The Mutual Admiration Society(78)
Mr. McGinty helps me back up to my feet and into my chair, then takes out his neatly folded hankie from his gray shirt and passes it to me. “Tessie, no one is calling the police on your sister, isn’t that right, Martha?”
After I wipe my eyes and blow my nose, I look over at the strictest nun I’ve ever met, expecting her to say something awful like, Even though we’re twins, I’m afraid I cannot agree with you, Jimmy. As her godfather, you have a spiritual responsibility to teach the child right from wrong and how will she ever learn if she doesn’t suffer the consequences? But much to my astonishment what she actually says is, “Calling the police under these circumstances”—she squeezes Birdie’s hand again—“is completely out of the question.”
When I start bawling all over again, this time from relief, Birdie and Charlie put their arms around me, and even Pyewacket jumps from where she’s been lounging on Sister Margaret Mary’s lap to stay for a few seconds on mine, before she leaps into Birdie’s arms, because the Siamese cat loves her most of all.
But even all the nice “there, there-ing” from the two people I love most in the world and Pye’s loud purring still doesn’t 100% convince me that our principal who eyewitnessed the stealing of the money from the collection box at St. Kate’s won’t call the police station and turn Birdie in. I’m not like Birdie and Charlie. I’m no pushover. I need to know why she’d do something so nice, so I ask her, “Are you sure you’re not going to turn her into the coppers?”
“Let me explain something to you, Tessie, that I think will help put your mind at ease,” Mr. McGinty says. “Before Martha and I moved to this neighborhood, we were raised in a small town in northern Wisconsin by a father who”—he glances over at his sister—“well, let’s just say he was not a forgiving man.”
“What happened to your m . . . m . . . mother?” Charlie asks.
“She died while giving birth to Martha and me,” Mr. McGinty tells him with lots of affection, because he knows why Charlie can’t help but ask that question.
“And what about your daddy?” I, of course, need to know. “You said he was not a forgiving man.”
“Father was killed in a lumberjacking accident many years ago,” our principal says. And I might be imagining it, because it has been a long and jam-packed day and I don’t trust my powers of observation anymore, but Sister Margaret Mary sure doesn’t sound all that broken up about her daddy getting killed by a tree. “The only family Jimmy and I have left are each other.” She picks up the brown paper bag off the table where Charlie smacked it down, peeks inside, I guess to make sure the Pagan Baby money really is in there and that we’ve haven’t been snow-jobbing her. She doesn’t pull out the wad of cash and start counting it, though. She pulls out the other something I put in the bag for Birdie before we came over for our visit that has turned out to be a lot more interesting than I could’ve guessed in a million years. “Oh, look, Jimmy! A peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich. Those were always our favorites, too.”
She’s looking pretty tenderly at the sandwich, so I’m starting to believe that she might not turn Birdie in to the cops, but because I’m still only about 75% sure of that, I’m going to bribe her the other 25% of the way. With two TV dinner suppers in her tummy and all the windmill cookies that my sister just ate, she shouldn’t go starving in the near future, so I point to the P B and M and tell Sister Margaret Mary, “Go ahead and take it as a thank-you for not squealing Birdie out.”
I elbow my sister to remind her to say thank you, too, because she forgets her manners about as often as she forgets everything else, but nobody’s home. Just like I knew would happen, the second she started running her little hand down the back of the tan and black Siamese, the two of them boarded the Orient Express to parts unknown. (Joke!)
7:18 p.m. Mr. McGinty looks up at the clock hanging on the wall above the brown sofa that he must’ve slept on last night so his sister who had gotten knocked unconscious could be comfortable in his bed until she could get her wits about her again. “It’s getting late,” he says. “If you intend to return the money to the collection box before Gert Klement’s deadline, Marty, you should leave soon.”
With one more pat of Birdie’s hand, Sister M & M a.k.a. Martha “Marty” McGinty says, “I’ll just change,” and then she excuses herself from the card table and disappears into her brother’s bedroom, and when she does that, just for a second, that nun kind of reminds me of Clark Kent disappearing into a phone booth, because that’s about how big our friend’s bedroom is and also because it seems like our principal is being very super about not turning Birdie in.
While we wait for Sister Margaret Mary to come back, Charlie asks Mr. McGinty something that would be of big interest to a kid who keeps track of so many things and has a very unforgiving father of his own. “So who did you come to live with in the neighborhood after you got turned into an orphan?”
Maybe it’s because he is such a private person, but it sure doesn’t look at first like Mr. McGinty wants to tell him, but then he does. “Henry Michael Gilgood was my mother’s brother,” he finally says. “Marty’s and my uncle. He took us in.”
“Mister Gilgood in the mausoleum that you take such extra good care of? The guy who was the richest man in the whole neighborhood who lived in the airplane house?!” I practically shout, because hot damn!