Missing Sisters
Page 1
Missing Sisters
Gregory Maguire
For Debbie Kirsch, with love
Contents
Part One
Ice and Fire
My Fair Lady
Part Two
Kingdom Come
Part Three
Smithereens
The Twilight Zone
Part Four
Life Would Be So Heavenly
Part Five
O Clement O Loving O Sweet
The Snow People
Part Six
The Miracle
About the Author
Other Books by Gregory Maguire
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
ICE AND FIRE
“Look. Lookit, Sister,” said the girl. She stretched her hands out on either side of her. “It’s raining out one window and snowing out the other.”
“I’ll look in a minute,” said the nun. “After I get this oil off the burner—it’s popping like nobody’s business.” She hustled the skillet onto the chopping board. “I’ll burn this place to the ground yet.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” said the girl.
“Pray that I don’t,” said the nun. “Say a prayer to the patron saint of stupid people, whoever that might be.” She dried her pink hands on a square of burlap cut from a potato sack. “Now, what’s to see, Alice?”
“Lookit: snow,” said Alice, pointing out the large windows over the kitchen counter. Snow indeed. “And lookit: rain.” Across the room and above the sink, the other windows were spattered with raindrops.
“Well, well,” said the nun. “Fancy, you’re right.” She folded her arms across her apron bib for a moment in stillness, not like her. “Isn’t it grand.”
In the dawn storm the big kitchen of the retreat house seemed lit with purple. Alice was a twelve-year-old shadow, dark and observant, of ancient Sister Vincent de Paul, who in her black veil and habit and white apron looked like a witch in bandages. Slotted spoons and ladles and strainers hung from a central ring, a kind of chandelier of utensils. Flour from the day’s bread-baking efforts drifted in the air between the windows, an inside weather of white dust. The room smelled of oil faintly scorching.
The other girls and the other sisters were still asleep. Alice thought of them in their beds in the dormitories. Seventeen girls snoring their vacation trip away, while only Alice Colossus was awake and listening. Alice and, of course, Sister Vincent de Paul, who with her bum foot clumped around in a huge shoe like a safe-deposit box.
“You’re very sharp,” said Sister Vincent de Paul. “You’ve a keen eye when you’re on your own, Alice.”
“I’m not on my own,” said Alice. “You’re here.”
“You know what I mean.” Sister Vincent de Paul went to the walk-in refrigerator for eggs. She planted her square shoe like a cinder block and swung the rest of her body around it. Her skirts swished. Alice tried hard to keep the sounds sure in her mind, for relishing: the thump of shoe, the rustle of black cotton, and behind it the hiss of the two-minded storm. Or perhaps it was the sizzle of oil she still heard. Alice loved to be Sister Vincent de Paul’s helper before the house was up. It was her ears’ clearest time of day.
“Think fast!” called Sister Vincent de Paul from the door, and threw a package of frozen blueberries across the room. Alice saw it before she heard it, but managed neatly to swipe it from the air before it landed on the floor. “Bravo!” chortled Sister Vincent de Paul and returned, thump rustle thump rustle, with two dozen eggs.
“Now tell me why you think the storm both rains and snows,” said the nun, cracking eggs with one hand until twenty-four golden suns had flopped chummily in the flour.
“It can’t make up its mind, like me,” said Alice.
“Say it slower. Think your consonants.”
“It—can’t—make—up—its—mind,” said Alice again. If Sister Vincent de Paul would look up, she could easily lip-read what she couldn’t make out by sound. But Sister Vincent de Paul wouldn’t lip-read Alice, because Alice was merely lazy and could do better if she tried.
“The storm can’t make up its mind?”
It had been a joke, but it wasn’t funny the second time. “Storm’s stupid,” said Alice.
“It’s beautiful,” Sister Vincent de Paul declared, poking out the eyes of the eggs with a slotted spoon till they bled yellow. “Are you going to grease those muffin tins?”
“Storm’s mixed up,” said Alice. “Like me.”
“The storm,” said Sister Vincent de Paul—and then a crash of thunder announced an opinion—“the storm is brilliant! Like you!” There was lightning, and more thunder. The snow was dancing in spirals. Around and down, more and more. The rain out the other window spattered all the harder.
