The Sisters of Summit Avenue Read online

  Mother and he regarded each other. “So you can hear me, after all.”

  He kissed his daughter on the top of her head. “Every last word.”

  “Thought so,” Mother said.

  They exchanged a look that June did not understand.

  Richard brandished the arms of his stethoscope. “Five more minutes, John. Then you should rest.”

  “But I don’t feel tired, Doc. I’ve got a lot to make up for. I’ve been lying here all these years, listening, watching, seeing everything. Oh, how I’ve wanted to be with you all, but I’ve been as trapped in my own body as Poe’s black cat in the wall—just like you said, Margaret.”

  “You heard me say that?” Margaret’s adolescent voice cracked. “We were out in the kitchen.”

  “A body can hear just about anything in this house, if he listens. And I’ve been listening.”

  He dashed a hank of dark hair out of his eyes. “The things I’ve wanted to say! To you and you and you and you.” He nodded to his children, each in turn. “Margaret, you’re just like your mother, your nose always in a book. When you were reading the Boxcar Children books, no one could get a word out of you.”

  She straightened her wire-rim glasses on her freckled nose. “You knew? Those are my favorites.”

  “And Irene, you like kittens.”

  “So do I!” her twin exclaimed, not to be left out.

  “I know, honey, but you like the chickens just as much. Even that ill-tempered leghorn with the broken wing. What’s her name . . . ?”

  Ilene chortled with self-recognition. “Flo!”

  He paused at Jeanne, hanging her head. “And you. Honey, I’ll take over the worrying for you now, okay? Everything’s going to be all right, I promise.”

  Tears wet the child’s lashes.

  Ruth started to leave.

  “And you.”

  Ruth stopped. June had not seen her sister look so guilty since she was a toddler and had broken her mother’s finger.

  Nick put his head inside the door. “Knock, knock. I heard the good news.” He extended his hand as he crossed the room. “Welcome back.”

  “To my own house, yes. Thank you.”

  A blush swarmed up Ruth’s cheeks.

  Richard rose from the edge of the bed. “Look here, good fellow, John only has a few more minutes until I insist that he rests. Maybe he should spend them with his family?”

  Nick looked at Ruth, who glanced away.

  June regarded her husband, facing down Nick with a good-natured smile. He really could be a decent man.

  Nick was still retreating down the hall when John said, “Kids, your old man needs to get back in bed. But don’t leave. I want you to tell me all about yourselves.” He got up, then sagged back into the chair. June ran to support him.

  Ruth brushed past them and out of the room.

  “Ruth!” Mother scuttled after her. “Ruthie!’

  At the bed, Richard received John from June, then waited for John to lower himself on top of the covers. As soon as John pushed his head back onto the feather pillow, Richard listened again to his heart.

  He patted John’s arm when he was done. “So far, so good. Congratulations, my good man.”

  John shook his head in wonder. “Thank you, Doc, for saving me.”

  “Don’t thank me. I’m doing it for the boss.”

  Their gazes found June. She sank under the weight of them.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1926

  June had been married for four years when Ruth and John had made their second trip to see her and Richard in Minneapolis. Angling for a visit from the stork had been her full-time job then, although the actual act of mating took precious little of her effort, harried as Richard was at work. The rest of her time she spent feathering the Whiteleather nest, and entertaining friends and colleagues, to raise Richard’s and her standing within their set.

  She had gotten good at it, so good that as the other young wives had babies, their share of the burden of organizing events had slipped onto her empty shoulders. With the intensity that only an outsider possesses, she observed those whom she admired and then bettered them as if her life depended on it (which it did). She—she!—became the expert on what to serve at a yachting luncheon or how to set the table for a smart bridge buffet. Her friends would run to her wanting to know what to serve for an exotic patio supper (Mexican rice enchiladas and fruit) or how to make a standout table arrangement (try the new mirror place mats).

