by Mark Dunn
Frances Kay’s three siblings each helped their pecuniarily precarious sister as best they could, but by 1989, with the need for a hip replacement for Carly Ann (who was born with a compromised acetabulofemoral joint), Frances Kay watched as her financial situation became even more dire. Frances Kay’s ex-husband, Burt, was of no help; though recent re-releases of the films Fame and Flash Dance revived customer interest in leg warmers, especially those using non-traditional fibers, none of the income generated by these sales went to Frances Kay, and she had not the wherewithal to seek legal redress.
In early March, the four sisters gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to celebrate their mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. The mother, Eunice, lived in a nursing home there. She was not an official resident, however, but only pretended to be a resident; Eunice Ludden worked undercover for a watchdog group formed to gather evidence on nursing and convalescent home patient abuse. To protect her anonymity, she never used the last name Ludden, but was, instead, Mrs. Luden. Like the cough drop. And she asked that her daughters come to see her wearing disguises that would protect their identities as well, given that one of the most popular programs viewed in the television room of the Olentangy Manor Extended Care Center was the syndicated rerun version of Augie Rausch’s Variety Hour. The geriatric residents had their favorites among the show’s regular performers, who often could not be remembered by their actual names, but were referred to, in the necessity of the moment, as the “Accordion Man,” “the Happy Married Couple Who Sing about Jesus,” and “The Tap-dancing Negro.” But the Ludden Sisters (or “Those Four Pretty Girls with Angel Voices”) were the most beloved and revered among Olentangy Manor’s television-viewing inmates.
Eunice greeted her four daughters in the home’s dining room, where the staff had baked her a large birthday cake. Frances Kay’s plane ticket was paid for by her eldest sister Patricia. (All of Eunice’s daughters had flown in.) Frances Kay was especially happy to see her sisters. It had been quite some time since they had all been together, and this was a good thing for another reason: Frances Kay had a proposal to make—something that she had been thinking about ever since Irv Miller first mentioned it.
Infomercials.
According to Irv, infomercials were where it was at, baby. Everybody was doing them. Even he had been offered the chance to pitch the new Flowbee Vacuum Haircutting System, though he was forced to turn the offer down because the concept of using the family vacuum cleaner to trim hair unsettled him. “But late-night infomercials are the way to go, darling. You could do a Christmas album with your sisters and sell it in time for the holidays. You need to get something new out there, something that will put a little dough-re-mi into your pocket, darling. A little? Who am I kidding? You’ll make a mint! And you can get yourself and that verkakta-hipped daughter of yours into a much nicer place. The Oleander Arms—it ain’t for you, darling! You got life in you yet. And such a voice! I hear that voice through the wall when you’re singing in the shower or sitting on your commode, and hand-to-God, it’s just like an angel came all the way down from Heaven just to take a shit in your bathroom.”
The four sisters and their Nellie Bly of a mother ate cake and shared it with some of Eunice’s fellow residents. No one recognized Eunice’s daughters as the world-famous Ludden Sisters; the disguises, made up of various wigs and funny eyeglasses, seemed to be working. After everyone had wandered away and given the Luddens some privacy, Frances Kay made her move. She explained infomercials, though her sisters had seen them and had a fairly good idea of what they were. She reminded Patricia and Janet and the “baby” Brenda how many people still remembered them and loved them, and how much their fans especially enjoyed the old Christmas shows. Frances Kay was exactly right—Augie’s special holiday broadcasts had been ratings gold for CBS. Because of the sisters’ popularity, each of the new, original carols they sang on the air shot straight to the top of the charts and quickly earned prominent placement in the holiday canon: “Bless this House on Christmas Day,” “Santa and the Manger,” and “Merii Kurisumasu,” which the sisters performed in kimonos fringed with bright silver tinsel. A comical offering in the early ’60s, “Uncle Bob Ain’t a Masher Tonight, ’Cuz There’s Mistletoe Overhead,” was covered by Eartha Kitt, Annette Funicello, Michele Lee, Bobby Rydell, and the Brothers Four.
