by April Smith
The night of the bull sale, Honeybee’s timing had been excellent. He saw through the front window that his mother was already knocked out on the sofa. The Perry Como Chesterfield Show, still playing on the TV, would cover the sound of his footsteps. Carrying a paper sack heavy with contraband, he opened the door and tiptoed down the hall, avoiding the squeaky spots. Earlier in the day he and his buddies had piled into the back of a pickup and driven through the rain to a bootlegger’s spread where they knew they could buy booze, but when they’d passed the sale barn and seen the parking lot was packed because it was auction day, they decided to go back and have a look. Now he entered his room, closed the door, and emptied the sack of half a dozen broken-off car mirrors into a carton in the closet, adding to the pile he’d already stolen around town; no reason, just because he damn well pleased.
—
That same night, when the kids were asleep, Betsy found Cal at the kitchen table, reading.
“Want some popcorn?” she asked.
When he ignored her, or didn’t hear, she knew he was deep in concentration. After working all day learning the business of cattle ranching, Cal would stay up studying for the South Dakota bar exam, and she was grateful. The sooner he could open a law practice in Rapid City and bring in money, the sooner they could buy their own place and get out of this prehistoric hut. She could think about a nursing job again.
He was out and about, but she was stuck with two young children. She heated water on a wood-burning stove and the toilet was a hole in the ground. With the prairie right up to the door, there was no safe place for kids, and Lance was always getting into cow dung or stinging nettles. She missed the neighborhood playgrounds in New York, where you could strike up a friendship with another young mother over a box of Cracker Jack. She missed her sister and her union friend, Elaine O’Grady. She missed having a telephone.
“When are we going to have our own house, Mama?” Jo would ask.
“Why do you want our own house when it’s so nice living here?” Betsy would say, amusing herself with her own humor.
“I want a house with a swing.”
And a washing machine, Betsy thought. And privacy. She shook the popcorn pot over the stove.
“Smells great,” Cal said.
“To help you study for the bar.”
“The bar would be a cinch compared to this.” He laughed and spun the book around so she could see. “I’m reading the tractor manual.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why?”
“The Roys’ tractor broke down and it’s causing all sorts of havoc.”
“Have you tried horsemint tea?” Betsy suggested lightly. “That’s Doris’s cure for everything. This afternoon Jo had a rash on her arm because I didn’t stop her from picking some kind of who-knows-what flower, but don’t worry because warm compresses of horsemint tea will fix her right up. Why don’t you brew a pot of horsemint tea,” she concluded tartly, “and pour it down the tractor?”
Betsy was wearing slippers, an old rayon skirt, two sweaters, and a woolen muffler. In the light of the fire, the pot in one hand, a wooden spoon in the other, she looked irresistibly quaint. Cal got up from the table and stood behind her and massaged her shoulders.
“What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”
“I thought you were taking the bar exam in July,” she said, relaxing under his strong fingers.
“I am.”
“Then why waste time on a tractor?”
“Because something’s not right, and I’m trying to make it right,” he answered tightly.
He didn’t want to bring up Scotty’s fabrications about his war service. It had gotten under his skin, but it was tricky because Dutch and the rest of the world believed his lies. Cal had to work things out in his own mind first, before he stepped into that hornet’s nest.
He sat back at the table. She set the bowl of popcorn down.
“It’s cabin fever,” he told her. “You need to get out.”
Betsy’s answer was to take out the Olympia typewriter and compose a letter to her sister. They corresponded almost every week. The Fergusons had a neighbor, Mrs. Zajac, a widow with eyes on Albert, who read the letters to Marja and would write her answers. Betsy set the typewriter on the kitchen table. It had been a gift from her parents when she graduated from the Knox School. The Olympia lived up to its name as the pinnacle of freedom for a sheltered girl. She could write an article. She could apply for a job. Even now its round keys seemed uplifted on their levers, awaiting the touch of her fingers to come alive; but loneliness stilled her thoughts.
—
There was little comfort here. Comfort was their apartment in the art deco building on the Grand Concourse, morning sun falling across the baby-blue carpeting, of which their mother, Rosslyn, would have approved. She had called herself an interior decorator, although she had no training and had never held that job, and the living room was stuffed with relics of her bourgeois aspirations: Japanese lamps, porcelain figurines of shepherdesses, heavy mirrors, a baby grand piano.
Bright sun from the corner window would be unkind to Marja’s ample, big-busted figure, in a simple gray cotton frock with the buttons closed up to the collar, in the discreet way they taught girls to dress at the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. The hem would fall below the knee, so that the white stockings and manly shoes, chosen for stability, would be awkwardly revealed. Her black hair would be parted on the side, following its natural waves until stopping midair in a crimped mass like an unanswered question.
It pained Betsy to remember her little sister going about looking so matronly. Whenever she passed the Junior World Sportswear at Gimbels, she would assemble imaginary wardrobes for Marja, so she’d fit in better with the sighted world. The doctors said she could see well enough to choose her own clothes, but Marja wasn’t ready to leave the cocoon of semi-blindness where she’d been indulged all her life. She held her lids downcast, and had acquired dark, freckled-stained circles underneath her eyes. Her habitual expression was of a faintly humble smile—really just a pose of acquiescence that masked the fury, which sometimes lashed out like lightning, of being trapped in a life of dependence.
