The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

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  For my mother and her sisters, my sisters, my daughters, and their daughters, and the good men in our lives.

  HOW THE STORY BEGINS

  1908

  Little Ruth felt herself being shaken. She opened an eye. Six-year-old June leaned over her, the sleeves of her red robe dragging against Ruth’s quilt.

  “Get up! Santa’s been here!”

  Ruth sat up and rubbed her eyes, then blinked at the top of June’s wavy gold hair as her big sister jammed slippers on her feet and buttoned her into her robe. She slid off their bed and let June lead her, slippers scuffing across the wood floor.

  They crouched at the entrance to the front room. Empty pink sockets flashed where June’s baby teeth had recently been. “Ready? One, two—”

  Ruth joined in. “—Free!”

  They burst into the room, where on a table, a scraggly pine, no taller than four-year-old Ruth, drooped under the weight of tinsel. The celluloid angel on top, a serene smile painted on her shiny face, dipped down as if to tell a secret. Mother and Dad, in their robes and nightcaps, stood off to the side, together, for once.

  “Ho ho ho,” said Dad. “Merry Christmas!”

  Ruth and June mined their stockings for peppermint sticks and then, with the candy crooked in their cheeks, attended to the presents under the tree, one for each girl.

  Ruth fingered a package wrapped in funny-papers as she eyed the larger one next to it.

  “That one’s for you, Ruthie,” Mother called from under Dad’s arm. When Ruth ripped it open, a rubber ball and metal jacks tumbled out. She looked over at her sister, freeing the bigger present from its sheet of newspaper—a doll the size of a sack of flour. Painted eyes stared out from its smooth cloth face.

  Ruth watched the little red ball roll past the smattering of jacks and under a chair. Tears needled her eyes and nose.

  June tilted her head at her, much in the manner of the tree angel. After a stroke of the doll’s long brown yarn hair, she held it out to Ruth. “Trade.”

  Ruth snatched the doll, clutched it to her throat, then glared at June as if challenging her to take it back. But June wasn’t watching. She was running her finger through the tinsel on the tree. If she gave her sister enough time, she would give it back. She always did.

  DOROTHY

  Are you in there?

  Good. I thought that you were.

  As I was saying: That rain! It had turned from prickly sleet into a pitiless deluge. I can still feel it beating my hair from its pins and rapping my neck with cold knuckles before it snaked an icy rivulet down my back. Teeth chattering, I drummed down the steps and to the dead lawn, where I splashed past the bandstand, over a muddy flower bed, and through some little trees. I stopped short. Ten-foot iron spears loomed in the dark before me: the fence that kept in the residents. I grabbed onto one of the rusty palings to catch my breath, then hoisted up the baby. She looked up from inside my coat. Even with fat raindrops plunking on her eleven-month-old’s fluff, her face was blank.

  Ice shot through my veins.

  I closed my collar over her head and plunged on toward the gatehouse. There was nothing wrong with her, no matter what Mrs. Lamb said. And if there was, I didn’t care.

  The excuses I had cooked up for the guard were a waste. He wasn’t in his little hut. I slipped out the gate and onto State Street, its bricks shining under a streetlamp.

  I hadn’t gotten far when I heard the sucking of shoe rubbers against brick. I turned away to let their owner pass.

  The sucking stopped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw soggy trouser legs about a body’s length away. I tightened my grip on the baby. Caught!

  “Are you all right?”

  My sights crept up a long black coat to a dripping umbrella. The umbrella tipped to reveal a young man in a bowler and rain-fogged wire-rim glasses. He had a chin the size of a hand trowel.

  “Ma’am?” he asked. “You need help?”

  My teeth hurt from chattering. A horse pulling a buggy clopped by, leaving a weighty splat. I could smell the manure as the buggy juddered away.

  The chinny fellow wouldn’t leave. “Ma’am?” He cleared his throat. “You don’t even have a hat.”

