Secret Sisters

by Joy Callaway

  I looked behind me, found no one following, and edged into the door at the back of Old Main. Immediately wishing I’d remembered to bring a candle, I stumbled blindly through the rubble.

  The basement was freezing in the chill of night. I heard scurrying all around me. I made it to the closed door, guided by the little strip of light escaping from the seam. Raising my fist, I struck the door once and lingered, then tapped four times, and rolled my knuckles across the wood.

  “Who knocks on the door of Beta Xi Beta?” Lily’s voice filtered through the door, barely loud enough to be heard.

  “It’s your sister, Beth,” I said. The door creaked open and Katherine’s gaze met mine, her tears catching the candlelight. Lily had already told them. Without preamble, Katherine embraced me, the intense scent of rosewater perfume engulfing me as she did. Slightly shocked by this immediate display of affection, I clutched the bunch of ivory lace along the back of her bodice and glanced over her shoulder at Mary’s cloaked figure draped protectively around my roommate. They both smiled at me, though Lily’s face looked gaunt, as though she was in danger of collapsing at any moment, and Mary’s eyes were fully hidden by the cloak’s hood and a black blusher veil, making her look as though she’d just come from a funeral. In part, I suppose she had—the death of Lily’s innocence.

  “She’s decided to keep the child . . . if she’s with child, that is,” Mary said, as though I hadn’t been privy to any prior conversation. “I told her that I doubt she’s fallen pregnant. I overheard Mother speaking to one of her friends once, and it’s apparently quite difficult to do even if a woman is trying for a child. And since she and . . . and since they were not made one, it would be highly unlikely. I know you said the same.” I nodded. “I also said that if by chance you and I are wrong, Mother would know of several reputable practitioners—despite the procedure being contrary to the law—if she’d like to resume her cycle, but she’d have nothing of it.”

  I didn’t reply, knowing Lily desired no further discussion on that matter.

  “If I do have a child, the child and I will be just like you and Judith,” Lily said to Mary, mustering a bleak smile.

  “Yes. Always the best of friends,” Mary said with a wink at me, knowing I knew the truth. The evening after Christmas, after Lily had retired, Mary and I had begun a conversation about parents. In reality, Judith and Mary hadn’t always been close. After Mary’s father’s death, she had been raised in part by an elderly neighbor, Miss Verona, who’d cared for her while Judith fought for the cause. For years, Mary didn’t understand her mother’s absence and snubbed the movement because of it—it had only made her a subject of ridicule at school. But then, on her seventeenth birthday, Judith decided to take the day off. She’d worn a floral costume instead of her token black and they’d gone to high tea at the Palmer House Hotel. She hadn’t even corrected the waiter when he’d mistakenly called her “Mrs.” On the way home, however, the coach passed by a middle-aged woman crumpled next to a brownstone and Judith had immediately ordered the driver to stop. The woman was one of Judith’s organizers, and she’d been beaten by her husband so severely that her nose had been broken and her cheek crushed. Together Mary and Judith ushered her to the hospital, and for the next month, the woman lived with them. That day, Mary came to understand her mother’s passion for women’s rights, and began to wear black in kind.

  “Well, now that Beth’s here . . .” Mary trailed off and left Lily’s side to pluck the candlestick from the desktop. “Gather ’round,” she said, gesturing to Katherine and pushing my cloak into my hand. I ducked into the garment, realizing Mary had already fastened my wreath pin to the fabric at my chest, and reached to clutch Lily’s hand.

  “Right before my mother’s friends decided on a mission for the cause, they’d stand in a circle in our living room and pass a candle,” Mary continued. “At times, they’d sing a song as they went, but the meaning was always the same—whatever the secret they shared, whatever danger the mission entailed, it would be kept in solemn confidence between them. I propose that we adopt this ritual as our own . . . if that would be all right with the rest of you.”

  “I think that would be lovely,” Katherine said.

  Mary started to hum the beginning notes, but Lily stopped her.

  “A moment first?” Lily bit her lip, looking over the three of us. “Thank you, all of you, for loving me. For responding in love to my news instead of judging what I’d done. I’ve always wanted a family more than anything, and I’ve found it in you.”

