by Lynn Cullen
EIGHT
Indiana-Michigan line, 1934
Ruth dried her face on a towel that June had sent her from some big-shot store in Minnesota. Ignoring the anxiety that rose in her lungs every day at this time, she tramped downstairs to where the girls were gathered around Margaret, who was at the dining room table, balancing a cardboard box of kittens on her knobby knees. Jeanne, the second oldest, called to Ruth as she petted an escaping kitten.
“Come see, Mommy!”
The middle child, she had a second sense about Ruth’s moods, which made Ruth both proud and uneasy. Jeanne also bit her nails until her fingertips were fleshy stumps and suffered with headaches that forced her to lie motionless on the davenport for hours.
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ruth went on to the kitchen. She picked up John’s tray, aware of her mother watching her.
“What?” Ruth asked.
Mother shook her head.
Mother was acting even more strangely than usual of late. Hardening of the arteries? Ruth turned toward the downstairs bedroom with her load.
“Wait!” Mother ran outside into the dull evening light.
The spoon clinked against the bowl on the tray as Ruth pushed back her damp bangs with her arm. She listened to her daughters at the table. They were shouting their names for the kittens over each other, claiming ownership, much like June and she used to fight over the animals that Dad would bring home. Ruth usually won, which meant she had to care for them, which suited her fine. At one time she was juggling the mothering of a turtle, a bunny, a baby robin, a mouse, and their cat, Tom, a full-time job that involved eyedroppers, milk, and bits of hamburg, if she could get it. June would be off somewhere, drawing. That was okay. Ruth needed her little patients as much as they needed her. Taking care of them was one thing she was better at than her sister.
Mother reappeared with a branch of brown-tinged lilac blossoms, the screen door slapping shut behind her. Panting, she stuck it in a Ball jar, plunked it on the tray, then stood back.
Ruth frowned at it. “What’s this about?”
Mother waved at her with the handkerchief she’d pulled from her bosom. “Hurry! He’s waiting.”
Dear Lord, do not let her arteries solidify quickly. I really cannot manage two invalids.
“Go on! Don’t make him wait!”
* * *
The back-room door was always left open so that John would not feel cut off from his family. Now, from the doorway, with the daylight lowering, the room looked to Ruth like an old-time photograph. The bed, with its headboard made from slabs of oak from trees that John’s father had chopped down on their land and planed himself, the old wardrobe, the spread of the small bed that she’d been forced to use since Mother had come to live with her and driven her from her room, even the cracked plaster walls with a few lathes showing above the washstand, were various shades of brown.
After eight years, Ruth knew to wait to see if this was one of the days that he could talk. And to not expect that it would be. So often when she sat with him, he couldn’t even open his eyes. They would quiver under his lids while his mouth and fingers twitched, like a long-dead monster coming back to life. No wonder the kids were afraid of him.
She took a deep breath and entered.
His eyes were open.
She cocked her head with surprise. “Hello.”
His gaze inched along her body. “New—dress.”
“You like it?” She lifted her brows. He was having a good day. Years ago, such a level of alertness would excite her. She knew better, now.
She pulled at the red-dotted Swiss of her skirt. “Mother gave it to me. I had to take it in on the sides.” She didn’t mention that June had sent it to Mother for her birthday, and Mother, being Mother and preferring her old, weird clothes, had given it to her.
He stared at the dress.
“Well, here’s your supper.” She picked up the spoon to feed him.
“Nick.”
She felt a stinging ping. “What?”
“Nick.”
“What about him?” Guilt rolled off her like steam.
“At dinner.”
“Do you mean, will Nick be at dinner? Yes. Of course he will be. He always is. Did you want to talk to him?”
“No.”
She hid her hand under her arm, then shot it out to touch the browning lilac branch tilted in its jar. She could smell its sweetness, even in this shriveled state.