“The line of snow cloud must be just above this room,” said Sister Vincent de Paul, sprinkling a little flour onto the breadboard, lifting a spoon, and pointing heavenward. “It’ll shift in a moment. We’re at a miraculous juncture. As usual. Warm front and cold front having a stare down directly overhead. And only you and me to notice, Alice.”
Alice missed some of this. She rubbed Crisco into the muffin tins. “It’s just a cloud,” she said.
“And you’re just a girl, and life is just life,” said Sister Vincent de Paul gaily. “And the morning bread just feeds us daily so we may notice such goings-on!” She began to sing in a sort of off-center way—her voice was riding the melody like a kid on a bicycle for the first time, whoopsing and wobbling along. “Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee. How great Thou art, how great Thou art!”
Alice hummed a little to herself. The lightning stitched a path between snow and rain, the thunder kettle-drummed. The kitchen lights flickered and went out just as Sister Vincent de Paul was returning the pan of oil to the burner. “Oh,” said Alice. “Mercy!” said Sister Vincent de Paul. The skillet bumped into the corner of the stove, and a long silver tongue of oil sloshed out. In a moment the counter was on fire. Small yellow-blue flames ran up the wall like morning glories growing on a trellis in a hurried-up nature movie.
“Salt,” snapped Sister Vincent de Paul. Alice ran for the butler’s pantry and came back with six saltshakers, not one of which held more than a teaspoon. She began to untwist the caps. “No, the salt in the canister!” said Sister Vincent de Paul, beating at the fire with her apron. Alice hadn’t remembered the canister.
But salt didn’t do it, and the fire extinguisher’s help was only limp and sputtery. “Alice, you must run and wake everyone.” Sister Vincent de Paul was yelling to be sure she was heard. “And call the fire brigade!”
Alice couldn’t do the phone. For some reason she couldn’t hear well over wires and through the little dots in the ear-piece. So she stumbled through the swinging door and across the refectory, past the twenty-five places set at the two long tables. Skidded on the circle of braided rug in the hall and turned the corners on the big, carved staircase like a pro. Her long legs drew her up four steps at a time.
Rachel Luke and Esther Thessaly were coming back from the john together (they were supposed to call it the jane, since John was an evangelist and apostle, but nobody did). Sister Isaac Jogues was wafting up and down the corridor with her nose in her breviary, muttering matins. Hadn’t they noticed the lights go off? “Ahh,” said Alice. “Fire in the kitchen! Wake up!”
Rachel and Esther, who were only about eight, clutched each other and said, “What’d she say?” But Sister Ike dropped her breviary to the floor and strode like a linebacker down the corridor toward Alice. “Fire! Where, Alice?”
“Wake up, wake them up!” Alice said wildly, tearing from Sister Ike’s grasp and turning into the ol
der girls’ dormitory. “Fire in the kitchen! Don’t anyone hear me? Fire!”
The clock in the hall chimed six and three quarters. Alice could hear its bonging, like an angel’s announcement of the hour of death. Domestic thunder. Sister Ike had roused Sister John Bosco, who appeared without her wimple, showing spikes of silver hair and putting to rest for all time the rumor that she was bald as a basketball. Alice had gabbled her message more and more clumsily at the groggy girls. In a tatter of nightgowns, habits, and even four-year-old Ruth Peters in her shameful soiled diapers, they lined up and counted themselves and marched single file down the right-hand side of the stairs, no talking and no running. Sister Francis of Assisi soon hoisted the sobbing Ruth in her arms, thinking nothing of the stink, or maybe just offering it up.
Sister John Bosco and Sister Francis Xavier had run on ahead to the kitchen, from which large balls of black smoke emerged and changed shape in the air. Alice said, “Phone!” but it turned out the phone lines had been cut, too, perhaps by the same tree limb that had downed the power lines.
