The searchlight of Ms. Perl’s prose also tends to wash out the girls’ features. She uses catchphrases to describe the girls, calling them “mysterious” or “loners,” and at one point goes so far as to say they were “attracted to the pagan aspect of the Catholic Church.” What that phrase meant exactly we were never sure, but many people felt it had to do with the girls’ attempt to save the family elm.
Spring had finally arrived. Trees budded. The frozen streets, in thawing, cracked. Mr. Bates recorded new potholes, as he did every year, sending a typed list to the Department of Transportation. In early April, the Parks Department returned to replace ribbons around condemned trees, this time using not red but yellow ribbons printed with the words “This tree has been diagnosed with Dutch elm disease and will be removed in order to inhibit further spread. By order of Parks Dept.” You had to circle a tree three times to read the whole sentence. The elm in the Lisbons’ front yard (see Exhibit #1) was among the condemned, and with the weather still cool a truckful of men arrived to cut it down.
We knew the technique. First a man in a fiberglass cage ascended into the treetop and, after boring a hole into the bark, put his ear to it as though listening for the tree’s failing pulse; then, without ceremony, he began clipping smaller branches, which fell into the grasping orange gloves of the men below. They stacked the branches neatly, as though they were two-by-fours, and then fed them into the buzz saw in the truck’s back. Showers of sawdust shot into the street, and years later, when we found ourselves in old-fashioned bars, the sawdust on the floors always brought back to us the cremation of our trees. After denuding the trunk, the men left to denude others, and for a time the tree stood blighted, trying to raise its stunted arms, a creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along. In that death-row state, the trees resembled the Baldinos’ barbecue, and we understood that Sammy the Shark had fashioned his escape tunnel with great foresight, to look not as trees did now but as they were coming to look, so that if he was ever forced to escape in the future, he could leave through one of a hundred identical stumps.
Normally, people came out to say good-bye to their trees. It wasn’t uncommon to see a family gathered on the lawn at a safe distance from the chain saws, a tired mom and dad with two or three long-haired teenagers, and a poodle with a ribbon in its hair. People felt they owned the trees. Their dogs had marked them daily. Their children had used them for home plate. The trees had been there when they’d moved in, and had promised to be there when they moved out. But when the Parks Department came to cut them down, it was clear our trees were not ours but the city’s, to do with as it wished.
The Lisbons, however, didn’t come out during the de-branching. The girls looked on from an upstairs window, their faces cold-cream white. Lunging and retreating, the elevated man sheared off the elm’s great green crown. He chopped off the sick limb that had sagged and sprouted yellow leaves last summer. He proceeded to cut off the healthy limbs, too, and left the tree trunk rising like a gray pillar in the Lisbons’ front yard. When the men drove away, we weren’t sure whether it was dead or alive.
For the next two weeks we waited for the Parks Department to finish the job, but it took them three weeks to return. This time two men with chain saws climbed out of the truck. They circled the trunk, taking its measure, then steadied saws on thighs and pulled the starter cords. We were down in Chase Buell’s basement at the time, playing bumper pool, but the whine reached us through the exposed rafters overhead. The aluminum heating vents rattled. The bright balls trembled on the green felt. The sound of the chain saws filled our heads like a dentist’s drill, and we ran outside to see the men moving in on the elm. They wore goggles against flying chips, but otherwise dragged about with the boredom of men accustomed to slaughter. They lifted the snarling guide bars. One spit out tobacco juice. Then, revving the motors, they were just about to tear the tree apart when the foreman jumped out of the truck, furiously waving his arms. Across the lawn, in a phalanx, the Lisbon girls were running toward the men. Mrs. Bates, who was looking on, said she thought the girls were going to fling themselves on the chain saws. “They were heading straight for them. And their eyes looked wild.” The Parks Department men didn’t know what the foreman was jumping up and down about. “I was blind-sided,” one said. “The girls ducked right under my saw. Thank God I saw them in time.” Both men did, and held their saws in the air, backing off. The Lisbon girls ran past them. They might have been playing a game. They looked behind them as though afraid of being tagged. But then they reached the safety zone. The men turned off their chain saws and the pulsing air subsided into silence. The girls surrounded the tree, linking hands in a daisy chain.
