The Patron Saint of Liars (7 page)

I wondered what I would be glad about, having the baby, giving the baby away, coming here at all. None of them seemed like particularly joyful things. I followed her up the stairs and into the main lobby, keeping my eyes on the long black rosary that swung in and out from the folds of her skirt. Then I looked up and saw a sea of pregnant girls.

If you see a pregnant girl on the street, maybe you notice. There could be some brief registration in your mind about her or her child, and then it goes. But this room was full of girls, sitting on sofas, reading magazines, talking quietly among themselves, and each was more pregnant than the last. One girl's size served only to exaggerate another's. Their bellies were so uniformly large they overwhelmed the room, so that it wasn't the girls you saw at all, only a gathering of distended abdomens, overinflated balloons from which small wisps of girls were attached. I felt that surely I had come to the wrong place, that whatever these girls had was not what was wrong with me. I was thin, flat, tall, and when they looked up at me, you could tell that was the very thing they were thinking. Or possibly they were thinking, wait and see.

Sister Bernadette pulled me through without introductions. I must have looked pale, and I felt pale. I knew now what was coming, my body was going to rebel, take on a life of its own, make decisions without me. All of this leaving, this sadness, this driving, had been about having a baby. I was going to have a baby. Until that exact moment I hadn't understood this fact at all.

We went behind the elaborately carved registration desk, where a hundred wooden boxes stood without keys. Sister Bernadette knocked lightly on a door that read
OFFICE
. "Mother?" she said.

The nun who answered the door was as tall as I was but three times my size. She was a big woman in every sense, heavy-boned with weight besides. Her face was soft and red and a tuft of iron gray hair jutted coarsely from beneath her wimple. Her breasts were as noticeable and as awkward as the stomachs of the girls who filled the lobby. They created a shelf that ensured that anyone meeting her would have to keep their distance. I couldn't help but think a nun must be embarrassed by such breasts.

"What have we here?" she said, as if I was another delivery, a carton of milk, a sack of flour.

"This is Martha Rose Clinton," Sister Bernadette said.

"Yes, of course, from California."

"California!" Sister Bernadette said. "What a long way to come."

Mother Corinne made a strange movement, almost as if she was bowing her head for a moment, and Sister Bernadette was silent. She left as quietly and completely as she had arrived. "Come in, Miss Clinton," she said, and I followed her into the office.

It must have been Lewis Nelson's office. There was still a picture of a horse on the wall, along with paintings of Saint Elizabeth and the Sacred Heart. It was an office built by a man who was playing at running a hotel. The desk was big enough to sleep on, the chairs were leather, the big picture window looked out to the place where water once came from the ground.

"So you know Father O'Donnell?" she said.

"Yes, in San Diego. Did his letter come?"

"No, there's been no letter, but he called. He had several interesting things to say about you." She toyed absently with a silver cross that hung around her neck.

"What did he have to say?"

"That would be between Father O'Donnell and myself," she said, opening up a file I couldn't see. The distance created by the desk was formidable. She kept her eyes on the paper in front of her.

"Do you know Father O'Donnell?" I said. It never occurred to me that he might know people here. But she didn't answer my question. I got the feeling Mother Corinne was in the habit of asking questions, not answering them.

"Do you know for sure that you're pregnant?"

"Yes," I said.

"So you brought a medical report."

"No, but why would I lie about a thing like that?"

Mother Corinne looked up at me and shrugged. "It's happened. You're not showing and people will lie about strange things. Most girls wait until they truly need our services before they arrive, so it's quite easy to tell. Other girls are vagrants, looking for a place to stay for a while."

It had been a long drive and I was tired enough to want to kill her, but at the time I remember thinking she looked like someone who would never die. "You spoke to Father O'Donnell?" I said.

"Yes."

"Then you know at least I'm not a vagrant." I paused, wondering how to address the rest of it. "I'll try to show as soon as possible," I said.

"Don't be fresh, Miss Clinton," she said, marking something in the file and then closing it. "I'm here to look out for the welfare of all the girls, you included."

