The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  They parked the car and got out and walked up the sandy drive to the house.

  He pushed his way in ahead of her, taking her hand. The music was an assault to the ears, the smoke, the closely packed bodies reeking of whiskey and tobacco and sweat was almost too much for her. She had to breathe through her mouth, looking down at her feet as he pulled her along. There were no tables but he managed to find them a couple of spaces at the bar, and he made room for her beside him and ordered two Highballs.

  He leaned over and said into her ear, “See anyone you know?”

  She shook her head, looking around the smoky club.

  “Not your usual crowd.”

  “No,” she said, hoping her relief wasn’t too apparent.

  The band was playing I’ll Get By and the dance floor was packed. Beside them at the bar, a couple of young women wearing too much rouge laughed loudly. Their dates eyed Alice boldly.

  “Do you come here often?” She had to lean in to talk to him, so close she could smell the faint scent of his cologne.

  “I come for the music,” he said. He leaned his elbows on the bar behind him, regarding her with a grave expression. Beneath his steady appraisal, Alice found herself wondering if her lipstick was applied correctly, if her hair had lost its carefully-constructed wave and gone wild and curly in the heat.

  “The Jazz Age is dead Up East,” he said, “but down here everyone’s still dancing the shimmy.”

  “So you’re saying we’re provincial hicks.”

  “Compared to New York, yes.”

  She eyed him above the rim of her drink. “Spend a lot of time in New York, do you?”

  He frowned, looking down into his glass. The part in his carefully combed dark hair was as white and straight as if drawn with a ruler. He was wearing a navy blazer and a pair of wide-bottomed trousers, and Alice was struck again by the quality of the cloth and the fit of his clothes. So different from the first night she’d met him, in his greasy jumpsuit with his hair combed carelessly and breaking over his forehead.

  “I go up a couple of times a year on business.” He swirled his drink, and looked at her. “Have you ever been?”

  “Many times. A number of the girls I go to Sweet Briar with are from the city. We’d ride the train up on the weekends to go to house parties.”

  He looked at the dance floor, watching the sweating couples who were dancing with vigorous abandon. “Sweet Briar,” he said distantly. “Where’s that?”

  “Virginia.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “Didn’t my sister tell you where I was in school.”

  He stared at the crowd. The music crescendoed and then stopped. The musicians shuffled around on the stage and set their instruments down to take a break. “Your sister rarely mentions you at all,” he said, grimacing, and tossed back his drink.

  Ridiculous that his comment should bother her, but it did. She had been the one to bring Laura up, not him. But mentioning her seemed to set up a chill between them, an uneasy distance, so that they both stared at the dance floor for some time without speaking.

  It was easy to tell herself that she was here to rescue her sister, to see to it that she didn’t risk her reputation on a man like Brendan Burke. And even her promise to see him tonight, extracted from her on the Country Club dance floor, had been more about preventing a scene with Bill Whittington than anything else. Or so she had told herself earlier, as she carefully dressed to meet Brendan. But why then, had she agreed to come with him to the jazz club? Why had she been so hesitant to let the evening end? What excuse could she possibly find for that?

  She found him attractive; there was no denying it. He was different from the men she usually dated. They were polished and self-assured but he had his rough edges, a feeling of containment that seemed at times, forced. She felt that by hiding parts of himself away, by keeping secrets, he made himself more interesting. She imagined him a man capable of great passion. She had seen it in his face earlier when he spoke of jazz, when he listened to the five-man negro band build to the pumping crescendo of I’ll Get By, the ride-out he called it, his lips parted, eyes narrowed with pleasure. His hands, with their long blunt fingers, rapped the bar in time to the music. It was easy to imagine those hands, strong, capable, cupping a breast or stroking a thigh.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” he said and she looked up to see him regarding her with a look of curious amusement.

  Her face flushed with a sudden heat and she turned her shoulders, leaning back against the bar.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “It’s rather warm in here.”

  “Let’s finish our drinks and then we’ll leave.”

  The band climbed back onto the stage, swinging into a spirited rendition of Nagasaki, and the crowd reacted enthusiastically. A young man in a Glen plaid suit came up and tapped Alice on the shoulder.

  “Would you like to dance?” he said.

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Brendan said. He took her hand and led her toward the dance floor.

  “That was rude,” Alice said.

  “Was it?”

  “You know it was.”

  “I’m not as generous as Bill Whittington,” he said, pulling her smoothly into his arms.

  It was after midnight when they finally left. Walking out into the cool night air was like diving into icy water. Alice stopped for a moment, breathing deeply, filling her lungs hungrily. He still held her hand. She didn’t pull away.

  They walked quietly down the sandy lane toward the field where they’d parked the car. The field was less crowded now; only a few dozen cars remained. The grass glistened wetly in the slanting light from the club windows. He leaned and opened her door and then held it, slightly askew, so she couldn’t step inside.

  “I want to see you again,” he said. His face in the dim light was pale but determined.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Are you engaged to Whittington?”

