Missing Sisters Read online

  “You know I hate this,” said Alice as they stood in the pantry, waiting for their turn.

  “Twenty bucks,” said Naomi inspiringly. “Think what you can do with your share of the first prize. Twenty bucks.”

  “And now Alice Colossus to perform My Fair Lady, as the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle!” screeched Sally through the ancient PA system.

  Wendy Beasley lurched over the keyboard as if she were having stomach cramps and battered the opening chords loud enough for Alice to catch the musical cue. She sang while squatting like an Iroquois and pretending to rub her hands before a fire. Actually my voice is pretty good, she thought. Nobody was laughing, which was an improvement over the time she’d done it with the boys from Saint Mary’s of Albany. “And life could be so heavenly!”

  Ruth Peters came up to the edge of the stage. “Alice!” she cooed. “Hi, Alice!” Everyone laughed.

  Alice just went on with the next line. Ruth remembered the words, too, and sang along as she scrambled up the steps. She held Alice’s hand, and they sang to the end of the song. The little dance Alice had planned was ruined, but it was okay. Ruth was having such a good time.

  When she finished, the girls began to shout and cheer. They were a very enthusiastic audience. They hammered their feet on the floor and called in rhythm, “NA-O-MI! NA-O-MI!” Alice would have preferred their calling “AL-ICE, AL-ICE,” but as long as her part was done she didn’t care. She swept off stage and Sally intoned, “Eliza Doolittle makes friends with a speech therapist named Henry Higgins, who teaches her how to speak clearly and then takes her to a fancy ball. Naomi Matthews as Eliza coming home from the ball.”

  So her last name was still Matthews. Hmmm. Alice wondered why. She watched Naomi twirl in from the dark shadows in her silly-looking bedsheet. The audience oohed and aahed. Wendy Beasley slaved away at the crisp runs of the introduction, and Naomi began to shrill out her part. When she got to the final line, she improvised a cancan kick by picking up her sheets and jackknifing her legs out like a single demented Rockette. The crowd shrieked—praising, rejoicing, and being glad. Naomi warbled out her last note, squeezing every second she could out of it, and even Alice in the mercy of her deafness could tell Naomi was a half-tone sharp. The girls of the 1968 second summer session of Camp Saint Theresa weren’t, on the whole, as discriminating as Alice. They went wild.

  They stamped. They wolf-whistled. They called, “NA-O-MI! NA-O-MI!” Naomi beckoned Alice back on stage for another bow. Alice and Ruth Peters came out. Ruth bowed more times than anyone.

  Third prize went to Cabin Saint Dymphna, for singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” in harmony. Third prize had no money attached. Naomi and Alice got second prize, which was worth only twenty-five bucks—ten bucks each and five for Wendy Beasley. Then Wendy Beasley walked off with the first prize of fifty dollars. Without so much as a word of friendly warning, she had entered herself as a separate act. She had played “Malaguea,” all eight pages of it, in just under ninety seconds, even the slow part. The traitor.

  But Alice hadn’t ever expected to have as much as twenty bucks, so it wasn’t too big a disappointment to pocket ten. Naomi was so thrilled with cleaning up what she called the popular support of Camp Saint Theresa that she didn’t even mind Alice trailing along afterward when she met her glitzier friends. “You know you have a good voice,” said Naomi, not too grudgingly. “I mean you can’t understand much, but it has a pretty sound.”

  “You’ve got a great voice, Naomi,” said one of the other girls in an enthusiastic tizzy, bouncing and beaming fatuously at Alice.

  “I’m not Naomi,” said Alice.

  “She didn’t say Naomi,” said Naomi. “She said Naomi.”

  From time to time, Alice found herself in a hearing dead end. Usually she just shrugged and accepted the fact that she couldn’t figure out what was going on. But Ruth Peters was still clutching Alice’s left hand. With her higher voice she clarified for Alice what was being said. “She’s calling you Miami, Alice,” said Ruth. “Not Naomi.”

  “Miami?” said Alice.

  “That’s what they were all shouting when you finished,” said Naomi. “I didn’t get it, either. What’s Miami got to do with the price of beans?”

  “Isn’t that her name?” said Pam, one of the glitzier girls.

