Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  “You can see the effects of the drought,” Cal shouted over the twin engines.

  On the approach to the ranch, Cal pointed out their farmhouse, pens, corrals, barns, ponds, and pastures. As the wings dipped toward each landmark, Leon kept his eyes on the sick bag and lips pursed shut. His lips were his most alluring attribute—at odds with his pompous medical authority—Cupid’s bow–shaped, distinctly carved as the curves on a violin. His aunts always said those lips were wasted on a boy. At a plump fifty-five, he wore a dark, groomed mustache that suggested a thoughtful nature and complemented his prominent cheeks—well rounded by a taste for red wines and moldy cheeses. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed back in long, self-conscious waves, shining with Cussons Imperial Leather Brilliantine. He owned a wardrobe of Savile Row silk bow ties.

  Dr. Leon Winter was more than a rococo ophthalmologist. He was also a businessman who understood that just one wonderful Dr. Winter would never do, were he to create the kind of wealth he’d glimpsed while operating on some of the richest people in New York City. He would never own a Park Avenue apartment one eyeball at a time, and so, taking a cue from Nedick’s hot dog stands, he opened a chain of Winter Eye Institutes in Harlem, Queens, Staten Island, and, eventually, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where life-sized cutouts of himself wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope were the closest a lower-class patient in the outer boroughs would ever get to the real flesh-and-blood founder. He hired cheap refugee doctors who’d been displaced by the war, and took out subway ads. Sandwiched between Heinz spaghetti (“Another 57 household help—cooked and ready to serve!”) and Knickerbocker beer (“Less filling…more delicious, too!”) were posters for the Winter Eye Institute (“You can see today and take your time to pay!”).

  Dr. Winter’s expertise was cataract surgery. He met Marja Ferguson when she was teaching music at the Institute for the Education of the Blind. She had performed Debussy’s Two Arabesques at a recital at the school, and Leon, also a devotee of romantic French piano, found the tableau of the innocent figure alone on the bench in a dusty hall, drenched in music so much bigger than she, and yet restraining it under firm but delicate control, achingly erotic.

  Afterward he introduced himself and took her hands in his. Their first touch was electric. The sensitivity of the surgeon’s fingertips and the knowingness of the blind pianist’s converged with a sexual heat unknown to either of them before.

  “What a remarkable interpretation,” he told her. He could say no more. His voice had gone hoarse. He managed to ask about the condition of her blindness, and the ensuing encounter in a deserted rehearsal room led to a successful surgery, performed by his own moistly gloved fingers, and, afterward, several ecstatic shopping trips to Saks, during which Dr. Winter waited on a tuffet outside the dressing room for Marja to emerge in costumes of his choosing. She blossomed, unknowingly taking on the appetites of her acquisitive mother, Rosslyn, while undergoing a Pygmalion-like transformation from a poor, unprepossessing spinster to the wife of the surgeon who had saved her sight: a walking, stylish advertisement on his arm. From his point of view, the difference between their ages was all the more reason to rush into marriage. Marja had cared for her father until the end; Leon, whose Cupid’s bow lips would often fall into a pout of self-pity, expected the same devotion from his relatively young and nubile wife.

  Cal had barely announced they were about to land when the Piper Apache began a harrowing plunge toward the airstrip the Kuseks had added to the property. Marja and Leon screamed as treetops rushed at them, his hand crushing hers in panic, mesmerized for some very long seconds by the swirl of colors about to swallow them whole. They hit the ground and bounced along to a jerking halt, stunned at the shock of finding themselves still breathing. Cal climbed out of the cockpit and opened the cabin door, letting in a flood of light and green-smelling humidity.

  “Everyone all right back there?” he called.

  “Perfectly fine,” Leon answered, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Cal helped them climb out of the plane, which had landed in a former wheat field on the Lucky Clover Ranch. The drought had pretty much wiped that crop out of western South Dakota, and the city shoes of the visitors were immediately covered with the colorless powder that had replaced the fertile topsoil. Marja had never lost her keen awareness of every new sensation: heated drafts of dry air, the howl of the engines winding down, a deafening chorus of insects, scores of which seemed to be landing all over her skin.

