All for a Sister (21 page)

Oh, how her words gouged at me, my belly full of lies, my home flooded with deception. Others around me were dabbing their eyes with lace handkerchiefs, but I dared not shed a tear, lest I burst forth in confession.

“The harvest is very great, but the laborers, oh, so few.”

I looked at this tiny woman, who seemed capable of shouldering the burden of salvation for an entire nation, and wondered briefly how God must see me, gluttonous and shameful, day after day eating my sin. I wished right then that I could go to China.
Take my hat and handbag and follow this woman out of the parlor and onto the next boat. Let Arthur and Mrs. Gibbons discover Mrs. Lundgren in the middle of some night when the woman crept from her room in search of food. Send a letter to Calvin explaining that his mother had to find some way to escape the trap she’d set for herself.

For it was a trap. It could be nothing less. Two women, one child. At some point the jaws would snap, leaving one of us on the outside, and a whole world ready to end my misery.

“How many are there who imagine that because Jesus paid it all, they need pay nothing? Who have forgotten that the prime object of their salvation was that they should follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ in bringing back a lost world to God?”

“What can we pay?” The impassioned voice of Mrs. Scott spoke first, as was fitting her role as hostess.

“You can all come back with me.” Her eyes glittered with humor, allowing us to giggle self-consciously at the absurdity of the suggestion. “But to be direct, you can give money. As the mission board is finding it to be more and more of a struggle to fund our efforts, we are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the physical needs of our workers and the spiritual needs of God’s children.”

“But we are not Baptists,” said Mrs. Scott. Indeed, I’m sure our missionary friend was the first of such to ever step foot in her parlor.

“It matters not to the Lord,” she said with good humor. “He loveth a cheerful giver.”

A warm round of laughter followed, and Mrs. Scott sat at an ornate writing desk in the back corner of the room, ready to receive donations. Several of the ladies followed; still others crowded our speaker, looking like a host of furred and plumed
creatures circling a little brown house mouse. I joined neither group, knowing my delicate condition would explain my inactivity. Soon, such unaccustomed social interaction took its toll on the missionary, and she came to sit beside me, her feet swinging freely from below her plain black skirt.

“You look to be as tired as I feel,” she said. I never felt so unworthy to be in the presence of another. “Your friends say you are expecting a child?”

The affirming lie slid out of me, more easily than I could have imagined, turning the remnants of lemon cake bitter on my tongue.

She laid her hand on mine, an astounding strength in even that small gesture. “Do you have other children?”

I told her a boy, Calvin, six years old. And a little girl—here, I choked back a sob—whom God had recently taken from me.

It was the first I’d spoken of Mary to a person who didn’t already know, and it felt like a confession of my own sin. That I’d somehow done something to call for such a penalty, and with my voice barely above a whisper, I expressed my loss at knowing just what I had done to deserve such a punishment.

Her worn, thin face became a sea of kindness, but not sympathy. “As it says in the book of Job, ‘Despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: for he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole.’ This child, then, is his way of making you whole again.”

She’d seen far greater tragedy than this, and through her stories so had I. What was the loss of one privileged child when compared to those masses starving outside of God’s grace?

I thanked her for her words of comfort, giving no indication the weight of the burden that she’d lifted.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you can find some peace in making an
offering so that one woman, unknown to you, living on the other side of the world, might be spared the same sorrow.”

I asked if she really thought that was possible, that one offering would bring peace to my soul?

“In the book of Matthew we hear of a young man who had kept all of the laws of God and had loved his neighbor, and came to Jesus asking what he lacked. And Jesus said to him, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.’” She squeezed my hand. “I cannot make that same demand.”

I smiled and said I could never attain perfection.

Before I left, I gave Mrs. Scott all of the money I had, nearly thirty dollars, and having obtained the proper address, wrote a check for one hundred more upon arriving home.

“If thou wilt be perfect . . .”

I gave and I gave, every month until you were born, but after everything that happened that night, I knew I would never be able to give enough.

CELESTE, AGE 10

1916

IT WAS A MUCH-ANTICIPATED
day in the DuFrane household. One week earlier, Daddy had received a message from somebody called Technicolor, interested in seeing his research on processing color film. He’d torn through the house, clutching the letter and reading its small body of words to Mother and Graciela and Calvin in turn. Celeste had run right alongside him, hearing the missive repeatedly. At the supper table that night, she entertained the family by repeating it verbatim, pitching her voice to that of her idea of a person in authority.

Since then, there had been a flurry of activity. Going through all of his papers to compile years of research notes, documentation of his patents, carefully separating the work he had done while connected to the university in Chicago from that which was a result of many late nights in a rented laboratory or in his own office at home.

Celeste never left his side, eager to do any task, even painstakingly typing the notes scrawled through multiple journals. Though she understood little of what she typed, she prided herself on needing help only with some of the chemical abbreviations. Once all the papers were collected, she numbered each one in her neatest hand, clear up to 357.

“This is why we came to California,” he said, gazing raptly on the stack of pages as if it were holy in itself. “This is going to make us rich.”

“Aren’t we rich already?”

A look passed over Daddy’s face, one Celeste couldn’t identify. Discomfort, but not quite shame, and he ran his hand over his tome of research. “That is your mother’s money. Her grandfather’s, actually. This is mine. This is money for the future, before the future even arrives.”

She didn’t have a clue what he meant, but the tone was clear, and she covered his hand with hers in solemn agreement.

