Simony

Simony is a religious term that shadows the child narrator’s account of the dead priest in “The Sisters.” First heard as an obscure word from the Catechism, it returns in a dream as the name of a sin for which the priest appears to seek absolution; the story’s refusal to explain the priest’s offense leaves the term charged with unease rather than settled definition.

The word before the death

The narrator initially places simony beside “gnomon,” another puzzling word, as an item of difficult vocabulary whose sound has lodged in his mind. As he watches the priest’s window night after night, however, the word becomes more than a schoolroom mystery: he says it sounds like the name of a “maleficent and sinful being.” The shift from a word in the Catechism to an imagined presence ties religious language to the child’s fear and fascination with the priest’s impending death.

The priest’s death is anticipated through signs the narrator knows how to read but cannot fully interpret. He expects candles to be reflected on the blind if the priest has died, and recalls that the priest had said he was not long for this world. Against that vigil, simony is one element in a cluster of associations—alongside paralysis and the narrator’s longing to see its “deadly work”—through which a religious concept becomes entangled with bodily decline and mortality.

The dream of confession

After hearing Old Cotter’s unfinished remarks and struggling to understand what he means, the narrator dreams of the priest’s heavy grey face. In the dream, the face murmurs as if it desires to confess; its continually smiling expression and lips marked with spittle make the imagined confession both intimate and disturbing. The child feels his soul receding into a “pleasant and vicious region,” where the priest’s face is waiting for him again.

The dream supplies the story’s most direct connection between simony and the priest: the narrator remembers that the priest died of paralysis and finds himself smiling “as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.” Yet this apparent act of absolution does not disclose what the sin was. Simony works here as a moral name attached to a mystery, while the child’s imagined participation in the priest’s confession makes the mystery feel personally involving.

Religious language and unresolved meaning

The story gives the word a strong imaginative function without explaining the offense or establishing a definitive account of the priest’s conduct. That gap matters: the narrator recognizes the category of sin but does not possess the knowledge needed to judge the dead man. His dream briefly casts him as absolver, but the comparison remains part of a child’s unsettled vision rather than a resolution of the priest’s secret.

Simony therefore connects the story’s religious vocabulary to its central uncertainties. The word moves from remembered catechism, to a sinister-sounding presence during the priest’s final illness, to the dream image of a confession and an attempted absolution. Its recurrence gives the child’s fear a moral shape while preserving the unanswered question at the heart of his encounter with the dead priest.