The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  “Hi. Betty.”

  Stupid words spilled out. “You know about Betty?”

  “You’re—famous.”

  Richard pushed next to her. “Hello, John. Remember me? Mr. Crocker?”

  “Hi. Doc.”

  She wasn’t giving him over so quickly. “John, how do you feel? What can I get you?”

  His chest heaved under his covers. “Just—my legs.”

  She felt the kids backing away behind her.

  “John.” Ruth’s voice was brittle. “Just let Richard look at you, would you?”

  June understood that Ruth’s words were meant for her. She got out of the way, joining the kids at the back of the room, where she recorded Richard’s frown as he took John’s pulse, the children’s wary expressions, and Mother’s rabbit gaze as she ran her thumb under her chin. Mother wouldn’t have the slightest idea how this kind of despair felt. Dad had always coddled her.

  Now Ruth was demanding, “What do you mean? Cure him how?”

  Richard turned to see if June was listening before he answered. “A colleague at the hospital has just had success in treating encephalitis lethargica.”

  “I thought there was no cure,” Ruth said bitterly.

  “That is the prevailing thought. And true, there has been no hope for the hyperkinetic form of the disease. He doesn’t have rapid motor movements, uncontrollable twitching, anxiousness, or general restlessness, does he?”

  “No.”

  “Same for the amyostatic-akinetic form, which presents like Parkinson’s disease. The patient has Parkinson’s-like tremors and dramatic reduction in muscle strength and difficulty with moving.”

  “Are you asking if he shakes?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. He doesn’t. He just sleeps.”

  Richard patted John. “Then, as you probably know, our friend here has the somnolent-ophthalmoplegic form, the most prevalent type. It starts with a high fever and the patient falling asleep randomly, even while walking or talking, then moves into psychosis, derangement, or hallucinations before the individual assumes an oft-fatal comatose state. How long was John in a coma, Ruth?”

  “Five days.”

  June reached for one of the twins then let her burrow into her.

  “I see. He’s lucky he lived through it. And then comes the end stage. Patients go into a state of akinetic mutism, lacking the will to move or express themselves in any fashion. It is thought that they will stay this way for the rest of their lives.”

  “We know this!” Ruth said. “Tell us something new!”

  Down on the bed, John opened his eyes. Everything in June lurched for him, even as she stood with the children.

  “As I was going to say,” Richard said, “there has been no hope. Until now.”

  Must he make such a production of it? “What is it, darling?” June asked.

  “One of my colleagues has found what might be a simple therapy—simple but surprisingly efficacious: vitamin B-12.”

  “Vitamins!” Ruth scoffed.

  “My colleague’s patient had a complete recovery after receiving injections. I saw the patient myself—talking, walking. She even did a little dance—the polka, I believe. This after being, well, in crude parlance, a zombie, for six years.”

  “For crying out loud,” Ruth muttered.

  Silence fell over the room. John stared at Richard as the cheer-cheer-cheer of a cardinal sifted through the rusting screened window. June tightened her hold on her niece. “What does this mean for John?”

  Richard smiled. “How good are you at dancing, John?”

  Mother exclaimed and clasped her hands.

  “Enough!” Ruth glared at him. “Say these vitamins could work. How long until we would see results? Or do you even know?”

  “I’m not certain, I’ll admit. If there’s no improvement in eight hours, I’ll give him another injection. I have enough serum for two weeks, QID—four times a day. If it works, I could get you more and show you how to administer it.” He paused, then raised his voice for John, who had drifted off again. “I’ll admit, this isn’t foolproof. They’ve only tried it on the one subject, not exactly a rigorously conducted study, although her response was remarkable.”

  “Then why get our hopes up?” Ruth cried.

  He turned to her with his friendliest doctor expression, the one he reserved, June knew, for cancer patients with inoperable tumors. “If there’s a chance for recovery, don’t you think it’s preferable to doing nothing?”

  John reopened his eyes and, searching Richard’s face, inched his hand across the bed until he grasped him.

