Missing Sisters

  “What is it, Alice?”

  “Father Laverty?”

  “Father Laverty? Is that what you’re trying to say? He just left. You might catch him in the parking lot if you hurry.”

  Alice hurried. The side door slammed behind her. Father Laverty’s little Volkswagen beetle was parked there. He must still be inside. Maybe he’d been in the men’s room on the first floor. He was the only one who ever used it. Alice often wondered who cleaned it, if anyone. Nuns were too sensitive even to think about a men’s room, but there it was.

  Music and cash envelope in hand, Alice headed back to the side door. But, with Saturday security measures, it had locked behind her. She picked her way through the snow mush in the parking lot around to the front door. No one answered the bell. Well, Sister Frank had the headphones on, of course. And the girls weren’t allowed to answer the door…. Besides, they’d probably all left for the movie theater. Where had Sister Isaac Jogues gone? Maybe she was running a bath to wash Ruth Peters.

  Alice rang and rang, beginning to feel the cold. She had on an oversized blue cardigan, a nun’s reject sweater, which hung like a tunic over her hips, but even so. The air bullied her into shivering. Then she remembered the kitchen door and had gone around another corner of the building and down the unshoveled steps before she realized—yes—the steps were unshoveled because Sister Vincent de Paul was gone. Sister Vincent de Paul wasn’t there. Through the window of the locked door, the kitchen looked cold and dark, and the blue pilot lights were like squat vigil candles in their cast-iron cage. It was send-out-to-Neba’s-for-submarine-sandwiches for sure tonight.

  Maybe Father Laverty had a key. She’d wait by his car for him to come out. But when she ran around again to the parking lot, the little rusty heap of Volkswagen was gone.

  Gone! And without the music for the boys at Saint Mary’s!

  Now Alice was in trouble for being outside the school without permission—Sister Frank’s bored directions wouldn’t stand up as approval. Alice knew this from experience. And she would get yelled at, also, for going outside without her coat in February. And for not completing the task assigned her—to deliver the music and money to Father Laverty. As if everyone wasn’t already cross at her for stalling the Harrigans, for annoying and disappointing them.

  How hard it is to be good, Alice thought as she began to stride down the street away from the school. She didn’t hope for the fame of sainthood as Naomi Matthews did. She just wanted to tiptoe around the occasions of terrible sin, if she could manage it. Yet the world kept shuffling itself in ways that shoved her forward in the wrong directions. Like being spun through a revolving door and falling into the wrong company on the other side. “You’re not bad, Alice,” Sister John Bosco would say. “Not a bad girl in any instance. Not bad behavior. But unfortunate. At times unthinking. Were you thinking?”

  She was thinking! She was always thinking! As she caught the bus for downtown, paying with some change from the money envelope, Alice thought: I’m always at work in my brain. I just am thinking about the other side of things, not the way nuns think.

  Troy seemed today like a city built out of sand or salt, half dissolved in the opposing forces of weather. The redbrick factories and mills; the brownstone town houses; the formal buildings of Russell Sage College all pulled away from the sidewalks as if fearful of catching something from their unsavory neighbors. The whole city wobbled on the edge of the great steel Hudson River and threatened to go lurching in. Or maybe it was the sleet starting to fall that gave it that look. I love Troy, thought Alice. Hideous place. I wonder if Sister Vincent de Paul misses it? Or is she in a hospital here somewhere?

  On one of her regular visits to the ear doctors, Alice had seen a Capital District bus marked for Albany parked across the street from the clinic. And—a miracle—there one was, exhaust puffing out the tail pipe, magic accordion door open, driver waiting, reading the Times Union. A bus to Albany was a very minor miracle; Alice realized this. But it did seem like a sign that she was doing the right thing. And when she didn’t have the correct change from the cash envelope and a young man carrying a guitar in a duffel bag made up the difference, Alice felt positively anointed.

  Albany was what, eight, ten miles away? Four? It was across the river, she knew that. Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers, who carried the Christ Child piggyback across the river, save me from drowning in case the bus plunges off the Dunn Memorial Bridge. Or whatever bridge we use. Amen.

