Claudia, stunned and speechless, watched her husband warily as he pulled a flask from his inside pocket and swigged down a few gulps. He offered it to her, and when she looked blankly at him, tucked it away again. He wore a slight smirk on his face and seemed to forget her for the rest of their ride to the Cates mansion. Claudia went upstairs and changed into her traveling clothes. She later remembered feeling numb in the hours before their flight headed for Tijuana, where they honeymooned. Escape seemed unthinkable, her sense of duty clear, despite her muddled thoughts.
That evening, seated across from him in their hotel dining room, she watched the handsome man, whom she had thought of as shy during their courtship, down shot after shot of bourbon.
“You were damned pretty in that dress. You looked like an angel.” Timothy’s good humor had not yet waned. But the more drunk he became, the more his sweet talk disintegrated. He muttered the words “pussy whipped,” “goddamn hobitches,” and “tight-ass cunts.” Claudia was insulted and embarrassed, even though there was no one around to witness the exchange.
Afterward, as they walked together toward the elevator, he staggered slightly, and she placed her arm around his waist to steady him. He jerked away from her and in the process almost lost his footing on the gleaming marble floor of the hotel lobby. Arriving at their room, Claudia felt anxious about not being able to subdue whatever coarseness the liquor was unleashing in him. Timothy managed to remove his jacket, becoming momentarily entangled in one of the sleeves. This done, he awkwardly grabbed his wife, steering her backward until she fell onto the queen-size bed. Not knowing what was to come, Claudia’s instinct was to lie unmoving beneath him while he groped her, then fumbled at his zipper. Gradually, without success, he sighed once, then began to breathe heavily, lying still on top of her. She knew then that he had passed out and began to get free of his weight. Standing, she looked down at him and, shaking her head, began to right his still figure awry on the bed. This was the first of a ritual they would act out for the next three decades of their marriage.
Claudia did not resist Timothy’s entreaties to her when he was sober. Rather, she steeled herself for the ten minutes or so that their lovemaking lasted. With only the vaguest notion of what constituted gratification, and no actual experience, she never made demands, nor did he ask if he was pleasing her. When other women talked about making love with their husbands, their experiences of rapture did not register with her. Beginning with their wedding night, Claudia did not enjoy sex with Timothy because of his drinking. Early on in their marriage, she made her disinterest clear. The couple settled into a pattern of cordial estrangement, talking minimally at the dinner table about household concerns and family news. Sex was something Claudia did not really miss, but she did miss the respectability she had had as a Cates daughter, and she had fully expected that to be enhanced by marrying and being a wife. So, when women began calling the house asking for him, they would bicker. When sober, Timothy smoothed things over ably, telling her she was the only woman he could ever love.
“These women, they just want some attention,” he said. “They don’t mean anything to me. We can’t let it come between us. You’re a lady, Claudia, and I can’t always get you hot when I need to.”
Claudia took Timothy at his word and wondered secretly that she might be deficient somehow in her womanliness. She buried her fear of being frigid and halfheartedly consented to his philandering. She was never able to talk to him about his drinking without his bringing up that her coldness was at the root of all their problems.
Ultimately, Timothy functioned as Claudia’s escort to the lavish galas of Chicago’s black uppercrust. In this milieu, Claudia kept very busy with parties, club meetings, and volunteer work. She had a pleasant circle of friends scattered throughout Hyde Park. These women were married, indifferently for the most part, but the shared discussions over their designer wardrobes, their Wisconsin and Michigan summer homes, the schools chosen for fractious children, and the rotating decoration of their lakeside apartments fueled a closeness dependent on each’s respective place in their elegant, cloistered world, a world unknown to Peoria.
It was hard for Claudia to come back to the town full of people she grew up with, an excruciating dislocation, causing her to feel and behave oddly. She misinterpreted the requirements of local decorum because she had forgotten them. Her tastes and world-view were tainted by her Chicago years. She had to get used again to rising early, even though for the life of her, she couldn’t imagine what was so urgent about the sun coming up. She was easily bored with church-related social activities, but had to attend. A repeated absence by any member of the Cates family would be too conspicuous. Claudia was strange, and despite her effort to do otherwise, she seemed to signal to her native community that she had no wish to conform. She desired apparently to remain as she was, in plain view of her neighbors, but out of reach.