  When asked these things, her gut response was always a frightened How should I know? before being Mrs. Richard L. Whiteleather, III, kicked in. What would her friends think if they knew that beneath the French twist hairstyle she had adopted from Richard’s mother, beneath the pearls, beneath the frock shipped in from New York, beneath the feathered hats, beneath the carefully cultured accent (also lifted from Mrs. Whiteleather, who had in turn lifted it from the previous Mrs. Whiteleather), that she was the daughter of a recluse and a bankrupt? She intended for them to never find out.

  That first Monday of Ruth and John’s visit, Richard had taken the morning off from his work, unusual for him—he didn’t like to unload his cases on his partner. He was also sacrificing his chance to bounce into his patients’ hospital rooms after he’d freed them of bad gallbladders, strangulated hernias, and festering appendices, to receive their undying (literally!) praise. He guzzled down their love like a lush quaffed whiskey. But at least he actually deserved it.

  Richard and June had gathered in the den with their visitors after breakfast. Richard sat in his oxblood leather wingback, with his feet—and June—propped before him upon the nailhead-studded ottoman. Ruth perched on the edge of her chintz chair. Next to her, long tall John overflowed his flowered chair like Lincoln in his new Memorial. Their two girls, not much more than toddlers then, were playing with Richard’s antique pottery Staffordshire dogs on the floor before the empty fireplace from which the smell of ashes festered, no matter how much potpourri June had hid around the room. The little girls were making the cat-sized russet and white figurines, with their golden painted-on chains and human-like eyes, dance and sing like dolls. They were unaware that their uncle Richard had bought the dogs for a sum, were he ever to be gauche enough to divulge it, that was more than John’s monthly income on the farm.

  “What about the zoo?” Ruth was saying. “Would you girls like to go there?”

  The oldest girl, Margaret, then three and a half and the bridge of her stub nose already sprinkled with pale freckles, set her dog down hard on the rug. Its permanently raised anthropomorphic brows seemed to lift in shock. “The zoo? With animals?”

  June could feel her husband beaming his gaze on the dog. He recrossed his leather slippers. “I believe that the zoo might have a few of them.”

  Margaret shrank into her Peter Pan collar; up came the shoulders of her puffy sleeves.

  “Do you like elephants, Margaret?” June said gently. “There’s an elephant in our zoo.”

  Two-year-old Jeanne, suffering from a cold, sniffed at the glistening stream between her nose and mouth. “I want elfalents.” She galloped her dog, its human’s eyes wide, over to her sister’s. The girls made whining sounds as their dogs greeted.

  “Well, then, it’s settled,” said Richard. “Elfalents it is.” He patted June’s back. “You should call Wally, see if he could give us a special tour.”

  Wally was their friend on the park board. Richard wouldn’t do anything if he couldn’t get special treatment while doing it, even going to a zoo. It was the Whiteleather way. June wondered if she would ever get used to it.

  “Bet you could get him to let you feed the bears,” Richard told the girls.

  “Are there baby monkeys?” Margaret clinked her dog against her sister’s.

  Richard, watching his possession, cleared his throat. “I bet so.”

  Ruth put her cup on the coffee table then pushed it away. “How about we go to your country club? Isn’t t
here a swimming pool there? Girls, would you like to swim?”

  “Yes! Yes!” They raised their fragile pets in celebration.

  June’s gaze rested upon her sister’s home-sewn dress and cheap orange lipstick. June had told her friends when she’d first joined the club that she was from a small midwestern town. One of them got the idea that her father owned a bank there and the notion stuck. Why had she not set them straight immediately? Why did she not tell them that her mother-in-law had taught her everything, that because she’d been left on her own so often as a child, she had been almost feral, her and Ruth, until Linda Whiteleather educated her.

  “The water’s cold,” she said. “There’s not much else to do there.”

  Ruth sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, the flimsy rayon of her sleeves scraping against the bulge of her midterm pregnancy. “Really? I imagine people playing shuffleboard and couples playing tennis, and once people have had enough mint juleps, everyone jumps into the fountain. Is there a fountain? Please say that there is.”

  John turned to his wife. “She said there wasn’t much to do.”

