The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  A few minutes later, she was home. Anxiety descended, squeezing her like a too-small coat as she guided the Hupmobile up the drive. She couldn’t shake the sense that her own house was examining her, peering down through its circular porch window like an aristocrat with a monocle. I have pillars, a library, and seven plush bedrooms, it seemed to sniff. Who, in heaven’s name, are you?

  Defiantly, she parked the car under its lattice bower. You’re just a house! Bricks and wood! Sticks and stones! You can’t hurt me. She went indoors, where she settled at the breakfast nook table, sketchpad in hand and Stella alert at her feet.

  Over at the counter, the maid, Adela, filled a pie crust. Sunshine poured through the window over the sink, soaking the celadon green cupboards and yellow floors in buttery light. June noted the gleam the sunlight cast on Adela’s forehead, on the bone of her cheek, and on the red ceramic bowl in her hands. Vermeer couldn’t have painted a prettier picture.

  Through the window at the table, she watched the five-year-old neighbor boy, Ernie, pedaling up her drive on his tricycle, Band-Aids flashing on his knees. She wondered how she might convey the energy in the child’s greenstick bones with just the strokes of her pencil. Her heroes, Neysa McMein and Rose O’Neill, could have done it. Rose O’Neill infused so much character into her drawings of Kewpies that they made her one of just a handful of self-made female millionaires. Neysa McMein’s portraits of women and children had cinched her popularity with the fast crowd in New York, earning her a place at the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. June bet their houses didn’t look down on them.

  Richard’s car growled up the drive. June flinched with the screech of the emergency brake. As Richard walked around to enter through the distant sunroom—he liked to go through the garden and snap off a bloom—Stella sprang to her feet, then bolted out of the kitchen and through the dining room and back in a frenzied circuit, yipping as if scalded. Stella did not go berserk like that for June, although she fed and walked the dog.

  A few minutes later, Richard strode into the kitchen. A pink tulip fell on the table in front of June with a lush flop.

  “A beauty for a beauty.” Richard rested his hands, still damp from the downstairs powder room, on June’s shoulders, giving off the sweet, medicinal scent of ether. “What do you have,” he called to Adela, “besides this awful tomato jelly that my wife is eating?”

  “ ‘This awful tomato jelly’ is called ‘Chilled Tomato Salad’ in Betty’s $25,000 Recipe Set,” June said mildly. “The chef of the Hotel Croydon in New York commended it.”

  “How much did you have to pay him to get him to do that?” He dropped down across from her with a grin.

  With his springy pompadour of light brown hair, gray eyes shining from under their bony shelf, and wedge of straight nose, many thought Richard handsome. Thin from always being on the move, he rattled around inside his well-made suits, cut to make him look bigger. He moved with the cheery swagger of someone used to giving orders and having them followed, whether it be on the football field, in the operating theater, or in the bedroom, a slight man with a big personality. A man happy in his own skin.

  Acquaintances thought he was a stitch when he boasted that his house was built by Frank Lloyd Wright (it clearly wasn’t), or that he once plunged into Lake Michigan on New Year’s Day with the Polar Bear Club in Milwaukee (the only diving he did was off the side of his mahogany speedboat in July), or that in college he’d sat on top of a flagpole outside his fraternity house until a thunderstorm forced him down (oh, please!). His patients adored him and his tall tales, and when he spoke of miracle cures, they believed him, their raised hopes aiding in their recovery. June had been married to him for eleven years. They were childless.

  He tilted back his beige puff of hair as Adela laid a plate with a ham-salad sandwich before him. “Adela, has anyone told you that you have the sixth sense? How’d you know this was just what I wanted?”

  Adela twitched unsmiling lips. She had come from Spain and with highest recommendation from Elizabeth Headford at the country club. Besides doing good work, Adela’s bearing hinted of a highborn past. She held her back and shoulders so straight that you could almost see queenly robes draped upon them; her maid’s starched white cap circled her black hair like a crown. June yearned to ask her about her exotic history, but Adela’s reserve invited no questions. In truth, June was afraid of her, although they were close in age. She suspected that Adela knew she was a sham. For the same reason, June was uncomfortable around waiters and shopgirls.

