“Sisyphus was an absurd hero,” Mr. Grandy had said, standing at the chalkboard in Charlotte’s English class.
What was absurd was Charlotte’s mother, Vivian “I-don’t-trust-people-who-read-books” Dalton, reading classic literature in the Dalton family living room with nary a movie magazine in sight. Charlotte stood gaping like a fish at the aquarium glass, her mouth dropping open and pulling closed.
“I have decided,” her mother announced that night at dinner, “that I would like to get my high school diploma.”
The word “diploma” hung in the air over the casserole dish of cheese and burned chicken; a fancy, swirling invisible banner that suddenly sounded very foreign to Charlotte. Did she say “diploma”? Charlotte stared, and her dad stared, and her mother picked up her fork and was using it to prod at a few peas rolling around her plate.
“What?” her dad asked.
“I said—” her mother began again, really leaning into the word “said,” drawing it out into several syllables. Sa-a-a-a-ai-d.
“You’re not going to be in classes at the school, are you?” Charlotte blurted out, interrupting. She could picture it now, starting her junior year with Mrs. Kelvin saying: “Why, Vivian Dalton, did you make that dress yourself? And I just love that rooster brooch! Come sit here, next to Charlotte.”
“No, Charlotte,” her mother said airily. “I’ve spoken with Principal Scott, and he’s going to have some of the teachers coordinate a home curriculum for me.”
Coordinate. Curriculum. Charlotte stared at her mother, eyes wide. She then felt a sickly, sticky veil of horror descend over her at the idea of her mother meeting with the principal. Then she frowned at the absurdity. Absurd.
“Why do you want to do that?” Charlotte’s dad asked.
“Yes,” Charlotte chimed in, in what she hoped was a more pleasant tone. “Yes, why?”
“Because, I want to. That’s all.”
Her dad shrugged, and went back to eating his cheesy chicken, with a slight smile playing around the corners of his lips. Charlotte’s eyebrows furrowed again and she watched her mother scoop the peas onto the edge of her fork and guide them into her mouth.
Charlotte’s desire to leave Wooster returned with the strength of a late spring tornado. But not until she finished high school. Until she could get out, maybe this wouldn’t be the worst thing. The dictionary on Mother’s Day had been kind of a joke, but was it really a bad thing that her mother wanted to learn? With any luck she would use that dictionary to expand her vocabulary and her mind, so she could stop using the racial epithets that she didn’t really understand and that made Charlotte cringe with shame, and maybe she’d finally learn what “four-flushers” really meant.
Chapter 49
June crept up on Vivian almost without notice. All of a sudden it was time to flip the page on the wall calendar in the kitchen. Edward had installed the screens in all the windows, which were now open, just above the freshly planted geraniums in Vivian’s new flower boxes, to let the occasional warm breeze circulate throughout the house.
Springtime had come late in Ohio that year, but it’d finally brought back the kind of weather where Vivian wanted all the windows and doors open so she could smell the flowers, feel the warm breezes, and hear the crickets chirping at night. A lovely scent wafted in from the honeysuckle bush just outside the kitchen window, and Vivian found herself lingering over the dishes just to enjoy it.
“You think whatever was wrong with her in February had anything to do with it?” Edward asked from the table.
“Mmm.” Vivian shrugged but kept her eyes on the backyard.
Vera hadn’t really been sick in February, as far as she knew, but if it made more sense to Edward that she had been, and that Vivian had been a good sister and gone to see her in Akron, all the better.
“She seem sick at the party?”
“No.” Vivian suppressed a grimace remembering Grandma Kurtz’s birthday party, and Vera’s rude and awful behavior. “Healthy as ever.”
Vivian had been stunned speechless when her sister Violet telephoned to tell her about Vera’s stroke.
“She’s in the hospital right now, but should be able to go home with Wally in a few days,” Violet had said over the line, before taking a long drag on her cigarette.
Violet, too, had quit smoking to have James and Emily, like Vivian had with Charlotte, but had started up again when James got polio. He was fine now, but Violet hadn’t completely recovered. Her smoking was here and there when things were good. After learning of their eldest sister’s stroke, she was back to a pack a day.
