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grayish light from a foyer lamp through the grimy stained glass panels on either side of the door, and one or two slits of light on the second floor that looked as if they might be escaping from beneath lowered shades. Otherwise the ungainly old house and those around it were steeped in darkness like thick tea. I had little sense of the neighborhood, except that it gave off a stink of semicommercialism. I knew without even thinking about it that all of the darkened houses around me had once been single family residences, and substantial ones at that, but that now they were rooming houses or businesses of some sort: AAA Personnel Service; Peach City Temporar-ies; Dr. A. E. Moorvakian, Chiropractor; Madame Rhonda, Psychic; T. Plasters, DDS. Except for the sharp, cold night mist on my face and the distant river-roar of traffic over on Peachtree Street, I might have been back home in Corkie.
    There was the same slight, sour effluvia of defeat, slackness, decay. I would have known it on the other side of the universe.
    The door opened. I could not see the face of the woman who stood there, but I could see the white of her wimple and the dark skirts to the floor, and my heart sank. Why had I not expected a nun? Who better, after 27 / DOWNTOWN
    all, to guard the daughters of the Church in a strange city?
    But I had not. My vision of Muggsy in sentimental tears over her satin negligee vanished.
    “Maureen O’Donnell?” the sister said in a voice that seemed a piece of the night, harsh and affectless, overlaid with the singsong of the brogue I had thought I had left behind me.
    “Yes. Ah…at least, it’s Maureen Aisling, but everybody calls me Smoky,” I said into the darkness. I wished she would step back into the light. I felt as if I were talking to a statue.
    “I will call you Maureen. That’s what Mr. Comfort’s letter said, and that’s how you’re registered with us. I am Sister Mary James,” she said, and turned and went back into the house. I picked up my bags and followed her. Inside the light was the color of pale urine, and scarcely brighter than it had been outside. I could see only that she was heavy, wore flesh-colored plastic-rimmed glasses, had tight-stretched shiny skin, and might have been any age at all over thirty. All the doors off the foyer were dark fumed oak and closed, and the walls were painted the self-same green of those at Saint Zita’s. I thought perhaps there was a company somewhere that made green paint specifically for Catholic institutions.
    Sister Mary James moved ponderously and silently up a dark oak staircase. A runner of sour taupe carpet muffled my footsteps as I followed behind her. At the top of the stairs a crucifix hung over a scarred oak table holding twelve or so Thom McAn shoeboxes, each with a slit in its lid and a name crayoned under the slit.
    “For your mail,” Sister Mary James said, not pausing. “We sort it and put it out once a day in the mid-afternoons.” She turned left and padded on down the hall. On either side, doors were shut. Squares of cardboard taped on them had names, but I could not read

    ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 28
    any of them in the murk. The only light here came from a night-light attached to the baseboard about halfway down the hall and from a pink and green neon sign that flashed through the high window over the mail table: “Life of Georgia,” it winked. “Life of Georgia.”
    The thought came, unbidden and suddenly threatening to swamp me with choking laughter, that the night-light, when I passed it, would prove to be a plastic one of Jesus. But it was, after all, only a tiny bulb in a seashell. That, though, was plastic.
    At the end of the hall Sister Mary James opened a door using a key that hung from a chain around her neck and entered. She motioned me to follow her. As I passed I could see that the sign on the oak door read “Callahan, A.” and
    “O’Donnell, M.” I stopped still, suddenly shy. My daydreams had all had a roommate in