by Susan Isaacs
“Well, I’m sure there’s a limit.”
“No, there isn’t, and you know it. I just know by the time the baby is born you’ll be on top of the world.” She referred to her pregnancy so rarely that Richard sometimes forgot about it. But now he glanced at Dorothy’s stomach, a heavy mound resting on her broad lap.
“Dorothy,” he said, then licked his lips nervously. “I’m just an accountant. There’s a limit.”
“You’re comptroller, Richard. The sky’s the limit. You and I and the baby. We’ll be on top of Cincinnati. The Harts and the Heissenhubers. You’ll see.”
Whenever a momentous event occurred in the life of a key Hart employee—birth, marriage, death—Rebecca Hart sent flowers from Cincinnati’s most elegant florist. Following the first two events, a gift from Tiffany’s in New York would arrive: a silver porringer for newborns, a pair of handblown glass candlesticks for newlyweds. (Young mothers and brides would make themselves ill for weeks drafting thank-you notes to equal the simplicity of Rebecca’s Our best—The Harts.)
After Rhodes Heissenhuber’s birth, Dorothy remained in the hospital the requisite week. No flowers arrived. The porringer inventory at Tiffany’s remained stable. Eleven days after she and her son were home, she received a note on Rebecca’s stationery—ivory paper monogrammed in dark gray.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Heissenhuber,
Please accept my congratulations on the birth of your son, Rhodes. I know if my husband were here he would join me in wishing you the best.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Hart
Thus Dorothy reached the same conclusion her predecessor had: Richard was a loser. He never gave her any reason to change her mind.
Only their eyes showed they were brother and sister—big and deep velvet blue. His would gleam as they met hers, as she crawled along the floor, sneaking up to his crib. “Shhh,” she whispered.
But his delight was too vast for silence, and he welcomed Jane with an aria of monosyllables, love notes sliding up and down the scale. “Nin, nin, nin, nin,” he sang, “baa, baa, baa,” and he wiggled his tongue at her between his toothless gums.
“Shhh, Rhodesie.”
It was dangerous, meeting like that, sneaking into her parents’ bedroom while Dorothy was taking her afternoon nap, creeping across the floor to the crib, praying the inevitable squeak of the floorboards would not waken her stepmother.
But it was the only way she could play with Rhodes, tickle his little belly, run her finger against his incredibly tender cheek. “Shhh.” She hooked her index fingers onto the sides of her mouth and stretched it into a monster face, crossing her eyes at the same time. Rhodes smiled and said “Nu.” Jane grinned and slipped her finger between the slats of the crib. The baby grabbed it. “Rhodesie Poadsie, puddin’ and pie. I love you,” she whispered. Dorothy’s snoring changed tone, to a growl. Jane froze. Dorothy turned from her back to her side. Her breathing grew soft and regular. The baby drew Jane’s finger into his mouth and gnawed it with his hard gums. Then, as usual, he rejected it, peering at Jane with a disappointed expression, as if to say, I expected better from you. Jane pulled back the finger he was still grasping and kissed his knuckles, and he said “Mee” and held her finger even tighter.
Late afternoon was the only time Dorothy let Rhodes out of her sight. Almost always, he was close to her. She cradled him in her left arm and carried him from kitchen to living room to bedroom, dusting and vacuuming and waxing with her right arm. When she cooked she put him in his high chair, but that was only two feet away, so she could stir the beans, put down the spoon, and in two steps, bestow a kiss on the top of his head.
She never expressly forbade Jane to touch Rhodes, but every time the girl went near, Dorothy would murmur her concern about polio germs or explain that Rhodes was tired and if Jane bothered him he would be cranky and cry. Dorothy was distraught by his crying. She’d stop whatever she was doing and rock him back and forth with a frightened look in her eyes until he was finally soothed. And she watched Jane watch Rhodes. “Do you love your brother?” she had asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re not jealous?”
“What?”
“You don’t wish you were as beautiful as he is?”
“He’s not beautiful. He’s a boy.”
“Jane, you know we still love you. No matter how handsome—is that better?—Rhodes is, or how much attention he gets, you’re still part of the family. I know sometimes you may not think so, but we do love you. Even when—”
“Why can’t I hold him?”
“I want you to answer that question, Jane.”