“Go away,” said Mary. “This is our tree.”
They weren’t facing the men but the tree itself, pressing their cheeks against the trunk. While Therese and Mary had shoes on, Bonnie and Lux had run out barefoot, which led many to believe the rescue had been a spontaneous idea. They hugged the trunk, which rose above them into nothingness.
“Girls, girls,” the foreman said. “You’re too late. The tree’s already dead.”
“That’s what you say,” said Mary.
“It’s got beetles. We have to take it down so they won’t spread to other trees.”
“There’s no scientific evidence that removal limits infestation,” said Therese. “These trees are ancient. They have evolutionary strategies to deal with beetles. Why don’t you just leave it up to nature?”
“If we left it up to nature, there’d be no trees left.”
“That’s what it’s going to be like anyway,” said Lux.
“If boats didn’t bring the fungus from Europe in the first place,” Bonnie said, “none of this would have ever happened.”
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, girls. Now we’ve got to use our own technology to see what we can save.”
Actually, none of this might have been spoken. We’ve pieced it together through partial accounts, and can attest only to the general substance. The girls did feel the trees would survive better on their own, and did place the blame for the disease on human arrogance. But many people felt this was a smoke screen. That particular elm, as everyone knew, had been Cecilia’s favorite. Its tarred knothole still retained her small handprint. Mrs. Scheer recalled Cecilia often standing under the tree in springtime, trying to catch the whirling propellers of its seeds. (For our own part, we recall those green seeds housed in a single fibrous wing, and how they helicoptered to the ground, but we can’t be sure whether they came from the elms or from, say, the chestnuts, and none of us has a botany handbook handy, so popular with rangers and realists.) At any rate, many people in our neighborhood found it easy to imagine why the girls might connect the elm with Cecilia. “They weren’t saving it,” said Mrs. Scheer. “They were saving her memory.”
Three rings formed around the tree: the blond ring of the Lisbon girls, the forest green of the Parks Department men, and, farther out, the ring of onlookers. The men reasoned with the girls, grew stern, tried to bribe them with a ride on the truck, and finally threatened them. The foreman had his men break for lunch, thinking the girls would give up, but after forty-five minutes they remained belted around the tree. Finally he went up to the house to talk with Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, but, to our surprise, they offered no help. They answered the door together, Mr. Lisbon with his arm around his wife in a rare display of physical affection. “We’ve got an order to cut down your elm,” the foreman said. “But your kids won’t let us.”
“How do you know that tree’s sick?” Mrs. Lisbon said.
“Believe me. We know. It’s got yellow leaves. It had yellow leaves. We cut that branch off already. The tree’s dead, for Christ’s sake.”
“We’re for aritex,” Mr. Lisbon said. “Are you familiar with that? Our daughter showed us an article. It’s a less aggressive therapy.”
“And it doesn’t work. Look, we leave this tree
and the others will all be gone by next year.”
“Will be anyway, way things are going,” said Mr. Lisbon.
“I don’t want to have to call the police.”
“The police?” Mrs. Lisbon asked. “The girls are just standing in their own front yard. Since when is that a crime?”
The foreman gave up then, but he never followed through on his threat. By the time he got back to the truck, Ms. Perl’s blue Pontiac had pulled up behind it. A staff photographer was already snapping the shots that would later appear in the newspaper. Less than an hour had elapsed between the time the girls surrounded the tree and Ms. Perl’s Weegee-like arrival, but she would never divulge the source who had tipped her off. Many people believe the girls did it themselves to get publicity, but there’s no way of telling. As the photographer continued shooting, the foreman told his men to get into the truck. The next day, a short article appeared, accompanied by a grainy picture of the girls embracing the tree (Exhibit #8). They seem to be worshipping it like a group of Druids. In the picture, you can’t tell that the tree ends starkly twenty feet above their inclined heads.
