The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  Like with horses. Seemed like only last week that the streets in town were full of them, and now, poof! they were gone, as if lifted up by angels and borne away, their hooves dangling down from their knobby knees.

  Nothing these days was like it was. Radios blared in every home, telling you how to be and which new products you just had to have to achieve it. You worried about not buying the right kind of toothbrush, soap, or flour. Who knew that unless you used deodorant, you drove folks away with your body odor, until the deodorant makers pointed it out? Who knew that you were supposed to douse your nether parts in Lysol according to the ads, in order to ensure your “dainty feminine allure”? So far, Dorothy hadn’t tried it, and she strongly hoped her daughters wouldn’t.

  She ought to get up. Tell the kids to go to bed. It was way past their bedtime, and they were burning through the kerosene. But she felt oddly immobilized, like a bug being wrapped by a spider. Maybe it was the strange cold wind whistling through the screen. Things were banging around outside. Get up! Something bad was coming.

  But then her mother’s face came to her, harsh beneath her lace cap. Just lie there and shut up.

  So good little girl Dorothy folded her hands and did just that, as her grandkids played and radio music wafted up through the floorboards. How she yearned to go downstairs and see Junie. Just looking at her would suffice. Dorothy never took that privilege for granted. Yet she had let Ruthie go out in this weather and she could feel it in her bones—something terrible was going to happen tonight.

  Dear God, forgive her. For the honest truth was, she had never worried about Ruthie enough.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934

  June opened her eyes to John lying on the bed, smiling up at her. He pushed himself onto his elbow. “Hi.”

  She scrambled to rise from the chair next to the bed. How long had she nodded off?

  “Am I that frightening?”

  “Of course not. It’s just that you surprised me.” She brushed at the smear on her yellow skirt. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I was only going to rest.”

  “Thank you for falling asleep. It was nice having the shoe on the other foot, watching someone else sleep for a change.” He grinned. “Actually, it was a treat.”

  She felt a niggle of guilt, as if fraternizing with John was betraying Ruth somehow. “How long was I asleep?”

  “I’m not sure. Less than an hour.”

  “Where are the kids? And Ruth? She’d gone with Richard to make a phone call.”

  The laughter of children came from the distance.

  “Well, there’s your answer about the kids.” He frowned. “They’re up late.”

  “Maybe I should go put them in bed.”

  “No. Your mother will do it. She’s a pretty good egg.”

  She glanced at him.

  “She has kept me from going crazy,” he said.

  “Mother?”

  He smiled at her as if deciding whether to elaborate. “Let the kids be. They must feel discombobulated. They’ve just had the rug pulled out from under them.”

  “They are celebrating,” she said firmly. “Their father is back.”

  Cold air blasted through the bedroom window. The temperature had dropped significantly. She went over and pulled down the sash.

  “The radio’s on. Maybe Ruth’s already home.” He shook his head as if amazed. “I don’t have to wonder about it anymore, do I? I can get up and go see for myself.”

  “Yes, you can. Shall we?”

  She helped him out of bed and down the hall with her hand on his back, conscious of his warmth under his shirt as they walked along. Tension vibrated between them like a clothesline in the wind.

  The radio was playing in the empty parlor when they got there. The room, with its balding velveteen rocker, its faded flowered armchair under the floor lamp, and its buffet with peeling veneer, was a still-life painting of failure, of chances and hope lost.

  “They aren’t home yet.” June left him leaning against the armchair and retreated over to the radio. “I shouldn’t have let her go.”

  “ ‘Let her go’? Have you met Ruth?”

  June smiled.

  On the radio, three young women harmonized about the joys of eating Pep Cereal.

  John braced himself on the back of the chair. “I wonder if it’s still part of the Hollywood Breakfast.”

  “Pardon?”

  He shook his head.

  The commercial finished with a flourish of clarinet. The program resumed.

  “I’ve got to give Ruth credit,” he said suddenly.

  June waited.

  “How she has held this place together after the hand I’ve dealt her is nothing short of heroic.”

  June became aware that she was holding her breath. She exhaled. “Your illness was not your fault, John.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The result is the same. I ruined her.”

  “You didn’t ruin her. She has the kids, the farm. She has you.”

  “Some bargain I am.”

  “Some would kill to have you.”

  They glanced at each other. She should not have said that. But she did not know how to act. He was once everything to her and now he was to be a distant brother.

  He gazed around the room. “The place hasn’t changed. I can’t wait to take a walk around the farm. There’s so much to do.” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe that I’m standing here.” He grinned. “I still can’t believe that you’re standing here.”

  “What was it like, John?”

  “When I was ill?”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”

  “No. I can talk about it.” His measured speech failed to hide his anguish. “What it was like, was like being nailed inside a coffin, and banging, banging on the lid day and night but no one ever comes. I wasn’t kidding when I told the kids that it was like being bricked up in a wall while still alive—how did Poe know how that felt? He got it just right. He knew how murderous I felt.”

