The Wednesday Sisters Page 19

  It was quiet, just the patter of rain starting up as we crossed the street. Then we heard the piano, haunting notes. As we drew nearer, it was unmistakable: the music came from inside the old place.

  In the darkness around back, with the streetlights blocked by trees and the moon well sequestered behind rain clouds, the tinkle of piano notes wafted in the stillness, with only the occasional shhhhew of wheels on wet asphalt as a car passed on the street, beyond the trees. I started shivering. I was wearing only a light sweater, no protection against the rain and the chill and the tension of waiting. Danny gave me his suit coat, but still I was cold.

  It seemed a long time before the piano music ceased and the wandering light appeared at the back of the house, in one of the upstairs rooms. The room grew brighter in the darkness, and then we could see her, a girl with long flowing hair standing at the window, the daughter returning to her piano.

  Not a girl, though. A woman. We could see the silhouette of her, though we couldn’t see the details of her face.

  Danny whispered that he’d never imagined a woman prowling around there at night, but I had. Despite my disbelief in ghosts, I’d come to imagine this person was somehow connected with the widow who’d lived in the house.

  The woman disappeared after a moment, and we waited for a long time, beginning to wonder if she’d gone down the main stairs and out the front this time, eluding us again. But a faint light appeared at the top of the servants’ stairs, finally, and paused there. Danny tapped my shoulder, silently pointing to what I could see now in the little bit of light was an open window, just by a back door. We moved closer, crouched behind some bushes. It wasn’t until the woman began slowly to descend the stairs, the light fading in the upstairs window, growing stronger in the downstairs one, that I imagined my own feet on the worn wooden stairs, my own fingers on the candlestick, my own private sadness being observed.

  “Danny,” I whispered, and he turned to me just as the candlestick appeared in the window, casting its weak light on a table against the wall. I put my cold hands on Danny’s cold cheeks and kissed him, turning us both away from the window.

  The candlelight blinked out then, leaving the darkness total, and as our eyes adjusted, we could just make out the lonely shadow of a woman climbing through the window, quietly shutting it and setting off around the corner of the broken-down old place, to the park that had once been its lawn and, beyond it, to Ally’s house.

  THAT WAS THE FALL we switched from Wednesday mornings at ten to Sundays at sunrise. “Here’s the thing,” Ally said the third Wednesday after Kath had started working for the accountant. “No offense to the rest of you, but Kath, she’s just so . . .”

  “She knows when a manuscript is ‘just a li’l bit catawampus,’” I said.

  “Out of kilter,” Linda said.

  “She’d like to tell you how you might could fix it,” Brett said.

  “And she sure can make you laugh when you’re just about to tune up,” Ally said.

  “Or have conniptions!”

  “Tell the news!”

  “Throw a hissy!”

  “Pitch a hissy. Not throw. Pitch.”

  We’d just have to find a new time to meet, we agreed. Weekends, because Kath would be “all tuckered out” after work.

  But Arselia couldn’t sit for us on weekends, there was that problem. And with catechism and Sunday school and church—I’d just signed up to be a lector at Saint Thomas Aquinas—and everything else?

  “That leaves Sundays at sunrise,” Linda said with a sigh, not really meaning it.

  But Brett said, “Sundays at sunrise, then.”

  “Our Lady of the Park Bench,” I said.

  I STILL REMEMBER that first Wednesday Sister Sunday: getting up before dawn, moving quietly through the darkened house, trying so hard not to wake Danny or the children. Danny waking anyway, and coming up behind me as I stood watching the coffee bubble up into the clear top knob of the percolator. Him putting his arms around my waist and kissing my neck, whispering in my ear, “Come back to bed.”

  I felt his warm hands and smelled the coffee and the toast browning in the toaster, and I half wanted to climb back into bed with him, but I said I couldn’t. “I’m meeting the girls in the park, remember?”

  “Right,” he said, exhaling frustration. “Of course.

  “Don’t go out before the sun rises,” he said.

