Secret Sisters

by Joy Callaway

  Miss Sanderson marched toward Professor Fredericks, the stack of papers she held against her chest drawing attention to the cameo she always wore at her neck. He stopped lecturing and took the stack of papers from her hand. She turned to go, eyes searching the room—no doubt for Will—and the professor touched her arm.

  “If you wouldn’t mind staying for a moment, Miss Sanderson, we’re reviewing the cardiovascular system and a real life example is in order. I need a woman’s help.” I glanced down at my skirts, wondering if perhaps he saw me as an equal after all.

  “All right, students,” he said, keeping an eye on Miss Sanderson, whose gaze had found Will. Will picked at his cuticles, likely avoiding her stare. “As today’s time is dwindling and an opportunity for learning has just presented itself, we’ll take today’s examination next class. Now let me make my point. As you can see, Miss Sanderson is a perfectly healthy young woman.” The professor’s eyes settled on her bosom before addressing the rest of the classroom. “Her cardiovascular system is likely working as it does in most every woman, each month ridding her brain of a substantial amount of blood as she releases an egg and then menstruates. You do plan on having children, Miss Sanderson?”

  My jaw clenched. He was teaching an unconfirmed hypothesis. He wasn’t seeing me as an equal at all. I knew where this was going and prayed he’d stop for my sake.

  “Of course,” she drawled. “My goodness, what a question.” She lifted her palm to her chest, round eyes going wide, as if even the thought that she wouldn’t reproduce was offensive, though in my opinion, the world would benefit if she refrained.

  “And your designated course of study is?”

  “Secretarial science. You know that.”

  She smiled and Professor Fredericks nodded.

  “Yes. A wonderful choice, my dear.” He stepped toward the diagram of the body and pointed at the heart. “A woman’s cardiovascular system is a bit unique. You see, the heart pumps blood to the uterus, and a large amount of that blood is expressed from the brain and other organs during the menstrual cycle, depriving the woman and allowing for healthy fertility. Now, if a woman routinely submits herself to mental fatigue, like, say, Miss Carrington, who has decided to ignore all medical evidence to pursue a career most unsuitable for a woman hoping to start a family, the body reacts differently.” I looked away from the professor’s sneering face to the diagram behind him. I fixated on the heart, feeling my own buzz with unquenchable rage. “Can someone tell me what the female body’s natural reaction to mental fatigue is?” His question sounded distant.

  I tried to calm myself. I couldn’t let him unnerve me. It wasn’t the first time I’d been singled out in a course, and it wouldn’t be the last. I needed this class to move forward to other courses, to graduate, and I wouldn’t let one old man stop me.

  “The blood will reverse its natural course out of her uterus and travel upstream, clouding her good senses and putting strain on her already fragile brain,” Edwin Putnam said. It was the first time I’d ever heard him actually answer a question.

  “Oh my! Is that true?” Miss Sanderson exclaimed. Clearly she had no brain to strain in the first place.

  “Yes. It’s been scientifically proven, my dear,” the professor said. I couldn’t take it anymore. The pent-up fury of the morning overwhelmed me, and I rose to my feet.

  “Of course it hasn’t. There’s still quite a bit of speculation. You would know, professor, if you’d read the piece in The American Journal last month.”

  “That was an editorial opinion piece by a very controversial female physician, a graduate of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania,” he said, drawing out the second female as though the fact of it discounted her findings altogether. “It’s hardly legitimate. It’s the same rubbish they published years ago claiming that the female brain is the same size as the male’s.”

  His eyes slid from mine to rest on Will next to me. “In any case, the fact that you’re in obvious mental distress right now proves my point. Mr. Buchannan?”

  “Sir?” Will barked, a tone he only used in arguments.

  “Considering Miss Sanderson here is perfectly healthy and Miss Carrington is not, what’s the difference? And what would you suggest, as a physician, that Miss Carrington do to alleviate this unhealthy psychological strain? I expect your answer to be serious and well-reasoned, Mr. Buchannan, or I will be tempted to question my recommendation that you continue in this program next semester. We all know that I’ve been generous with regard to your lack of enthusiasm for this course.”

