The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  She had thought that John could hear her all along. Though he’d rarely opened his eyes while she talked to him when she fed him, there was something about the way he held himself when she laid him back down after ladling in the soup that had led her to suspect it. He wasn’t limp like a half-full sack of flour but was so rigid that he seemed to vibrate under her hands. Sometimes when she spoke, energy ran through him like a plucked guitar string, making his eyes quake and fingers tremble. He seemed to be fighting to get out of his body, such a horrible thought that it made bile rise to her throat.

  But now a vitamin shot had brought him back to life. Well, they could use a miracle around here. She hadn’t expected such a tremendous result when she’d told June that Ruth wanted her to come. She had just been trying to get June’s help with Ruth, and here their John had come back to them. What good news for all the sleepers around the world! Think of them rising up from their beds, and of all the happy families, so glad to receive them.

  Venus put her paw on Dorothy’s lips. She lifted her hand to the fine rows of fur between the cat’s ears.

  The problem was, with John back, if their marriage was going to work, Dorothy needed to clear out. They didn’t need some old woman lurking around when they were trying to find their way as husband and wife again. But how was she going to live alone? She’d never done it. William had spared her of it the one time she’d struck out on her own.

  William. What greater power had led him to her in her hour of need? After a two-week courtship during which she’d stayed at his sister Edna’s house, he had left college to marry her, a year shy of finishing his degree. She had never felt good about that.

  She remembered when the two of them had moved into his parents’ house in Angola, soon after they had gotten married—before Edna had died and left her house to them. They’d had trouble that day with the car that William had borrowed to move them. By the time they’d reached his parents’ door, he was frazzled, fumbling with the doorknob while juggling the baby’s wooden high chair and their suitcase.

  William wasn’t the only one who was awkward. Dorothy’d had trouble getting Junie in her little dress, even though putting clothes on Junie, as pliant and quiet as she was, was like suiting up a china doll. Taking on a baby and a marriage all at once had been tough on William and her. And her trying to forget Edward—that was no mean feat, either. Edward was always on her mind, even when she stood with her new husband on William’s parents’ doorstep, a ferocious expression on his long-chinned face as he wrestled with the knob.

  She chuckled now at the memory of mild William, his hat knocked back on his head and his hair waggling in his eyes as he wielded Junie’s high chair like a weapon. All he’d wanted was to make her happy and here he was making a mess of it. That night, even with his parents battened down in the next bedroom in their flannel nightgowns and caps, she’d made love to him with extra zest. Ruthie had come of it.

  Venus pushed her paw against Dorothy’s lip, this time with a hook of claw. Well, no use crying over spilled milk. William was gone now. Swiping her eyes with her arm, she pictured the object nestled in a browning shoebox below her. It waited for her beneath the mattress ticking and box springs of the kids’ bed, tucked between Ruth’s boxes of old photos and important papers. It was the one thing of value that Edward had given her.

  No, that wasn’t true—Edward had given her something of far greater value. He’d given her that which was most precious to her in this life, and yet she had let her be damaged. She kissed the soft leather of Venus’s paw, the miniature sickle of cat’s claw nearly, but not quite, piercing her flesh. The paw remained there, riding Dorothy’s lip, as she murmured the part of her story that she could not, she would not, let another mortal bear.

  DOROTHY

  The moon was prowling between clouds like a wolf through a herd of sheep, lighting up and then concealing the dour brick fortress of the School for Feeble-Minded Youth. I clung to the spiked iron palings of the fence, wondering how I was getting in.

  I hoped that she wasn’t on the top floor. The windows there were fitted with metal fire-escape tubes that swooped from the three-story building like giant ear trumpets. Did they just hurl the children down them when there was fire, like laundry down a chute?

  Didn’t matter. I was getting her.

  I slipped through the open gate as a carriage shuddered its way out. Before the guard could see me, I was sneaking across the grounds.

  Moisture seeped into my boots from grass spongy with melted snow and rain. A light peppering of sleet had begun zinging. I was picking my way through the slush, my heart whaling at my chest, when my shin rapped something hard. I stuck out my hand and caught a wet chain. A swing?

  I kept going, past an abandoned bandstand, along the brick drive empty of carriages and wagons, to the front of the building with its forbidding rows of windows. The dark seemed to hold its breath. Or was that me?

  A flight of concrete steps led into the central tower, where a gas lamp hung in the portal, its flame hissing at the night. I would march inside to whoever was in charge and demand to see my baby.

  I trudged up the stairs, then heaved open the door, releasing a thrum of distant disembodied voices and the stink of Lysol and despair. The desk by the door was bare save for a greasy white plate piled with chicken bones. The wooden chair behind it was askew.

  “Hello?” My voice echoed down the green plaster hall.

  No one answered. I not so much walked as floated toward distant voices. Fear had disconnected my mind from my feet. I glanced in rooms along the way, my brain unwilling—unable—to process the horrors it was seeing: Iron rings on the wall. Howling mouths. Flurries of limbs and hair.

  Keep moving, I told myself. Find somebody to help. Find where they keep the babies.