“It certainly isn’t the worst idea in the world, Frances Kay,” said Patricia, who was looked up to by her sisters as the voice of wisdom and authority for the foursome, “but we’re all retired. I don’t think any of us has time to do a new album, let alone try to sell it at two o’clock in the morning. Who’s watching television at two in the morning anyway?”
“I’ve seen them,” said Janet, who was wearing a particolored clown wig. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep. And remember, Patricia: when it’s two o’clock on the East Coast, it’s only eleven o’clock in Sun City, California.”
“Our fans go to bed at eight,” deadpanned Brenda.
“She’s right about that,” added Mrs. Ludden. “By nine, everybody in this place is fast asleep. Even the nurses. Excuse me for a moment, girls—there’s a male orderly at the other end of the room throwing Mr. Rothman into his wheelchair as if he were a sack of potatoes. I must document.”
Mrs. Ludden left. Her four daughters grew quiet. Frances Kay, sensing resistance to her idea, kept her eyes on her half-eaten wedge of birthday cake, not moving her fork.
Janet sighed. “Although, it would be a kick for all of our fans.”
Frances Kay looked up and nodded.
Brenda and Patricia nodded too. Their hearts went out to their sister Frances Kay. All of the sisters were close and it was a hard thing to be cruel to the one who had been the least blessed among them.
Finally, Brenda said, “I serve on the board of an orphanage in New Haven. So many unwanted children, and so, so many of them foundlings. Fetal alcohol preemies. Crack babies. My heart breaks in two every time I have to go there. Let’s say we do this holiday infomercial. What if—” Her face brightened. “What if during the infomercial we were each to hold one of these sad little babies in our arms?”
“You want each of us to hold a crack baby while we’re trying to sell our Christmas album?” asked Patricia, not quite understanding.
“Well, I thought we might sing to them. Most babies like to be sung to, even at-risk ghetto infants.”
“You do have a point, Brenda,” said Janet, nodding with interest. “What would you want us to do—just hold the babies while we sing or should we rock them in our arms and serenade them like we were singing them a lullaby?”
“We’ll work all that out,” said Frances Kay excitedly.
Janet bunched up her lips and thought for a moment. “I’m wondering, though—crack babies—they aren’t always shriveled-looking and heart-tugging, are they? If we want to tug a little more on our customers’ heartstrings, I think the way to go would be babies with congenital defects—visual ones like harelips and prolapsed eyelids, that are easy to see without having to go in too close with the camera.”
“What is it you girls are cooking up now?” asked Mrs. Ludden, who was writing on a little pad: Tyrell threw Mr. Rothman into his wheelchair with unnecessary force. Check for bruises tomorrow.
Janet answered for her sisters: “Frances Kay is very serious about this new Christmas album idea and selling it through an infomercial. And now Brenda wants us all to hold special-needs babies in our arms as we’re singing carols. Which carols do you think the little deformed babies would like, Brenda?”
“‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ would be nice. It’s about having a nice Christmas even in the midst of troubles. For example, let’s say you’re a baby born without legs or you have Down syndrome or something. You can still have a merry Christmas if the fates allow.”
Patricia hummed a few bars of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as she pondered what her sister had just said. Then she said, “You can’t have just one Down syndrome baby in a
setting like that. It pulls focus from the other babies. They should probably all be severely retarded, don’t you think?”
“Is there a special way to hold a retarded baby?” asked Eunice. “It’s been so long since I’ve held one that I’ve forgotten.”
“When did you ever hold a retarded baby, Mama?” asked Frances Kay.
“Many years ago. Before any of you were born.”
“What was the occasion?” asked Patricia.
“The occasion? Well, what was the occasion? Let me think about that.”
“Anyway…” said Janet, attempting to put the discussion back on track.
“No, I’d really like to know, Mama,” interrupted Patricia.
