The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  Ruth’s hired man removed his hat. “I’m Nick. I help out Ruth here.”

  June shook hands with him. Goodness, he had striking eyes. Such a brilliant blue. How was Ruth able to work with those looking at her?

  She glanced at Ruth to share her amusement but Ruth just gave her a crabby look.

  She touched her pearls. Oh, dear, I am not the one who’s done wrong here, sister.

  Well, she’d be the better person. “Nice to meet you,” she told Nick.

  He ducked his head. “The pleasure is mine.”

  He’s actually very sweet, she thought as he rejoined Ruth.

  She was still smiling at him when his hand slid to the base of Ruth’s back. Was he . . . rubbing her?

  Ruth wrenched away from him but still June saw that hand. She couldn’t look away from it.

  Oh, no. No. Oh, John.

  Ruth shouted, “Girls, stop that!”

  June rolled her sickened gaze to where two of Ruth’s daughters were gripping her suitcase in a fight to the death over who could carry it into the house. Richard, dabbing his handkerchief at his neck, stepped over and took it from them.

  “Sorry, ladies, but you’d better let me have that. Betty Crocker, I mean, your aunt June, is a clotheshorse and doesn’t pack lightly. Try to lug this and you’ll pull your rhomboid major and twist your latissimus dorsi.”

  Nearly-eight-year-old Ilene, her too-large top front teeth half-grown-in and as ridged as a rake, screwed up her face at him. “What?”

  He slipped the suitcase handle from her then whispered, “You’ll hurt your back.”

  Nick strode over to where Richard’s suitcase stood in the grass, snatched it up, leaped up the chipping green-painted concrete steps, then held the door open. Once everybody had passed beneath the bull’s-eye of sweat under the arm of his chambray shirt, he entered the stuffy crowded kitchen himself, as if Ruth’s lover were just another member of the family. Did no one else find this objectionable?

  June looked to the other side of the room to her mother, who was clasping her hands as in a prayer of joy. Of course Mother had no idea of what was going on between Ruth and the hired hand. Mother had always lived inside her own little shell, disconnected from her family and everyone else. Not only could she not stop bad behavior, she wouldn’t be able to recognize it if she saw it.

  Closer at hand, Richard was talking at Ruth; Ruth was watching her lover; the lover was trying to tell June something. June could see his aquamarine eyes sparkling and his smooth lips moving, but she could not get her mind to focus. In her peripheral vision, she saw Mother hustle from the room.

  Seconds ticked away like the timer on a bomb, her heartbeat ratcheting up with each tick, until, at last, June burst out— “Excuse me!”

  A blush infiltrated the lover’s face as his mouth eased closed. Other than taking advantage of an invalid, he seemed like a nice enough man and June was almost sorry she was rude. She sighed deeply as he slunk over to help Richard with the bags, then gathered her voice to raise it above Ruth’s children, who were shouting over one another in their excitement, and over the general din of too many people in one sweltering kitchen.

  “I’d like to see John!”

  Her words reverberated through the room. Ruth stopped directing Richard and Nick toward the rickety stairs with the bags. “All right.”

  “I’d like to see him, too,” said Richard.

  June looked at her husband in surprise. Richard had patronized John when he was well and hadn’t troubled himself with John when he was ill. And, was it so terrible to admit—she wanted to see John alone.

  “Don’t you think that too many of us at one time will alarm him?” she asked.

  The biggest girl, Margaret, tightened her grip on her prize—June’s train case. “If he’s sleeping, he won’t notice.”

  “Actually,” said Richard, “he could. It has been found that many encephalitis lethargica patients can attend to everything going on around them, even when seemingly asleep. Although they can’t respond, make no mistake about it—they are fully awake.”

  Ruth ran her finger along the cast-iron top of the range. “He’s aware of things when he’s sleeping?”

  “If he’s like other encephalitis lethargica victims, he can be quite alert while somnolent.”