“Now,” he said, “help me look through some of the archives and find the right footage to take to the interview.”

What followed were nights gathered in the back parlor, a room hung with heavy, dark curtains and a series of small sofas all facing one large, blank wall on which Daddy projected one after another of his experimental colored films. There were minutes upon minutes of nothing more than flickering images of flowers, and the ocean, and a monkey in a red suit furiously turning the handle of a silent music box. One reel showed Mother on a grassy lawn somewhere, sitting on a red-checked blanket and nibbling what looked like a chicken leg.

“Oh, not that one, surely,” Mother said as the family watched. “I look big as a house.”

Daddy tried to convince her. “But see how clearly the colors of the blanket—”

“Absolutely not.” And that was final.

Another reel captured Calvin playing with his toy soldiers, with close-ups of the tiny battles and cutaways to his much-younger face, squinting in youthful strategy. To everyone’s amusement,
he even puffed at an unlit cigar and studied a giant map with the help of an oversize monocle.

“I remember that day,” the now-grown-up Calvin said. “I think that was when we were still back in Chicago.”

“It was,” Daddy said. “See? The color isn’t quite right. Of course, that could be the age of the film.”

“But it could speak to how long you’ve been working,” Calvin said, “and show just how far you’ve come.”

“True.” Daddy stood back at the projector, but he moved forward until the image of his son was spread across the back of his shirt. “But I’d have to admit to some hand-tinting here—” he pointed to a fallen soldier stained red with blood—“for effect.”

“To think of all those poor boys off dying in a real war,” Mother said, her words eerily hollow.

“Yes, Mother. To think.” Calvin lit a cigarette as his boyish image flickered into darkness. “Although I hardly believe you give much thought to them at all.”

For a moment, the only light in the room was the glowing tip of Calvin’s cigarette, and it moved in a slow arc, briefly illuminating his face.

“You have no idea what I harbor in my heart,” Mother said.

“Enough.” Daddy flipped on the light switch, showing Mother and Calvin both preparing to leave the room.

“Just one more,” Celeste pleaded. “Please? We haven’t seen one of me yet.”

“Which is such an impossibility of odds,” Calvin muttered, “seeing how you can barely move from one end of a day to another without Dad documenting it on film.”

“Shut up.”

“Mary Celeste DuFrane!” It was rare for Daddy to ever offer chastisement, but the sharpness in his tone was unmistakable.

“Don’t call her that.” Mother’s defense was equally sharp.

Calvin exhaled a stream of smoke and declared that he was leaving.

“Sit down.”

Her father was preoccupied with threading the film from the take-up reel to the feeder, and for a moment the whirring of its rewinding was the only sound in the room. Celeste eyed her brother, who paced the small area between his vacated chair and the door like some sort of caged animal before dropping into the seat. He stared straight ahead, his face sullen as he smoked, mindless of the dry ash that fell to the floor at his feet. Did he really hate her that much? Could he really not stand to look at her image projected on a wall? Ever since the night he’d told her that she’d died and come back again, Celeste had been wary of his presence and haunted by her own. They’d spent little time together, given his tendency to stay out most evenings with what their mother called “mindless California trash.” Tonight was the first evening the whole family had spent any significant time together in months, and there he sat, impatiently tapping his foot as if serving out a sentence.

“There,” Daddy said, having readied the new film. “One more, and I shall release you all.”

He turned off the light and the room echoed with the flickering sound of promise, and then the wall filled with a beautiful shot of their very own backyard, all in bloom. There was Celeste’s little playhouse, and a strange woman standing next to it.

“She could be Alice in Wonderland,” Celeste said, “after she grows big.”

Mother made a dismissive noise. “Not with that painted face.” Indeed, the detail of the color clearly showed the woman’s pink cheeks and reddened lips. “Just who is she, exactly, Arthur?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Glancing over her shoulder, Celeste thought her father appeared to have been transported back to that afternoon, and when she looked again, she understood why. There she was, in all her cute and curled glory. She remembered being chilly that afternoon, but she hadn’t worn a jacket. Rather, a bright-blue sweater, each looped stitch clearly displayed. Her own cheeks and lips were tinted, enhancing what she knew to be a natural beauty. She skipped out of the house and into the woman’s arms, embracing her as she would any loving mother. The memory of the moment brought to mind the smell of the woman’s heavy, cheap perfume. She wrinkled her nose and announced as much to her gathered family.

“Cheap?” Calvin asked. “How would you know the difference?”

“Because she didn’t smell like Mother. It was awful.”

“Still, doesn’t mean it was cheap.”

“I’m sure it was.” Whether Mother was finalizing the argument about the cheapness of the perfume or commiserating on the awfulness of the moment remained unclear, but both subjects were dropped.

“You look beautiful, my little Celi.” Daddy rarely used the nickname anymore, and the fact that he did so now, steeped in nostalgia, made him all the more vulnerable to her charms.

“Do you see? I keep telling you I should be an actress.”

“Don’t start,” Mother warned.

Celeste ignored her. “If I could pretend that horrible woman was my mother—”

“Don’t call her a ‘horrible woman,’” Calvin said, seemingly with no reason to defend her other than to be contrary. “She’s a stranger. You don’t even know her.”

“Yes, a stranger,” Mother echoed.

Celeste barreled on. “See how I’m hugging her? And letting her kiss me? Most kids would be terrified to have to act like that.”

“Most
kids
?” Calvin mocked her choice of word. “Because you’re, what, ten years old? Such a young woman of the world.”