Other than Vera and Mrs. McGinty, who was surprised when anything good happened, no one in the McGinty family had been surprised when Vivian got herself the job at Bell. They weren’t surprised when Edward Dalton proposed, and they weren’t surprised Vivian married before Vera did; a whole three years before Vera did. On a pleasant afternoon in June of 1937, Vivian Margaret McGinty married Edward George Dalton.
Money was still tight, and the beautiful long white dress and lace veil her ten-year-old self had daydreamed about would’ve been impractical. Vivian was a woman now. A grown-up. With a proper job, and a handsome bridegroom. Her “something old” was the gold Irish claddagh ring from Aunt Catharine, and she wore it proudly on her right hand as she stood in her smartest skirt suit and matching hat (her “something new” from Beulah Bechtel’s). The fragrance of the Firmament lilacs pinned to her lapel (her “something blue” that matched her eyes) wafted around her head as Edward held her hand and leaned in close while they repeated their vows to each other. They might as well have been in the room alone, because everything around Vivian was a blur, and she couldn’t see anyone other than Edward.
“I do.”
Dalton-McGinty Nuptials Solemnized This Morning
Miss Vivian McGinty, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. P. W. McGinty, of South Buckeye Street, and Edward G. Dalton of Syracuse, N.Y., were united in marriage this morning at 10 o’clock at the Church of Christ parsonage, with Rev. T. R. Freytag officiating. The double ring ceremony was used.
The couple was attended by Miss Vera McGinty, sister of the bride.
The bride was attractively dressed in a three-piece tailored brown and grey suit, with matching brown accessories. She wore a shoulder corsage of Firmament lilacs.
Miss McGinty wore a grey suit with grey accessories. Her shoulder corsage of roses and sweet peas.
Mrs. Dalton has been employed by the Ohio Bell Telephone Corp. for the past few years.
It was official, and now everyone in Wooster would know. There hadn’t been quite as many details about Edward, but Wooster wasn’t his town. Forest Chapel Methodist was being renovated, and neither Vivian nor Edward wanted to wait for it to be finished, so they’d made do with the parsonage at the Church of Christ. As far as the wedding attire, Wallis Simpson hadn’t worn a white gown with a lace veil, either, so Vivian wasn’t too bent out of shape about it. Mrs. Simpson wore a designer silk crepe gown in “periwinkle blue,” the magazines said. Periwinkle was just a shade off the Firmament lilacs the colorist matched to Vivian’s eyes when he touched up the wedding photograph.
Vivian had thought it was both important and significant that her wedding to Edward was just two days after Wallis Simpson married her Edward. Vivian had made note to use the word “significant” more often, after church one Sunday, months earlier. “The J. Ellis Reed family has made a significant donation,” the reverend had said. She also thought it was important and significant that the fancy and glamorous Mrs. Wallis Simpson was marrying an Edward, and she, the not-quite-as-fancy-or-glamorous Vivian McGinty, was also marrying an Edward. Names had importance and significance. More than most people bothered to notice.
“Listen to this,” she’d said to Violet while she read aloud from her magazine. “Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Duke of Windsor. Garsh, that’s a lot of names!”
Vivian didn’t need a lot of names. She just needed her own. Her new one. She was Mrs. Vivian Dalton (pleased to meet you). She loved how fancy that sounded and couldn’t wait to introduce herself to new people.
Although she’d later try to get him to admit that he’d picked that bumpy Henrietta Street for their first car ride on purpose, her husband, Mr. Edward Dalton, tried to deny any indecent motivation. But he denied it with a smirk. And anyone with an automobile, carriage, bicycle, or wagon back then knew what to expect on Henrietta Street, with its jumbled, uneven bricks. “And, boy, did I get what I was expecting!” Edward would hoot, then waggle his eyebrows, and give Vivian a pinch on the rear that would send her scuttling into the next room, flushing in embarrassment, her scowl threatened by hints of a smile.
