The piano music stops. “Is that Ann?” Hank steps up behind and peers out over Dad’s head. He’s always been as tall and lanky as a stork, with thinning hair. Now he’s completely bald.
“Hi, Uncle Hank.” She tosses another snowball between her hands. “Dad and I are playing.”
“Playing? It was an ambush,” Dad says with a grin. From the peg behind the door, he takes down his wool coat. The black furry hat he pulls from the pocket is the same one she remembers him always wearing. “I’m on to you now.”
The snowball fight is short and laughter-filled. Hank brings out two pairs of gloves. The ones he gives Louise are too big and smell like the Aqua Velva he’s always worn. She slips them on and joins Dad in rolling the base of a snowman.
“So why didn’t Arnie come out this time?” Dad asks, pushing the ball. It’s about the size of a watermelon. “Haven’t seen that mug of his in quite a while.”
Louise deflects. “That’s because you refuse to come out to L.A.”
“After those crashes? You’re not getting me on an airplane.” He stops when the base is half as high as his knee.
“You need to get yourself a car and then you can drive out to see me.” She nods toward where the Champ is parked in the driveway.
“Much easier to make enough pathetic phone calls that you give in and come to New Jersey.”
She knows he’s teasing, but she reaches across and puts her hand over his. “Sorry it’s been so long this time.”
He sniffs loudly and squeezes her hand. “The cold is making my nose run.” He slips off his glove and fishes in his pocket for a handkerchief. “You didn’t answer my question about Arnie. He couldn’t come along? It’s Christmas.”
Christmas in the little house on Rodeo Drive is Bing Crosby records, strings of lights, Tom and Jerrys, and rare steaks. But she says, “Oh, that doesn’t mean much out in Hollywood.” She tries to sound flippant. “The tinsel in ‘Tinseltown’ doesn’t apply to the holidays. The only day we get off work is Cecil B. DeMille’s birthday.”
He prudently doesn’t ask why she’s had a week to drive across the U.S. “Then Arnie’s busy working.” He starts another ball rolling.
Even when he was working, Arnie and she always made a pact. Nothing but books and bedroom slippers and late afternoon naps from Christmas to New Year’s. “Terribly busy.”
Dad stops rolling. “Al.” He puts a gloved hand under her chin and tips her face up. “Stop worrying about your lines. There’s no script for life, my girl.”
“There has to be,” she insists.
“Nope. No choreography. No blocking. No score. You improvise and ad-lib and hope you have the right co-stars.”
“I do.” She might not have been certain when she set off from L.A., but she is now. “Does he?”
“I’ve seen that boy light up when you walk into a room.” He kisses her forehead. “He does.”
She smooths down the sides of the base. “He hasn’t been well,” she finally says. “Not since he got back.”
“Nobody really is, at least not right away.”
“It’s been three months, Dad.”
“Kiddo, do you realize how long it took me to get a decent night’s sleep after coming back from France?”
She shakes her head.
“Longer than three months.” He brushes off his gloves. “Soldiers aren’t used to getting much sleep. They’re not used to being safe or still or a lot of things. And I wasn’t even a soldier.”
“He keeps pushing me away.”
He raises his eyebrows. “So what did you do?”
She sits back on her heels. “I left.”
Dad doesn’t say anything, not for a while. “Are you going back?”
“Did you?” she asks suddenly. “You left too. That ranch we went to in Nevada all those years ago, it was a divorce ranch.” Snow sneaks past the edges of the gloves and touches her wrists.
“Your mother followed us out to the ranch. She wanted to reconcile. Instead she…Well, she died out there.” He blinks away snowflakes. “Don’t you remember?”
She doesn’t, not really. Just the acacia tree, the sweaty handful of primroses, the sound of Dad’s tears. The unmarked hole beneath the tree. A woman who smelled like Djer-Kiss holding her until she stopped crying. “A little.” Snow falls icy on the back of her neck. “I remember how a funeral feels. I didn’t remember it was in Nevada.”
“It was the radium that killed her,” he says. “A job that she had for half a minute during the war. Turns out all those girls poisoned themselves with each lick of paint.” He stacks a second snowball on top of the base. “They both worked in that tomb, but Ethel was the one who suffered.”
“Dad, Florrie died too,” she reminds him quietly. “It was cancer.”
He sighs and runs a hand across the back of his neck. “The radium was just biding its time, then.”
Louise slides off her gloves to shake out the snow inside. “You didn’t know Mom was dying when you went to Nevada. Please tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course not, Al. And when I found out, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. With the divorce.”
She crosses her arms and tucks her icy hands in her armpits. “Dad, why’d you want to divorce Mom to begin with?”
The front door opens. Yellow light spills out onto the trampled lawn. Hank comes out with a carrot and a pipe and a scarf for the snowman. And an extra scarf that he drapes gently around Dad’s neck. “I have hot cocoa, you two,” he says.
That one little gesture explains thousands of others she’d overlooked over the years. All of those Sunday dinners where Hank came with lemon meringue pie and stayed until after she went to bed. The way the two men cooked together and shared a newspaper. The duets they played on Dad’s piano, sitting close. That one time she’d found Hank’s reading glasses on the nightstand.