They were unsure what to do. Outside it rained and snowed, back and forth like armies advancing and retreating, not only on the odd, steep roofs of the retreat house, but on the pine-toothed hills and stubbled meadows of the desolate country of God. There wasn’t a farmhouse within a twenty-minute walk, and the hamlet with the fire station seemed so far away as to be in another century, beyond decades of snow-drift and ice. The city of Troy, where they usually lived, was like a past life, two hours away. “Girls, into your boots and coats,” said Sister Jake, but where were they to go?
By the time the upstairs clock struck seven, all the girls, including Alice, were swaddled in wool coats and scarves and sweating like mad, standing in two rows just inside the French doors and floor-to-ceiling windows. You couldn’t even see the lake, just fifty yards down the slope. Sister Jake kept counting the girls obsessively, as if one might be missing, but she came up each time with eighteen, which was the right number.
She called them by name. The girls had Old Testament first names and New Testament surnames; they were Sarahs and Ruths and Naomis and Miriams. Alice’s first name, a quirk in the pattern, had come from a benefactress of the Sacred Heart Home for Girls, and her last name from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Alice Colossus.
Alice Colossus. A kind of grade-school Frankenstein orphan: tall, pretty deaf in a crowd, weird. While Sister Jake counted the girls, Alice counted the nuns.
The nuns had the names of men. Sister Francis Xavier, Sister Francis de Sales, Sister Francis of Assisi. (They all called each other Sister Frank, but no one else could.) Sister John Vianney. Sister Isaac Jogues. (Jake. Ike.) Sister John Bosco, the boss nun. (John Boss.) And of course Sister Vincent de Paul.
All seven sisters: three in the kitchen, four in the parlor.
Naomi Matthews, at fourteen the oldest girl, began to pray the rosary, loudly. The other girls took it up, the pattern of their voices familiar to Alice in the rhythm, though not in the meaning. Braa na na, na na naa, bra na na na NA. Sister Isaac Jogues told them to please hush up while they decided what to do. Naomi Matthews glared pityingly at Sister Ike’s lack of faith in God, but dropped her voice.
Alice couldn’t make out what they were jabbering over, but she could guess some of the trouble. The diocesan bus they’d come in had gone back to Albany. They had one car, but the roads were surely slick with ice. If the whole building burned to the ground, what would they do?
“Boathouse,” said Alice loudly, proving to Naomi and all that she hadn’t been concentrating on the prayers. “Sister, we can hide in the boathouse.”
“Alice, if it’s important enough to be heard, it’s important enough to say correctly.” Even at a juncture of fire and brimstone, nuns couldn’t resist the tart reproof.
“Safe in the boathouse.”
Sister Ike’s expression smoothed over: This was a possibility. Alice felt proud. Maybe she wasn’t so holy, maybe she had failing grades in deportment because her speech was zigzaggy, but at least she was helpful.
The swinging doors of the kitchen flew open. From across the room they could see the disaster: The small, localized fire had just bloomed into an inferno. Sister Francis Xavier and Sister John Bosco emerged with little Sister Vincent de Paul between them. Her veil was on fire and the shoulders of her habit were also winged with orange, like tongues of flame at Pentecost. The girls stared at the sight, which reminded them of the Giotto in the math room, though they couldn’t have named the painter.
Sister Francis Xavier threw Sister Vincent de Paul on the carpet and knocked chairs aside rolling around on top of her. Sister John Bosco saw the girls lined up inside the glass doors as if for a photo and screamed so loudly even Alice got it. “For the love of Christ, get out of here! There are gas lines in there, are you mad?”
They broke the single-file processional form and tumbled, screaming, out onto the porch. Slipping, holding hands, plunging, they skidded down the stone steps to the snowdrifts on the lawn. Without stopping for their coats, Sister John Bosco and Sister Francis Xavier followed, dragging Sister Vincent de Paul with them. They didn’t stop till they got to the far edge of the lawn, where the day before the girls had made snowmen.
“Look,” Sister John Bosco had said yesterday to her nuns, “all these snow creatures, look what they are. Not mothers and fathers and children, which I thought was universal. These look like snow orphans and snow nuns.” And it seemed to be true: a polite line of snow orphans, black smiles made of raisins, and behind them a few scattered snow nuns, with crucifixes made of carefully broken twigs pressed into their modest, vaguely shaped fronts. But today, in the blizzard, the snow orphans and nuns were looking swollen and anonymous, their features blurred.
