Bunner Sisters

Can you take some more Edith Wharton?

I’m not going to say one last – because it’s not the last. I’m in the middle of one of her longer novels, and I’ll have sometime to say about that when it’s done. And that will be the last for a while. We’re moving on. He’s reading Cather next week – and I’ve written about her before in this space – but after that we’ll be fully in the 20th century, so hang on for that,

As I was reading this longish story/novella, I wondered, How is it I know this is going to end badly? Is it because it’s Edith Wharton? Or is there something in the nature of the story or even the style that lets us know – there’s not going to be a “happy” ending here?

The other day in the comments, Brendan Hodge remarked that he’d read The House of Mirth as a younger man and not liked it much, but wondered if he’d have a different experience reading it today. And someone else commented that she appreciated Wharton more as she got older.

I think that’s probably true for me, as well, although maybe not. Maybe it’s just in my constitution. Coming from the family background I do, I was never much of a believer in happy endings anyway. I read MIddlemarch in my mid-20’s and loved it – it was extremely formative of my sense of the possibilities of life, far more, say, than Austen – as brilliant as she is. Most of the time people are not, indeed, rescued from their near-mistakes and misjudgments. Most of the time they plunge right into the delusion and must deal with the consequences for a very long time, if not the rest of their lives.

Anyway – this story may be set in New York City, but other than that, the setting is not “typical” Wharton, in that it’s not peopled by American aristocracy, but their opposites – the lower middle class, the poor and the recent immigrant, the struggling shopkeeper, the laundress, the seamstress and the addict.

And yes, I read this with a growing sense of dread. You can just see it – things are not going to end well. It’s a bit like House of Mirth in that you want to reach through the pages and shake someone. NO. DON’T MARRY HIM.

In ‘Bunner Sisters’, the older sister Ann Eliza and the younger sister Evelina live together in a shabby New York City neighborhood in the 1890s. The two sisters are beyond what was usually thought of as marriageable age. They keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small hand-sewn articles for women, and they barely scratch out a living.

Ann Eliza decides to get Evelina a clock for her birthday with money she has saved, and that is when their real troubles begin. Enter the clock maker Herbert Ramy. He is a German, and he seems quite capable with clocks. Soon he starts coming around to the sisters’ house. At first Ann Eliza thinks he might be interested in her even though Evelina is the one who has had boyfriends before. Then Ann Eliza realizes that Evelina has her eyes and heart set on Mr. Ramy and decides to forgo her own possibilities in favor of her younger sister.

There’s a lot more that happens, and it’s pretty tragic. And then….completely surprising me to the point where I said, WHAT outloud, there’s a, yes, Catholic angle:

The elder sister drew near to the bed.

“There’s one thing I ain’t told you. I didn’t want to tell you yet because I was afraid you might be sorry—but if he says I’m going to die I’ve got to say it.” She stopped to cough, and to Ann Eliza it now seemed as though every cough struck a minute from the hours remaining to her.

“Don’t talk now—you’re tired.”

“I’ll be tireder to-morrow, I guess. And I want you should know. Sit down close to me—there.”

Ann Eliza sat down in silence, stroking her shrunken hand.

“I’m a Roman Catholic, Ann Eliza.”

“Evelina—oh, Evelina Bunner! A Roman Catholic—you? Oh, Evelina, did he make you?”

Evelina shook her head. “I guess he didn’t have no religion; he never spoke of it. But you see Mrs. Hochmuller was a Catholic, and so when I was sick she got the doctor to send me to a Roman Catholic hospital, and the sisters was so good to me there—and the priest used to come and talk to me; and the things he said kep’ me from going crazy. He seemed to make everything easier.”

“Oh, sister, how could you?” Ann Eliza wailed. She knew little of the Catholic religion except that “Papists” believed in it—in itself a sufficient indictment. Her spiritual rebellion had not freed her from the formal part of her religious belief, and apostasy had always seemed to her one of the sins from which the pure in mind avert their thoughts.

“And then when the baby was born,” Evelina continued, “he christened it right away, so it could go to heaven; and after that, you see, I had to be a Catholic.”

