There was no breakthrough, no shocking realization, and no Truth until January third. January third was circled on the small Woolworth’s calendar with a dark ring of blue ink. A dark ring that had been circled with the pen pressing down so hard it made an indentation in all the other months of the calendar. The days that followed found Vivian sporting matching dark rings under her eyes, as if she’d circled them repeatedly, and violently, with the blue pen in her sleep.
Chapter 17
Vivian Dalton should have thanked her lucky stars Betty Miller had to go out of town during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Betty’s goodwill toward men had dried right up with Vivian’s little performance at church on Christmas Eve, but the following day was Christmas, and there was neither room nor time for anything other than presents and toys and family. So many toys! Santa had been good to them all. It was only after the children had gone to bed that night, full of chocolate, candy canes, and sugar cookies, that Betty had answered a telephone call from Marilyn Dean, and then promptly invited her over to the house for cocktails.
“Shhhhit,” she whispered, with the t breaking off like one of the sharp icicles hanging from their house. She’d just inadvertently created an opportunity for Marilyn.
Once Betty’s father had been elected mayor, everyone seemed to need a favor from her. It wasn’t as if she didn’t secretly enjoy the added influence she had over certain people, but when she wasn’t in the mood for it, it was an annoyance. Marilyn Dean had been pestering and pressuring Betty to talk her father into appointing her husband, Farley, as Wooster’s director of finance. Betty tapped a manicured index finger, Revlon’s Fire & Ice red, on the side table and stared at the telephone. Should she call Marilyn back and cancel? No. No, of course she shouldn’t cancel. What was she thinking? Goodness, that was selfish. It was Christmastime! And Marilyn had sounded more overwrought than usual. She most likely just needed to unwind after the Christmas Day chaos familiar to anyone with a houseful of overstimulated, sugar-soaked children. Little Bitty and Charles Junior had been so carried away with their new Mr. Potato Head kit, they’d poked holes in half the potatoes Dolly had meant for the au gratin dish. She’d had to run next door and borrow some from the Talbots. Betty had no doubt that Marilyn had had a similarly harried and chaotic day, but, just in case . . .
Betty had prepared herself to ambush Marilyn with the Vivian Dalton gossip as soon as she came through the door. But, to her surprise, Marilyn had burst through the door with her own crisis, desperate to talk, and it didn’t have anything to do with the director of finance position. Betty hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise, as Marilyn went on and on about how Farley had spent the morning with her and the children, and then claimed to have something important to do at the office.
“And so he just left,” she said. “Left the house on Christmas Day, to go into the office?”
Betty shook her head slowly and swirled her Manhattan around in the glass.
“He’s an accountant. What accounting emergency could be happening on Christmas Day, that couldn’t be handled on any other day? Hmm?”
Betty picked up the bottle of whiskey and topped off Marilyn’s glass.
“Another cherry, dear?”
Marilyn nodded.
“It’s not as if he’s the sheriff, or even a local policeman. He’s also not a doctor.”
“No,” Betty agreed with her.
She thought that if Marilyn was going to mention the director of finance position, that would have been her cue. He’s also not the mayor, and speaking of your father . . . But Marilyn missed the obvious segue, and continued to propel the conversation forward, harping on her personal suspicions about Farley. Betty settled back into the floral-print davenport, and continued to half listen. The liquor cart was within arm’s reach.
“But what really worries me”—Marilyn took a large slug of her drink—“is that I found his checkbook, sitting open on the desk in his study. Do you know how much he gave his secretary this year for a Christmas bonus?”
“How much?”
“Two hundred dollars. Do you know how much she got last year?”
“How much?”
“Fifty. Now, what sort of secretary goes from a fifty-dollar Christmas bonus to a two-hundred-dollar Christmas bonus? That’s what I want to know.”
The cocktails had kicked in, and Marilyn’s face was flushed. She was beginning to slur her words a little.
“Oh, honey.” Betty reached out to pat Marilyn’s knee. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Farley did really well last year, didn’t he? That’s what you told me.” But she was thinking that a hundred-and-fifty-dollar increase in bonus sounded mighty suspicious to her. She tried to remember what Farley Dean’s secretary looked like, and wondered if she should risk upsetting Marilyn further by asking her. She decided against it.
