The Sisters Sweet, page 36
“You’re looking pale,” she said.
In the two months since the party and Mama’s strange outburst, she had rarely spoken to me except to criticize: my dress was too tight, I’d talked too much about myself at dinner, if I stayed up reading I’d ruin my eyes and then we’d have glasses to cope with on top of everything else, besides which she hated to think I was becoming a show-offy intellectual type like that cousin of mine. I pinched my cheeks to draw up some color. Uncle Eugene hadn’t introduced me to a mark for several weeks. Mama had said, more to herself than me, that we shouldn’t worry, that it was a busy season for the Institute, but when he’d invited us for Christmas, she’d seemed relieved. Now, as I turned to her, displaying my freshly pinked cheeks, she nodded, but with narrowed eyes, her mouth bunched, her scrutiny indistinguishable from disappointment.
The door opened.
“Merry, merry, merry Christmas,” Uncle Eugene cried, his cheer belied by a weary look in his eyes. We followed him to the parlor, where we were met by a fresh waft of pine from the tallest, fattest Christmas tree I’d ever seen anywhere but a stage. All around the room, white candles were twinkling. Ruth sat slouched beside the fireplace, knees to chest, on a little chair I had seen a dozen times before but only now recognized as a piece of the children’s furniture from her old playroom in Toledo. Uncle Eugene watched with a thin, tight smile as she stood to greet us.
A few days earlier, we’d drunk gin in her studio and plotted, getting our stories straight: how much time we spent together these days, what, exactly, we did. Evidence of my improving influence. Her accepting her father’s invitation seemed to belong to that category. She teased that she was only coming because she wanted to see me in action at his house, and, as gaily as I could, I told her she’d better behave herself, so he didn’t start to wonder whether Harriet the Institute Girl was all an act.
She kissed Mama’s cheek.
“Merry Christmas, Aunt Maude.” Her voice quavered slightly. She was wearing an ill-fitting brown velvet dress I didn’t recognize. I wondered if it was out of her high school wardrobe. If her father had made her change when she arrived. For the first time, I considered the fact that somewhere in that house there was a bedroom that had once belonged to her. Maybe it was still a time capsule of the girl she had been, full of that girl’s clothes, her books, a coterie of china dolls in pastel dresses, their hair a little faded but still as smooth as silk. A Smith pennant.
“I can’t wait for you both to try Harriet’s gingerbread,” Mama said, brightly. “Her own special recipe.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Ruth said, smiling even as she gripped one arm with the other hand.
I went to put the gingerbread in the kitchen, expecting Ruth to follow. But she just sank back into the little chair. When I returned to the parlor, Mama and Uncle Eugene were keeping up a bright conversation while Ruth stared into the fire. I sat beside Mama on the couch. We spoke of the day’s services at the Institute, the first of which Mama and I had attended, the second of which, in Mama’s telling, we’d listened to on the radio while I made the gingerbread. Ruth said little. At one point, she rose, and from a table in the corner fetched a cast-iron nutcracker shaped like a squirrel.
It was too whimsical an object for Uncle Eugene, and I knew it must have been Aunt Marion’s. I saw her hand, now, in all the room’s festive touches: the red glass beads on a string, hung along the mantelpiece, the paper Santas, the cut tin creche. So often at Uncle Eugene’s I’d been aware of the game of replacements: how Uncle Eugene stood in for Daddy, Mama for Aunt Marion, I for Ruth. Now there were more of us than there were parts to fill, but somehow that only made the gaps seem more vast. How many Christmases had it been since Ruth’s last Christmas with her mother? If she were still alive, would Mama and Aunt Marion be slipping out of their mother selves now and into frantic, girlish fits of laughter, as they had in Toledo? Would Mama seem suddenly depleted, and insist on going upstairs to lie down? If Daddy hadn’t left us, would he have consented to come to Christmas at all? Uncle Eugene was describing plans for a cafeteria the Institute would open in the New Year to serve forgotten men, and I wondered if Daddy ate in places like that now, or if he too had found his luck in California. Though luck was fickle. Josie’s latest picture, Hard Cases, had been another flop.