“I don’t see—”

“Don’t I have to be where the baby is? I couldn’t ever ha’ gone there if I hadn’t been made a Catholic. Don’t you understand that?”

Ann Eliza sat speechless, drawing her hand away. Once more she found herself shut out of Evelina’s heart, an exile from her closest affections.

“I’ve got to go where the baby is,” Evelina feverishly insisted.

Ann Eliza could think of nothing to say; she could only feel that Evelina was dying, and dying as a stranger in her arms. Ramy and the day-old baby had parted her forever from her sister.

Evelina began again. “If I get worse I want you to send for a priest. Miss Mellins’ll know where to send—she’s got an aunt that’s a Catholic. Promise me faithful you will.”

“I promise,” said Ann Eliza.

After that they spoke no more of the matter; but Ann Eliza now understood that the little black bag about her sister’s neck, which she had innocently taken for a memento of Ramy, was some kind of sacrilegious amulet, and her fingers shrank from its contact when she bathed and dressed Evelina. It seemed to her the diabolical instrument of their estrangement.

Evilina continues to decline:

“Miss Mellins, can you tell me where to send for a priest—a Roman Catholic priest?”

“A priest, Miss Bunner?”

“Yes. My sister became a Roman Catholic while she was away. They were kind to her in her sickness—and now she wants a priest.” Ann Eliza faced Miss Mellins with unflinching eyes.

“My aunt Dugan’ll know. I’ll run right round to her the minute I get my papers off,” the dress-maker promised; and Ann Eliza thanked her.

An hour or two later the priest appeared. Ann Eliza, who was watching, saw him coming down the steps to the shop-door and went to meet him. His expression was kind, but she shrank from his peculiar dress, and from his pale face with its bluish chin and enigmatic smile. Ann Eliza remained in the shop. Miss Mellins’s girl had mixed the buttons again and she set herself to sort them. The priest stayed a long time with Evelina. When he again carried his enigmatic smile past the counter, and Ann Eliza rejoined her sister, Evelina was smiling with something of the same mystery; but she did not tell her secret.

After that it seemed to Ann Eliza that the shop and the back room no longer belonged to her. It was as though she were there on sufferance, indulgently tolerated by the unseen power which hovered over Evelina even in the absence of its minister. The priest came almost daily; and at last a day arrived when he was called to administer some rite of which Ann Eliza but dimly grasped the sacramental meaning. All she knew was that it meant that Evelina was going, and going, under this alien guidance, even farther from her than to the dark places of death.

When the priest came, with something covered in his hands, she crept into the shop, closing the door of the back room to leave him alone with Evelina.

It was a warm afternoon in May, and the crooked ailanthus-tree rooted in a fissure of the opposite pavement was a fountain of tender green. Women in light dresses passed with the languid step of spring; and presently there came a man with a hand-cart full of pansy and geranium plants who stopped outside the window, signalling to Ann Eliza to buy.

An hour went by before the door of the back room opened and the priest reappeared with that mysterious covered something in his hands. Ann Eliza had risen, drawing back as he passed. He had doubtless divined her antipathy, for he had hitherto only bowed in going in and out; but to day he paused and looked at her compassionately.

“I have left your sister in a very beautiful state of mind,” he said in a low voice like a woman’s. “She is full of spiritual consolation.”

Ann Eliza was silent, and he bowed and went out. She hastened back to Evelina’s bed, and knelt down beside it. Evelina’s eyes were very large and bright; she turned them on Ann Eliza with a look of inner illumination.

“I shall see the baby,” she said; then her eyelids fell and she dozed.

I am always interested in portrayals of Catholicism in fiction, particularly from writers who are not Catholic. What I see over an over again as I encounter these depictions is a sense that in the Catholic Church, and particularly as embodied in religious and, of course, especially priests, is that Catholicism, even to an outsider, represented something solid and unchanging, with the contrast between the human, weak even foolish-seeming minister and the solidity he bears, mysteriously covered in his hands, of particular interest.

Recall The Damnation of Theron Ware? And The Power and the Glory? And the last scene of O’Connor’s The Displaced Person?

Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.