The Sisterhood

by Helen Bryan

  “Very well. I approve the adoption.” Mother nodded at the Walkers and pushed the parcel over to Sarah-Lynn, who whispered, “Thank you.” Mother rang a little silver bell and Sor Rosario appeared so quickly Mother knew she had been listening outside the door. “Please bring Isabelita.”

  Sor Rosario took her time. Mother made polite conversation while they waited, proudly pointing out the portraits of the crowned nuns, saying she thought they were quite special and certainly old, explaining that on feast days the orphanage children were allowed into her study to see them as a special treat. Convent life was rather spartan for the children, and a visit to Mother’s parlor to hear a story about the crowned nuns was one of their few luxuries. Mother explained to the Walkers how she would give a little talk about these extraordinary girls, who were dressed in beautiful clothes with flowers and jewels and elaborate crowns as they prepared to become nuns. “Isabelita loves these paintings. When I asked why, she said they smiled at her.” Mother smiled herself. “Perhaps they do. But mainly the children look forward to these occasions because afterward they have hot chocolate and almond pastries, like the ones offered to girls entering the convent, as a symbol of the sweetness of a cloistered life dedicated to God.”

  The Protestant Walkers looked dazed by this information, so Mother politely changed the subject.

  “Let’s see, what can I tell you about Isabelita to help you know her a little? She is a very good girl, very obedient, says her prayers and tidies her clothes. Her health is good. She’s never been ill or at all naughty, although when Christian Outreach was so generous we were able to buy toys for the children—we’ve never been able to afford toys here.” Mother shrugged apologetically. “Isabelita was so excited by the crayons and coloring books that she decorated the walls of the dormitory and some of the missals in the chapel before we could stop her.”

  “Bless her heart, the child was just happy to have something to play with!” exclaimed Sarah-Lynn.

  Virgil grinned. “We got a new refrigerator, plain white, could do with some decorating,” he said. “I’ll get her the biggest box of crayons they make and she can draw on that all she likes.”

  Then there was a knock at the study door and the three of them turned as the door opened. Sor Rosario was holding the hand of a beautiful little girl, her dark hair neatly braided, wearing a spotlessly clean, carefully darned white pinafore, white socks, and new white sandals. Mother repressed thoughts of sacrificial lambs. After saying “Buenas tardes, Mother,” the child smiled shyly from under her long eyelashes and wished the Walkers “Buenas tardes.”

  “Well hey there.” Virgil smiled.

  Sarah-Lynn whispered, “My precious baby!”

  Mother beckoned the child to her side and took her face in her hands. Speaking in slow Spanish so the Walkers could follow she said, “These good people were lonely without a little girl of their own and have chosen you to be their daughter. Your parents in heaven are watching over you and are happy that God has sent them to be your new mother and father. You will leave the convent and go with them now. But wherever you go, our prayers will follow you every day.” She spoke earnestly, looking deep into the child’s eyes, which were neither brown nor black but a dark, inky blue. Mother’s word was law. The child nodded obediently. “Good girl,” whispered Mother.

  Mother unscrewed an old-fashioned fountain pen. “Now the paperwork must be completed. The full name on her baptismal certificate is Maria Salome Isabella Luz de los Angeles—the ‘light of the angels’ surname we give to all our orphans whose surnames are unknown, but what of her first names? Do you wish to give her another?” Mother strove to sound casual.

  Virgil looked at his wife. Adoption counseling stressed the need to respect ethnic origins. Would it seem disrespectful to change this rather exotic name? He said tentatively, “That’s a real nice name, just a little unusual—not many girls named Salome, what with John the Baptist and that business with his head—”

  “A more American name, perhaps? Brenda or Marjorie or…Nancy?” Mother suggested, racking her brains for American names. “Susan?”

  Virgil breathed more easily. “Those are nice but, we always had a name picked out for a daughter if we had one. Menina Ann Walker.”

  Mother looked up in surprise. In old Castilian “Menina” meant a young lady-in-waiting to the queen.