They had all just collected themselves near the stone shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes when the kitchen wing popped like a balloon. Glass shattered into the driveway. The roof was first crowned in flames and then disappeared in a screech just like a car crash; you could hear brakes squeal, metal scrape, giant iron fists punch each other inside out. Even Alice got it, both ears. All the while the snow whitened the day, and odd stabs of lightning and wrongheaded thunder kept up their tricks.
Alice broke the reestablished line to throw herself at Sister Vincent de Paul. The little woman’s face was as black as her habit, with smoke and char, and her eyelashes were crinkled like a bug’s legs. Her eyes were closed, her lips split and bleeding. What was left of her veil seemed to have melted into her head, and the skin of her scalp was red and raising in welts. Alice began to pick the flecks of veil out of her scalp, while she wept. But she was tearing the skin open, so she stopped; and Sister Francis Xavier stopped her, too, with a sharp remark.
They huddled under an apple tree and watched the place burn. It began to seem to be in slow motion. But maybe the rain and snow were being helpful, slowing down the damage? God’s grace? The girls gazed, partly delighted at the crisis; the nuns seemed lost without little attention bells to rap or sour balls to award to the girls as bribes. But Naomi Matthews suddenly wrenched herself to her knees and cried out, pointing a mittened hand. The fire had arced itself over the main roof beam and descended like the teeth of the devil onto the roof of the chapel.
How could they have been so awful! They had saved themselves, but not the Blessed Sacrament. The sacred Hosts, the Body of Christ—it was too horrible. The girls took this in as fully as the nuns, and as deeply.
The three Sister Franks like a team of Green Berets all leaped up and began to run back to the chapel. Sister John Bosco was shouting wildly at them. She wagged a forbidding finger, but their black flapping skirts and veils pitched on through the snow. For the second time in half an hour Sister John Bosco swore in a most unchurchly fashion. She yelled at the girls that no one should under any circumstances move a muscle, and she headed after her disobedient sisters.
This left only Sister Isaac Jogues and Sister John Vianney with the unconscious Sister Vincent d
e Paul and eighteen schoolgirls. Naomi Matthews jumped up to run help the nuns save the sacred Hosts, signs of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but Sister Isaac Jogues tackled her and sat on her to save her from a holy scorching. Sister Vincent de Paul was apparently martyr enough for one day. Naomi will never get over this disappointment, Alice observed to herself. Naomi Matthews wanted nothing so dearly as to die for her faith. She could be quite cross when kept from it.
But the main drama was past. Sister Francis of Assisi appeared at the chapel bearing the monstrance, its hammered gold sunrays oddly bright even across all that vacant whiteness. The other Sister Franks carried the Bible and the crucifix from the high altar and the small gold container called the ciborium that the communion Hosts were kept in. Sister John Bosco had gathered up the altar linen, a strange thing to save, the girls all thought, until they saw how she bound up Sister Vincent de Paul’s head in it.
Then they sat in the boathouse, on top of the rowboats and canoes stored upside down for the winter. They sang hymns and prayed for Sister Vincent de Paul, while Sister Ike and Sister Francis de Sales braved the icy roads in the Dodge Dart, and went to get help. The girls had advanced to “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and the nuns to leading calisthenics to keep them all warm, when help arrived.
It was late morning by the time the nuns and the girls left. They didn’t get to see the rest of the retreat center sink to its knees in ashes. Instead they got to ride in a milk truck, with chains fastened all around its tires like loose-fitting fishnet stockings or charm bracelets. The rain and the snow, having divided the day between them, had united at last in ice, which was thickly coating every twig, every fussy little branch-let, with its own diamond shell. The girls were entranced. To Alice it seemed like God’s spit, hardening, jeweling everything; cracking everything too, if the predictions of the milk-truck driver were to be believed. “Keeps on like this, it’ll be known as the ice blizzard of 1968,” he bellowed as he tucked blankets around them. “Trees’ll be down from here to the Canadian border. You girls’ll tell this all to your grandchildren. How’re you good sisters, nice and toasty now?”