“What?”
“Answer your own question. Why won’t I allow you to hold Rhodes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say ‘I don’t know, Mommy.’”
“I don’t know, Mommy.”
“Well, I want you to think about it. Think about the kind of girl you’ve been. All right? Will you? And then we’ll talk some more.”
Cautiously, Jane withdrew her finger from Rhodes’s hand; she did not want him to cry at his loss. “Shhh.” In a way, she could understand Dorothy’s proscription. Rhodes was probably the most beautiful baby in the world. Everyone thought so. Neighbors said “Oh, my word!” and “My heavens!” each time they saw him. Passersby, glancing into the carriage, stared at him and, after a moment, at Dorothy and then quickly back to him. The pediatrician’s nurse swore to Dorothy he was the most magnificent child she’d ever seen in all her fourteen years as a nurse and said she bet when he grew up he’d be discovered by a Hollywood talent scout. When Dorothy had told Richard and her parents that at Sunday dinner, they’d beamed, until they saw her sneer; she had better things in mind.
Dorothy grunted in her sleep. Jane’s arms and legs went rigid. The dizzy feeling came, where she couldn’t tell the floor from the ceiling, where up and down kept getting mixed up. If she was discovered, nothing would happen. Not right away. Dorothy never hit her. She would wait for Richard to get home and then, standing in the hall and taking Richard’s coat, deftly hanging it up with one hand while holding Rhodes with the other, she’d relate Jane’s trespasses in a sad, almost defeated voice.
Richard would march Jane upstairs, sit on his bed, pull her across his lap, draw up her skirt and take down her pants, and spank her until her shrieks were so loud that Dorothy would come upstairs, hugging Rhodes’s face tight to her chest so he would not have to see. “Enough, Richard,” Dorothy would plead then. “Please. They’ll hear next door.”
Holding her breath, Jane wormed her way toward the bedroom door. Just as she slithered past Dorothy’s bed, Rhodes screeched, shrilly protesting his abandonment. Dorothy jerked up, her face white with terror. “Rhodes?” she called, and rushed from her bed. She tripped over Jane. “Oh, my lord!” Dorothy wailed. “What did you do to him? What did you do?”
4
…whether Mrs. Jane Cobleigh, aged 40, might ever regain consciousness…
—The Guardian
The Heissenhubers’ house, 7510 Ross Avenue had a lawn but no garden. The contractor had thrown in the lawn, as well as the swan decal on the glass shower door in Dorothy and Richard’s bathroom and the front door three-note chime, which had been meant as a refined touch, but which rang out Yankee doo—leaving callers unsatisfied, waiting for the dle. The Moffetts and the Donners on either side of the Heissenhubers put in tulip bulbs, but Dorothy had seen no point in it since she was waiting to move up and away the moment Richard found his place in the Hart Company, by the right hand of John Hart.
But Richard remained an internal auditor. The secretaries never called him “Mister,” he ate his bologna sandwich at his desk, and the closest he got to John Hart’s right hand was when the multimillionaire investor offered it each year before Christmas, to hand Richard his bonus check. When Dorothy realized that Ross Avenue was as high as she would step with Richard, her interest turned to her son, Rhodes, and she never planted so much as a sunflower seed.<
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The best and the worst to be said for the house was that it was modest. Set on a forty-five-by-ninety-foot plot, it was a 1940s adaptation of a Cape Cod and a free Cincinnati interpretation at that, white clapboard with a sort of mansard roof and a side-entry front porch. It was not a house to love at first sight, but the average American family who would buy such a house would have made it at least slightly lovable—painted the trim forest green or plunked a weather vane on the roof. The Moffetts’ house had nearly as much ivy as a college, and the Donners had enclosed their property with a white picket fence. The Heissenhubers’ lawn was mowed and the clapboard repainted every five years, but there were no touches to show that a particular family—Richard, Dorothy, Jane, and Rhodes—lived in that particular house.
The inside of 7510 was nearly as undistinguished as the outside. The furniture, purchased in suites in department stores, was designed neither for comfort nor for beauty but to fill rooms. Everything matched; chairs, ottoman, and sofa were covered in the same dark green rayon damask; dresser, chest, nightstands, and headboards were all maple, with brass drawer pulls like buck teeth. That was it. No afghans drooped over sofa arms, not a single ashtray or vase marred the tabletops. All the walls were bare.
