BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Ninth Hour’ by Alice McDermott

OPINION:

THE NINTH HOUR

By Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 245 pages

“The Ninth Hour” begins with the suicide on a gray February afternoon of a young man while his wife, with “a baby coming in summer,” was shopping for their supper.

Alice McDermott has woven a rich tapestry of life in Catholic Brooklyn in early 20th century. Yearnings remain unfulfilled; hopes are seldom realized. Yet there is generosity, faith and small moments of joy. Miss McDermott has a great gift for describing the ugly and the beautiful in the world she creates, and in expressing both strength and weakness in the human condition. Her characters are alive.

While the young widow, Annie, and her daughter, Sally, are principals, it is perhaps the nuns of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, dedicated women who visit and care for the ill, the abandoned, the lonely, who play the pivotal role in the novel. “None of the Sisters, in those days, spoke of their lives before the convent, in what they dismissively called the world. To take their vows was to leave all else behind: girlhoods and families and friends, all of love that was merely personal, all of life that required a backward glance.”

Old Sister St. Savior, with aching feet and in need of a toilet after a day spent begging in the lobby of Woolworth’s, happens to pass the house of the suicide. Drawn into the gas-filled apartment, she takes over, comforts Annie, makes funeral arrangements and plans the clean-up of the apartment.

Annie is given work in the convent’s basement laundry as an assistant to Sister Illuminata, “a solid, plain, wide-bottomed woman. In the basement, the low-hanging light was dim, the dark brick walls clammy to the touch. All day long there was the sound of agitated wash water, of the wringer’s tortuous crank and squeak, the hiss and thud of Sister Illuminata’s black iron.”

After baby Sally was born, she first slept in a basket next to her mother at work; later, she played on a small rug on the laundry floor. As a young woman, Sally was convinced she had a vocation and set off by train to the mother house in Chicago to begin her novitiate.

The vulgar coarseness of her large seat-mate who “gave off the smell of artificial violets and, just behind it, cooking oil,” and the sly, avaricious begging of a girl seated at Sally’s table in the dining car, “showed her the truth of the dirty world, showed her that her own impulse was to meet its filthy citizens not with a consoling cloth, but with a curse, a punch in the face.”

By the time Sally arrived in Chicago, her vocation to help the downtrodden had vanished. Returning to Brooklyn, Sally surprised her mother entertaining Mr. Costello, the married milkman. Shocked, Sally takes in the scene “with what might have been her father’s own eyes: envious, lonesome, buried, bereft.” She resolves to expiate her mother’s “sin,” by assisting Sister Lucy in caring for Mr. Costello’s bed-ridden wife.

Mrs. Costello has only one leg. She is querulous, difficult, and ungrateful. “The air in [her] room was a dirty yellow, the ceiling marred by mustard-colored water stains, the seams of the faded wallpaper grown pale brown. Behind the drawn lace curtains, the shades were the brittle color of old paper. The constant hiss and rattle of the radiator was like the gurgle of muddy street water going down a rusted drain.”

The ninth hour is the time of the nuns’ afternoon prayers. It is the time when Jim turned on the gas, and when Annie is able to get a short reprieve from her tasks in the basement laundry to “get a breath of air” or visit the shops, and later, to meet Mr. Costello. It is the time when Mrs. Costello’s unexpected death paves the way for the future.

• Corinna Lothar is a Washington writer and critic.