In her own room the shades and windows were at half-mast, letting the low afternoon sun fold across the sills. At the front end of each row of desks a small pile of refuse waited, whisked there by the students—one from each row—who got down on hands and knees and ran a side-broom between the desk runners at the end of each day to save Mr. Olczak the trouble of doing so.
This was Sister Regina’s favorite time of day. With the children gone, the room became her own. She went to the blackboard, rolled back her sleeve and began erasing when Mr. Olczak said from the doorway, “Afternoon, Sister.” Her heart leaped but her outward demeanor reflected only placidity as she turned and found him standing in the doorway holding a dust mop.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Olczak.”
“How did my girls do today?” Beside him a rolling bucket held an assortment of cleaning supplies slung on its sides.
“It was a day of mixed emotions, I’m afraid.”
“What happened?” He came in and began running the wide mop around the perimeter of the room, spreading the smell of dusting oil.
“This morning Lucy had a bad spell and wanted to go back home, but Anne brought her to me and we had a quiet talk away from the other children. Both of them seemed much calmer afterward.”
He turned a comer and went along the back of the room. “If you want to know the truth, I worry about Anne more than I do about Lucy. She might seem like the stronger one, but underneath it all I think she’ll miss her mother more than the little one.”
“I guess it’s natural, since she’s known her longer and has more memories built up.”
Eddie stopped in the far comer, the length of the room from Sister Regina. He stacked his hands on the end of the mop handle and planted his feet comfortably. “I’ll tell you, Sister, I’m sure glad they have you. I could’ve used somebody to talk to this morning myself.”
She knew she should not encourage personal talk, so offered a small smile instead and sat down at her desk.
He went around the third side of the room, then down one aisle and stopped at the rear again. Leaning over, he scraped something off the hardwood floor with his fingernail, then straightened and seemed to pause before saying what was on his mind. “Irene came in this morning,” he told her. “She sort of... well, she sort of took over for Krystyna, if you know what I mean.”
Sister merely nodded.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he hurried on. “I was glad to have her get the girls ready for school, but she... well she...”
Sister waited.
Eddie worried the tip of the mop handle with a thumb. “I kind of resented her being there, invading Krystyna’s territory.”
In her lifetime no adult man had ever confided in Sister this way. It was wholly unexpected, his choosing her as a confidante, and she felt somewhat rattled by his openness. Holy Rule was wildly waving its arms for her attention, but she ignored it. After all, his children were her students: what he had to say affected them, did it not?
“That’s perfectly understandable.”
“I guess that was pretty selfish of me, wasn’t it?”
Their eyes met across the classroom. “I wouldn’t worry about selfishness for a while if I were you, Mr. Olczak. Irene meant well, but she understands how hard it is for you right now.”
“She knew where everything was—you know what I mean?—like where Krystyna kept things, and all of a sudden I had this feeling like ... like she was trying to be Krystyna. I didn’t... well, I didn’t like that very much.” Sister nodded again.
“Same thing the day Krystyna died,” Eddie went on. “The women came in before I even got home and they cleaned up everything as if she was only in the other room, things I wish they would have left alone, the last things she touched. I wanted to storm in the kitchen and say 'Get out! Leave the coffeepot where she had it! And put back every bobby pin and crumb she left on the cabinet, and the dish towel just the way she folded it and the grocery list leaning against the canisters and her empty coffee cup in the sink!’ ” He grew visibly blue, his voice quiet as trickling water. “But they moved it all. They brought in their cake pans and their roasters and pushed things aside to put out food and I never did see how Krystyna had left the kitchen that day. I know they meant well, but they shouldn’t have done that. They should have waited.”
He was no longer looking at Sister. He was staring at the sunlight on the windowsill and battling tears. She could see his Adam’s apple working, and his thumb bent motionless against the mop handle. From outside the ka-klunk, ka-klunk from the block factory sounded like a heart beating when you put your ear to someone’s chest, and she imagined, for a moment, it was his heart, broken, and it was her ear on his chest searching for a way to heal it.
He sent her a look of appeal and asked, “Shouldn’t they, Sister?”
“Y...” She tried to find her voice, which cracked. “Yes... they should have,” she whispered, quelling the urge to approach and comfort him. Forbidden to do such a thing, she went on in the calmest voice she could muster. “But they simply didn’t think. It’s natural that you should want Krystyna’s place to be inviolate, that you should want to... to move among her memories and find them untouched. All you can do is remember that the women, and Irene as well, only meant to help. Just don’t waste your time feeling guilty about your reaction. I don’t think God would find you uncharitable, Mr. Olczak. I think He would understand what you’re going through.”
She could see the tension ease from his shoulders. His hand loosened and slid lower on the mop handle. He shifted his feet.
“You know what, Sister? There’s never been a time when I talked to you that I didn’t feel better afterwards.” He even managed a little smile for her benefit.