“Well.” Marilyn held her highball glass next to her rouged cheek. “He did.”
Betty pursed her lips, thinking what she’d do to Farley if she were Marilyn, but Marilyn wasn’t quite that clever, nor did she demand the same level of rectitude as Betty.
“I wouldn’t give it any more thought, if I were you,” she lied, for Marilyn’s benefit as much as her own. “You just go on home and get some sleep, and if you need to talk about it tomorrow, you just give me a call.”
Betty was not eager to hear any more from Marilyn about her obviously cheating husband, and had extended her generous offer of a sympathetic ear the next day because she knew she wouldn’t be home to answer the telephone.
“You know,” Marilyn began, “I meant to talk to you about Farley and the director of finance position.”
Betty took Marilyn’s Manhattan glass from her and gently guided her to the front door. Unbelievable. He was cheating on her, yet she still wanted to help him advance his career.
“Of course.” Betty smiled through her incredulity, certain that she wouldn’t be helping Farley now. Marilyn was the one who’d be needing the help. “But let’s talk about that tomorrow.”
And before Marilyn Dean realized it, she was in her matching fox hat and coat, with her car keys in gloved hand, weaving her way toward the Coupe de Ville parked in the circular drive.
The next day, the Millers left town to spend the rest of the week with Charles’s parents up in Cooperstown, New York. Betty wasn’t home to receive Marilyn’s telephone call, thank God, because that was going to be a long conversation and she had too many other things to worry about. Her mother-in-law, potential blizzard conditions on the road, her mother-in-law, keeping the children frostbite-free, and her mother-in-law.
It was only after New Year’s Day, after Betty had returned to Wooster, that she was able to turn her full attention to the gossip about Edward and Vivian Dalton. Well, she said to herself as she opened the telephone book to the florists and pointed a sharp red talon at the top of the page, since Marilyn was too preoccupied with her own personal scandal, I suppose I’ll have to handle this one myself as well. And she proceeded to go about planning an afternoon event where she could make that happen.
“Yes, I’d like to be connected with Barrett’s Flower Shop.” She reached for her notepad and pencil. “Hello?”
Silence at the other end of the line.
“Hello?”
Betty reached over and tapped aggressively on the telephone cradle.
“HELLO!”
Oh, honestly, these things are supposed to make life easier, she grumbled as she reached to dial the operator again.
Betty had Dolly hand-deliver the invitations to her afternoon tea, while she handled the flower, food, and drink arrangements, but she wondered if she shouldn’t have done it the other way around. The arrangements took about three times as long as they should have, since the telephone line kept getting disconnected nearly every time she tried to make a call.
When Betty Miller extended a written invitation, women of Wooster clamored to respond in the affirmative. This had been a slightly unusual invitation, seem
ingly without occasion. It wasn’t to honor someone’s birthday, engagement, marriage, or baby, and it wasn’t a fund-raiser. Betty Miller was big on fund-raisers. The month of January was supposed to be reserved for recovering from the chaos of the holidays. To catch the collective breath, the ladies would all agree. But there it was on the invitation: January 17, a Saturday afternoon tea, with watercress sandwiches and polite conversation. What on earth was that about?
Clara Weaver had been irritated with the invitation, not only because it interrupted what was supposed to be a relaxing January, but also because it meant donning an afternoon dress. She was still holding on to the extra seven (or ten) pounds of holiday weight she had accumulated (all Christmas cookies and fudge), and the most appropriate dress she could fit into was one left over from her last pregnancy. But she knew if you turned down a Betty Miller invitation, you would not receive another until she felt you had served your time in Wooster’s social purgatory.
Clara had strapped a belt, loosely, over the dress and gone to the tea, as had everyone else on the invitation list. And they had talked about their respective Christmases, and they had eaten the tea sandwiches and cookies, and sipped the tea and fruit punch. And they had learned all about Vivian Dalton and her husband. There had been more breathless pearl-clutching and tsk-tsking that afternoon in Betty Miller’s living room than last summer at the Wayne County Fair, when it was discovered that Lucy Kratz had stolen Ethel Armstrong’s cherry pie recipe and passed it off as her own. Ann Metcalf had been so surprised by the Dalton news, she’d spilled Shrimp Louie down the front of the new orange silk shantung Beulah Bechtel dress she’d purchased just for the tea.