  She was almost as disoriented as when Leon had removed the bandages, and she’d sat in the chair blinking uncomprehendingly. Bright shapes assaulted her brain, which had no way to sort them out. Before, the world had looked like waves through frosted glass; afterward, she had been awakened to an unbearable overload on her senses, and for months took refuge behind dark glasses and the steadying presence of the doctor and his staff. Little by little, the flat world acquired three dimensions. The ground no longer seemed impossibly far away, nor the sky a glowing ceiling just above her head.

  So after a decade apart, it was literally with fresh eyes that Marja gazed upon her sister, when they reached the back of the house on the path that led from the landing strip. The screen door opened and Betsy came running out into a tight embrace that almost knocked them both off their feet. She smelled of things Marja could barely identify—horse sweat, worn leather, pungent herbs. Her body was unfamiliar, too; no longer curvy, soft, and yielding, it had turned sinewy and scarecrow thin. She seemed to have grown taller. She looked like a stranger who oddly had Betsy’s same features, but windswept and sharpened somehow. Her skin was browned and deeply wrinkled. Did she always have such hooded eyes? Her hair was several sun-streaked shades of blond, still in short messy curls.

  Betsy, too, was shocked by her sister’s transformation.

  “You look just like Mama!” she blurted out, staring at a contented-looking matron with dark wavy hair, wearing lipstick and a pastel blue travel suit, whose portly husband was heaving a set of “his” matched luggage while Cal followed with a second set of “hers.” She noticed her brother-in-law’s gold alligator wristwatch, which must have cost as much as the airplane.

  Betsy gripped Marja’s shoulders and looked deeply into her sister’s eyes. “Can you really see?”

  “I can see,” Marja affirmed, smiling. “It’s a miracle, thanks to Leon.”

  Betsy whispered, “Are you in love?”

  Marja replied with a coquettish shrug. “I’m in love! So is he.”

  “He better be!” Betsy declared with a mock frown, leading her forward. A dizzyingly sweet fragrance hit from scores of purple blossoms bursting from a shrub near the back door. “Isn’t it wonderful? You’re just in time for lilacs!”

  Behind them the men had paused because Leon was having a sneezing fit. By the end of it he’d counted fourteen sneezes in a row.

  “Hay fever?” Cal suggested.

  Leon nodded while swabbing his eyes with the handkerchief and furiously blowing his nose.

  “Sorry, old man,” said Cal. “That’s rough out here.”

  “First you almost crash the plane, and now I’m being attacked by allergens,” Leon gasped. “You’re going to kill me!”

  He was trying to be funny to hide his irritation.

  “Wait until we get you on a horse,” Cal promised.

  Leon shook his head in protest. They would never get him on a horse, and he wasn’t pleased about the filthy chickens leaving their droppings all over the yard. Now Marja was pointing with distress at a large reptilian head followed by a thick body with brown markings that was making a sluggish appearance from the woodpile.

  “Good God!” she cried.

  “Are you okay with snakes?” Betsy asked lightly, as if this were an everyday occurrence. “I know, not my favorite, either. We have a mice problem. He’s looking for mice.”

  “As long as he’s not poisonous,” Marja said.

  “No, he’s harmless.”

  “W
hat is it?” Leon asked suspiciously.

  “Just a garter snake,” said Betsy.

  “Won’t kill you,” Cal added smoothly.