  I didn’t. It had fallen off when I’d snatched the baby out of the crib. Go away, I wanted to tell him, but couldn’t move my mouth. People get lockjaw from stepping on rusty nails. This was what it must feel like.

  “My sister Edna lives around the corner. On Parnell. I was just heading there from a wireless telegraphy meet-up.” He stepped closer with a rubbery squish.

  He had sensitive lips, sweet as a child’s in that tremendous chin. I laughed. I wasn’t quite right.

  He pulled back his head. “Ma’am?”

  From somewhere on the other side of the fence, a muffled groan escalated into a shriek, then dissolved in the spattering rain.

  He sighed. “I don’t know how Edna stands living by this place. I couldn’t bear hearing this suffering all night and day.”

  The top of my coat gapped open as I turned away.

  He leaned to look in. “Say, is that a baby in there?”

  I shrank back.

  My knees buckled. He reached out to steady me but stopped short of making contact. He seemed to know that if he touched me, I would run.

  He spoke gently, as if to a skittish animal. “My name is William but I go by Bud. Bud Dowdy. Everyone calls me Rowdy Dowdy.”

  I rolled my gaze up at him. He looked as rowdy as a baby bunny.

  He edged in the direction in which he wanted to coax me. “I’m going to my sister’s now. Around the corner. See?” He pointed. “We can fetch a cab from there to take you wherever you need to go. But come get warm first.” He saw my hesitation. “If you want.”

  He took a few steps away, then stopped, as if encouraging a stray cat.

  The few times in my life that I’d trusted people had not worked out well. But there was something gentle about him, something good. And I had to get my baby out of the rain.

  In his sister’s home, a tidy frame cottage with a neat gingerbread-trimmed porch, I sat on the edge of a wooden chair, not wanting to get it wet, while I kept my grip on the baby on my lap and a cup of tea. Small as it was, it was a nice house, homey, smelling of furniture wax and fried potatoes. Clocks ticked on nearly every surface, brass clocks, wooden clocks, porcelain clocks, clocks with danglies dripping from them, each clock clicking to its own particular beat. On a pink-flowered chair, his sister Edna, no-necked, graying, as stout as a fireplug and blessed with the family chin, stared at me, stirring her own tea. She offered the baby her spoon. She glanced at me when the baby didn’t reach for it. The baby couldn’t even sit up right.

  She laid her spoon on her saucer with a clink. “Who are you? What were you doing by the State School with a baby on such an awful night?” When I didn’t answer quickly enough, she asked her brother, “Who is she?”

  What could I tell them?

  “Can’t you see that she’s in trouble?” William exclaimed.

  The clocks chittered away.

  “How old is the child?” she asked.

  I told her eleven months.

  Her chin rubbed her chest as she shook her head. “Bud has always
brought home baby birds and rabbits and such. I have fed more little creatures with eyedroppers because of this man.” She bounced her elbow on the arm of her chair in emphasis as she pointed at him. “But this is the first time that he’s brought home an actual human baby and her mother.”

  He blushed so violently that it seemed to light up the fine black hair combed back from his forehead.

  “ ‘Bud, Bud, Stick in the Mud.’ He’s always been shy. Knows more about wireless transmitters than he does about women. If you ever need to learn the Morse code, you’re in luck.” The clocks tapped as Edna twirled a curl at the base of her sagging yellow pompadour. “But you look like a good enough little girl.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that.

  She put down her cup and got up. “I’m not going to send you back out into the rain with a child. Come on. You can’t stay in those wet clothes. You must be frozen.”

  When I didn’t move, she snapped her fingers. “Let’s go. Hop to.”