  “That’s what sisters are for,” Katherine said quietly. “Any of us could have found ourselves in a similar fix.”

  My thoughts immediately flashed to Will, and I wondered, given Katherine’s lenient morality, if she’d ever fallen pregnant. Then again, I had no idea if she’d ever actually been intimate with a man, and she didn’t seem like she’d be ashamed to say if she had, given Lily’s circumstance.

  “And I’m thankful you’re mine.” Lily grinned at her. “I’ll make a cloak for you as soon as I can procure the fabric, and a wreath, too.”

  Katherine blinked back tears and smiled back.

  “Now,” Lily went on, “I told all of you that I didn’t want any of this mentioned to Professor Helms or anyone else, but I didn’t say that I didn’t want the score settled.”

  “Thank goodness,” Mary breathed. “I would have gone along with your wishes, but I want, more than anything, to send him straight to hell. How shall we do it?”

  “We’re not going to kill him literally,” Lily responded. “Only in a roundabout way.” Her hazel eyes met mine straight-on. “Beth, I want Beta Xi Beta to take on new members. I want this fraternity to grow in numbers and resilience until we are so powerful that the board will be forced to listen to us, grant us a charter.”

  I opened my mouth to agree with her, but she held her hand up and continued. “And when that time comes, when our voices are officially worth the weight they’re due on this campus, I’ll be long finished with Professor Helms’s course. Our influence will be like the Iotas, too great to ignore, and then we’ll find a way to ruin him.” The last words came out in a sharp whisper.

  “Then let’s begin,” Katherine said. “In the meantime, I’ll pray for nothing more than his calamity.”

  All three of them looked my way.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’re our president,” Mary said, the edges of her lips turning up in a grin. “Perhaps you were right to seek Mr. Richardson’s help after all. What was it about Iota Gamma that convinced the board to approve them? How did they recruit new members when they were meeting in secret? We’ve never done it of course, and will need a process.”

  I had no answer to either question.

  “We can’t just take anyone that’ll have us yet, Beth, seeing as we’ll still have to be covert. We’re not exactly supposed to be meeting,” Lily said.

  “That’s true, but there are only five other women in non-traditional concentrations. We only have five prospective pledges to begin with right now. I say we consider all of them,” I said. “And I’m not quite sure how they did it. Mr. Richardson would never tell me anything about their procedures, even if I asked. He doesn’t qualify as a friend and it’s clear that he holds Iota’s secrets close to his chest.”

  “If we could somehow figure their methods, their rituals, how their relationship works with the college, we could copy it,” Katherine said. “Industry does this all of the time with great success. My father’s fortune was won by following the example of another grower and—”

  “Why would we want to do that?” Mary asked, though my mind was in a different place for a moment. How would Katherine know about industry? Though she’d said her traditional reputation was a ruse, the use of the power she said it wielded wasn’t immediately clear.

  “Beta Xi Beta should be entirely unique, set aside from the Iota Gammas, a true sisterhood built for camaraderie, betterment, education,” Mary contin
ued. “The only reason I suggested looking to their strategy for engaging new members is because they’re quite good at hiding their interest until they’re certain. In any case, their process isn’t the cause of their clout. Mr. Richardson is.”

  “I disagree. True, the Richardson family has always elevated Iota Gamma’s influence, but Iota Gamma has been a force on this campus since its inception. It only requires a look through the Cardinal’s archives to see that,” I said. We’d been required to learn the history of the school’s medical program through the paper’s records, and I’d ended up fascinated, perusing the papers from before the war. “The first mention of Iota Gamma was in 1854. They won a case against the school insisting that Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter be permitted for study—an important victory because one of the founding Iotas had been caught with a copy.”

  “Very well. They’ve always been influential; but I still don’t understand why we’d want to imitate them,” Mary said.

  Suddenly I recalled a bit of information from the introductory pamphlet we’d been sent upon acceptance.

