Lizzy Enders’s friendship with Mrs. Lacey

Lizzy Enders’s friendship with Mrs. Lacey turns an older woman’s generosity into a rare bond of mutual trust. Mrs. Lacey offers Lizzy companionship and confidence when the child is far from home; Lizzy, in turn, becomes the person Mrs. Lacey chooses to hear her painful history and to accompany her through illness and death. Their friendship is measured not by grand declarations but by gifts, food, private disclosures, a promise about a staircase, and the care with which Lizzy keeps that promise.

Kindness and Companionship

Mrs. Lacey’s friendship with Lizzy takes shape amid the unsettled life of Santa Fe. In the marketplace, Mrs. Lacey gives coins to people who speak with her and sweets to children playing in the streets. She also buys Lizzy a pair of Indian moccasins and candy. Lizzy protests the purchase, but Mrs. Lacey explains her gesture by calling Lizzy her friend; Lizzy accepts that the friendship itself makes the gift welcome. The exchange gives their relationship a concrete form: attention expressed through small acts of generosity, rather than through an abstract promise of affection.

That care continues in the convent. When Lizzy brings Mrs. Lacey breakfast, she finds her sitting by the window; later, Mrs. Lacey has returned to bed. She waves away the goat’s milk Lizzy has brought and asks instead for coffee, saying it helps her neuralgia more than the pillow. Lizzy agrees to fetch it. The request is ordinary, but its intimacy lies in Mrs. Lacey’s direct appeal to her and in Lizzy’s willingness to respond. As Mrs. Lacey’s condition worsens, Lizzy remains attentive to what she wants and to what she can still enjoy, even as the household around them is absorbed by other crises.

Confidence and Shared Wounds

Mrs. Lacey makes Lizzy her confidante because she believes the child may learn from her mistakes. She says she would not tell her miseries to a priest or to the Bishop, but is willing to tell Lizzy; the penance she values is the possibility that her experience might be useful to someone else. This confidence changes the friendship from affectionate companionship into a relationship of counsel. Lizzy is not simply being cared for: she is trusted with a story Mrs. Lacey has carried for years.

That story begins in Richmond, Virginia, where Mrs. Lacey lived with her first husband and her son, Robert Lacey. Her husband was much older, judged her enjoyment of life as wantonness, and was intensely religious; he also beat her. Robert tried to intervene when his father struck her and was himself beaten. Mrs. Lacey tells Lizzy that she stayed because she feared that leaving would mean losing her son. Looking back, she believes she should have found the courage to leave and make a new life for those she loved. Lizzy immediately relates the question of leaving to her own experience of being left by her father. Mrs. Lacey answers with a distinction that becomes central to their exchange: sometimes leaving requires courage when it is done to protect the people one loves.

The consequences Mrs. Lacey recounts are devastating. When Robert was nearly sixteen, he defended her during another severe beating, and the conflict ended with him killing his father. Mrs. Lacey later married John. She and John remained in New Mexico after the Confederates were defeated at Glorieta Pass because he was assigned to stay; he died about eight years before the conversation. Although Lizzy suggests that Robert might have gone to war even if his mother had left, Mrs. Lacey cannot release herself from the belief that her decision helped bring father and son into conflict. Lizzy lets her cry and tells her that it was not her fault. The scene makes their care reciprocal: Mrs. Lacey offers Lizzy language for thinking about abandonment, while Lizzy listens to the guilt that Mrs. Lacey has never been able to set down.

The Staircase and a Promise

Mrs. Lacey connects her remorse to the new chapel staircase. She gives money to the church because she hopes the completed staircase will redeem Robert’s soul: she believes that once the work is finished, he will rest, be forgiven for killing his father, and enter heaven. The staircase is therefore more than a construction project in her understanding of it. It carries her hope of doing something, however belatedly, for the son she loved and the act she cannot forgive herself for.

She asks Lizzy to promise not to leave the convent until the staircase is complete, even if Mrs. Lacey dies first. Lizzy agrees. The request places a difficult weight on their friendship: Mrs. Lacey is asking Lizzy to remain in a place where she is lonely and unhappy, and to stay for a purpose that is bound to Mrs. Lacey’s own hope. Lizzy later visits Robert’s grave at Mrs. Lacey’s request. The visit also takes her away from the girls who are making her life difficult. Sunday afternoons and evenings have become especially painful since Mama died, bringing a sense of family-loss and homesickness that Lizzy cannot name. Her visit thus answers Mrs. Lacey’s request while meeting a need of her own: it gives her a reason to leave the convent during a time when grief presses especially hard.

Illness, Death, and Continuing Presence

Mrs. Lacey’s illness makes the friendship more urgent and places its promises under strain. While Lizzy is away, Ramona tells her that Mrs. Lacey is seriously ill and that the Bishop has baptized her while she was out of her mind. Lizzy learns that her friend’s worst fear has come true: she has become Catholic through a baptism performed when she could not understand or consent to it. The news is painful not only because Mrs. Lacey is near death, but because Lizzy cannot reach her in the confusion that has overtaken her. Their earlier confidence has created a closeness that illness now makes frighteningly vulnerable.

Later, Ramona wakes Lizzy because Mrs. Lacey has asked for her. Lizzy goes to her room in bare feet, kneels beside the bed, and is allowed to be alone with her after the nuns leave. Mrs. Lacey grips the asafetida bag and thanks Lizzy, again affirming their friendship. She asks whether the staircase is progressing. Lizzy lies that it will be finished by Christmas, giving her a date to hold onto; Mrs. Lacey imagines herself in heaven with Robert by then, in the Methodist heaven of her own faith. She also describes a dream in which Lizzy has a hospitable home, much land, and many children, but lives somewhere other than New Mexico. Her vision offers Lizzy an image of a future beyond the convent and its present sorrows.

Mrs. Lacey asks whether Saint Joseph has come to build the staircase. When Lizzy says no, Mrs. Lacey jokes about the girls who would fail to recognize him, then asks Lizzy to post a letter to her father. Those are her last words to Lizzy. As her grip loosens, Lizzy cannot cry; she has already spent her tears grieving for Mama, though she feels the pain of this loss. The wind that rises around the house, garden, walls, trees, and street becomes, in Lizzy’s telling, an upward spiral carrying Mrs. Lacey to her Methodist heaven. The image joins the material staircase to the movement of death without resolving whether either is miraculous.

What the Friendship Leaves Behind

The friendship leaves Lizzy with a promise to keep and with a model of care that does not depend on certainty. She cannot know that Mrs. Lacey’s hope for Robert will be fulfilled, and she cannot undo the baptism or the illness that separates them. She can listen, comfort her, visit Robert’s grave, and tell her what she needs to hear about the staircase. The difference between Mrs. Lacey’s conviction and Lizzy’s practical acts gives their bond its emotional force: Lizzy honors what matters to her friend even when she cannot share or verify the beliefs sustaining it.

After Mrs. Lacey’s death, Lizzy experiences a sudden peace and senses an unseen presence close to her. She wonders whether it is Mama or Mrs. Lacey, but does not claim to know. The moment matters precisely because the identity remains uncertain. Their friendship has not supplied Lizzy with a settled faith; instead, it has made room for her to accept an experience she cannot explain without dismissing it. Mrs. Lacey’s care and confidence remain part of Lizzy’s emotional life, alongside her grief and her promise, as the staircase reaches completion.