  “Where we come from, it’s a custom to call children by names in the family. Sarah-Lynn’s mother was Menina. She passed shortly after our wedding. Ann was my mom’s name. How does that sound to you?”

  “Menina Ann Walker—sounds very American. Very nice.” Mother took her time laboriously signing the official adoption papers in handwriting she had practiced over and over, until it was so embellished with curlicues as to be almost but not quite indecipherable. “Just one more form, for the convent records.” Now Mother filled in the names of the adoptive parents as Mary and John Smith, place of residence, Chicago. She wrote Isabelita’s old and new names illegibly. She shook a large blot of ink onto the new one for good measure and replaced the pen in the inkwell with a smile of satisfaction. Then the Walkers signed everything—too nervous to bother reading the papers, let alone translating them. Anyone looking for Isabelita would find themselves on a wild goose chase.

  “Isabelita, from today you have a new name, Menina Ann Walker. It is God’s will,” said Mother in Spanish. She sat up very straight, pushed her spectacles back up her nose and frowned at Sor Rosario, who was dabbing her eyes suspiciously. Sor Rosario gave a little sob and bent and hugged Isabelita hard, then Mother came round her desk and bent down stiffly and hugged her, too. “Remember, always be good.” She said again in the child’s ear, “Be a good girl. A very good girl. God bless and keep you. Adios.”

  “Don’t y’all worry,” Virgil told the nuns. “We’ll bring her up right. And keep our promise,” he added. He bent down and held out the teddy bear to the child. She looked at Mother for permission. When Mother nodded, her face broke into a huge smile as she walked to him and took it. He scooped her up and said, “Hey, whose little girl we got here?” The child giggled and buried her face in the bear. “Menina honey, Mama and Daddy are going to take you for some ice cream, helado. You like helado?” The child nodded. She had no idea what helado was, but that seemed to be the right response. “And after that, we’re going to get on a big airplane and fly away. This family’s going home!”

  Sor Rosario opened the door and followed them out, sniffing loudly. Mother listened as their footsteps faded down the corridor. Alone again, she looked up at the monjas coronadas. “May God guide and protect her, but I am convinced we have done the right thing. Deo gratias, for the Walkers, sisters. Deo gratias.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Laurel Run, Georgia, March 2000

  The force of Mother’s parting admonition to “Be a good girl” stayed with Menina long after her memories of Mother, Sor Rosario, and even the convent faded into a hazy recollection.

  “Be a good girl! Be a very good girl!”

  She was. Everyone in the small town of Laurel Run agreed that Menina Walker was a credit to her adoptive parents. She was polite, a straight-A student since first grade, sang in the choir of the Baptist church, helped her mother without being asked, and in high school had been one of the girls with a “good” reputation. She had never sneaked cigarettes, smoked pot, come home drunk, or experimented with sex at the drive-in. Laurel Run mothers who despaired of their own teenage daughters’ behavior wondered how Sarah-Lynn Walker had managed to raise such a lady, and held her up as an example to their own girls.

  The girls often felt driven to retort that it wasn’t like Menina had had much chance to be anything but good. The pretty child who returned from South America with the Walkers had gone through a gawky adolescence, taller than her classmates since the age of twelve, afflicted by braces on her teeth and a reputation as the class brainbox, teacher’s pet, and model of good behavior. The scrawny duckling had only emerged as a swan during her fi
nal year in high school, and by then boys saw her as the class valedictorian, not someone to date.

  But she had blossomed, strikingly. At nineteen she was tall and slender, fine featured, with a smooth olive complexion and dark hair that offset her beautiful sapphire eyes. Up close, despite her ready smile, a certain tentativeness in her manner and a slight shyness in those lovely eyes betrayed the fact that her beauty was a recent development—one she was still getting used to.

  Even now she didn’t quite believe how she’d changed, whatever her mirror and her doting parents said. Not that she spent much time worrying about how she looked. She had had to develop the good sense not to and besides, she knew she was a bit of a nerd—she had learned long ago that the best antidote to feeling plain and left out of the giggling cliques of her girl classmates was to bury herself in her schoolwork. It made her parents proud when she got all As and was at the top of her class and the star of her high school honors program. And she actually really, really enjoyed school.