  “Because, beyond the fact of tried organizational success, if we modeled our fraternity after the Iota Gammas, there’d be no difference between our fraternity and theirs . . . other than the sex of our members. Their practices have been examined by the board and found satisfactory. If we mimic them, it would give the board almost no room to deny us,” I said. “As it is, our social experience as women outside of the divinity course of study is nonexistent. If I fail in convincing President Wilson otherwise, I say that we—”

  “During your romantic appointment with Mr. Richardson?” Mary snickered. Lily had apparently told the girls about my agreeing to accompany him to the ball.

  “Hardly. But, for some reason he asked, and seeing as how it will award me an opportunity to speak to the president about our establishment . . .” I paused, smiling to myself. Regardless of secret societies being forbidden, it gave me great joy to know that we’d begun our fraternity before any sort of approval. “I thought that I should agree to it. With your blessings, of course.”

  “As long as President Wilson isn’t made privy to the knowledge that we’ve already begun,” Lily said. “I would rather loathe getting expelled after what I’ve done to stay.”

  I squeezed her hand.

  “Of course I’ll keep our secret in confidence. In any case, I’m hoping that the president is a reasonable man and hears our plea, but if, as I’m expecting, he doesn’t, we’ll have to find another way. If we recruit the right women, mass expulsion won’t be an option, and modeling our fraternity’s bylaws and actions after Iota Gamma certainly won’t hurt. It may give us enough strength in both establishment and numbers that we could petition the college with the argument that not allowing us to organize would be in violation of Mr. Everett’s intent to integrate the sexes. Is that what you meant earlier, Katherine?”

  “Yes. And if I’d been able to get a word in edgewise, I would have explained myself,” she said, glancing at Mary, who didn’t seem to notice.

  “Why couldn’t we go to the board with that argument now?” Lily asked, her face suddenly lightening with the possibility.

  “Right now there are several things against us,” I started. “All they would see when they examined us—if we weren’t exiled from Whitsitt on the spot for organizing in secret—would be a glaring suffragist agenda, four women out of nearly forty on campus, a damp basement room, homemade cloaks and membership pins, and a measly two-sentence pledge—”

  “That we should discard immediately,” Mary said, avoiding Lily’s gaze by adjusting the positioning of her blusher.

  “Why?” Lily’s eyes narrowed at Mary and I coughed, hoping Mary would drop it. This was not an argument we needed to have. Not now.

  “Never mind me.” Mary slapped on a counterfeit grin and laughed. “Everyone knows I love the pledge. I was just making sure you were still with us, old girl.” She elbowed Lily in the ribs and swiveled her head to face me. “So, to begin, what have you picked up from the King of Flirtations, Beth?” The abrupt subject change worked. Lily’s focus snapped to me and I laughed under my breath at Will’s title, wondering what Katherine thought of it.

  “Not much, unfortunately. All I know is that Mr. Richardson has asked him to follow five select freshmen around campus to see if they’re worthy of the Iota Gamma letters. I’m not sure how they decide on the men, but I did witness him screening one tonight. He gave the gentleman the benefit of one interaction.” I shook my head. Given how utterly disgusted I’d been by Katherine until just this morning, I was aware that our perceptions were often tied into our prejudices. “I’d like to think we’d give our potential members more than one opportunity.”

  “Are you sure that’s Mr. Richardson’s method of doing things or Mr. Buchannan’s?” Lily asked. Will did have a reputation for being impulsive and a bit slapdash.

  “Likely Will’s,” I conceded. “But anyway, we need to find a directory. I’ll wager that’s how Mr. Richardson finds them, likely choosing those with important last names first.”

  “Or it could be by impression,” Katherine ventured with a smile. “Perhaps the brothers are asked to be mindful of recruitment during fall semester, looking for any freshmen that affect them. Then, the prospective selections are discussed in chapter meetings and the few that all of the brothers agree on are secretly observed during the spring semester.”

  Mary cleared her throat.

  “You aren’t speaking from conjecture,” she said. “How do you know?”

  Katherine let go of my hand and twisted the wispy blonde curl at the side of her head.

  “It might be because my younger brother made an impression on Mr. Samuel Stephens last semester and Mr. Stephens warned him to be on his best behavior come January.”