  He noticed her face. “I’m sorry. I must sound like a madman. But, frankly, I was mad. It drove me insane to hear my little girls, playing and laughing, and be powerless to reach out to them. Do you know how excruciating that was? I was just a lump on the bed to them—I don’t think they thought I was fully human. And now I’ve come back to life.” He gave a dry laugh. “I must terrify them.”

  She came over and squeezed his arm. “They are happy. They’ll show you—give them time. You’re here, now, finally. How strong you are! How did you ever manage to survive?”

  He glanced at her hand, then spoke as she removed it. “The first few months, I made up messages in the Morse code that your dad taught me.”

  “Dad taught you Morse code?”

  “Rowdy Dowdy taught me a lot of things.”

  “Dad,” she sighed.

  “I tapped out code with one finger. Even with my eyes closed, I kept it up all day: dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash—”

  “SOS.”

  He looked at her pointedly before continuing. “And then I realized—no one understood. They thought I had a tremor! The more I tapped out the distress signal, the more they worried about my palsy. Ruth even called back the doctor.”

  A clock ticked as if bearing witness.

  “I went into a depression after that. I was at the bottom of a deep black narrow well and no longer tried to get out. I kept thinking, June would have noticed. June would have known. June would have saved me. But she’d been banished.”

  She looked away. All those years, she’d never come. She’d not been there for him in his time of need, not even as just a friend. She hadn’t been banished. She’d been a coward.

  “Seasons passed. Leaves fell, and then the snow, and then later, much later, I became aware of the girls playing outside, of the calling birds, of the smell of sunshine on the grass. I began to let myself think again, calming myself when I panicked by figuring out what new cro
ps to grow, what I was going to do around the farm when I woke up, or ways to fix the house. Throughout this time, your mother was talking to me. When she fed me, she told me about herself. She told me about you.” He studied her a moment before going on.

  “I arranged her stories into a longer one, fictionalized it some, until it had shape and meaning and a kind of music. It became the book that I’d always dreamed of writing.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “I’ve spent the last few years telling it and then retelling it to myself, drilling it into my brain. I was determined not to forget it, so that I could set it all down on paper as soon as I got well. I guess I can do that now.”

  “Yes. You can.”

  “But I always come back to the same thing.”

  She lifted her eyes.

  “To you.”

  No, John.

  “I’m just telling you the truth. After all this time, can’t I just tell you the truth?”

  Jazz violin drifted from the radio.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “You’re thinking of Ruth,” he said. “Well, I have thought of her, too. I heard everything, June. I could open my eyes at times, you know. I could see things a man shouldn’t have to see.”

  “She didn’t know,” June said softly.

  “That I could hear her? Is that supposed to make it better?” He gave a bitter laugh. “Maybe that makes it worse.”

  She turned her head.

  He stepped closer. “I’ve made you feel bad. I’m sorry.” He squeezed her hand then laughed. “I forgot that I can do this.”

  She slipped her hand from his. “Hurting my sister is the same as hurting me.”

  “Am I hurting her? I don’t think she cares enough about me for me to hurt her.”

  “Oh, John, she cares. I promise you. She cares.”

  A note of hope crept into his voice. “Do you really think so?”

  With sudden clarity, she saw that Ruth mattered to him, a great deal. In the years that they’d been together, through all their hardships and joys—admit it, they’d had joys—Ruth had supplanted her. He needed Ruth. As maddening, wrong-headed, and absolutely irritating as Ruth could be, he leaned on her, whether he could admit it to himself or not.

  They both looked upward at a sudden thumping on the ceiling. The children were playing in their room. They heard the murmur of her mother talking to them.

  They pulled their gazes down to each other.

  “How do we do this?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  A muted trumpet sobbed through the radio.

  “ ‘Moonglow,’ ” he said. “I’ve heard this song from my bed. I’ve always wished I could dance to it.”

  Gently, she said, “You can, you know.”

  “I forget—it’s a brave new life.” When he held out his hands to dance, his voice was rich with affection. “Milady, would you care to?”

  He took her by the waist, then cradled her hand and rested it against his chest. She looked up at him until tears, foreign to her, threatened to rise, and then she laid her head against him.

  His heartbeat muffled the voice of the singer. It must have been moon glow / Way up in the blue . . .

  Their feet barely moved on the wooden floor. He whispered, “I should have married you. I should have claimed you. But I was so damn proud. If you’d just said the word, if you’d just said that you’d leave Richard and come to me—”

  “But, John. You didn’t ask me to leave him.”

  “I told you that I loved you that day at the beach. What more did I have to say?”

  “You went away, and you didn’t come back.”

  “I thought you wanted me to go.”

  She felt his heart pounding under her cheek. If only he had claimed her. But he hadn’t, so she’d stayed safely with Richard. And then she had heard that he was with Ruth, and Ruth was pregnant.

  The sob of muted trumpets swirled around them, enveloping them in sweet sorrow.

  She burrowed back into him. Their feet scarcely moved as they swayed as one. This was all they had.

  Remember this moment. Remember.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934

  Dorothy ran her thumb over the truculent lone hair under her chin. She could just make out the singer on the radio downstairs.

  “No fair!” Irene shouted.

