The Cape Ann by Faith Sullivan Read Free Book Online

casually, to save Sister embarrassment.
    When the nuns leapt the wall of their own reserve, the exchanges were uncomfortable. They knew so little about us. And how would they? They lived in an austere, white cottage across the street from the church, and seldom went out on Main Street or elsewhere in town. Their groceries were delivered by Truska’s and their meat by Rabel’s.
    The exterior of the nuns’ house was painfully barefaced. Everything was white—clapboard, window frames and sills, gutters and downspouts—everything. There was not a shutter or a scrap of trellis to adorn it. Nor was the front yard more showy than the house: green grass, a pair of self-effacing arborvitae on either side of the door. A three-foot, gray statue of the Virgin with clasped hands floated, lonely and cut-off, on the deep green sea, twenty feet from the door.
    However, it was said that in the yard behind the cottage, they raised the finest vegetables and the showiest flowers in Harvester. Mama’s friend Bernice McGivern had seen the garden. “Rows as neat as knitting,” she had said. “And not a weed anywhere. Carrots and radishes and lettuce and tomatoes and whatever else you could think of. And corn. Beautiful corn. And all around the edge, flowers. Zinnias and marigolds and bachelor’s buttons and gladiolas and delphiniums and larkspur and roses as big as dinner plates.”
    Old Father Delias seemed remote from the nuns, perpetually surprised to see them around the church. His life was very different from theirs. He was invited to dinner everywhere that a Catholic priest was welcome. And he went fishing with men from the parish. He liked to laugh and drink beer and tell funny stories about priests he knew and seminarians he had known. As loved by children as the nuns were feared, he was like the jolly father in a family where discipline is left to the mother.
    On May Day, when the young children whose parents could afford it delivered May baskets, Father Delias’s front porch and steps were littered with colorful baskets, like spring flowers, filled withcandy and home-baked treats. Father chased each child who rang the doorbell and, catching him, gave him a hug and a penny.
    It didn’t occur to anyone to leave a basket at the nuns’ house.
    As Sister Mary Clair stood on the topmost step wanting to know about cookie baking in the kitchen of the Ridzas, who lived in a shack on the south edge of town where there was no street, only a hard-bitten path among the weeds, Beverly scratched her thigh and looked at her scuffed oxfords, which were her brother’s. She was running out of ready lies.
    I shoved myself forward, toward Sister Mary Clair. “Sister,” I began, but my voice started to fade, like a radio station slipping out of reach.
    “What did you say?” Sister asked, bending toward me. “Speak up.”
    “I just wondered … I just wondered—is gambling a sin?”
    “Gambling?” Sister asked in a neutral tone of voice, her eyes retreating from me. Later it occurred to me that she was perhaps thinking of the Wheel of Fortune and other innocent forms of gambling at the annual church bazaar. Was there Protestant criticism out there in the town? she likely wondered, feeling suddenly more estranged. “What kind of gambling?”
    “Poker?”
    “Well, that would depend,” Sister said. Had Father Delias and his fishing cronies been criticized?
Did
Father Delias play poker when he went fishing? It was probable. “Gambling isn’t necessarily a sin.”
    “When would it be a sin?” I asked. I had to know, was Papa going to hell?
    Leading the conversation away from anything that might have reference to Father Delias, Sister explained, “If a man gambled and lost all his money, and his wife and children suffered, that would be sinful.”
    “Would he go to hell?”
    “Not if he were truly sorry and went to confession and asked God to forgive him.” She fished a pocket watch out of the folds of her garment, glanced at it, and