“It isn’t important,” said Mrs. Ludden in a quiet, hedging voice. Then Eunice Ludden amended what she’d just said. “Well, of course it’s important. And I’ve kept this from you girls long enough. The little retarded girl was your oldest sister.”
Absolute silence greeted this announcement. All that could be heard in the room was the sound of two cooks in the kitchen off the dining room rattling their pots under the running sink faucet, and Mrs. Malloy being harshly berated by one of the nurses for having accidentally knocked her juice glass on the floor. Such a thing would have ordinarily sprung Eunice, crusading investigator of nursing home mischief, into action, but now she just sat, looking at each of her daughters with significant solemnity.
Finally she took a deep breath and said, “It’s a long, sad story. I’ll give you the short version, because it’s already cast a terrible pall over me. I dated your Mr. Rausch in college. You probably know that he had a show on the radio back during the war. I knew when everybody was gravitating to television that he would go too. His variety show was perfect for television. I am a farsighted woman. I knew that with your father’s good voice and fine looks and my fine voice and good looks, we would have beautiful, songfully talented children. I had no idea that I was destined to have only girls, but girls is exactly what the good Lord blessed Felix and me with. It was my dream to put you on Augie’s show and make you famous. There was only one problem: my firstborn was neither beautiful nor talented. Nor was she even normal. What we did in those days, dears, was we put damaged little girls and boys in places where they could receive specialized care.”
“You institutionalized her?” asked Patricia, with unconcealed horror.
“Well, she wouldn’t have been any good for Augie’s show, and what’s more, I didn’t have time to see to the very demanding needs of such a child. It was imperative that I spend my time raising normal, healthy children—beautiful little songbirds who would grow up to make Felix and me proud.”
“And Daddy went along with this?” asked Frances Kay.
“At first he did,” replied Eunice. “But then—well, I must tell you, dears, that when he walked out on us in 1959, it wasn’t for the reason that I told you. There was no floozy waitress. There was only your father’s profound disappointment over the fact that I had chosen to sacrifice little Frances Kay so that the four of you could become famous.”
Frances Kay shook her head, confused.
Eunice explained: “Oh, my firstborn was also named Frances Kay. I so loved the name that I gave it to you, dear. I hated to see it go to waste.”
Brenda stood up. She was the tallest of the four daughters of Eunice Ludden, and now she towered, imposingly, over her mother. “Is she still alive—our sister?”
“I suppose she is, although I’ve lost touch. The last I’d heard she was in Des Moines. I’m sure she’d love to see her sisters on television again. She always enjoyed watching you perform.”
Mrs. Ludden’s daughters got quiet. Something both profound and troubling had just occurred. Although the Ludden sisters didn’t realize it fully at that moment, a song in their repertoire had just changed its key from major to minor—a mother’s lullaby, the oldest song they knew.
The infomercial was a success, though in the end, the idea of singing to babies—any babies, for that matter, with Down syndrome or otherwise—was dismissed as shameful pandering to the sensibilities of viewers whose hearts were already open and receptive. It was the Ludden Sisters, after all! Frances Kay II was able to pay for her daughter’s surgery and move the two of them into a charming little bungalow in West Hollywood within view of the famous Hollywood sign.
That Christmas, rather than join their mother in Cleveland (she was now working undercover at a different nursing home, which had been accused of putting its residents in adult diapers and nothing else), the sisters took their children and spouses to Des Moines to spend the holiday with their oldest sister Frances Kay I, or Frannie as she would later be called. Frannie, as it turned out, had long been deinstitutionalized and was now living in a group home with several other mentally challenged young and middle-aged adults. The Ludden sisters were lucky. The day that they became five sisters was also the day that they met their father for the first time in thirty years. He was one of the house “parents” who watched over Frannie and the other residents.
“I had to make a choice,” he explained, “and this was it. I’ve followed your wonderful careers from a distance, and I couldn’t be prouder—but my place has always been with Frances Kay, and all those others here who need me.”
