We Five (5 page)

“Well, if you're going to be like that, I won't tell you.”

“Mag was just having fun,” said Molly pacifically. “Please tell us the last one.”

“Yes, I remember it now. It's the sun.”

Maggie stopped. Her companions halted as well. Maggie glared at Mirabella. “You mean the human race could go extinct from too much sunshine? Would this apply to Eskimos and Santa Claus too?”

“Well, what do you think causes droughts, for Heaven's sake?
Moonbeams
?”

Maggie snorted. “Mirabella Hampton Prowse,
you
are a moonbeam. A true mooncalf.”

“Of whom we are very, very fond,” Molly hastily put in. She reached over and demonstrated her fondness for her former grammar school desk-mate by giving her a little buss on the cheek. Then she seized Maggie by the arm and the two dashed off. “Very late!” Molly tossed back. “Love and kisses to you and the professor!”

After Maggie and Molly had put themselves a good distance ahead of their gaped-mouth friend, they slowed their pace to a stroll. “I know it was mean to dash away like that,” repined Molly, “but I also knew if I didn't do
something
, you were going to chew her up for breakfast. You
were
, weren't you?”

Maggie grinned and nodded. “But not breakfast. Dinner. A big plate of mooncalf's liver.”

Since the two of them seemed, at least for the time being, to be getting along, Molly wanted so badly to speak to Maggie about the marriage proposal, and how, should Mrs. Barton accept it, a union between their two parents might redound to the benefit of all concerned. But she kept her ongoing promise to her father and scrupulously avoided the topic. Instead, the two friends, as they strode past the solid brick mansions and quaint wood-frame houses of oak-lined Ninth Street, turned their conversation to the day that lay ahead, one greatly anticipated by Maggie and Molly and their three circle-sisters.

The woman for whom the five worked, the famed female evangelist Lydia DeLash Comfort, had “come home.” After several peripatetic years preaching the holy gospel in tents and auditoria throughout the country, money was raised (and was still being raised) to build a great Christian “tabernacle” in Zenith, the city of her birth and the place where her evangelizing career had begun. When construction of her “Tabernacle of the Sanctified Spirit” was completed in a couple of weeks, it would dwarf all other houses of worship in this middle-western metropolis,
and
be the envy of every pastor, priest, and rabbi in town.

The opening, the unveiling, the “Inaugural Service of Sanctified Celebration,” was scheduled for a week from Sunday. Leading up to this day, Maggie and Molly, and their equally assiduous sisters, Carrie and Jane and Ruth, were pitching in alongside all the other employees of “Sister Lydia's Square Deal Ministries” to make ready the big day. We Five handed out circulars to spread the word about the tabernacle's jubilant opening. They answered telephones and prepared mailings in the tabernacle office. They also worked as factotal Christian soldiers in service to all the various auxiliary groups that were popping up like mushrooms in Sister Lydia's sacred garden, as the evangelist's ministry, which had once been popular only with Pentecostals and others who spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor, was now becoming a transformative and very nearly respectable religious and cultural phenomenon of significant renown. There was still the little residual matter of the Sister's miraculous healing powers and whether these miracles would continue, with or without the reputed snake-oil operandi. But regardless, it was hard to deny that Sister Lydia's Square Deal Ministries had the potential to become veritably global in its scope and outreach.

Yes, Sister Lydia DeLash Comfort was doing the nearly inconceivable: she was becoming even more famous than Mary Pickford.

Today, though—
today
the saintly singing sisters were finally getting to sing. Under the leadership of choir director Vivian Colthurst, choir rehearsals in preparation for the inaugural celebration were finally getting underway. It was on this warm Monday in early July that We Five (lovingly named by Miss Comfort “Sister Lydia's Quintet of Songful Seraphim”) joined the other fifteen women hired by Lydia on the basis of the mellifluity of their laryngeal pipes and their willingness to lead the congregation once daily (except Thursdays) and three times on Sunday in making the requisite joyful noise unto the Lord.