  “No.”

  “Then I want to see you again.”

  “Look,” she began reasonably but, without asking, he leaned over and kissed her. The move was so unexpected, so smooth and practiced, the weight of his mouth so pleasurable, that she gave herself up to him almost immediately, leaning with her back against the warm car while he kissed her hungrily.

  The music began again, faintly, the beginning strains of Summertime rising along the ridge tops into the starry sky. Far off across the river, the distant sound of a passing train echoed, low and mournful.

  Laura was sitting up in bed reading Anna Karenina when she came in. She called softly to Alice as she walked by.

  “Have you been out with Bill Whittington?” Her face in the lamp light was thin and hauntingly beautiful.

  “No,” Alice said. “With some friends.”

  “Ah.” She smiled faintly and looked down at her book, a delicate color rising in her face. “Mother said you had broken it off with Bill.”

  “Mother seems to keep her ear to the ground when it comes to my affairs.”

  “You know how she is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight, Laura.”

  Ten

  Alice’s power was back on when Stella arrived on the following Wednesday and the orange cones across the end of her driveway were gone. Elaine was busy writing in the binder when she walked into the kitchen.

  “When did the power come back on?” Stella asked, setting her backpack down on the counter.

  “Sunday night. The second storm that came in Thursday night was awful. It hit not long after you left. I made Alice get in the hallway and we huddled there until it passed.”

  “I’ll bet she liked that.”

  Elaine gave her a faint, practiced smile. “How about you?” she said. “Did you lose power?”

  “No, believe it or not, we were one of the few houses in the whole valley that didn’t.”

  “Lucky you. It’s still out on Signal.”<
br />
  “Sorry.”

  Elaine began to collect her knitting, stuffing it into a long embroidered bag. “Oh, one other thing. The cable’s out. So Alice can’t watch Family Feud or Wheel of Fortune. It’s made for a couple of tense nights.”

  “Well, we don’t watch a lot of TV anyway.”

  Elaine straightened, an expression of curious disbelief on her face. “Really? What do you do then?”

  “Mainly Alice tells me stories and I listen.”

  Elaine stared at her as if she couldn’t quite comprehend this. She gathered her embroidered bag and her laptop. “I’ll see you tonight,” she said.

  Stella waited until she heard the front door slam and then she opened the binder and read what Elaine had written.

  Restless last night. She dreamed about someone named Brendan. When I asked her this morning, she said she didn’t know who I was talking about. She was breathless this morning when I woke her.

  Stella walked down the long hallway to the bedroom to say good morning.

  “Oh, hello,” Alice said. “You’re back.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “So the power came back on Sunday night?”

  “Yes. And not a minute too soon. She had me get in the hallway while she was on the phone to her mother, hysterical, that we were going to get killed by a tornado.”

  “Sorry, Alice. I probably should have stayed.”

  “I kept telling her, If we get hit by a tornado, so what? If it’s our time to go, it’s our time to go.”

  “I’m sure that made her feel a whole lot better.”

  “Do you know what she said to me last time we were sitting in the dark? She said, Alice, I’m going to sing you some hymns.” Alice rolled her eyes and her expression was so droll that Stella laughed.

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, Oh, yes please.”

  “And how long did this go on?”

  “Too long.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m not going to sing you any hymns.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said.

  That morning as they walked through the living room, Stella looked down at the hazy valley and said, “Alice, can you see the Incline from here?”

  “What?”

  “The Incline.”

  “The what?”

  “The Incline Railroad,” Stella said loudly. “Can you see it from here?”

  “You can’t see the Incline from here. It’s on the other side. Although the view on this side is better than on East Brow. Over there all you can see is the cemetery and the cement factory.” She chuckled maliciously when she said this, sliding her walker out in front of her.

  The Incline was the steepest passenger railway in the world. It ran up the side of Lookout Mountain and in places boasted a vertical incline of over seventy percent. Stella had ridden it once when she first moved to Chattanooga. It began in a little town at the foot of Lookout Mountain named St. Elmo, an old suburb of Victorian cottages fallen on lean times, and ended at the top of the mountain near Point Park, a world famous tourist attraction.

  Later, as they where having lunch, Alice said, “You know, I went one day to pick up my son, Roddy, at the Incline and he wasn’t there. My children all went down to Miss Fenimore’s School and the teacher was supposed to put them on the Incline after school and I’d pick them up at the station. Anyway, one day Roddy wasn’t on the train. His cousins, Spears and Barrett, were there but Roddy wasn’t. So I drove down to Miss Fenimore’s School and I said, Where’s Roddy? You didn’t put him on the Incline. And the teacher, Ann Ricks, said Oh, did I forget one of the Whittingtons? There’s just too many of them to keep track of! And she and the headmistress acted like it was just a big joke. So I lit into them. I mean, I really let them have it.”

  Stella laughed, imagining Alice in her prime doing battle with a couple of prim school teachers.

  “Now see,” Alice said in a querulous voice. “You’re laughing just like they did. I didn’t think it was funny.”