  But Leon was annoyed with everything about the Kuseks. Marja had told him all about her sister and her husband, and frankly, they sounded on the freethinking side, living off the land and all that nonsense. So what if Kusek did have a law degree from Yale? These liberals really believed they owned the moral high ground. His sainted brother-in-law had “thrown it all away” to come out here to this deserted hellhole and “serve the people.” Well, Dr. Leon Winter served people, too. He owned clinics in bad neighborhoods. He himself performed eight surgeries a week—sometimes ten—and often pro bono. Or whatever insurance would pay. Now he was ravenous and sweating like a pig from dragging around all this damn luggage Marja had brought only to impress her sister, who didn’t seem to give a damn—and he’d had enough of the stink of superiority coming off Cal Kusek like chicken dung, if that’s what it was, that gooey crap he’d almost stepped in.

  “Will someone please open the door?” Leon growled.

  His brother-in-law obliged and the men shouldered inside.

  “I’ve never seen lilacs that weren’t in a vase,” Marja said, touching the petals in wonder.

  Betsy gave her sister’s waist a happy squeeze. “I knew you’d love it here!”

  The simple farmhouse had seen improvements over the past few years. Marja and Leon were shown to a guest room furnished with a four-poster bed done up with a frilly pink canopy. The Kuseks had built a sleeping porch and updated the kitchen so that it was no longer a hodgepodge of mismatched wooden cabinets inherited from Stell Fletcher’s mother, but a modern raft of Formica counters, a new refrigerator, a stove with a stainless steel exhaust hood, yellow linoleum floor tiles, and a breakfast nook—everything clean and sleek as the Piper Apache.

  Cal grabbed a meat loaf sandwich. He had to turn around and fly back to Pierre for a nine a.m. appointment with the FBI the following day, another meeting in the glacial process of clearing his run for Senate.

  “What are they going to ask you?” Betsy wanted to know.

  He shrugged. “When you run for federal office you have to undergo ‘special scrutiny.’ Basically it’s a security clearance. Nothing to worry about. There won’t be any red flags.”

  “Will they ask about me?”

  Cal was surprised by the question. “Why would they? You mean the party? That’s old news. McCarthy was finished six years ago, and besides, you quit.”

  “I know it and you know it, but do they know it?”

  “Sure they do. You talked to the bureau when we left New York, and they gave you the all clear.”

  “I can’t help it. I still think the FBI is scary. I guess it’s from the union days.”

  “I’m a public servant. We’re all on the same side now,” Cal reminded her. “I’m more worried about how you and your sister are getting along.”

  “Fine!” said Betsy brightly. “What do you think of Dr. Winter?”

  “To be charitable? A lot of hot air.”

  “I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Betsy agreed staunchly.

  Cal packed an overnight and took off. While Betsy was assembling dinner—steaks from their cattle, vegetables from the garden—Marja came into the kitchen holding two pink pillowcases.

  “Leon says these smell funny.”

  Betsy was putting the potatoes in the oven.

  “I washed them before I put them on the bed.”

  “He gets fussy about this kind of thing.”

  “I’ll wash them again,” Betsy said, sticking to her vow of tolerance.

  “Sorry if it’s any trouble.”

  “No, I’ve got a load waiting anyway,” Betsy said, heading to the laundry room.

  Marja followed. “Your own washer-dryer—I’m green with jealousy!” she cooed. “Remember in the apartment on the Grand Concourse, how we’d have to go down to the basement and put coins in the machines?”

  “What a pain that was,” Betsy agreed. “Does Leon remind you of Dad?”

  “Leon? No, why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…physical resemblance,” Betsy said, backing off the comparison to their father’s dominating personality.

  “What time do the kids get home?” asked Marja.

  “They have after-school activities,” Betsy said evasively. “They take the last bus.”

  She closed the lid and the machine began its comforting routine. Betsy was not prepared to tell her sister about Jo. She’d never had children, so it was hard to know how Marja would react to the news that her adorable, precocious niece had turned into a troublemaker. She’d been cited twice for truancy, as well as a stunt when the girls from the team stood on the boys’ shoulders and wrapped all the swings in the playground around the top pole. Like Betsy, Jo played basketball, which, in a sports-mad school, allowed her to get away with more than most, but three further unexplained absences and the school would be obliged by law to alert the state attorney’s office; bad news for the Kusek campaign.