It was the best job the girls had ever had. It sure beat working as bookkeepers and file clerks in the cramped front mezzanine office of Ramfield Wholesale Drugs and Sundries from whence they were—
rescued
would be the best way to describe it—by none other than the Reverend Lydia DeLash Comfort herself, when, upon a visit to the offices of that venerable Zenith concern to extract a sizeable contribution to the tabernacle's building fund from the company's circumstantially devout and philanthropic owner, Sister Lydia overheard the five singing “I Don't Know Why I Love You But I Do” in the employee lunchroom and was struck statuary by the close harmonies wafting from the girls' sweet lilting voices, and then was commensurately struck euphoric over the idea of having the five youthful female songbirds join her permanent choir (which had replaced the itinerant berobed and somewhat bedraggled quartet that had tagged along with Sister Lydia throughout her traveling ministry).

From the flat shared by Molly and her father above his dentist offices, it wasn't too long a walk to the house in which Molly and Maggie's friend Carrie and her mother lived. But they were late.

Both Mother and Daughter Hale were taking their breakfast on the front verandah. The colored cook and maid, Vitula, was home with a head cold, and Sylvia Hale, an inefficient time manager, was behind the clock. Eyeing that clock, Carrie suggested the two eat on the porch so she could watch the street and then be able to dash off when her friends came to collect her.

“Well, we certainly made a good thing out of Vitula's unfortunate absence this morning,” said Mrs. Hale, shaking out her lap napkin at the little wicker tea table. “This is
quite
lovely.” Carrie agreed with a nod. For a moment, mother and daughter sat upon their marginally comfortable chintz chair cushions in silence and listened to the bright and chirpy sounds of their Floral Heights neighborhood as it rose and shone.

Finally, Sylvia said, “Finish your waffles, dear. You know what they say about breakfast being the most important meal of the day.”

“No, Mother, what do they say?” Carrie grinned. “I respect you for trying, Mother, but your waffles taste nothing like Vitula's. But don't fret. There's always fresh fruit in the tabernacle offices. I'll just grab a peach or something before rehearsal starts.”

“You have a smudge on your cheek,” said Mrs. Hale, rising to wipe it away. “You look as if you've been sleeping in the coal bin.” Out of the corner of her eye Sylvia Hale caught her neighbor, Mrs. Littlejohn, coming down the sidewalk, tethered to her Cairn Terrier, unimaginatively named Toto. Thinking Carrie's mother was being especially friendly by standing up to greet her, Mrs. Littlejohn waved with wriggling fingers and called out, “Good morning, Sylvia! Good morning, Carrie! There was such beautiful music coming from your front parlor last night. Was that the two of
you
or the phonograph?”

“It must have been us,” returned Mrs. Hale. “I don't think we touched the Victrola last night.”

“What a contrast to that perfectly awful jazz scritch-scratch that comes tumbling out of the Prowses' house every time you turn around.” Mrs. Littlejohn's eyes went to the house in question, which she'd just passed. It belonged to Professor Reginald Prowse—head of the astronomy department of Winnemac Agricultural and Mechanical College—and his new baby bride, Mirabella (or Bella, to those who were close). “How you can live next door to all that racket and all those bohemian goings-on without pulling out all your hair, I cannot possibly imagine.”

Mrs. Hale drew an index finger to her lips, and then, thinking the gesture required some buttressing, she said, “Keep your voice down, Deloria. It's still early.”

“And wouldn't
that
be a tragedy: depriving the professor and his flip-flapper wife of their beauty sleep, when this is exactly what
they
do to all the rest of us two or three times a week!”

Mrs. Littlejohn interpreted Sylvia Hale's admonition as reason to come up the flag walk and address her neighbors on a more intimate basis upon the front steps. As the three spoke, the woman, who looked—it cannot be expressed otherwise—like a human-sized pear with legs, permitted, by slackened leash, her small terrier to trespass upon Mrs. Hale's flowerbed and dig its paws into the ground, still moist and friable from the heavy watering it had received the evening before. The scruffy dog was to do this more than once, and each time it did, Mrs. Littlejohn tightened the lead and yanked the dog cruelly back to heel, and Carrie, who was watching the multiple acts of this painful little drama from her seat, involuntarily grabbed at her own throat in sympathy.

