by Linda Hughes
Her father’s face became struck with sadness. He took a deep breath and got up to go over to his whiskey decanter to pour a drink. “Would either of you ladies like a small glass?” he asked politely. They both shook their heads no. He returned to the divan and took one gulp, as if for courage.
“I’ve never wanted to believe it, Meg. I have absolutely no proof to say that she did. Nothing other than she wasn’t happy being married or being a mother and suddenly he was gone. There was never a ransom demand. No sign of anyone having invaded our house. No one, not the police or the private detectives I hired, not even Abby, could ever find a single clue to what happened to him.
“My heart was torn in two. I thought I might die. I wanted so badly to comfort you but I couldn’t even figure out how to comfort myself, let alone do that for someone else. Your nanny was a godsend during that time. She took such good care of you. She loved you like her own, Meg, and you deserve that kind of love.
“When you were twelve and she’d fallen in love and needed to move away to marry, I thought it might destroy you. But, of course, I couldn’t let her feel guilty about that. She deserved happiness. So, I watched her go and did what I thought best for you. I’ve questioned the decision to take you to Chicago every day of my life since.”
He took another drink of his soothing whiskey. “Eventually you seemed happy and that assuaged my guilt. Now, there’s nothing more in the world I want than for you to be happy again.
“But to get back to your original question: I don’t know if your mother hurt Harry. I don’t know what happened to him. But I do know she’s not well and that she needs to be where she is.” He tipped his head back as he drained his glass.
For a long, measured moment, Meg looked at her father. His eyes pleaded with her to forgive him any wrong he might have done her. She said, “Thank you, father. That helps me a great deal. I saw tonight that you’re right. She’s where she needs to be, and even where she wants to be. My mind is at rest about that.”
“I’m glad.” Obviously relieved, he inhaled a deep breath.
“I think I’d like that drink now,” Hannah said as she stood and went to the decanter. “Meg?”
“No, thank you. I’m tired.” She got up and went to the study door. “Why don’t you two enjoy yourselves while I drag myself to bed?
“And, by the way, I know you’re in love. Everybody knows you’re in love, so you may as well continue to live together like you were before I came home.” She winked at them and turned to go upstairs.
27
At dawn, Abby hopped onto Mr. Hollis’ milk cart as he drove down the main road and came by the trail that led to her cabin. Their first stop after that was the Sullivan house, where Abby jumped down and left their usual Tuesday morning order of four bottles of milk, one crock of butter, and one brick of cheese. As they drove away she waved at Cook, who came out to gather the goods from the backdoor stoop.
As was the routine two days a week, she rode with the milkman and they chatted amicably, today with the weathered little man explaining that his best milk cow, Betsy, was getting on in age and her udders had started to chap badly. He had three other Holsteins that had never been nearly as giving as she and feared he’d have to buy two new cows to replace that old gal when the time came.
Abby suggested bag balm to soothe the poor girl’s mammary glands while being pulled and squeezed during milking. She knew where to get a jar from the local veterinarian and promised to have some by the time they rode home this afternoon. Mr. Hollis thanked her mightily.
As they stopped at farmhouses and country cottages outside of town, Abby would hop out of the cart and leave the orders on the doorsteps or porch stoops. After so many years, she knew the route as well as Mr. Hollis. Doing this chore had long ago become her way of paying him back for the rides to and from town.
By the time they arrived in Traverse City, he took her straight to the garage where she did morning readings two days a week. Usually the sun came up by now but it was such a gloomy, overcast day, the sun remained allusive. She waved as the horse cart pulled away, knowing she was lucky to have so many good friends that could help her and who she could help in return.
Going to her table in the back room of the garage, she found a dowdy, dour woman already waiting. It seemed the woman suspected her husband was cheating on her and wanted the spirits to tell her if the “scumbag” needed to be “stripped naked, horsewhipped, castrated, chained to a motorcar, and dragged naked down the street.” Always finding it difficult to convince her ancestor spirit guides to cooperate when this level of hostility became involved, the fortune teller did her best, to no avail. All the spirits would tell her was to get this wrothy viper away from her.
Abby fibbed her way through, eventually telling the woman the truth: Her husband aside, she needed to deal with her deep-seeded anger. Until she did, nothing else would fall into place in her life. The woman stomped out of the garage, furious. She didn’t pay.
The next three visitors weren’t much more amenable and Abby counted it as an odd morning. One simply wanted to find a lost ring. It could be found, the spirits said, in the pocket of her apron. But the woman insisted she’d already looked there. Abby asked if she had a second apron. Embarrassed, the woman quickly threw down two one-dollar bills and left.
Another wanted to know which of two suitors she should marry. Neither, as it turned out. She said that was no help at all. After all, she insisted, she had to marry somebody. She tossed a silver dollar onto the table, half the normal fee, before storming out.
And the last visitor, a businessman in town, wanted to know if he should invest in a motorcar or if they were going to turn out to be folly. He reasoned that the roads couldn’t accommodate them and places to get gasoline were scarce. Abby told him the spirit guides liked cars. He rejected their advice, mulling it over and coming to his own conclusion that those motorcars, even though popular at the moment in cities, would never catch on because they weren’t practical.