Ruth fed the squirrel nuts, cracking them by raising and lowering its tail. Sometimes she ate them, and sometimes she just tossed the meats and the shells alike into the fire. When the clock chimed five, Uncle Eugene invited us to serve ourselves from the dishes Hilda had laid out on the sideboard earlier in the day. Turkey and dressing and candied yams, stuffed celery, onions baked in butter, three molded salads, wedges of toast topped with creamed shrimp and avocados cut to look like mistletoe leaves. Ruth took my usual place at the table; from the marks’ seat, I watched her push her food around her plate. I ignored Mama’s disapproving look when I went to fill my plate a second time. From the head of the table, Uncle Eugene told long stories that felt like sermons and explained facts and ideas in his puffed, persistent way, as if his discourse were a gift the rest of us were fortunate to receive. But it was Ruth he looked at most often. He wished she’d eat more, I saw that. But he also wanted her to react to him: to laugh at his jokes, to glow with admiration, to defer, to show she knew he was brilliant and wise. His need was as plain to me as my parents’ need had always been, and though I’d often felt overwhelmed by that need, unequal to it, I had always understood that it was the path through which goodness lay. It was different with Uncle Eugene and Ruth, somehow, I could see that, though I couldn’t quite see why it should be different. But I understood: If she acted as he wished at Christmas, he’d only want her to come to church on Sunday, and then he’d want her to move back home and marry well. If she gave any of herself he’d want her whole self, and to give him that would be to destroy herself. He started explaining President Hoover’s proposal for economic relief, which I knew Ruth knew inside and out, having written a brief on it for work. I saw a flash of irritation cross her face and suspected Uncle Eugene had gotten something wrong. I wondered if he even knew what her job was. She took a small bite of dressing. My relief that she hadn’t corrected her father felt like a betrayal.
After dinner, Ruth and I went to the kitchen to assemble coffee and dessert, alone together at last. Her familiarity with the contents of every drawer and cupboard made me feel like an interloper. While the water boiled, she leaned against the counter, closing her eyes.
“It’s miserable in there. I’m miserable in there. I shouldn’t have come.”
“I think he’s happy you did,” I said, arranging slices of gingerbread on a tray.
“Oh, Harriet, I’m rotten, but somehow that’s the worst thing about it. You want?”
She’d taken a flask from her pocket. I hesitated only a moment before nodding. When I handed it back, she tipped generously into two of the coffee cups she’d laid out on a tray.
Back in the parlor, I passed around slices of gingerbread, and Ruth distributed the coffee, and in spite of myself I felt a flash of jealousy: how easy they came to her, the gestures of a hostess, which she disdained and which I’d had to wring out of a book. Uncle Eugene brought Mama and me gifts from under the tree: for Mama a daily devotional with a moss green cover, and for me, a set of tea towels, monogrammed with a single initial, “to be completed on a happy occasion to come.”
“Thank you, Uncle Eugene,” I said warmly, running my fingers over the embroidery.
Ruth snorted into her coffee cup.
Uncle Eugene went very still. My heartbeat was frantic as I waited for him to cast her out, right there in front of Mama and me. If he even scolded her, it might all come undone—the delicate web of half-truths and self-delusion that allowed me to have my cake and eat it, to be a good Institute girl and Ruth’s best friend.
He smiled firmly. He lifted his fork and took a bite of gingerbread, letting his eyes flutter shut as he swallowed.
“Now, this is a fine gingerbread,” he said. “Your mother used to bake gingerbread, Ruth. Do you remember? It will be a lucky man who takes for a wife a woman who can make a gingerbread like this.”
Ruth dropped her plate. It hit the floor and shattered. She looked sharply at her father, her gaze throbbing with a hurt that seemed to have been waiting all evening behind a shutter, and now the shutter had been thrown open, the hurt was shining through. I felt the fragility of the moment, the need for patching over, and almost echoed Uncle Eugene’s praise of the gingerbread, before I remembered that I was meant to have made it myself. In the end, it was Mama who, too brightly, too shrilly, agreed with Uncle Eugene, while I hurried to gather the white shards from the floor.