“Look, John—lilacs, from the bush you put in. I made you plant it on the hottest day of the year. Remember?” She forced a laugh. “I thought you were going to kill me.” She almost said it: Until I got you to fix the cream separator.
She didn’t need to. The unspoken words hung between them, as real as breath.
He closed his eyes.
She glared at the spoon in her hand. A rock seemed to have been sewn inside her chest.
“Don’t,” he said.
When she looked up, his eyes were open again.
The hair rose on the back of her neck.
“Don’t what?”
Sweat beaded his forehead. Keeping his eyes open cost him.
She glanced away. She didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t want to know.
She put the spoon back on the tray and then stood up. Fists balled at her sides, she walked carefully from the room and down the hall. Nothing was left of her self-respect when she got to the dining room table.
“That was fast,” Mother said.
Nick grinned from his chair at the table, the comb lines still visible in his wet dark hair. His turquoise eyes were even more disconcerting without his hat to shade them. He must have just come in from the barn, where he’d made a place for himself by hanging a curtain to wall off a corner and installing a bed and washstand. It was the same corner in which John had curled when he had come down with sleeping sickness and was delirious, but Ruth had never told Nick that.
She sat at the table. “I didn’t finish.”
“You didn’t finish feeding him?” Mother exclaimed.
The kids looked over at her.
“No.” As evenly as possible, she said, “You do it.”
“Me?” Mother’s eyes widened behind her glasses.
“You do such a good job. You should go talk to him about—” She shrugged. “—whatever it is that you talk to him about. He likes that.”
“Did he say that?”
“His food is getting cold. Go.”
“All right.” Mother got up, rubbing at a place under her chin—a recent physical tick, Ruth noticed.
The floorboards creaked under her mother’s footsteps in the hall. Ruth took up her spoon.
Nick asked, “Root, how is John?”
The kids were watching.
“Fine and dandy.” She dipped into her stew.
Over the clink of spoons against bowls and quiet slurping, she felt a gaze upon her. Little Jeanne was watching her.
“What?”
Jeanne shook her head.
“I told you to stop worrying.”
Jeanne’s little girl’s voice broke. “Oh, Mommy.”
“Eat!” The boulder expanded in Ruth’s chest. “Everyone just eat!”
Margaret ducked under the table then came up with a writhing kitten. “Here.” She held it out to Jeanne, its clear claws bristling from splayed pink paws.
What would Betty Crocker and her doctor husband say about a table like this, with Ruth’s Italian boyfriend chatting and her kids near tears and cats in the soup? They’d get a load of her household in its full glory the day after tomorrow, and would know her to be the wreck that she was.
“Excuse me.” Modeling manners—wasn’t she fine?
She left the table, rushed through the kitchen, and pushed her way out the flimsy screen door, letting it bang. Outside, crickets cheeped in the dusk; the weary air smelled of heat and dry earth. She kept going until she got to the pasture, where she opened the wooden gate, then strode for
Mother’s horse. She laid her forehead against the animal’s thick neck, the cows shifting politely to make room for the pair of them. JoJo turned her head as if wondering if there were something in it for her, but if not, okay.
Animals didn’t know a jerk from a saint.
She started to weep.
DOROTHY
Open up, John. There’s a boy.
Now where were we? Oh, yes: Edward and I were at the art museum. I love that part! Well, the day after, he took me to the zoo.
I’ll never forget riding side by side with him in his horse-drawn trap, up the leafy hills of Cincinnati and down, with the wind blowing so hard that it lifted my straw hat from its pins. Edward owned a brand-new Cadillac Runabout, too, red, with chrome lamps sticking out to the sides like great big bug eyes, but he said he didn’t want me to be frightened by its terrific speed. I wouldn’t have been scared, but that’s all right. I felt special enough, riding along with him in his old surrey.
We hadn’t gotten far when he turned his head, as large and stately as a lion’s. “I remember that you like animals,” he told me in his new English accent.
“I do,” I said.
“You see, I remember a lot about you.”