While their mother shopped in Manhattan and golfed at the country club, Marja had been raised by live-in nurses. Betsy sat on the floor with the fretful toddler and, as she grew older, made up games they could share. When the neighborhood kids ganged up on “the dumb blind girl” and pounded her with snowballs, it was Betsy who fired back and tackled the boys and stuffed chunks of snow down their necks—her premature height finally an advantage. She was Marja’s defender, but failed to be her savior.
“Let’s go to the beach this weekend,” Betsy would suggest. “Coney Island! Some friends are going from the store.”
“Are you mad?”
Marja could sound incredibly pretentious. Betsy thought it was from listening to radio dramas all day.
“Why not?”
“We’ll be on the subway for hours,” her sister complained.
“So what?”
“It’ll be crowded and hot.”
“No worse than this apartment,” Betsy insisted.
“You go on,” Marj would say. “I’ll stay with Papa.”
—
Cal closed the tractor manual and said he was going to bed. Without realizing it, Betsy had begun to type. There was something about the hammering of it, and the bold black letters striking the page, that demanded truthfulness, and she did her best:
Dearest Marj,
Cal and I are finally talking about finding our own place. The Roys have gone out of their way but it’s time to move on. I want to get on a horse and ride across land that is ours. To fall asleep dead tired from harvesting vegetables from my own garden and to put up preserves and bake a lemon chiffon pie (if I can only master the wrist action). I’m excited about putting down roots—only sad because I miss you and still haven’t made any real friends. (Sorry to sound like a spoiled teenager.) When we
have our own place you MUST come out here and see it all, dear Marja—everything working together!
Your loving sister, B
7
The first time Betsy met Stella Fletcher, she had ventured downtown alone, pushing Lance in the carriage and holding hands with Jo. There was no indication they had settled in the fastest-growing city in the state. In those early days, the double-wide western streets were still virtually empty. To Betsy’s eye they looked surreal, as if you disappeared the crowds from Fifth Avenue, hung a broad blue sky, and put giant fans on every corner. No matter that it was spring; the wind prevailed, sweeping down shining streets that were ruler-straight. Cars passed rarely. The next pedestrian might be a hundred yards away. You could see infinity from every intersection.
It was an innocent and drowsy pace, with none of the battle scars of the wheezing, middle-aged municipalities of the East. According to the enthusiastic 1950 Rapid City Business Survey, the current population of 24,310 was projected to grow by half in the next ten years. “Ninety-five percent native born, no foreign element, no Negroes,” the Business Survey bragged. By the time Jo was in high school, the city called the “Summer Playground of America,” whose claim to fame was Mount Rushmore and a dinosaur park, would have shamelessly renamed itself the “New Denver of the West.” It would boast forty-four grocery stores, sixty-six restaurants, three drive-in movie theaters, four music stores, a sanatorium for tubercular Indians, two museums, and thirty-five lawyers, including Calvin Kusek.
On that afternoon in late spring, there would have been no cause for Betsy Kusek to feel anything but optimistic as she promenaded her babies down Main Street. She’d dressed the children up, put on a yellow shirtwaist and her spring coat, and tied a scarf around her hair. It was marvelous to be wearing heels and walking on pavement. Returning the smiles of the occasional passersby (“What adorable children!”), Betsy began to imagine the wispy fragments of her life coming together.
A year from now Lance would be out of diapers and Jo would be in kindergarten. What would Betsy want if she were free? To work as a nurse in the hospital, or maybe for the school system? Do typing for Cal? He’d need the help lawyering as well as running the ranch. All of that was fine, but what Betsy really badly needed was a bosom buddy like Elaine O’Grady back in New York, who worked in the hotsy-totsy Fashonia Dresses department at Gimbels, but was one of the most earthy girls she knew. On lunch break, they’d skip the company cafeteria and take a sandwich to the park, hoping to meet a guy. The guy—snagged or not—inspired hours of analysis of where and with whom they should lose their virginity, swearing to tell each other the minute it happened. The guy was really an excuse for Betsy and Elaine to skate along on their exhilarating new friendship. Betsy missed her terribly. Just then, although the day was fair, a brutal crack of thunder followed by a spit of lightning reverberated in the distance, as if to mock the futility of her thoughts.
Jo flinched. “Mommy, is it going to rain?”
“No, sugar. That’s just heat lightning, and it’s far away from us.” To distract herself as well as the child, Betsy added, “Isn’t this a pretty town?”
The turn-of-the-century planners had decided their best bet in drawing people to their newborn city, in a place where the wind comes at you full force no matter what the season, would be the guarantee of permanence. Middle-class stability. A collective fist against the elements. So they built downtown on a squared-off grid, out of bricks made from local clay fired by wood from the Black Hills, installing blocks of Italianate buildings with elegant facades, arched windows, leaded glass, and ornate cornices that were ordered by mail and brought in on trains. Mornings and evenings, when the prairie light was crystal clear, the austere setting gave you faith in the solid, democratic values that built this city.
