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.”