The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  “Why are there no famous women painters? I looked through this entire book—” He tapped the volume lying in front of him. “—and didn’t find a one.”

  “That’s just how it was, pretty much until Mary Cassatt and a couple other female Impressionists came along near the end of the last century.” Why didn’t he come over and kiss her?

  “Women started painting recently, then. Is that it?”

  The flesh of his upper lip was a little puffier than the lower, giving him the slightest, sweetest overbite. She couldn’t take her gaze from it. “Not really. Women were painting back in the Renaissance—Sofonisba Anguissola in Italy, Judith Leyster in the Netherlands, Clara Peeters in Antwerp, several others. But they didn’t have much of an output. At least I don’t know of it. It’s possible that they painted a lot but people assumed that men had done it. Either way, over time their reputations faded away, until now they are pretty much overlooked.”

  “You.” He shook his finger at her. “Don’t let yourself be overlooked.”

  Did he not know that by marrying him, and by being isolated on a farm, she would greatly compound the odds of that very thing? After talking with Dad, he had asked her to marry him before he had left her parents’ house over Christmas. She had not given him an answer.

  He reached for her over the space between the beds. She made no move to connect with him, as much as she craved him.

  “You should keep studying,” he said. “Become such a master that no one can overlook you, wherever you are. Even on a farm.”

  Her face heated. He’d heard her thoughts, as he often seemed to. Well, it was not that simple. Even as young and inexperienced as she was, she suspected that being good at something wasn’t the only necessary ingredient of success.

  “I suppose that having families might have gotten in their way,” she said. “Having children to care for would cut into their work time. Men don’t have that problem.”

  They looked at each other, her frustration and desire, his determination to have her for good, flying between them.

  “There was also the issue,” she said, “of women not getting adequate training back then. They couldn’t tackle the classical themes so popular in the Renaissance because they weren’t allowed to paint from the nude.”

  He smiled crookedly. “They weren’t allowed to paint while they were naked?”

  Relief washed over her—confrontation avoided, for now.

  “No, you nut,” she said affectionately. “The painters kept their clothes on. Women couldn’t paint nude models. It was considered to be unseemly for them to see bare bodies.”

  “Men could see—and paint—naked models but women couldn’t?”

  “They’re called ‘nude models’ in the art world. ‘Naked’ sounds more sexual. And, no, women couldn’t see or paint them. You’ll notice that all of their subjects have clothes on. They weren’t allowed to study what was underneath.”

  “That’s not fair.” He was frowning when he said, “I think I should make up for it.”

  “Oh, really?”

  He started unbuttoning his vest. “Don’t say I won’t do anything for your art.”

  June had taken many life classes in her studies. She was no stranger to a nude. A year had passed since that first time at the Institute when a handsome young man had come padding down the polished marble steps of the Grand Staircase, the patter of his bare feet echoing from the balconies, and, in front of the men and women of her class with their sketchbooks poised, had let his robe slide from his muscled body. How she blushed at his exposure, then at herself for blushing, even as the image of his body parts embossed themselves on her brain.

  For months afterward, she couldn’t talk to a man without picturing what lurked beneath his trousers, be it her teacher while discussing shading, a fellow student telling a joke, or a policeman patrolling the Michigan Avenue bridge, twirling his billy club. She had quickly come to appreciate the necessity, no, the mercy, of clothing.

  “Where’s your drawing paper?” He dropped his vest and started undoing his shirt. “Quit smiling. I’m serious about this. I want to be the fellow known as the man behind the great woman.”

  A blade twisted in her chest. The hard truth was, she wanted him to be a great man. She wanted her husband to be a great man. For a woman, being a somebody meant marrying a somebody, no matter what she might achieve on her own, and with his father’s health recently failing, John was more embroiled in the farm than ever. He was always going to be a farmer. Yes, the notion that a woman had to marry a somebody to be somebody was unfair and ugly and maddening. It made her furious and sick to just think it. But that did not make it less true.

  A knock came on the door.

