The Sisterhood

Chapter 2


Laurel Run, Georgia, March 2000





The force of Mother’s parting admonition to “Be a good girl” stayed with Menina long after her memories of Mother, Sor Rosario, and even the convent faded into a hazy recollection.

“Be a good girl! Be a very good girl!”

She was. Everyone in the small town of Laurel Run agreed that Menina Walker was a credit to her adoptive parents. She was polite, a straight-A student since first grade, sang in the choir of the Baptist church, helped her mother without being asked, and in high school had been one of the girls with a “good” reputation. She had never sneaked cigarettes, smoked pot, come home drunk, or experimented with sex at the drive-in. Laurel Run mothers who despaired of their own teenage daughters’ behavior wondered how Sarah-Lynn Walker had managed to raise such a lady, and held her up as an example to their own girls.

The girls often felt driven to retort that it wasn’t like Menina had had much chance to be anything but good. The pretty child who returned from South America with the Walkers had gone through a gawky adolescence, taller than her classmates since the age of twelve, afflicted by braces on her teeth and a reputation as the class brainbox, teacher’s pet, and model of good behavior. The scrawny duckling had only emerged as a swan during her final year in high school, and by then boys saw her as the class valedictorian, not someone to date.

But she had blossomed, strikingly. At nineteen she was tall and slender, fine featured, with a smooth olive complexion and dark hair that offset her beautiful sapphire eyes. Up close, despite her ready smile, a certain tentativeness in her manner and a slight shyness in those lovely eyes betrayed the fact that her beauty was a recent development—one she was still getting used to.

Even now she didn’t quite believe how she’d changed, whatever her mirror and her doting parents said. Not that she spent much time worrying about how she looked. She had had to develop the good sense not to and besides, she knew she was a bit of a nerd—she had learned long ago that the best antidote to feeling plain and left out of the giggling cliques of her girl classmates was to bury herself in her schoolwork. It made her parents proud when she got all As and was at the top of her class and the star of her high school honors program. And she actually really, really enjoyed school.

But not being popular left her with time to fill. So she found a way to do that, too.

No one had ever disparaged Menina’s Hispanic origins, and indeed, the Walkers had always stressed that she should be proud of them. When they gave Menina the medal and the old book on her sixteenth birthday, just as they had promised Mother Superior they would, Virgil had made a little speech about how important her heritage was and how her birth parents might have put the medal round her neck, hoping it had some miraculous power to save their child. Menina had taken his words to heart.

But she had gleaned early on that, as a Mano del Diablo orphan and the Walkers’ adopted daughter, she was privileged. She was uncomfortably aware of the local prejudice against Mexicans and the other Hispanic immigrants, with their battered trucks full of shabby kids, and their willingness to sweep hardware stores, pump gas, and do heavy yard work for less than the minimum wage. There was a lot of local resistance when money was donated to build a Hispanic community center on the outskirts of town, and a joke made the rounds at the high school. “What do you call a Hispanic maid? Answer: Spic and Span.” When Menina heard it she was angry. That very afternoon after school, she had ridden her bicycle to the center.

She found the director’s office—a small room smelling of plaster where workmen were putting up a large brass plaque noting the community center was the gift of the Pauline and Theodore Bonner II Charitable Trust—and offered to volunteer. Soon Menina was tutoring children in English and helping their parents with advice and referrals and forms for practical things like health care and food stamps. She enjoyed feeling useful, and she began to relearn Spanish in the process, though when she tried to test her Spanish on the old book from the convent, she found the book just too difficult. The s’s all looked like f’s and it just seemed to be about nuns. A convent record, like her parents said. Not all that interesting.

When the time came for college, Menina preferred not to leave home. She won a scholarship to study art history at a local all-girls junior college called Holly Hill. It was, the old ladies of Laurel Run thought, a ladylike choice, which only raised her in their estimation. As did her choice of subject.

Holly Hill was one of those anachronisms that survived in southern states. Founded by two bluestocking spinsters late in the nineteenth century as a “female academy,” it had offered girls Latin, history, and sciences at a time when flower arranging, embroidery, and a smattering of French were all that was thought necessary for a young lady’s education. The founders’ motto was “If a girl can read Cicero she can read a recipe,” and Latin, which Menina had once been uncool enough to admit she loved, had remained an entrance requirement. Thanks to wealthy alumnae, the college had added an outstanding art history department.