  But not being popular left her with time to fill. So she found a way to do that, too.

  No one had ever disparaged Menina’s Hispanic origins, and indeed, the Walkers had always stressed that she should be proud of them. When they gave Menina the medal and the old book on her sixteenth birthday, just as they had promised Mother Superior they would, Virgil had made a little speech about how important her heritage was and how her birth parents might have put the medal round her neck, hoping it had some miraculous power to save their child. Menina had taken his words to heart.

  But she had gleaned early on that, as a Mano del Diablo orphan and the Walkers’ adopted daughter, she was privileged. She was uncomfortably aware of the local prejudice against Mexicans and the other Hispanic immigrants, with their battered trucks full of shabby kids, and their willingness to sweep hardware stores, pump gas, and do heavy yard work for less than the minimum wage. There was a lot of local resistance when money was donated to build a Hispanic community center on the outskirts of town, and a joke made the rounds at the high school. “What do you call a Hispanic maid? Answer: Spic and Span.” When Menina heard it she was angry. That very afternoon after school, she had ridden her bicycle to the center.

  She found the director’s office—a small room smelling of plaster where workmen were putting up a large brass plaque noting the community center was the gift of the Pauline and Theodore Bonner II Charitable Trust—and offered to volunteer. Soon Menina was tutoring children in English and helping their parents with advice and referrals and forms for practical things like health care and food stamps. She enjoyed feeling useful, and she began to relearn Spanish in the process, though when she tried to test her Spanish on the old book from the convent, she found the book just too difficult. The s’s all looked like f’s and it just seemed to be about nuns. A convent record, like her parents said. Not all that interesting.

  When the time came for college, Menina preferred not to leave home. She won a scholarship to study art history at a local all-girls junior college called Holly Hill. It was, the old ladies of Laurel Run thought, a ladylike choice, which only raised her in their estimation. As did her choice of subject.

  Holly Hill was one of those anachronisms that survived in southern states. Founded by two bluestocking spinsters late in the nineteenth century as a “female academy,” it had offered girls Latin, history, and sciences at a time when flower arranging, embroidery, and a smattering of French were all that was thought necessary for a young lady’s education. The founders’ motto was “If a girl can read Cicero she can read a recipe,” and Latin, which Menina had once been uncool enough to admit she loved, had remained an entrance requirement. Thanks to wealthy alumnae, the college had added an outstanding art history department.

  Being ladylike had its rewards. In her first year at college Menina had caught the eye of handsome Theo Bonner III. When Theo’s sports car began to appear in the Walkers’ driveway in the evenings, the whole town took note of the fact. Theo was the only son of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Georgia. He could have been a trust fund layabout, but instead was finishing law school at the university, planning to work for a law center for the indigent instead of joining one of the prestigious Atlanta law firms, and was generally approved of as a “boy with his feet on the ground who’d amount to something.” There was speculation he would go into politics, because the Bonners had been involved in state politics behind the scenes for generations.

  And in a scandalous age when single women and men lived together to see if the relationship worked before getting married, Theo had done the old-fashioned thing and proposed within a year of meeting Menina.

  In coffee mornings, at Bible class, garden-club luncheons, and church suppers the Walkers’ friends congratulated and envied Sarah-Lynn who never tired of regaling them with the story of how Menina and Theo first set eyes on each other.

  At college Menina had continued to work twice a week at the Hispanic community center, and a few weeks into her first year at Holly Hill she was rushing to one of her tutoring sessions with no time to change from paint-spattered jeans and an old sweatshirt full of holes she had worn for studio work. To her mortification, the center’s director called her into the office and introduced her as their hardest-working volunteer to Pauline and Theodore Bonner, who had come to see the center in operation. Feeling awkward, Menina shook hands with a distinguished gray-haired man, a slim and well-dressed older woman, and then their son, Theo Bonner III, who shook Menina’s hand and said he was in law school and had come along to see if the center’s users could be referred to their free legal-advice sessions.