  “I know that he can understand what’s going on when he’s awake, sometimes even if his eyes are closed, but I thought that when he was asleep . . .” Ruth twitched grease off her fingers. “He just doesn’t seem very conscious, that’s all.”

  “I’m afraid that he is.” Richard tousled a twin’s hair. “The poor souls, trapped inside their bodies but watching everything. They’re buried alive, like in an Edgar Allan Poe tale.”

  Margaret swung June’s train case like a bell. “In ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ the buried break out in the end and get their revenge.”

  Her mother turned on her. “What kind of trash is that?”

  Margaret shrank back. “We read it in school.”

  “Mommy, no.” Jeanne, long-chinned and skinny, tried to take her mother’s hand.

  Ruth tucked her hand under her armpit. “Well, those are horrid stories. I can’t believe that they teach them to kids.”

  June had not yet unpacked her bags and already she was desperate to leave. She would leave, right now, if it weren’t for John and the children.

  She turned to her sister. “Where is he?”

  Ruth pointed down the hall off the kitchen. “Good luck.”

  PART THREE

  FOURTEEN

  Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1921

  Ruth, hunched on the davenport, rewrapped herself in the old olive-green army blanket then tucked back into shoveling cereal from her chipped bowl. About a body’s length away, next to the front door through which she had just let him in, along with a blast of biting cold, stood her sister’s caller, hat in hand.

  Huh, he was good-looking. Well, so what? Ruth had nearly been engaged to her own handsome fellow, when she was sixteen. And hers had been rich, as rich as any of the swells June had dragged home before she’d gone to art school.

  Robin was her guy’s name. Ruth and he had been sweethearts when he was a senior in high school and she was wandering through her sophomore year. While Robin wasn’t one of the doctor’s or lawyer’s sons so prized by Sister June, his father did own a bottling company that produced a bright blue soda pop called I Dazzle U, of which Robin was grotesquely proud.

  The pop business afforded the scion of the family a Stutz Bearcat, the only one in town, in which Robin, all cocked straw Panama hat and nonchalance, loved to prowl, his arm slung over Ruth’s shoulder in the same possessive manner in which he draped his hand on the steering wheel. With girlfriend in tow, Robin loved nothing more than to tool around town in search of someone drinking the azure family brand, and if he did, he’d strangulate the ball of his horn: Ah-OO-gah!

  From the start, Ruth had found his behavior repulsive, but at first she enjoyed the excitement of seeing people—be they men raking leaves, boys crouching over marbles, or women leading little children—stop to stand in awe of the bright yellow sporting car growling down the street with her, Odd Dorothy Dowdy’s daughter, in it. She wore, with defiant pride, Robin’s class ring, wrapped with pink yarn to size it down for her, and was flattered by his assumption that they would be married.

  But Bearcat rides come at a price. Ruth had not yet given her virginity to him (something about him—his skinny worm that he’d made her touch?—made her resist that final frontier), so Robin had her make up for it by requiring her constant attention. He needed her every minute after school, every weekend, every holiday. Even her best friend, Barbara, had been banished as too demanding of her time.

  Woe to Ruth, should she be talking to a boy when Robin picked her up from school! Robin would yell, he would snub, he would sulk. His pop sightings produced but a tiny, petulant oog. Ruth, sixteen and dumb, went along with him.

  The end came
when she was working one Saturday afternoon in her father’s quiet store, restocking the jars lined up on the counter of candy root beer barrels, gumdrops, and wax lips. She’d been chatting with her father’s sole employee, Ned, dear to her for his prizewinning pair of ears and his ability to laugh at even her weakest jokes. He was giving her a pincushion shaped like a bag of Gold Medal Flour—he’d won it by mailing in a completed puzzle to a woman named Betty Crocker at the flour company in Minneapolis—when Robin stalked in and demanded that she leave.