  Will cleared his throat. Though it was true that he was quite lazy when it came to his studies, he was more learned than our entire class about the actual application of medicine. He’d observed his grandfather, a family physician, since he was a child, but he’d also subscribed to every journal he could find for as long as I could remember, reading them over and over until the pages tattered or fell out. Only then had he loaned them to me.

  I held my breath, waiting for the smart reply that I knew would make Professor Fredericks feel so foolish that he’d never call on Will again.

  Instead he said, “I suppose most would advise a major more suitable to the fragile female condition.”

  I whirled toward Will, expecting to find him smirking, but he wasn’t. Instead, he was staring straight ahead at the professor, refusing to meet my eyes.

  “However,” Will continued, in a tone I could barely hear, “I would—”

  "Ratio!” I interrupted, slamming my hands on the top of the desk before the thought to stop the impulse passed through my mind. The room fell silent. “Haven’t you heard of the elephant test, Professor?” I continued, my voice shaking. “Elephants have larger brain mass than human males, meaning that if the size of the brain were the factor signifying intelligence, elephants would be smarter than all of you. So, it was determined that the actual way to calculate intelligence is to figure brain weight relative to body weight, in which case, females have larger brains than both men and elephants.” A murmur went across the room. I caught my breath, plucked my briefcase from the worn wood floor, and leaned toward Will.

  “Here’s a math problem for you,” I whispered, noticing his eyes were fixed on the desktop. “If you’ve made overtures to nearly every woman on campus and never captured the heart of one, perhaps you should examine your own psychological strain before discussing mine.”

  Seething with anger, I didn’t wait for his response and exited the room, satisfied by the slam of the door behind me.

  5

  The depressed crown of my brown satin bonnet was collecting snow flurries by the time I reached the shelter of the turret protruding from Old Main. I was breathing hard, and tears pooled in my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. I edged the carved mahogany door open and removed my hat, realizing the black quills on the side of it had turned to ice.

  I kept my head down, nodding once at the President’s secretary sitting behind her desk in the foyer. Slipping into the hallway on my right, past vacant offices that smelled of old books and pencil shavings, I shivered, wondering if anyone had had the decency to start a fire. The place had fifteen fireplaces. On winter days, the building usually felt like an oven.

  I walked toward a stream of gray daylight beaming across the end of the hallway. I could hear Professor Helms’s gritty voice as I passed the open door of the lecture room, and wanted nothing more than to stop in the shadows and catch Lily’s attention. As much as I needed her right now, Helms’s grammar review was much more important. Lily had barely made the grades necessary to keep her scholarship last semester and had already been warned that one more slip in her marks would render it revoked. It wasn’t that she wasn’t intelligent enough—in fact, she was one of the brightest women I’d ever met. The problem was simply her lack of preparedness. Her tutor at the orphanage had taught her many things, but never an effective method of studying.

  The distant wail of a cello playing a sad song momentarily mingled melancho
ly with my anger, reminding me of Will’s betrayal. He and I had been friends for six years, ever since we’d been shoved into the last seats on a packed cable car coming from a matinee performance of As You Like It at McVicker’s Theatre—an end-of-semester treat for good marks from our respective schools. As we discovered, his father was my father’s boss at Western Wheel Works, and thus anything his father approved, mine did as well. Will was the reason I’d been allowed to attend Whitsitt in the first place. Initially, my father had been so appalled at the notion of his daughter living without a husband or father half a state away that he’d cursed at me in the middle of dinner. Will and I hadn’t even been eligible to apply for three years, but in an attempt to make conversation, my father had asked Will about his plans to study. Unable to stop myself, I’d chimed in, mentioning that I knew Whitsitt was a co-educational college and that I’d like to study there as well. As horrified as my father had been, Will’s father thought co-educational schooling beneficial, and had eventually convinced my father to send me to Whitsitt so long as Will promised to look out for me. He’d broken his promise.

