The construction crisis caused by the new Santa Fe chapel’s missing choir-loft staircase

The construction crisis caused by the new Santa Fe chapel’s missing choir-loft staircase begins with a practical oversight and grows into a test of faith, authority, and judgment. The chapel is complete, but its choir loft cannot be reached; the improvised responses range from prayer to hiring a carpenter, while the staircase’s eventual appearance leaves the novel’s central supernatural question unsettled.

The Missing Staircase and Its Stakes

The crisis is announced at a meal after the new chapel has been finished. Mother Magdalena explains that the work took five years and cost Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy dearly, only for everyone to discover that no staircase had been built to the choir loft. Until a way up can be found, the choir must sing from the back of the church. Elinora St. Clair, who had looked forward to singing in the loft because her uncle had written about the chapel, reacts with dismay. The omission is therefore more than an inconvenience: it frustrates the chapel’s intended use and disappoints a girl who had imagined her place within it.

Mother Magdalena says that no one knows how the staircase was left out. She connects the failure to a broader problem of oversight: unless someone stands over workmen, she suggests, they may not deliver what was promised. The remark makes the missing stair an institutional failure as well as a design problem. Her immediate response is prayer. The nuns have begun a novena to Saint Joseph, a repeated devotional appeal that gives the unresolved construction work a religious timetable and a communal focus.

The physical constraints make the problem difficult to solve. Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy tells the carpenter that no room was left for a conventional staircase. The remaining options appear stark: tear down and rebuild the choir loft at great expense, or use a ladder, which he considers unsuitable for the schoolgirls who would have to climb it. The crisis is thus not simply a matter of finding a builder; the chapel’s completed design has left too little space for an ordinary solution.

Prayer, Authority, and Competing Expectations

The staircase becomes a continuing concern within the school. Mother Magdalena includes the novena among Lizzy Enders’s obligations, alongside classes, daily Mass, and wearing the purple school uniform. She presents the prayer as important to the community because the chapel needs a staircase. For Lizzy, a Protestant newcomer who does not understand the Latin Mass, this imposed devotional practice also marks the distance between her own religious position and the school’s Catholic life.

The novena has a more intimate effect on Lizzy than its institutional purpose alone suggests. As she grows accustomed to the incense, Latin, and sung responses, evening prayer becomes a peaceful interval in the school day, a place where she can sort through her thoughts. It is also the time when she most allows herself to think about her dead mother. The construction crisis therefore unfolds alongside private grief: the same ritual that asks Saint Joseph for a way into the choir loft offers Lizzy a quiet structure for remembering Mama.

The staircase also carries a personal meaning for Violate Lacey. She gives the church additional money after her first contribution, hoping it will help secure a carpenter, and explains that she is doing it for her son, Robert Lacey. In her belief, he will not rest in peace until the church is completed, and completion requires the staircase. Mother Magdalena calls Violate’s fixation strange and emphasizes that she is not Catholic. The contrast shows that the appeal of the staircase crosses confessional boundaries even as the convent tries to define the crisis through its own religious practices.

Violate’s account of earlier events complicates the question of who noticed the problem and when. Recalling her riding days, she says that she repeatedly asked the architect about the staircase, but he would not listen and threw her out; she says the nuns also disregarded her warnings, then scolded her when the builders had left. In her telling, the omission was foreseeable but her testimony was dismissed. Her recollection makes the crisis a story not only of absent planning, but of whose warnings are taken seriously.

The Carpenter and the Unfinished Novena

Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy does not claim that prayer can make him perform a miracle. When Lizzy Enders tells him that an unemployed carpenter is staying in the barn, he treats the man’s practical skill as a possible answer: the hungry carpenter should inspect the chapel. The proposal places human work beside the novena rather than simply declaring one to be a substitute for the other. The Bishop is willing to act, although the nuns have been praying for Saint Joseph to resolve the same problem.

After examining the restricted space, the carpenter says that he can build a staircase, but that it must be spiral. The design offers an alternative to rebuilding the loft or sending girls up a ladder. Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy is surprised that several carpenters and architects consulted earlier did not suggest it, and asks whether the man can manage the work. The carpenter says he can. His solution answers the immediate architectural constraint through a form no one in the story’s earlier consultations had proposed.

The carpenter nevertheless postpones beginning until the novena has ended. He knows that the nuns are making their final appeal to Saint Joseph and does not want to start before it is finished. His deference matters to Lizzy Enders: she had told him about the novena, and he treats that information as a reason to wait. When the work begins, the community’s expectations remain divided. Some girls believe that hiring him has interfered with the miracle they were awaiting, asking how Saint Joseph can act if the problem seems solved by human hands.

The construction itself is made visible as work rather than apparition. Mother Magdalena posts a notice telling people that the carpenter is working in the chapel and asking them to pray quietly from the front pews without approaching him. Lizzy Enders disobeys the request not to approach, and sees that pews have been removed to clear the site. Candles burn in many kinds of holders around the work area, and the wood sits in tubs of water. When the carpenter tells her that people stare and whisper that an old beggar cannot build a staircase, Lizzy explains that they expected a miracle after the novena and may think Saint Joseph will be insulted if he works while they wait. She herself says that she has neither time nor heart for miracles.

Completion and the Question of Saint Joseph

The staircase is reported finished after Ramona takes the carpenter his supper and finds the work complete. The girls and nuns gather at the back of the church to look. The result is a polished circular ascent of thirty-three steps, each carefully trimmed. Its graceful, solid appearance supplies the practical answer the chapel lacked, but the carpenter has gone, and the absence of a banister immediately gives the gathering a new reason to wonder what the staircase means and how it should be used.

Sister Roberta interprets the missing banister as a lesson in faith and demonstrates a cautious way down, moving backward on her hands and knees. The nuns pray as she descends and sigh with relief when she reaches the bottom. Her response links the staircase’s physical risk to the language of trust, while the careful descent makes clear that faith does not remove the need to negotiate its actual structure. She also praises the beauty of the wood, keeping the achievement grounded in its material craft.

Mother Magdalena supplies the supernatural explanation: the carpenter, she concludes, must have been Saint Joseph. The nuns kneel and pray, but Lizzy Enders rejects their certainty. She remembers the carpenter not as a remote holy figure but as the man who listened to her troubles, held her kitten, advised her about her father, and spoke of the sadness of leaving his own family. She also remembers that he was hurt when the girls did not want him around. For Lizzy, these human encounters resist the transformation of a particular, vulnerable stranger into a miraculous emblem.

The novel does not finally settle the matter. Its author’s note identifies the story as a work of fiction built from the Santa Fe legend of the mysterious carpenter who appeared after the Chapel of Loretto was completed in 1878 without access to its choir loft. The note recounts that builders had advised either rebuilding the loft at great expense or using a ladder, and connects the novel’s dilemma to that tradition. Within the fiction, however, Lizzy Enders keeps only a small opening for belief: the blind cat is no longer blind after the carpenter holds her. Whether the carpenter was Saint Joseph, and whether Lizzy believes it when she leaves the convent, remain questions the narrative deliberately leaves to the reader.