[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  PRAISE FOR THE PRACTICE HOUSE

  “A stunning, pitch-perfect tale of a star-crossed, Depression-era love triangle. National Book Award finalist Laura McNeal is a magnificent writer.”

  —Lily King, author of Euphoria

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 Laura McNeal

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-10 (hardcover): 1477817905

  ISBN-13 (hardcover): 9781477817902

  ISBN-10 (paperback): 1503937259

  ISBN-13 (paperback): 9781503937253

  Cover design by Rachel Adam Rogers

  For Tom

  Meum et Tuum

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  PART TWO

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  109

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  1

  On the April day when the Americans mounted the stone steps and pushed the door buzzer, rain had fallen for eleven of the last eleven days, and Aldine McKenna was waiting, metaphorically speaking, for her Japanese man. She and her sister, Eileen, were stuck as usual in Aunt Sedge’s house on Bellevue Crescent. The house was bigger than their father’s had been, and much closer to the shops in Ayr, but Aunt Sedge watched over them more—“As I promised your poor father,” she would say until Aldine thought she might scream. Even when Sedge went to visit a friend, she left a list of chores a mile long and told the neighbors to keep an eye out, which really meant spy, didn’t it?

  Aunt Sedge was Charity Sedgewick McKenna, their father’s sister, older by nine years and his opposite in every way. When going out, she always wore a fascinator or a small rakish hat, gloves, and whichever animal-shaped brooch matched the fascinator. She had no children of her own and had tried to host the girls weekly when they were little, planning a different cultural outing every Saturday, but her ideas of fun were confining and dull: when they were four and five, she wanted them to go with her to hear chamber music, but they kicked their legs and sighed too often. Their mother told Aunt Sedge—no one ever called her Charity—that perhaps she should just try to have fun with the girls, so Sedge planned a tea party with all of her old bears and dolls sitting around a child’s antique table. Although it was a delicious tea, with three different kinds of flower-topped bakery cakes, including orange spice with four layers of the creamiest white frosting Aldine had ever tasted, Aldine and Leenie felt silly and self-conscious, because those bears and dolls belonged to a grown person and thus couldn’t possibly be alive. Adding to the awkwardness was the fact that a Japanese man sat in the corner the whole time, smiling grimly, never saying a word, just nodding now and then. Later, their father said the Japanese man was Aunt Sedge’s true love and he had come to see if she would marry him and go live in Japan, but Sedge had said no, for some reason. Perhaps it was too late for her, their father said. This had made a deep impression on both girls, and the efforts of Charity Sedgewick to keep Aldine and Leenie, now nineteen and twenty, from falling in love at the wrong time with the wrong person and their fear of waiting until it was too late made for a combustible situation.

  Leenie was the most childlike but also the most dutiful. She had cut up beef for the pie and hung wash over the Aga, two things on Sedge’s chore list, and now she was knitting, which had a calming effect on some souls, but not Leenie’s. It made her peevish, complaining that Aldine had not even started her share, which was true. Aldine was drinking, as she always drank, overly sweetened Fortnum’s tea. It was 4:30. “Half past nothing,” their father used to joke, “half till nothing more.”

  No man had come close to courting Aldine in a year at least unless you counted old Dr. O’Malley. She’d expected to be quizzed about her mathematical skills when she went in for the job but the doctor didn’t follow this line at all. “You’re the one who sang Mendelssohn in church, are you not?” he’d asked, a surprising question because it had been a while, months, perhaps even a year. “‘Wings of a Dove,’ wasn’t it?” She said aye, she’d been the one, and he’d asked no other questions, but just nodded and said, “Right then,” and left the room. She wasn’t sure she’d been hired until his nurse, Mrs. Terlip, told her so. Aldine liked the work. The sums weren’t difficult to add and sort, and Dr. O’Malley liked to keep the rooms warm. He talked pleasantly to everyone, old, young, rich, poor, and when no one was near, he hummed tunelessly with a funny little smile on his face, his way of thinking, or so she supposed.

  In his office late one winter’s afternoon, when the clients were gone, and Mrs. Terlip, too (to Leenie, Aldine referred to the woman as Mrs. Turnip), and already the light was seeping away, the doctor had taken her arm and run his ancient fingers along the underside of her wrist and said in a low, gentle voice, “The smooth-skinned girl,” which made her draw her arm away, though she smiled so as not to offend him. When the following day he gave her a set of Bakelite bracelets and said he hoped she “took no offense,” she’d presumed he was talking about his earlier remark and said, “No offense taken at all, I’m sure,” and, having slipped the bracelets over her
hand, she was surprised by the small but actual thrill that passed through her when she presented her wrist for him to admire. The old doctor was alone, after all, and she understood the wretchedness of that.