  “Mr. Stephens? Will’s friend?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that one of the brothers would so readily share the fraternity’s schemes.

  “Of course. Don’t seem so surprised, Beth,” Mary answered for her. “It’s widely known that if you’d like a secret to be known all over campus, tell Mr. Stephens.” She twirled the candle in her hand, making me wonder if she’d been in Mr. Stephens’s confidence before. But why would she? As far as I knew, she hadn’t done anything remotely scandalous except spend an evening in New York City with Roger McDonnell, a fellow student keen to become a conductor, to watch Theodore Thomas lead the Philharmonic—but they’d been chaperoned by one of Miss Zephaniah’s friends in the city, hardly a romantic rendezvous.

  “It’s true,” Katherine said. “Mr. Stephens told my brother, James, everything—prefacing all of it with an oath not to snitch, of course. The problem, though, is that James isn’t the least bit interested in joining, so he had no qualms telling me about it.”

  “Iota’s recruitment strategy seems fair,” Lily said. “Perhaps we should adopt it for our own and spend the next week observing the other girls. Each of us could take one of the others—”

  “James could probably be convinced to play along with the Iotas if we wanted him to. He could let us in on their secrets. He owes me a favor,” Katherine interrupted. She smoothed the lace at her bodice and waited for us to consider the idea.

  “You really suppose he’d do that for us? What if he changes his mind?” I asked, finding the prospect of a secret informer in the Iota Gamma house a risky one. Mr. Richardson was too charismatic. He won everyone over eventually.

  Katherine shook her head.

  “You don’t know James. He’s much too intelligent to succumb. He had a rather strange experience with the Masons when he was younger and walked out on initiation. He found it too hedonistic and cult-like. He assumes that the fraternity is the same and stands with Whitsitt on the ban.”

  “And you don’t?” Mary asked, gesturing around the circle.

  “Of course not,” Katherine said, wrinkling her forehead as though it was the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. She lifted my hand and Mary’s. “I
’ve joined a family. Unless I’m sorely mistaken, you aren’t going to ask me to pledge my soul to the devil or pay nearly one hundred a semester to wear your letters.”

  “One hundred? Each semester?” Lily spat.

  Katherine nodded.

  “That’s the rumor,” she said. I watched this exchange with a bit of trepidation. Eventually, we’d have to collect dues as well. That’s how houses were bought and bills paid. But there were more immediate hurdles to overcome right now. “Plus, James and I are so different you’d wonder if we were actually related. You’ll see when you meet him.”

  “Do you think this is the wisest plan?” Lily asked, lips pressing together for a moment as though she wasn’t sure. “If he gets caught and tells anyone about us . . .”

  “We’re not going to force him to help,” I said. “And we may not need him if the president agrees to hear our proposal. But if I fail with President Wilson and Mr. Sanderson agrees, it’ll give us another chance to establish Beta Xi Beta as a real fraternity.”

  “He’d have to swear secrecy,” Lily said.

  “That goes without saying,” Katherine said.

  A bit of hot wax dripped onto Mary’s hand and she winced, shifting the candle to the other. “So, we’ll wait to hear back from Beth following the ball next Friday, and if she fails, we’ll approach Katherine’s brother.”

  “That’s right,” I said, and Mary sighed.

  “Now that that’s settled, we’ll pass the candle. It will forever be our symbol of trust and honor,” she said, staring down at the flame. “I’ll begin to sing a little song I wrote in music theory earlier and we’ll pass it. When I stop, Lily will blow out the candle and her confidence will never be broken.”

  We were silent for a moment as she passed the candle to Katherine.

  “After the flame is extinguished, after the secret is kept,” Mary sang in her smooth soprano. Katherine handed the candle to me and I held it for a moment, feeling the contrast of the cool wax and the slight bit of warmth from the flame. “After we’ve left the chapter room, after our hands have unclasped.” I handed the candle to Lily and watched her stare at the light. Her mouth pursed for just a moment and then she smiled to herself. “Four hearts are opened, if you knew them all—you would know our sisterhood is stronger than them all.”