“Yes, well... that’s...” She realized she was treading on forbidden ground and finished lamely, “...that’s good, Mr. Olczak.” In the kneehole of her desk she belatedly rolled down her right sleeve, discovering she had forgotten it all this while. She pulled a stack of fourth-grade spelling papers to the center of her desk and began correcting them as he resumed sweeping the aisles. Up and down, collecting the little stacks that the children had left at the front of the rows, picking up things with a big metal dustpan. After some time, he said, almost as if to himself, “Well, I’m glad the kids did good today anyway.”
The room settled into silence. She ran a red pencil across a row of arithmetic sums, making an occasional check mark, while he emptied her garbage can and began washing the blackboards on the side of the room, then behind her. She recorded the grades in her grade book while the blackboards began drying in gray rainbows. He disappeared into the cloakroom to clean it while she looked up tomorrow’s feast day and found there was none to post on the blackboard. Instead she wrote a new set of spelling words for the fourth-graders, and a simple prayer: Holy Mary, mother mild, smile upon this little child. Amen.
She was seated at her desk once again by the time he was finished with everything and pushed his rolling bucket to the doorway. He paused to read what she had written. “That’s nice, Sister. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, goodbye, Mr. Olczak.”
When he was gone she sat as still as the painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary that hung above the blackboards on the opposite wall. She looked up at the visage of the woman in the blue dress and white penumbra, all the while recognizing the rush of feelings and the stirring of blood caused by the man who’d just left the room. It was the kind of womanly response she had denied herself when she donned this habit. And it was forbidden.
She folded her hands—not a relaxed pairing with the fingers pointed up toward heaven, but a tense gripping with the fingers knit. Lowering her head to her knuckles, she closed her eyes. Dear God, she prayed, help me to remain pure of heart and immaculate of body like your blessed mother. Help me to maintain the vows I’ve taken and to resist these impulses toward worldliness. Let me be content in the life I’ve chosen, so that I may serve You always with pure heart and spiri
t, in Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.
________
Irene was still there when Eddie got home that day. He’d been expecting her to be, of course, since she’d shown up at school, announcing that she’d come for the girls and was taking them home.
When he walked into the house he could smell chicken stewing and coffee brewing. Irene was in the kitchen lifting fluffy white dumplings out of a kettle when he reached the doorway.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
She blushed. He frowned. His displeasure barely showed between his eyes, but she recognized it and felt her stomach quaver.
“Lucy wanted dumplings,” she said, apologizing.
“Lucy always wants dumplings.”
“Well, she said Krystyna was going to... she was...” Her words trailed away and he walked past her, straight over to the sink to wash his hands. It was easier to say what had to be said with his back to her.
“Irene—”
She went to the back door and called through the screen to the girls in their playhouse, “Girls, time for you to come in and get washed up for supper!”
“Irene, I appreciate your help but—”
“No, listen... you don’t need to say any more. I was just going to get the food on the table, then I was going home. I wasn’t going to stay, honest, Eddie.”
He bent over and washed his face with his soapy hands to give himself time to think of how to handle this. When he turned, drying his face on a blue towel, she had withdrawn as far from him as she could get and was trying to put the last of the food on the table without infringing on his space. Though she tried to hide her tears, he saw them glimmer in her eyes. The sight of them made him feel small, so he relented.
“All I was going to say was that there’s still food left over that people brought last week.”
“It was old,” she said, keeping her face averted. “I cleaned out the icebox and threw a lot of it away. I also washed all the roasters and casserole dishes and put everybody’s names on them so you know who they belong to. If you want me to return them for you I—”
“No, Irene, you’ve done enough. I’ll make sure they get back to everybody. Now listen, you’ve made this nice supper. You might as well stay and eat with us.”
The girls came barging in.
“Are the dumplings ready?” Lucy bellowed.
“I’m hungry!” Anne declared.
The meal was laid out, steaming and smelling delicious, and though Irene gave the table a longing look, she did so backing away. “Ma’s expecting me,” she told Eddie. And to the children, “Girls, you be sure to wash up good before you sit down. Now come and give me a hug... bye-bye, honey. Bye-bye, dear.” She hugged them both and scuttled away.
The girls dove for the sink and the bar of soap while Eddie followed Irene to the front door, feeling guilty as hell for resenting her kindness. He remembered Sister Regina’s words. She only meant to help. Furthermore, she probably needed to be near him and the girls to handle her own immense grief.
She knew he’d come up behind her and paused, looking down at the screen door spring. “You want me to come again in the morning, Eddie? ’Cause I don’t have to if I bother you.”
“Irene,” he said, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder. Though he had not sighed, a sigh was implied. Neither of them spoke for a while. In the kitchen the kids quibbled about who’d get the first helping of dumplings.
“I only meant to help, Eddie. I didn’t mean to... well, you know.”
He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand drop. “I know, Irene.”
She got brave and turned to face him. “What do you want me to do, then?”
This time he did sigh, and put his hands in his back overall pockets. “I guess I need your help, Irene,” he admitted.
“Okay, then, should I come in the morning?”
Resigned, he answered, “Yes, if you don’t mind.”