  Dorothy started, then listened as the child’s siblings calmed their sister. She had taken exception to Margaret buying something called “Park Place.” Irene, prickly like her mother, Ruth, though not yet eight years old, would make noise about her disagreement. She was sturdy like that.

  Well, all the girls needed to be sturdy now, now that their dad was awake. Dorothy suspected the girls were up here hiding from him. She should have made them go to bed, but she supposed that they were all stirred up from his awakening. She didn’t blame them. He was a stranger to the twins, and all of a sudden he was supposed to be special to them. That would take some adjusting. To the older girls, he was something even scarier—a real dad now instead of the dream dad they would have created from the haze of their early experiences. Thinking of your parents as people was hard enough in any circumstance.

  She pictured her own father when she was a little girl, up in their rooms, dressing to serve dinner to the Lambs. How handsome he was in his long black tails and with those bushy red side-whiskers! She saw his head tilted down in concentration as he poked a cuff link through its slot, his muttonchops glistening like chipmunk fur. She wanted to stroke them, but she never could, of course. She never touched him, nor he, her.

  She’d been so proud of him! It never occurred to her when she was young that he was lower in rank than Mr. Lamb, even when her mother scolded him for drinking milk out of a cereal bowl, or for walking around their quarters in his undervest, or for sweating when serving a party of fifty, and other “ungentlemanly” offenses. Dorothy thought he was perfect. She loved to watch him read his newspaper in his chair under the floor lamp, his side-whiskers gleaming and his brown eyes frowning at the print.

  One time while Dorothy was studying him, he surprised her by grabbing her mother when she walked by—surprised her mother, too, by the sound of Mother’s squawk. Father had pulled her into his lap and kissed her neck until they saw little Dorothy laughing, and then Mother had jumped up and fled and he had gone back to his reading. Dorothy had wished she’d been the one who’d been pulled onto his lap. But she never was.

  No wonder she didn’t know what to do when William was affectionate after they were married. She thought at first that it meant he needed male release, so she braced herself for relations. It was the least that she could do in repayment for his kindnesses, and sometimes he did make it feel rather fine. But to her surprise, often he just wanted to pat her shoulder, kiss her hair, or squeeze her hand, just for the sake of doing it. Once she understood that, she was grateful.

  She never did know how to give him a little pat, though, just to pat him for the sake of patting him. She would have liked to. She even thought about it, hovering around him, wanting to reach out, coaxing herself to touch him.

  But she was stopped by the fear that he’d want something more from her, more than relations, something that she didn’t know how to give, and so she kept her hand to herself, even as another layer of loneliness poured over her heart like liquid rubber.

  Something thudded against the side of the house. “What was that?” cried one of the girls.

  Everyone paused to listen to a deep howling in the distance. An attic timber popped.

  The girls shuffled in a herd to Dorothy’s bedside.

  “I miss Granddad,” said Margaret.

  Jeanne put a bedraggled hank of hair in her mouth. “Me, too. He’d make it go away.”

  All four nodded, a symphony of fresh skin, dirty bobs, and worried faces.

  “How?” said Dorothy. “How could he make a storm go away?”

  Quick to be the aut
hority, little Irene, always her mother’s daughter, spoke up. “He’d tell us a story.”

  “Like what?”

  She raised her chin to recite. “ ‘Elgie met a bear. The bear was bulgy. The bulge was Elgie.’ ”

  “That could make a storm go away?”

  “If that didn’t work, he held our hand.”

  Dorothy gazed out over this little crowd that shared her blood. They didn’t ask her to tell stories. They didn’t ask her to hold their hands. They didn’t even consider it. She could lift her quilt now and invite them in, even as she peeled up a corner of her frightened old heart. But what if they refused to come?

  The far-off roaring seemed to ease. Margaret pulled at Ilene’s wrist. “Hey, it’s your turn.” She dropped to her knees over by the board game, as did her sisters. “Where’s the other dice? Who’s got the other dice?”

  Ilene plunged under the bed then crawled back out. She opened her child’s soft palm. “Here!”

  The dice skittered across the floor. Dorothy lowered herself by degrees back down to her pillow, back into the bitter smell of feathers. They probably wouldn’t have come to her, anyhow.

  * * *

  The wind banging her skirt against her legs, Ruth gave the crank a good yank with her left hand—never with her right unless she wanted that arm broken if the engine backfired—then jumped into the stuttering car. She had left Richard inside the Squibbs’ tidy house with its lattice-skirted porch. Ethel Squibb was still stuffing him with oatmeal raisin cookies, payment, in general, for his finding the cure for sleeping sickness, and in particular, for opening an impromptu nighttime clinic for her family. He’d made his important call and now he promised to check on her little Alvin, sick in bed with a cough for two weeks now, and on her little Teddy with the leg that would not heal, and to lance a boil on Squibb’s back. Even half-awake in gowns and nightcaps, they worshipped him, which he gobbled up more greedily than the cookies. Anyhow, Ruth didn’t have time to wait for him to finish, especially after they started grilling him about life with Betty Crocker. The storm was ugly and it hadn’t even started raining yet. The Squibbs would take care of him. She had to get back home.