“Unh,” was all that had come out of Vivian’s mouth.
“The doctor says she can’t talk, but she understands everything. And she can’t move the whole left side of her body. Wally’s hiring a nurse to help her when he’s at work.”
Vivian had pulled the telephone cord to its limit and was almost to the top of the stairs. She wanted to lie down on her bed, but instead slumped into a sitting position on the tenth stair.
“Viv? Did you hear me? Are you there?”
She steered the Buick over to the curb in front of Violet’s house and honked the horn. Violet still couldn’t drive, and said she had no intention of learning. Why would she? Robert drove her everywhere. Vivian had rolled her eyes. It was almost as if Violet enjoyed being a little bit helpless now and then. That wouldn’t have annoyed Vivian so much if the helplessness came along with a considerate punctuality. Violet was always late.
Vivian turned the rearview mirror toward her and patted the skin under her eyes. The makeup didn’t quite cover the shadows, evidence of the sleepless nights she’d endured since hearing about her sister’s stroke. Vera was only forty-four. And Vivian had been struggling with flashes of Good! that squashed the charitable pity she should’ve been feeling one hundred percent of the time. She’d held on to much of that anger toward Vera, and also thought that Vera’s stroke was probably her just desserts for being such a horrible sister all these years.
Five minutes passed before Violet came out of the house, and through the open windows of the Buick Vivian heard her calling back into the house to Robert that she’d be back in time to cook dinner. She climbed in the front seat, and the McGinty sisters started on their drive up to Akron.
“Vivy, gosh, you’re thin!” Violet exclaimed. She hadn’t seen Vivian since Grandma Kurtz’s birthday party. “You look like Katharine Hepburn.”
Vivian made a face. Katharine Hepburn was one of those women who wore trousers.
“I haven’t been baking as much. Except for these.”
She patted the tin of peanut butter crisscross cookies beside her. Vera had always liked peanut butter cookies.
Vivian might have dropped a few pounds, but it was nothing compared to Vera. Vivian inhaled sharply when they stepped into Vera’s bedroom. She’d never seen her older sister so weak, so diminished. Her skin lay atop her bones like wax paper across a rickety ladder. In fact, she looked like a skeletal version of their mother. Violet took Vivian’s hand and pulled her up next to the bed, where Vera was propped up against a lace-edged pillow, with their mother’s crazy quilt pulled up around her torso. Two straight-backed chairs had been set next to the window, to the left of Vera’s bed.
Vera’s eyes lit up when they drew closer. They were watery, but alert, and there was a brightness in them that Vivian’d never seen before. That scared her even more than her sister’s sickly appearance. There’d never been a time she could remember when her older sister looked pleased to see her. Vivian was properly unnerved and had to put her hand on the back of one of the chairs to steady herself.
“Hi!” Violet greeted Vera in a cheery but soft voice, as if speaking too loudly would give Vera another stroke.
The right side of Vera’s mouth pulled up in a ghastly way. On the nightstand next to the bed was a glass of water and a notepad and pencil. The stroke had paralyzed Vera’s vocal cords and the left side of her body, so she couldn’t sp
eak. But she could write what she wanted to say on the notepad.
“She’s smiling, Viv,” Violet said, explaining the lopsided facial expression that was sure to give Vivian nightmares.
Vivian stood next to the chair, still holding it with one hand, the other holding her pocketbook. The nurse had taken the cookie tin to the kitchen when they’d arrived. Seeing Vera in her current condition threw Vivian’s emotions into a choppy washtub of confusion. From the bed Vera lifted her right hand and waved for them to sit in the two chairs.
“Come on, Vivy,” Violet coaxed, patting the empty chair like she was talking to one of her cats.
Vera’s hand moved to rest on the notepad, and then she tapped the cover with her middle finger.
“You want to write something?” Violet asked, getting up from her chair and reaching for the notepad.
