The Sisters Sweet, page 3
That night, and the next night, and the one after that, instead of sleeping, I found myself listening to Mama and Daddy’s conversation, waiting to hear another name I knew, the story of another death. Usually, all I could make out was a whipping tension, but even that gave me a stomachache. I worried we’d have to stay in that little room forever. That for eternity, I’d have to look at those four walls, those two beds, that brass lamp, the painting on the wall of the boardinghouse itself, which, even before we’d been trapped, had made me feel slightly uneasy. And if someday we did get out, I worried we’d never work again. What if the act failed, as, I remembered now, our first act had? What then? Who would we be? The life we had made as the Siamese Sweets was still new, but already, any alternative seemed like its own sort of death.
I dragged through the days that followed my sleepless nights. Every afternoon, I collapsed into a long, dense nap, from which I woke hot and damp, certain I sensed the beginnings of a fever. I irritated Josie by asking her to feel my forehead, asking if I could feel hers.
But the fever never came. In November, Mama found us a job, and, anxious, masked, we boarded a train for the first time in a month. After that job came another, and another, short stints here and there until January, when, at last, Mama booked us a long engagement, in Moline. We settled into a new boardinghouse room, hanging postcards on the walls and putting bundles of dried flowers in the drawers. In February, we had a new job in Joliet, where Daddy won a ukulele in a card game, and that seemed to mark with certainty the return of our good fortune. We learned to play: Josie made the chords while I strummed.
Sometimes, when I lay awake at night, listening to the soft sounds of the rest of them sleeping, the black wave would come crashing over me. But as winter gave way to spring, as the tense weeks of the fall of 1918 slipped further into memory, the wave came less and less. One afternoon that May, Josie and I picked lilacs from a bush outside our rooming house. After dinner, we begged Mama to let us braid them into her hair. She relented, settling on the floor beside the bed, leaning back on her palms, legs straight forward, skirt smoothed out around her. I maneuvered her thick plait around my little fingers. Beside me, Josie cradled the flowers, trying not to laugh lest she swallow the hairpins poking out from between her lips. Daddy sat across the room, sketching the three of us. In that instant, I could almost believe my fear that any of us would die, that anything about our lives would ever have to change, was just another game of pretend. A nightmare I’d confused for real life.
* * *
That summer, the summer of 1919, our second on the road, Mama started writing us sketches to perform between songs. Daddy had the idea for a Siamese cartwheel, and Mama worked out how we could do it, training us on whatever stage she could get us into early in the morning, or on days we didn’t perform. We were in Terra Haute when, one morning, just after sunrise, we arrived at a dance school, where Mama had arranged for us to use a studio. She went in search of the studio key, leaving Josie and me waiting in the hall. I had brought a book of fairy tales I’d found some months back, abandoned in a rooming house parlor, and was idly turning the pages when I realized I wasn’t just looking at the pictures: I was reading some of the words.
I slammed the book shut, recognizing danger, though I couldn’t have said what exactly that danger was.
“Hey, I was looking at that,” Josie said. But Mama returned then.
We were staying in a cheap hotel, lucky to have a bathroom en suite. That night, I dragged the book in with me and turned the flimsy lock. I sat on the toilet lid and opened the book over my knees. Sure enough, there were the words, rising up from the black shapes my eyes had been sliding over for months as Mama read aloud.
After that, whenever I could get a moment alone—when Mama retreated into a bath or a nap, and Daddy went out to look for some company or a drink, and Josie settled in a corner for one of her private spells of daydreaming—I would crawl under a bed or into a closet with the book and run my finger under each row of words, whispering them to myself. From Mama’s briefcase, I stole a stubby pencil and a few sheets of paper so I could practice writing the letters, matching what I saw on the pages of that picture book to the alphabet song. All summer, I decoded words in newspaper headlines and on posters and billboards, every new word like a piece of candy in a secret stash. I scrawled letters and crumpled them up before anyone could see I hadn’t just been drawing. That I could read and write stirred in me the same flushed-cheek thrill as being onstage, but better for being private, contained entirely within myself. And at the same time, for the same reason, a source of shame. As if to possess an experience so wholly were somehow deceitful. Greedy.