  An attendant burst from a room in a flash of white gown. I flattened myself against the wall as another flapped forth, then another. Their footsteps beat the tiny gray honeycomb tiles as they flocked to a room ringing with shrieks.

  I felt invisible. Or dead.

  Down more halls I drifted, and up a broad stairwell, going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the place, where the very walls seemed to contract and dilate with suffering. A sweet medicinal tang masked something pungent.

  I peered through doorways, revulsion auguring through my gut. In some rooms, children sat on their cots, still as stones. In others, teenagers tore at their mattresses or at themselves. I saw trembling heaps upon the floor. Heaven help these poor lost children. How could people treat their fellow souls this way? But my baby was not among them. Had Mrs. Lamb lied?

  There was one last room. Its door yawned open at the end of the hall. One last dip in, one last mortal blow to my heart, and I was done. Mrs. Lamb would have had her cruel joke.

  I drew in a breath and plunged in.

  It was in the corner. A single white iron crib.

  My heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t see straight. Something was hanging down from the bars of the bed: four leather restraining straps, thick and flaccid as dead snakes.

  I lifted my gaze to the mattress, where lay a small white-gowned figure. Its legs were splayed in the manner of porcelain limbs sewn onto the soft cloth body of a doll that had been dropped.

  I leaned in.

  She rolled her gaze up.

  Those eyes. A kitten’s eyes.

  My heart jammed to my throat.

  “Shhhh. Don’t scream.”

  But June was as mute as glass.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Indiana-Michigan line, 1934

  The hallway in her house smelled like rubbing alcohol. The smell of doctors. Ruth tried to remember if June’s house in Minnesota’d had that odor when she and John had visited there the year he’d fallen ill, but all she could recall was the scent of rose potpourri and baking cookies and the stink of her own shame as she’d compared her threadbare life to June’s elegant one. If she really wanted to hurt herself, she could let herself remember the re
ek of her anxiety as she watched John and June pretend that they weren’t in love. But why would she want to do that?

  Dinner had long finished. Out in the parlor, Nick was turning on the radio on the bureau. She paused in the hallway to observe him, enjoying his beauty as he stood back to let the device warm up. The tubes cast an orange glow on the flowered wallpaper as he stroked his chin; she could hear the scratchy sound of his beard. She knew exactly what that stubbly chin felt like against her cheek.

  He looked up and saw her, his turquoise eyes scrunching with worry. “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t ask, “Is John all right?” He didn’t ask, “Is your sister all right?” He asked, “Are you all right?” It was the right question.

  “No.”

  He gestured with both hands for her to come to him. When she didn’t, he frowned then went for the dial. He knew when to let her be.

  “George Squibb was here,” he said over the radio’s whining and whooping. “He said we are to get a ‘doozy’ of a storm. We could get gusts of fifty miles per hour.”

  They both looked toward the window. Beyond the screen, the evening sky was decaying from gray to a dark olive green. The wind, the birds, even crickets had gone silent. The animal in Ruth cowered.

  “We’ve got to bring in the stock.”

  He kept searching for a station. “He said it should be in here in a few hours. And something about it carrying a load of dust.”

  “Dust!” she scoffed. “We don’t get dust. Not this far east.”

  Muted trumpet music oozed from the radio. He dropped his hand from the dial and faced her. “Root, we must talk.”

  Anxiety shrunk Ruth’s guts as she stared back at him. A woman was crooning on the radio.

  Don’t know why

  There’s no sun up in the sky.

  Stormy weather.

  “Are they playing that as a joke?” Ruth exclaimed. “Put on WOWO! Where’s the weather report?”

  The kids tramped into the room. Ruth glanced at Nick. No need to scare them yet. “Go upstairs.” It was way past their bedtime.

  Margaret looked up the stairwell. “Grandma’s up there talking to herself.”

  The twins cocked their heads to listen, then giggled. “She is!”

  Ruth flipped her hand at them. “Go give her someone to talk to.”

  They raced one another up the steps, not waiting to be told again. They weren’t bad kids.

  Nick watched them go then left the radio. “I can leave the farm if you want me to.”

  Ruth looked away. Eyes should never be that blue.

  “Did you hear me, Root? I will leave, if you want. I never meant—”

  Ruth glanced back quickly, ready to bristle. He never meant for what? For her to love him?

  “I never meant to hurt anyone,” he said.

  Life is bare . . .

  Ruth sighed. Why was that woman still bawling on the radio?

  Nick waited until Ruth looked at him again. “I want to do what’s best for you and for John.”

  Ruth’s breath stopped. “You want to do what’s best for John?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She wanted him to say that he cared for her. That he wanted to do what was best for her. Then she would tell him to go, if that’s what she had to do. She’d do what was best for her family. She always did. She just wanted someone to think she was special, just for a moment, and to fight for her. Then she’d do the right thing. Was that asking so terribly much?

  Richard strode into the front room, all puffed out, big doctor man.

  “Say!” he said over the music. “Could you be a good fellow,” he asked Nick, “and take me to a telephone? John said there was one at a neighbor’s.”

  Nick glanced at Ruth. “A bad storm is coming.”

