Carol Sister O'Marie - The Missing Madonna

“With your history background, you’ll be a wonderful asset,” Erma had insisted.

Mary Helen had been impressed. After all these years, how had Erma remembered her major? She couldn’t recall if she had even declared one yet, in that long-ago summer session.

“And, of course, we want Sister Eileen too. With her vast knowledge of reference materials.” So, it wasn’t memory at all! She had pumped Eileen.

“If that’s all right with you, Sister?” Erma’s voice brought Mary Helen back to the present.

Mrs. Taylor-Smith, pewter eyes unflinching, looked at her expectantly.

“Oh, yes,” Mary Helen answered. If good old Erma said something was all right, she’d bet even money that it was.

Everyone smiled pleasantly-everyone, that is, except Eileen, who looked puzzled. Mary Helen would ask her what she had agreed to as soon as they were alone in the hotel room.

Meanwhile, she watched while Erma introduced the other OWLs to Mrs. Taylor-Smith.

Beside her, Caroline Coughlin removed a glove and extended her hand. The feather on the wide-brimmed hat covering her champagne-colored hair quivered ever so slightly as she inclined her head. Caroline’s deep blue eyes smiled, but she curved her lips just barely, so that not a wrinkle creased her subtly made-up face. In Mary Helen’s opinion, this woman was the closest the OWLs would ever come to meeting a royal princess or, at Caroline’s age, a queen dowager.

Rumor had it, though, that when provoked, the genteel Mrs. Coughlin, who had outlived two husbands, could sing a song of swearwords guaranteed to make a stevedore blanch. Whenever she had accidentally let one slip in front of the nuns, Mary Helen noted, she had the uncanny knack of making it sound like the height of refinement. Yes, indeed, she thought, observing her charm Mrs. Taylor-Smith, Caroline Coughlin was, as they say, “to the manner born.”

Lucy Lyons, whom Erma introduced next, was blessed with another attribute. Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad . That inscription over the door of Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies fit Lucy perfectly. These two qualities had been her only patrimony, yet they had served her well. Short, plump Lucy Lyons probably had more money than all her other companions put together.

Mary Helen watched their escort’s pewter eyes examine Lucy. They began at the top, where a hastily plaited braid coiled around her head like a thick gray snake. With disdain they wandered from her horn-rimmed glasses down her jersey off-the-rack suit to her sensible black pumps. They flickered only for a moment when they focused on the diamond in its Tiffany setting on Lucy’s left ring finger. The stone was the size of a small marble. Her husband, Jimmy, had given it to her a year or so before his death.

“A token of his affliction ,” Lucy always said when asked about the ring. Jimmy was the type, Mary Helen had been told, who could sell snow to the Eskimos. As a matter of fact, he had started out selling purses. “There’s a lot of money in purses,” Lucy often quipped.

With his ability and her sense of fun, the couple had amassed a fortune, bought a palatial home in San Francisco’s St. Francis Wood, and sent four children through college. Yet Lucy never lost her simplicity. Her one flaw was her terrible addiction to corny jokes and puns. She just couldn’t seem to resist them. Mary Helen sincerely hoped she would not be able to think of one until Mrs. Taylor-Smith had safely deposited them at their hotel.

“Hello. I’m Noelle Thompson.” Looking over her half glasses, Noelle extended her hand before Erma had the chance to introduce her. Noelle, a spinster, was probably the most intelligent or at least the best-educated member of the group. Surely she was the most assertive. The woman had held several important positions with the federal government and often acted as its spokesperson. Noelle Thompson had been the OWLs’ unanimous choice for president of their chapter.

“It’s nice to meet you, Alice,” Noelle said. Mary Helen had forgotten that Mrs. Taylor-Smith’s name was Alice. From the way the woman was blinking, she wondered if Mrs. Taylor-Smith might have forgotten too.

Adjusting her blue leather shoulder-strap purse, Noelle picked up her matching blue carry-on case. She straightened the jacket of her blue-plaid wool suit. Everything about Noelle Thompson was blue or had a touch of blue, even the light rinse in her white hair.

“The color picks up and intensifies her blue eyes,” Eileen had commented when Mary Helen first noticed it. “I read about it in Vogue ,” she said with authority. “Many women choose a color to highlight their eyes. It commands attention.”

Dumbfounded, Mary Helen had stared at her friend. “What in the world were you doing reading Vogue ? Don’t tell me, at our age, you’re going glamorous on me!” She smoothed her own navy-blue skirt, wondering just how out of style it was.

“Glory be to God, Mary Helen.” Eileen’s eyebrows had shot up. “It will take more than one article in Vogue to make a pacesetter out of the likes of me. If you must know, the truth of the matter is that Vogue -and an old issue, to boot-was the only magazine in the dentist’s office.” She paused to let that sink in. “I did, however, find it an interesting idea. Don’t you?”

Mary Helen had mulled over the idea briefly and decided against ever trying it. Her own hazel eyes showed such a myriad of color that choosing a hue to highlight them would be more trouble than it was worth.

Sister Mary Helen didn’t realize how tired she was until the six women had finally snuggled into Mrs. Taylor-Smith’s stretch Cadillac, hired, Mary Helen suspected, for the occasion.

Her eyes burned. She closed them. She’d be glad to get to New York City and into bed. Let the other girls carry on the chitchat on the way there. She would just rest her eyes. She took a deep breath. No wonder she was tired. It was just a little more than two weeks ago, right before Easter, that she had unexpectedly run into Erma Duran at the college.

“What in the world are you doing here?” Mary Helen had blurted out the moment she saw Erma. “I’m surprised to see you,” she had added quickly, realizing just how rude her question sounded.

Apparently good old Erma hadn’t noticed. “Not as surprised as I am to be here,” she had answered. “A couple of weeks ago Lucy talked me into signing up with her for one of your Senior Enrichment classes. She thinks it will be good for both us. Luckily it’s on Monday, my day off.”

Grimacing, Erma had unfurled the college brochure in front of Mary Helen and pointed to a blurb about an intensive journal-writing workshop.

Mary Helen was just about to say that she never thought of Erma as the journal-writing type, intensive or otherwise, when Lucy rounded the corner.

“Hi, Sister,” she had called. “I’m so glad we ran into you. It saves me a phone call. Jimmy used to say that when I died they would have to get the damn thing surgically removed from my ear.”

Mary Helen had laughed. Although she had heard Lucy say that at least two dozen times, she still enjoyed it. “What’s up with you two eternal coeds?” she had asked.

Lucy had demurred in favor of her friend.

“Well, we’ve been talking among ourselves…” Erma’s brown eyes had sparkled with the excitement of finally being able to tell a secret. “And the four of us-Noelle, Caroline, Lucy, and me”-she had counted the names off on her chubby fingers-“are going to New York for the OWL convention. We would all be delighted if you and Sister Eileen would come along with us. Actually,” she had said with a quick smile, “it wouldn’t be the same without you.”