  Aldine stared at Aunt Sedge’s Japanese lithograph of a huge white-fingered wave about to crush a fishing boat and thought of the Japanese man. Was he still pining for Charity Sedgewick? Did her aunt think of him when she went to bed every night alone? Is that why she had this tragic picture on her wall, where the water seemed to reach down like claws to destroy the tiny bareheaded men bowed down in the boat?

  She was down to the last swallow of her second cup, the dregs of which she would sometimes, if she were alone, touch with the tip of her tongue like an anteater, when she heard the door buzzer. God, it was an irritating sound—like you were treating someone to electric shocks—but through the side window she saw two men in three-piece suits and homburgs and that seemed like fun beginning.

  “It’s men,” she told Leenie.

  Leenie was studying the knitting chart so she hardly looked up. “What men?” She had George Prendergast, anyway. Such as he was. Sedge had never met him and Leenie always insisted he was just a passing thing, not a type strong enough to imprint—imprint being the word Sedgewick sometimes used for seduction, as if they were baby geese.

  “Strange men,” Aldine said. She checked her hair in the hall mirror and thought that even if they were selling something it would be a change.

  “Pretend we’re not home.”

  But of course Aldine went to the door.

  The men were, as she’d hoped, young. One was homely and the other was starkly not. The tall one had very arresting sea-gray eyes, dark hair that curled in spite of how short it was cut, and a very kissable forehead. “I’m Elder Cooper,” he said in an American voice, “and this is Elder Lance.”

  “Charmed,” Aldine said, but she didn’t shake hands because a tradesman was waiting on Mrs. Nith’s front step and looking over now and then, tilting his black umbrella.

  Elder Lance had an upturned nose, which leaked in the cold, and his teeth, what he showed of them when he tried to smile, were faintly gingery like his hair and freckles. Both men were wearing cloth gloves and holding books within the shelter of their umbrellas, and their coats were clean but of poor fit and quality.

  “And what would you be elders of?” Aldine asked just as Leenie said, from the parlor, “Oh, you wooly piece of shit!”

  Elder Cooper colored slightly. “We’re not selling anything,” he said, “if that’s what’s worrying your . . .”

  “That’s just my sister,” Aldine said, “and she doesn’t mean you.”

  Leenie came up behind her. “This here’s Elder Cooper,” Aldine said. “And that one’s Elder Lance.”

  Aldine knew that now she was the one being compared. Since earliest childhood Aldine had drawn pictures of herself with straight lines—her straight brown hair, her too-long legs, her too-long neck and arms, and she had very little bosom besides—whereas pictures of her sister, had she drawn them, would’ve flown from pleasing sweeps to curves. Leenie had gotten her full share of buxomness and Aldine’s besides, and if that were not enough, Leenie’s hair got all the curl.

  Aldine could feel Leenie’s irritation, so she added, “Not sure what the elder part means yet.”

  “We’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Elder Forehead said in a rush, as if he expected them to step back and shut the door. His umbrella was too large to fit next to his companion’s, so the other man stood a step behind, and rain flowed down the metal tips of their umbrella spokes and splashed on pink stones that were so wet the men might have been statues standing in a fountain. “We have a message to share with you.”

  Leenie gave out a laugh that sounded frisky, to Aldine’s surprise. “Did you not announce you weren’t selling anything?”

  The ginger one held his umbrella tightly and said, “We’re not selling anything,” and Elder Forehead jumped in with, “We’re here because we have something to give.”

  Aldine almost laughed at that. What, she would later wonder while smoking cigarettes in a poorly insulated Kansas schoolhouse, would have happened to her and Leenie if the men had not seemed so comically earnest, like a pair of stray dogs? Was Elder Cooper the right man or the wrong man if you applied the Allegory of the Japanese Man?

  Aldine checked the street (no one was passing and Mrs. Nith’s visitor had gone in) and said, “It’s Baltic out. Would you care for tea?”

  2

  Leenie thought Aldine would send them packing, so she was as shocked as the men were when Aldine asked them in.

  “Are you alone here?” the good-looking one asked.

  “Oh, no,” Leenie said, because she didn’t want them to think they were defenseless. “We live with our aunt.”

  “Shall we introduce ourselves?” Elder Forehead asked.

  “She’s very reclusive,” Aldine said, and Leenie almost laughed.

  There were open jars of Silver and Golden Shred on the tray in the living room—lemon marmalade for Aldine, orange for Leenie. Empty cups and crumbs making it obvious tea was already over, and that only two of them had been drinking it, but no one brought up the aunt again.