The Daltons would eventually make it part of their anniversary celebration. A ceremonial drive down Henrietta Street. Sometimes Vivian would wear a flimsy blouse without her brassiere, singing “Pennies from Heaven” out loud, and wiggling around like a whore, because she was married then and it didn’t matter. (So there, Mama!) And sometimes Edward would sing nursery rhymes like he liked to do to make Vivian laugh. She loved to laugh. His voice would joggle and wobble as the Model A bumped over the stones.
“Ma-a-a-a-ry ha-a-ad a li-i-i-tle l-a-a-amb . . .”
He was no Rudy Vallee, but he could carry a bumpy tune.
But those anniversary drives down Henrietta Street came later. After they’d moved back to Wooster.
Vivian was only superstitious when she wasn’t giddy and thrilled about getting married. So, Forest Chapel Methodist wasn’t available, and they had to have the ceremony somewhere else. So what? And she hadn’t given it another thought when she’d dropped her handkerchief getting out of the car on her wedding day. If she’d been watching it happen to another bride, she’d have muttered, “Oh, Jesus, that’s bad luck,” under her breath. And maybe it was nothing. Maybe dropping her handkerchief wasn’t the bad luck it was said to be, but having to move away from Wooster wasn’t her idea of a great start to the marriage. It’d seemed to come out of nowhere.
“It means you’ll have to quit the phone company,” Edward had said when he told her about his new job.
Vivian’s face had pulled into a deep frown, until she remembered that deep frowning caused wrinkles. She’d looked down at her wedding ring, which was already starting to feel a little heavier than she’d expected. She’d let out a small sigh. She was a dutiful wife now (“Mrs. Vivian Dalton, pleased to meet you”), wasn’t she? Her salary was milk money compared to Edward’s, wasn’t it? And it would have been foolish to try to argue about it, wouldn’t it? The answer to all those questions was, “Well, yes.”
So, shortly after the day of her wedding to Edward George Dalton, Vivian moved away from Wooster, away from her family, and away from the job where she’d felt a little control and a lot of pride. Far, far away from the McGinty house on South Buckeye, and far, far away from Ohio Bell on East Liberty Street. The Edward Daltons began their life of marital bliss in a run-down yellow clapboard bungalow that was five hundred miles away from Vivian’s hometown, and less than two miles from the Institution for Male Defective Delinquents.
The Eastern New York Reformatory in upstate New York was opened in 1900 mainly as a facility to handle the overflow of other prison facilities. Overflowing with thieves, murderers, rapists. If anyone had bothered to ask Vivian where she’d like to live as a newlywed, she’d have said, “Oh, near the park,” or “It’d be nice to be close to the beauty parlor.” Not, “How about a short drive from the Institute for Male Defective Delinquents at Napanoch?,” which was the official name of the reformatory by the time Edward Dalton was hired there in May of 1937. Just a few weeks before their wedding. The reformatory was overseen by the Department of Corrections, and the inmates were men over the age of sixteen with IQs of under seventy, and their sentences were indefinite.
Other than the steady pay and the security that went along with it, the only thing Vivian liked about Edward’s job as a prison guard was the uniform. Boy, did Edward look good in that uniform. Her favorite photograph was him standing with hands on hips, smiling, in his starched khaki shirt, black tie, and jodhpurs, with his thumbs hitched into his metal-buckled belt. That, by the way, was how he’d told her he had his position at the prison, the sneak. She’d been so busy at Bell, and with making plans for their wedding day, she hadn’t thought to ask him anything about his new job. She’d assumed it was something nearby. And Edward didn’t say anything about it until after she saw the photograph. He’d handed it to her, and waited for her reaction. He’d stood there, with that wicked little grin
on his face, and she’d fallen for it. She’d blushed and gushed over how dashing he looked in the uniform. And he’d said, “Glad you like it,” and then he told her they had to move to New York State. “Honey, I know it’s not what you wanted, but I have to be close to my job.”