  “It’s not magic,” June said. “Ham salad is your favorite. She makes it every day, in case you come home.”

  Richard nodded at June’s sketching pad. “What are you doodling at now?”

  June drew a breath. She was one of a handful of women who had won a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago based on her talent and, well, need. Dad, with his pity for widows and veterans, was owed more money than he made. When she had met Richard, she had been chipping away at her studies while clerking evenings in the housewares department in the basement of Carson Pirie Scott. He’d come along on the lowest night of her life and had beamed his searchlight upon her, and then he kept it there, until he’d won her with his interest, his exuberance, and his ability to rip her from her sorry roots for good. She had also adored his mother.

  She held up the drawing tablet.

  Richard scowled before sinking his teeth into the soft white bread. She knew that he hated when she drew children. It was a reminder of the thing she wouldn’t give him.

  He swallowed his bite. “Listen, about your trip to see your sister—”

  June heard water blasting on the metal fender of a car outside the screened window. Adela’s fifteen-year-old son, Angel, who did odd jobs around the house, had brought out a hose and was washing Richard’s black Cadillac. When June looked out, Ernie had gotten off his trike and was begging Angel for a turn with the water. What was it about a child’s skin that made it glow from the inside like a candle through wax, and how did she capture that on paper?

  She had been good at drawing, once, good enough that her drawing instructor at the Art Institute, Matilda Vanderpoel, had told her that she’d seen similar potential in another student she’d had, Georgia O’Keeffe. June had held that compliment next to her heart to this day, taking it out and holding it up to the light in time of need.

  “I’d like to go with you,” Richard said.

  “What? To Ruth’s?”

  “I’ve got a little surprise.”

  “You want to go with me? You’re able to leave your work?”

  Nothing took precedence over Richard’s practice. How many nights had she spent alone after the hospital called? How many events had she had to attend by herself? He hadn’t been there to witness her winning “Most Valuable, Betty Crocker Division” at her company awards banquet, although she was always sure to go to his galas, hospital picnics, and charity balls.

  But his work was more important than hers. She mustn’t forget that for a moment. All she did was to show women how “luminaries” set their tables for brunch. He saved lives.

  She had been warned by her mother-in-law that it would be this way. Linda Whiteleather was everything June’s Dream Mother would have been: elegant but simple, kind but wise, wealthy but modest—everything the American Woman aspired to, or at least that June aspired to. Everything her real mother wasn’t. Mrs. Whiteleather, short-waisted, chesty, with silvery blond hair caught in a sophisticated twist, had taken June under her wing, gently starting her education in manners by teaching her how a bed should be made, how to speak on a telephone, and table etiquette. (June realized on her own that she should drop the nonexistent “r” in “wash” when she spoke.) Refinements branched from there.

  June aped Mrs. Whiteleather’s behavior at parties, going so far as to imitate her tony accent and laugh. She wore her own hair in a twist (swimming against the current, with everyone wearing a bob since t
he twenties), bought hats with her at Bes-Ben on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, went to the same manicurist on Grand Avenue here in town. Mrs. Whiteleather seemed to genuinely like June, showering her with gloves, scarves, and sweaters, speeding June’s assimilation into the upper crust with her kindness. She wasn’t put off by June’s gaffes, of which there were many, like not waiting to be the last in line at a buffet luncheon (the higher one’s status, the longer one waited), or admitting what one paid for something (not even to celebrate getting a bargain), or letting more than twenty-four hours pass before writing a bread and butter note. Mrs. Whiteleather’s tolerance was not matched by her husband, the elder Dr. Whiteleather, whose pursed smile told June all she needed to know about his opinion of her.

  June recalled sitting with Mrs. Whiteleather in the tranquility of the Whiteleather den, soon after her engagement. Mrs. Whiteleather had put down her cup with a click of bone china.

