Free The Business of Naming Things by Michael Coffey Page B

freighters.”
    Masonry crumbling. His mother turned away.
    M ARGARET TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH in the same direction. She came from farther north, from Quebec City. She was an only child who lost her mother to a street accident when she was only six. Her father was a civil engineer, building bridges, and brought a young woman in to help with Margaret. Margaret loved Mireille, who taught her to dance and bake bread and comb and braid her thick auburn hair. Mireille was also a bit of a rebel—Margaret’s father called her a flambeuse , a risk taker, because she smoked and had beaucoup petit copain —boys.
    Margaret’s father was strict enough, but not too much. He was gentle toward his little Marguerite, but he hated the Protestant English and the Catholic Mohawks. One day in Vieux Ville—as if the whole city weren’t old—her father ran into a Mohawk he knew from work on the Taschereau suspension, who was out with his family. He spoke harshly to the man. The Mohawk had a rosary around his neck, and was drunk. Margaret’s father berated the big man, who was ashamed and sought no trouble, but Margaret’s father would not stop. She began to scream for him to stop. She pulled on his sleeve. He slapped her, and then punched the Mohawk in the ear. The man fell. Her father then kicked him down the rough cobblestone. Margaret thought, Father, you will go to hell. She said to him, Allez en enfer! Her father looked at her, stricken. He could not catch his breath. They made their way toward the cathedral, but once they reached the steep steps, Margaret’s father sat down slowly. He put his cheek on the limestone, frothed pink bubbles, and convulsed, looking at his only daughter. Margaret was twelve years old. She went silent then for many months. She thought she would go to hell, but she did not go to hell and made sure she wouldn’t. She went to the Ursulines, the teaching order of Catholic nuns that ran a boarding school in a convent at the top of the cliff.
    Margaret learned ornamental tapestry making, weaving threads of gold and silver—tapestry being the Ursuline’s principal service to the iconography of the Church. Margaret’s specialty was in structuring reliefs out of horsehair—the outcropping upon which a saint might stand, the roll of a bishop’s miter, the breast and shoulder—and this Margaret felt most fitting—of a horse. But she also learned chemistry and hygiene and German; she learned how to read music and to play the harp—Purcell’s Ode to St. Cecilia , she practiced for a year. At nineteen she was married to Christ in a wedding dress with a dozen other girls, all of them homely in homely glasses but for Margaret, who was slender and small-boned, her green eyes bright with belief and her French braid curled on her shoulder like a reminder of who she once had been.
    When Margaret arrived at Franklin Manor—a former sanatorium and now an Ursuline convent in northern New York—Father Paul, the pastor, saw her by accident one morning her first week there—he’d not had a formal introduction to the new sister. She was down in the laundry; she had taken off her habit and wimple and scapular. Her hair was short, rough-cut, and the color of brass. She had on only a loose white shift. She was bone white. Father Paul could see her breasts moving against the fabric as she worked her arms around, putting clothes into the washer. Her whole upper body tensed and flexed as she ran bedclothes through the ringer, turning the crank round and round. She thought she was alone and unseen in her exertions, didn’t she? A private ecstasy. Or did she know that the priest next door across the lawn could see right through the hydrangeas to the convent laundry? When she turned and framed her face in the window and looked right at him, he knew. Almost three years ago. It was Easter week. . . .
    H E IS WIDE AWAKE NOW . Where is Margaret? What are