“Not too close, I hope,” she’d said on the drive in the Model A from Wooster to Wawarsing, some little nowhere town between New York City and Albany. After they’d crossed the Ohio/Pennsylvania border she’d finally stopped looking for her Uncle Hugh on his Ohio State Patrol motorcycle. That, at least, had given her a little comfort, knowing he was out there somewhere on the road. A thread of connection to the family she was leaving behind. It would’ve been nice to see another McGinty out there. She would’ve even been happy to see Vera, for crying out loud, flying down the opposite side of the road on her broomstick. Vivian snickered to herself and set her chin on her elbow leaning out the window, the wind whipping her face.
The stretch of highway had been endless, and the day cloudless and hot, with nowhere proper to stop when she’d had to go to the bathroom. She’d had to go wandering out into the woods to get away from the road, not that there were any other cars on it, mind you, because no one in their right mind wanted to go to Wawarsing, New York, in July, but that would’ve been just her luck, to get into a sweaty squat near the road and have someone suddenly drive by and honk at her. She knew Edward would’ve just laughed. He said he didn’t have the same problems with modesty that she had. He called them problems, she called them manners. One thing she learned on that drive to Wawarsing was that being married was going to take some getting used to.
“How often do they escape?” she’d asked, wiping perspiration from her brow and looking uneasily out the open car window as they drove past the squat fortress set back from the road. She wondered how a place could look so gloomy and dangerous even in late afternoon July sun.
“Escape?” Edward laughed. “Who, the inmates?” and he reached out his right hand to ruffle her hair. “With me in charge?”
She hadn’t been satisfied with that answer, but Edward had then pulled the Model A into the two dried-mud grooves off Lundy Road that led up to the west side of the house, put the gears in park, and before Vivian knew it she was distracted. The little yellow bungalow on Lundy Road had peeling white shutters with Christmas tree cutouts, a sagging roof, and a rickety front porch, and it was all theirs.
The Daltons’ first house. Mr. and Mrs. Edward Dalton! Pleased to meet you, and welcome to our home! Vivian pushed open doors, and poked the broom into cobwebby corners, and put the wilting groceries away in the icebox. And then she’d stood at the back door staring across the overgrown yard at the little yellow outhouse.
“Jesus Christ.”
Vivian spent her days tidying the house, washing their clothes and hanging them on the clothesline in the backyard, and preparing dinner for the two of them. Canned soups and vegetables that she’d heat up on the stove, and the occasional chicken or ham that she’d burn in the oven. Sometimes she’d eye the empty cans and think of the old telephone game she used to play with Henry when they were kids. Cans with the string pulled taut between them. And then she’d think of the glass pressed up against the wall, which then made her think of her old job at Bell. Octopus cords everywhere and a live person chattering in her ear every few minutes. She held the can of peas to her ear. “Number, please.” She held it there for a moment as she swayed back and forth looking out the kitchen window. When she set the can back on the counter she let out a wistful “Whuff,” bringing a corner of her apron up to blot her eyes.
Edward would come home from his shift at the prison looking exhausted and asking her not to ask him about his day, so they’d eat in silence. The same silence she’d had to listen to all day.
“What the hell’s that smell?” Edward said one night when Vivian’d burned the soup again.
Except that he wasn’t talking about the soup. He was in the bedroom.
“Well,” Vivian shouted in irritation through the smoky kitchen, “that’s our baby, roughing up my insides, is what it is.”
She’d been using the sick bowl for the past few weeks. Goddamned outhouse was too far away. Today was the first day she’d forgotten to empty it.
So, that’d come out a whole lot more awkward than she’d planned, her special announcement. She wanted to do something a little fancier, maybe with candles and dinner that wasn’t burned, with a bouquet of late autumn wildflowers in the crystal vase they’d received as a wedding gift from Edward’s cousin Evelyn. The kitchen table wouldn’t have held all of that at the same time anyway, but still. This wasn’t the way she’d wanted to do it.
Goddammit.