I stared at the face of Saint Elizabeth, an older woman, so happy to be pregnant.

"About the father," she said.

"Yes?"

"What became of him?"

"He's dead," I said. "It happened in a car."

She sighed and shook her head, reopening the file and making yet another mark. "Dead," she said. "Yes, of course."

Then suddenly Sister Bernadette was back and leading me up the stairs to my room. What if he had been dead? That would make me a fairly sympathetic case, a pregnant girl with a dead lover, that deserved at least a few words. Sister Bernadette opened a door to what must have once been a lovely room. Now the worn bedspreads and thinning carpet seemed depressing. At least there was a bed, which meant I could sleep.

"You'll be sharing a room with Angela," she said. "She's a sweet girl, you'll do fine with her. You get some rest now, Rose. After a while I'll bring you up a tray."

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I was suddenly too tired to say anything, even to thank her.

"You'll be fine," she said, and patted my shoulder.

I dreamed of my mother at the cosmetics counter that afternoon, an endless line of women waiting as she tiredly told each of them how to apply their make-up. When I woke up I was crying, as I would do for many years whenever I dreamed about my mother, and there was a dark-haired girl sitting on the edge of the twin bed opposite mine, watching me cry.

"Hey," she said quietly. "You okay?"

I wiped my eyes on the corner of the sheet.

"You don't need to do that. Here, look here." She handed me a box of Kleenex and I took one. "I'm Angie," she said. "I'm your roommate. Did you have a bad dream, or are you just crying?"

"It was a dream," I said, and blew my nose, but I couldn't seem to stop crying. It wasn't anything much, but it wouldn't stop.

"I wake up that way sometimes," she said, "lately, you know. I didn't used to." She leaned across the gap of our two beds. "It makes me feel a little crazy, like there's all this stuff going on in my head that I don't know about. It seems like a person ought to at least know what was going on in their own head."

"It seems that way," I said, and sat up. This was two times in a row now I'd woken up with someone watching me. I was starting to think that I was more interesting in my sleep.

"You're not showing at all," she said, looking at my stomach. "I'm not much, but you can see it." She pulled her thin dress tight across her stomach to show me the little roundness that was there. "We must be pretty close together. That's how they decide on who rooms with who. If they put a real pregnant girl in with a new girl, the new girl freaks out when the other one leaves, or she gets real scared about having the baby and all. Someone said that once a girl tried to do herself when her roommate had her baby."

"Kill herself?"

"No, no, kill the baby, you know. She drank a whole bottle of castor oil. Can you believe that?"

I said I couldn't.

"Well, who knows what's true around here. The stories you hear. They told me your name was Martha."

"It's Rose."

"That's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. Rose. That's a lot prettier. Where did you come from before?"

"California." My head hurt, and I had that feeling that I'd been having lately, like the room was rocking.

"California? Well, why did you come all the way out here? Don't they have places like this in California?"

"I wanted to get away," I said. I wasn't quite up to being questioned. I wasn't quite up to anything, so I lay back down on the bed.

"Did something bad happen to you?"

"My husband died," I said.

Angie began to giggle a little, and she covered her mouth with her hand. "I sure hope you didn't tell Mother Corinne that."

"Why not?"

"Because that's what everybody says, stupid. Everybody says they had a really great husband but he died, in a car crash or something. Except now girls say he got shipped out to Vietnam and stepped on a land mine. Usually one of the older girls tries to tip you off before your interview. They say it's best if you just look down at your hands and act all sad and penitent."

"Great."

"Don't feel bad, you figure things out here in no time. I've only been here eight days and it already seems like my whole life."

I tried to think of that, being here my whole lifetime. It made my head hurt worse. "So what do I need to know?" I said tiredly.

"Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena are the ones you want to go to if you've got something on your mind. Sister Evangeline is sweet but she's older than time and pretty much blind. Sister Loyola is a snitch. She seems nice enough when you meet her, but she takes everything from your lips right to Mother Corinne's ears."