“They don’t make any sense,” he said.
Abby repeated what her spirit guides said word for word. “Human beings often do things that don’t make any sense.”
He scoffed, paid with two silver dollars, and left. Abby didn’t know why he’d come, being so intent on making up his own mind. Of course, however, she knew he was wrong. The spirits were seldom wrong, and if it seemed they were that was only because she’d misinterpreted what they said.
Abby bid goodbye to the garage owner and headed toward the veterinarian’s barn to pick up the bag balm for Mr. Hollis’ milk cow. Pulling her shawl over her hair as it looked like it might rain any minute, she walked through town seeking out interesting motorcars. There were none today, however. All she saw were standard Model T’s, Tin Lizzies, scattered in-between horses and carriages. She’d hoped for a few classy Model T Runabouts, maybe even a burgundy one. Or a Touring Car with a cloth top. At least a snazzy jalopy. A police car, a lumber mill truck, and an ice truck went by, but nothing out of the ordinary. A few kids rode down the street on bicycles. That was it.
Then she went by the Union Street train station and saw something interesting. There stood Meg talking to her “beau,” Jed O’Neill. He looked debonair in a professional black suit, white shirt, and tie. His hat sat on his head. Obviously having just come off the train, which at this time of day would have been the one from Detroit, he carried a leather valise. Meg looked jaunty in a flowered pink dress and pink sweater. They each carried a black umbrella.
Abby slipped behind a tree and watched. She wasn’t close enough to hear but could see them clearly. Meg talked for a few minutes, gesturing animatedly. Jed listened intently and put a hand on her shoulder. Then Meg talked a bit more and shrugged, her hands spread wide. He nodded and took Meg into his arms. They kissed, right there in front of the train station, so smitten with each other they were oblivious to the rest of the world.
They are in love. Already, Abby thought. That didn’t take long.
It started to rain as she entered the veterinarian’s barn but by the time she left the shower stopped and the sun peeked out from between intermittent clouds. She decided to take a chance on the possibility of seeing Lizzie in the woods by the asylum.
The lengthy walk to their spot, however, didn’t invigorate her as it had so often in the past. It used to be that the thought of seeing her friend built up her excitement to a fever pitch. But today, when she came through the trees and saw Lizzy already sitting on a blanket in their shed with a picnic basket beside her, rather than leaping with joy, her heart lagged.
Any mere pleasantness or pretense waned even more and more the longer and longer her companion talked. Lizzie’s unemotional story of Meg’s visit rattled Abby. The mother’s unkind description of her daughter in no way matched Abby’s impression of the young woman.
Dark clouds rolled in overhead, adding to the gloom.
When Lizzie said she hoped her daughter never came back, a wall crumbled within Abby’s heart. Almost unable to breathe, she unexpectedly envisioned how carefully she’d built that barrier over the years in order to rationalize her affection for her friend.
Her appetite lost, Abby didn’t finish eating the egg sandwich and apple Lizzie brought for her. Lizzie, on the other hand, had no problem downing all her lunch.
Excusing herself earlier than usual, saying she wanted to make sure to catch Mr. Hollis for a ride home as it might rain again, Abby left the woods a broken woman.
Her life, she knew, would never be the same.
The visit to Lizzie the night before must have been what Meg was telling Jed about. The girl had experienced, perhaps, the same kind of realization that had just hit Abby over the head like a blow from a sledgehammer. No genuine comfort or unselfish love would ever be found in the person of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Sullivan.
Abby knew now this was why her ancestor spirits never communicated with her about Lizzie. They despised her.
The Chippewa fortune teller trudged toward her meeting spot with the milkman, all the while contemplating what had made her bond so quickly and deeply with that woman almost twenty years ago.
Of course, she knew the answer all too well, one that wasn’t new to her, although this was the first time she’d allowed it to reach fruition in her mind. There had been so many signs over the years, so many subconscious warnings, and, yes, even so much blatant proof. Their bond was unhealthy and unnatural, but not for the obvious reasons.
Oh yes, most people would think them evil for the kind of love they shared, “the love that dare not speak its name,” as Lord Alfred Douglas wrote in his poem Two Loves. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 “indecency trial,” where the prosecution used that phrase as damning evidence, resulted in Wilde being convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” and going to jail.
The revelation that some people of the same sex were intimately attracted to each other had become common knowledge today. That didn’t mean that most people accepted it. Even women’s rights had come a long way in the last twenty years, but not that far. And regardless of new laws, new beliefs certainly had not reached a small town in a remote area of a Midwestern state. Some people might accept her, but others would have her committed to the asylum, right along with anyone else who didn’t meet society’s expectations of what they should be.