  “It’s Alice,” said Naomi. “Everybody knows that.”

  “No,” said Pam. “Why’d you tell everybody it was Miami?”

  “I never did,” said Alice.

  “You did too.”

  “Nobody don’t talk to me,” said Alice. “So, like, when?”

  “When you won the basketball competition, most dunks from a standing start,” said the girl in an aggrieved voice. “Stop pulling our legs, Miami. Just because you can sing.”

  “What basketball thing?”

  “Last session, the basketball thing.”

  “I wasn’t here last session,” said Alice.

  “She wasn’t here last session,” said Naomi. “You’ve got a screw loose, Pam.”

  “You were too,” said Pam. A couple of the other girls nodded and shrugged in a single motion. “Don’t give me that.”

  “I was not,” said Alice. “I was home.”

  There were marshmallows over an open fire. Most of the camp had flocked there after the talent show. Alice, Naomi, Ruth, and the older girls stood aside, mired in their misunderstandings. Tiny red sparks went zigging up, burning out before they got even eight or ten feet high. Above, the stars were salty white, and the wind rushed through the trees with the sound of water. “All I know,” said the challenged Pam, who could be as energetically offended as she could be delighted, “is that I was here for both sessions, and Miami won the basketball jump award. And there were enough girls there then who can back me up on this now. That’s why people were chanting Mi-am-i! when you were finished singing.”

  “I thought they were saying Na-o-mi,” said Alice.

  “They said that later,” said Pam. The other girls were drifting toward the fire.

  “How’d she speak?” said Naomi suddenly.

  “Regular,” said Pam. “Why?”

  “Alice can’t speak regular,” said Naomi. “She’s got a defect. Her tongue is too big or something, and she’s deaf.”

  “Only partly,” said Alice sharply.

  “You mean that’s not an act?” said Pam. “I thought she was just being silly.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Alice coldly, and turned toward the fire.

  “Sorry,” called Pam. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  The fire wasn’t any fun. It brought back too many memories of the retreat house burning down and Sister Vincent de Paul getting scorched. Alice wandered out onto the dock. The lake was a dark mirror. Above it, the stars were tiny as grains of sand, yet they seemed to light up the whole sky. The lake surface, though bright in its own way, was too active to reflect the stars. It stirred in its bed, almost imperceptibly. Alice had an idea of diving into the water, even with her stupid Eliza Doolittle costume on. They hadn’t even been clapping for her, but for some girl named Miami they were mixing her up with. Every little happiness got shattered into smithereens. Nothing was fair. She hoped she never saw Naomi Matthews again. She couldn’t wait till tomorrow to go home.

  THE TWILIGHT ZONE

  Alice did not consider herself a quick thinker. But a few days later, back in the baking summer heat of the third floor of the Sacred Heart Home for Girls, she had to congratulate herself on her initiative. She was looking at the addresses she’d collected at camp. On a scrap of notebook paper were scrawled the home addresses of Sally the reluctant novice, an RFD route in Feura Bush; of Wendy Beasley in Schaghticoke; of Naomi Matthews in Watervliet. At the bottom, printed in Sally’s neatest nun-in-training script, was the address of Miami Shaw: 86 South Allen Street, Albany.

  It had been easy to find the Miami Shaw address. Alice had simply told Sally the truth. People were confusing Alice with a camper who’d been enro
lled in the previous session. Alice wanted to write her a letter. Could Sally dig up the address in the office? The extra hug Alice gave Sally ahead of time was only mildly a bribe. When Sally came back with the goods, the next hug was genuine.

  Alice sat on her bed. During the summer the home was unusually quiet; some girls were always away at the camp, and the sisters rotated supervising the rest. Alice chewed on the long pointed collar of her striped shirt. She told herself: Think. Think. But she wasn’t really sure what she should be thinking about.

  Why and how there could be somebody living ten miles away who looked like her, that was what to think about. But Alice couldn’t get past just the fact of it. Was it really true? How could it be? It seemed like a miracle. It would’ve been good to be able to drift downstairs to the kitchen now and peel potatoes with Sister Vincent de Paul. The subject could’ve come up. What would Sister Vincent de Paul have to say about it? Try as she might, Alice couldn’t imagine. In her mind Sister Vincent de Paul opened her mouth with an expression of mighty strong opinion, but there wasn’t any way of telling what the opinion was. Short of asking her, of course. But how to do that?