We were in Kalamazoo one bright, golden morning that fall, sitting at the back of the house, on a bench that had been put there for us special, since the harness made it impossible for us to sit in the seats, waiting for our turn to rehearse, when a suited woman with a clipboard swooped in. The manager of the theater watched with crossed arms as she approached. After a brief argument, the manager made an angry sweep of his hands and walked away, and the woman pointed at Little Tibby Longfellow. We’d been annoyed to discover she was also on the bill in Kalamazoo, and were quietly satisfied when the woman, who had an authoritative, punishing aura about her, ordered Tibby to follow her into the hall.
Mama hurried to join the cluster of mothers whispering in the corner. When she came back she spoke urgently: “If she asks your age keep quiet. Be smart.” But before she could explain what exactly being smart entailed, the woman returned a tear-stained Tibby to her mother and pointed to Josie and me.
When she saw what we were—what we wanted her to think we were—she turned to look at the wall, as if she couldn’t trust herself not to gawk. Josie and I followed her into the hallway and perched together on a folding chair. I tried to keep from slumping too badly over the edge, so the harness wouldn’t dig into my latest rash.
The woman took the chair across from ours and lifted her clipboard, shifting her shoulders and blinking rapidly as she forced herself to look right at us, take us in.
“Age?” she said.
We shrugged, our shoulders rising and falling in perfect unison. The woman peered at us over her glasses and scribbled something on her clipboard. The questions continued: What was the nature of our act? Did we do any juggling, acrobatics, fire work, animal work? We folded our hands together in our lap, and I kept my gaze forward and level, while Josie answered the questions, one after the next. I began to relax. Be smart, Mama had said, and Josie knew just what to do.
“And have you ever been enrolled in school?”
Josie’s inside arm went stiff against mine. She opened her mouth and closed it again. The lady pursed her lips, made another mark on her clipboard. Then she handed me a blank piece of paper and Josie a pencil.
“Write your name—your names—your name, please,” she said.
My secret rose like an itch to the surface of my skin. If the woman had handed the pencil to me instead of Josie, I might have managed something close to H-A-R-R-I-E-T. But Josie clung to it helplessly. My heart pounded in my throat.
The woman made one last mark on her clipboard and ushered us back into the theater.
“Mrs. Sweet?” she said. Mama followed her into the hall.
The next morning Mama woke us early, but instead of readying us for the dance studio, she had us sit on the edge of our lumpy mattress and declared—cheerfully, matter-of-factly, as if it had been her plan all along—that it was time we learned our ABCs. She set a phonebook on my knees and on top of it, a sheet of paper with the alphabet written out in neat rows. She handed me a pencil and before she could say another word, I was copying out the letters, so excited that I forgot I wasn’t supposed to know how yet.
“Why, Harriet!” Mama said. I braced myself for trouble. But she was smiling at me the way she smiled at Josie when she made a joke or mastered a new song. Pleasure swirled in my chest.
Josie grabbed the pencil with her right hand, the hand she always grabbed with when we weren’t in the harness. Mama swatted her fingers gently.
“No, no,” she said, and moved the pencil to Josie’s left hand—her outside hand.
Josie frowned but accepted the phonebook and the paper from me. Tongue pressed between her teeth, eyebrows knitted together, she tried to fill in a row of letters below mine. But no letters emerged, just tangled lines, some thickly scrawled, some trailing off in a barely visible thread. She pressed harder, and the pencil slid the paper off the phonebook. Again, Mama said no. She said let me show you, begin at the beginning, and reached to guide Josie’s hand, but Josie yanked her own hand away. She looked at Mama, and then she turned to me, her eyes burning with anger, and snapped the pencil in two.
