• 6 •

IT WAS THE speech.

Beulah darted back to the rear of the mess hall. One of the soldiers — the handsome one, Hack — stepped into the exit to block her way. “Orientation is mandatory, miss.”

“I only want some air,” Beulah whispered, but when every girl sitting nearby turned to look at her, she settled for taking her air indoors, on a vacant bench in the back of the tent. She dropped down in what she hoped was a posture of exhaustion, loosened her collar, and fanned herself with her hat.

It wasn’t the stifling air that sent her into a swoon: it was the moralizing. Every girl in camp had just been told to watch for wickedness among them. And who more perfectly personified immorality than the notorious Beulah Binford? Her name was so synonymous with moral degeneracy that it was still invoked without explanation in the papers. Just the year before, a salacious crime in Boston had been described as “a Beulah Binford–style case involving an alluring young lady and a prominent banker.”

Beulah had no intention of misbehaving at camp. She’d spent every penny just to get there, and she’d borrowed from Mabel, besides. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to. She hadn’t fare for a hack or shoes that would carry her far on a muddy farm road. To make a success of herself at this camp and to win passage to France was her only hope. She wasn’t about to throw it away over a stolen cigarette or a wine bottle.

But it didn’t matter what she did, it mattered who she was. Anyone might recognize her from the papers and point a finger at her. What was she to do about that?

Beulah saw all too clearly why Mabel had tried to warn her away from this place. She was trapped here, for all practical purposes, with two hundred pairs of eyes upon her. In New York, she could slip away. She could dart down a side street, pull her hat over her eyes, evade a curious landlady, or walk out on a job. What was she to do here, but to pretend to be someone she wasn’t, and hope no one noticed?

Now it did feel stuffy and close in the tent, with every girl cheering and clapping. Beulah kicked her feet a little to push some air up her skirts. Miss Miner finished speaking, the general made his remarks, and then they were released, at last, to rush out into the cool night air and back to their tents.

“What happened to you?” came a voice at her elbow. It was Fleurette, tender and solicitous. She was a sweet girl, and eager to please, but Beulah could already see that she’d have trouble shaking her if she ever wanted a minute alone.

“I needed a little air, that’s all,” Beulah said. Remembering the character she was to play, she added, “Although I suppose it’s to be nothing but fresh country air, morning and night. I’ll take a nice town house on Park Avenue any day, and a good leaded window that stays closed.”

“Do you live on Park Avenue?” asked Fleurette, as they made their way outside with the others.

“Only in the winter,” Beulah said carelessly, as if to live anywhere both winter and summer would be uncouth. It was true that the better blocks uptown were virtually empty in the most stifling weeks of summer.

“You’ll have to show me your house sometime,” Fleurette said.

Beulah considered the power she could hold over a girl like Fleurette. As long as the possibility of an invitation to a Park Avenue town house was dangling before her, what would she do? Would she keep a secret, if she had to? Would she tell a lie?

It was a mean-spirited thought. Beulah tried to banish it as they reached their tent and made ready to settle in for the night. But once they were in their cots, with the lamp extinguished, her mind kept circling the question of who misbehaves and who keeps the secrets. Who kisses and who tells. Among sisters, you were always one or the other. And now, with Beulah surrounded by sisters, she couldn’t help but think of Claudia — Claudia, whose name had vanished from her lips, whose presence had been driven from her mind.

As much as she fought it, as she drifted off to sleep, it was Claudia who came back to her.

THE FIRST TIME Beulah awoke and found her sister gone, she was too terrified to say a word. Beulah was a fearful child, prone to nightmares and convinced that disaster lurked around every corner, usually in the form of a family member gone missing. But this wasn’t a nightmare. She was awake, and Claudia was, in matter of fact, missing. Beulah pushed a toe over to Claudia’s side of the bed and found it cold. She’d been gone for hours.

It was Beulah’s belief that if she woke her grandparents, Claudia’s disappearance would be made all the more real, but if she stayed in bed, and closed her eyes, and allowed any sort of dream to overtake her, even a terrible one, that when she awoke, there was at least a possibility that her sister would be restored to her and that the terrors of the night would be vanquished.

Much to Beulah’s surprise, that was precisely what happened. Claudia was back in bed before dawn. Her hair smelled of smoke and when she opened her mouth, there came from it a spoiled raisiny odor that reminded Beulah of their mother. She tried to ask Claudia where she had been, but Claudia only put a finger to Beulah’s lips and said, “Hush, baby.”