  It was six months. Six long months since Sister Vincent de Paul had left. Now the sun pelted upstate New York with blasts of hot air, lashings of buttery heat. The ice-rain storm was a distant impossibility, an adventure story that had already become boring by overtelling. Now the tar on the roof of the home grew sticky and melted in the heat, and the smell eddied in through the gray screens at nighttime, followed by the sweet vegetable-rot aroma of the weedy saplings that grew in the alley. It was a different season, and Alice supposed she was a different person. But she would’ve liked Sister Vincent de Paul there anyway. A new nun, a young, smooth-faced, cranky one named Sister Paul the Hermit, had come in and taken over the cooking. The girls called her Sister Paul the Hermit Crab. That her name was somewhat like Sister Vincent de Paul’s made Alice anxious, as if one nun could blot out another just like that, by having a similar name.

  So Alice sat and pondered. In the absence of Sister Vincent de Paul she had few choices. She kept the folded-up address list and the ten-dollar bill she’d won as her share of second prize in the talent show in the little Camp Saint Theresa wallet, which she’d decorated with a holy card. The bill and the holy card and the address list seemed to operate on each other like ingredients in a stew. Having no other ideas, Alice decided to act.

  On Thursday there was an outing to Thacher Park. Sister John Boss herself was going to drive one of the station wagons, and Sister Francis Xavier the other. Most of the girls loved to swim in the pool, especially as it was the custom to stop at the Tollhouse for ice cream on the way home. Alice signed herself up to go, and then went into the kitchen to speak with Sister Paul the Hermit.

  “If I decide not to go, if I want to stay here and help you make supper, can I?” said Alice. “Sister Vincent de Paul always used to say yes.”

  “Oh, the trials,” said Sister Paul the Hermit. “I know you’re the special case, but you’re going to have to speak more clearly, child of God, if you expect me to understand. They tell me you can; you’re just lazy.”

  “I’m not lazy,” shouted Alice.

  “I heard that,” said Sister Paul the Hermit. “Now what’s the rest?”

  Alice repeated her proposal. She was counting on Sister Paul the Hermit’s being too new to have learned the system completely, and she was right. (So why’d they write on her report card that Alice was a slow learner when the stupid nun couldn’t even figure out how things went?) “It’s okay by me,” said Sister Paul the Hermit. “But I’m warning you. I’m not the world’s best company today. It’s that time of month.”

  “If you don’t see me here in fifteen minutes, I went swimming and don’t worry,” said Alice. “But you gotta sign this paper that says it’s okay. Thanks, Sister Paul the Hermit.”

  “I wish,” sighed the nun. “The hermit part, I mean.”

  With the permission form in hand, Alice went and dawdled in the parking lot with the other girls. Esther Thessaly and Rachel Luke were playing jump rope. “Fancy lady dressed in red, sleeps each night in a different bed. People want to know why is it, how many bedrooms did she visit. One. Two. Three.” The fancy lady visited fourteen bedrooms before Esther tripped on the rope. Then the nuns swept down the concrete steps and clucked and pummeled the kids into the cars, including Alice. She waited, and just before the door closed she hopped out again. “I’m going to stay. Sister Paul the Hermit signed for me,” she said. She thrust the paper at Sister John Boss, who was annoyed.

  “Don’t be fickle,” said Sister John Boss. “Get in the car.”

  “I feel carsick,” said Alice, and then, daringly, “It’s my time of the month.”

  “Oh, lordy,” said Sister John Boss. “I hope not. Not already. You’re only a babe.”

  “Wanna stay home too!” screamed Ruth Peters, trying to scramble over laps to follow Alice.

  “You stay where you are, Ruth. You need some sunlight,” snapped Sister John Boss. “Well, all right, Alice, if you’re not feeling well, go and lie down. Sister Paul the Hermit will get you an aspirin if you need one, and we’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ll come up to check things over then. You understand?”

  “Gotcha,” said Alice.