If the house had the ambience of a motel room, it did not really bother Jane, whose status was that of an undesired guest who’d checked in. The house was Dorothy’s, and Jane could no more suggest a watercolor over the couch than offer ideas of what to serve for Sunday dinner. But sometimes, coming home from her friend Lynn’s house with its coffee table full of family photograph albums—giant leather books with The Friedman’s tooled in gold—she’d imagine a picture of Sally in a heart-shaped frame, right where her fingers touched her bedroom wall.
There were no photographs of Sally. Jane had only fragments of memory: the dry crinkle of a taffeta slip as she climbed into her mother’s lap; picking fat gold raisins, one by one, from Sally’s cupped hand, sucking the wrinkles out of them, thinking how much more satisfying they were than the black ones. She could recall two complete sentences: “Honey-bunny, you remember where I put the clothespins?” and “Red is definitely your color.” She remembered the soft skin on the underside of Sally’s arm.
Richard never explained why all traces of Sally were lost. He’d once shrugged and muttered that the two or three photos he’d taken must have been thrown out with the old National Geographics.
When Jane was eleven, her grandmother died of a stroke. Jane, assigned to clear out Anna’s closet, found a photograph in the bottom of a hatbox under layers of yellowed tissue paper. (Along with it she unearthed a pornographic postcard—a picture of a Gay Nineties woman wearing only high-button shoes sitting open-legged on a footstool, fingering her vulva.)
The photo in the hatbox was of Richard, who looked astoundingly handsome; his hairline had not yet crept back, leaving a huge, shiny forehead, like an alien from a brainier world, nor had his strong jaw melted into a fleshy chin. He was holding an infant Jane in the crook of his arm. A hand with long polished nails rested on his sleeve; it was a black-and-white picture, so the nails appeared black. When Jane examined it, she saw the white edging missing from that side of the photograph. Grandma Anna had cut Sally off.
But it was source material for Jane. She added the graceful hand and dark nails to the maternal portrait she’d created from the fragments of her memory. The pieces couldn’t form the real Sally, but they served. They were a living portrait, an internal mother who soothed “Sweetie, he didn’t mean it” each time she received another spanking from her father. Jane would lie face-down on her bed, her backside throbbing like a sore heart, and embrace the cool comfort of her pillow. Sally’s voice—not heard so much as felt—murmured, “Janie, baby, don’t cry. Shhh, now. Shhh. She made him do it.” The soft manicured hand with its black-lacquered nails sleeked back her hair. “He didn’t want to.”
Richard told her little. He remembered Sally was short, and Jane filled in the rest. She was indeed short, but delicate, with a neck a swan would covet and regal posture. Sally could sit motionless and straight for hours, her back never seeking the support of her chair. Her hair was black, like Jane’s. Jet black, Jane always thought of it. Since Richard could not recall her eyes, Jane made them crayon colors: blue, green, occasionally violet. And since Sally had been an actress, her voice was rich and full, yet gentle. But not soppy. Sally was no mushy madonna memory. She remained in death what she had been in life—Jane’s center of gravity.
Jane needed a mother. From the time she was four, Jane antagonized Dorothy several times a day, angered her into colitis attacks at least weekly. As Dorothy confided to Rhodes, it was Jane’s manner.
“I know you don’t mean to be, but you seem surly,” Dorothy explained in one of the frequent heart-to-heart discussions she’d demanded since Jane was small. “Please look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not.” Dorothy hunched forward in her chair, her hands clasped on the Formica kitchen table: the judge. Jane, now twelve years old but oversized for her age, with her father’s long limbs and the beginnings of her mother’s large breasts, occupied the position that had been assigned to her since she was four, on the ten-inch square of green floor tile beside the pot cabinet, slightly more than an arm’s length from her stepmother. Round-shouldered to compensate for her height (she had already reached five feet six of her eventual five feet ten inches), with straight black hair cut in long bangs that hid her eyes, head hanging down, she looked guilty as charged. Her feet shuffled on the green square.