We didn’t perform for a few days—we were waiting for the Gerry lady to clear out of town, Mama explained, to find some other hardworking Americans to harass. But every morning, she sat us down for a reading lesson. Josie snapped another pencil, tore the page with its printed alphabet into confetti. When we were finally able to return to the theater, Mama seemed more relieved than any of us.
On our first day back, during our first matinée, in the middle of our first sketch, a wooden pear fell from a rickety stock set tree, right onto my head. I was startled: there was a lag, a tiny one, during which I felt myself blinking stupidly into the dark house. But I had recovered and was about to say my next line when Josie scooped up the pear.
“Say, why don’t you lay off my sister!” she said and mimed a punitive bite.
The audience’s laughter was electric, quickly out of control. She tossed the pear over her shoulder with a wink, and there was another wave of it. People clapped and whistled. For the first time since New York, stage fright crimped my belly. I started my next line but couldn’t get it out over the sound of the crowd. Inside the harness, Josie pressed her elbow into mine; I waited until the laughter trailed to a trickle, as we’d been trained, and then, finally, I got out the line, and on we went. We made it to the end of the act without another mishap, but the whole time, I felt peculiar. Cold. Separate from Josie as I had never before felt onstage.
As we took our bows, Josie gave an extra wink and wave and there was a rush of fresh applause and a shrill whistle. Just for her. It was impossible: there was no her on the stage, there was only us, a single being. But as we hurried off I understood: Josie was the star. When we were onstage together and I felt so free, so warm, so alive, so gifted, it wasn’t because of some mutual effort, some equal exchange. I was basking in Josie’s light.
Backstage, Daddy shook his head and laughed, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to slap Josie or give her a dollar. But Mama grabbed her shoulder and dragged us both down the hall toward the dressing rooms. As soon as we were alone, she crouched down and whispered fiercely in Josie’s face.
“What were you thinking? What business do you have, improvising? Showboating? Don’t think I didn’t know that was exactly what you were doing.” As she went on I looked down at the floor, as if by refusing to watch the scolding I might make it end. My chest was heaving, my muscles jelly, my undershirt clinging to my sweaty skin. Mama promised her a spanking when we got back to our room. Josie didn’t even flinch.
I was certain then that she had done it on purpose. Because I could read, and she couldn’t. It had been a message, a warning. Look, sister, she had said. Never forget how things stand.
* * *
—
A few weeks later, Mama attempted another reading lesson, but Josie hummed “Yankee Doodle Dandy” until she threw up her hands. She tried again a few months after that, and a few months after that, and then periodically over the next few years, the lessons usually following a visit from a Gerry agent, or a warning that one was at hand. But Josie refused to listen. She refused to learn.
We outgrew harnesses as quickly as Daddy could stitch them. Our dolls, Susan and Emily, evolved from babies into dancers, whose pink painted mouths we filled with words of the women we eavesdropped on backstage and at parties, words we didn’t quite understand but knew better than to say loud enough for Mama to hear—pessary and blotto and cramps. I moved from storybooks and headlines to newspapers and whatever reading material I found discarded on trains and in hotel lobbies, forgotten in backstage nooks: novels and popular histories and magazines and seed catalogs and collections of speeches and volume “M” of an encyclopedia. Still, every time Mama tried to teach her how to read, Josie sighed, she broke pencils, she ripped paper, she split strands of her hair and tore out the hems of her clothes, calmly, as if she was only asserting her right to be left alone, until, at last, Mama closed her eyes and said, “All right. That’s enough. We’ll try another time.” A dancer who had run away from home offered us whatever we wanted from a stack of her old books. I took eleven, of which Mama gave me permission to keep three: I chose Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, and, for self-improvement, an old exercise book that I worked through, over and over, until the front cover tore from the spine. Josie laughed as if the dancer had offered us her old underthings.
