things about her younger sister. Things he expected to hear. Instead she said, “Sister George has a face like the Mummy. Only not as cute.”
From my perch on the ceiling, I smiled. Frankie winced. First because she thought it was a
childish thing, a sinful thing to say out loud. Second because she’d probably get about a thousand Hail Marys.
But Father Paul didn’t say anything about any Hail Marys. He started laughing, a barking laugh that sounded a lot like a cough.
Frankie leaned closer to the screen. “Are you okay, Father?”
“Just a tickle in my throat. You were saying?”
“She dumped me out of my bed this morning. She’s always dumping me out of my bed.” Frankie tugged at her hair and then stopped when she realized she was doing it.
“Was it time to get up?” asked Father.
“Well,” Frankie said.
“There you go. Do you think you’re showing Christlike respect for Sister George by calling her, uh, what was it?”
“The Mummy. Only not as—”
“Cute,” he said. “I think I’ve got it now.” More coughing. “And are you truly sorry?”
Frankie didn’t know if she was. Maybe she was. Maybe if she didn’t say bad things about Sister, Sister wouldn’t do bad things to her. It wasn’t true, but who could blame her for thinking this way? She had no idea that Sister George disliked Father simply because he was from Ireland. Frankie had no idea that too many people believed you could be from a right place or a wrong one.
The orphanage was German Catholic, and Sister George was more German than German. In Frankie’s language class, they’d learned that the German word for “squirrel” could be literally translated as “oak croissant.”
That was what Sister’s face looked like. A croissant.
“Yes,” Frankie was saying, “I’m truly sorry.”
“Well, then. Anything else?”
“I’ve been thinking mean thoughts about her, too.”
“Her?” said Father Paul. “Who’s her?”
Frankie blushed and was glad for the screen. “My father’s . . . his . . . friend.”
Frankie didn’t have to explain. There might be nine hundred orphans at Guardian Angels, but Father Paul seemed to know the lives of every single one of them. “What kinds of thoughts?”
“I want her to move to the North Pole. Or the South Pole. Whichever’s colder. And where there are bears. Starving ones. With big teeth.”
Father cleared his throat. “She might be your stepmother one day. Some young ladies would be grateful to have a stepmother who cares about them.”
“She hates me worse than Sister George.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” he said. “From what I hear, she and your dad visit all the time.”
Frankie said nothing.
“And bring you all sorts of nice things. Things the other girls never get. You must learn to appreciate the gifts that God has given you. A father who loves you. A new mother.”
Sharp now, like the sting of a strap: “My mother is dead.”
“Your mother is with God. In a better place.”
I hoped Frankie’s mother was with God. I really did. I hoped she and God were sharing a coffee cake. Once I’d confessed to my own mother that I thought God was a woman, because who but a woman would care so much about the oceans and the plants and the animals, who but a woman could build a whole world in seven days? My mother slapped me so hard my ears rang like church bells for hours after.
More things Frankie wasn’t thinking about: coffee cake, because she’d never had it, which should have been some kind of sin but wasn’t. Church bells, or the time it took to conjure all those mountains and trees, sharks and whales, bears and wolves. No, Frankie was too busy imagining how lonely her mother must have been when she stepped off that boat from Sicily, about what made her mother get on that boat in the first place, the kind of courage it took to sail across the ocean all by yourself. What had her mother hated so much about her home, and what had she missed once she’d left?
Frankie put her hand to her middle again. I remembered doing that, remembered when the feelings were so strong they turned your insides to a frothing stew. Frankie’s mother had been just sixteen when she came to America to build her own new world, and had died for it.
But Frankie only smoothed the fabric of her dress. “Do you think there are meatball sandwiches in heaven, Father?”
Coffee cake, I said, still floating against the ceiling. With lots of brown sugar.
Father said, “I always imagined there’d be corned beef. But I suppose there could be meatballs too. Ten Hail Marys. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.”
“For His mercy endures forever,” Frankie said.
When Frankie finally threw herself back on the pew next to Stella, Stella said, “What took you so long?”
Frankie said, “I was telling him about all your impure ways.”
“What?”
Sister George gave them one of her don’t-make-me-come-over-there looks. Frankie slapped her hands together and prayed, but she was praying that Sister wouldn’t drag them out of church by their necks. It had happened before.
Sister must have been too tired from kicking over mattresses to drag people out of church,
because confession ended without anyone losing any more hair. The rest of the boys and girls filled the church pews all around them, going silent as dolls when the nuns gave them what Frankie called the stink eye. Frankie tried to focus on Father Paul. Father was always different during mass than he was in confession, facing away from the congregation, droning on and on in Latin about hell and fire and brimstone, infernos and abysses and sinners. His lilting, musical accent made the Latin words sound less frightening, but it wasn’t supposed to. Everyone in the whole place was certain they were going to burn for something. There was no need to keep bringing it up.
Frankie believed there was nothing that any father could say that would surprise her.
She was wrong.
In my best Irish accent, I bellowed, Hill! Fyre! Breemston! right in Frankie’s ear. She didn’t even turn her head.
I got bored with the sermon, so I drifted back out of the church and into the courtyard, standing in the curtain of sleet that couldn’t touch me, couldn’t chill or soak me. Across the courtyard, on the upper floors of the dormitories, a shadow darted from window to window. That shadow traveled from left to right until the ghost girl with
the broken face burst through a pane without shattering the glass. She plummeted to the ground, screaming, No, please, wait! the whole way down.
See?
Hell is never what you think it’s going to be.
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