  “Sorry, Alice.” Stella coughed and put her fist to her mouth. She looked down at her plate. After a moment of quiet chewing, she swallowed and said, “Was he okay?”

  “Who?”

  “Roddy.”

  “Oh, Roddy was fine. He was waiting for me up at the Incline station. When Ann Ricks drove off without him he just took the bus down to the station in St. Elmo and took the train up.”

  Alice finished her lunch and pushed the plate away. She wiped the front of her bib with a napkin. “Well, that was very nice,” she said.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” Stella said.

  “You’re a very good putter-together person.”

  “Well, Sawyer keeps the refrigerator pretty well stocked so I don’t have to think too much about it.”

  “He’s a very good shopper. And griller. He loves to cook things on his shiny new grill.”

  “Lucky for his wife,” Stella said. She was still thinking about Alice doing battle with the school teachers and trying to imagine her as a young mother. Had she been the nurturing type, the kind who played games with her children and helped them with their homework? She couldn’t imagine Alice as a nurturer. There was something aloof and distant about Alice; and her sarcastic tongue would have been sharp in those days, too. She had seen the way Alice’s friends treated her, how afraid they were to call and cancel luncheon appointments, how they seemed to cower in the face of her changing moods. There was no doubt in Stella’s mind that in school Alice had been one of the Mean Girls. The girl, who, with her sullen, bored demeanor and wicked tongue, would have been the leader of all the others. She said, “Did you like to cook when your children were younger?”

  Alice gave her a droll look. “I don’t cook,” she said. “I thaw.”

  Stella grinned. “I’ve never heard it put that way but I like it.”

  “The first time I saw frozen dinners in the supermarket I thought they were the most marvelous creation.”

  Still grinning, Stella rose to collect the plates. “Would you like some ice cream?”

  “What have we got?”

  “You name it, we’ve got it.”

  “Okay. Surprise me then.”

  Stella fixed a scoop of Banana Split and set it in front of Alice, and then sat back down. No, she decided, Alice would have been a detached mother. Perhaps not as detached as Stella’s own mother had been once she married Moody Bates, but Alice would have allowed a series of nurses to raise her children. She would have been busy with board meetings and bridge groups and fund raisers, all the standard activities women in her socio-economic group were expected to participate in. Stella thought, guiltily, of the letter she’d read written by Alice’s mother, the reference to the woman in the kitchen ironing – now what had her name been – Leta? Alice’s children would have been raised by a series of Letas.

  “Did you like having children, Alice?”

  Alice turned her head and stared, her eyes fixed and colorless. Her skin, in the slanting light from the kitchen window, was crisscrossed with fine wrinkles like old parchment. “What do you mean, did I like it? It wasn’t something I thought about. You just did it because it was expected of you in those days. You got married and you had children. There weren’t a lot of choices back then.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  Alice turned back to her ice cream. “Oh, that looks lovely,” she said, dipping her spoon. “What is it?”

  “Banana Split.”

  “Do you want some?”

  “No thanks.”

  Alice took a spoonful and stared at the wall, her mouth moving soundlessly. “Do you have children?” she said finally.

  “No, Alice.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” She jerked her head impatiently, as if she had just remembered their prior conversation. She pointed at the ice cream with her spoon. “What’s that red stuff on the top?”

  “Cherries? Don’t banana splits hav
e cherries on top?”

  “I guess they do,” Alice said. “Do you have a husband?”

  “A boyfriend.”

  “Does he make you happy?”

  “Well,” Stella said.

  “Don’t answer that,” Alice said. “It’s none of my business.”

  Outside in the street a truck chugged by. Stella cast about for something to say to change the subject. “Sawyer is a very good shopper,” she repeated lamely.

  “He’s a good kid, as Bill used to say.” Alice stuck another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth and chewed slowly, staring at the wall with an expression of rapt attention. “He does a lot of good work for The Salvation Army. He took over his place on the board from me.”

  Stella had seen the various crystal bowls and plaques scattered throughout the house from both The Salvation Army and Big Brothers/Big Sisters, thanking Alice for her tireless efforts on their behalf.

  Alice chuckled, her white curls trembling faintly. “At Christmas time, Sawyer likes to stand outside the Walmart at the foot of Signal Mountain ringing the bell.”

  “Really?” Stella said. It was comical, the idea of this trust fund scion haranguing the upper-middle class suburbanites for change. Stella decided once and for all that she liked Sawyer.

  “That’s really nice of him,” she said.

  “He learned it from me,” Alice said. “When the children were little we used to stand outside Goldman’s Department Store ringing the bell at Christmas time. Do you remember Goldman’s? No? Well, it was the fanciest store in town and everybody shopped there. People will act funny when you’re trying to get money out of them. We’d stand out there and I’d see someone I knew trying to duck into a side entrance and I’d send one of the children around to block their way. ‘Hello, Mrs. Jones’ they’d say sweetly. ‘And how are you today?’”