In the Still of the Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

of the unfortunates and the degraded who came and went among them with the inevitability of time and tide.
    As Mrs. Ryan got out of the elevator that January morning, she saw the nun backing off from the doorman. Louis seemed to be trying to persuade her to go out of the building by demonstrating how it could be done. He would prance three or four feet ahead of her toward the door and beckon her to follow him. The nun would take a step away from him deeper into the lobby.
    Mrs. Ryan had seen the nun in the building before, and she had seen her on the street, always hurrying, always laden with nondescript bundles and shopping bags. She was tall and lean and wore a habit such as most orders had stepped out of years before. Nor could Mrs. Ryan associate her garb with that of any order in her long religious acquaintanceship. “Is there any way I can help you, Sister?” she asked when she came abreast of the nun and the doorman.
    “Better you can help me,” Louis said, pleading with empty hands. “The super says she’s not to come in, but she is in.”
    “You ought to show respect, Louis. A Sister is a Sister. You don’t speak of her as she. ”
    The nun gazed at Mrs. Ryan with large china-blue eyes that were full of pleading. “Can he put me out if I’m waiting for a friend?”
    “Certainly not,” Mrs. Ryan said.
    Louis started to walk away in disgust and then turned back. “Miss Brennan left the building an hour ago in her nurse’s uniform. Wouldn’t you say it would be a long wait till she comes back, Mrs. Ryan?”
    “Sheila Brennan is a friend of mine,” Mrs. Ryan said. “If she said she’ll be back, she’ll be back. Would you like to come up to my place for a cup of tea, Sister? We can phone down to Louis and see if she comes in.”
    “How very kind of you, Mrs. Ryan. I would love a cup of tea.” Moving with more grace than would be thought possible in the heavy, square-toed shoes, the nun collected two shopping bags from among the poinsettias. Mrs. Ryan hadn’t noticed them. Whether Louis had, she couldn’t know. He was standing, his back to them, looking out onto the street and springing up and down on his toes.
    In the elevator, Mrs. Ryan surveyed her guest surreptitiously. She wore a full black skirt all the way to her shoe-tops and a jacket that seemed more Chinese than Christian. It buttoned clear up under her chin. The crucifix she wore was an ivory figure on what looked to be a gold or bronze cross. It put Mrs. Ryan in mind of one she had once noticed on a black man who, according to her friend Julie Hayes, was a pimp. For just that instant she wondered if she had done the right thing in inviting the nun upstairs. What reassured her was an association from her youth in Ireland: there was a smell to the nun only faintly unpleasant, as of earth or the cellar, but remembered all Mrs. Ryan’s life from the Sisters to whom she had gone in infant school. Alas, it was the smell of poverty.
    Over her head of shaggy brown hair, the nun wore a thin veil that came down to her breast. It was not much of a veil, but there was not much breast to her, either. She said her name was Sister Justina and her order was the Sisters of Our Lady of Hope, of whom there were so few left each was allowed to choose her own ministry: most, Sister Justina said, worked among the poor and the illiterate, and often lived with them, as she herself did.
    What Mrs. Ryan called her apartment was a single room into which she had crammed a life, and which she had for many years shared with a dachshund recently gone to where the good dogs go. A life-size picture of Fritzie hung on the wall among a gallery of actors and directors and theater entrepreneurs. “There’s not a face up there you’d recognize today, but I knew them all,” she said, coming out of the bathroom where she’d put the kettle on to boil on the electric plate.
    The nun was gazing raptly at the faded photographs. “Were you an actor?”
    “I was an usher,”