She had seen Melissa crying uncontrollably the day she left, and begging their parents to let her stay. Their mother’s face had been hard, and she kept telling Melissa she was a disgrace. After she left, Hattie went to her room and cried too. She was going to miss her sister for the seven or eight months they said she’d be gone, nearly a whole school year. But Melissa was going to go to school at the convent in Ireland so she didn’t miss a year. It was her junior year in high school. Melissa had always wanted to go away to college in California, but in the end, she went to Columbia, so she could stay home and take care of Hattie. Her dreams of California went out the window when first their mother and then their father died, within a year of each other. Their mother died of stomach cancer, and their father of what the doctor called “liver trouble,” which years later, Hattie realized, meant he was an alcoholic. He had kept it quiet, and Hattie never suspected it, but Melissa knew. She saw him drinking at night, and their mother accused him of being an embarrassment and a failure, a useless husband and a bum, when he got fired from jobs again and again, while his inheritance from his parents continued to dwindle. He still had enough to support them and pay for private school for his daughters, but their mother worried that the money wouldn’t last forever. Hattie was aware even as a child that being married to their mother couldn’t have been easy. She was openly critical of him and demeaned him in front of the children. It was one more thing for Melissa to hate her for. Her father came from a good family, but had never been successful at anything, including his banking jobs, and went through most of his money. He left his daughters enough to get by on, if they managed carefully and weren’t extravagant. And he left a sizable life insurance policy that lasted until Hattie went into the convent, and Melissa’s books took off. After that the insurance money was gone, and except for the small trusts both sisters had received, which Hattie still had and had never touched until now.
Their mother came from a less wealthy background, and her parents had left her nothing when they died in an accident, so she had to drop out of college and go to work as a secretary. But she had been beautiful and sexy when she was young, and caught their father’s eye when she worked at the same bank he did. His family never approved of her, and she was bitter about that too. He still managed to support them on what was left of his inheritance, despite his drinking and the jobs he lost, but he couldn’t provide the easy life and luxuries his wife had hoped for when she married him. But she never had to work during their marriage. They had also inherited his parents’ Park Avenue co-op apartment, where they lived until Melissa sold it after their parents’ deaths and moved to a small West Side apartment with Hattie. Melissa had handled their finances well.
Their father was a gentle man, but they led a small life, while he drank heavily at night, and all day between jobs. While her parents were alive, Hattie hid in the room she shared with her sister so she didn’t have to hear their parents fight. But Melissa knew it all. Her mother blamed her father for Melissa’s pregnancy, and said that if he was a better father, supervised his daughters better, and was sober, it wouldn’t have happened. Melissa tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault. She was just looking for love, but he refused to discuss it with her and let his wife decide what to do about it. He paid to send her away, and when she came back, he acted like nothing had happened. Her mother told Melissa it was her fault she had gotten stomach cancer, from all the worry and shame she caused her. People whispered about them, because of his drinking. And to her dying day, she blamed her husband and oldest daughter for her illness. He died less than a year later, and was in a coma for the last month of his life, after a drinking binge, so the girls never got to say goodbye, and tell him they loved him. As an adult, Melissa felt her mother’s own venom had killed her. She had been a bitterly unhappy, dissatisfied woman all her life. Melissa wrote about her in her books, and about the weak father who had given up and died. Both girls felt sorry for their father. He had been a frightened, defeated, sad man, a failure in life and in his wife’s eyes. It had made Melissa a fighter, and made Hattie long for a safe haven, which she had found at last when she took her vows. Nothing could touch her in the convent.
* * *
—
When they got to the bus terminal, Hattie took a cab to Saint Blaise’s, and it loomed out of the darkness like the prison Melissa had described. It made Hattie shudder. She couldn’t even imagine what it must have felt like to Melissa as a frightened teenager far from home for the first time, facing unknown terrors and agony in the months to come.
Hattie had already missed dinner when she rang the convent bell, and an elderly nun with a cane came to answer. She had a kind smile, and Hattie explained who she was, and the old nun looked startled.
“I thought you were a nun.”
“I am, Sister. I’m sorry. We don’t wear the habit most of the time now. I’ve got it with me in my suitcase.”
“Things must be very modern in America,” she said, and hobbled into the dark hallways with Hattie behind her. “You’re up the stairs, third floor, first room to the right. The door is open. The WC is at the end of the hall. Mass is at five-thirty, breakfast at six-fifteen in the refectory.”
“Thank you, Sister,” Hattie said, as she walked up the stairs with her bag. It looked like a perfect setting for a ghost story or a horror movie. The room was grim and bare when she walked in and closed the door softly behind her. The place was every bit as dismal as Melissa had said, although she said that the girls lived in dormitories, with as many as twenty to a room, and Hattie wondered if they even existed anymore. It was a home for older nuns now, and Hattie doubted that they housed them in dormitories, but more likely in cells like the one she was in.
She lay in bed that night, thinking of her sister, no longer surprised by how angry she had been at their mother, and how bitter about the experience ever since. She had been a happy young girl before that, although somewhat introverted and bookish, and an angry woman when she returned, seething with rage at her mother.
Hattie set the alarm she had brought with her for five a.m., and when it woke her, she showered and dressed in her habit. Although it was August, the convent was damp and chilly. There were only two other nuns on her floor. She arrived at Mass promptly at five-thirty, slipped into a pew, and quietly observed the community of nuns who lived there, some of them her age, others much older, and a few earnest-looking young ones, about thirty-five in all. The elderly nuns who lived there now no longer came to Mass at that hour and were exempt, and there were many of them, she had been told.
Breakfast in the refectory was a silent meal, according to ancient tradition, and a far cry from the convent where Sister Mary Joseph lived. She was used to the babble of conversation at breakfast, before everyone rushed off to their day at work in schools and hospitals around the city.
She had an appointment with Saint Blaise’s mother superior at nine a.m., and went back to her room for two hours to pray. She hoped for some little wisp of information that she could use to warm a trail toward Melissa’s daughter, but the meeting was discouraging. The mother superior was a woman in her early sixties who had only been there for two years, and said she knew little about the adoptions that had taken place so long ago. She confirmed that there wasn’t a shred of the records left, and told Hattie that there was no way to reconstruct them now, since there had been no copies of the records and documents, to protect everyone’s privacy, including her sister’s.