Louise looks at her dad, at the way he turns to the sound of Hank’s voice, at the way he smiles up through the falling snow. “Perfect,” she says, and means it.
Hank helps them up. “I’ve made meat pie with peas for dinner. It just went in the oven. It’s not much for a Christmas dinner, but your dad didn’t know when you’d arrive.”
“It sounds wonderful.” She pushes herself up on her tiptoes and kisses his cheek. “I’m glad you’re here, Uncle Hank.”
She swears the old man blushes.
They walk up to the front door, but the squeal of brakes makes Louise stop on the porch. She turns. A taxi is parked at the curb in front of Dad’s house. “Does Santa come by cab these days?” she says.
Dad scratches his head under his hat. “Hank, we expecting anybody?” he asks, without thinking.
But it isn’t Santa Claus who steps out onto the street. It’s her agent, Charlie, wearing a ridiculous hat with earflaps.
“My agent,” she tells Dad and Hank. “He hates the cold so much, he sneezes just thinking about it. What on earth are you doing here?” she calls.
He looks at her over the top of the taxi and lights a cigarette. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Liar.”
“Well, I was in the state.” He tucks his lighter back in his pocket. “I came to bring you a couple of Christmas presents.”
“Maybe you are Saint Nick after all.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Charlie walks around the taxi to the sidewalk. “Gift number one, we took the pot.”
She blinks. “What pot?”
“Poker?” Dad asks.
Charlie grins. “So to speak. Remember that bluff you wanted me to play, LuLu?”
The studio. The contract. “We…won?”
“Still have a few details to iron out, but I got you that new contract.” He says it almost casually. “It’s not perfect, but it does give you script approval, and a nice little pile of dough to boot.”
She claps her hands and spins around. “We won!” She kisses Dad and a startled Hank smack on the lips.
“Gift number two?�
� He picks his way carefully up the walkway. “I have a script for you to peruse. We’ll take it to the studio. It still needs a little work, but…”
She feels a little fissure of disappointment. “I’ve heard that before.”
Charlie holds up a finger. “Original story by Florence Daniels.” He seems to enjoy watching understanding settle on her face. “I stopped by your house to check in on that no-account husband of yours, and what do you know? He was halfway through a revision of a Daniels’ script.”
Behind her, Dad murmurs, “She left scripts?” but Louise can’t answer him right away.
Instead, to Charlie, she says incredulously, “He…read them? Arn did?”
“Had to send over to the neighbor for a new typewriter ribbon,” Charlie announces, resting a foot on the lower step. “After he washed the ink off his fingers, he let me take a look. Something about two friends and a Model T. Like I said, still needs some work, but…”
This time it’s Charlie she kisses. She almost knocks him down into the snow. “You’re better than Santa Claus.”
But he says, “Just wait,” and walks back to the cab.
The cabbie is unloading the trunk. He sets a suitcase on the sidewalk, and then a folded wheelchair. It glints in the taillights.
She steps off the porch.
The back door of the taxi opens. “Merry Christmas, Lou.”
She’s down the walk in a handful of seconds and kneeling in the snow by the curb.
“I thought about sending you a note,” Arnie says. The light from the front porch touches his face in the backseat of the cab. “I am a writer, after all.”
“A note?” She takes his hand without waiting to ask. “It’s been done before.”
He’s wearing an old tweed coat and a trilby. She’d forgotten how good he looks in a hat.
“I hope you don’t mind. I should’ve told you I was coming.” On the seat next to him, she can see a bouquet of wilted airport flowers.
“Mind?” She lets go of his hand. Behind her on the sidewalk the wheelchair rattles as Charlie locks it open. “Put your arms around my neck.”
“What?”
“You can’t eat Uncle Hank’s meat pie out here in the cab.” She slides an arm behind his back.
He pulls away. “Charlie can help me get into the chair. You don’t—”
“Arn.”
He looks up and she remembers that first glance across the library table. Eyes blue as oceans.
“That’s what love is, isn’t it? You take turns lifting each other up.”
He takes a deep breath and shrugs off her arm. He pivots so he’s facing her on the sidewalk. “Then let me show you how to do it right.” His voice is soft. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
The pain in the middle of her heart that she’s been carrying the past few months suddenly throbs less. “Then, Arn? Don’t ever fall asleep with your back to me again.”
“Don’t ever get rid of the Klimt book,” he says.
“Don’t ever wear the same pajamas twice,” she counters.
“Don’t ever repaint the living room.”
“Don’t ever hide subpoenas from me.”
“Don’t ever leave.”
She swallows and just shakes her head. “What did you decide about the hearing?”
He shrugs, trying to look casual. “It’s been a long while since I picked a good fight.”
She lets out a breath and nods. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Together?”
“Every inch of the way.”
He reaches for her, runs a hand across her cheek, through her hair. “Is this the cinematic fade-out over the sunset?”
“The end?” She raises herself up until they’re face-to-face. She kisses him like she should’ve months ago. “This is only Act Two.”
