Sisters (21 page)

The ringmaster introduced
the first act, a cheerful contortionist in green spangled tights and
tunic, who seemed to have an extra joint somewhere in the area of his
breastbone. The crowd gasped as he bent backward until his head
touched his backside. He smiled, seeming greatly to enjoy doing to
his body what it seemed no human body should do.

Esther leaned over Sally.
"Aunt Sophie, I just wonder. How do you think he found out he
could do that?"

"Do you suppose he
just got bored one day and said to himself, 'I think I'll see if I
can bend in two backward'?"

"What? What, Aunt
Sophie? What did you say?" Sally demanded. Esther repeated for
her what Sophie had said, and Sally seemed satisfied. Esther and
Sophie smiled at one another over the top of her head.

The elephants were next. A
brightly sequined woman named Flora put them through their paces, had
them sitting up as though they were tiny poodles. Then the elephants
left, and the albino family came into the ring. Even in the dim light
of the tent, they were squinting. The white hair, the pink eyes, the
pale, mottled skin--they looked so lost, so wrong, Sophie thought.
She wanted to rush them to a cool room somewhere and turn off the
lights and pull the shades.

Mother, father, and
daughter began to sing, and Sophie tried to listen objectively, but
it was impossible. The almost physical discomfort she felt made her
remember the first freak show she had ever seen. There had been an
Indian in it, a dull-eyed, swarthy-skinned man on display as "The
American Savage." She hadn't thought of him for years, but as
she did so now, she wondered if he accounted for her aversion to
sideshows. But there was something too about the freaks being so
helpless, as much at the mercy of others as the circus animals were.
Only there were no gaily painted and carved wagons for the freaks.
The cages in which they lived out their lives were painfully,
horribly grotesque.

The albino family sang one
sentimental air after another, their voices thin and reedy, their
faces unsmiling. Because the light bothered them, they kept their
eyes down, but as they concluded "Home, Sweet Home," the
woman suddenly looked up, and her eyes found Sophie's. They were
pink, edged with white lashes, unlike any Sophie had ever seen, and
yet they seemed to say, "I am like you. I am like you."

Without knowing why she
did, Sophie looked away.

When the family had
finished the song and was leaving the show ring, Sophie scanned the
crowd. Was she the only one to react with anything besides curiosity?
It seemed so. Face after face was turned toward the ring, face after
face avidly watching the exiting figures. Face after face--except
one, and it was turned toward her, smiling, staring. Jake Rodman. How
dare he? Hadn't he been told to leave her alone?

She turned her back to the
show and watched distractedly as the sluggish lions performed. When
they were led off, a diminutive figure wearing a lion's mane ran into
the ring. It might have been a child, but Sophie suspected it was Dr.
Petty. He circled the ring once and then began to jump through the
lion's hoop, back and forth, back and forth, hypnotizing the crowd
with his motion. Suddenly another figure appeared, a huge figure
which seemed even larger when juxtaposed to the tiny lion. It was the
female Samson, and the small "lion" began to stalk her. As
the huge woman fled from him in feigned terror, the crowd around
Sophie roared with laughter. Sophie was horrified. The huge woman
acting so helpless--it was awful, partly because she really did seem
so terribly vulnerable. Her face was an almost normal size, but at
the neck she swelled to grotesque proportions. Her hands were almost
delicate, but at the wrists she began to expand and lengthen to
extraordinary dimensions. These malproportions gave her such an
unhealthy look that Sophie shuddered. And as she did so, she caught
sight of Jake Rodman again. He was still staring at her.

After the performance,
Sophie let the children talk her into stopping at Ellis' soda
fountain on Eddy Street. Esther and Sally both asked for ice cream,
and a young man in a stiff white apron put generous scoops into two
molded glass dishes. Sophie requested a cherry phosphate, and he
mixed red syrup with soda water, adding a dash of phosphate from a
squirt bottle. Then he planed a large block of ice and put the cold
shavings into the drink. When they had all been served at a round
table, Sophie reached into her pocket for her change purse. It wasn't
there. She checked her other pocket, but it too was empty. "I...
I don't seem to have my purse."

"I'll pay for it, Aunt
Sophie," Sally volunteered. "Don't worry, I can pay for
it." To prove her point, she pulled several wadded-up bills from
her skirt pocket. The young man took one of them and smoothed it out
on the tabletop. When he returned a moment later, Sally made a great
show of retrieving her coins from the ornate change dish he sat in
front of her.

