The Night Sister (3 page)

Mr. Alfred Hitchcock

Paramount Pictures

Hollywood, California

June 3, 1955

Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

My name is Sylvia Slater, and I am eleven years old. I live in London, Vermont, where my family runs the Tower Motel on Route 6. I get top marks in my class and my teacher, Mrs. Olson, says I am already reading and writing at a high school level. Daddy is teaching me to help with the bookkeeping, and sometimes he even lets me write the daily tallies in our big ledger.

I want to be an actress when I grow up. Or maybe even a movie director, like you. Are there any girl directors? My sister Rose, she says she doesn't think there are, but she's only eight.

I don't mind telling you, Rose is a little odd. She watches me all the time and it's starting to bother me. Mama says Rose is just jealous. My father says Rose has an overactive imagination. I honestly can't imagine what goes on in her head. She runs around the motel in torn dresses, tangles in her hair, and her best friend on earth is a sad old cow we have named Lucy. And yet she has the nerve to tell me
I'm
silly for wanting to be an actress one day.

I've started keeping a movie scrapbook filled with pictures I've cut out of famous actors and actresses. Sometimes I show my uncle Fenton what I've pasted in my book. You're his favorite director. He's seen every single one of your pictures. It was his idea that I write to you, because I have an idea for a movie. But I have to warn you, it's really scary.

My Oma, she's my mama's mother, came to visit last year all the way from England. Oma told me and Rose terrible, frightening stories. Rose loved the stories, but I hated them. They gave me nightmares.

She told one story that I'll never forget, because she swore it was true. It's the scariest thing I ever heard.

Mr. Hitchcock, before I tell you any more, there is something I need to know:

Do you believe in monsters?

Sincerely yours,

Miss Sylvia A. Slater

The Tower Motel

328 Route 6

London, Vermont

Rose watched her sister, Sylvie, pull back the curtain that they'd strung up along the clothesline at the side of the house before stepping out onto the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Sylvie announced in a booming voice. “Welcome to the one and only World Famous London Chicken Circus!”

She dropped the needle onto the phonograph, and “Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts began to play. As Sylvie began to sway back and forth, with each graceful step her blond curls bounced. They were pulled back from her face with simple white barrettes. She'd put her hair in curlers before the circus, because she thought it made her look like Doris Day.

Rose wiped the sweat from her forehead and hauled back the curtain to reveal their audience: Mama and Daddy, Uncle Fenton, Bill Novak the fish man, a shy young couple driving up to Nova Scotia for their honeymoon, and a New Jersey family of four—two parents, one boy, and one girl—who were all on their way to a week of camping in Maine. It wasn't the largest crowd they'd performed for, but not the smallest, either. It certainly wasn't bad for a Thursday—tomorrow and Saturday, when the motel was full, they'd have their biggest crowds. The size of the crowd didn't matter, though: she and Sylvie would do the circus for even a single guest. Daddy said to make every performance count, even if there was just one man watching.

“You never know who that one man might be,” he told them. “Maybe he's a talent scout. Or a reporter. Maybe he has a hundred friends back home who he'll tell all about the show and motel.”

Daddy was sitting in the very front row, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, watching intently through his one good eye, the other squinting at them, able to discern only their shadows. He wore his buttoned white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and kept a pack of Lucky Strikes in his pocket, along with a pen and pencil and little notepad. His hair was cut short and slicked back with Brylcreem.

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.

Sylvie might be able to entrance the chickens and the whole rest of the world, but Rose Slater was immune to her sister's charms. That didn't mean Sylvie didn't try.

Uncle Fenton had given Sylvie a book—
Mastering the Art and Science of Hypnotism
—for Christmas, and she'd studied it cover to cover, underlining passages and making notes in the margins. Fenton had thought that she could use some of the techniques on the birds, but Sylvie had taken it further, insisting on practicing on Rose.

“Keep your eyes on my finger; feel yourself getting sleepier, sleepier still. I'm going to count backward from ten; when I get to one, you'll be fast asleep, but you'll hear every word I say.”

It never worked, really, but Rose pretended. She followed Sylvie's finger, lowered her eyelids, spoke and moved as if she was in a trance state. She said goofy things, clucked like a chicken, did whatever Sylvie commanded. It was great fun, fooling her sister, letting Sylvie think she was in control. Rose loved knowing that she had the power to ruin the game, to pop open her eyes and confess that she'd been faking all along. And there would be Sylvie, the clever daughter, the beautiful, graceful girl, waving her dumb finger through the air for nothing.

Rose herself was just the opposite of Sylvie: awkward and thick-limbed, with dark, easily tangled hair. She was the kind of kid people glanced right over, a short and clumsy shadow lurking behind Sylvie and occasionally sticking out her tongue when she was sure no one could see.

As Sylvie and Matilda hammed it up for the audience, Rose busied herself setting up the next act: Petunia was a Barred Rock who Rose had taught to balance on a metal roller skate as it was pulled across the stage on a string. The best part was her costume—a little gingham dress and a pillbox hat that Rose bobby-pinned to her feathers.

“We're on, girl,” Rose whispered to the hen, giving her a good-luck stroke. She grabbed a handful of raisins from the Sun-Maid box and went to work, leading Petunia across the stage as the skate's metal wheels rattled.

