Osborne observed Maggie and his daughter Molly as they exchanged perfunctory morning greetings on the sidewalk. He smiled as Molly, lifting her head, and, seeing him standing at the window, waved good-bye. He waved back, though Maggie refused to be witness to any of it, staring ahead, her face set and unemotive. Then the two girls moved along, Molly hooking both of her arms around Maggie’s left arm to effect a lively bonhomie, whether the recipient chose to subscribe to it or not.
Michael Osborne had cleared his calendar of patients for that day. Today — the entire day was reserved for Clara Barton. Because she was certain to say yes. This he made himself believe. And he was certain they should spend the remainder of the day celebrating her acceptance of his proposal, perhaps by taking themselves to North Beach, where the pounding surf would applaud their decision to be together forever thereafter, and perhaps even replace at long last the mental picture of his late wife, in that very same spot, walking herself into a watery tomb.
___________
Maggie Barton and Molly Osborne had just turned the corner into Bush Street when they were hailed by a bubbly young woman with singing eyes and a massive coil of black hair held upon her head by a superfluity of tortoise-shell hairpins. Whereas Maggie and Molly wore the sedate and understated “uniform” of the female department store salesclerk — starched skirt and soft-toned shirtwaist (the only permissible flash of color being found upon their nearly matching pink-dotted neckties) — the girl beckoning their attention was rigged in an ornately embroidered orange-and-gold men’s Mandarin jacket and a fringed Chinese shawl that had been twisted and turned so as to become a nest for her bobbing head. “Do you like it?” she asked, modeling her rig with palms down and projecting out to the sides like those of a posing mannequin — especially one from ancient Egypt. “It’s Reggie’s jacket, but I made it my own. It’s to grab people’s attention so I can slip them a printed advertisement for his lecture Thursday night.” The girl handed a piece of paper to Maggie. “You two must share it, because I haven’t an inexhaustible supply. Do you think you’ll be able to come?”
Molly looked up from the paper. “I’m sorry, but I have my stenography class at that hour.”
The girl, whose name was Mirabella, was on friendly and familiar terms with both Maggie and Molly due to the fact that the three of them had attended grammar school together. She turned to Maggie with the same bright and hopeful look. “What about you, Mag?”
“I’ll try,” fibbed Maggie, “but I cannot imagine your new husband will have many others in attendance. ‘The Extinction of the Human Race’ is a very depressing topic for this month’s ‘Lecture for the Masses.’”
“And yet it’s something to which we should all be giving serious thought. Futurists tell us that humankind may not survive this new century — that the tragedy of Galveston was only the first of many such devastating catastrophes that will, in the end, wipe all human life from the planet.”
Maggie handed the paper announcement back to Mirabella. “You and your newlywed professor husband sound like those sandwich-board-wearing fanatics who stand on Market Street and preach the end of the world. You dismiss the fact that there are a good many others — like that Mr. Bellamy whom Ruth’s been reading — who believe quite the opposite. By the way, Mirabella: what does your husband predict will be the nail in the coffin of our species — the one big, final event which will make all humankind disappear forever?”
Mirabella frowned. “Well, it sounds to me like you aren’t coming, so I shouldn’t tell you anything, but of course I will because we’re friends. Reggie lists five different potential agents of permanent annihilation.”
“Perhaps you should name them some other time, Mirabella,” said Molly, uneasily. “Mag and I are both late for work.”
“Then I’ll walk with you. I should vacate this block anyway. The Salvationists are about to start caterwauling on that corner and they’ll drown me out completely.”
Maggie and Molly resumed their brisk walk along Bush with Mirabella falling into skip-step next to them. “First. Water. Reggie calls this the Noachial model — whatever that means. Then. Fire. Either by the hand of nature or by the hand of man. Oh, let me see. Slow down, will you? Wind. Tornadoes, hurricanes — we’ve seen a good deal of that already. Then earthquake, volcano — that sort of thing. ‘Earth eructions,’ my horned-rimmed honey calls them.”
“Earth eruptions?” asked Molly.
“No. Eructions. Like big terrestrial belches. Isn’t my new husband clever? He’s such a wooz.”
Maggie and Molly nodded as one, or rather like two kittens tracking a playfully dangled bit of twine with their whole heads.
“Anyway, don’t we get a taste of that from time to time here in wambling ol’ Frisco? Oh, do slow down just a smidge. I’m going to trip, I really am. Thank you. And the last one — hum, what is the last one?”
“Yes,” sighed Maggie with only slightly masked annoyance, “what is the last one? Molly and I are dying to know.”
“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.”
Chapter Three
Zenith, Winnemac, U.S.A., July 1923
(from
Five Saints, Five Sinners,
by Gail Lowery)
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.