The Night Visitors(70)
And that old woman was right; I wasn’t on my own at St. Alban’s and it’s not a bad place. The nuns are kind and quiet. The other women are kind and loud. We have our own common room and kitchen. We cook dinner together and watch movies and talk late into the night. It’s what I imagine college must be like.
The best part is that I see Oren every day. He looks well fed and happy. He’s also got new clothes, including a brand-new Star Wars sweatshirt that I suspect Mattie got for him.
Mattie comes every night. She brings bags of groceries, toiletries, and clothes—not just for me but for all the women and children at St. Alban’s. All the nuns and volunteers know her, and she gets to break whatever rules she wants, like getting Oren permission to come over to the women’s wing to watch movies at night. She brings all the DVDs of the Star Wars movies and we have a marathon.
Mattie tells me that Doreen has a friend at Children’s Court working on my petition for custody. It may take a while but they think they will prevail in the end.
“Is Doreen okay?” I ask.
Mattie nods, her face tightening. “She will be. It helps her to have your case to work on.” Then she tells me her plans for me. She’s got a friend who runs a B and B in Mount Tremper, on the outskirts of Delphi, who needs a housekeeper. The job comes with a cottage out back. It’s not much, but it’s a place that Social Services will deem suitable for Oren to live. She’s got another friend at Ulster Community College who can talk to me about going back to school. She’s even got a friend (Well, Wayne actually, she says, blushing) who has an old car I can use.
Anita Esteban was right. Mattie has hundreds of friends and she’s calling on them all for my sake.
“What about your case?” I ask.
She sighs and I think it’s going to be bad news. “When the police searched Frank’s house and computer they found evidence that he’s been taking money from Pine Crest for delivering young people to a judge in Albany who always sends them to Pine Crest. That kind of backs up my story, so Anita’s hopeful I won’t be charged.”
“You don’t sound happy about that,” I say.
She turns to me, her violet eyes shining in the reflection of the television set. “How could I have not seen what had happened to Frank?”
It takes me a second to realize she’s really asking. That she wants my opinion. I look at her, at this woman who has spent a lifetime helping the most powerless and helpless people, who has built a safety net wide enough to catch me and Oren in our most vulnerable moment, and I know what to say. “You see the best in people, Mattie. You see what they once were and could be again if only someone would give them a chance. Look at what you’ve seen in me.”
Mattie smiles, transforming her face into that beautiful teenager in the Polaroid photograph. She puts her arm around me. “Oh, that was easy, Alice. With you I see a woman who got stuck in a bad situation to save a little boy. I see a mother who loves her son. I’d have to be a lot older and blinder not to see that.”
Then she wipes a tear away and turns back to the set, her arm still around me.
That night when I’m putting Oren to bed (another privilege Mattie has sweet-talked the nuns into giving me), he says to me, “I was wrong about this being a bad place. The bad things that happened here were a long time ago. Everyone here now is really nice. Mattie’s friend Wayne said he’s going to bring his telescope one night. They’re both coming tomorrow to take us to the Cookie Walk. We’re going to carry lanterns and walk through the village and eat as many cookies as we want. You’ll come, won’t you?”
I tell him I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I don’t ask him about the bad things that happened here a long time ago or how he knows about them. Instead I go the next day at four o’clock—the best time to catch her, Mattie has told me—to Sister Martine to ask her instead.
“I guess you could say that bad things did happen here,” she tells me. We’re in her office having tea and “biscuits,” which turn out to be cookies. “St. Alban’s ran a home for ‘wayward girls,’ as they were called then, from the 1890s through the 1970s. I came here in the 1960s and the first thing I did was read all the files. It was hair-raising, let me tell you; the maternal and infant mortality rate was five times the contemporary national average. It was clear no one cared very much about those girls and their babies. ‘It is perhaps a blessing,’ one of my predecessors had written, ‘that the poor doves go so quickly to their maker, considering what lives lie ahead of them.’”
“Wow,” I say, “that’s cold.”
“As the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno,” Sister Martine responds. “I tried to improve conditions. I enlisted local doctors and health care advocates, wrote many an angry letter to the bishop. But perhaps what helped the most was just changing attitudes toward out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Once it was no longer considered a shameful secret, something to be hidden away, many girls could stay in their own homes rather than come to a place like this. And then, of course, there was Roe v. Wade and girls had other options.”
Sister Martine must see the shock on my face—a nun remarking favorably on abortion?—because she smiles. “I’m not saying it’s the best option, but it certainly did decrease our numbers. So much so that the diocese threatened to shut us down. I pointed out, though, that there were many other ways to help women and children. And of course there were still girls—and women—who needed a safe place to come and have their babies.”