CHAPTER 25
THE OFFER
POV: MAE
The box is on the front steps at seven in the morning.
Rosa finds it when she goes out for the milk. She brings it to the kitchen held out in front of her like it might bite, and sets it on the long oak table, and steps back, and crosses herself twice.
It’s a plain cardboard box. Big. Tied with white string. Snow on the lid.
Ronan is at the table with his coffee. He looks at it for a long moment without touching it.
Then he takes out his knife and cuts the string.
He lifts the lid.
Inside, folded neatly on white tissue paper, is my camel coat.
Clean. Dry-cleaned. On a wooden hanger with a plastic sleeve. The kind of clean that costs money.
On top of the coat, folded into a perfect square, is my black lace veil.
And on top of the veil, a Mass card. The kind you buy at the back of a church for a dollar, to have a Mass said for someone who died. On the front, a painting of the Madonna. On the back, printed in gold:
The Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.
And under that, in blue ballpoint, in a heavy man’s hand:
For Liam. See you there. — C.K.
The kitchen is very quiet.
Rosa has her hand over her mouth.
I reach past Ronan and pick up the veil.
It’s clean too. Somebody washed it by hand and pressed it. It smells like somebody else’s detergent. Somewhere in Southie, in a kitchen, a woman who works for Conor Kavanagh stood at a sink last night and washed my veil in cold water so the lace wouldn’t shrink.
I shake it out.
“Mae,” Ronan says.
I put it on.
I pin it at the crown with the pins from my cardigan pocket, the way I wore it to the altar, and I let it fall down my back. Then I sit down at the table across from him and pull my plate toward me.
Rosa stares at me.
“Eggs, please, Rosa,” I say. “And the pear.”
***
At two o’clock that afternoon, Mother Clare comes to Draven House.
I’ve never seen her outside the walls of St. Agnes. She looks smaller out here. Smaller and older. She stands in the front hall in her black coat and her plain veil and her sensible shoes, with snow on her shoulders, and her hands are folded in front of her even now.
She looks at the portraits. At the chandelier. At Grace Draven at the end of the hall.
Then at me, coming down the stairs.
Her eyes go to my cheek. The bruise has gone green at the edges and deep purple along the bone. They go to my wrists, where the gauze shows under my cardigan cuffs.
Something moves in her face.
“Magdalene.”
“Mother.”
She doesn’t call me Mrs. Draven this time.
I take her into the front parlor. It’s a small room, blue and cream, with a fire going and a camera in the plaster rose on the ceiling that I can see if I look for it. I don’t look for it. I know he’s watching. He’s in the Crypt. I asked him to be.
Rosa brings tea. Mother Clare doesn’t touch hers.
“The Bishop sent me,” she says.
“I know.”
She looks up sharply.
“I was told you’d come,” I say. “I didn’t know it would be so soon.”
Mother Clare looks at me for a long moment over her pearl-rimmed glasses. Then she opens her handbag and takes out an envelope. Cream. Heavy. The diocesan crest embossed in the corner.
She sets it on the table between our teacups.
“His Excellency asked me to deliver this into your hands,” she says.
“And to tell you that he’s been praying for you.
He said that you came to him at the Copley in distress, and that he could see your soul was in danger, and that he can help you.
” Her voice is flat. The Angelus voice. “He says a marriage entered under duress, without the consent of the Church, in the season of Advent, can be declared null. He says he has already begun the process. He says there’s a place for you.
A shelter in Chelsea. Our Lady of the Harbor.
Quiet, safe, far from—” Her eyes flick to the ceiling. “Far from this house.”
I don’t pick up the envelope.
“And?” I say.
“And he’ll be at the Chancery on Christmas Eve.
The reception before midnight Mass. Everyone will be there.
Your husband will be there, he says, he always comes.
” Her voice doesn’t change. “He says that when it’s time, he’ll take you into his private rooms for a blessing, and there’ll be a car at the side door, and by morning you’ll be under the protection of the Church. ”
The fire snaps.
I look at Mother Clare. Her hands are folded so tight her knuckles have gone white.
“Mother,” I say. “Do you know what Our Lady of the Harbor is?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Do you know where the girls go? The ones who don’t go home?”
“I know,” Mother Clare says, very quietly, “what your husband is.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
She looks down at her hands.