For the first time in her life, Abequa “Abby” Crane admitted to herself that she’d fallen for Elizabeth Sullivan for one reason and one reason alone: By the time they met when they were both eighteen years old, Abby had become desperately lonely. Her parents died four years earlier. With no immediate family; living alone since age fourteen; being an Indian outcast no matter how friendly others might be; not totally Chippewa and not totally white; never having had a physical relationship; and coming upon a beautiful, wild creature who had no qualms about initiating their affections… Abby admitted to herself that she’d been a total pushover for falling in love — with a woman or a man.
Blinded by a need for attention, derailed by sexual desire, and thwarted by her own obstinate denial, for twenty years she’d ignored the stone-cold fact that Lizzie was a damned shrew.
Suddenly it struck her that the things she’d loved about Lizzie, those things she thought she’d always love, were qualities she admired because she sought them in herself. The carefree spirit, attention to nature, and acknowledgement of being different could be respected. But there were too many other qualities within that woman’s dark soul that Abby could no longer abide.
It was the mother’s attitude toward her own daughter that had done it, once and for all. Abby felt maternal toward Meg the moment she met her. Lizzy’s icy disregard for such a warm, loving young woman, her own daughter, had chilled Abby to the bone.
For some years now, Abby had been shoving away notions that she needed to break off their relationship. But every time the warning cropped up in her mind, her loneliness prevailed and within a week she’d be tromping through the woods outside the asylum to liaison with her lover. Now, however, she knew that she would never go back.
It must be much like, she surmised, a woman being married for twenty years and slowly over time coming to acknowledge that her husband is a brute, and getting a divorce.
She’d rather be alone for the rest of her life than be with Elizabeth Antoinette Wolcott Sullivan for one more moment.
Only the bag balm in her pocket gave her a slight sense of having done something a bit useful on this morbid, gray day. At least Betsy the cow might find some relief in what she had to offer.
28
With a steady hand, Elizabeth reached up to add a touch of deeper red to the rose.
“Damn it all to hell!” she groused. “This red paint is all over my hands.”
Grabbing a rag, she swatted at her hands, to no avail. They refused to come clean. Looking down at her clothes, she realized that in her haste she’d forgotten to put on her apron and her white blouse was virtually ruined. Red paint stripes swathed across her chest.
“Hell, it’s all over me!”
She swiped at her blouse with the rag but only seemed to transfer what was on the rag onto her clothes. There was no getting rid of this damnable color. Next time she’d have to paint a white rose.
It was bad enough trying to paint by lamplight, but the urge had struck her so violently she simply had to come into her studio to paint. Usually by this time of evening, right after supper as the sun set, she was lolling in her comfy bed in the other room, marveling at the spectacle she could see out her big windows. Being on the second floor of Cottage 23 and on a corner with two full walls of long windows, on clear nights she could see the moon rise in the east and a sky full of stars in the dark of night. In the morning when the wake-up whistle blew at seven o’clock, she’d open her eyes to the dawn, the level of the sun depending on the time of year. The scene looked different every day. She’d had them place her bed right in the center of the room to take full advantage of the view.
She could also see the tops of trees, which offered up all kinds of entertainment, including birds building their nests, spring-born hatchlings chirping away, and squirrels chasing each other in circles. Every now and then there was a bird ruckus where mother and father bird would have to holler and peck at predator birds who tried to get to their young. The noisy parents usually attracted help from other birds of their kind and the combined army usually won. Once in a while, though, a baby bird would disappear long before it could fly on its own.
If she walked right up to a window, she could look down at bushes and flowers planted alongside the cottage, like the lilacs and irises in bloom this time of year. When she opened the windows, like now, different smells filtered into her room, depending on the season and what was in bloom. It was one of the things Elizabeth loved most about her rooms here.
She’d painted many a scene, birds, squirrels, trees, flowers, clouds, sunrise, su
nset, and the night sky, right from these windows.
But tonight was troublesome. Her painting had gone awry. She was filthy dirty with red paint all over her. She couldn’t seem to do anything right.
Sweeping a loose lock of hair out of her eyes, she realized she’d just wiped paint onto her face.
“Good God! Will there be no end to this?”
She tried a clean rag. This time red paint came off on the cloth and she felt like she was finally getting somewhere.
Out of nowhere, a sound echoed from the other room. She stopped wiping herself down and stepped into her main room to listen. It came again. A knock at the door.
“Who in hell would be here at this time of night?” She tossed the rag aside and headed for the door.
“Oh, Jesus Jenny!” she swore when she tripped. “That damned lump is still there. Somebody needs to come and take that away.”
Stepping gingerly over the large heap in the middle of the floor, she straightened her back and opened the door.
A deputy sheriff, young and good looking, and the sheriff, old and ugly as sin, stood there in spiffy uniforms.
“Hello, gentlemen. What can I do for you?” She patted the side of her head to fluff her hair.
She’d only opened the door halfway and stood in the way so they couldn’t see into her room. Upon further inspection, she could see her cottage supervisor standing behind them, a normally ebullient woman now solemn-faced as a cadaver. And the night nurse in her white uniform who did final rounds after supper, and who had in fact been here not long before, stood by the supervisor, crying with a white handkerchief to her mouth.
What a crazy gang of people, Elizabeth thought. Somebody needs to commit them to this place.