Timothy came home with Claudia, thinking that Rebecca’s money would make life easier and his access to it would attract more women. He was wrong; Rebecca fully expected him to work.
Gracelyn Cates experienced true passion. She married Bernard, a man she met at college. He was handsome, sensuous, and intended to teach English. They shared a love of literature and books, as well as each other. Their first five years together were bliss. But during this time, unknown to Bernard, Gracelyn had been writing a novel. He had no idea his wife, who had majored in home economics, was as skillful at crafting sentences as she had been at decorating their home and arranging their garden. She sent it off and received more than one offer for publication. Bernard was unable to reconcile himself to his wife’s success as a published writer. His own writing had been curtailed by a rigorous teaching schedule. He withdrew from her emotionally in the face of her achievement. Her physical loveliness still held him bound, but he maintained a silence at home, and over a period of months Gracelyn lived with his torture of her, taking refuge in her garden. After her early success, she stopped her own writing regimen in an attempt to save their union. But she began to write again, secretly, during trips to the library, carefully hiding her work in their home when she returned. Again taking up her passion provided her with a glow she believed had been permanently lost. Still, she tread lightly around Bernard all those years, making certain he understood he was more important to her than her craft.
Gracelyn got used to walking on eggshells, taking pains to do or say nothing she thought might displease her husband. All the while, her longing for him was unabated. She prayed that their love would rekindle and they would resume the tenderness she had known for five years with him. After awhile, when this did not happen, Gracelyn, tense and unhappy, began to eat excessively. Bernard’s response to her increased appetite and weight gain was to call her “Piglet.”
Gracelyn fought her intuition that Bernard’s professional envy had unleashed a desire to destroy her, but she continued to write in secret. One Sunday afternoon during a midterm break, Bernard discovered her manuscripts, hidden in the dining room beneath leather-bound scrapbooks in their breakfront. Leafing through each page to get the sense of it, it dawned on Bernard that this was Gracelyn’s work. There were stories, poems, and worst of all, a new novel, unfinished.
“Gracelyn!” he commanded furiously, “Come in here!” Standing before her, he waved the thick mass of pages in front of her face. “Why have you done this? Why can’t you just be my wife and be satisfied?”
Bernard continued, visiting insults upon her and irrationally attacking her womanhood. Gracelyn stood before him for long minutes in silence, then suddenly moaned and wrapped her arms around her belly. In a swift motion, she crumpled to the floor and began writhing. Bernard stopped his tirade, stunned and silent as the stream of blood flowed from beneath his prostrate wife.
After Gracelyn’s miscarriage, Bernard was kinder to her. Noting this, and still hopeful of regaining his love permanently, Gracelyn began talking to him about moving to Peoria. Living in the Cates home would ease the pres
sure on Bernard to earn a living, she reasoned, and he could write full-time and catch up to her own success. At first he resisted, but with the possibility of artistic fulfillment and ego redemption dangled in front of him, he consented. Once they arrived in the town, Bernard threw himself into his own writing, isolating himself in an attic office in the Cates home for long periods. He did not welcome interruption. It was clear to Gracelyn that it was more important for him to outdo her than to resume his love for her.
Gracelyn lost her husband to his work. They made love occasionally; otherwise Bernard was distant. Gracelyn knew he used her body only for physical release, and that the spiritual union she once felt with him was no more. But she continued to hope. When Bernard contracted a terminal bone cancer, it was hard for her to think of him leaving her for the next life. In fact, she could not have missed him any more than she already had.
It was left to the sisters now to put their men away without scandal, and in the aftermath they looked forward to becoming each others’ primary companions, as they had been when they were growing up. Without their husbands, their yearnings for a new lease on life could be realized. Each knew the mission had to be accomplished delicately. They had seen the way other women in the town absolved themselves of men who for years had not been able to make love to them, and who now could not dream or discuss doing anything with their lives, other than to survive the misery of their remaining days. The right places had to be found, not too remote and not too near, with good reputations, and expensive enough so that their community would know they had done right by their ailing partners.