Sophie drank her phosphate
and thought about her purse. What could have happened to it? Then she
remembered Jake Rodman and the way he had jostled her. Had he taken
it? But why would he? And how dare he? Hadn't James told him to leave
her alone?

"Wanna see me give
myself a headache?" Sally asked, breaking into Sophie's
thoughts. And before Sophie had time to answer, Sally took a huge
bite of ice cream, waited wide-eyed for a moment, then scrunched up
her face in pain and grabbed the side of her head. "There it
is!" she shouted triumphantly.

"I'm going to tell you
a little-known fact," Sophie said, leaning forward. "It is
so little known, I may be the only one who knows it. Listen, now: ice
headaches do not start in the head, as you might think, but in the
chest."

Both girls looked at her
doubtfully.

"No, it's true. They
start right here." She patted a place high on her chest. "This
is where you feel them first."

As she knew they would,
both girls took great bites of ice cream, and in the second before
they scrunched their faces in pain, she saw the light of discovery in
their eyes: ice headaches do start in the chest!

The girls finished before
Sophie and clamored to go outside. She agreed to meet them in a few
minutes at the waiting carriage. She finished her phosphate, thinking
of Rodman again. Perhaps he was trying to bother her just enough so
she was aware of it, but not enough so that she really had anything
to report. She had no proof that he had stolen her purse, after all.
All she could say for certain was that she had seen him at the
circus, and he had jostled her and stared at her.

When she left Ellis', she
saw Esther, but not Sally. Esther pointed down the block to where
Sally was playing tag with two boys. Sophie called to her.

"In a minute!"
Sally called back.

"It's going to be hard
for her when she has to put on long skirts," Esther observed of
her sister.

"She has a while yet.
But what about you? It's not that far off for you."

"I don't mind so much.
But how's Sally going to play tag with a long skirt on? Miss Travers
says she'll suffer when she gets her long skirts."

"Does Miss Travers
have any suggestions for making it easier?" Sophie could imagine
the schoolteacher encouraging Sally to play quietly with her dolls,
trying to change her now so that adult female life wouldn't come as
such a shock.

"No, she just says
it's plain gonna be hard." Esther paused. "Even if she did
have some ideas, I don't think Sally'd pay her much attention."

"Doesn't she like
her?"

Esther shrugged. "She
doesn't like hugging and kissing, and Miss Travers is always doing
that. And sometimes..."

"What?"

"Well, she says things
like, 'Your father never hugs and kisses you, does he?' But that
doesn't bother Sally as much as..." She broke off. "Look,
who's that Sally's with?" At the next corner, Sally was talking
with an unshaven fellow standing beside a tarpaulin-covered cart.
After a few moments of earnest conversation, the man lifted the
corner of the tarp and Sally climbed up on one of the wheels to have
a look inside. She lifted the edge of the tarp and peered under it
intently. Then she jumped down and ran toward Esther and Sophie.

"You gotta see!"
she shouted. "He captured it way up near the Little Popo Agie
and was bringin' it to the circus. Come on, you just gotta see!"

As Sophie and Esther
approached the cart, Sally climbed up on the wheel and threw back the
tarpaulin. Inside was a tangle of fur, horns, and limbs. "It's
got eleven legs," Sally shouted excitedly. "And two heads!
He thinks it's some kinda antelope." A horrible stench emanated
from the dead creature, and Sophie took an involuntary step backward,
covering her nose.

The unshaven fellow caught
her expression and seemed embarrassed. "I reckon it's gettin' a
little high. Critter was alive when I captured it. I was bringin' it
to the circus, but damn thing died on me, and the circus don't want
nuthin' to do with it now." His face lightened. "But I been
showin' it to folks on the street, and they think it's somethin', all
right. That fella right over there, he said he was sure you'd like a
look. Ain't it somethin', though?"

Sophie looked across the
street where the unshaven fellow indicated. On the opposite corner,
leaning against a bank building in an attitude of studied indolence,
was a small man in dark clothes. When he saw her look at him, Jake
Rodman smiled and nodded in her direction.