For a long time she doesn’t say anything. The fire snaps. Somewhere in the house, far away, a clock chimes the half hour.
“I have heard things,” she says at last. “Over the years. I have heard things, and I have not asked.” She lifts her eyes to mine.
They’re wet behind the glasses. I’ve never seen Mother Clare cry.
Not at funerals. Not at Sister Perpetua’s deathbed last spring.
“I have thirty-one sisters, Magdalene. I have a roof. I have a boiler. I had to choose what not to know.”
“You chose for me, too.”
“Yes.”
“On the front steps. Through a chain.”
“Yes.” Her voice cracks on it. “God forgive me. Yes.”
I look at her.
I think about the first night I came to St. Agnes, with one suitcase, and she opened the door, and looked at me, and said, Come in, child, you’re letting out the heat. I thought she was kind. I thought God had opened the door.
It was a letter. On a man’s letterhead.
I pick up the envelope.
“Tell His Excellency yes,” I say.
Mother Clare stares at me.
“Tell him I’m grateful. Tell him I’ve been so frightened. Tell him I’ll come to the reception on Christmas Eve, and I’ll let him give me his blessing, and I’ll go wherever he wants.” I smile at her. The polite smile. The one they teach girls. “Tell him I cried when I read his letter.”
“Magdalene,” she whispers. “What are you doing?”
“I’m doing what you taught me, Mother.” I stand. “I’m choosing what not to know.”
***
On Saturday, I go back to St. Agnes.
Ronan doesn’t want me to. He says it three times in the car. He sends four men with me and sits in the car himself across Adams Street with the engine running, where he sat for two years, and I feel him watching the whole time I’m inside.
I say I’ve come to say goodbye to Sister Bernadette.
That’s true.
She’s in the laundry. Of course she is. The mangle is going, and the steam is rolling, and she’s folding a pillowcase into a perfect square when I come down the stairs.
She looks up. She sees my face. My cheek. The veil.
She puts the pillowcase down very carefully on the folding table.
“Well,” she says. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
I go to her. She holds out her arms, and I walk into them, and she smells like starch and bleach and that terrible drugstore talcum powder she’s worn since before I was born, and I put my face in her shoulder and hold on.
She pats my back. Hard. Like she’s burping a baby.
“There, now,” she says. “There, now.”
When I let go, she holds me at arm’s length and looks at me.
“Who did that to your face?”
“A man named Liam Kavanagh.”
“And where’s he now?”
“Dead.”
Sister Bernadette nods once. Briskly. Like I’ve told her the dryer’s finished.
“Well,” she says. “Saves me the trouble.”
We sit on the folding table with our legs dangling, the way we used to on Tuesday nights when the laundry was done and we were too tired to climb the stairs.
She tells me the envelope came. Twenty thousand dollars.
Rosa brought it Thursday. She tells me Mother Clare cried in the chapel for an hour, and nobody’s ever seen Mother Clare cry, and half the sisters think she’s dying.
“She isn’t dying,” I say. “She’s sorry.”
“Same thing, at her age.”
I look at the door at the far end of the laundry. The one to the infirmary. And past the infirmary, the little room where Bernadette dries her herbs.
She sees me look.
She doesn’t say anything.
“I need to go in there,” I say.
Bernadette looks at me for a long moment. Her old eyes are very sharp behind her crooked glasses.
“For what?”
“For something to help me sleep.”
“Chamomile’s on the left. Valerian’s in the blue tin.”
“Not that kind.”
The mangle hisses.
Sister Bernadette has run the infirmary at St. Agnes for thirty years.
She knows every plant in that room. She knows which ones help old hearts and which ones stop them.
She taught me, in my first winter, when she let me help her sort the jars.
This one’s for Sister Perpetua’s heart, she said, holding up a jar of dry green leaves.
A pinch, and it helps. More than a pinch, and it stops. Never touch it without me, child.
She looks at me now.
She looks at my face. My wrists. The veil Conor Kavanagh washed and sent back to me with a Mass card for his dead son.
“Who’s it for?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“Magdalene. Who’s it for?”
“A man who runs a shelter,” I say. “In Chelsea.”
Sister Bernadette goes very still.
I watch her understand. I watch her put it together, the way she puts together a sheet with the corners matched. The shelter. The girls. The ones who don’t go home. The Monsignor who drowned in a font, whose office she told me never to go to alone.