The Cates women needed to be careful not to arouse suspicion of wanting to start their lives over, freed of partners who made them miserable, had not fulfilled them, or who could not have measured up to their father in the first place.
“We’re losing the light,” Rebecca noted after the women completed a second hour of piecework and conversation. “Let’s go in; I need to pay Lucy before she takes off.”
II
AT REBECCA’S BIDDING, the sisters placed their work into wicker baskets and went inside the house to reassemble around the dining table. Lucy had set out tea utensils for them, and, in the minutes before she knew the sisters would be coming inside, filled the teapot and placed it on the stove. For this part of their Sunday ritual, the Cates women put their handiwork aside to have tea and dessert baked earlier during the morning’s elaborate food preparation. They sat in the stately room surrounded by hung photographs of Reuben and Mattie, Reuben’s mother, Mattie’s parents, themselves as children, and their wedding photos.
Claudia had baked dessert, her specialty, a sweet potato pie with a custardlike texture. When she heard the teapot whistling in the kitchen, the slender woman rose from her seat to prepare peppermint tea and slightly reheat the luscious pie. Rebecca and Gracelyn waited, excited as little girls, for their evening treat, though they knew their glamorous sister would take her time.
This Sunday, Rebecca told Lucy to lay out the gold-rimmed ivory Sheffield china with an orchid pattern, her favorite of all of Mattie’s sets. Rebecca’s earthy appearance belied her quite ethereal tastes. The orchids she cultivated in the estate’s small greenhouse—Laelia, Dendrobium, and Phalaenopsis hybrids—were exquisite, and before bringing blooms into the house, she spent hours deciding on the right crystal or silver vase or porcelain urn. She would see the arrangement in her mind’s eye first, then astonish Claudia and Gracelyn by how easily she executed it. To Rebecca, using the family’s best china and silver service for tea added a visual feast to the gastronomic one.
Claudia carried over to the table a huge silver tray with slices of pie topped with fresh whipped cream on dessert plates, teacups and saucers, and napkins held snugly in engraved silver rings. The women ate leisurely, continuing their gossip and laughter until a long moan was dimly heard from the second story above their heads.
Claudia continued the discussion Rebecca had started on the front porch.
“I hear Briney Memorial’s a decent place. Louella has Joseph up there and he’s a drinking man like Timothy. Louella tells me they do very well with that sort.”
“That near Chicago?” Rebecca queried. At Claudia’s affirmative nod, Rebecca commented, “Be good for you visiting. You could see some of your friends in the city from time to time.”
Claudia blushed, but she understood clearly Rebecca approved of her mixed motive for the selection of Briney Memorial for Timothy. Rebecca knew that Claudia had thrived in the social whirl of black Chicago society and reigned for years at formal balls given by the archaic clubs to which she and Timothy belonged. When Timothy’s drinking caused him to miss out on important seasonal engagements, it had been uncomfortable for Claudia to make her entrances unescorted. Now in her mid-fifties and still stunning, Claudia looked forward to making public appearances sans scandal, amid the common knowledge that her husband’s health had failed and she had had to institutionalize him. She loved being with her sisters in Peoria. It seemed they never had enough time to talk and laugh over vivid memories of their childhood. But she also longed to be a celebrated dowager in what was to her the exciting social network of Chicago she left behind when she returned home. Rebecca also realized that Claudia had never fully understood Timothy’s drinking, but had at some point made her peace with the inevitability of it. She had accepted her responsibilities as his spouse as Rebecca outlined them, but was now well past the stage of wringing her hands over his lost potential and ruined health.
Rebecca added, “Be good for me to go up there and visit some of our congregations.”
Gracelyn, understanding that this was her moment, chimed in.
“They always have important lectures at the University of Chicago. I keep saying I’m going to subscribe to their author series. It would be good for me to go up there with you from time to time.” She added in afterthought, “When you’re visiting Timothy.”