  I said I wouldn’t, and he went back to bed then, and I peeked in a minute later—he was sleeping again—and I took my coffee mug and my toast and I walked out the front door, into the moonlit park.

  As I sat at the picnic table in the moon shadow of the dilapidated mansion, watching for the sun to rise, I thought of Kath. Kath and Lee. I imagined Lee arriving at her house—their house? I imagined Kath going to the grocery store after our gathering, Lee helping her unload the bags when she got home, the whole Montgomery clan going off to church as a family, which they planned to do. Lee staying for supper and going back to his apartment only after the children went to bed. I wondered what the other Kathy thought of this arrangement. I wondered if he was still seeing her. Even Jeff, who worked with him, wasn’t quite sure. He never saw Lee and the other Kathy together at the hospital.

  Not long before sunrise, a slim shadow of darker darkness moved toward me from across the park, but I wasn’t scared. Even in the darkness I knew it was Linda. She sat next to me and looked at the mansion too.

  “Her daughter died of typhoid,” she said, and when I turned slightly toward her, she said, “The woman who built that house. She was from a big political family; her stepson was governor, I think. Her husband died when she was in her early forties, and three months later her fifteen-year-old daughter died of typhoid. Her only child. Like the Stanfords’ son. Fifteen. Typhoid. Only child.”

  We sat silently for a moment, watching the shambles of the house begin to emerge from the darkness as the sky lightened in the east.

  “This park always makes me think of my mom,” she whispered. “It’s what she would have done if any of us had died, I think. She would have made a park for children to enjoy, and named it after us.”

  She sat beside me, straight-backed and square-shouldered as always. “Even when she was really sick, she used to make herself get out of bed to take us to the park.”

  I set my hand gently over hers, and she intertwined her fingers with mine.

  Across the park, the shadows of Ally and Brett and Kath appeared, approaching us together, side by side by side.

  “Someday I’m going to do something like this for my mom,” Linda said. “I’m going to make something permanent. Something forever. A park in her honor. A college. A library.”

  “A book,” I whispered, as Ally and Brett and Kath reached us, as they slipped onto the picnic table benches as quietly as latecomers slipping into Mass.

  “Yes,” Linda said just as the first sharp ray of the sun sparked at the horizon. “A book.”

  “A book,” Ally echoed, as if it were right there in a missalette in front of her, her response.

  And Kath and Brett repeated after her, “A book.” And the dawn broke, the sun cresting the horizon, bringing to life the detail around us: the two brick chimneys rising proudly from either end of the long mansion roof, the sturdy trunks and bright red and orange and gold leaves of the trees all around us, our five faces smiling at each other, not sleepy despite the hour. Kath brushed a dried leaf from the table, then, and Brett pulled the worst of the splinters and tossed them onto the ground, and we set our pages in front of us, and we began again.

  KATH HARDLY WROTE those next months, not even in her journal. She was emotionally exhausted, all her energy sapped by the demands of motherhood—taking care of Anna Page, Lee-Lee, and Lacy with no real help from Lee—and the drudgery of her work for the accountant. She needed to change jobs, Linda kept saying. “Why don’t you find something you enjoy doing, Kath? You could be . . . I don’t know. A journalist or an editor or a buyer for a bookst
ore. You could probably run a bookstore.” Then one Sunday in November, Linda arrived at the park looking like the canary that ate the cat. She’d met a woman at an AAUW meeting who knew an editor who would be looking to hire someone that spring. She wasn’t quite sure of the details, but it was in publishing. Wouldn’t Kath love to work in publishing?

  “In the spring?” Kath said doubtfully.

  “The person she needs to replace is getting married in the spring. I think she’s accepting résumés, although she won’t interview until after the New Year.”

  Despite the long lead time, Kath got all in a twist right then. She’d never interviewed for anything, she said. And when we pointed out that she’d interviewed for all those jobs before she started working for the accountant, she said, “Anything that matters. Any job I might actually want.”