CHAPTER
20
On New Year’s Eve, Ruth and I went to a party where I kissed a strange man at midnight. That would be the last of it, I resolved. It was 1932. The year I would marry.
But the pace of Uncle Eugene’s matchmaking remained slack. Out loud, Mama blamed the weather. Bitter, lashing rains that overnight turned into heaps of snow, gray days when dusk came before it ever got properly light. On a frigid evening when Mama and Vera and I were holed up in our apartment, eating popcorn and playing pinochle, Mama told Vera it hardly mattered that the city’s taxi drivers had recently gone on strike, that everyone was hibernating anyhow, as if Vera were the one who needed reassuring.
At the end of the month, Uncle Eugene introduced me to a widower with a gray beard, whose nine-year-old daughter reached under the tablecloth to poke me in the thigh with her fork. The next night, Ruth and I went to a burlesque interpretation of the book of Genesis presented at a hole-in-the-wall theater on North Clark, and then to a party of the company, where after a few drinks I slipped into a supply closet with one of the performers, who slid his hand up my skirt and made me feel what Paul had failed to make me feel in the tree house.
But the one didn’t have anything to do with the other. Mama was right: winter was a lean season. That was natural. I hadn’t shown Uncle Eugene a thing to object to. I was the daughter who had stayed, who had seen my duty through. My husband would turn up in the spring, I decided, along with the robins, along with the groaning open of the ice-locked lake.
In February, Uncle Eugene produced a missionary, freshly returned from the Far East, who recalled his work in an uninterrupted monologue from peanuts and punch straight through dinner. Before I had a chance to pour him a cup of coffee he got a bloody nose and went home. I didn’t bother mentioning him to Ruth. She had started taking on extra jobs—copyediting, translations—that swelled the tally of her savings so rapidly I had to stop looking at the page on the wall. She read me letters from Morris Dack detailing his adventures in New York, and I knew it wasn’t enough to express admiration, or even jealousy, that she was fishing for something more—a concession, a promise, some share of my future. Sometimes, I left her place early, out of patience for reasons I didn’t want to investigate. Sometimes I spent the night, intimidated by the bite of the wind, or simply unable to tolerate the idea of going home to my mother.
My fourth winter in Chicago turned—haltingly, through spells of bitter cold and late flurries—into a dismal spring. It was chilly on my birthday, raining off and on. That afternoon, Mama and I had lunch with Vera, who said she’d heard the Lindy baby had been found, but the afternoon’s papers said otherwise, which made the whole day seem foul and disappointing. That evening, on our way to Uncle Eugene’s, I stared through the cab window at a sky that gleamed light gray behind thready dark clouds that threatened to mass and pour, freshly annoyed with Mama for having accepted an invitation from Uncle Eugene on my birthday, when she knew Ruth and I had made plans. Ruth had said not to worry, that I could just come over to her place after. But it felt like another betrayal on my part, a nick in our friendship.
As we turned onto Sheridan, we passed a worker pasting a new poster up over one advertising Turkish Delight. Josie’s latest flop. I glanced at Mama, who, to my relief, didn’t seem to have noticed. The picture had been banned as indecent in seventeen states. Religious leaders across the country had issued statements denouncing it as evidence of Hollywood’s degradation of traditional Christian values and an attack on the moral and spiritual welfare of America’s children. Uncle Eugene had read his statement over the radio, ending with an appeal for donations to a new Campaign for Morals in Cinema.
The cab stopped at a red light. Mama leaned her head back and closed her eyes, the last of the faint daylight sparking on the white threads in her hair. A year earlier, I might have enjoyed watching Josie’s face disappear under Norma Shearer’s. Now I thought of an article I’d read earlier in the week, which claimed Josie’s unpredictable behavior on the set of her next movie, Shiver Me Linda, had led to costly reshoots. Already it was supposed to be one of the most expensive pictures ever made. Josie played a socialite, kidnapped by pirates; there were dance numbers filmed at sea, in Technicolor. When I remembered the article’s last line, it seemed somehow to be as much about me as it was about Josie, as if her faltering career were the public expression of my failure to find a husband: “This reporter is forced to ask: Has the starlet once known as the Neatest Sweet Tomato gone splat?”