  I ran my hand along Patrick Everett IV’s plaque on the Founders’ Wall. A staunch Liberal Universalist and supporter of women’s suffrage, Mr. Everett had refused to fund the college unless women would be allowed to study alongside males. Thanks to Mr. Everett, women had always been allowed to attend any of the colleges, though most besides the seminary had always been traditionally male. He’d passed away eight years ago, at the age of ninety-four. Since then, his principles had been begrudgingly followed—they were still admitting us, after all—but more or less forgotten in the classrooms where professors’ views weren’t so progressive.

  Professors be damned, I thought as I slipped into the darkness of a short hallway, forced open the door to the stairwell, and descended the stairs into the basement.

  Water was dripping somewhere. The drops slapped the brick floor as I felt my way down the hall, hands grazing the cold stones. My mother’s voice rang in my head. “At the end, your legacy will be a name on a forgotten slab and, if you’re lucky, a story or two,” she’d said, turning to clutch my hand as we’d passed a small plaque dedicated to Revolutionary War heroine Deborah Sampson Gannett. “I beg you, Beth, do something worthy. You have the courage that I don’t.”

  I’d heard the echo of my mother’s words for the first time when the coroner had come for her body. Everything about St. Luke’s Hospital, from the physician’s monotone to the barred windows to the sedated women on either side of her, had been cold and unfeeling, hopeless. In that moment, I knew I’d been called to medicine; specifically, to the battleground of a hospital. I not only felt my mother’s urging to find an answer to death without definite cause, but to bring comfort to the families of the acutely and terminally ill, families away from their homes and physicians.

  Feeling my way to the brass knob, I turned it and shrugged out of my coat, tossing it on the moth-eaten wingback in the corner. Over the last week, we had decorated the chapter room the best we could with the discarded contents from the basement. It didn’t look half-bad. I closed the door. Opening the top drawer of the old secretary, I found the match book and struck one, lowering it to the first of three taper candles Mary had stolen from the chapel. The light cast a hazy glow on the pea green tufted couch below our letters on the back wall and the gray wingback chair.

  I reached under the secretary, withdrawing the first of three navy blue hooded robes. Pulling it over my head, I inhaled. It smelled like starch, like home, like my mother ironing my father’s shirts in the morning.

  Lily had made the robes in haste last week, after Mary thought that we should wear a uniform of sorts, a visible measure of our unity, during meetings. Blue fabric was on discount at the Whitsitt Five and Dime—the only place to obtain supplies unless you had the time to secure a ride to Green Oaks—but we’d quickly decided to pretend we’d chosen the color to signify parity.

  Fluffing the bangs along my forehead that had nearly fallen flat with the snow, I sank onto the couch, arranged the cloak over my gray velvet skirt, and wedged my fingers into the cushions to retrieve our braided silk wreath pins. We’d made them here a few nights ago with gold pieces from the Five and Dime’s scrap basket while Mary and Lily bickered over the exact wording of the pledge that we’d asked Lily to write.

  My fingers brushed something damp and I recoiled, edging to the center of the couch. Shutting my eyes, I imagined a house like Iota Gamma’s to live and congregate in with my sisters instead of a dank basement. Each time that thought crossed my mind, though, I was reminded that I should be thankful for any space at all.

  A long knock at the door startled me. I sat up in time to hear another long tap, followed by four short ones, and the roll of knuckles across the wood. The secret knock had been my idea. My girlhood friend and I had adopted the method for our club when we were children and would steal away to a small closet off her family’s drawing room to play tea party. If a knock other than ours sounded on the door, we knew we’d been found out by one of her brothers.

  “Who knocks on the door of Beta Xi Beta?”