  The smell of diesel oil in the bus was quite strong.

  Alice hoped she wasn’t misbehaving. She wasn’t always clear in her mind about it. She had to be good, so that Christ would ladle forgiveness out of His bottomless bucket o’ mercy. She was doing the job Sister Frank had given her, so that Sister Vincent de Paul would recover and come home. It only looked like she was running away.

  “Without Satan, that snake, we’d never have needed the love of Christ,” Sister Vincent de Paul was fond of saying. “So we should thank Satan kindly for tempting Adam and Eve. Because of their stupidity we got to get Jesus in our world.” Alice hadn’t quite been able to follow this, but cut her thoughts off early. God was hard to figure out; Jesus and Mary were much chummier and Alice preferred them. But God was the boss God, and Alice tried not to be disrespectful.

  From bad mistakes, from accidents and disasters, good could grow. This is what Alice wanted to believe.

  The young man—well, he was a boy—the one with the guitar, he was changing his seat. “Mind if I sit here?”

  Alice nodded yes, then shook her head no, then gestured: Sit.

  She had to grin a few minutes later. He didn’t realize she was a clumsy talker. He yakked so much all she had to do was nod or shrug. When he put his arm around her, however, she said as distinctly as she could, “Stop it, please.” She might be tall, but she sure wasn’t old enough for this kind of nonsense.

  “You just looked cold, no coat and all,” he said.

  She nodded—yes she was cold—and yes—she still meant what she said. Then she removed his hand with hers and said with inspiration (Holy Ghost sanctify me, Holy Ghost enlighten me): “Play your guitar instead.”

  “Play my cigar?” But he wasn’t being mean. He got it from the bag; its neck stuck out in the aisle. “What’ll I play, tootsie? Beatles?”

  Alice made a face. “Play My Fair Lady.” Wasn’t he a fair one himself, though, with those soft brown curls?

  He laughed again. “Okay, My Fair Lady, my fair lady. Which song?”

  “It don’t matter.” She thought some more. “Heavenly one.”

  After a while he figured it out. He even sang, too, a kind of nice voice in a cold city bus. The snow that people had tracked in was melting in rivulets down the grooved wooden floor of the bus. Below them, below the bridge, skaters circled on the gray marble slab of river. The sky had strange blotchy yellow-brown clouds in it, like butter streaked on wax paper.

  Alice joined in on the lines she could remember. The sleet came down, but with the noise of windshield wipers and music she couldn’t hear it. Other passengers, even the driver, began to sing. When they finished, they started all over. Alice let her voice out like a fishing line in a pool, a little at a time, letting it get louder, unreeling it. Nobody laughed the way Naomi and her friends had.

  All too soon the château on the top of State Street in Albany showed up, red pointy roofs almost pewter-colored under the sleet. “That’s our State Capitol building,” said the guy. “My name’s—” Alice didn’t quite catch it, and didn’t want to. “I’m taking the Pine Hills bus back to the state college dorms. Want to come along?”

  A college boy!

  Alice blushed. She was hip-deep in trouble now. With some effort she managed to say that she needed to find Saint Mary’s School for Boys. The orphans-and-troublemakers school—did he know it? He did. It was even on the same city-bus route. He would take her there.

  “I can’t go to your college,” she said forcefully, so he
wouldn’t be expecting things.

  “I’m cool,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll still show you where you’re going.”

  And so he did, although as the next bus crawled along the streets and Alice noticed cars switching on their headlights, she began to feel that she was getting quite a bit farther from the parking lot of the Sacred Heart Home for Girls than she’d intended. Is that how Eve swallowed the apple too—she was just thinking of something else, and bang, there it was with a big, white, tooth-marked, mouth-shaped cave in it, in her hand, and the juice running down her chin for the rest of her short sorry life?

  Is there a dotted line beyond which the apostles and angels won’t help you anymore? Peg you as a loser? Cut their losses and turn their attentions to a more docile soul, a likelier prospect for the company of saints? If you belonged in Troy, did that dotted line in your case run through, say, downtown Albany? Should she throw herself off the bus and wheel wildly around in the other direction? It was even getting dark. She had no coat.