When Hilda delivered us to the parlor, Uncle Eugene was sitting at a small desk, staring glumly out the window at the rain that had just begun to fall, pen poised over the hardbound notebook in which he drafted his sermons. A long moment passed before he turned to greet us. Mama and I sat on the couch, and he took his place across from us in one of the armchairs. His conversation was clipped, absentminded, as if he were still focused on his sermon, or the rain. It seemed plain that he didn’t want us there, and I felt freshly annoyed at Mama and him both for having disrupted my plans with Ruth.
After a little while, Hilda called Uncle Eugene to the telephone.
“I’m afraid Mr. Hockelburg will be late,” he said when he returned, a small, stiff smile hardly masking his irritation. “A minor crisis at the office.”
When Mama pressed him for details about Mr. Hockelburg, he provided them succinctly: he’d just taken a position working for his grandfather, who owned real estate downtown. His father was the minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest and on the board of the college there; his mother was from one of the fine Chicago families, the middle of five daughters. The others had been society darlings in their youth, but Mrs. Hockelburg struck him as a solid, sensible woman.
Hilda brought in the peanuts and punch. I distributed them in the usual fashion. But after a minute, Uncle Eugene put down his punch glass. He went to a cabinet in the corner, where he turned a key, opened the door, and pulled out a bottle.
“Sherry,” he said, in a clear, sharp voice. “A gift from a member of the board.” He carried the bottle back along with three small glasses. I looked to Mama, hoping for guidance, but she was staring, wide-eyed, at the bottle from which Uncle Eugene had begun to pour as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. He handed Mama and me our glasses and raised his own.
“To Harriet, of course,” he said. “Our birthday girl. Many happy returns.” As he drank, he closed his eyes and smiled, as if returning to a long-forgotten pleasure. When neither of us followed suit, he gave Mama a quick, impatient nod. She let the liquid touch her lips and then set her glass down as if it were poison. But I couldn’t make myself drink in front of Uncle Eugene. I couldn’t. He didn’t seem to notice, or to care, as if it were sufficient that Mama had obliged him. He raised his glass a second time.
“And to my wife,” he said. Mama went ashen. Uncle Eugene drank deeply, then threw another log on the fire, sending up a spray of sparks. He leaned against the mantel. Yellow light flickered against his face, pooling in the troughs beneath his eyes.
“Today is our wedding anniversary,” he said. And then he turned to Mama, his smile brittle. “Do you remember Edison Day?”
“Of course,” she said. She watched him cautiously, sitting up very straight, her hands folded tightly over one knee.
“Our town was the very first where a city hall was built wired for electricity, if you can imagine that,” he said to me, noticing my untouched glass on the table and swallowing a small, approving chuckle. “Mr. Edison sent the chandelier that still graces the front lobby. For many years there was a festival every spring. Oh, small towns always find a reason for a festival, and that was ours. Each year the children fought over who would get to carry the banner at the front of the parade. Maybe they still do. Your mother must have been—eight, nine?” She nodded, still wary. When he turned back to me she emptied half her glass. “And Marion a few years younger than that. My mother was in charge of the parade that year. In the end, she chose the two of them. The Foster girls, everyone called them.”
“My mother made us white dresses, and stoles.” She spoke haltingly, as if she were easing out onto an icy pond she wasn’t certain would hold her weight, and though the explanation was for my benefit, she was looking at Uncle Eugene so intently it was as if I weren’t even in the room. “Mine was green and Marion’s blue.”
“It was that morning that I busted a tire on my bike, just up the road from your farm. Do you remember?”
“Yes.” She drank again, but this time she looked up at him with a girlish smile. “My father came down to help you repair it. Marion and I watched from behind the fence. You were already so impressive then. All the children in town knew your baseball records.”
He laughed and lifted the bottle of sherry toward Mama. After a moment’s consideration, she held out her glass. He topped her off and poured a little more for himself.