  Theo was taller than Menina, handsome in an agreeably scruffy way, tanned with sun-bleached hair that looked like it needed cutting, and wearing a frayed sport coat that must have been inherited from a fraternity-house grab bag. The director asked Menina to give the Bonners a tour and Menina did, flustered by Theo’s presence, unable to stop herself sneaking glances at him. Something about Theo made her feel like she had an electric current running through her bones. She tried to behave normally until Theo caught her looking at him, grinned back, and winked at her. When the Bonners left, Menina cursed the fact she looked like she had crawled out of a garbage can. Then she sighed and told herself not to be an idiot. Theo Bonner was way out of her league.

  She was dumbfounded when he called a week later, saying he’d wormed her number out of the director, and asked Menina out. At Christmas the following year, Theo had proposed. Menina, dazzled and in love for the first time in her life, felt sure it was all a dream—of course she said yes.

  Out of Sarah-Lynn’s hearing the ladies speculated that Menina was engaged because she had heeded her mother’s advice not to have sex before marriage, which would have been along the lines of advice given by their own mothers: “Men think, why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free?” Pretty, ladylike and deserving—Menina moved in an aura of romance and approval.

  The only person less than thrilled that Menina was getting married was Menina’s best friend, Becky Taliaferro, though she hadn’t had any time alone with Menina to say so since Menina called her with the news she was engaged. Becky thought Theo was nice and definitely attractive and Menina seemed to be in love, but she’d never dated anybody else, so what did she know about men? Besides, Becky and Menina had always planned to travel and discover the world after college. Becky frankly hoped Menina wasn’t going to wind up as a housewife, even a rich one—Menina was too smart for that. Not just because she got As, but smart as in she liked ideas. She thought about stuff, really thought. Menina was the only person Becky knew who had a sort of scholarly streak—it was just who she was.

  But loyally, she was going to be Menina’s maid of honor in June. Now three months before the wedding, she had come home from college specially to choose her maid of honor dress. The two girls slouched on loungers in the Walkers’ sunporch, with iced tea and a plate of cookies between them. It was a comfortably shabby room—a repository for
old rattan furniture, sun-faded cushions, and back issues of Good Housekeeping—and had been Menina and Becky’s playroom ever since the day Becky’s family moved next door to the Walkers. Seven-year-old tearaway Becky had grown tired of teasing the cat, ripping open packing boxes and driving her mother crazy, and climbed the fence to make friends with seven-year-old Menina. Before long, naughty, irrepressible, blonde Becky and shy, dark-haired, well-behaved Menina were inseparable, always together at one house or the other. The Taliaferros stopped referring to Menina as “that nice little Walker girl” and nicknamed her “the Child of Light” because around Menina, evil little Becky behaved beautifully.

  As children the girls had built tents with card tables and blankets in the sunporch, had rainy-day picnics; as preteens they huddled over a forbidden Ouija board; in high school they pushed the card tables back and practised for cheerleader tryouts. In their senior year they sat at the card tables filling out college applications together. At the time, Becky teased that Holly Hill was a dull choice, while Menina quipped that Becky’s eagerness to embrace a hectic social schedule and join a sorority with hundreds of other students at the University of Georgia filled Menina with dread.

  Neither imagined how quickly their choices would lead them in different directions. If Menina was on the road to matrimony in short order, Becky had seized the opportunity to spread her wings. Abandoning her preschool teaching course, she had surprised everyone who knew her by being accepted to the Grady School of Journalism where, between boyfriends, she had become surprisingly focused on a career as a foreign correspondent, like Marie Colvin or Christiane Amanpour. So people would take her seriously, Becky compensated for her pretty face, wide blue eyes, and blonde curls with a gold stud in her nostril, a tattoo on her shoulder, and her current boyfriend’s motorcycle jacket. All of it, from journalism to the jacket, gave her mother fits.