She held it open and handed Vera the pencil. Vera guided the pencil in awkward motions over the page. Her muscles on the right side, although recovering, still weren’t operating as they had before the stroke. When she put the pencil back on the nightstand, Violet turned the notepad toward herself and read what Vera had written.
“Oh, in the back here?” she asked as she paged forward in the notepad, past blank pages, until she was almost to the last one. She held the open notepad out to Vivian, who had crossed her ankles and placed her pocketbook in her lap.
“Hmm?” Vivian said, but accepted the notepad, laying it on top of her purse.
She looked up at Violet.
“She wants you to read that,” Violet offered with a shrug, and then turned to Vera. “Are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?”
Vera offered the grotesque half smile again as her gaze went to the notepad.
“Oh, yes.” Vivian handed it back to Violet, who opened it to the front again, where there was blank space to write.
“Some toast,” Violet read, after Vera had picked up the pencil and labored over another bit of writing on the page. “All right, you just sit tight, and I’ll be right back.” She handed the notepad back to Vivian, who leafed through to locate the message in the back again.
As Violet’s pumps clacked across the floor and out of the room, Vivian started to read. As she read, she realized that her sister had written her an apology. An apology for exposing the secret about Edward’s first wife.
Chapter 50
It’d been just after Halloween, and Vera McGinty Irwin had been sitting on Zella Johnson’s front porch in the late afternoon sunshine up in Akron. Zella went around with Forest Sadler, one of Wally’s drinking and gambling buddies. The one who’d been fired from Freedlander’s department store for being a drunk Santa Claus. Vera and Zella had been laughing about Wooster.
“They’re country club people, the Wooster relations, you know how they are.”
“I do, I do,” Vera said, remembering the year and a half she spent taking care of the Dean and Thompson kids. It’d been the height of the Great Depression but Edith Dean and Beverly Thompson came home from shopping in town, bragging about how Beulah Bechtel’s was selling every dress for just $14.95. They’d bought two each! Vera would’ve had to work forty hours just to make enough to buy one of those dresses.
“We’re not the cousins the Reeds and Millers like to parade around, if you get me.” Zella said “we” like she was talking about more people, but she might’ve just meant herself. “How ’bout a drink?”
“Sure,” Vera said.
The screen door slammed as Zella disappeared into the house. It was too warm for November, and Vera removed the cardigan sweater she’d been wearing and let the late afternoon sun warm her bare arms. The whole day had been a lazy one, and Vera wasn’t about to ruin that with the washing or housework. She stretched her legs out on the steps in front of her and leaned back onto the heels of her hands. A leftover Halloween jack-o’-lantern sat just inches from her fingers, grinning out at the street. It looked a little like Vivy used to before she got her pretty new dentures. Vera smirked to herself, but the smirk quickly faded. She took a deep breath and blew it out through puffed cheeks. She didn’t quite know how to feel about Vivian, her husband, their marriage, and this new fly in the ointment of it all. The fly Vivy didn’t even know about. Vera’s thumb ran back and forth across a nail head sticking out of one of the porch planks. Sticking out there like her nagging thoughts about her younger sister.
Vivy’d always gotten just what she wanted, and she’d always gotten it first. Vera was the oldest, but Vivian was the one who got herself a proper job first, got married first, and had a baby first. Vera might’ve been mistaking Vivian’s pride about all that for smugness, but it was hard to tell. “A fine line” like their Pawpy liked to say. Vera’d wanted kids but it hadn’t happened for her and Wally. They’d settled for a different kind of life. The kind her mother’d warned her about when she’d done all her complaining about the “criminal element seeping into Wooster” way back when. Back when the Brinkerhoffs next door started renting rooms to a couple of down-and-out men during the Depression. Well, her mother’d been right. Wally Irwin had what Vera would call a “colorful” past, and he had the colorful friends that went along with it.