“You don’t say a word around the house, Jane, except when you pick on Rhodes or steal his colored pencils, and that’s jealousy, I’m afraid to say, jealousy, pure and simple. And your appearance just shows your contempt. You walk around with those blue jeans and that shirt hanging out like the Wreck of the Hesperus. Look at me, please, not at the floor. You let your hair get—well, greasy, to be perfectly honest, and then you wonder why Charlene Moffett gets calls from boys and you don’t. I’m sensitive to these things, even though you think I’m not. I know it bothers you, so don’t bother denying it.”
“I don’t want boys to call. No one has boys call yet, until you’re fourteen or fifteen, and the only reason Charlene—”
“Dark hair and dark skin can be very attractive, but you have to scrub. If you look clean you’ll feel clean, inside and out. Clean and cheerful. Please stop that pouting. And no mumbling under your breath, Jane. I am trying so hard, even though you’ve set me up as your enemy. I’m trying to work with you. I bought you that expensive shampoo for oily hair…. All right, have it your way. Make all the faces you want. Don’t think I didn’t notice. I obviously can’t get through to you. You’d rather have your father handle it, is that it? Is it? All right, don’t answer me. Just get up to your room this minute.”
Jane would comply. Upstairs she’d crawl beneath her bedspread, nauseated from the encounter, slick with sweat, anticipating her father’s reaction. But then she’d soothe herself with Sally’s words until, even if it was midmorning, she’d ease into a deep sleep.
But Sally’s maternal spirit wasn’t potent enough to bank the rising outrage in Jane. Between her thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, she tried to fight back.
“Daddy, can I talk to you? Daddy, just one second. I just want to know one thing. Can’t you put down your newspaper for just one minute?”
Richard leaned forward in his club chair. The wash-and-wear fabric of his cord suit pants made a scratching sound against the rayon damask. “Is that a fresh tone of voice?”
“Daddy, could you just explain one thing to me? I just want to know why Rhodes gets everything and I don’t.”
“You know, Mother warned me you’ve been acting very jealous, and she says she’s at her wit’s end—”
“I swear I’m not jealous. It’s just that he goes to Country Day even though you’re always saying we have to cut back and there’s no money for this
and no money for—”
“Mother and I think he’d be better off in a private school. You’re doing fine at Woodward. Now go outside and play.”
“Daddy, I’m thirteen and a half. And I also want to know why you never ever lay a hand on Rhodes, and—”
“Dorothy? Dorothy? Could you come in here, please?”
“Daddy, please just listen to me.”
“Anything you can say to me you can say to your mother. Oh, Dorothy. Would you explain to Jane why Rhodes is going to Country Day?”
“Explain?”
“Well, you see, Jane asked why—”
“Jane,” Dorothy said, “if your father was a wealthy man don’t you think we’d send you to private school too? But he’s not.”
“You wouldn’t send me anywhere and neither would he!”
“Jane—”
“The only one you care about is Rhodes.”
“Stop it!”
“You don’t even care about my father. You don’t! It’s just Rhodes, Rhodes—”
“Enough! Richard, did you hear that tone of voice? Did you? I want you to make her get control of herself.”
“Jane, get a grip on yourself.”
“Daddy, please listen to me. She makes it sound like I’m bad, but I’m not. It’s not fair. Every time, she makes you—”
“Richard! Listen to her tone of voice. Just listen to it!”
“All right, all right. Come on, you. Upstairs.”
Punishment for her crimes was severe, and nothing—not even the sweetest words she could conjure up for Sally’s spirit to utter—could ease the mortification of Dorothy’s inevitable triumph and the pain of Richard’s punishment.
The spankings grew harsher as she matured. They usually began with an after-school affront to Dorothy, and by evening at five thirty, when Richard was walking up the street on his way home from work, Dorothy would push open the door of Jane’s room, snap on the light, take a step in, her shoes sounding sticky on the linoleum, and say, “Your father’s coming.” Jane would get out of bed, stiff, slit-eyed from the brightness, and follow her stepmother downstairs. Together they’d wait for Richard in the frame made by the open front door, backlit by the sickly orange light of the colored glass hall fixture. “I’m sorry, Richard,” Dorothy would say as he climbed the first of five steps to the front porch. “I know you’re tired, but she called me…I can’t say it…a witch with a ‘b’ today. I can’t deal with her. You know how I’ve tried.”