  “June, much will be expected of you as a Whiteleather. It will exhaust you. Especially if you weren’t brought up in this milieu.” She saw June’s face. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad, dear. I wasn’t brought up in this environment, either. That’s how I know how difficult it will be. Oh, you’ll be able to keep up, but . . .” She grimaced, then reached for the polished coffeepot.

  “I have my art,” June said. “I will never abandon it.”

  “I hope not, dear. But that’s not how it usually goes.”

  June hadn’t been really listening. She’d been so desperate that summer, with Ruth and John . . . doing whatever it was that they were doing.

  “We’ll leave tonight,” Richard was now saying. “We can return on Tuesday. Jim will cover my patients for me.”

  “What? Tonight! Your plan hardly gives us any time there—the train won’t get there until tomorrow and we’d have to leave to come back home Monday. Driving would take even longer.” She knew that he preferred driving. He liked to be in control.

  “I realize that, darling. That’s why I booked passage on a plane.”

  “A plane!”

  “I thought that you’d like the idea of flying.”

  “I don’t!”

  “It’s about time that we give it a try. These are the thirties, you know. Everyone’s doing it.”

  “No one’s doing it, except movie stars and tycoons.”

  “Well, in that case, one of us fits the bill. You’re a star, you know, Betty.”

  “If only Betty existed.”

  “A quibble. Anyhow, you know I’m not a fan of trains and driving isn’t safe these days, not as long as the countryside is rife with those ridiculously named fellows who are robbing banks and then making their getaways. ‘Baby Face Nelson,’ ‘Machine Gun Kelly,’ ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’—where did these devils come from?”

  She took up her fork. “They came from being poor, I would guess.”

  “It was a rhetorical question, darling.”

  June glanced outside. The countryside wasn’t the only place filled with those fellows. John Dillinger, the subject of a nationwide manhunt by the Bureau of Investigation, was known to lurk around St. Paul. Just recently, he’d escaped in a shootout from the apartment in which he lived with his girlfriend, only a mile or two from there. The girl had been caught in Chicago and brought back here for a trial.

  “Do you think Dillinger will come back here to break her out?” June asked.

  “Who?”

  “Dillinger’s girl.”

  “I didn’t know you were so interested in Dillinger, darling.”

  “I’m not.” June had seen the pictures of the robber’s woman in the paper. Her name stuck with June: Evelyn Frechette. She’d grown up on the Menominee Indian Reservation just outside of town, which had saddened June upon reading that fact. She could understand why the girl, deprived and scorned for being an Indian, would fall for a flashy man who could buy her things. Had she been all that different herself?

  Adela poured Richard’s tea. “Thank you,” he told her. To June he said, “Did you see the article about him in this week’s Time?”

  She had. She’d pored over it. Evidently Dillinger had been crisscrossing the countryside between here and her sister’s farm on the Indiana-Michigan line, on the run from the band of machine-gun-carrying detectives on a mission to take him “dead or alive.” June had been struck by the picture of the outlaw, smirking from the glossy page of the magazine. Under a mustache as threadbare as a child’s much-loved security blanket, his lopsided grin gave him the appearance of someone trying to be tough, even though he was bone-weary from the effort.

  She’d felt curiously sorry for him, as she had for the fox at a hunt at the Hardings’ to which Richard had taken her years ago. When Harry Harding had seen her expression as she watched the small black-footed animal flee across a field with a pack of baying hounds at its heels, he put his hand forwardly on her waist and assured her that the fox was a clever, calculating animal who controlled the chase by various ruses and deceptions. The creature enjoyed the sport of it, Harry told her with an overly familiar squeeze, and simply went home when he tired.

  Harry hadn’t answered when she asked what happened if the fox was caught.

  She nudged the rubbery red pile on her plate. Outside, Angel, slightly taller than the Cadillac, was rubbing down the car, each thin arm muscle articulated under his smooth brown skin as he worked—an artist’s delight. She hadn’t realized how much she had been looking forward to going back home alone. She didn’t know why that would be, as rudely as Ruth would treat her, when she was the one who should be rude. They both knew what Ruth had done.