Rebecca declared resolutely, “It’ll be good all the way around.”
Both Gracelyn and Rebecca were sensitive to Claudia’s dilemma. Timothy, unlike poor confused Jake and terminally ill Bernard, was pretty much a quiet drunk, and his behavior was not considered serious enough to warrant permanent confinement. Also, though it was generally known that he chased women, his dalliances were somewhat overlooked because many people considered Claudia to be a cold fish. The general reasoning was she should be happy now that he had become too weak to betray her.
Claudia would have to unload Timothy at some distance from her neighbors’ judging, so that even if their first reaction was disapproving, the memory of the once-handsome man peacefully imbibing too much liquor at local bars, would dim. Neighbors would have to be satisfied that Timothy was well taken care of at his remote location near Chicago, and the sisters’ visits to see him at Briney Memorial would have to be grandly orchestrated.
Rebecca thought shrewdly that she would have Claudia stand up at church during the sick and shut-in announcements and inform the congregation each time they were planning to go see him. She knew that Claudia—who loved dressing up and making entrances, but who was actually shy about speaking in front of a group—would be nervous. Expressing concern for Timothy’s well-being would call for some acting skills, but Rebecca thought Claudia would rise to the occasion. Timothy would continue to appear the focal point of her life, when in reality, she was, as were her sisters, women who could now pursue their own agendas. Rebecca, who could strategize like a general, knew these repeated announcements would eventually endear Claudia to their community and neutralize any antifemale sentiment Reverend Wilson might cull from the sisters’ actions.
In between visits, they could all report on how their men were doing, Jake at Sacred Lamb in Springfield, Timothy at Briney Memorial, and Bernard at a nearby hospice. Bernard’s prognosis was six months or less, yet Gracelyn had already stated her rationale for putting him away, rather than letting him die at home.
“I don’t want him to suffer any more than
he has to,” she had informed Rebecca and Claudia on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks prior. “The doctors and nurses can do a lot more for him and I’ll ask them to increase his morphine. I’ve been praying that maybe they can find out something more about this dreadful disease from examining him on a regular basis.” She then told her sisters she had just a week or two before she would receive word from the hospice to call an ambulance to bring Bernard in.
Rebecca knew Gracelyn might never fully get over her love for Bernard, and that her furious writing activity was her way of distancing herself from his tragedy. Rebecca intuited that this was driven as much by Gracelyn’s confusion and regret as it was by her younger sister’s rekindled ambition. Rebecca knew that Gracelyn was also struggling with bitterness over the years lost to a futile love, and now, realizing that her hope of Bernard’s loving her again was completely dashed, her bitterness might easily reach full flower and turn to rage. It would be best to remove the helpless man from the household sooner than later. In the meantime, Rebecca, while encouraging Gracelyn’s distractions, would be a nonjudgmental confidant and do her best to soothe her sister’s inner turbulence.
Rebecca, coming back to their primary issue, decided to raise the stakes.
“Reverend Wilson doesn’t spend enough time talking about our sick and shut-in members to suit me. All these men falling by the wayside and all these new widows. I’ve decided to bring it up to him that we need to stay regular with telling who’s in, who’s out of the hospital, who’s ailing, and so forth. Maybe we could work up a little ceremony for women who have had to nurse their husbands for a long time, a prayer ceremony to keep them filled with the spirit, and keep them going. I think I’ll stop by the parish house this week and talk to him.”
Claudia absorbed the import of Rebecca’s statement in seconds. She was not the strategist her sister was, but she knew that Rebecca’s plans for challenging Reverend Wilson had been thoroughly mapped out. Her head jerked up from her dessert plate, where she had just stabbed a last morsel of pie with her fork, and, midway to her mouth, Gracelyn’s cup of tea paused for several seconds as they took in Rebecca’s words. Both of them knew precisely what their elder sister meant. When Rebecca made a decision, they never questioned her motives or doubted the outcome would be in her favor. But this would be a bold strike indeed.
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