That went on for almost a year. Beulah was only nine and would do anything her older sister asked of her: lie, keep her secrets, and even live with the dread that burrowed inside of her every time she turned over in bed and discovered Claudia to be away on what had become her routine midnight absences.

One night, she awoke and knew something was different. Their grandfather was up and waiting in the sitting room. She could hear him cough and scratch his beard. His chair squeaked faintly when he shifted around in it.

Beulah slipped out of bed and crawled just far enough down the hall to see that he was sitting in the dark, with his constable’s coat on and a rifle across his lap. Poppa — that’s what they called him, having never grown accustomed to calling their own father anything — had fought in the War between the States, and after that was over he found that he enjoyed marching back and forth with a rifle and wearing a uniform, so he took up constabulary work. He liked the house run with a certain amount of order and precision, which suited Beulah just fine, as she regarded predictable meals, a clean bed, and washed and folded clothes to be luxuries never previously afforded to her.

But Claudia chafed at it. When she came home that night and found Poppa waiting for her, she was ready for a fight and she got one.

“If you want to go out there on the streets like your mother, you ought to stay gone,” Poppa said.

“You don’t know where I go,” Claudia said.

“I know exactly where a pretty girl like you goes at night,” he said. “You’re not the first one to live under my roof and try a trick like that, but you will be the last. Your grandmother took you in after I told her not to. I said you girls couldn’t stay here unless you behaved like the Lord’s own angels. If you’re done behaving, you can leave. Both of you.”

“Beulah’s got nothing to do with this.”

Beulah sat up in the dark when she heard her name.

“Beulah will do just like you in a few years. I see it every day. If there’s one in the family, all the rest of them go rotten.”

“Nobody’s going rotten. I go to school. I do my chores.”

“If you’ve got time for school and chores and running around all night, then you’ve got time to work. I’ll put you on at a cotton mill and you can see how you like that. You’ll be too tired to sneak out at night. Maybe that’s just what you need.”

“What I need is to be left alone once in a while,” Claudia snarled. Her footsteps moved toward the bedroom where Beulah cowered in silence, but then there was a smack and a stumble, and Claudia cried out, and then their grandmother was awake. She shuffled out of the bedroom and told Poppa not to lay a hand on the girl, but then she said to Claudia that she ought to be more grateful for what had been given to her.

“I took you in,” Meemaw said. “I didn’t have to, but I did.”

“You did have to,” Claudia said. “We were children.”

“You still are.” Meemaw was crying now. “You’re my baby girls.”

Claudia couldn’t bear to see her grandmother cry. No one could. Beulah, still curled up in a knot in the dark, pressed against the blackened oiled wood in the gloomy hallway. She could hear the sounds of Claudia comforting her grandmother and making promises that she had no intention of keeping.

The trouble with Claudia was not that she was a bad girl, but that she was restless. She had nothing but contempt for the kind of future she’d been told to expect for herself: a few years of seamstressing or factory work, to be followed by a marriage to a man who could afford nothing but a little shotgun house, just two rooms and a hot, cramped kitchen in the back.

That just wouldn’t do for Claudia. In that respect, she was like her mother, Jessie.

Jessie Binford always wanted something better: a better dress, a better pair of shoes, a better complexion, a better man. She wanted money and nice things, and she didn’t want to work for them. Anyone would desire a life like that, but the difference was that their mother — and Claudia, turning out to be like her — believed herself to be entitled to just about anything she could dream up. If she could imagine it, she deserved it, and the world was a cruel place for denying it to her.

Beulah unwound a little as the sounds in the parlor subsided. She told herself, as she always did, that if only she could go to sleep, she would awake in the morning with her sister next to her and it would be as if none of this had happened.

She was still young enough, back then, that she could just crawl into bed, close her eyes, give herself over to sleep, and it would rise up and carry her mercifully away.

NOW, AT THE age of twenty-four, sleep was no longer so merciful to Beulah. She was once again wide awake on her cot inside the tent, listening to Norma’s snoring and the breathing and sighing and stirring of the others.

There was something else her grandfather said to Claudia that night — something Beulah used to turn over and over in her mind, trying to make sense of it. What was it?

With a shudder she recalled it, like a nursery rhyme she’d forgotten.

“The hemlock in the soup does not know it’s the poison,” Poppa had said. “It just thinks it’s a bunch of green leaves, because it don’t see what it does to others. You’re the poison in the soup, Claudia Binford. You just don’t know it. Your momma didn’t know it, neither.”