  Robin was furious, not so much because Ruth was talking to a male, although that was forbidden (no matter that Ned was seventeen years Ruth’s senior and lived with his mother), but because Lord Robin had been kept waiting in his Bearcat for five minutes. No one kept him waiting, especially not his girl. Especially not his girl who was supposed to be loose but hadn’t been loose enough. And, most especially, not a girl whose father was broke. He’d flung down the Gold Medal pincushion—he didn’t care if some witch named Betty Crocker sent it—grabbed Ruth by the arm, and steered her outside.

  Once they were in his car, he roared around the block and down the cinder-paved alley behind Dad’s store, where JoJo was grazing outside her stable. Sweet, clunky JoJo, who would follow Ruth for a pat and then thank her with a nudge of pink velvet muzzle, was switching her tail with contentment as Robin idled the car. She was cropping weeds around a fencepost when, with a cruel grin, he leaned into his horn.

  JoJo reared up. Eyes flashing white, she bolted across the yard and into the wire fence. Her flesh was rippling with terror when Ruth reached her. Blood arose from the track of wounds in the pink skin of her belly.

  Minutes later, Robin blasted off, rusty pocked cinders flying behind the Bearcat like burnt-out meteorites, his class ring reunited with his pinky. Ruth had decided that if this was what catching a big shot got you, she’d rather be an old maid.

  Now she gave June’s latest dupe a thorough going-over, while June, home from art school for Christmas, was back in their bedroom getting ready for a “romantic” walk with him in the snow.

  Ruth didn’t get it. Was her gold-digging sister slipping? This one didn’t look rich. If he was, he sure had a lousy tailor. His wrists stuck out of the cuffs of his red plaid jacket by a couple inches. He had buckled up his rubber boots like a farmer when, from the magazines that Ruth had memorized, she knew that all hep city cats wore them hanging wide open. He was tall, Abraham Lincoln tall, with old Abe’s cheekbones and shock of black hair.

  There was something calm about him that really bugged her. He didn’t seem the least bit daunted by the ratty davenport, the bare carpet, the beat-up piano, or even Ruth as he waited. He didn’t try to smile at her in spite of her studied boorishness, like June’s other hopefuls did. He just watched her, like she was watching him.

  After a while, he said, “That cereal must be good.”

  “Yep.”

  “What kind is it?”

  She wiped her chin. “Pep.”

  “Pep. Isn’t that the brand that you’re supposed to eat when having ‘The Hollywood Breakfast’?”

  “This isn’t a Hollywood Breakfast. If it were, I’d be having orange juice and toast. Anyhow, I don’t let movie stars tell me what kind of breakfast to eat. I don’t pay attention to silly advertisements.”

  “Yet you knew what a Hollywood Breakfast is.” He shrugged when she did a double take.

  His upper lip was just enough puffier than his lower one to hint of an overbite, so that she couldn’t hate him for being too handsome. She could smell his scent from where she sat—Ivory Soap and male. He smelled good. Darn it.

  He stayed by the door. “You’re Ruth, right?”

  June hadn’t brought a boy home since she’d gone to college. Ruth looked at him more closely. Why this one?

  He looked right back. “What do you like to do when you’re not eating the Pep portion of the Hollywood Breakfast?”

  “She reads.” June trotted in from the little hall, effortlessly charming in a camel-hair tam-o’-shanter, baggy coat, and fashionably open galoshes. She dressed like the merry coeds in Time magazine although Dad could hardly pay the mortgage. She claimed that her clothes were from a secondhand store, which was probably true. She could make anything look good. She could probably spin gold from straw, too.

  “What do you like to read?” he asked.

  June answered for her. “She’s a fan of Sinclair Lewis and other hotheads.”

  “Hot head, hot heart,” John said, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked at Ruth calmly, as if curious about the creature inside. “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

  She squinted at him. Was he making fun of her?

  He seemed to hear her thoughts. “Are you going to do something with all that reading?”

  She looked dumbly at her book. She’d never thought about what she’d do. Girls from her class got married, had babies, became grandmas. If they were lucky, they didn’t marry jerks. Precious few went to college. She herself didn’t want to go—it was just another place for people to look down on her.