"And Mother Corinne?"

"Well, you already met her. And you can bet that anything you thought about her was right on the money." Angie looked at me. "I wish you'd stop crying," she said.

What I couldn't understand was why, in a place with nearly a hundred rooms and only twenty-five girls, we had to have roommates at all. I asked it carefully, making sure Angie understood it wasn't her I minded, I was just wondering. She told me that years ago they used to have the whole place set up like a hospital ward, with all the girls in rows of beds in the grand ballroom, but then one girl got the pox and they couldn't control the spread at all. "All those little babies born blind or missing arms," she said. "Can you imagine just waiting on that? All the girls in front of you having crippled babies and you know you will too but all you can do is sit around and wait for it to happen. After that they put people in rooms. They say we can't have our own rooms 'cause of the heating costs, that they don't like to open the whole place up, but really it's because they don't like for us to be alone, or they 'don't think it's natural,' as Mother Corinne likes to say."

I had never shared a room with anyone but Thomas.

I put on a clean dress. Billy's mother had washed and ironed the few things I had before I left Arkansas. The only vestige of the days of the grand Hotel Louisa was that people still met on the front porch at five o'clock in the warm months. The bourbon and sodas were strictly forbidden, but we went there as if pulled by tradition, just to sit in the chairs and look out over the Clatterbucks' back pasture.

"You've got to be respectful to the girls ahead of you," Angie told me as we were walking downstairs. "The farther along a girl is, the nicer everyone will be, like fixing her plate at supper and giving up chairs. It's only right, you know, we're all going to graduate sooner or later. There are three girls now, Charlotte and Nora and Lolly, who are already two weeks late. That's a lot to have late at the same time. Everybody's real nervous about it."

The stairwell was lined with grand paintings, mostly of a beautiful, dark-eyed woman I later learned was Louisa herself. Louisa with her hair up, standing in front of the fireplace. Louisa with her hair down, walking through the gardens. Louisa with Lewis, his hand resting gently against her shoulder. I don't imagine she had time to do much else but sit for paintings. At the bottom of the stairs was a small dish of holy water nailed up to the wall. Angie dipped in her fingers without looking down and crossed herself, and after thinking about it for a moment, I did the same.

We walked onto the porch in the late August afternoon of Habit, Kentucky. It was hot, but not like Flagstaff and Amarillo and Oklahoma City. There had been good rains all summer and the grass in the pasture was heavy and dark. I had never seen such thick banks of trees, such softness growing from every surface of a field. Kentucky was another country, and in that country, Saint Elizabeth's was a country unto itself, where on the porch of a grand hotel, twenty-five pregnant girls drank sweaty glasses of iced tea and watched the sun set west while their loose dresses blew around their hips and pressed against their huge stomachs. I couldn't imagine which ones were two weeks overdue. They all seemed two weeks overdue to me. I watched their faces carefully; they looked like they had forgotten themselves and maybe for a moment thought their husbands were upstairs changing in the room, and would soon come onto the porch and kiss them and look proudly over the beginnings of their family. Every now and then a girl broke away from the group and walked down the front steps and into the field, where she could imagine herself to be the only woman in the world about to have a child.

At six o'clock the one that Angie said was Sister Loyola stepped onto the porch and rang a small bell. The girls hoisted one another up from their chairs with exaggerated effort and laughed. "That damn bell of hers," Angie whispered to me. "You think she could just say that supper was ready."

As I turned to go in I saw a man walking up toward the hotel. He was the only man I had seen since my arrival, and I wondered for an instant if he was coming to get someone. "Who's that?" I asked.

"Oh, that's Son," Angie said, and waved to him. He waved back to her and smiled. He was a giant man, maybe six foot six. He wasn't fat, but as big and broad as an oak. His arm swept through the air like the branch of a tree. "He fixes things. Everybody's in love with Son."

I didn't know how she meant that, really in love, or as a kind of joke, but she had gone into dinner before I could ask her.