  The brightest in her class, Jo was failing two courses because she was “bored.” Today she was finishing a week of after-school detention as punishment, but instead of doing her homework, she was reading the sexy parts in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, which she’d gotten from the library. Her loyal brother, Lance, hung around until they let her out, so she wouldn’t have to ride the bus in the company of the true morons who were also in detention, which meant their chores were late, bedtimes late, and they were dead tired in the morning, when the whole thing started again.

  And yet when Betsy heard the dogs bark and knew the kids were home, she forgave everything in a flood of love, relieved that they were safely back, as if there was a finite amount of times they’d make it through that door in one piece and they’d just punched another ticket. Watching them storm the kitchen like a pair of starving coyotes—slamming cabinets, attacking the refrigerator, grabbing this and that, dutifully hugging Aunt Marja with their mouths full of pickles and bologna—Betsy had a feeling, from the way they avoided looking at her directly, that something was wrong…and she was right.

  “This is for you,” Jo said, handing Betsy a folded note.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re supposed to see the principal.”

  Mother and daughter stared at each other. The air went dead between them.

  Silence.

  Marja said, “I think I’ll go lie down.”

  “No, stick around,” Betsy said, claiming her sister as an ally. She wanted a sympathetic witness. “I thought today was the last day of detention.”

  “It was!” cried Jo indignantly. “And they made us watch this horror movie, Communism on the Map. Did you know Communists are everywhere? They’re poisoning our food and taking over the world!”

  “I saw it, too. They showed it in our science class,” said Lance. “They’ve already invaded Latin America. They’re worse than the devil—pure evil—and they don’t care about anybody. Is it true they’re going to march up through Texas?”

  “They showed that movie in school?” Betsy cried, upset. “That’s pure right-wing propaganda. That’s outrageous! I’ll certainly talk to the principal about that!”

  “Don’t, Mom,” said Jo. “Just don’t.”

  Betsy took a breath and read the note. “It says you’re suspended from school.” She took another breath. “Why is that?”

  Jo considered her options. It would be a lot worse coming from their crummy principal, Mr. Emry.

  “Okay,” Jo began, “don’t be mad, but me and Robbie—”

  “Robbie and I,” Betsy cut in, losing patience.

  “Robbie and I were throwing firecrackers out the bus window—”

  Together, Marja and Betsy exclaimed, “You were what?”

  “The bus driver is about seventy-five years old,” Lance put in, devouring an apple.

  “Robbie got kicked off the bus and had
to walk eighteen miles home.”

  “What the hell were you two up to?!” Betsy yelled.

  “They were tiny, this big, from a penny pack. I’d light it and Robbie would throw it, but one time the wind blew the firecracker back inside the bus and it went off under the driver’s seat.”

  Lance spit chewed apple all over the floor and collapsed laughing. He just couldn’t hear it often enough and it cracked him up every time.

  “A firecracker? On a school bus?” Betsy exclaimed. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Robbie’s suspended, too,” said Jo, while Lance snorted derisively in the background.

  “Does his mother know?”

  Jo shrugged contemptuously. “Depends if he gives her the note or tears it up.”

  “Jo, your father is running for the U.S. Senate.”

  “I know that, Mother. I take American government.”

  “Don’t be fresh.”

  Jo didn’t answer. Now she was holding back tears. Marja looked away.

  “Everyone in town will find out about this.”

  “I thought you don’t care what other people think.”

  “We are family. Everybody here counts. Your behavior is damaging to your father’s reputation. We are staking our lives on this election.”

  “Maybe there’s something more to life than politics. He doesn’t care about us. He’s never here anyway.”

  Jo stalked out the back door and gangly Lance followed.

  Marja patted her sister’s arm.

  “Jo and I are having a bad time,” Betsy admitted miserably. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “It’s her age.”

  Leon shuffled into the kitchen wearing bed slippers and Betsy almost took his head off.