Did he remember how I smelled, the sound of my laugh, the tapered shape of my fingers? I remembered these things about him.
By the time we reached the zoo, my head was light. I had to pinch myself to keep my feet on the ground as we waited in the shadows for the regular folk to get off the Vine Street streetcar. He would only let us enter after they’d all gone in. He was awfully big on privacy. He was a Lamb, you see, of the Lamb Beer fortune.
Once inside, I had a notion to go to the Monkey House, to see all those simians capering around on their little leathery hands. But Edward thought the crowds rushing into it would “spoil our pleasure.” He said, “Let’s go somewhere intimate.”
I followed him to the Aviary, where he turned around and took my elbow, then guided me into the warm and stuffy dim. It smelled strongly of droppings in there, and was so quiet and empty that you could almost hear the birds breathe.
At the passenger pigeon exhibit, a little sign said, HOME OF THE LAST PASSENGER PIGEONS ON EARTH.
I stopped. Inside their cage, the two boy birds, one named George and the other named I don’t remember what, didn’t appear to know the gravity of their situation. Heads bobbing like windup toys, they waddled around the girl. They showed off like boys will do, trying to get on her back, though she wouldn’t allow it.
After a while, the girl, Martha, had had enough. She fluttered up on whistling wings to the dead branch of her perch, where she sat, staring through the bars of her cage. Only the blink of her white lids gave away that she was alive.
Edward leaned toward my face. “Dode, are you crying?”
I tried to swallow away the lump salting my throat.
“You are crying! Whyever for?” he asked in that accent.
I swallowed enough to say, “She doesn’t want her babies to be sad like her.”
He smiled. “You’re giving her a lot of credit, aren’t you, love? Birds don’t think.”
I was so upset by what I read that I could hardly savor that he called me “love.” “It says here that she hasn’t laid eggs since the zoo got her. Why else won’t she lay, unless she doesn’t want her young to be sad? How terrible to be the last female of her kind.”
“Cheer up, Dode. She doesn’t have to be the last. If she would simply get over her hysteria and lay some eggs, she could solve her own problem. A boy and girl chick could start their own dynasty, like those brother-and-sister kings and queens of ancient Egypt, and fill the skies with their offspring.”
The door opened. I followed his glance to two older women, carrying expensive silk parasols. They nodded at him, then looked at me.
We left the zoo soon after. There was a park that he said he liked on the other side of Cincinnati.
After that, as July heated up the summer, he took me to parks nearly every day. “I simply cannot get enough of the fresh air!” he would exclaim from behind the windshield of his open Cadillac. He drove his automobile now, better to get to the distant grounds which he said were so much more interesting than those nearby.
I was all right with that.
We appointed ourselves to be experts on the parks of the region, making a big show of evaluating which had the best band shells, the best ornamental bridges, the best rose arbors. It was when judging one of those rose arbors, beneath some sweet-smelling last blooms under which he had playfully positioned me, that he pressed his lips to mine.
We didn’t talk much on the ride back. The smell of roses, and the feel of his lips against my own, lingered in my mind as the car roared toward the sinking sun.
He stopped a few blocks from home.
Get out, he said. Meet me in the stables.
My heart pounded. I knew my life was changing.
I crunched down the cinder-paved alley, past fires smoldering in ashcans, past rats slithering over garbage heaps, past horses pawing in their stables. At the biggest and grandest stable, a miniature of the many-gabled house behind it down to the stained-glass circular window of a little white lamb, I stopped. Home. Without being told, I knew to hide. I did so behind my favorite sycamore, my shoulder to bark peeling away to expose the smooth white trunk. After what seemed like hours, the stableman blew out his lamp and left.