  Richard swallowed another bite of sandwich. “Listen, if you wanted, we could stretch out the trip another day in Chicago—we already have to fly in and stay the night there for the morning flight. I have a friend there I’d like you to meet.”

  Her antennae went up. “What friend?”

  “Bert Hayes. We went to medical school together. He’s an expert in problems like ours.”

  She didn’t have to ask which problem.

  How many examination tables had she had to lie upon over the last ten years of their eleven-year marriage? She’d been shucked open like an ear of corn as her most private self was studied and discussed by Richard’s medical friends, many of whom they socialized with. When nothing could be found, the treatments began. She’d had carbon dioxide pumped through her fallopian tubes. (They were not blocked, it turned out—the resulting agony in her shoulders as the gas filled her body cavity proved that.) She’d swallowed fat capsules filled with ground-up animal pituitary glands. (And felt green for days.) She’d been dutifully stimulated by Richard in ways recommended to bring on the orgasm thought helpful for conception. (The surest way not to have a climax.) No special diet, no exploratory surgery, no having sex when she didn’t want it, nor not having it when she did, could fix her. She was defective, it seemed, a poor bargain as the elder Dr. Whiteleather had suspected, an inferior specimen who didn’t even have the grace to produce a baby.

  When it became obvious, after nine years, that even with the benefit of the best of modern medicine there would be no little Whiteleathers, she’d switched gears. Her idea was that if she stopped trying to have a baby, one would magically come. She had heard of this working for friends who had adopted. Sue Browning had gotten pregnant the minute she brought home her baby.

  With this in mind, June had applied to the biggest employer in town. She had hoped that the company might take her on, part-time, for her to do a little illustrating for the advertising department while she waited for the stork. She had not expected to be offered a full-time position as a Betty. She’d not even known that being a Betty was a job.

  Richard tipped back his glass. “Bert might find a new wrinkle in our case.”

  She laid down her fork. “But we’ve done everything.” She left unspoken, I’ve done everything.

  He stared at her, then swallowed his mouthful of tea. “What if there really were a new angle?”


  She could not bear to get her hopes up again. “What new angle?” she said bitterly. The disappointment in her in his eyes crushed her. “Just give me time. All I need is rest.”

  “Then stop working!” he exclaimed.

  “I will.”

  “You don’t need the work, June. You’re taking the money from someone who needs it. You’re being selfish.”

  In fact, she sent all of her salary to Ruth, which he knew and approved of, but there was no winning an argument with Richard. “I’m going to quit, Richard.”

  “Isn’t all this enough for you? Don’t I give you everything that you want?”

  “Of course you do.” She had every intention of quitting, and yet she hadn’t. She couldn’t. It was the only place where she felt smart and admirable, most of the time. It was the only job in the world where everyone else was in on being a counterfeit. As someone who had never had anything to hide, he would have no idea what a relief that was.

  Outside, Angel had given Ernie the hose and was helping the child to train a blast onto one of the wide whitewall tires, to Ernie’s milk-toothed delight.

  “How is your sister’s husband, by the way?” Richard asked. “Any improvement? Or is he still essentially bedbound?”

  June stared out the window. It was ridiculous how Richard would never speak John’s name. He was always “your sister’s husband.” Anyhow, she hadn’t seen John since he’d fallen ill. He couldn’t come to Dad’s funeral, and she wouldn’t go out to their farm.

  “I guess so, yes. I wouldn’t know.” The odds might be better for their having a child if they actually had sex more than once a month. He obviously didn’t want her, turning away from her so often that now she seldom tried. At least when they’d been trying to make a baby, they were a team. Now they seemed to have come to a crossroads, or more accurately, to the edge of a cliff. She didn’t want to jump, but she was clinging to the rock with the wind snatching at her clothes and there was nowhere left to go but into the abyss.