One
“I ADORE THIS HOUSE,” Rose was saying to Gina about the Wayside. “Sometimes I half-wish it were still mine, still in my family. I told everyone we sold it because we couldn’t stand living in it after my son died, but the truth is, George couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments, no matter how hard he worked. We had to sell it.”
Gina listened half-attentively, one spiritual part of her listening, one mechanical part washing the floor, and one female part lamenting the sorry state of her dress.
The last part was the loudest of all.
“Did he”—she thought hard to recall Rose’s words—“work hard?” Her question less to do with Rose than with her own self, her own life.
“Yes. He was a professor, he corrected other people’s manuscripts on the side, he edited books, he wrote columns. He was a genius, and he never stopped working. But it just wasn’t enough for this summer home and a place in Boston.” Rose sighed and crossed herself. “It’s better this way. I chose this—not just to serve the poor, but to be of the poor. And I’m still here in my beloved Wayside, where I can sleep and yet continue to do the work of the Lord.” Rose gazed at Gina, scrutinized her. “In my past life when I thought I also could be a writer, like my father, I penned a story called ‘The Love of an American Girl.’ Have you heard of it?”
With her bare hands Gina was wringing the mop of all debris, filth, waste, medicines. “I haven’t heard of it, no.”
Rose followed her outside while Gina changed the water in the bucket. “Not many people have. I’m not my father, I soon learned. I don’t have his gifts. In any case, in my story, the heroine is dazzling and full of virtue. But the crux of any story is to know when one is loved.” Rose paused. Waited. When there was no response from Gina, she nudged further. “Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know,” Gina said, full of hesitation. “What if one thinks one is loved, but one is not?”
“I think what often happens,” Rose said, “is one is loved differently from the way one expects, and it’s this false judgment and subsequent disillusion that leads to so much trouble in life. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Gina didn’t answer. What Rose was saying didn’t apply either to her physical activity or to her spiritual distance. She was rushing to finish mopping because she wanted desperately to change her dress before she had to cook and serve lunch and Ben came.
At 11 a.m. every day the bell rang five times in the tiny makeshift chapel to commemorate the five wounds of the Lord, followed by an hour of silence, during which Gina washed and cleaned and prepared food for the sick. Psalms were recited before and after meals, starting with Psalm 1, ending with Psalm 150, repeating every three days.
Have mercy on me, o God, and hide thy face from my sins.
“Gina, you know how I feel about you,” Rose was saying. “You are like a divine child. But you also know how I feel about the work we do. It’s uncompromising. And I’m unyielding when it comes to maintaining a very high level of servitude. The sicker our patients, the poorer and more wretched, the more I expect from the women who minister to them.”
“I know that, Rose.”
“I cannot force anyone to be good, it is not my inclination nor my desire. But any hint of laziness, frivolity or self-indulgence and I must ask them to seek service elsewhere.”
Gina tried hard not to bow her head. “I understand.”
Rose kissed her. “Do you remember you once told me you were too fond of dancing and ice cream to be a nun?”
“I don’t remember saying that.” It did sound like her, though.
Rose smiled. “Do you still feel that way?”
Gina frowned, slightly puzzled. “I’m married, Rose. I can hardly become a nun now.”
“Are you too fond of dancing and ice cream to be a wife?”
Letting go of Rose’s hands, Gina stepped away. She tried not to stagger away. “No. But I must run, I have much to do.”
“This may surprise you to hear, Gina, but I myself am not a merciful woman.” Rose crossed herself. “What I do is bountifully preach mercy.” She paused. “And by mercy I don’t mean forgiveness. I mean care for life’s poorest of the poor and its most abandoned.”
He drew me out of deep waters, he brought me out into a spacious place, he rescued me because he delighted in me according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.
Rose’s patients were the poorest of the poor, life’s most abandoned. At death’s door, they required nothing more than compassion and kindness. They were kept clean to the best of the nuns’ abilities. Rose insisted that whatever one may have felt about the state of the sick, the only face one was allowed to show them was one of mercy and goodness, because that was what the dying required. But sometimes even the priests who came to administer last rites or to offer Communion would turn their heads and vomit before they continued to walk between the beds, so overpowering were the physical conditions that surrounded the sick.
For many months Gina had immersed herself in the works of God, as an offering, as repentance, praying for Harry to be released early, for a baby to bless their life, for a bit more money, to struggle less, to want less, to be happier. But something happened to her after Ben returned to her life. Whereas before, all she had noted about herself was her inner life, she was now made unduly conscious of the outer Gina. The woman who sewed her own clothes, who had once saved money for silk and chiffon, for lace gloves, for patent leather shoes, for bobbles and beads, gave herself a withering once-over and concluded that no woman who worked in a ward of humans that made priests retch and men faint could make herself outwardly attractive to anyone. Holiness was wonderful but did nothing for vanity. Holiness was beautiful but not externally.
Yet Ben came. He came like the professed, the novices, and the postulants. He came wearing his most dispensable clothing, calling himself Gina’s orderly. Sometimes he drove up to Concord so early on Saturday morning, he got to the Wayside even before Gina. He was always full of good cheer and happy stories of Panamanian feasts and fevers. He worked side by side with her among the oppressed, carrying her pails of dirty water, searching for potatoes in the earth, taking her to a market in Lexington so she could buy vegetables and bread for dinner. He never fainted and he never retched. When one day she asked him how he did it, how he stopped himself from reacting to what even the men of the cloth could not ignore, he said he had seen things in Panama, lived through things in Panama that had given him a permanently altered outlook on life.
“I’m not a debutante, Gina,” he said.
“Me either.”
“That I know. But even Alice, who was one, was not one. Do you know what I mean?”
Ben often brought up Alice. As if he were trying to make Gina feel better about the road her life had taken.
“Marriage must be socially and economically endogamous,” Ben said. They were cleaning the soiled pails outside in the cold brook at the back of the house.
“Excuse me? Are you allowed to say that word to women?”
He laughed. He laughed often and openly when he was with her. “It means marrying only within one’s own social stratum. Alice, released from the burden of that suffocating duty by Harry’s rejection, found herself a man and a life much better suited to her.”
“A Texan?”
“A rancher, yes. He traveled north to her lumber mill to buy a quality haul for his ranch in Abilene. She advised him on what kind and how much. A month later he was back. He said he needed more for his stables and paddocks. She advised him on what kind and how much. A month later he was back for lumber for his