grabbed her nightgown and draped it over her curly red locks, making a pious face. “With our own toothbrushes.” She tied the gown’s arms around her forehead, fashioning a nun’s wimple for her makeshift veil. “Here at the Good Shepherd,” she said in Mother Mary Joseph’s unsteady falsetto, “unwholesome pursuits will not be tolerated.” Muriel lifted a pudgy thumb and started ticking off the rules. “No tobacco. No cards. No alcohol. No profane language.” She unfolded her pinky with a flourish. “And no suggestive literature.” She cleared her throat and stretched her voice another octave. “It’ll rot your very soul.”
“I’ll not scrub one floor,” Lily said, as she considered the consequences for the infraction she was about to commit. “And I’m not afraid to tell her that,” she added, though her voice lacked conviction. She sat on the corner of Muriel’s bed and fingered the magazines. True Story, True Romances, Modern Screen, Movie Monthly—all scandalous, though none very recent. Why, Gertrude Olmstead was on a November 1928 cover of True Story, and she hadn’t been heard from since talkies became the rage.
“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you tell her that one.”
“Who?” Lily picked up the December 1929 True Story with a picture of Clara Bow on front.
“Mother Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Both girls erupted into laughter. “Oh!” Muriel pressed her hands against her belly. “He’s a real scrapper,” she said, rubbing a tip of elbow or knee poking up.
Lily grimaced. “What was that?”
“He’s kicking.”
Lily looked at Muriel’s belly, stunned.
“You didn’t know?” Muriel swung around sidesaddle, reached for Lily’s hand, and placed it against her stomach. “Here,” she said. “Feel that?”
When the baby kicked again, Lily pulled her hand away and wiped it on the blanket. “How awful!”
“Awful? Happens to everybody.”
“Not me!”
“You too, silly.”
Lily’s mouth dropped open.
“First you feel flapping inside,” Muriel squinted, “but soft, like a hummingbird’s wings. After that, the kicking starts.”
Lily’s eyebrows sprang up.
“I’m just starting my seventh month,” Muriel said, “so you should be showing any day. Probably just need to put a little meat on those bones.” She picked up a 1925 Movie Monthly with a picture of Priscilla Dean on the cover. The headline read, “Ladies in Peril.” She scooped up the remaining magazines and buried them in the open drawer. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
Lily shook her head and moved to her own bed. Clara Bow peeked out from under her arm. “She said I’d already had quite an education, and that nature would take care of the rest.”
“How ’bout that sister of yours? She’s no spring chicken. Imagine she’s been around the block a time or two.”
“Violet? Hardly. She’s too busy mooning over Stanley. Stanley, Stanley,” she singsonged. “That’s all I ever hear.”
“What sort of fella is he?”
“Sweet enough, I suppose. Not much taller than Violet. Educated. Finishing up law school right here in Philadelphia.”
“How romantic. Will she see him?”
“No!” Lily slapped the magazine onto her lap. “He doesn’t know a thing, and Violet swore it would stay that way. He thinks we’re off in Buffalo visiting our relations.” She picked up the True Story and smoothed its pages. The publication’s motto, Truth is stranger than fiction, stared up at her. “It’s bad enough the widow knows, but Mother couldn’t be stopped. She said Catholics know more about worldly matters.”
Muriel closed her eyes and smiled. “Is he handsome?”
“Promise you won’t tell?”
Muriel nodded so vigorously that her wimple and veil slid off her head, down onto her pillow.
“I couldn’t say.” She leaned in and whispered, “I’ve never been able to get past the hand.”
“What’s wrong with his hand?” Muriel scooted toward the edge of her mattress, closer to Lily.
“It isn’t there.” Lily drew back and shivered. “For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always just had the one.”
“Born that way? I’ve heard of that. A woman oughtn’t look at a crone or a cripple when she’s in the family way. It’ll mark the baby for sure.”
Lily considered the warning. “It’s different with Stanley. Lost his hand in the mine when he was a boy. Came this close to dying.” She pressed a half-inch of air between her thumb and forefinger. “He swears it was Violet’s voice that brought him back.”
“Now there’s a romance story if I ever heard one. And what about you?” Muriel rolled her copy of Movie Monthly and rapped it against Lily’s headboard. “Do you have a sweetheart waiting for you back home?”
Lily considered the question. She loved George Sherman Jr., but that didn’t make him her sweetheart. Or her his. He’d told her to come back in a few years after she’d “grown up some,” but that hardly meant he was waiting for her. She’d seen him around town with those other girls. And he’d certainly never want her now if he knew she was expecting. “I can’t say for sure.” Her eyes teared up. “How about you? Do you have a beau?”
“Promise you won’t tell?” Muriel leaned in.
“Cross my heart.”
“I’m a married woman,” she said, stretching out a ringless hand. “All very proper.”
Lily examined Muriel’s unadorned fingers out of politeness. “Why not tell?”
“Pa would kill him.”
“Is he mean?”
“My pa? He’s wonderful to me. Says I’m his little princess.” Muriel wrapped her arms around her stomach. “I’m the only girl in a family of nine.” She trembled. “So naturally he favors me.”
“What’re you going to do when the baby comes?”
“Take him home, of course. Raise him with his daddy.”
“Or her. Could just as easily be a girl. Even Carol what’s-her-name said so.”
Muriel winced. “It’s a boy,” she directed toward her belly, as if issuing a command, “no matter what Carol Kochis says.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Just has to be, is all.” Muriel shivered again.
“What’s