  She scowled. Besides pooling their money for an ancient phonograph, the paper umbrellas, and the ratty tapestries, she and her roommate, Norma, a licorice-haired actress from French Lick, Indiana, had bought a small silk pillow embroidered with the word JAZZ in scarlet letters. They’d worked out a system of hanging the pillow from the bedroom doorknob in the event of illegal male stowaways. June, who took classes by day and worked demonstrating potato peelers at Carson Pirie Scott by night, and whose beau lived on a farm over two hundred miles away, seldom had call for it, unlike Norma with her loud actor fellows from Tower Town. June was sure she’d hung it out today. It was not like Norma not to honor it.

  The knock sounded again. “June?” came a familiar voice.

  Is that your sister? John mouthed.

  June was shaking her head with incredulousness when the bedroom door swung open, the little JAZZ pillow bouncing against it.

  Ruth’s flushed face swelled into view. She looked between them, backed up, then burst out laughing.

  NINETEEN

  Chicago, Illinois, 1922

  Ruth had a nose for when someone was hiding something. Personal experience. So when she arrived in June’s place in Chicago and June’s little dark-bobbed Betty Boop of a roommate tried too hard to entertain her with loud chitchat, Ruth had made a beeline for the elephant in the room: the closed bedroom door. She’d thrown it open. But she had not expected to see John, stripped to his waist, standing by June’s bed.

  She groaned and backed straight onto the toes of Betty Boop, who was literally hard on her heels. For crying out loud, she’d caught them in the act! Even as she was groaning, she wondered how many times a couple could do it in a day. She laughed out loud at her own depravity.

  “What are you doing here?” June demanded.

  Ruth was taken aback for a moment. June’s golden skin and those goldy-green cat eyes could be unnerving if your guard wasn’t up. People aren’t supposed to be so pretty.

  “Hi to you, too.”

  June shut the door, behind which John was scrambling for his clothes. Trailing perfume, she took Ruth’s arm to lead her away. “Sorry—hi. But I wasn’t exactly expecting my little sister who lives another state away.”

  “Surprise.” Ruth shrugged her off. She wasn’t a baby who could be led. Actually, she’d never been much of a baby even when she was a baby. She’d never had the luxury of being doted on and dandled, at least not that she ever knew of. But who was counting?

  “How did you get here?”

  Ruth shrugged. “There are these miraculous machines called trains.”

  John came out with his vest open. “Ruth!” June cried. “You took a train by yourself?”

  “Why not?”

  June and John swapped glances, Mama and Papa Katzenjammer worried about their Kid. They were almost cute.

  “Why would you take such a risk?” June demanded.

  It wasn’t like she hopped trains for the joy of it. There was a method to her madness. She had been boning up on all things flapper since she had seen June in her hep cat glory at Christmas, reverently consulting Photoplay and Time and the newspapers for tips on how she might achieve that look, too. She hadn’t even let up on the train ride there, where she’d swayed on her seat across from a mother and three lit
tle boys in red felt cowboy hats, her gaze glued to a clipping that was limp from use. She could recite from it now, all thirteen items that were the hallmark of a flapper:

  1. Hat of soft silk or felt

  2. Bobbed hair

  3. Flapper curl on forehead

  4. Flapper collar

  5. Flapper earrings

  6. Slipover sweater

  7. Flapper beads

  8. Metallic belt

  9. Bracelet of strung jet

  10. Knee-length fringed skirt

  11. Exposed, bare knees

  12. Rolled hose with fancy garter

  13. Flat-heeled little girl sandals

  Ruth had made the trip to Chicago to acquire some of these items, as Fort Wayne was not exactly a hotbed of hepness. If her sister could be a flapper, so could she.

  “Does Dad know?” June asked.

  “Not yet.” Was that a flapper curl on her sister’s forehead? Was that a round flapper collar on her blouse? That getup would look swanker with a hep metallic belt.

  June’s voice rose. “Does Mother?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Ruth! I don’t know what’s worse—Mother knowing and panicking about disease and murder on the railroads, or her not knowing and panicking about your being abducted.”