“Four sisters of Cecilia Lisbon, the East Side teen whose suicide last summer focused awareness on a national problem, put their own bodies in jeopardy Wednesday in an attempt to save the elm Cecilia had so dearly loved. The tree was diagnosed with Dutch elm disease last year and was scheduled to be removed this spring.” From the above, it’s clear Ms. Perl accepted the theory that the girls saved the tree in memory of Cecilia, and from what we’ve read in Cecilia’s journal, we see no reason to disagree. Years later, however, when we spoke to Mr. Lisbon, he denied this. “Therese was the one who was into trees. She knew everything about them. All the varieties. How deep the roots went. I never remember Cecilia taking much interest in plant life, to be honest.”
Only after the Parks Department drove away did the girls break their daisy chain. Rubbing sore arms, they went back inside the house without so much as looking at any of us gathered on neighboring lawns. Chase Buell heard Mary say, “They’ll be back,” as they went inside. Mr. Patz, who had been standing in a group of ten or so people, offered, “I was on their side. When the Parks men left, I felt like applauding.”
The tree survived, temporarily. The Parks Department moved down their list, removing other trees on our block, but no one else was courageous or misled enough to oppose them. The Buells’ elm, with its car tire swing, was taken down; the Fusillis’ disappeared one day while we were at school; and the Shalaans’ vanished, too. Soon the Parks Department moved on to other blocks, though the incessant whine of their chain saws never let us, or the girls, forget about them.
Baseball season began and we lost ourselves in green fields. In the old days, Mr. Lisbon would sometimes bring the girls to a home game, and they would sit in the bleachers, rooting like everybody else. Mary would talk to the cheerleaders. “She always wanted to be one. But her mother wouldn’t let her,” Kristi McCulchan told us. “I used to teach her some of the cheers and she was really good.” We didn’t doubt it. We always watched the Lisbon girls instead of our dizzy cheerleaders. In close games they chewed their fists, and thought every ball hit to the outfield would be a home run. They bounced up and down, then rose to their feet just as the ball descended, too soon, into the outfielder’s mitt. The year of the suicides the girls didn’t come to a single game, nor did we expect them to. Gradually, we stopped scanning the bleachers for their excited faces, and stopped walking underneath to see what we could see of them, cut up in slices from behind.
Though we felt for the Lisbon girls, and continued to think about them, they were slipping away from us. The images we treasured of them—in bathing suits, jumping through a sprinkler, or running from a garden hose charmed by water pressure into a giant snake—began to fade, no matter how religiously we meditated on them in our most private moments, lying in bed beside two pillows belted together to simulate a human shape. We could no longer evoke with our inner ears the precise pitches and lilts of the Lisbon girls’ voices. Even the jasmine soap from Jacobsen’s, which we kept in an old bread box, had gotten damp and lost its aroma, smelling now like a wet matchbook. At the same time, the fact that the girls were slowly sinking hadn’t completely penetrated our minds, and on some mornings we awoke to a world still unruptured: we stretched, we got out of bed, and only after rubbing our eyes at the window did we remember the rotting house across the street, and the moss-blackened windows hiding the girls from our sight. The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.
The colors of their eyes were fading, the location of moles, dimples, centipede scars. It had been so long since the Lisbon girls had smiled we could no longer picture their crowded teeth. “They’re just memories now,” Chase Buell said sadly. “Time to write them off.” But even as he uttered these words, he rebelled against them, as we all did. And rather than consign the girls to oblivion, we gathered their possessions once more, everything we’d gotten hold of during our strange curatorship: Cecilia’s high-tops; Therese’s microscope; a jewelry box in which a strand of Mary’s dishwater-blond hair lay bedded on cotton; the photocopy of Cecilia’s laminated picture of the Virgin; one of Lux’s tube tops. We piled everything in the middle of Joe Larson’s garage, opening the automatic door halfway to see out. The sun had set and the sky was dark. With the Parks Department gone, the street was ours again. For the first time in months, a light came on in the Lisbon house, then winked out. Another light, in an adjoining room, flickered in answer. Around the aureolae of streetlights we noticed a dim swirling we didn’t recognize at first because we knew it so well, a senseless pattern of ecstasy and madness: the massing of the first fish flies of the season.