  The ginger boy tugged off his gloves, laid them on the sofa, then must have seen—as Leenie had—the dark spot where he’d been touching the glove to his runny nose, because at once he turned them over. Leenie decided it was Aldine’s monkey pile—Aldine asked them in; she could entertain them—so she settled herself on the pink velvet sofa beneath the stilled curl of the Japanese wave and picked up the chart for the sweater that was driving her insane. Aldine took the hint and carried the teapot to the kitchen to refill.

  “Knitting?” the ginger one asked.

  Leenie nodded. Obviously, she refrained from adding. But then the other one, Cooper, started talking, and he had a way about him.

  “Are you twins?” Cooper asked her. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Leenie, right?” Later she would learn that he often sat that way when talking to people, giving them his full attention.

  “Yes, as in Eileen. We’re not twins, though. I’m the eldest. Can’t you tell?”

  He shook his head. “Do you have any other brothers and sisters?”

  “Nay.”

  A slight pause, not at all awkward. The rain running down the window glass and thudding on the roof. The room warmer because he was in it.

  “What are you knitting?”

  “A jumper. It’s for myself because it’d be cruel to make anyone wear a thing that I knitted.”

  “I think it looks nice. I’d wear it.” His smile was large and unforced. He had such unspoiled teeth and a small, humble-seeming crinkle around the eyes when he grinned.

  “Oh, I doubt that, but thanks. What about you? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Four. A brother that’s fifteen and three younger sisters.”

  “How lucky!” Leenie said. “I love big families.” She realized she hadn’t asked the ginger one anything and he was just staring around the room. “And you? Do you have a giant family also?”

  “I have two younger brothers,” he said.

  “And where are they?”

  “Kansas. That’s where my family lives.”

  “What’s that like? Kansas?”

  “A lot drier than this,” he said.

  Before Aldine even came back with a fresh pot and scones and butter and smoked venison sandwiches, Leenie had decided she liked them both, but especially Cooper. He was so boyish and clean seeming, as if he’d been carved from a bar of soap and brought to life. It was hard going, though, when the preaching started. Leenie tried not to look horrified when Cooper stopped grinning and became very serious and said he wanted to tell them about a fifteen-year-old boy who saw two angel-people hovering above him in the woods.

  As Cooper spoke—Joseph Smith this, Joseph Smith that—Leenie hoped he couldn’t tell that she was
pondering his forehead and his sea-water eyes and that she was wishing he would stop preaching and start talking about home or anything at all besides revelations. When Cooper said Joseph Smith prayed for wisdom, Leenie nodded stiffly. He then told quite a long story about how God appeared to Joseph in what Cooper seemed to be calling a pillow of light.

  To avoid commenting on something so outlandish, Leenie asked, “More tea?” even though their cups were still full.

  “I’m sorry. We can’t,” Cooper said.

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” Leenie asked.

  “We don’t drink tea or coffee. It’s part of our faith,” Lance said. “No alcohol, either. And we don’t smoke.”

  “No tea? Ever?”

  “Ever.”

  Well, that was bizarre. Better that they had come into the house and said, Would you care to join our church? We don’t breathe oxygen! Or drink water! Or eat food!

  The men accepted scones, at least. Aldine held up the jar of Silver Shred, but Cooper shook his head a little more vigorously than seemed polite, so Leenie laughed and said she agreed completely. Too perfumy, the Silver was, like something you’d rather wash with than eat. Only Aldine had ever liked it.

  A gate clanged on the street and Leenie wondered if her aunt could possibly have taken an earlier bus back from Troon.

  “It probably sounds strange,” Cooper said. “Well, it must. I’ve been in your country one year, eight months, two weeks, and one day and not one person has believed me yet.” He swallowed and summoned a voice from somewhere in his chest. “But I testify,” he said, his eyes on Aldine’s, then Leenie’s, pleading with them, “that it’s the truth.”

  Aldine swallowed a sip of tea and looked at the carpet, as if not sure how to greet such an exposure of the soul. She was embarrassed, Leenie saw.

  After a pause, Aldine looked at both men in turn and asked, “Are you sure it’s not due to the tea business?”

  “What?”

  “The not drinking tea. Maybe people think, Oh, I could never.”

  “I don’t see how it could be that,” Cooper said. He walked to the window and gazed at the wet glass and the wet street, the soaking wet stones of the conjoined houses, and something about him tugged at Leenie’s being.

  “Do you ever hear from your family at all?” she asked.

  He drew something from his pocket and unfolded a picture that was unremarkable: a sun with lines sticking out of it, two figures, small and big, holding hands, the word lov, some squarish shapes. Each week, he said, his youngest sister, Sarah, who was three, drew him a picture, and his mother sent it to him, and he carried one with him at all times in case he got discouraged, which happened a fair amount.