“Mattie Parcher tells me you're starting your choir rehearsals today, Carrie. You must be so excited.”

Carrie nodded. “I am. It should be such fun.”

Mrs. Littlejohn gushed, “I've always known you Hales to be musical, but I thought the family talent was limited to the instrumental rather than the vocal. Sylvie, dear: wasn't your husband—the man who ran away and left you nearly destitute—wasn't he some sort of vaudeville musician?”

Mrs. Hale masked her displeasure over Mrs. Littlejohn's having brought up such a sore topic with the veneer of amiable froth: “Why, Deloria Littlejohn, you are the worst person I know for getting things completely jumbled up. My husband did
not
leave Caroline and me ‘nearly destitute.' I have always had income from my father's real-estate holdings—never as much as I would like, but enough to keep the wolf far from the door. As for my husband's profession, yes, he was in vaudeville and, yes, he played all manner of musical instruments. But he was not a performer per se. He was an impresario.”

Yank
.

Carrie seized her throat. Was the little dog choking? Why was its tongue now protruding frog-like from its mouth?

Mrs. Hale proceeded: “Had Gordon remained in Zenith and retained all his wits, he would have been quite proud of Caroline. Singing in Sister Lydia's choir! Just think of it.
Sister Lydia
! I understand she searched far and wide for every single member of that chorus of angels. Isn't that right, Caroline?”

Carrie removed her hand from her throat. “She
was
somewhat selective.”

Mrs. Littlejohn hum-sighed. Then she rhapsodized, “Who knew that such a beautiful songbird lived right on this very street?”

Yank
.

Mrs. Hale seconded Mrs. Littlejohn's observation with a knowing nod, her eyes closed, her fist gently thumping her equally proud maternal heart. “Well, I can't say I'd known all along that Caroline was
this
talented, but it wasn't as if I never entertained the possibility. My daughter excels at whatever she sets her mind to. Don't you, darling?”

“I don't know, Mother. I suppose I—”

Yank
.
Yelp
.

Seizing her throat once more, Carrie said, “Molly and Maggie are late. They're hardly ever late.”

“Perhaps they swung around to pick up Jane first,” suggested Sylvia with a superfluous swirl of her fork through the air.

“Well, that wouldn't make any sense. Jane lives two blocks closer to the tabernacle. Coming for me
after
picking her up would require doubling back.” Carrie succeeded in saying this without the use of any hand movement at all.

“Well,
I
should be getting back,” said Mrs. Littlejohn with misfired relevance. “Home, that is. I have an early appointment at the salon. Mrs. Tubb is coming to pick me up. Do you know Mrs. Tubb—Hermione Tubb? She lives in that newer section of Floral Heights—she's taking me to her beauty salon for my very first violet-ray facial treatment, and then if all my pores close up properly we're having chop suey and seeing that new Betty Compson picture at the Grantham.” Mrs. Littlejohn gave her little dog one great, decisive tug with the leash. “Something has been in this bed, it appears. Perhaps the squirrels have buried nuts here. Goodbye, Sylvia. Goodbye, Carrie, and congratulations. We're all so proud of you. I'm so fortunate to have the two of you for neighbors.” Mrs. Littlejohn glanced at the house next door and narrowed her eyes into coin slits. “Not at all like
some
people, who taint this block with absolute cacaphonia and the most appalling African rhythms, and dare to call it music. Whatever happened to Franz Lehár and Victor Herbert?”

“I think they're still with us,” said Carrie. “I mean, still alive.”

“Well, I hope they're still writing music. Because what I'm hearing today by the Negroes and the Tin Pan Yids has no business even being
called
music.” Mrs. Littlejohn waddled off without waiting for a response.

After she was safely out of earshot, Mrs. Hale said to her daughter, “I'm sure she means well.”

“I'm sure she does,” agreed Carrie, nibbling around the burnt part of a piece of toast.

Mrs. Hale looked both ways down the street (as if her daughter's friends might have taken leave of their attendance to practicality and created a new and even
longer
route by which to come and pick up Carrie). “Or maybe they
have
gone to fetch Jane first for some reason. How
is
Jane, by the way? You haven't spoken of her lately.”