Onstage, I made occasional mistakes: garbled a lyric, missed a note, forgot a line. Josie rescued me when she needed to but never again drew attention to herself as she had in Kalamazoo. Still, I didn’t forget what she’d shown me that afternoon, didn’t lose track of the distinction she’d drawn. When fans approached us after a show, or when we came off a train and found a crowd waiting for a glimpse of the medical and theatrical miracle, I signed the autographs. Josie mugged and chatted, absorbing their admiration.
1903
Maude Foster emerges into the steam and hustle of the platform at Grand Central Station, clinging to her suitcase and staring, with great purpose, some yards ahead, the surest way, she has learned, to keep busybodies from asking why she is traveling alone. The sanitary belt they gave her in Philadelphia cuts into her abdomen, and she can feel on her thighs a stickiness that makes her grateful for the heaviness of her skirts. But for the first time in months there is also a lightness beneath her breastbone, a sense of possibility both exhilarating and terrifying that propels her through the throng of travelers. In a glove now damp and slightly yellowed, she clutches Vera’s address. She scolds herself, gently, for thinking of her so familiarly—“Miss Vance,” she ought to say.
When she passes through a revolving door onto the street, the noise and the brightness and the jostling of the crowd pull her up short. A sob collects in her chest, and she cannot keep it from escaping her lips. There, for a moment, is the baby—a mite of a thing, oddly heavy for his size, gauzy blue eyes shocked open as he tries to absorb the impossible newness of the world, of her own face, which she was careful to keep still, ungenerous, as if to say, no, child, I am not for you. Now she presses her lips together, tamps down the sob. What is done is done, she thinks, willing a plaque to form against the soft, throbbing surface of her heart.
“Can I help you, miss?” He is an elegant man, with a smooth, pink forehead, a thin, aristocratic mouth, and she is aware that she must look weak and lost. She considers it. She could hand him Vera Vance’s address, she could ask him to take her there. But if she is certain of anything after the last few days, after Eugene Creggs and his late-in-the-game attention to her honor, it is that she has no interest in saviors. She has made a decision: she has refused to let herself be saved. By now, Eugene will know she has gone, he will hate her for it, but he will do right by that baby, she is sure of that much, so let him have that—let him save the boy, and leave her to her own fate. And let this posh city man find another lost girl to rescue. She shakes her head and begins to walk, uncertain of the way but determined to look certain. It is a warm evening, and the sun is still high in the sky; she has time to figure it out.
If they heard back home that Maude Foster had found herself in a pinch and refused help from a perfectly nice man, they would call her a showoff. Stuck up, they would call her. Arrogant. They have called her these things since she was a little girl, and she can hardly blame them. The truth is there has never been a moment of her conscious life in which she has not understood that she was designed for something better than Hobart, Ohio. When she was younger, she collected stories about city girls from old copies of smart papers a friend of her mother’s sometimes brought over in a bundle. She dressed her paper dolls in shoes and hats and gowns cut from The Delineator, suitable to the future she imagined for herself: one of fine fashion and fresh flowers in crystal vases and elegant, cultured people. She would be the wife of a city doctor, or a senator. Propel herself as far as she could from dreary, pig-smelling Hobart, Hobart with its church suppers on Saturday nights and high school basketball games on Wednesday nights and the county fair every summer, ad infinitum, the same pudding-cheeked, blond boys in overalls growing up to help their fathers on the farm or at the store, the same virtuous girls with their excruciating conversations about the overalled boys, about what sort of curtains they planned to hang in the houses they would live in up the road from their mothers after they got married. That she was not destined to remain in Hobart was as simple and natural an understanding as the fact of day and night, as the fact of her beauty, her surety of which, after so many months of feeling like a lumbering stranger, is returning to her. She glimpses her reflection in a window and is pleased by the glossy waves spilling over her shoulders. Her color is back, the complexion Laura Zimmerman’s mother once called “English rose.” “She’ll break hearts,” Mrs. Zimmerman said.