  William spread his hands as if there was nothing he could do about his sister. He beamed when I put down my cup and followed her.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1934

  June had been working for Betty Crocker for two of her thirty-two years. Yet each morning when she arrived at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange Building with its wheat sheaves carved around the door and its imposing wall of elevators, and she clicked across the cavernous green marble lobby in her chunky-heeled nurse’s shoes, her purse swinging on her arm above her gloves and the skirt of her white uniform swishing against her hosiery, she felt as if she were on the verge of discovery. Of what, she didn’t know. As she rode up in the elevator thick with the smell of brass polish, she imagined herself to be like the heavy brown cicada larvae that lumbered up the trunks of the trees of her Summit Avenue estate in St. Paul. Her body was swelling, her too-tight shell was splitting, and her wings were unfurling to fly her up to the treetops—or in her case, to the ninth floor—where she might sing, or soar . . . or fall down to the ground to buzz clumsily on her back.

  None of the other women in the Betty Crocker test kitchen would guess her fear of failure; at least she hoped not. All twenty-one of them had an area of expertise. Karen from Hastings, Nebraska, was the go-to girl on naming foods; “Pigs in Blankets” were “Wiener Turnovers” until she came along. Carolyn of Angola, Indiana, was the Queen of Stretching a Dime, a handy skill when most people had so few of them these days. Eager little Darlene from Endeavor, Wisconsin, whose hunger for more than Bundt cakes was belied by her wholesome, well-scrubbed face, was their expert on pleasing men, proof that you should never judge a book by the cover.

  June’s role around the Crocker kitchen was to be the Sophisticated One. The other girls called upon her to create menus for “smart luncheons” and “elegant suppers,” and to show how “distinguished social leaders” set their lovely tables in advertisements and cooking publications like last year’s Betty Crocker’s 101 Delicious Bisquick Creations as Made and Served by Well-Known Gracious Hostesses, Famous Chefs, Distinguished Epicures, and Smart Luminaries of Movieland. (Advertising’s title, not hers.) She was the Girl Friday to whom the others came when describing how to put on a proper plate luncheon, yachting party, or hunt club breakfast, activities the ad men imagined that Betty Crocker’s fans dreamed of.

  While a campaign that featured the man-trapping properties of flour always played well, increasingly Advertising was turning its attention to the everyday housewife. Once they got her married, what did they imagine that the American Woman wanted? More, that’s what, of everything! She wanted, no, she deserved the High Life and all that came with it: furs and maids and Cadillacs, and most importantly, the burning envy of her peers. And once the ember of that desire was fanned and stoked into a raging fire of need, how might the American Woman attain it? How might your plain penny-squeezing Jane, at home frying cabbage for her unemployed husband and letting down the cuffs of her growing children’s coat sleeves, transform herself into the elegant, popular, tiara-wearing hostess portrayed in publications? By listening to that oracle of success (who happened to use a lot of flour) Betty Crocker—that’s how!

  And so June had been hired. She was the only girl on staff without a home ec degree. Her husband had been her qualifier. Not only was Richard a prominent surgeon in town, but his family came from money. Buckets of it. No one at the company had asked her who her own family was when they’d hired her. They still hadn’t.

  “Here we are, Betty!” The elevator operator, Mr. Gustafson, an elfin, elderly gentleman with a long upper lip and bright gray eyes, folded back the brass restraining gate with the same zeal that he’d shown since hiring on a few months ago—grateful to have employment in these difficult times, June assumed. He called all the women who worked in the Betty Crocker kitchen “Betty.”

  He pulled the heavy lever to open the doors. “Go make someone happy!”

  June replied to him as she did every day. “I will, Mr. Gustafson, I will.”

  She stepped across a mat bristling with the word WELCOME. Even the floor was friendly in Betty Crocker’s world. A push through glass doors brought June into the Tasting Room, a yellow-papered space bright with stylish caramel-colored Early American tables and chairs, ruffled curtains, and the smell of warm spice cake, frying bacon, and Lysol. The girls were already at work. You had to get up early to get ahead in the Crocker kitchen.