  MY OWN LIFE wasn’t as complicated as Kath’s that winter, but it was complicated enough. For one thing, being a lector at my church was turning out to be more time-consuming than I’d expected. Just a few minutes reading aloud during a Mass I would have attended anyway, I’d thought when I volunteered, and I was thrilled to do it, in part because only men had been allowed to read when I was growing up. I hadn’t counted on the psychological energy it took to stand up in front of a whole church full of college graduates, though, their squirming children letting me know just how tedious my version of a Letter from Paul to the Corinthians was.

  The first Sunday I read was, shall we say, eventful. I tripped climbing up to the lectern and went sprawling at Father Pat’s feet. That got everyone’s attention as surely as Sister Margaret’s whistle had when I was in grade school—she put her thumb and middle finger to her mouth and shot out a sound that even the boys playing football on the big field couldn’t fail to hear. When I was in the third grade, I’d asked her how she did it—I was the only girl ever to ask, she said—and the first time I’d belted out a good one, she’d laughed and said, “Delightfully unladylike! Now you’d best be careful how you use it, Frances, or you’ll end up an old nun like me!”

  With all those people staring at me from the pews, I picked myself up as gracefully as I could, straightened my glasses, and stood at the lectern. I could hardly find the page where I was to start the reading, even though it was marked with a ribbon. My voice croaked as I began. You could feel everyone suppressing their laughter, or holding their breaths.

  The reading was from the prophet Isaiah, and I hadn’t yet recovered from my inauspicious beginning when I read, “‘None shall be weary nor . . . nor stumble . . .’” I choked up for a minute, too embarrassed to read on. I looked down at Danny, sitting with Maggie and Davy in the second pew, working hard not to laugh. At the whole congregation behind him.

  I made a silly face and shrugged, and a rather delightful chuckle rippled through the church.

  “‘None shall slumber nor sleep,’” I read on, cutting a glance toward Father Pat, who was known to doze off on occasion when he was assisting rather than saying the Mass himself. That got another chuckle, along with some poking of spouses who were known dozers, too.

  When I’d finished reading and sat in the pew again, Danny took my hand and squeezed it, and whispered that I’d done a great job. I closed my eyes, prepared to have a few stern words with my God—privately, of course. But the God that came to me in that closed-eyed darkness looked more like a Wednesday Sister than like a stern old bearded Father, and she was chuckling, too.

  All sorts of people stopped me after that Mass to say they’d enjoyed my reading. Even Father Pat had laughed, they said. And though I never did quite feel comfortable up at that lectern, in no time I went from sitting anonymously in the pews every Sunday to knowing so many parishioners that I was forever bumping into them at the parish office and the grocery store.

  I was surprised to find myself controversial, too: a woman reader. Just when women had finally found our way to participating in the Mass—not reading the Gospels, that was still reserved for men, just doing the non-Gospel readings—the Vatican issued a revised Roman Missal, which restricted us. The NOW Ecumenical Task Force on Women and Religion burned part of the missal in protest that spring, and that fall it seemed half the nuns in America were in an uproar, the heads of seven orders meeting with Catholic bishops in Washington to demand a stronger voice in the Church. A nun, a woman who’d dedicated her life to the Church, couldn’t read the Gospels when a mere deacon could, just because he was a man? That didn’t seem right.

  We learned that Danny was going to Canada that fall, too. His company was looking precarious—they had rushed to release the 1103, a breakthrough MOS memory product with four times the capacity of the original 1101, but as Danny’s boss said privately, “Sometimes the thing just doesn’t remember.” Andy feared the chips would all come back in returns and it would be the company’s death. But the manufacturing arm of Bell Canada offered an amount equal to the company’s entire net worth to be a second source for producing the 1103s, and Danny was being sent to Ottawa as part of the transfer team.

  “Just temporarily. A few months, maybe,” he said.

  “A few months!”

  “Six or eight at most, I hope.”

