I bowed my head and hurried on, walking in a suddenly clipped and urgent way that I thought would nicely match my lie.
At Gerty’s house, sure enough, the stoop was empty, and a kind of confidence in my own prescience made me take the steps two at a time. But no sooner had I gotten into the gloomy brown light of the vestibule than I saw that the fat woman was now sitting on the inside stair, halfway up, tilted over a bit to lean against the banister. There would be no getting by her without first saying, Excuse me please. But neither could I turn around, with the woman looking down at me, and dart out the door. All reluctance, I put my hand to the rail and my foot on the first step, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.
From above me the woman said, “You don’t live here, do ye? I saw you pass by before.” She had a voice like a man’s, deep and smoky, with a brogue—if that’s what it was—that was thicker even than the accents of the McGeevers, my father’s cousins, who spoke Irish to him when they came for their interminable Sunday visits and, through their narrow mouths, an unintelligible English to me. “I thought you were coming up then, but you went on,” the woman said. She leaned away from the banister, straightened her back somewhat wearily, as if the conversation were a task she had been putting off until now. She touched one hand to the step beside her, inviting me to sit. The other hand gripped the feathered fan. All against my own will, I continued to climb the stairs. The woman’s calves, even in the dim stairwell, were bright white, veined with gray and blue like marble pillars, the rolled stockings at her ankles as solid as stone. There was a basement odor about her, the odor of cold dirt. The apron that looped over her dark blouse and stretched across her black skirt was dim and gray, soft with wear. “I take it you’re a friend of little Gertrude Hanson,” she said, a small smile making her words seem warm. “I take it you’re coming to call for her.” A bit of light from the transom above the door might have caught her eyes as she cast them down at me on the stairs. Her short hair, carefully curled, had a goldish, grayish hue. She shook her head. “But I’m here to tell you she’s gone away. Her father took her out this morning. To his people in New Jersey. There’s nobody home upstairs.”
Now I paused. I said, “Oh,” and the woman suddenly leaned back. I thought at first that she was trying to see me more clearly in the gloom, but then I realized that she was leaning in order to push her apron aside as she reached for the pocket underneath, in her skirt. She stretched out one of her great ivory legs as she maneuvered her free hand beneath the apron and briefly rolled her eyes to the ceiling as if to picture what it was she was searching for. There was something of Big Lucy in the rolling of her eyes. And then she produced a penny and held it out to me. “Do you know your prayers?” she said.
I nodded, although I knew I could not recite one if asked. The woman laughed warmly as if she knew this, too. The laughter made her look younger. With the McGeevers in mind, I had expected a toothless grin, but the woman’s teeth were strong and straight.
“Give me your right hand,” the woman said kindly, and when I struggled with the schoolbooks in my arm in order to hold out the left, she shook her head and whispered, “The right one, dearie,” full of a peculiar sympathy. She placed the fan on her knee. She reached up to take my right hand from the banister. I felt suddenly unbalanced, there on the dim stairs.
“Get yourself down to Mary Star of the Sea,” she said. “And light a candle.” She pressed the penny into my palm. “Don’t worry if every prayer’s gone out of your head. Don’t be bothered by that. A good outcome’s enough to say. Light a candle and ask our Blessed Lady for a good outcome. It only takes the asking.” Her pale eyes went back and forth across my face. Despite the gloom of the staircase, I saw that the woman could read everything there: not only the fact that every prayer had indeed gone out of my head, or that left and right still puzzled me, but also that I had already determined that I would not go into the empty church all by myself. I had never gone into an empty church all by myself. If Gerty were here, the two of us would go together, we would make a game of it, as we sometimes did on Saturday mornings, laughing at the door and then tiptoeing together up the echoing aisle, lighting the flame and leaning into our folded hands at the kneeling rail with exaggerated piousness. But Gerty had gone to her father’s people in New Jersey and the apartment upstairs was empty.
The woman held my wrist and pressed the penny into my palm, and knew, I could tell, that she would not be obeyed. But she asked me anyway, “Will you do that?” And I said anyway, “I will.”
Out on the street, I walked around the block again and climbed my own steps. Mrs. Chehab was gone, but the scent of the vinegar from her window cleaning still lingered. An Easter scent, I thought, although Easter had already passed. It was the scent of the solution we made to dye our eggs, but also the odor that pricked my nose in church when they read that part of the Passion where Jesus said, I thirst, and a sponge soaked with wine and vinegar was raised to his lips. And then the angel in the empty tomb saying, “He’s not here.”
Upstairs, Gabe was alone in the apartment, already bent over his books. He raised his head as I came in. His brown eyes with their golden lashes looked tired in the dim light. He said, “Momma’s gone out”—although I had known this as soon as I opened the door, an absence in the air—and then he watched me as I placed my own schoolbooks on the table where he was already studying. “You’re late getting home,” he said. “You shouldn’t make Momma worry. She needs you to be good.”
I shrugged. I still held the black penny in my palm, and his gentle reprimand was only a small weight added to my own awareness that I was not being good: that I had taken the penny with no intention of going to church with it. That I had forgotten already what it was the fat woman had asked me to pray for, a good solution or an answer of some sort. I put the penny on the table between us. “I stopped to see Gerty,” I said. “She wasn’t in school today. She’s gone to New Jersey.”
But my brother spoke over me. “Momma’s in the city,” he said. “You should be a good girl now”—he was repeating my father’s phrase—“and do your homework quietly until they get back.”
I reached out and picked up the penny again. It was my father’s phrase, “Be a good girl now,” but when my father said it, there was a wink about the words that also said he understood what a bland and tedious thing it was to be a good girl, little pagan that I was. When my father said it, he was asking me to pretend, at least. He was saying he would admire me all the more for my pretending. But my brother meant what he said. Beside him on the table was the single glass of water he now allowed himself in the afternoon, his sustenance between breakfast and supper, some preparation for his life in the seminary come fall.
“I have to go to church,” I told him. I said, “A lady I met at Gerty’s house asked me to light a candle for her and I promised I would. She gave me a penny.”
I held out my palm to show him the black coin, as if he might otherwise not have seen it. He looked at the penny, and then he looked at my face. I saw that he understood there was some deception here, if only in the extravagance of my gesture. I saw a subtle disappointment, a kind of sadness, cross his eyes. He wanted me to be good.
I closed my fist around the penny. “I won’t be long,” I said, and turned to leave again.
“Don’t be,” he said, “for Momma’s sake.”
Outside, the boys were well involved in their game and the girls who pretended not to watch them every afternoon were gathered on the steps just beyond the Chehabs’ house. Some of them were friends of mine from school, others were older girls who made me feel shy.