  “Fix me.”

  * * *

  The clank of cowbells drifted into the room, along with the smell of withered grass. Heat was building outside, and it wasn’t even noon.

  “All right, sir,” Richard said, “if you’re game, I will see about fixing you up. June, help me prepare, would you, darling?”

  He strode to the washstand with its bowl and thick porcelain pitcher, where she poured water over his hands, let him lather up, then rinsed him. When they were done, they went back to the bed, where Ruth was sinking onto the mattress. John slipped his hand into Ruth’s, and Ruth squeezed it hard.

  June took the blow. What did she expect? Ruth was his wife, not her. If John were cured, Ruth and he would go back to their happy married life. That was the way it should be.

  Mother edged toward the bed.

  “Come closer, Dorothy,” Richard called. “You ought to be able to watch this, since you’re the one who instigated this reunion. June, fetch my bag.”

  Glass tinkled inside the satchel when she picked it up. Mother instigated the reunion?

  “What signs are we to look for that it’s working?” Mother asked.

  “John fox-trotting on the bed, evidently,” Ruth said.

  Mother put her hand over her mouth. “Will it be that fast? Shouldn’t we have lunch first?”

  “You, planning for lunch?” said Ruth. “How long do cans take to open?”

  “Unlatch my bag, would you, darling, and get my head mirror?”

  Ruth was scared, June thought, opening the bag. She’s rudest when she’s frightened. She thought of Ruth, her pimpled face fierce, cracking Mr. Horn with the broom. June had never dwelled on it, but Ruth must have been scared out of her mind then.

  June fitted the head mirror over Richard’s hair. “Can you sit?” he asked John.

  When John couldn’t manage it, June helped Ruth prop him upright, then she retreated to a corner of the room. Ruth’s place was next to the bed, not hers.

  Richard flipped the shiny disc over his eye then peered into John’s pupil.

  “Kids,” said Mother. “Can you see this?”

  The children stayed glued in the doorway. The very room seemed to hold its breath as Richard examined John, slumped against the headboard. One of the girls coughed.

  At last, Richard drew back. “All right, John. We’re going to give this treatment a whirl.”

  He fished in his bag, tore some cotton wool from a roll, wiped John’s arm with alcohol from a brown bottle, then opened a small vial. A medicinal smell permeated the air.

  A hand on her back—June flinched and turned. It was Mother.

  Richard filled a syringe.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Chicago, 1922

  June brushed past the would-be revelers outside the Dil Pickle Club door. She only stopped to catch her breath in the alleyway when she had cleared the line of them.

  Richard came to a halt beside her, his raccoon fur wafting in the light of a streetlamp. “I’m sorry that he upset you. What kind of numbskull treats his girl like that?”

  Already she regretted blurting out to him that she’d seen John and Ruth kissing. “I don’t care. He can do what he wants.” She pulled her baggy coat closer. The damp in Chicago’s wind pierced straight to the bone. “I should be going.”

  “I can’t let you wander off alone.”

  “I don’t
live far.” Should she have told him that? She didn’t know who this young fellow was. This was Tower Town—an expensively dressed fellow could be a mobster or a con man. She’d seen some in the club.

  “No matter if you live across the street: you’re not traipsing around this part of town without me. Doctor’s orders.”

  June must have had a suspicious look on her face because he took out his wallet. She peered at the card he produced: the American Medical Association.

  He shrugged when she looked back up at him. “I know. I don’t look like a sawbones, do I?”

  She liked him more for his modesty.

  He walked her home that night, then called on her the next day at the Three Arts Club. While he seemed a little less humble perched behind the wheel of his topless roadster, with his fedora tilted across his brow and the fur of his raccoon coat rippling in the wind, he was sweet just the same. He took her driving through Lincoln Park with its naked winter trees and empty bandstand, then, as she held down her bottle-green cloche, they roared past the self-satisfied façade of the Drake Hotel. They conquered Michigan Avenue, rumbling past old churches and new offices, past the mock-medieval Water Tower, beneath the concrete gingerbread dripping from the Wrigley Building, and over the sea-green Chicago River, to the row of frilly Gilded Age skyscrapers overlooking Grant Park.

