The Night Sister

Daddy was the most handsome man Rose knew. Sylvie said he looked just like Cary Grant, who she loved to read about in the papers and magazines guests left behind. She’d talked Daddy into getting a subscription to Life and studied each issue cover to cover as soon as it arrived in the mailbox each week. On the cover of this week’s issue was Henry Fonda in his new picture, Mr. Roberts.

Rose knew that if it came to London—and if the picture was approved by Mama and Daddy—Sylvie would persuade Uncle Fenton to take her to the Saturday matinee. Fenton loved the movies, too, and went as often as he could. He and Sylvie would have long, animated conversations about directors and stars, and sometimes he’d describe the movies she hadn’t been allowed to see to her, scene by scene. It was Fenton’s idea that Sylvie start a movie scrapbook, and she spent hours going through magazines and newspapers, cutting out pictures of her favorite stars and pasting them into her book. She also took notes—making lists of movies she’d seen, movies she wanted to see, and even ideas she had for making movies of her own.

Sometimes Rose got to go to the Saturday matinees with Sylvie and Fenton, but most of the time, she was pronounced too young and was left behind to help Mama with cleaning and mending. To be honest, Rose didn’t mind much. Sometimes Mama would tell her the story of how she met Daddy, and that was kind of like a movie, too.

Rose liked to imagine it. There they were, her parents, up on the big screen. Daddy was in an English hospital bed, rumpled and wounded but still handsome after his plane had been shot down, and Mama looked like an angel in her stiff white nurse’s uniform as she changed the bandages over his injured eye.

“I’d all but given up on myself,” he’d tell the girls when they asked for his version of the story. “The last thing I wanted to do was go back home and be a half-blind farmer. I was feeling like my life was just about over until your mother came along. Charlotte, your mama, was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”

Rose would always smile at this part, imagining her mama young and pretty, drifting onto the scene, and changing everything—Mama, who was what Daddy called a rare beauty. When he said this, Rose would picture him off in the jungle, coming upon a one-of-a-kind orchid high up on the edge of a waterfall, carefully uprooting it, putting it in a pot, and carrying it home, hoping he had what it took to help it flourish.

“I asked your mama where she was from. ‘Here in London,’ she said. And I laughed and said, ‘Wouldn’t you know it? I’m from London, too.’?”

“I think it’s so romantic,” Sylvie would say. “The boy from London meets the girl from London. Like it was meant to be.”

“Life could be a dream, if I could take you up in paradise up above,” the Crew Cuts doo-wopped now, as the record spun on the little portable player Sylvie had brought out from their bedroom.

“Introducing Miss Matilda, the star of the show,” said Sylvie, and she led the plump Rhode Island Red onstage with her handful of raisins. Matilda followed Sylvie over to the wooden structure they’d built with two poles placed four feet apart, each with a platform and a ladder leading up to it. This was the high-wire act, although instead of a wire they had a narrow board, because they hadn’t been able to teach a chicken to walk across rope.

With Sylvie’s encouragement, Matilda climbed the ladder on the left, made her way across the narrow top board, then to the other platform, and down the ladder. When she reached the bottom, she rang the little bell that hung there by hitting it with her beak.

The crowd applauded, smiling. Sylvie had Matilda do her bow, which got more applause. Sylvie looked up and smiled, her hair coming loose from her right barrette, a few wisps falling into her eyes. The boy guest was at the edge of his seat, his eyes dreamy, the way people’s eyes often got when they watched Sylvie. She had the same effect on people that she did on chickens: they watched her intently, eager to do whatever she asked them next.