Being ladylike had its rewards. In her first year at college Menina had caught the eye of handsome Theo Bonner III. When Theo’s sports car began to appear in the Walkers’ driveway in the evenings, the whole town took note of the fact. Theo was the only son of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Georgia. He could have been a trust fund layabout, but instead was finishing law school at the university, planning to work for a law center for the indigent instead of joining one of the prestigious Atlanta law firms, and was generally approved of as a “boy with his feet on the ground who’d amount to something.” There was speculation he would go into politics, because the Bonners had been involved in state politics behind the scenes for generations.

And in a scandalous age when single women and men lived together to see if the relationship worked before getting married, Theo had done the old-fashioned thing and proposed within a year of meeting Menina.

In coffee mornings, at Bible class, garden-club luncheons, and church suppers the Walkers’ friends congratulated and envied Sarah-Lynn who never tired of regaling them with the story of how Menina and Theo first set eyes on each other.

At college Menina had continued to work twice a week at the Hispanic community center, and a few weeks into her first year at Holly Hill she was rushing to one of her tutoring sessions with no time to change from paint-spattered jeans and an old sweatshirt full of holes she had worn for studio work. To her mortification, the center’s director called her into the office and introduced her as their hardest-working volunteer to Pauline and Theodore Bonner, who had come to see the center in operation. Feeling awkward, Menina shook hands with a distinguished gray-haired man, a slim and well-dressed older woman, and then their son, Theo Bonner III, who shook Menina’s hand and said he was in law school and had come along to see if the center’s users could be referred to their free legal-advice sessions.

Theo was taller than Menina, handsome in an agreeably scruffy way, tanned with sun-bleached hair that looked like it needed cutting, and wearing a frayed sport coat that must have been inherited from a fraternity-house grab bag. The director asked Menina to give the Bonners a tour and Menina did, flustered by Theo’s presence, unable to stop herself sneaking glances at him. Something about Theo made her feel like she had an electric current running through her bones. She tried to behave normally until Theo caught her looking at him, grinned back, and winked at her. When the Bonners left, Menina cursed the fact she looked like she had crawled out of a garbage can. Then she sighed and told herself not to be an idiot. Theo Bonner was way out of her league.

She was dumbfounded when he called a week later, saying he’d wormed her number out of the director, and asked Menina out. At Christmas the following year, Theo had proposed. Menina, dazzled and in love for the first time in her life, felt sure it was all a dream—of course she said yes.

Out of Sarah-Lynn’s hearing the ladies speculated that Menina was engaged because she had heeded her mother’s advice not to have sex before marriage, which would have been along the lines of advice given by their own mothers: “Men think, why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free?” Pretty, ladylike and deserving—Menina moved in an aura of romance and approval.

The only person less than thrilled that Menina was getting married was Menina’s best friend, Becky Taliaferro, though she hadn’t had any time alone with Menina to say so since Menina called her with the news she was engaged. Becky thought Theo was nice and definitely attractive and Menina seemed to be in love, but she’d never dated anybody else, so what did she know about men? Besides, Becky and Menina had always planned to travel and discover the world after college. Becky frankly hoped Menina wasn’t going to wind up as a housewife, even a rich one—Menina was too smart for that. Not just because she got As, but smart as in she liked ideas. She thought about stuff, really thought. Menina was the only person Becky knew who had a sort of scholarly streak—it was just who she was.

But loyally, she was going to be Menina’s maid of honor in June. Now three months before the wedding, she had come home from college specially to choose her maid of honor dress. The two girls slouched on loungers in the Walkers’ sunporch, with iced tea and a plate of cookies between them. It was a comfortably shabby room—a repository for old rattan furniture, sun-faded cushions, and back issues of Good Housekeeping—and had been Menina and Becky’s playroom ever since the day Becky’s family moved next door to the Walkers. Seven-year-old tearaway Becky had grown tired of teasing the cat, ripping open packing boxes and driving her mother crazy, and climbed the fence to make friends with seven-year-old Menina. Before long, naughty, irrepressible, blonde Becky and shy, dark-haired, well-behaved Menina were inseparable, always together at one house or the other. The Taliaferros stopped referring to Menina as “that nice little Walker girl” and nicknamed her “the Child of Light” because around Menina, evil little Becky behaved beautifully.

As children the girls had built tents with card tables and blankets in the sunporch, had rainy-day picnics; as preteens they huddled over a forbidden Ouija board; in high school they pushed the card tables back and practised for cheerleader tryouts. In their senior year they sat at the card tables filling out college applications together. At the time, Becky teased that Holly Hill was a dull choice, while Menina quipped that Becky’s eagerness to embrace a hectic social schedule and join a sorority with hundreds of other students at the University of Georgia filled Menina with dread.