  June took his hand. “Let’s go.”

  Ruth stared after them as they left, her teenage heart withering. June’s Abe Lincoln had pulled back the curtain on her soul and she did not like what she saw. She saw a chicken. One who squawked a lot but was actually just afraid to stick her neck out. A big fat chicken, scared of failing.

  Her gaze drifted down into her bowl, where a few flakes of cereal floated in milk, the remains of her not-quite Hollywood Breakfast. She had not thought that girls like her were even allowed to dream.

  She hardly knew how to start.

  FIFTEEN

  Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1921

  June hadn’t made it all the way out to the living room before realizing that the wool tam-o’-shanter was a bad idea. Her forehead itched from contact with it. She was just about to go back and take it off when she heard John ask Ruth what she liked to read.

  She couldn’t help herself—she was proud of her quirky little sister. Ruth was the smarter and the braver of the two of them. She read at least a book a week. And she had once whacked Mr. Horn with a broom! Her hero! But Ruth had become reclusive and surly since June had gone to art school. For no apparent reason, her already sharp tongue was growing barbs. It hurt June to think of her bold little sister becoming a sour old spinster.

  “She’s a fan of Sinclair Lewis,” she called out. When Ruth scowled, the nut, June added affectionately, “And other hotheads.”

  “Hot head, hot heart.”

  She was surprised to see John watching her sister. She stepped forward and put her hand on his arm.

  “What are you going to do when you grow up?” he asked Ruth. “Are you going to do something with all that reading?”

  June took his hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go.”

  There was a delay before he glanced at her and squeezed back.

  He held her door for her. She savored his warmth as she passed under his arm. She shouldn’t be falling for him. She had worked too hard to get where she was—Odd Dorothy’s daughter, going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and living in the fashionably bohemian artists’ colony north of the Loop called Tower Town. All right, she was living in a charitable women’s club just outside of Tower Town, but she had flown from her dreary childhood home and had plans. She couldn’t be slowed down. Meeting John when he was visiting Chicago from his farm on the Indiana-Michigan line, and liking him, too much, had not been part of the plan.

  They trampled across the tiny covered porch and down three wooden steps, the buckles of her galoshes jingling, and then landed on the shoveled walkway to the street. The metallic creaking of swings filled the frigid December air.

  Until the age of five or six, June thought nothing of having a brick fortress across the street from their house. Hers was set among knobby pines that bled milky sap and was guarded by an eight-foot-tall iron fence to which the residents of the castle clung in all weather
s—when they weren’t standing in the middle of the play yard or pumping away on one of the eight vulcanized-rubber swings. Behind the swinging residents loomed the palace power plant, with its shining mounds of coal and a cylindrical brick chimney as tall as a princess’s tower. But Rapunzel’s golden tresses did not cascade down from the tower-top, as much as June imagined in her daydreams for it to be so. Most unregally, the smokestack belched sticky soot, which settled over the neighborhood in a fine black web, including on her bedroom windowsill.

  On occasion, an older resident would escape, his or her identity tipped off by the hospital gown or, in the case of one memorable fellow, an ensemble consisting solely of brown work shoes. When word got out that an inmate was on the loose, neighbors went inside and locked their doors, as if retardation was catching. Only her mother, contrary in all things, went outside as if to talk to the escapees, although she could never get one to stop for her.

  When June was seven, she had been stripping the privet bushes in her yard of their tiny pretend-grapes when two women on bicycles came puffing down her street. She lowered her chipped cup, suspending her game of “little lost child” long enough to stare. Look at the pretty ladies in their white shirtwaists with black neckties! Look at their big balloon sleeves—why, they’re bigger than their heads. And look at the size of their straw hats. You could keep a litter of kittens in them.

  “Isn’t she cute?” one of the ladies said to the other as if June were not right in front of her and couldn’t hear.

  “Poor thing, how does she stand living across from this place?” said the other.