Wally was the one person who could stand up to her, and she liked it. Or, she liked it until she wanted to have her way, and then things could get rough. There had been a few black eyes, hers and his, because Vera gave as good as she got. She’d suffered a broken rib or two, but those healed up if she was careful about how she slept, and made sure not to hold the wash basket on that side. It didn’t happen when Wally’s friends were around, though, so Vera learned to like the gambling-casino/boardinghouse atmosphere of their house in Akron, because it meant a more or less peaceful household and unbruised knuckles for both husband and wife. Vera played poker with them, she drank with them, and she fed them. And she listened to all their stories.
The screen door creaked open again and Zella stepped out holding two tall glasses of what looked like iced tea. Vera took one of the glasses.
“It’s lemonade with whiskey,” Zella explained. “But the way I make it, it looks like iced tea, so the neighbors won’t get nosy.”
Vera held out her glass and clinked the edge of Zella’s drink.
“Here’s to that.”
As they drank their “iced teas” Zella told her all about her cousins Betty and John, and how their mother was her mother’s sister, but they didn’t really talk anymore, because you know how sisters get. Vera had glanced at the jack-o’-lantern. Once Zella got past mocking all the Wooster Country Club stuff, sticking her nose high in the air and putting on a prissy tone of voice, and complaining how different her cousins were now, Vera could hear wistfulness behind the resentment.
“You know,” Vera ventured, “my sister went around with John, way back in the day.”
“John Reed? My Cousin John? No foolin’?”
Vera nodded. “Before she got married.”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Vivian. Vivian McGinty at the time.”
“Hunh.” Zella took a drag on a freshly lit cigarette. “She pretty?”
Vera’s our sturdy one, Vivy’s our pretty one, and Violet’s our baby. All her life. And it never got any easier to hear.
“I suppose.” She managed to grunt out the words.
She didn’t even like to admit it to herself, but maybe, just once, Vera would’ve liked to hear that she was pretty.
“I wonder if she was the one he was so crazy about. There was one of those girls he was just head over heels for, just plumb nuts about, and when she threw him over, he was pretty sore about it.” Zella squinted at a squirrel jumping across the road. “Yep. He was sore, but Betty took it even harder. She was fit to be tied.”
Vera hadn’t paid too much attention to Vivian’s beaux, but she remembered John Reed because he was one of the north siders. A four-flusher. Once, Vera’d tried to tell Wally that “four-flusher” meant a richie, when he’d been saying it had to do with
card playing, but he hadn’t been in the mood to argue and Vera hadn’t been in the mood for another bruised arm.
People always said Vivian was pretty, but Vera’d thought Vivian was just pretty stupid not to marry John Reed. She could’ve had as many Beulah Bechtel dresses as she wanted; clothes were so damned important to her.
Vera felt herself getting all worked up again over Vivian being the goddamned belle of the ball. Everything went Vivian’s way, and she didn’t even notice it. She was always feeling sorry for herself. Maybe it was about time somebody gave her something to really feel sorry about.
Vera’d heard it from the mouth of Marvin Taggart, one of Wally’s buddies “from the old days.” The old days, right after that lousy Wally’d left the Brinkerhoffs’ boardinghouse, leaving a smitten Vera high and dry and stuck in Spinster City for eight years. He’d taken the Brinkerhoffs’ other boarder, Ralph Eberly, with him and Vera’d shouted after them that she hoped Ralph would keep him warm at night.
The men had hitched on the railroad around Galion, and the New York Central line took them to Cleveland, then Buffalo, then Syracuse, then Albany, and back to Wooster. While most everyone else was heading west after the Depression, Wally and Ralph thought they’d be smart and head in the opposite direction, picking up jobs where they could. One of the jobs had been construction, in Syracuse, New York, in ’33. Some big shot relocating his baseball franchise to Syracuse had to have the stadium finished in three months. The rushed deadline meant the pay was good; Wally loved to tell Vera all about when “the pay was good.” Because those were the days, he’d say. Wally, Ralph Eberly, Forest Sadler, Marvin Taggart. They’d all been there, and though they’d gone their separate ways afterward, they reconnected now and again in Akron to drink and play poker at Wally and Vera’s place. Marvin had gone his separate way straight to the prison at Auburn after he’d been caught stealing a car near Syracuse.
The Operator Page 27