Lizzy Enders's Relationship with Sister Roberta

Sister Roberta’s relationship with Lizzy Enders grows from small acts of practical kindness into a bond of trust, candor, and shared care. As the convent’s nurse and a rule-bending presence within its disciplined routine, Sister Roberta offers Lizzy more than protection: she models a faith expressed through attention to vulnerable people, animals, and the ordinary needs of daily life.

Identity and First Acts of Care

Sister Roberta is one of the four nuns who run the school. Her responsibilities range widely: she manages the infirmary, teaches French, nurses the sick, and sometimes helps Ramona in the kitchen. The infirmary gives her work a distinctive setting. It is a many-windowed room with wide sills full of plants, a potbellied stove, and a brick floor often wet from watering. Sister Roberta rolls up her black sleeves, tucks her skirts into her belt, and wears boots there; she smokes a pipe, explaining that its fragrance is good for the plants.

Lizzy first comes to know her through care for Violate Lacey. When Lizzy fetches medicine, Sister Roberta puts it in a small basket and adds a sweet cup of coffee with milk and nutmeg. Her explanation, “God forgives disobedience,” she says, “when the act helps someone in need,” makes kindness—not strict observance for its own sake—the measure of the small rule she has broken. Lizzy’s response is immediate and intense: she thinks she would have died for Sister Roberta. That devotion takes shape within the first week, when Sister Roberta keeps her after French class and begins drawing her into a more personal connection.

The relationship develops through invitations as well as gifts. Sister Roberta hopes Lizzy will not leave too soon and asks her to come to the river to gather O-pshaw, since her supply is running low. When Lizzy tells her that Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy is coughing, Sister Roberta offers to get her out of class so she can come along. She says she has some say in the school, making her authority useful not as a display of rank but as a way to create time together.

Confidence, Comfort, and Shared Work

At the river, Lizzy talks about the witch’s house, her cats back home, and the kitten Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy had said she could have. She also voices her fear that she may never hear from her father. The quiet conversation feels almost like having her friend Cassie beside her. Its importance lies in the range of what Lizzy can disclose: strange experiences, affection for animals, and the raw uncertainty of being separated from her father. Sister Roberta’s company makes room for those subjects without turning the conversation into a lesson or reprimand.

That trust matters when Lizzy has been hurt and is confined to a cold cell. Sister Roberta comes at night with a blanket, pillow, and warm brick wrapped in a towel. She explains that the Sisters sometimes use the cell while fasting and doing penance, but tells Lizzy she has no need to do penance and is breaking the rules to make her more comfortable. Sitting on the bed, she holds Lizzy and asks, “It wasn’t your fault, now, was it?” She later brings salve for Lizzy’s hurts and tells her to rest. The care is intimate and physical, but also morally clear: Sister Roberta refuses to treat Lizzy’s suffering as proof that she deserves punishment.

Her concern includes attention to what Lizzy cannot easily say. When she sees Lizzy looking as though she has been in a scrape, Sister Roberta asks if there is anything she wants to tell her. She then urges Lizzy to clean up, change her apron, and hurry before appearing before Mother Magdalena. The exchange combines an open offer of confidence with practical guidance about the immediate danger of being seen unprepared. Sister Roberta neither presses Lizzy to disclose nor leaves her without help.

They also work together amid the convent’s ordinary disorder. Sister Roberta kneels with Ramona after the kitchen table collapses, leaving flour, dishes, and broken eggs across the room. She points out that the table needs replacing but that the damaged one must somehow be repaired in the meantime, then calls Lizzy in to help. Lizzy answers that Sister Roberta has given her an idea. The moment connects their relationship to shared problem-solving: Sister Roberta makes Lizzy a participant in addressing a concrete need, not simply a recipient of adult care.

Mercy, Animals, and Religious Difference

When Lizzy believes a kitten is blind, Sister Roberta recognizes the depth of its condition and says that putting it to sleep could be painless. Lizzy asks to keep it. Their exchange does not erase the difference between their responses: Sister Roberta considers ending the animal’s suffering, while Lizzy insists on keeping it. But Sister Roberta’s willingness to speak plainly about the possibility, and Lizzy’s ability to state what she wants, make the exchange one of honest care rather than scolding. The episode also returns to the kitten later as an example of the beautiful things God has given them.

Sister Roberta’s mercy is tested more sharply over Violate Lacey’s baptism. Violate Lacey had been baptized Catholic while in a coma, although she was Methodist, had no paper proving her earlier baptism, and had asked Lizzy to put a bag of asafetida around her neck if the nuns baptized her. Lizzy tries to carry out that request. Sister Roberta finds her at the doorway and tells her, “You could have asked me for it. I would have given it to you.” As Lizzy leaves, Sister Roberta adds, “Asafetida doesn’t void baptism, you know.” She neither abandons Lizzy to the secret nor pretends the remedy can undo the sacrament. Her response acknowledges Violate Lacey’s wishes while distinguishing a gesture of fidelity from an effective religious reversal.

Sister Roberta also promises to protect Lizzy from the consequences of the episode. If Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy asks, she will say that Violate Lacey had been coughing before she went into a coma. The offer places her between Lizzy and institutional authority without turning the disagreement into an attack on the Bishop. Her loyalty is expressed in a specific act of discretion, rooted in her understanding of what Lizzy promised Violate Lacey.

A Faith Practiced Through Care

Sister Roberta articulates a view of God that rejects punishment as the central religious image. While sewing, she tells Lizzy that God is not a punishing or wrathful figure keeping accounts, but a loving God who made people and wants them to enjoy the beautiful things in the world. She names Lizzy’s kitten and baby Elena as examples. The statement connects doctrine to the living attachments around them: an animal Lizzy wants to protect and a baby who needs care.

Lizzy answers that care with care of her own. After Sister Roberta assures her that she is not dying or leaving, and offers a suggestion that might persuade the carpenter to stay, Lizzy offers to watch baby Elena after her last class so Sister Roberta can have free time. She takes Elena, bundled in her cradle, into the garden and sits with her under the arbor. Their bond is therefore not only a one-way refuge for Lizzy. The child-care episode shows Lizzy choosing to lighten Sister Roberta’s responsibilities, while Sister Roberta’s words have helped frame the kitten and Elena as lives to cherish rather than burdens to dispose of.

The relationship also reaches the chapel staircase, where faith and practical judgment meet. Sister Roberta says that faith is what the episode has shown them; for now, she will come down by the only method she considers feasible, and afterward they will practice descending gracefully while showing their faith. Her answer does not require Lizzy to confuse belief with ignoring physical danger. It pairs a practical route with the possibility of later practice, preserving both caution and religious meaning.

Significance of the Relationship

Sister Roberta becomes a dependable counterweight to the convent’s harsher forms of discipline. She can invoke the rules, as when she warns Lizzy to change her apron before facing Mother Magdalena, yet she breaks rules to bring warmth to the cell and uses her influence to release Lizzy from class. Her care is not abstract: it arrives as medicine, coffee, a heated brick, salve, a protective explanation, and time to talk.

For Lizzy, who fears that her father may never write, Sister Roberta offers a relationship grounded in presence rather than promises of permanence. When Lizzy grieves that the carpenter has stopped working on the staircase that she wanted completed for Violate Lacey, Sister Roberta tells her that she is not dying or leaving and offers to help find a way to keep him. The assurance speaks directly to Lizzy’s fear of further loss, while the practical suggestion keeps consolation tied to action. Across these scenes, Sister Roberta’s influence comes from joining tenderness to competence: she listens, makes room, protects confidences, and turns belief into everyday acts of mercy.