She’d lain next to Edward in bed that night, wide awake while he snored soundly. The warm glow of Edward’s excitement about the baby had worn off as soon as he’d fallen asleep and Vivian was already back to stewing about his complaint. Her moods had been getting sourer and sourer with every week. It was easier to be ornery than to be sad and sorry for herself. She couldn’t let this hopeless helplessness swallow her whole, and who was he, anyway, to be complaining about smells? The sick bowl, the burned dinners. He comes home smelling like a goddamned latrine on fire and I don’t say a thing. Boys, men. They never did learn to keep after themselves. Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails. She hoped her baby would be a girl.
Vivian got her wish, and little Charlotte Catharine Dalton (a lovely, significant, and important name) was born on February twenty-second, nine months and seventeen days after Vivian and Edward’s wedding day. The pregnancy had been nine months of sick and grumbling and aches, and then the labor, whoo-boy, she wouldn’t be going through that again. Vivian told Edward that would be it for her.
“You’d better like this one,” she’d breathed, while propped up in the hospital bed, wan, sweating, and drained of energy. “She’s going to be the only one.” It would be too bad for Edward, she’d thought. He’d probably wanted a boy. He hadn’t said as much, but she knew people.
Charlotte’s birth made Vivian twice as anxious as she’d been when they first moved to the little yellow house the year before. She’d spent so much time worrying about the prison, the criminal inmates, and the proximity of their house to all of it, she hadn’t had time or brain space to consider any other types of threats. Little Charlotte was just seven months old at the time of the attack.
Chapter 9
Charlotte’s mother had struck her just four days after Thanksgiving. It was the first time she’d hit her in Charlotte’s fifteen years and she was still a little rattled. Holy smoke, had that been a shocker. Right in the back of the head as she’d been storming out of the kitchen; away from the argument. SMACK! Open-handed and sharp. The cartoon stars spinning before Charlotte’s eyes.
If Charlotte had had to pinpoint when her relationship with her mother started to show strain she’d have guessed it was a few years earlier; around middle school. When she really started to get excited about what she was learning. Although she didn’t really figure it out until high school. That was when it dawned on Charlotte that there seemed to be a direct correlation between her bubbling enthusiasm over Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, or anything by the Brontë sisters, and her mother’s scowling. Fifteen issues of Movie Stars Parade, stacked one on top of the other, measured up to the height of Mansfield Park as it sat on the side table next to the sofa, but there was no convincing Charlotte that anything in those magazines could measure up to what was inside the Austen book. She’d bet her mother hadn’t even bothered with a glance at the book’s title, and there was a small part of her that worried her mother might think Jane Austen was the president of Wooster’s Trowel & Trellis Garden Club. Oh, yes, Jane Austen. I think I’ve seen her at Beulah Bechtel’s. The one with the chin mole and the blue rinse.
Smart, Aunt Vera had said. Charlotte had overheard Aunt Vera discussing her with Aunt Violet. Aunt Vera never had any of her own kids, but doted on Charlotte like she was
her own. Doted on, but didn’t coddle. The rest of that comment to Aunt Violet had been, A little naïve, though. Charlotte had gasped in indignation at that, and then folded her arms with a frowning pout, wondering what Aunt Vera meant.
She’d admit, she’d felt naïve about certain things, like when she hadn’t understood why Rosie Gianetti’s family hadn’t been reimbursed by Wayne Building & Loan following the embezzlement scandal. Charlotte’s parents had been reimbursed. Rosie’s parents had not. “Why do you think they’re not getting their money back, Charlotte?” Rosie had shouted, her fists clenched and face red, because the word around Rosie’s neighborhood was that none of the Italian families were going to be reimbursed.
Charlotte had stood, dumbfounded, unable to answer what was really a rhetorical question. She remembered that Mrs. Betty Miller had organized an event in Wooster’s Public Square to honor her father, who’d said he’d reimburse people who’d lost their money. The day had been a sweltering summer one and there’d been loudspeakers and Mrs. Miller was calling out to the crowd about this “celebration of simple human decency,” saying that her father’s generosity was the kind of thing all local communities should celebrate. Charlotte had even heard Margie Miller saying her mom thought there ought to be a statue of him in the square, and a special “J. Ellis Reed” holiday, which was a big eye-roller.
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