Santa Fe

Santa Fe is more than the destination to which Lizzy Enders is brought: it is the charged setting where her grief and sense of abandonment meet unfamiliar customs, convent discipline, and a staircase legend that resists a final explanation. At first the town seems smaller and harsher than the place she and Mama had imagined. Over time, however, its church bells, adobe-colored streets, old fort, and convent become the landscape of Lizzy’s most consequential encounters—and of the questions about faith she carries away.

Arrival and First Impressions

Lizzy arrives at Santa Fe in the hour before dark, beneath golden aspens and a sunset that seems to deepen their color. The caravan passes under a great wooden arch; a distant church bell reaches her like the sound of tinkling broken glass. The approach carries the ache of plans that can no longer be fulfilled: Mama and Lizzy had imagined what they would do during the two days her father promised they would stay. Lizzy resolves to look carefully at the place, at least for Mama.

The town does not match her expectations. She sees low, squat houses the color of red sand, mongrel dogs, and goats and burros resting on wooden walkways. Her first impression also registers the people she sees in blankets—Native people and Mexicans—as well as children running about with little clothing. The description belongs to Lizzy’s disappointed, unsettled perspective, not to a neutral survey of Santa Fe. Elinora St. Clair, by contrast, seems at home enough to point out the Governor’s Palace. The difference between the girls’ responses establishes Santa Fe as a place that Elinora can approach with familiarity while Lizzy already feels trapped in it.

Streets, Bells, and Convent Discipline

The caravan stops before a church, beside a building whose grillwork entrance opens toward a courtyard and garden. Black-dressed sisters come out to greet Elinora and recognize her as Elinora St. Clair; Mother Magdalena receives her there. Santa Fe thus introduces the convent not as an isolated institution but as part of the town’s streetscape, closely joined to its religious life. As the church bell grows louder, Elinora recognizes the Ave Maria and crosses herself. Lizzy cannot make sense of the sound: it presses into her thoughts and body even as she covers her ears.

That first encounter anticipates the rules that govern Lizzy’s new surroundings. Mother Magdalena declares that the girls may not leave the grounds without permission and that they are not to roam Santa Fe’s streets. Lizzy argues that many girls go home at night and asks how they manage it, trying to turn the rule against its enforcer. The argument fails. The restriction gives the town a double character: it is the open, beckoning place beyond the convent grounds, but also a space from which the girls are formally kept away. Later, Lizzy must ask special permission to go into town, and Mother Magdalena limits the errand to one stop and a return within the hour so she can post a letter.

The Town’s Edges and Its Customs

Santa Fe’s story-world extends beyond the school’s doors. When Lizzy and Mrs. Lacey hear a baby crying at the same moment, Mrs. Lacey hurries across a flat, dry stretch of ground toward the only remaining building, an old, crumbling two-story structure. The scene sends Lizzy toward danger and responsibility: the town’s surroundings are not merely scenery but the ground on which she encounters other people’s urgent needs.

The old fort also becomes a place of grief and communal memory. After Mrs. Lacey’s death, her grave is dug there and Robert’s candle is set in the lantern. Jean Baptiste Lamy says the final prayers as the wind moans. The schoolgirls look nervously at the remnants of the fort, which had seemed menacing to Lizzy when she first saw it. At the graveside, she imagines that people hidden from view will come after the mourners leave to smooth the dirt and grieve for Mrs. Lacey. She cannot say who they are or whether they are real; what matters to her is that the dead woman will not be forgotten. The place gathers public ritual and private conviction into the same scene.

Santa Fe’s burial custom makes that gathering urgent. Mrs. Lacey is to be buried within twenty-four hours, and the wind persists through the day and into the night. The deadline lends the funeral its pressure, while the lantern, the prayers, and the exposed remains of the fort make the burial feel at once observed and surrounded by uncertainty. Santa Fe’s rules are practical facts in the plot, but they also shape the novel’s atmosphere: death is not postponed until the living feel ready.

The Staircase and the Question of Miracles

The town is also the setting for the chapel staircase dilemma. Jean Baptiste Lamy explains that the sisters have prayed a novena to Saint Joseph and that he has prayed too, but admits that people look to him for miracles he cannot perform. Lizzy proposes that the hungry carpenter staying in the barn be given work on the staircase. The solution begins as a practical response to a building problem and a man’s need for work; afterward, the carpenter’s disappearance allows the convent to recast the work as a miracle.

When the finished staircase is revealed, the girls and nuns gather at the back of the church to look up at it. Its polished circular ascent has thirty-three carefully trimmed steps. Mother Magdalena interprets the carpenter as Saint Joseph, and the others kneel in prayer. Lizzy rejects that conclusion: the carpenter had spoken with her, listened to her troubles, held her kitten, advised her about her father, and confided that he was sad to leave his own family. Those ordinary acts make him a person to Lizzy rather than a saintly answer imposed after the fact. Yet her certainty remains incomplete. The blind cat is no longer blind after the carpenter held her, leaving a small opening for belief even as Lizzy doubts the convent’s explanation.

The legend has a specific connection to Santa Fe’s history. In the author’s note, the novel is described as drawing on the famous account of the mysterious carpenter who built the staircase in the Chapel of Loretto after the chapel was completed in 1878 without access to its choir loft. The Sisters of Loretto had been brought to Santa Fe from Kentucky in 1852 by Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy to run the school attached to the chapel. The note recounts that conventional builders proposed a space-consuming staircase, rebuilding the choir loft at great expense, or using a ladder. The novel uses this local legend as a springboard, but leaves the carpenter’s identity unresolved rather than settling whether he was Saint Joseph.

Departure and Narrative Significance

Four months after the staircase is completed, Lizzy leaves the convent for Texas with Elena. The tracks of the new Santa Fe Railroad have reached the New Mexico plains to within sixty-five miles of Santa Fe, but Lizzy’s journey takes another route. Her departure is arranged by Jean Baptiste Lamy, with an escort and companions to accompany her and Elena. Santa Fe has not erased her skepticism or her grief; it has changed what she can recognize as a source of help. The author’s note describes Lizzy as leaving a better person, though not quite believing she met Saint Joseph, and leaves that uncertainty open to the reader.

That unresolved balance is central to the town’s function in the novel. Santa Fe is at once a concrete place of streets, rules, burial customs, and institutions, and a setting where Lizzy’s observations cannot settle every question. The church bell that first overwhelms her, the grave at the fort, and the staircase that invites competing explanations all keep the material and the mysterious close together. In Santa Fe, Lizzy’s most persuasive miracles are not necessarily supernatural: they are acts of human care, including the help that makes it possible for her to leave.