I rolled open the door. The stable was as familiar to me as the scar on my thumb from picking up Father’s razor as a child. Edward and I had played in the manure-tinged gloom when young. But it looked different to me that steamy July night, foreign, and not just because much of it had been given over to autos those days. Pale blue moonlight poured inside, drenching a painted stall, the flutes of a horse’s ears, a muscular rump. I closed the door and went over and laid my head on the warm neck of JoJo, the Lambs’ young gray-and-white cart horse, a forgotten gift for Mrs. Lamb’s little niece when she’d visited last fall from Connecticut.
The stable door rumbled open.
“Dode. You there?”
I raised my head. I could hardly hear my own whisper over the pulsing of my blood. “Yes.”
“Where is my good girl?”
I ran to him. He kissed me so tenderly that I cried out when he pulled back. I needed more.
He drew his finger over my cheekbone. “A tear, love?”
He didn’t wait for a response. “I brought you something.”
From behind his back, he held out a little metal box. The moonlight caught the bumps and curves of the cherubs carved on top.
“Open it.”
My blood surged. Was it a ring box? Was there a ring?
I couldn’t find the latch.
He put my finger on a frail little knob on the bottom. “Here.”
When I pressed, the lid snapped back. Out popped a feathered bird. It trilled as it jerked back and forth and lifted its wings.
I laughed, as much as out of disappointment as in surprise.
“It came all the way from Germany.” He kissed me. “For you, to remember our day.”
“How does it work?”
“Does it matter?” He kissed me harder. “You are such a funny girl.”
“I don’t know about that.”
His hands roamed my body. Each part unfurled under his touch, straining like a naked hatchling to its parent.
All of a sudden, nothing must be between us. We swam through the layers of clothes separating us. When flesh reached flesh, we stopped. I gasped at the warmth of his arm sliding under my bare thighs, and at the thrill of him lifting me.
I was reeling from the pain and pleasure of being loved when Father spoke. It took a beat for his voice to register.
“Dorothy.”
Edward flinched as if stung. We froze together like two lewd statues.
My voice seemed to come from someone else. “It’s all right, Father!”
Father’s reply seared the silence.
> “It is NOT all right.”
PART TWO
NINE
En route
June was running home from high school with an armful of books, out of breath. She recklessly crossed State Street, drawing a clang of the streetcar man’s bell. The State School kids were pumping away on their creaky swings as she ran up the path to the porch, threw open the front door, swirled into the living room, and dumped her schoolbooks next to Ruth on the davenport. Hands triumphantly on hips, she waited for her sister to look up from a book the size of a dictionary.
“Guess what?”
Ruth saved her place in the book with her finger. “What?”
“Of all the seniors at school, I was one of six chosen to model in the window of Wolf and Dessauer’s!”
June let the salient points of her announcement resonate. One of six! Chosen to model! W & D’s, the biggest department store in town! Such a feat would be the crowning achievement of June’s—anyone’s!—almost eighteen years.
“Congratulations. There is no higher honor than being picked to shill for a store by standing around in their clothes like a dummy.” Ruth returned to her reading.
June gave her sister a pitying look. Thus spoke one who would never be chosen.
June began her preparations immediately. Trips back and forth across the living room with a book on her head ensued, causing the cut-glass pendants on dead Aunt Edna’s clock to jingle on the bureau. She practiced clenching in her stomach beyond the point of concavity. Assorted smiles were auditioned before the flecked glass of the bedroom mirror.
She embarked on the more serious operations the night before the show. To make her already shiny hair gleam, she followed the advice of Mary Pickford in Photoplay and doused it in olive oil and wrapped it in a hot towel, after which it reeked like a salad. With increasing panic, she’d repeatedly scrubbed all three feet of it with Watkins Mulsified Cocoanut Oil Shampoo, which, though it promised not to injure her hair, left her with a frazzled mane that still smelled strongly of olives. She slathered her already dewy young face with Pond’s cold cream, as recommended in Woman’s Day by Lady Diana Manners, the Most Beautiful Woman of the English Aristocracy. Then she shocked her greased skin with Listerine as an astringent, just as the ads suggested.