  I thought we ought to move with him—what would we do without him?—but he insisted that it wouldn’t be that long, and that if we moved we’d end up living in a shabby apartment in the heart of one of those dreadful Canadian winters. “You’d be miserable having to bundle up the kids every time you stepped out the door, Frankie,” he said. “And with no friends, no park.” He’d be working all the time, anyway, he said. It wasn’t like we’d ever see each other, even if we all moved.

  The first few weeks Danny was away, I called him at his Ottawa apartment each night just before eight—eleven his time—so Mags and Davy could say good night to him, and he was always there. But he started getting back later and later as the weeks dragged on into months. I’d call every half hour, at eight-thirty, at nine; he didn’t like to call me lest the phone wake the children, and no amount of assurance from me would convince him it would not.

  He’s working late, I would tell myself on those nights. He wants to finish up his work there so he can come home. I tried not to imagine him out having fun with his cohorts while the children kept me housebound and exhausted. I tried not to worry that he’d met another woman, that he was drinking his evening scotch with her. But things had been off between us lately—not on the surface but underneath. I can see now that it started that morning he found me writing, the moment I confessed to telling Bob I was writing a novel, but at the time all I could see was the strain that had crept into our lovemaking since I’d gotten my diaphragm, which, with the exception of that morning after he’d had the breakthrough on the MOS chip, I’d been using religiously.

  One night when I got no answer at his apartment at eleven, at midnight, at one in the morning—4 A.M. his time—I was sure he was in some other woman’s arms. Some mask designer, I thought, who had a life of her own, money of her own, who wouldn’t have to turn down the heat in the wintertime to save up for a second car. I don’t know why I didn’t call his office earlier that night—maybe because I rarely did even when he was here, because I hated to interrupt his work. Or maybe because I, like Kath, didn’t really want to know. But when I finally summoned the courage to phone his office, he answered on the first ring, his voice full of that funny croaky roughness it gets when he works intently for a long time.

  With all that time alone while Danny was out of town—he came only for the occasional weekend—I wrote and wrote so that, by the end of 1970, I declared myself “done” with “Michelangelo’s Ghost.” Again. (There’s a wonderful quote by the French poet Paul Valéry—compliments of Brett, of course: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” We were all beginning to see that “done” was a relative thing, not so much “finished” as “can’t bear to read a single word again.”) I made a new list of agents, and I was more prepared for rejection this time: Maggie had made me a little squid
out of a toilet paper roll, complete with a black piece of paper inside, which, when you blew through the tube, came out as the little guy’s “ink.” When I got rejection letters, I could just pull out my squid and ink them!

  The day I sent off my new batch of queries, Maggie lost her first tooth. She didn’t want to leave it under her pillow for the tooth fairy, she wanted to keep it herself. “I don’t need money,” she said. “I still have my dollar Grandpa gave me for my birthday.” She would leave a note under her pillow asking the tooth fairy to let her keep the tooth, she decided. If the tooth fairy promised not to take it, she would put it under her pillow the next night. If the fairy said she’d need to take the tooth to leave the money, no deal. A small thing, that first lost tooth, but I missed sharing it with Danny, missed enjoying together our daughter’s odd spin on it.

  In mid-February, the phone rang: an agent calling to ask for my manuscript. No need to ink that! One part of me thought it meant nothing, that he liked the idea of the novel but when he started reading he would pass, and another part of me was worried: Who was this agent? What did I know about any of this? Five rejections poured in over the next couple of weeks, only confirming my fears. But then a second request for the manuscript came, another small measure of hope.

  One afternoon later that month Maggie and her friend Karen Geisel, along with Linda’s Julie and Jamie, proudly informed me they were writing a book together. I made all the right noises—their writing was so neat, and their illustrations lovely. (“Illustrations,” I called them, not “stick figure crayon drawings.”) Karen, comfortable now, said they were going to send it to her grandpa when it was done, and he would publish it for them.

  Me: “Is your grandpa a publisher?” Shamelessly milking this seven-year-old for information, thinking maybe I did have a connection to a publisher, albeit a tenuous one.

  Karen: “No, he’s Dr. Seuss.”