THE END
For Ellen and Owen,
who have many journeys ahead of them
Acknowledgments
Between 1917 and the 1940s, thousands of women worked in U.S. factories painting luminous dials on wristwatches, something in high demand in and above the trenches of both world wars. The paint they used was made with radium and mesothorium, which gave the dial the coveted glow so prized on dark battlefields. These women were taught that, in order to precisely shape the digits, they needed to draw the paintbrushes to a point with their lips. They were told that there was no danger in doing so and, in fact, ingesting the paint would give them a “healthy glow,” an attitude supported by the influx of radium-infused medicines and products for the home sold in the early twentieth century.
These working women might have been lost to history if it weren’t for the complications that arose from their work. Starting in 1923 former dial painters in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois began appearing at dentists’ and doctors’ offices with a host of alarming symptoms. Anemia. Tooth loss. Necrosis of the jaw. Spontaneous fractures. Bone lesions. Cancer. At first medical professionals under the pay of the radium companies dismissed the claims, discrediting the former dial painters with diagnoses of syphilis. But women working in New Jersey’s Department of Labor, Department of Health, and Consumers’ League didn’t shy from the challenge of working to give recognition and legitimacy to the dial painters’ complaints. Lawyers took up their cases, bringing suits against the radium paint corporations. Some women took settlements offered by the companies, but five, with nothing left to lose, brought their cases all the way to trial. They were dubbed “the Radium Girls” by a sympathetic press and their actions led to a reshaping of labor laws and establishment of industrial safety standards that are in effect today.
Though my dial painters are fictional, their experiences are based on those of very real Radium Girls. I combed contemporary news articles, medical journals, and court documents for details about their cases. I did this not only to make my characters real and vivid, but also to try to understand these women and their tenacity in the face of despair. I hope I have done their story justice. I dedicate this novel to those women who fought on, despite loss and worsening health, so that their children and grandchildren would have safe places to work and live.
I spent the writing of this book communing more with maps, brochures, and postcards than with actual people, but there are a few (people, not postcards) who deserve my utmost thanks.
To Anne Speyer for helping me to sharpen my writing to bring Louise’s story and Ethel and Florrie’s story to their emotional best.
To Courtney Miller-Callihan for her unending trust when, with only a hint of what I was writing, I hid away with my vintage maps and guidebooks.
To Rebecca Paul, for being my sounding board on Arnie’s recovery and therapy. And, also, for being my sister.
To Danielle Lewerenz and Rebecca Burrell for patiently listening to my frustrations, my brainstorming, and my countless “cool history facts.”
To anyone else, friend or stranger, who might have innocently asked, “So what are you researching today?”
Eternal gratitude to Jim, Ellen, and Owen for suffering through my enthusiastic responses to our regular “What did you learn today?” dinner-table question. They are now prepared for any spontaneous water-cooler conversations on early-twentieth-century autocamping. They can thank me later.
BY JESSICA BROCKMOLE
Letters from Skye
At the Edge of Summer
Woman Enters Left
PHOTO: © SARAH LYN BALBOUGH
JESSICA BROCKMOLE is the author of the internationally bestselling Letters from Skye, which was named one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly, a novella in Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War, and At the Edge of Summer. She lives in northern Indiana with her husband, two children, and far too many books.
Jessicabrockmole.com
Facebook.com/jessicabrockmoleauthor
Twitter: @jabrockmole
Woman Enters Left
Jessica Brockmole
A READER’S GUIDE
A
Peek into the Archive
Just the other day I came home from an antiques shop and showed a treasure—slightly dusty—to my husband. It was a pre-printed postcard dated 1948 and sent by a local power company. The text on the back announced that the county had standardized road names and a uniform house-numbering system, and could the resident please use their official address as typed on the front in all communications? Handwritten in pencil was a helpful note to the resident: “For trouble nights & holidays” they should call Consumers Power at the following five-digit number.
Needless to say, my husband wasn’t as impressed as I was by this crooked little postcard. “Who saves things like that?” he asked. Implicit in the question, I knew, was, “Who wants things like that?” Well, I always answer, historical novelists do.
Finds like that little postcard hold so much for the novelist. The printed message, of course. The one-cent postage stamp, perhaps. The handwriting and the use of pencil instead of pen. The neat, spare address (no zip code yet). The rubber stamp across the front inviting the recipient to buy U.S. bonds. These tiny details help us writers to bring a time and place to life on the page.
When researching modern history, these ephemeral treasures are easy to find. Those who spend their days in past centuries—whether historians or novelists—seek primary sources and original documents. Twentieth-century historians often have it easier than those who explore earlier eras. Not only do we research a period when mass media and mass communication were both cheap and plentiful, but the distance between then and now is obviously shorter. To reach into the past, we don’t have far to go.
The things that people save and tuck away in attic boxes often find their way to archives or local historical societies. Letters. Journals. Photos. High school yearbooks. The stories in these are usually right on the surface, ready for a novelist and her “what ifs.” I’ve had many a fun evening (for serious) with a high school yearbook and a census, seeing how a moment in time played out over the years. Did Floyd find success after four years in the school literary club? Did “Most Likely to Succeed” Helen go to college like she planned? Research + imagination = a story waiting to be written.
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