  Richard scowled toward the window as the trumpets sobbed around their mutes. “It does look rather threatening out there. I’d better get the call in before the weather breaks, then.”

  “I will take you,” said Nick, “but I must bring in the cows first.”

  “I’m afraid this can’t wait, chap. It’s rather important, you see. Ruth’s husband’s recovery is making medical history.”

  Ruth spoke up. “I’ll take you.”

  “Would you?” Richard lowered his raised eyebrows. “That’s a good sport.”

  “No, Root, do not go. It is too dangerous.”

  It did look like tornado weather. The very idea of tornadoes terrified the kids and it didn’t do much for her either. “Maybe we should wait until after the storm passes. The Squibbs are probably already in bed now, anyhow.”

  Richard pushed back his sleeve to check his watch. “It’s not even nine.”

  “Things are different out here in the country.”

  “Maybe your neighbors will forgive me when they hear what it’s about. Who would want to keep the encephalitis sufferers around the world sleeping another minute?”

  “Let me go, Root, not you.”

  It came out even more bitterly than she’d intended: “Don’t you want to ask John if he approves?”

  Ruth turned on her heel before Nick could answer. She saw how it was. He wasn’t going to fight for her. Oh, she’d refuse him if he did, she had to, she knew that, but couldn’t he at least make an effort for her? No man ever had. Even her husband had only married her because he had to.

  “Don’t forget to bring in JoJo,” she snapped over her shoulder.

  “I do not forget nobody!”

  She walked away. Prove it.

  * * *

  The pitcher was getting heavy in June’s hands. She needn’t be holding it. She could have put it on the floor, like she had the washbowl that went with it, but she did not know what else to do with herself. Richard was writing notes at the makeshift desk he’d made out of the washstand; Ruth’s kids were at the foot of John’s bed, fidgeting with one another, giggling, and shoving. Only little Jeanne stood apart, sucking on her hair as she hugged herself. They didn’t know how to act, June realized. How scared and confused they must be of John, now sitting up on his bed and talking with them. He was a stranger to them, a new head of the household who’d been suddenly dropped into their lives. Not even the oldest of them would likely remember life with an active father. All they’d ever had was Ruth.

  He sat forward, quiet for a moment. They stole surreptitious glances at him.

  “Girls, tell me what your favorite subject is in school.”

  They stared at him before the oldest one mustered an answer.

  “Art.”

  The others followed.

  “Art.”

  “Art.”

  “Reading.”

  He smiled at the reader, Jeanne. “What’s your favorite book?”

  The others answered for her with their own favorites.

  “Wizard of Oz.”

  “Wizard of Oz.”

  “Wizard of Oz.”

  “Velveteen Rabbit,” she said.

  “That’s a baby book,” a twin objected.

  She hugged herself tighter. “I like it.”

  “I do, too,” said John. “Poor rabbit, wants to be real but can’t be until he’s loved. I’ve always had a soft spot for him.”

  “I like scary stories,” Margaret offered.

  “Hence the Poe,” said her dad.

  Margaret nodded, as did the twins, who were unlikely to have read any Poe. “I like Washington Irving, too,” she said, perhaps showing off a little. “ ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is creepy. That Headless Horseman—brrr!”

  The little ones, no more apt to be familiar with Irving than Poe, were still nodding in enthusiastic agreement when Jeanne said, “ ‘Rip van Winkle’ scares me.”

  John regarded Jeanne a moment. “It does?”

  When she didn’t answer, June put down the pitcher and cut in brightly. “Now I’m going to have to go back and read it. Was it that frightening? I can’t remember how it ended after Rip van Winkle awakened. Happily, I’m sur
e.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Jeanne. “He doesn’t like his wife. He is sorry that he woke up.”

  Richard looked up as if alerted by a change in the room.

  “Maybe we ought to let your father rest now,” June told the girls.

  “That’s not necessary. I’m fine.” John’s face, pinched with exhaustion, said otherwise.

  “Isn’t it your bedtime?” June asked Margaret.

  “We usually would have been in bed an hour ago.”

  “There you go,” June told John. “Case closed.”

  “Betty’s a bully.” He winked at his daughters. “Goodnight, girls. See you tomorrow.”

  The group bolted for the door as if slingshotted. They’d only been looking for an excuse.

  June could hear them talking in the hall.

  “Grandma’s up there talking to herself.”

  “She is!”

  They giggled until Ruth said something inaudible, then June could hear them tramping up the stairs.

  John faded back on the bed and closed his eyes.

  Richard put his notes in his bag and got up. June moved to leave with him.

  “No,” he told her. “You stay. Someone should be here with him while I go make a call, to make sure he rests. He’s going to have to take it easy at first.”

  “A call? They don’t have a phone.”

  “I’ll get that Nick character to take me to a neighbor’s.”

  She glanced at John, eyes still shut.

  “Don’t go, Richard!”

  “I have to. This kind of news can’t wait. We may have made a breakthrough which could affect thousands of patients. Imagine how many families this could put back together.”

  John spoke without opening his eyes. “He’s right.”

  “You.” Richard thumped John’s arm. “You just lie here and take it easy. Let Betty Crocker take care of you.”