All the women at the afternoon tea were well versed in the art of displaying false concern. They continued to clutch their pearls and tsk-tsk as they wondered how on earth poor, poor Vivian was going to deal with this when it got out to the rest of Wooster. Edward Dalton had a second wife.
Chapter 18
“My mother has turned our tiny attic room into an office,” Charlotte Dalton told Sue Barker over lunch in the Wooster High School cafeteria. Conversations were all held at a higher volume there than in the classrooms or hallways of the school, and the clank of silverware on trays was constant. The din surrounding them was a comfortable and distracting level of the muted chaos, which allowed Charlotte to share her increasing concerns about her mother’s behavior.
“A few days after New Year’s. She pushed all the boxes into the corners and set up a little table by the window for her typewriter and stack of paper and pencils.”
“Why?” Sue asked, before taking a large bite of her liverwurst sandwich.
“Who knows?” Charlotte answered, with a shrug more casual than she felt. “She’s been acting weird since before Christmas. Well, weirder. She seems really frosted at my dad, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed yet.”
“Ha, that’s typical, isn’t it? My dad’s the same way. He has no clue.”
“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed, and took a bite of her apple. As she crunched, both girls scanned the rest of the cafeteria. “I mean”—she shifted the apple into her cheek so she could talk—“she seems really, really mad at him.”
“So, really frosty frosted?” Sue scrunched up her nose the way she did when she made her little word jokes. “Like, her frosting is frosty frosted.”
“We didn’t even go to Akron this year to look at the Christmas windows.” Charlotte ignored the frosty frosting comment because Sue, as usual, was making everything into a joke, and Charlotte felt like this was kind of serious. “We’ve gone every year, as a family. I was kind of looking forward to it. You know, shopping and having lunch at O’Neill’s.”
“Aw.” Sue offered a supportive pout. “We went. It wasn’t so great. Don’t feel bad. Do you think I should get another piece of cake?” She craned her neck in the direction of the food line.
Charlotte knew Sue was just being nice about O’Neill’s. O’Neill’s at Christmas was always great. The weekend they were supposed to go, her mother had been sick. So sick, she couldn’t get out of bed, and Charlotte had brought her orange juice and toast and chicken broth. Then, at around three p.m. on Sunday she just popped right up out of bed and insisted on cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and making dinner. Charlotte thought it had either been a really quick virus, or her mother had faked the whole thing just to avoid going up to Akron.
“She was actually being kind of scary.” Charlotte stared trancelike at a spot just beyond Sue’s shoulder, remembering her mother with the knife in the kitchen that one night, and all the plate-stabbing with the fork.
“And, did I tell you, she invited this Italian couple for dinner one night?”
Sue’s eyes bugged out as she frowned over her mouthful.
“Yeah,” Charlotte continued. “Some lady she works with. And after she made that big stink about how I can’t bring Rosie Gianetti home anymore.”
Charlotte stared back at the spot beyond Sue’s shoulder, thinking about the weird, exaggerated, bright “hospitality” toward that nice Italian couple she had for dinner. And since when did her mother invite coworkers for dinner? She didn’t even invite friends for dinner. Well, she didn’t really have any friends, honestly. And then there was the erratic behavior at church on Christmas Eve.
“It’s still really uncomfortable at home and, jeez Louise”—she broke the trancelike gaze to look back at her lunch tray—“I feel like, lately, she’s been eavesdropping when we use the phone. She’s asking all kinds of questions, asking my dad where he’s going all the time.”
“Ugh,” Sue said. “Mothers.”
“But, that one day, just after New Year’s, jeez, was she ever mad. I don’t think I’d ever seen her that mad.”
“Really?” Sue asked, disbelieving. “Not even when you brought home the syphilis book?” As soon as she said “syphilis book” she burst out laughing.