  The cars left. The neighborhood sighed in relief; it liked it when the girls went away for a while. Alice ran and found her wallet, which she had hidden under the lilac bushes. Then, remembering her expedition to Saint Mary’s in February to deliver the My Fair Lady music, she hurried along the sidewalk to where she’d caught the bus.

  Only this time she had ten bucks in her pocket. She could plan a more efficient disobedience now. She corraled all her available courage, and invented some she didn’t really have, then leaned down at the window of a waiting taxicab. “I need to go to Albany, number eighty-six South Allen Street,” she said. “It’s an emergency.”

  The cabdriver opened the door and said, “Jump in, sister.” He didn’t seem to have any problem understanding her. For a minute she wondered if he thought she was a nun. No, he was just being friendly, calling her sister.

  “You got the cash for a ride all the way to Albany?” said the man.

  “Is ten dollars enough?” said Alice.

  “You’ll get change,” he said, and pulled the sleek yellow car out into the stream of traffic.

  The window was down, and air splashed Alice’s long hair into a frenzy worthy of Hollywood. The noise made talking difficult, for which she was grateful. She didn’t have a plan for when she got to South Allen Street. She might just turn around and come right back. She just wanted to see where this Miami Shaw lived. It would be like knowing another possible life she could have had if she’d wanted. Who knew what it would be like? She was just curious.

  There was the Hudson River, flat and brown in the heat. Kids were fishing, their lines going down into the water amid rejected car tires and a scum of greenish froth. Then came the big, white cliff-face of Montgomery Wards’ warehouse, and before long the taxicab was zipping through downtown Albany traffic. Alice didn’t feel as if she were pushing the limits of her guardian angel’s jurisdiction this time. Albany seemed perkily familiar. There was the monumental State Capitol building. There the State Education Building with a well-behaved grove of Greek columns lined up in front. Men were walking around in short-sleeved shirts, ties loosened, buying hot dogs and Cokes at pushcarts. It made Alice feel safe, to see government guys at lunch.

  Then the taxicab careered through a park, with curving roads and gentle hills, until it came out on a broad street lined with dying elm trees and huge red or yellow brick houses. “Is this South Allen Street?” asked Alice.

  “No. I’m going to have to stop and ask at a gas station. It’s around here somewhere,” said the driver. “My regular stomping ground is Troy, dolly. Give me a sec; I’ll figure it out.”

  The young guy at the pump answered the driver’s question. For
a second Alice thought it was the boy with the guitar, the one who had befriended her on the bus from Troy last winter. But before she could take a second look to be sure, the taxicab was zipping off again. Nobody in a taxicab does anything slowly, do they, thought Alice. I haven’t had time for the next step to occur to me yet—and here we are. South Allen Street.

  She gave the number again. The driver pulled over. “Here you are,” he said, and gave her more than five dollars in change. Well! She could even afford to take a cab home! This wasn’t such a difficult life out here.

  She stood on the sidewalk. The house was the highest one in sight; it crowned a steep hill, the front slope of which was dense with brush and an ample supply of litter caught at its roots. A long flight of steps, made of wood and grounded in crumbling concrete, leaned to the right as it climbed the incline. Above, Alice could see the roof of a porch—the hill was too steep to see into the front yard without mounting the steps—and the house rose overhead, clapboards a little loose, windows open for the breeze, and a spike-roofed turret lifting skyward. It was the sloppiest house in the neighborhood. Alice fell in love with it.

  But what was she supposed to do now, just stand there and look at it?

  Before she could decide, an inflatable beach ball came bounding off the front lawn and began to roll down the steps as if trying to escape the kids who were playing with it. Alice ran forward and caught it neatly as it bounced off the lower steps, heading for sure suicide in the busy street. “Thanks,” said a boy’s voice overhead. Alice looked up. “I thought you were eating lunch at Patty’s today,” he said. He was about the size of Ruth Peters, but a different color and about a hundred years ahead in confidence. “Throw me the ball.”

  “Hi,” said Alice.

  “Hi,” he said. “What’d Patty do to your hair now? You look like Mrs. Munster.”

  “Who’re you?” she said.

  “Come on, Miami. Give me the ball,” he answered.