Betsy was delighted by the variety of modern stores that currently inhabited the shells left by Victorian dreamers fifty years before—beautiful dress shops, Billiam’s Fabric, all filled with the cutest notions. Three shoe emporiums on one street! The jewel of the city, the Hotel Alex Johnson, was a grand high-rise with a rooftop garden, as luxurious as any in Manhattan. Around the periphery of downtown there had bloomed beautiful parks and neighborhoods of large, tasteful homes that reminded her of childhood in the suburbs of New York City.
All of that was due to giddy postwar affluence. The Depression had come early to South Dakota, in the 1920s, after the failure of so many farms. That was the shock of it. Until then, those industrious, decent Christian folk who had settled in Rapid City could dupe themselves into believing they had achieved the impossible—a durable and lasting way of life—when in fact they had dug down deep in a place of no boundaries. In the cold void above the clouds, above humanity, atmospheric forces would push and shove as they always had, blowing apart and renewing, in an endless, pointless turbulence that froze calves and killed wheat and turned farmland into dust, all of it as careless of human hopes as the late-spring squall that dropped that day out of the blackened sky, pummeling the Kusek family.
In a matter of minutes the temperature dropped by twenty degrees. Large pellets of hail came down hard. Moments ago the thunder was a faraway tease; now it was above them, suddenly colossal, loud enough to make store windows rattle. Betsy pulled the carriage hood down over the baby, scooped up her little girl, and ran. The scarf blew off and tangled around her neck. She kept her head down, her usually agreeable features a grimace of determination. The icy rain was blinding. With one hand Betsy propelled the carriage while with the other arm she carried Jo on her hip. Nothing would make her lose hold of those children.
Assaulted from all directions by capricious wind, she hobbled to the nearest shelter, shaken by how the world had changed in a snap. But for now they were safe in the entryway of the Duhamel Company western wear store.
“That was fun!” said Jo. “Carry me again.”
Betsy shook the ice particles from her hair, pocketed the soaking scarf, and arranged another blanket over Lance, who stopped his panicked yowling and gratefully took the bottle. She wiped her cold, wet face and sighed. It was too late to pull Jo away, she’d already seen the toys cannily displayed in the window among grown-up jeans and riding shirts and braided belts. But it wasn’t the Happi-Time Camera or the Tweedie Singing Bird that drew the child in a trance right up to the glass.
“I want cowboy boots!” Jo declared.
In her size they were adorable: tooled red leather with white embroidery.
“Cowboy boots are expensive,” Betsy said. “First you have to learn to ride,” she added, dodging.
“I can ride Pete.”
“I know, but Doris has to hold you.”
“Doris doesn’t hold me. She lets me ride all by myself.”
Betsy’s stomach tightened. “She does?”
“It’s easy. Pete likes me! Look, I’ll show you.”
Jo grabbed her mother’s hand and dragged her toward a coin-operated horse set beneath the awning as an enticement. It was painted bright yellow, yellow as butter, all four legs outstretched in a flying gallop. On the pedestal, RIDE CHAMPION! was written in a lasso that spelled out the letters.
A boy Jo’s age was sitting on the mechanical horse. He wore jeans, suspenders, and a flannel shirt. His flax-blond hair was mowed in a scalp-revealing crew cut. Although the horse was still, he was energetically slapping the leather reins against its fiberglass neck. The boy’s mother stood nearby. Like Betsy, she seemed to have been caught in the storm, for she wore just a pink cardigan over a skirt and blouse and carried a white straw purse.
“Please,” she was saying.
Bending toward her son, she was not the picture of a confident parent, more like a desperate teenager.
“Robbie, please.”
“One more ride,” the boy insisted.
“I’m out of dimes. Let’s go.”
“No!”
Robbie’s mother spun away as if she’d been slapped. As if the boy’s rebuke was the absolute last thing she c
ould bear that moment. Fumbling with her purse, she found a handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes.
“Why is that lady crying?” Jo whispered. “It’s just a stupid ride.”
“Don’t say ‘stupid,’ ” Betsy said. “Excuse me,” she continued to the distraught woman, “I’ve got dimes, if you need one.”
“That’s very nice of you,” the woman said. “But his father’s waiting.”
She was several years younger than Betsy, with natural strawberry-blond hair that framed an oval face in waves that fell to sloping shoulders that seemed to have sunk under the burdens of life. Her wide, high-flown eyebrows contributed to an open expression that would have been sweet as a high school portrait if her face hadn’t been ravaged by some kind of deep-seated unhappiness.
She twisted the handkerchief in her hands. “I’m sorry. This is embarrassing. It’s funny but he’s not usually like this.”
“One of those days,” Betsy replied sympathetically.
A dense curtain of cold rain fell on the other side of the awning over the entry, cutting off the street. They were silent, staring at the barrage of water.
Finally Jo tugged on Betsy’s coat. “It’s my turn.”
“You’ll just have to wait.”
“But he’s not even riding—”
“Hush! Can you believe this weather?” Betsy said, still trying to console the young woman. “Back east, this is what we call November.”