  She stayed on the bus.

  On they churned through the slush. Each city block seemed to Alice as dense and infinite as a state of the union. She would never get home. What had she been thinking of? Girls from the Sacred Heart weren’t allowed to go out alone! Even the nuns traveled in pairs, and only with permission of Sister John Bosco! The bus flew westward, away from Troy and Albany, in a matter of minutes crossing the borders of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wyoming in her imagination.

  “Here’s our stop,” said the guitar boy, and pulled a cord that made no sound Alice could catch—but the bus stopped and out they tumbled.

  “Thank you,” said Alice to her savior and persecutor. He grinned, and they fell into step together on icy, slate paving stones, under elms, next to snow-covered yards that seemed to Alice as wide as prairies and the lonesome range where the deer and the antelope play. The streetlights came on, one at a time, as if being plugged in by a man in a basement in the State Capitol.

  “Here’s Saint Mary’s,” said the college kid. “Can I come in?”

  “No,” said Alice, and ran up the walk. “Sorry,” she flung over her shoulder, hoping he understood it. “Sorry. Bye.” She pressed the bell marked OUT OF ORDER—PLEASE USE KNOCKER. She pressed it again. She knocked out of desperation, not understanding. He stood in the sleet, not going away, in a cone of streetlight, traffic making a blurred pattern of noise and light behind him.

  The door at last opened. There were three boys in sweaters. A receptionist—a Franciscan in sandals and thick, hairy socks—was getting up from behind the desk, putting down his paperback of The Valley of the Dolls. Alice whirled around and cried out to her friend—

  “Heavenly!”

  She was back home within the hour. Father Laverty had understood her predicament without picking too hard at the reasoning. “You’re a good girl, Alice,” he’d said, putting his coat around her and shoveling her into his car. “You’re a good girl.” He was trying to convince her. She wasn’t convinced.

  “You delivered the music. Good for you. You didn’t get permission to leave. And you wouldn’t have. But you didn’t mean to disobey, I’m sure.” Father Laverty was too good. He behaved as if you were better than you were. But Alice felt bullied into accepting his kindness. She had actually liked sitting with the college boy. Sort of. In a friendly way.

  “Tell you what we’ll do,” said Father Laverty, guiding his little car through neighborhoods made mysterious by the black winter night and the white snow falling against it. “I’ve got a key to Sacred Heart. I’ll unlock the side door and see if you can slip in. If there’s no hubbub, all the better. But don’t lie about it if anyone has noticed you were missing. Tell the truth and tell Sister John Boss to call me if she needs proof.”

  Sister John Boss. He called her that, too. Alice looked at him sideways. He winked at her. “And do this again, Alice Colossus, and you’re in very hot water.”

  “I took some money for the bus,” she told him, to get it all over with.

  “We’ll let it go this time,” he said.

  She relaxed. He smelled like cigarettes and mothballs and sweat. He was a big, fat young man, pinker than nuns, with huge bare hands like Mickey Mouse gloves. “Do you know where Sister Vincent de Paul is staying, is she getting okay?” she said.

  “You’re very attached to Sister Vincent de Paul,” he observed. She realized he hadn’t exactly understood her question. But he went on. “I heard about that couple who wanted to take you in on a trial basis. The Harrisons?”

  “Harrigans,” she said, and even to her it sounded like Hooligans.

  “I wish you’d given them a chance,” he said. “You’re a likable young person. But Sister Vincent de Paul’s accident has stood in the way. You must move on, Alice. As Jesus said—”

  He paused for so long that even Alice knew Jesus had never uttered a word about orphans abandoning their good friends who happened to be nuns.

  “As Jesus said,” he continued, pulling up in front of the home, “it ain’t over till it’s over.” He grinned at her. “Be good. And better leave my coat here—they’ll wonder.”

  She nodded her thanks. Under his big, fat, unthreatening arm she was hustled to the side door. “Say your prayers,” he said, rolling his eyes at the idea of anxious sisters inside. “I’m getting outta here while the getting’s good.”