Her mouth goes thin.
She gets down off the folding table. She walks to the infirmary door. She opens it and goes through, and I hear her in the little herb room, a jar lid unscrewing, paper rustling.
She comes back with something folded in her hand. A small square of brown paper, the kind she wraps things in for the old sisters’ bedside tables.
She presses it into my palm and closes my fingers around it with both of hers.
“It’s bitter,” she says, very low. “Tea won’t hide it. Wine will. Something sweet and dark. Port, if he drinks port.”
“He drinks port.”
“Of course he does.” She doesn’t let go of my hands. “You’ll sit with him?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll hold his hand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s right.” She squeezes. Hard. “Nobody should die alone. Not even that one.”
She lets go.
I put the little square of brown paper in the pocket of my cardigan. It weighs nothing.
***
“No,” Ronan says.
We’re in his study. It’s Saturday night. The fire is lit. He’s standing at the window with his back to me, looking out at the snow on the square, and I’m sitting in the chair across from his desk where I sat when he showed me the ledger.
The little brown square is on the desk between us.
“No,” he says again.
“You haven’t heard it.”
“I’ve heard enough. You go into that man’s private rooms alone on Christmas Eve with his car at the side door. No.”
“I won’t be alone. You’ll be outside the door.”
“I’ll be in the room.”
“Then he won’t take me in. He won’t offer the blessing with you standing there.
He’ll smile and shake your hand and wait for next Christmas.
” I lean forward. “He has to think he’s winning.
He has to think I’m frightened and grateful and stupid.
He has to think I’m a good Catholic girl going back to the Church. ”
He turns around.
“I can put a bullet in him on the Chancery steps,” he says. “Tonight. Tomorrow. Any day.”
“And then you’re the man who shot a bishop at Christmas.
” I hold his eyes. “Every judge you own reads about it in the Globe. Every senator who took your roof money. Every priest in Boston. The Archdiocese hires lawyers. The FBI takes an interest. You’d win.
You always win. But you’d bleed for it, for years. ”
He doesn’t answer.
“If he dies of his heart,” I say, “at his own party, after too much port, he’s a sixty-two-year-old man who drank too much at Christmas. The Cardinal says a lovely Mass. They name a wing after him. Nobody ever says Our Lady of the Harbor out loud again.”
“And if he tastes it?”
“He won’t. Bernadette says port hides it.”
“Bernadette—”
“Bernadette gave it to me.” I stand up. “She put it in my hand and she closed my fingers around it and she told me to hold his hand while he goes.”
He stares at me.
“You said Crewe’s yours,” I say. “In the Crypt. After Declan. You said it to Theo. I heard it on the stairs.”
He doesn’t move.
“Give him to me.”
The fire snaps. The snow falls past the window. He looks at me for a very long time across the desk, and I let him look.
I know what he sees. A girl in a black veil with a bruise on her face and her wrists wrapped in gauze. A girl who stood on a bridge and counted to three hundred and forty. A girl who said good. A girl who walked a man into a wall in his own house and never looked back.
“Tell me the plan,” he says finally.
I sit back down.
I tell him the plan.
I tell him all of it. The reception at the Chancery.
The port Crewe keeps in the decanter in his private study, the one he brought out for Mother Clare every Christmas for ten years, the one she told me about on Thursday.
Crewe asking for me. Ronan letting me go.
Ronan outside the study door, not in it. The glass. The blessing. The hand.
He listens. He doesn’t interrupt. Twice he asks a question, short, exact, and I answer it. Once, he closes his eyes.
When I’m done, he’s quiet for a long time.
“If he touches you,” he says.
“He won’t.”
“If he touches you, I come through that door, and I don’t care about the Globe.”
“All right.”
“Say it back.”
“If he touches me, you come through the door.”
He comes around the desk. He stops in front of my chair. He puts his bandaged hand under my chin and tips my face up to him, the bruised side, into the firelight.
He looks at it a long time.
“He’s yours,” he says.
I pick up the little brown square from the desk.
Upstairs, later, in his bed, while he sleeps, I get up in the dark and take my breviary off the nightstand. The cracked spine. The one nobody borrows.
I open it to the place I’ve opened it a thousand times. The place where I used to hide the little book with my sins in it.
Between Compline and the Psalms, I put a small fold of brown paper full of dried green leaves.