  Pausing long enough to growl back at the bronze lions in front of the Art Institute, they charged into the park, zinging along the railroad lines and racing a locomotive to the modern-day temple of the Field Museum, beyond which the car came to the end of a dirt road and stopped.

  The roadster vibrated in idle. Ahead of them steam shovels, their yellow paint glazed with icy snow, were parked in an earthen pit like dinosaurs frozen in the act of grazing. A broad snowy field separated them from Lake Michigan, which lolled behind blocks of ice tossed haphazardly onto the shore as if by a race of giants.

  Richard raised his voice above the wind groaning off the lake. “They’re digging a new stadium.”

  She could see where the big machines had bitten off chunks of the pit in which they were trapped.

  “Thank you.” Her silk neck scarf snapped in the wind. “I needed this.”

  “I needed this, too. Thank you.” He had taken off his hat and the wind had unstuck his pompadour, whipping his hair in his eyes, making him appear more boyish. “You’re different from other girls. Wiser. Calmer.”

  “It’s all an act.” She wasn’t kidding.

  “Well, don’t stop being you. You’re special.”

  She looked into his light brown eyes. This was the part where men kissed her. Maybe she would not mind it so much, especially when she pictured John kissing Ruth. She leaned into him. He gave her arm a squeeze, and then let her go. He started the car.

  She smiled to herself. Interesting fellow.

  Richard returned to his home in St. Paul the next day, after which time he sent roses daily, and letters, until at last she agreed to come to St. Paul to visit over the summer, during which time she would stay in his mother’s house. It was his mother with whom she would fall in love, or at least the idea of being her daughter. She was engaged to Richard before the end of May.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Indiana-Michigan line, 1934

  The framed watercolor above the washstand of a curly-haired sleeping child, the work of an obvious amateur—June, in fact, when she’d been in high school—irritated Ruth with its naive serenity. The ticking of one of dead Aunt Edna’s clocks on the dresser also bugged her, as did the cardinal who wouldn’t shut up outside with its annoying cheer-cheer-cheer. Oh, there were plenty of irritants to keep her occupied while she waited to see how her future would be. Would she be a wife? A caregiver? A divorcée? Her fate hung on something so stupid as a vitamin.

  Ruth rolled her scowl to her sister and Richard, both sitting next to John on the bed. She toggled between imagining the rickety bed breaking under their weight and wondering how in the world June stood that husband of hers. Ruth would rather be poor than be shackled to such a phony. She almost hoped that John wouldn’t awaken just so Richard couldn’t claim credit—well, not really, but if Richard did cure him, it would be hard to stomach. Richard would be sure to crow about his medical miracle to his bigwig buddies and then newspapermen would be crawling all over the farm in no time flat, snapping photos of the Hoosier Lazarus and his pitiful, grateful family, who owed it all to their brother-in-law and his beautiful wife, one of the plucky women who was an ambassador for America’s Favorite Mother, Betty Crocker. Ruth could just see her family in Time magazine, beaming at the revived patriarch somberly ladling gruel from the pitted aluminum pot at their grubby table, the most recent poverty cases documented by the famous photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

  Now Richard was dipping that head of hair, big as his ego, toward June, who was drooping in her canary suit as if she were the grieving wife. When June looked up, he mouthed to her, Go.

  She glanced at Ruth.

  Ruth recrossed her arms, then wedged them under her small breasts. “Go if you want.”

  Richard patted June’s hand. They exchanged a long gaze that made Ruth burn with envy. Easy for them to be lovers. They had no children, no bills, no drought, no failing crops, no hungry herd, no Mother in their hair, no hope-crushing, dream-curdling, life-snuffing sleeping sickness—nothing—to sully their moonbeams and roses.

  Down on the bed, John opened his eyes.