Neither imagined how quickly their choices would lead them in different directions. If Menina was on the road to matrimony in short order, Becky had seized the opportunity to spread her wings. Abandoning her preschool teaching course, she had surprised everyone who knew her by being accepted to the Grady School of Journalism where, between boyfriends, she had become surprisingly focused on a career as a foreign correspondent, like Marie Colvin or Christiane Amanpour. So people would take her seriously, Becky compensated for her pretty face, wide blue eyes, and blonde curls with a gold stud in her nostril, a tattoo on her shoulder, and her current boyfriend’s motorcycle jacket. All of it, from journalism to the jacket, gave her mother fits.

Together again in their childhood haunt, for a minute it seemed impossible to be discussing such grown-up concerns like weddings and careers. How, both wondered, had they got to this stage of their lives already? Then Menina said, “You haven’t seen this yet. Look! Isn’t it beautiful?” and banished their childhood ghosts. She had twisted her engagement ring—a big diamond flanked by sapphires—inward, saving up for the big moment. Now she twisted it back and fluttered the fingers of her left hand at Becky. The setting sun shone through the dogwood trees into the sunporch, sending little sparkles from the diamond dancing on the wall.

“Oh Child of Light!” exclaimed Becky, leaning over from her lounger. “It’s amazing! Did Theo choose it or did Mother Bonner point him in the right direction?”

“Theo chose it. He said sapphires matched my eyes! Isn’t that sweet? But ‘Mother Bonner’—please!” Menina laughed. “Just between us, Mother Machiavelli’s more like it! I had no idea until I got to know her better. Don’t you remember, she was in that Vogue feature last year about women who are ‘Old Southern Money, New Southern Politics and the Power behind the Throne’? That woman is politics all the way.”

Becky munched sugar cookies. “Why doesn’t she just cut out the middleman and run for office herself?”

“Oh, you know, she can go all fluffy and talk about politics being a man’s game, but I think she likes the string pulling, fund-raising dinners and stuff. Thanks to her the Bonner family’s got political contacts up the ga-zing. I don’t know whether Theo really has ambitions, anyway. He talks about it, but he’s only just passed the bar exam. He wants to spend a couple of years working at the legal advice center.”

“The indigent’s friend? And speaking of indigent, are the two of you planning to live on what he makes there? You’ll have to get a job won’t you?”

“Well it is peanuts, but Pauline took me to lunch after we got engaged at Christmas and explained that Theo’s trust fund would support us. Don’t look at me like that! I have plans, of course I’m going to work! It’s just that it’ll be a help if I don’t have to work full time while I write my scholarship thesis.”

“A junior college and you practically have to write a master’s dissertation. Sheesh!”

Menina nodded. “Yeah, it’s harder than I thought it would be when I applied.” Her scholarship had been a big one—with its small classes, well-equipped studios, and high ratio of teachers to students, Holly Hill was expensive—but it had a condition attached that meant few girls applied for it. The scholarship was the gift of an art-loving Holly Hill alumna in the late nineteenth century. She wanted to encourage Holly Hill’s “lady” scholars to contribute to the study of art history without engaging in unseemly competition with men. Recipients signed a pledge to write an original thesis on an original art-related topic of their choice after they graduated—the scholarship included a special grant for travel if further research was necessary. These theses were then privately published by Holly Hill and available to the academic world at large. The stinger was in the penalty clause. If a scholarship recipient failed to deliver her thesis within a year of graduation she had a legal obligation to pay back her scholarship.

Menina had been so excited about giving her parents the good news about her scholarship she hadn’t mentioned that part and she still hadn’t.

“Sure focuses your mind,” said Menina, “but once that’s out of the way, I’ll finish my degree at the University of Georgia. Then maybe graduate school. I really like art history, and I’m planning to work in a museum someday. We’ll see. There’ll be a lot to juggle with classes, a part-time job, cooking dinner, all that stuff, but Theo’s pretty busy so I have time. We saw some cute apartments near the campus, in that section of old houses. A lot of Theo’s married fraternity brothers live in the neighborhood, and everyone takes turns to have the others for dinner. Mama’s already copying recipes for this and that for when it’s our turn.”

Menina didn’t mention that she had come away from her lunch with Pauline with a rather different view of Menina and Theo’s married life. To Menina’s dismay, then irritated astonishment, Pauline had made it clear that Theo was working on building his electable image for the future. As Mrs. Theo Bonner III, Menina would join the Junior League, do volunteer work, and attend charity lunches to network with the wives of prominent businessmen, the kind who made large political contributions. Menina knew it would be waving a red rag at a bull to repeat Pauline’s words to Becky. She would just have to think of a tactful way to stick to her own plans.