  Ruth ignored him. “I want to go! What’s it like, Richard?”

  June looked over her shoulder. Richard’s gaze was on the china dogs. “I don’t know—lovely, I suppose.”

  June was not taking her sister to the club. What a disaster that would be! What glee Ruth would take in recounting their odd childhood in which all they had to eat for dinner so many nights was a bowl of cereal, a far cry from the luncheon buffet presided over by waiters dressed better than Dad had ever been, and that their mother, the opposite of a gracious hostess, had spent her life hiding inside their home. What boogeyman had Mother conjured in her imagination that kept her from going to PTA meetings, a Girl Scout tea, or just shopping at Wolf & Dessauer, like every other mother in town? All June ever wanted was a mother like everyone else’s, or, short of that, at least a mother whom she could talk to.

  Richard raised his voice. “Adela!”

  Adela appeared with her braids crowning her head, the real queen of the manor. Her gauzy apron had been starched and ironed until it stood out from her dress.

  “How about taking my nieces into the kitchen? Bake some cookies with them.” Richard took his feet from the ottoman, got up with a crunch of leather chair, then squatted down with the girls. “Adela,” he said, releasing the pottery dogs from their small hands, “makes magic cookies.”

  They cocked their heads at Adela, ready to believe. Little Jeanne’s red chapped cheeks shone with mucus. “Magic?” When June had a child, she would never let her face get dirty like that.

  “Oh, yes,” said Ruth. “Magic Princess Cookies. You eat them and you turn into a princess.” She shrugged. “If they don’t work, you can always marry well.”

  “Ruth.”

  Ruth turned to her husband abruptly. “What? I’m joking.”

  John’s voice was calm. “Not now.”

  “If June doesn’t want us to go to the club for some reason—if she’s ashamed of us—”

  “Ruth. Not now.”

  June slid her gaze to John. He received her coolly, his face stoic above the wrinkled collar of the same white shirt he had worn in Chicago four years ago.

  Every cell in her body yearned to go over and tip her head against his chest, to tell him how sorry, how dreadfully sorry, she was. She had made the mistake of a lifetime in not marrying him, in not throwing caution to the wind and trying, somehow, to stake their places in the world together. She loved him, loved him, so much that if he did not hold her this moment, she might go irretrievably insane.

  Her gaze drifted to the gold-trussed Staffordshire dog.

  “I’ll call Wally,” she said.

  * * *

  At the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, their friend Wally rechecked his pocket watch as they strolled between exhibits. He clearly had other work to do. June would have to take him a chocolate cake to make up for their intrusion on his time, once her sister and her family went back home.

  Wally stopped before a cage reeking of urine where, behind thick bars, a black bear swayed miserably, swinging its great tan muzzle like a pendulum.

  “This is Peggy.” Wally put away his pocket watch. “We just acquired her. I understand that she likes to eat bread. Would you girls like to be some of the first to feed her?” He opened the small brown paper bag he’d been carrying.

  Ruth’s children took slices of white bread, hesitated, then heaved them through the bars, but “Peggy” couldn’t be coaxed away from her inner torment.

  Wally was soon released and the group moved on to a picnic lunch. They settled on a blanket, with John hugging his knees and Ruth plucking grass into a miniature green haystack. June was opening the basket that Adela had packed while Richard spun tales of the Winter Carnival—ice palaces built there in the park, soaring, translucent castles that shimmered with candlelight before they melted into a pool of nothingness—when a honeybee landed on little Jeanne’s nose. Even though she hadn’t been stung, she had a two-year-old’s fear of bugs and couldn’t be coaxed out of her hysteria, no matter how many times she was told that bees were her friends that brought her honey. If the group was to eat their sandwiches in peace, they had to leave.