Uncle Fenton whistled appreciatively. He was not actually their uncle, but a distant cousin of Daddy's and much younger: he'd just turned nineteen. He was wearing his usual outfit—a stained white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, blue work pants and heavy black boots. In his back pocket he always kept a thin paperback book, something he'd picked up at the five-and-dime: science fiction or crime, sometimes a Western. Uncle Fenton was Daddy's helper, the fix-it man at the motel, and he lived in a trailer behind the house that Daddy helped him pay for. When Fenton wasn't reading, repairing something, or cutting the grass, he was building himself a motorcycle out of parts he'd been collecting. Sometimes the girls would go help him, and he'd promise that once he got it running he'd take them for a ride—maybe even add on a sidecar, so they could all three go.

Now they got Sunshine, a big, glossy black hen, from the cage behind the back curtain, and all three birds were dancing, moving back and forth, spinning in carefully choreographed circles, banging into each other clumsily, while the girls led them on with raisins; all the chickens wore hats and silk scarves.

“And now for the grand finale,” Sylvie announced. “I will use the power of hypnosis to put all three chickens to sleep. I need absolute quiet from the audience. Watch, and you will be amazed.”

Rose held Matilda and Petunia firmly in place next to one another. Sylvie held Sunshine down with her left hand; with her right, she used a white stick (she called it her “magic chicken wand”) to twirl circles in the air in front of them, then drew lines on the ground, a straight line drawn again and again in front of each hen. The birds watched the white stick, eyes focused on the line it made in the dirt, and gradually relaxed, holding perfectly still. One by one, Sylvie picked the birds up and flipped them onto their backs, where they lay with their eyes closed, feet in the air. The crowd oohed and aahed. Sylvie gave a proud smile, then snapped her fingers and said in a loud voice, “Awaken!” All three birds jumped up, righted themselves, and ran wild.

“Tah-dah,” she said, taking a long, deep bow, chicken wand still clutched in her right hand.

Mama looked down and picked at the hem of her dress, pulling a thread loose. But Daddy banged his hands together and gave the girls an enthusiastic grin. Uncle Fenton laughed out loud, slapping his knees. The young newlyweds applauded politely, then headed back down to their room. The housewife from New Jersey reached over and took her husband's hand, and he looked at her and smiled a
can-you-believe-this
smile. Their wedding rings glinted in the sun. The little girl turned to her brother and said, “We need to get some chickens when we get home.” The parents laughed.

“Good show, girls,” Daddy said. He pulled the little notebook from his pocket and jotted down something. Daddy was always getting wonderful ideas—ideas that would make money, make the motel bigger and better and more efficient; ideas that could change the world.

“I'll go start dinner,” said Mama, her wary eye on the hen in Sylvie's arms. Mama was not a big fan of the chickens. She thought they were dirty and not all that bright, and sometimes worried out loud about the diseases the girls might catch from them, like salmonella. Secretly, Rose wondered how you could get a sickness from a chicken that would turn you into a fish, and what exactly would happen—would you grow gills? Scales? Not be able to breathe on land?

“It's my paper night,” Mama reminded them. Every Thursday, after dinner, the girls had to clean up the kitchen and get their own selves off to bed, so Daddy could watch the office while Mama had her newspaper meeting. She and some of the members of the Ladies Club of London put out a weekly paper—
The London Town Crier—
full of news, recipes, and advertisements. Mama was the editor, and each Thursday night they planned the next week's issue.

Sylvie wandered over to Lucy the cow's pen, and let the guest kids pet Petunia while Daddy talked to their father, the two men huddled close, smoking. They were talking about the highways being built all over, how soon there would be one running right by London, going from White River Junction all the way up to the Canadian border. Daddy shook his head, said in a low voice, “It's no good for this town. No one will come through on Route 6 anymore.”

The boy who was petting Petunia moved closer, so that the toes of his Keds were practically touching Sylvie's sandals. His hand brushed hers, and she smiled.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “Hypnotize the chickens?”

“It takes a lot of practice,” Sylvie told him.

“Can you hypnotize people?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “I do it to my sister all the time.”

“Will you do me?” His eyes glistened, his whole body thrumming with excitement at the possibility.

“I don't know,” Sylvie said. “Maybe.”

The boy's little sister was reaching through the cedar fence rails to pet Lucy. Nailed to the fence was a sign Daddy had painted:

LUCY, THE STATE COW, WAS BORN IN THE FALL OF 1943. IF YOU LOOK ON HER LEFT SIDE, YOU WILL SEE SHE HAS A SPOT IN THE SHAPE OF THE GREAT STATE OF VERMONT.

Now Lucy gave the little girl's hand a lick with her enormous tongue. The girl laughed.

“She was born the same day as my sister, September 16, 1943,” Rose said. “Sylvie and that cow are as good as twins.” Rose leaned in to rub Lucy's lucky spot, her hand covering the whole state of Vermont. “Daddy says when Lucy was born he had a vision. He saw the motel, the tower, the pen for Lucy. He knew people would come. And he was right. Because here you are.”

“Did your daddy build that big tower?” the girl asked, turning from the cow to look down the driveway. The tower was thirty feet tall, twelve feet across, built of stone and cement.

“He built it the year I was born,” Rose said. “He did everything himself: mixing the concrete, batch after batch, in a wheelbarrow, hauling rocks down from the hillside.”