Menina sighed and crunched the ice in her glass. “The hardest part was finding an original topic, but at least now I’ve got one. When they were cleaning out the library at Holly Hill a few months ago, the librarian gave me an old book nobody wanted and I found it in there. It was privately printed back in 1900 and had some portraits by an artist called Tristan Mendoza, painted in Spain in the sixteenth century. The portraits are all women, dressed up to the eyeballs, no low necks or anything, like in those English portraits of royal mistresses that have their bosoms practically in your face. These ladies have rosaries and prayer books, but then while you’re looking at them, they start to look different—well, sort of hot and come-hither like the bosomy ones. Pornographic; it’s hard to explain. None of my teachers had heard of Tristan Mendoza but they saw what I meant, and said the Spanish court was pretty straitlaced at the time—the Christians had just defeated the Moors and the Moors were puritanical in some ways so the Christians had to out-puritan them to prove they were superior. But you want to hear the most interesting thing?”

“I’m all ears.” Becky sighed.

“I got the magnifying glass to take a closer look at the reproductions, and under Tristan Mendoza’s signature he drew a bird! A little swallow exactly the same as the swallow on my medal!”

“Why?”

“That’s what I wondered, and from the research I’ve done nobody else seems to know. So—original thesis subject Tristan Mendoza and the swallow. If the swallow meant something to Tristan Mendoza, maybe it meant something to my birth parents. I just have to find out. My dad says they must have been Catholics, and believed it had miraculous powers or something.” Menina’s eyes filled with tears like they always did when she thought about her birth family hoping the medal would save her life. She tried not to think how much she wished they could know the wonderful man she was marrying or see her in her wedding dress. She rubbed them away hastily. “And get this, the Prado is the only museum with any of Tristan Mendoza’s work, so I actually have to go to the Prado! The scholarship even pays for it. I’m thinking I should take the old book the nuns gave me to the Prado. It’s pretty old and just sitting in a drawer in my room. They must have an old manuscript department, or if they don’t they’ll know who does.”

“Madrid!” Becky reached over and they high-fived. “Fabulous! I hope you find out what you want to know. Now, it’s getting dark, I better go; a guy’s supposed to call me about a project that I hope will get me a summer internship at the New York Times.”

“Oh Becky! I talk too much! Tell me!”

“OK, remember that local guy, Junior, kind of dumb kid who dropped out of high school, used to work at the gas station and then got the death penalty for killing a couple? Well he’s on death row trying to win an appeal or get a retrial—you know, he had a f*ckwit public defender, evidence full of holes, et cetera, miscarriage of justice, and his new lawyer’s keen to get some publicity but till now Junior won’t talk to anybody. But I got in touch with his lawyer and Junior remembered me from when I used to fill up Mama’s car and said since I was the only girl not too snooty to talk to him then he’ll talk to me now. His lawyer’s supposed to call and give me a date to come to the penitentiary.”

“I bet you haven’t told your mother you’re going to the penitentiary!”

“Er, no. I’ll surprise her. Gotta hop.”

They hugged. “Hasta la vista, Child of Light,” called Becky as she disappeared over the fence.

“Becky hasn’t changed,” muttered Sarah-Lynn darkly, closing the door. “What possessed her to stick that thing in her nose? Please tell me she’ll take it out for the wedding. What color dress does she want, the blue or the lavender?”

“Oh, sorry, Mama, forgot to ask her! We got carried away talking about other stuff. I was telling her about my thesis and—”

“That thesis again! Honey, it’ll have to wait; there’s a little matter of your wedding dress fitting and we’ve got to decide on a silver pattern and finish the guest list before the invitations can go out.”

“Later, Mama.” Menina escaped to set the table. She knew she ought to care more about dotted swiss versus tulle, flower arrangements and silver patterns, and all the things that brought joy to her mother’s heart, but she didn’t. The bride thing wasn’t the big deal, the big deal was living with Theo—she couldn’t wait. Aside from the fact they could finally have sex, it would be heaven to wake up together, knowing that she’d see him every evening, too. She hugged herself thinking about it.

While she knew for a fact that other girls had a flourishing sex life without a scarlet H for harlot appearing on their foreheads, she wasn’t exactly brimming with sexual confidence. Menina had indeed listened to her mother’s warnings about sex before marriage and all that stuff about cows and free milk. And Theo, who could have picked any girl in the world, had picked her. Deep down Menina thought maybe her mother had been right. She had been too terrified of losing him to risk finding out.