She opened the door and said, “I’ll be here.”
He watched her hurry to her dad’s truck, which was parked at the curb. She got in and drove away a little fast for Irene, and he realized just how much he had hurt her without intending to.
________
The meal she’d cooked was delicious. He couldn’t tell the difference between her cooking and Krystyna’s. They both made chicken and dumplings the way their mother did. He hurried the girls to finish eating and let Mrs. Plotnik next door know that they’d be outside playing with a bunch of the neighborhood kids while he ran over to church to ring the Angelus. When he got back home the dirty dishes were still on the table and the children were still playing Annie-I-Over over at the small white frame United Brethren church across the street from the Plotnik house. The U.B. church, as it was known in the neighborhood, had a steep roof like a tent, so they could see the ball rolling toward them clear from the peak, and it had a grassy yard good for running, and two outhouses with lattice screens around the doors, very convenient. So all the neighborhood kids would be outside playing until their parents called them in. Anne and
Lucy were old enough to wash and dry the dishes for Eddie, but the sound of their carefree voices calling, “Pigtails!” softened his heart, so he let them go on playing and washed the dishes himself. Though Krystyna would never have let dishes drip dry in the sink, he had to cut comers wherever possible on the housework, so he left them to do just that.
By the time the kitchen was put back in order, it was time to call the girls in for their bath. It took three repeated calls and another fifteen minutes before they obeyed, coming in crumpled and winded, their cheeks rosy from exertion.
He filled the bathtub and left them with orders to stay out of their mother’s dusting powder. A minute after he closed the bathroom door it opened again, and Anne came out in her underwear, bringing him a note. “Look at what I found on the clothes hamper, Daddy.”
It was written in pencil, nearly illegible.
Eddie I tuk yor close home and washd them you can coom & get them tomorr they will be irned Aunt Katy.
Aunt Katy, he thought, drooping with gratitude, bless your heart, old girl.
“What does it say?” Anne wanted to know.
“Aunt Katy washed our dirty clothes.”
He went into the bathroom and looked inside the hamper. It was empty except for the clothes the girls had worn today.
Aunt Katy Gaffke was his mother’s sister, a great-aunt to his girls, though they found shirttail relations hard to categorize, so they had always referred to her as Grandma Gaffke. She lived around the comer from the U.B. church, up the hill and across the street, about a two-minute walk from Eddie’s house. She’d been born in Poland, as had his mother, and had come to America with her parents when she was four. She spoke English with an accent and had never become proficient at writing it, but Eddie understood her message and the love behind her charitable deed.
The next day when he went to her house, he found his freshly ironed shirts hanging from her kitchen doorway, and Aunt Katy in a low armless rocker on her glassed-in porch, fast asleep. She’d been tearing strips of rags for making rag rugs, a common winter pastime for the old Polish women who sold them or donated them to church bazaars. Her lap, the floor and the rockers of the chair were so littered with strings that she looked like a bird in a nest.
He leaned down and touched her shoulder. “Aunt Katy?”
She jerked awake, tried to figure out where she was, looked up and mumbled, “Oh... hmm... must’ve drifted off.” The comers of her mouth were shiny. She dried them with an edge of one speckled hand and boosted herself up straighter in the chair. “Well, Eddie, didn’t hear you come in. Sit down, sit down.”
He sat on her daybed, which was covered with two of her homemade rag rugs that made the mattress nearly as hard as a church pew. It was late afternoon and the porch was on the shady side of the house. On a small crude blue-painted table in one comer were the coleus plants she’d taken in from her gardens and rooted for winter. Beyond the window martens were sw
ooping around a fancy white birdhouse on a tall pole. Her cat was hunched up, watching them, on a concrete step that led from the porch door directly onto the grass, with no sidewalk between it and the street. He could look down the hill to his right and see his kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of the Plotnik house. He could look to his left and see the top of the school grounds about thirty yards away.
“I sure appreciate your washing and ironing our clothes, Aunt Katy.”
She flapped a hand as if shooing a fly. “Gave me something to do.”
“I didn’t know how I was going to manage that. I’d like to pay you.”
“You might like to, but you ain’t goin’ to.”
“But—”
“Nossir.”
“But if this town had a laundry I’d have to pay them.”
“Nossir.”
“You know, you’re a stubborn old cuss when you want to be.”
“Yessir. And what’s more, I intend to keep on washin’ ’em ever’ Monday when I wash m’ own. Ain’t hardly got enough of my own to make it worthwhile filling that washer anymore.”
He got up and kissed her on the forehead, then sat back down. She smelled like homemade lye soap and fried Spam.
“How’re them little girls doing?” she asked, looking down the hill at them.
“Irene comes in the morning and gets them ready for school.”
“How ’bout in the afternoon?”
“Well, she’s been coming then, too, but I think it’s too much to ask of her.”
“Tell ’em to come here.”
“Oh, Aunt Katy...”
“No, you tell ’em to come here after school! They can play around here just as well as they can play around your house.”
“Are you sure?”