Charlotte glared at her, not laughing.
“What’s funny?” Barb Harper sat down next to Sue with her lunch tray, which held a carton of chocolate milk and a lump of canned green beans in a dish.
“Oh, nothing.” Charlotte waved a hand in an attempt to appear nonchalant.
“Oh, nothing, nothing.” Sue caught her breath, and glanced at Barb’s tray, noting the absence of cake. “Remember when we had to read The Myth of Sisyphus for English?”
“Sue . . .” Charlotte warned.
“Yeah,” Barb answered, peeling back the top of the milk carton.
“Well, Charlotte went home one afternoon after school, and she was carrying the book, and her mom saw the cover and went positively ape.”
“Sue!” Charlotte slapped her hand on the table like she was trying to reprimand a misbehaving puppy.
But Sue kept going.
“What did she say, again?” Sue said, looking to Charlotte for assistance, but Charlotte had covered her face with her hands. “Something like, ‘YOU WILL NOT BRING PORNOGRAPHY INTO THIS HOUSE!’”
Everyone at the tables in front of and behind them turned and stared at Sue, openmouthed. Charlotte’s forehead was now resting on the tabletop, her arms wrapped around her hair.
“She did not!” Barb sputtered, as shocked as the onlookers at the other tables.
Charlotte’s head nodded from under her wrapped arms. “She did,” her voice muffled by her arms. “She ripped the cover right off the book. Tried to rip the entire thing in half.”
“Oh, boy.”
Sue had doubled over laughing again, as Charlotte peeled herself up from the table and took a deep breath, straightening her sweater. “Well, at least she didn’t come to the school and yell at Mr. Grandy about it.”
Barb gasped. “Can you imagine?”
“Yes.”
Charlotte had been stupefied by her mother’s deranged outburst and it had taken her several minutes to understand the cognitive disconnect. Her mother had been so enraged that Charlotte couldn’t explain the mistake to her, and had just gone up to her r
oom with the remaining shreds of the book. She had then been flooded with dread, imagining her mother taking her Rage, with a capital R, to the high school, stomping in with hair and eyes wild, pocketbook swinging like a weapon, demanding to speak to the filth-monster who gave her daughter pornography.
Charlotte had had to wait until the next morning at breakfast, when her mother was calmly drinking her coffee, to explain that Sisyphus was a Greek king and not a venereal disease. Her mother had nodded and given Charlotte a paper bag and tape with which to bind the cover back onto the book. But she hadn’t apologized. She never apologized.
“The Myth of Syphilis, ha ha ha. Hey, you’re watching I Love Lucy tonight, aren’t you?” Sue asked, shifting easily from the horrors of mistaken-identity pornographic literature to the popular topic of the week and completely forgetting about Charlotte’s familial concerns. “She’s having her baby!”
“Oh, absolutely,” Barb answered. “Who isn’t going to watch that?”
Charlotte wished she could be as excited as everyone else about Lucy and Ricky Ricardo adding a little baby to their family. She just couldn’t escape the feeling that kept nagging at her about her own. There was something really wrong with her mother. She seemed to be teetering on the brink of something.
Chapter 19
In Vivian’s life, she wanted to believe she was a Lucy, and everyone else was an Ethel. The thing was, all the bad stuff seemed to happen to Lucy. Lucy and Ricky’d had to go through all sorts of misunderstandings, and it would’ve been swell if that’s all this was. This thing with Edward and his other goddamned wife. But Vivian was now certain there was no misunderstanding. As of tonight, Edward still had no idea she knew, and she still had no idea what she was going to do about it.
The Daltons’ television set was tuned in to CBS, and Edward, Vivian, and Charlotte all seated themselves in the living room, in their usual spots, as if nothing had been very wrong for the past three weeks. Edward in his chair, Vivian on the end of the sofa nearest the TV, and Charlotte on the floor, leaning against the far end of the sofa, holding a bowl of popcorn in her lap. It was the same way they always watched I Love Lucy, as a family. Vivian looked over at Charlotte, in her pedal pushers and bobby socks, plucking kernels from the bowl of popcorn.
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