  They piled into Richard’s shining new Packard. Richard, a proprietary hand on June’s knee, did his best imitation of a Swedish tour guide for Ruth and John in the back seat, their children in their laps. They glided past wide clapboard houses and awninged storefronts, past Richard’s boyhood friends’ comfortable pillared homes on Mississippi River Boulevard, and across the Erector Set trestles of the Marshall Avenue bridge from St. Paul into Minneapolis. Down the road on the other side of the river they breezed, until they came, at last, to the dense oak woods of Minnehaha Park.

  There, lunch was demolished and a stroll was achieved, each married couple properly hand in hand, until a former patient accosted Richard and the girls went running off, leaving June watching the waterfalls with John. They had not been alone since she’d lived in Chicago.

  June leaned against the bumpy river rock bridge, keen, it would seem, on the raggedy veil of water shredding before her. In truth, she was nearly immune to the earthy smell of moss and wet wood, to the constant gasp of the falling water. Every cell of her body was focused on John’s hand, resting on the warm rounded stone next to hers. Energy crackled in the half-inch space between them.

  A squeal from one of John’s daughters penetrated her awareness. Ruth was running after the girls, who were tottering down the footpath along the stream. June wondered what her children would have looked like if she’d had children with John. She thought about this often.

  “These falls are just as famous in winter,” she said, “maybe more so, when they freeze into a solid curtain.”

  He frowned slightly, as if wondering why she would be talking about falls.

  She blundered on. “People think it’s a lark to pick their way across the icy ledge behind them. It’s a Twin Cities tradition, you know. They say you have not lived until you’ve done so.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  She laughed. “Richard.”

  “Have you walked behind them?”

  She shook her head. “I guess I haven’t lived.”

  “I’d say you look like you’re doing pretty well.”

  He lifted his head to peer beyond her, at Ruth, prettily swollen like a fertility goddess. She grabbed Jeanne’s hand and they chased after Margaret until they came upon Richard in a bend in the trail, talking with the well-dressed couple who’d snagged him on the way to the falls. He greeted Ruth and the kids jovially, then scooped up Jeanne and put her on his shoulders, to her squealing delight. He was always a good sport.

  “You look like you’re doing well, too,” June told John. “The farm sounds wonderful. Tell me about this new bull that you’re going to go get in St. Louis.” He was planning to go soon after he returned home. “Is it a special kind?”

  When he di
dn’t answer, she gave him a questioning smile.

  He frowned at her. “June.”

  “I have to admit, I don’t know a Holstein from a—a—”

  “June, I’ve been wanting to say—” He waited until she saw he was serious. “June, I just want to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  Her chest tightened. “About what?” she said lightly.

  “Don’t.”

  She turned to the falls.

  “Just let me apologize.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for.”

  He pressed the side of his hand to hers. “You know that there is.”

  She removed her hand. “I think it’s best that you don’t.”

  “You just want to leave it this way?”

  How she loved looking at his face! “It has never been a matter of what I want.”

  She immediately regretted it. She shouldn’t punish him like this. It had never been entirely his fault.

  “There shouldn’t have been that last time,” he said. “You were with Richard.”

  “But I wanted it.”

  “Evidently not as much as I did.”

  She stared at the waterfall. The groan of water beating rock was relentless. “You were with Ruth.”

  In the near distance, Richard called, “Hallo!”

  She flinched. She turned toward her husband, striding up the path toward them, happy as he often was after talking with adoring patients. When he reached her side, he swung his arm over her shoulders. “I see that it hasn’t stopped yet.”

  She skipped a breath.

  Richard looked at her, then at the spilling water, then back at her.

  Of course. He’d meant the falls. She laughed, but not quickly enough.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934

  It had beeen a long day. Dorothy lay on one of the grandkids’ beds, her shoes off, with the crazy quilt folded back over her stockinged legs, hot as it was, like the pastry of the apple turnovers she used to make for Cousin Mildred. The murmur of voices, the loudest of which was that of her doctor son-in-law, wafted up through the floorboards. Downstairs, John and his family were having a reunion after dinner, now that he had been made to rest all afternoon, which was as long as he would tolerate. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to make up for lost time. She would stay out of their way up here with Venus, who had settled on her chest like a sandbag.