  Ruth folded her arms. “You mistake me for you. You, she’d miss. Me, she won’t even notice that I’m gone.”

  “That’s not true. Why would you say that?”

  “Maybe because it’s true? She did forget me my first day of kindergarten.”

  “Stop it. How’d you find my apartment?”

  “I told the policeman at the station you were in the Three Arts Club. He knew exactly where that was even before I gave him your address. And then I walked it.”

  “That’s over two miles! In a city you don’t know! Through a wild part of town!”

  Ruth followed John’s hand as he cupped it around June’s shoulder, loosening an itchy splinter in her own chest. “That’s how far you walk to the Art Institute. I passed it on the way here.”

  “I take the streetcar. And that’s not the point. You could have gotten lost and stumbled into a truly dangerous area.”

  “Death Corner? Hurray!”

  “Quit kidding around. It’s not safe for a woman to go wandering around here.”

  “You do it.” Back home, Ruth bragged to all the snobs at her school that her sister lived in Chicago. June hadn’t finished packing to leave for it before Ruth had aspired to live there herself. The fact of the matter was that for Ruth’s whole life, her greatest wish had been to be June, no matter that she hadn’t the beauty, the sweet temperament, the artistic talent, or any of the other admirable qualities that June had by the bushelful. Any effort for her to be June was sure to fail, but that had never stopped Ruth before. She didn’t know who else to be. Unless it was John’s wife.

  Betty Boop bellowed, “You ought to go down to the office and call your parents.”

  Ruth winced. Dear Lord, where’d that little girl get the foghorn voice?

  “I’ll take her down.” John let go of her sister and dipped back in the bedroom.

  Boop laughed. “You’re not supposed to be past the lobby,” she said when he came out shrugging on his coat, “let alone using the telephone.”

  “We’ll go find a phone booth down the street. You—” He pointed at June. “Study, Famous Artist. I’ll be back.”

  Ruth was glad for the noise their footsteps made in the stairwell as she and John trampled down the stairs. She didn’t know what to say to him. She hadn’t expected to have him to herself so soon.

  She wondered if he would be so friendly if he knew what had been written about her on the door of the girls’ bathroom at school.

  TWENTY

  Chicago, 1922

  Downstairs, Ruth scanned the situation: A girl was torturing the keys of the piano on the stage. Across the hall, the dining room rang with the clink of china as the Three Arts staff set tables for dinner. A matron with a shiny bun like Olive Oyl sat near the entrance hall door, writing at a desk.

  Acutely aware of the frustratingly attractive man inside the red and black checkered wool coat sleeve she was tugging, Ruth plucked her sister’s boyfriend across the hall and into an empty sitting room, where a fire was dying in the green-tiled fireplace.

  She mustered a tough front to cover her fluttering insides. “Let me talk to that dragon at the drawbridge. I’ll distract her and you can sneak out.”

  He threw an amused glance at her hand on his arm and let himself be led, as would a benign St. Bernard being bullied by a child. “You’re as crafty as your sister.”

  She drew back. Her angelic sister was crafty? “June?”

  “How do you think I got up there?” He stepped back into the shadows and shooed her on. “Go.”

  She stared at him a moment. He was treating her like a friend. Like she wasn’t a little sister, or a loser, or a whore.

  “Go!” he whispered.

  The matron—a different one than who had checked in Ruth, luckily—fell for Ruth’s line about being a needy art student interested in renting a room there. Maybe it was the patch that Mother had carefully sewn on the sleeve of her long maroon coat, not so invisible after all. The old bat at the desk looked at it then got out a clipboard with an application. Didn’t matter. It was worth the temporary wave of shame to see a six-foot-four man in a lumberjack coat go tiptoeing by.