  “It’s your sister, Mary, Queen of Debauchery,” the voice said, followed by a waterfall of laughter. We’d made her claim the title after she’d admitted that she’d been the one to steal all of the liquor from the Iota Gamma house before their winter ball last year, a scandal that had enraged the Iota Gammas so much that it had made the front page of The Whitsitt Cardinal. Mary insisted she’d only done it for the good of their future wives—she was staunchly against male drinking, though somehow thought female imbibing more than appropriate. We’d given her the designation to shame her, but the moment we did, we realized Mary wasn’t one to feel embarrassed about anything. Even if what she did seemed scandalous to the rest of us, Mary didn’t see it that way.

  “If it’s truly Mary,” I said, fixing my eyes on the orb of light around the candle, “please recite our pledge.” A huff came from the other side of the door.

  “Is that really necessary, Beth? You know my voice.” I didn’t say anything, but heard her clear her throat decorously. “I solemnly pledge my loyalty to the sisterhood of Beta Xi Beta until the end of my days. I promise that above all else, my purpose will be to foster equality and intellect among women—for a chain of linked hands is mightier than the most menacing army.” She laughed. “My, that’s ridiculous.”

  “What was that?” I asked. It was our pledge. It was to be taken seriously. The door flung open and smacked against the stone, echoing through the basement.

  “The pledge is absurd, Beth, and you know it.” She plucked her black trilby hat from her head, reached for her cloak, and stuffed an auburn curl back in its pin at the nape of her neck. “I know you won’t admit that it’s comical because Lily wrote it, Beth, but you should. Every time I say it, I imagine a Viking army with swords and clubs charging a line of women holding hands.” Mary grinned and sat down at the desk, propping her kid leather boots on the top of it. Her pose reminded me of the only photo I’d ever seen of her mother on the cover of a Chicago Suffrage pamphlet. Her legs had been propped on a large table spilling with posters, a pencil clutched in her fingertips. Judith had been heralded as heroine among many women in my school, but was ostracized in the papers. The instigator of countless tavern protests and rights marches, some of which had turned violent, Judith was one of the Tribune’s favorite subjects. My father had always rolled his eyes at the stories, muttering something about the “foolish black bat” after he read them. I’d always quietly admired her.

  “You have to agree that the pledge is a bit silly,” Mary pressed again, her green eyes squinting in the orb of the flame in front of her.

  I sighed.

  “It’s not meant to be taken literally. It’s just supposed to illustrate the strength of sisterhood.”

  Mary rolled her eyes, yanked the cloak over her head, and swung her legs down from the desktop.

  “I know that.” She
crossed to the couch, withdrew the wreath pins from the cushion, and leaned down to pin mine against my heart. “I’m not an imbecile. I’m only saying that if she would have taken my advice and changed the last line it would—”

  Another knock sounded at the door.

  “Who knocks on the door of Beta Xi Beta?” I asked.

  “Lily,” she said, and immediately recited the pledge without being asked.

  “Goodness, I thought I’d never make it.” She burst into the doorway. “Professor Helms was rather long-winded today and . . . there’s only twenty minutes until lunch.” Lily was covered in snow from her hair to her black leather boots. Even in the dim light, I could see the pink windburn across her cheeks. She took off her plain wool coat. “I ran back to the room to get my notebook after class and found Miss Zephaniah in our room.”

  “Why was she in there?” I asked, straightening my back against the couch. Surely Mr. Richardson wouldn’t have turned me in, would he?

  Lily shrugged.

  “Who knows, really. When I asked, she mumbled some nonsense about hearing a door open in the middle of the night and seeing a figure outside. She thought someone may have broken in to steal from us while we were asleep. Either that or she thinks she saw Lynnette Downey’s apparition. I think she’s just imagining things, the old loon. I swear our ninety-year-old warden at the orphanage was sharper. Even she didn’t dream up such drivel.”

  I looked down at my shoes to keep from laughing, relieved that I hadn’t been found out.

  “Miss Zephaniah looked half-crazed when I saw her,” Lily continued. “Her hair was down and scraggly and she was still wearing her nightshirt—you know, the one with the lace trim and scalloped edges—which makes her look ridiculous, like a gray-haired child. What is it?” Lily stopped, her expression quizzical.