  At her cubby, June peeled off her gloves, purse, and hat, stashed them on the shelf, checked her mirror (small blemish by her nose—who knew that you still got pimples at her age?), and readjusted her trademark pearl choker. She was the only Crockette to wear such an expensive accessory. She would have rather left it at home out of respect to the others, most of whom were the only breadwinners in their families and wore the same plain white dress every day to work, but her bosses complimented her on the necklace and encouraged her to wear it. For now, it stayed.

  She took out her binder, and then went through an additional set of glass doors to enter what appeared to be a cross between a scientific laboratory and an appliance store. To the left gleamed a white-enameled bank of the latest in electric refrigerators, ovens, and ranges, upon one of which the previously detected bacon sizzled. To the right, a dozen women in white, down to their shoes, tapped purposefully around the rows of white porcelain-topped tables, measuring concoctions, pouring mixtures into pans, or writing notes, even at this early hour. White sinks stood along the back wall, ready to sanitize.

  But this was not your typical dull research facility. Pains had been taken to give the test kitchen the feel of a lady cook’s playground. Orange and navy plates marched across the cornice above the stoves. A tomato-red watering can and a copper teapot winked from the corner shelves. Blue checked curtains waved from windows open to the springtime breeze and a view of the nearby flour mill, atop which scrolling letters spelled out in lights: “Eventually.”

  Eventually—Why Not Now? was the company’s original slogan. June supposed that “You’re going to want our flour sooner or later, so you might as well buy it now,” was probably not the most compelling argument to make a sale. But the forefathers had made a leap in figuring out how to net buyers in 1921, when one of them realized that a likable female character might sell goods better than even a catchy motto ever could. Hello, Betty Crocker!

  June laid her notebook on one of the tables, then peered into the bowl that her neighbor, Darlene from Endeavor, hugged to her white lapels. Man-loving little Darlene, squeaky-clean, honey-blond, white-lashed, and every bit as energetic as you’d imagine someone from a town called Endeavor might be, was fresh out of the home economics department of the university in Madison. She wouldn’t last long. She’d gotten married last year and a baby would surely follow. They always did. Unless you were June.

  “What are you making today?”

  “Cheese and bacon waffles!” Darlene sang.

  “Interesting. Do you put the b
acon in the mix?”

  “No, just the grated American, half a cup per recipe. I’m thinking I’ll lay cooked strips directly on the waffle iron, then ssssss—” Darlene acted out clamping a lid down on a waffle iron, sending a glop of batter from her spoon into her bowl. “—I’ll seal them in. I got the idea in a dream last night. I woke up Gary when I wrote it down. He was quite the grump—until I made it worth his while.”

  When they glanced at one another, Darlene laughed. Wife humor.

  She ironed the grin out of her voice. “What do you think of using cheese and bacon waffles on a breakfast menu for Clark Gable?”

  June raised her chin as if she and Richard, too, were going wild under the covers, although anyone with a touch of class might consider it just a wee bit gauche to boast about it. “Hmm. Sounds promising. I’ll think about it. Thank you.”

  It was genius.

  And there was nothing happening in her and Richard’s bedroom for her to brag about these days, even if she’d wanted to.

  Anyhow, she had her own new recipe for Let the Stars Show You How to Take a Trick a Day with Bisquick, the booklet they were currently developing. Until twenty seconds ago, she’d been pleased with it. She’d gotten it last evening while being walked by the dog, a rambunctious German shepherd named Stella that Richard had chosen and she took care of.

  It had been a glorious evening in May, with the air full of the scent of new leaves and blooming lilacs, the kind of evening that makes one feel inexplicably hopeful. Stella had been yanking her past a ragged man shooting a slingshot at pigeons on a telephone line (dinner, apparently) and some youths tossing a football on the lawn of the college down the street. Suddenly the boys’ calls to one another got louder and their dives for the ball more exaggerated. They were looking in her direction. June responded to the college idiots as did the peahens to the peacocks shaking open their tail feathers in the Como Park Zoo: she ignored them.