  Minutes later, she fell in step next to him in front of the apartment buildings out on Dearborn Street. Gusts of wind pierced her coat as automobiles stuttered past. Between crusty black banks of long-ago shoveled snow, a man in a baggy coat strode by, then a pair of women, their cloche hats pulled down low and their bare knees pinched and red above their rolled-down hose. Grand iron-railed stairways led up into sumptuous houses with lamps turned on against the early evening gloom. Ruth peered through windows, wondering about the sophisticates inside, as foreign to her as Martians. How happy they must be, living their exotic lives.

  “There might be a phone booth on Clark, down near all those cheap hotels,” John said.

  Although he’d worn what apparently was his Sunday best—the same that he’d worn to visit June at home over Christmas—Ruth could see now that he didn’t fit in here in Chicago. His opened red and black coat was too short; he wore no tie; his white shirt was buttoned up to his chin; his flat cap with ear flaps was no debonair fedora. He was perfectly dressed . . . to deliver wood in the city.

  Good-looking as he was, for a moment she was embarrassed to be seen with him, before fury at herself torched up in her chest. Who was she but a small-town flat tire? Unlike all the ducky dolls sashaying by, her knees were buried beneath her pinched-waist long coat, a full skirt, and white cotton stockings. She might as well have worn a sign that read OLD MAID IN TRAINING. She saw her future and was frightened.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s your hurry?”

  “I’m going to Death Corner,” she snapped.

  “You mean where the police look the other way as gangsters shoot each other up and innocent bystanders get killed every other day?”

  “I believe that would be the ‘Death’ part.”

  “Not under my watch, you’re not.”

  She kept walking. That’s how she got anything done—she just kept doing it even though people told her otherwise. She’d surveyed the map of Chicago before coming. She needed to stay on Clark to the Newbery Library, turn right on Oak Street, and then forge down several blocks to arrive at Death Corner and all the tenements there. But when they got to the stone pile of the library, he grabbed her hand and placed it on his arm.

  “Telephone is this way.” He kept them going straight.

  She suspected they looked ridiculous, a giant farmer and an adolescent old maid, promenading down the street, although having her hand on his arm did please her. She let him guide her on, regardless of the fact that her nose ached with the cold, a blister screamed from her h
eel, and the way to Death Corner was receding in the other direction.

  On the other side of the library, under some bare young trees in a little park, an older woman stood on a wooden crate and shouted into a megaphone, her baggy flapper garb billowing around her. Ruth’s heart quickened: they were in Bughouse Square! Dear Lord, let it be as wild as the guidebooks said.

  “Women!” the old flapper cried into her megaphone. “Are you letting your destiny be controlled by the fear of unwanted pregnancy? Let me tell you what your doctor, your husband—maybe your own mother—will never tell you. There are ways to protect yourself!”

  A crowd formed around Ruth to hear the woman speak. Ruth planted her feet on the wet sidewalk when John tried to move her on. “I want to listen.”

  A sightseeing bus stuffed with tourists under its canvas lid turned the corner and slowly rattled down the street between the library and the park. Several passengers had Brownie box cameras raised, in wait for the bus to come to a stop.

  Next to Ruth, a laborer in bulky coveralls yelled at the tourists. “Hey, what are you gawking at?”

  “You all are going straight to Hell!” a camera-toter shouted back.

  “Well, that’s good news.” A stocky man in shirtsleeves and suspenders spoke around his cigar as he handed out flyers near Ruth. “Heaven’s fine for climate but give me Hell for the society.” He shoved a bill into Ruth’s hands. “Can’t take credit; that’s Mark Twain’s quote.”

  She had just enough time to read the paper between her wool-encased fingers.

  TONITE!

  “IS

  FREE

  LOVE

  POSSIBLE?”

  DEBATE

  “Prof.” Jack Dunham, University of Chicago Campus

  Vs.

  Fred Hardy, Bookman

  Dil Pickle Club

  Thru Hole in Wall at 10 Tooker Place

  Down Tooker Alley to the Green Lite Over the Orange Door

  Members of the Dil Pickle Club furnish the “swell” music at our Friday Nite Dancing Classes

  John took it from her. “She’s just a kid,” he told the man, handing it back.