Patricia and Janet and Frances Kay II and Brenda didn’t know which parent was the bigger disappointment: a mother who had never intended to tell four of her daughters about their discarded sibling, or a father who had been willing to permanently detach himself from the lives of four of his very own children. It was concluded by Patricia, and seconded by each of her songstress sisters, that as parents, both their mother and father were sadly flawed, but in the end, deserving of some semblance of forgiveness.
It being Christmas and all.
Merii Kurisumasu.
1990
GERONTOCONCUPISCENT IN VERMONT
Cornell Rodgers was eighty-four. He’d been a widower for almost fifteen years. Cornell had become comfortably inured to all that went along with living alone, had come to accept the fact that he would probably be forever after a “me” and never again a “we.” He came to forget a lot of what it had been like to be married, to be in love—not the kind of love that comes with fireworks or overwhelms every other aspect of life, but that category of love that settles in for the long haul and feels comfortable and secure and just right.
Cornell had forgotten, as well, what it was like to share his life with another person as the norm and not the exception. His daughter Stephanie was the exception. She flew in from Ann Arbor to see her father dutifully once, sometimes twice a year. And sometimes his grown granddaughters—Stephanie’s two girls—dropped in for visits (with or without their husbands), when they could be conveniently appended to New England ski trips. And there were friends and neighbors who came by to see Cornell in his musty Victorian on South Willard, and whom he went to see, including one family in particular—the Ludviks—who lived a few blocks away and had been having him over for Sunday dinner every week for nearly a year.
Cornell liked his life in Burlington. It was cold in the winter, and that was okay. (“As my blood gets thinner, I don’t touch the thermostat; I just throw on a heavier sweater.”) He liked walking along the lake. He even liked the radical politics of the town and happily stuffed envelopes for Bernie Sanders. More recently, he’d marched with the anti-Gulf War protesters, carrying a sign that said “No War for Oil,” when the one first handed to him, the overly prolix “Kuwait: Give Your Women the Vote and Maybe We’ll Feel Better About Saving Your Ass!” didn’t quite seem to hit the mark.
A former high school principal, Cornell had been in retirement mode for almost two decades, the comfortable pace of his life needing very little adjustment as he aged. Retirement suited him. Burlington suited him. What he missed, even as his libido had waned, was sex.
The power and passion of male/female coupling—it had long stopped being a component of his sensual life. Cornell’s sensual life wa
s in his tastebuds now. It manifested in the goose bumps he sometimes got when he listened to Mozart’s symphonies and Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. It beheld the rutilant sky of twilight, set against the shimmering turquoise of Lake Champlain, with feelings of warmth and peace and quiet joy. Everything was sensory and above the waist now, none of it seated in the gonads.
And yet sexual longing in Cornell Rodgers, voiceless now and largely rudderless, still maintained a pulse.
How to channel it, give expression to it? Cornell couldn’t bring himself to buy adult magazines. Nor did he wish to visit one of the city’s adult movie houses. The potential appellation of “dirty old man” unnerved him. He had met women close to his own age—women whom he thought might be open to his advances—but in the end, though companionable, they had not proved all that physically compatible.
Cal was a teenage boy whom Cornell knew. Cal had a girlfriend named Kieran. Cornell knew the boy’s family from his long tenure as high school administrator (both of Cal’s parents were teachers) and he knew of the girl’s family (the father had a job with the town’s big restaurant equipment company, G.S. Blodgett). The boy was into old motorcycles and so was Cornell, and for a time he had thought of giving Cal his antique 1936 Harley Davidson 61EL—the one with the first “Knucklehead” OHV engine—which had been gathering dust in his garage.
Cornell shared aspects of his long life with the teenagers during their visits to a favorite city park. Kieran was especially interested in hearing how high schools had changed over the years, since she now felt that she wanted to be a teacher. With Cornell, the kids shared the empirical evidence of their young love—or rather lust, because Cal found it hard, even in a public park, to keep his hands off Kieran, who was plump-lipped and New England creamy-skinned and hungry for Cal’s every touch.