Sally never perceived
anything was wrong. She ran back to the waiting carriage, swinging
around a light pole on the way, absorbed in her own good spirits. But
Esther knew Sophie was upset. She walked alongside her in sympathetic
silence, glancing up at her from time to time.

How did he dare? Sophie
kept asking herself. What gave Jake Rodman such arrogance? This was
too much. He had crossed over the line. The harassment was so obvious
now, she would take it to James when he came back. And then, without
warning, the thought she had kept submerged shot to the surface:
James would come back before she had to leave, wouldn't he? He'd said
the better part of a week, and that was time enough for her--but that
was before they had quarreled.

They arrived at the
Stevenson house, and when Sophie headed upstairs, Esther followed.
The girl's expression was worried, and Sophie suddenly felt selfish
about the way she was caught up in her own concerns. She searched for
something commonplace to say, something to restore a sense that
things were as usual. "I think we should change before dinner,
don't you? I'm all over dust."

"Which dress are you
going to wear? Would you wear the cream-and-lavender one?"

"Is that your
favorite?"

"I think so. And that
little gold butterfly brooch. Can you wear that too?"

As they walked along the
landing, Sophie's glance fell on the mahogany secretary. The writing
surface of it was still down, but she was struck that it was so
obviously unused. There were no papers stacked up, no notes tucked
away in pigeonholes. Except for ink, pen, and blotting paper, the
desk part was entirely empty. "Esther, didn't your mother keep
her correspondence inside the secretary?"

"Mmmmmm-huh. She kept
it very nearly organized."

"But where is it now?
The secretary's empty except for the books on top."

"Miss Travers cleaned
it out. She came over the day after the funeral and cleaned out
Mother's closets and her chest of drawers and the desk."

"She took all the
clothes and papers?"

Esther nodded. "She
was going to give the clothes to the church for poor people. I don't
know what she meant to do with all the papers. Did you want to see
them?"

"I would have liked
to."

"Wait a minute. Maybe
there's something." She ran on up the stairs to the second floor
and opened a closet near the master suite. "Oh, it's not there
anymore," she said in a disappointed voice. "There were
some things I thought Miss Travers had missed. Right after Mother
died, I remember one of the maids went through the house tidying up
because, you know, people were coming over and everything. Anyway, I
saw her take a bunch of things that'd been lying around and put them
in an old bandbox. I think the loose papers off the secretary went in
there. And then the maid put the box here in the linen closet to get
it out of sight. But it's not here now."

"Don't concern
yourself about it. It's not important." But Sophie was not at
all sure. As she undressed, she thought of Amy Travers standing on
the porch as if to prohibit entry to her house. Could it be that Miss
Travers had things of Helen's in her house that she didn't want
Sophie to see? Things she'd spirited away later? Or was there another
explanation for the schoolteacher's strange behavior? How Sophie
would like a look at Miss Travers' parlor, just a glance through the
window next to the front door to see what was in there, to find out
what it was Miss Travers didn't want her to see.

She could do it. There was
a way. Miss Travers had said she was coming over after dinner, and
Sophie could go to her house then. Yes, she could do it. She would do
it, she decided, hanging up the yellow dress Connie had laid out and
taking out her dark dress instead. Then she remembered her promise to
Esther, and she also took the cream-and-lavender dress from the
wardrobe. It was important she wear it to dinner as Esther had asked.
And the Tiffany butterfly brooch, too. She could put on the dark
dress afterward.

As soon as she could get
away from the dinner table, she went upstairs to change, then quietly
left the Stevenson house. She didn't take the quickest route to Amy
Travers' house, but instead walked several blocks away from town
before turning toward House Street. The way she was taking was more
isolated, a less likely route for encountering anyone, but as she cut
through the new city park, she began to think perhaps it was too
isolated. The park was planted with saplings, all of them six to
seven feet tall. As she followed a diagonal path through the park, it
wasn't the rustling leaves she found frightening as much as the fact
that each of the trees was the size of a large human being. She kept
catching movement out of the corner of her eye, turning to see what
it was, and finding herself confronted with a swaying, man-sized
shape. It happened several times, until she could feel her heart
thundering in her chest. She tried forcing herself not to react to
the trees, but the skin at the base of her neck kept prickling. She
kept thinking someone was watching her, following her, until finally
she began to run. She didn't stop until she had exited from the park
onto Warren Street.