  June melted into a smile when she saw him. “Hi.”

  “You’re. Here.”

  So am I, John. Your wife. Right here.

  He grinned up at June, too happy to mask his affection. Didn’t matter, did it? Good, true John would never be unfaithful. Not even if he loved June more. Not even if he were well. Now, as Ruth watched their old familiarity flash between them, for one black second she was glad that he was felled, glad he had suffered, until her breakfast boiled up to her throat with shame and remorse and anguish.

  This was how it felt to lose your mind.

  “You gather your strength,” June told John. “I’ll be near.”

  He receded back into himself, asleep again.

  June got up, her eyes bright. Ruth peered closer: no tears. Why didn’t she just go ahead and cry? Why did she always have to be such a martyr?

  Richard rubbed June’s back, then watched her leave.

  “Well,” he said, “looks like it’s just you and me now, Ruth.”

  She lifted the corners of her mouth then let them drop. She might have to kill somebody.

  From the kitchen, Mother was making lunch noises. The kids were running through the house, until they’d latched on to June.

  Richard pointed that pompadour at her. “So how has life been?”

  “Oh, just peaches and cream.”

  He nodded and smiled, as if she weren’t being completely surly. “Thank you for having us. Your sister couldn’t wait to come.”

  What was he looking for? Thanks? “Thank you for helping out with the rent,” she said stiffly.

  “That’s all June’s doing—not that I don’t approve. She puts every penny of her check in an account for you and the kids.”

  Was he trying to rub it in? “Thank you,” she mumbled. When she looked down, John’s eyes were quivering behind his lids as if he were trying, hard, to listen.

  How much did he hear?

  “I admire how you’re managing the farm, Ruth. Even with help, in these times, that’s no mean feat. And with four children and a house to run—I tip my hat to you. You’re a remarkable woman.”

  She jumped to her feet. She didn’t stop until she reached the base of the stairs, where she clutched the newel post and gritted back a scream. She saw herself pregnant when she was eighteen, all those years ago. She was not quite showing, her skirt straining over her thickened waist.

  “We got married,” she was telling Dad.

  Pencil in hand, Dad looked up at her from the bills arranged over the dining room table, then swung his fa
ce to John, and back to her again. Wrinkles of confusion wreathed his gentle face.

  She had smiled stupidly. No, Dad, he’s not June’s boyfriend anymore. And no, Dad, I’m not exactly a virgin bride. I never disappoint to disappoint.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Fort Wayne, 1922

  Ruth was in the stable behind Dad’s store, where the air was so thick with the smell of animal that she could taste it. She ran her hand down JoJo’s firm warm neck, then laid her head against it. She concentrated on the feel of the horse’s smooth hair against her cheek—she had to, to keep her heart from thrashing from her chest. John would be here in a moment.

  They had become unlikely pen pals since they had stumbled around that night in Tower Town last winter, him trying to walk off the effects of the wicked hooch, her trailing behind him, not knowing what else to do. They’d ended up at an all-night automat, staring at a piece of pie. She couldn’t face June. He’d put her on the first train home in the morning without having said a dozen words to her.

  After school on the Monday she’d returned, she’d mailed him her olive branch: a piece of sheet music. The cover pictured a brilliantined hep cat fox-trotting a real live wire off her high heels. CRAZY PEOPLE, it read. Inside, Ruth had scrawled in red crayon over the musical notes, What do I say after I say I’m sorry?

  A week passed before the envelope came. When Ruth saw “State Line Road” on the flap, she ripped it open and unfolded the piece of sheet music tucked inside.

  GUILTY, it read. A Fox-Trot Ballad. The woman on one half of the cover dipped her marcelled head in shy remorse. The other half was a scene of a sweet girl-next-door-type turning away from a man.

  A quick flip of the cover revealed no other message.

  She laughed, then plunked down and wrote him right back. She had deposited her letter in the mailbox on State Street when it occurred to her with a jolt: Who was he saying was guilty?