A year had passed and still we knew nothing. From five the girls had reduced themselves to four, and they were all—the living and the dead—becoming shadows. Even their assorted possessions arrayed at our feet didn’t reassert their existence, and nothing seemed more anonymous than a certain vinyl go-go purse, covered with gold chain, that could have belonged to any of the girls, or to any girl in the world. The fact that we had once been close enough to pass through the aromas of the girls’ separate shampoos (through herbal garden, to lemon glade, and into a grove of green apples) began to seem more and more unreal.
How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure? As it was, we didn’t know them any longer, and their new habits—of opening a window, for instance, to throw out a wadded paper towel—made us wonder if we had ever really known them, or if our vigilance had been only the fingerprinting of phantoms. Our talismans ceased to work. Lux’s school tartan, when touched, summoned only a hazy memory of her wearing it in class—one bored hand fiddling with the silver kilt pin, undoing it, leaving the folds unfastened on her bare knees, about to fall open any minute, but never, never … We had to rub the skirt for minutes to see it clearly. And every other slide in our carousel began to fade in the same way, or we clicked and absolutely nothing fell into the projection slot, leaving us staring at goose bumps on a white wall.
We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn’t contacted us. Just as we had begun to despair of ever being near them again, more laminated pictures of the Virgin began showing up. Mr. Hutch found one tucked into the windshield wiper of his car and, not recognizing its significance, crumpled it up and threw it into the ashtray. Ralph Hutch found it later under a layer of ash and cigarette butts. When he brought it to us the picture was burned in three spots. Still, we could see right away that it was identical to the picture of the Virgin Cecilia had clutched in the bathtub, and when we wiped off the soot, the 555-MARY telephone number emerged on the back.
Hutch wasn’t the only one to find a picture. Mrs. Hessen found one pierced among her rose bushes. Joey Thompson heard an unfamiliar whirring in his bicycle tires one day, and looked down to see a Virgin picture taped between the spokes. Finally, Tim Winer found a picture stuck into
the grout of his study windows, facing in at him. The picture had been there for some time, he told us, because moisture had penetrated the laminated surface, giving the Virgin’s face a touch of gangrene. Otherwise she looked the same: dressed in a blue cloak with a butterfly collar of gold lamé. On her head sat an Imperial margarine crown. A rosary girded her waist, and, as usual, the Holy Mother had that beatific expression of someone on lithium. No one ever saw the girls placing the cards, nor did anyone know why they would do so. Even now, though, so many years later, we can easily recall the tingling that overtook us whenever someone came bearing a new find. The pictures were invested with significance we couldn’t quite fathom, and their sorry state—rips, mildew—made them seem ancient. “The feeling,” Tim Winer wrote in his own journal, “was akin to unearthing the anklet of some poor smothered girl in Pompeii. She had just put it on, and was dandling it before the window, admiring how the jewels glittered, when they suddenly lit up red with the volcano’s eruption.” (Winer read Mary Renault a lot.)
In addition to the Virgin cards, we became convinced the girls were signaling to us in other ways. Sometime in May, Lux’s Chinese lantern began to blink an indecipherable Morse code. Every night, as the street grew dark, her lantern flicked on, the bulb’s heat turning an inner magic lantern that projected shadows on the walls. We thought the shadows spelled out a message, and binoculars confirmed this, but the messages turned out to be written in Chinese. The lantern usually went off and on in varying patterns—three short, two long, two long, three short—after which the overhead light blazed, revealing the room like a museum exhibit. We respected the velvet ropes as we made our brief tour, past the late-twentieth-century furnishings: a headboard from Sears with matching night table; Therese’s Apollo 11 lamp casting light on Lux’s life-size poster of Billy Jack in flat-brimmed black hat and Navajo belt. The viewing lasted only thirty seconds before Lux and Therese’s room went dark. Then Bonnie and Mary’s room lit up twice, as though in response. No figures passed before the windows, nor did the length of the illuminations correspond to any habitual activity. The girls’ lights went off and on for no reason we could see.