  “Right,” she said, and slipped away inside.

  Safely, as it turned out. She’d reached the second-floor stairs before anyone saw her. “Oh, there you are. We’re taking orders for subs,” said Sister John Vianney. “Roast beef or tuna?”

  “Tuna,” said Alice, mainly because it was easier to say.

  In the lavatory she rinsed her face. Her shoulder felt warm. She pulled back her cardigan and blouse to see the pale knob of shoulder. It was not red. It was not warm from Father Laverty but from the young man with the guitar. The warmth dried the snow from her hair and the fear from her throat. She was only twelve. She remembered this and thought about it.

  Naomi Matthews came rushing in. “Oh, Alice,” she said, all brightness, an Up with People medley all by herself. She must be back to being holy again after her nastiness earlier. She began to brush her terracotta hair as if beating a rug, fiercely, out of joy. “You’ll never guess. Sister John Bosco, she called me from the wreck room? Remember? It was those Harrigans. They were so upset by seeing you again today, they wanted to take another chance. They talked to me. They’re going to see about taking me! I just told them one thing. If they said yes they wanted me, then I’d do it. I’d give it a try. But I just couldn’t go until after My Fair Lady. It wouldn’t be fair. I couldn’t leave you in the lurch like that.”

  The two Eliza Doolittles stared at each other in the bathroom mirror. Behind them the radiators clanked and cleared their throats. The bad Eliza, who couldn’t speak English correctly, just kept feeling her shoulder. The good Eliza, who would come onstage after the character had learned to speak correctly and be beautiful and sophisticated and rich, rubbed her hands through the static of her maniacal hair. “I just knew you’d be thrilled,” said Naomi Matthews. “I just hoped I’d be the one to tell you.”

  Naomi then bowed to herself in the mirror, accepting applause; she hurried to the door and bowed to Alice. Alice and her reflection bowed back. She bowed again after Naomi had gone, until her forehead touched the cold porcelain of the sink. She rested her face in its cold, white cave, nesting in its echoes, like Eve being surrounded by the apple’s white cave, Eve being deafened by the echoes of her deed.

  Part Two

  KINGDOM COME

  By common agreement Miami’s birthday was April sixth. Since Christmas she’d been coaxing and whining to be allowed to wear rhinestone earrings on that special day. The party was going to be big, she announced. It was going to be loud, like an eighth grader’s graduation party, although Miami was only twelve and still—and barely—in fifth grade. It was going to have boys. No it wasn’t, boys stank
. Well, maybe it was. She’d see. Both possibilities were examined thoroughly by a panel of fifth-grade experts at recess every day. At home, the discussion was clipped.

  “Your party can have boys,” said Garth, who was five and didn’t like Miami’s girlfriends.

  “What’s the dif,” said Miami. “You’re not coming to it.”

  “Why not? Where’s it gonna be?” said Garth.

  “Wherever you’re not,” said Miami.

  “I don’t get it,” said Garth. “I’m not not.”

  Miami leaned her face close to her brother’s. “You’re a little accident. Do my party a favor and banana split.”

  “Mom!” yelled Garth, from lungs that seemed to fill 90 percent of his small frame. He was unruffled and precise in his announcement. “Miami called me a little accident again.”

  Mrs. Shaw made a loud noise in the kitchen. By the time she appeared at the doorway she was quite calm. “Miami, did you say something to your little brother?”

  “I said,” said Miami, working her jaw like a slide trombone, “I said it was an accident he was a boy and couldn’t come to my party.”

  “He’ll be at your party no matter what you decide, darling. He lives here. So do we. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. They’re with you for the long haul.”

  “That’s a laugh,” snorted Miami. “You can’t choose your family? I’m not being rude”—she knew what her mother would say—“I’m just pointing out that you chose four children to adopt. It’s a fact.”

  But Mrs. Shaw just laughed. “I walked right into that one,” she said. “Of course there’s choice, sometimes. But there are rules, too, honey. A family is a commune. We all work together for the good of—”