Sisters and Strangers, page 1
SISTERS
Frances. Alice. Barbara. Three sisters who were raised together yet took such different paths. One into the glittering world of international society and sophisticated passion. One into a nightmare marriage that was destroying her body and soul. One into an independent career and an affair with a man whom she could not hope to marry.
AND STRANGERS
Now they had come together again—to discover how far they had drifted apart, yet how closely intertwined were their intimate feelings and perilous fates.
Sisters and Strangers
Helen Van Slyke
Table of Contents
Sisters and Strangers
Title Page
Reviews
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
About the Author
Copyright
“Highly recommended!”—LIBRARY JOURNAL
“Guaranteed to thrill!”—DALLAS MORNING NEWS
“Compelling”—SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
“Soul-satisfying”—THE ANNISTON STAR
“Vintage quality…tugs at the heart”—GREENSBORO DAILY NEWS
For my friend Jean,
who generously shared her time
and her “mile-high knowledge”
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter 1
Laura’s first thought when she awakened in the darkness of that pre-dawn October morning was that in two days she’d celebrate fifty years of marriage to Sam Dalton.
Fifty years. Half a century. Five decades with the same man. Perhaps she’d make a speech about that at the party.
“Two score and ten years ago we brought forth upon this community a marriage created by convention, conceived in monotony and dedicated to the proposition that all wedlock is enchained and unequal.”
She smiled, imagining how they’d all look at her if she said such a thing. Sam would think she’d taken leave of her senses. Her daughters would be shocked. No. Barbara and Alice would be shocked. Frances probably would think it was funny. The relatives would not understand. And the friends would feel embarrassed, as though she’d taken off her clothes in public.
Of them all, Sam would be closest to the truth. Sometimes she thought she was going crazy. Proper Laura Dalton, perfect wife and home-maker, pillar of the church, past-matron of The Eastern Star, mother of three, survivor of domestic disasters, keeper of the peace, tender of the flame of fidelity for fifty years. I have everything in the world to be grateful for, she told herself sternly. A paid-for house. Good health. A dependable, provident husband snoring beside me. I’m seventy years old, but in this day and age that’s not “old,” as it was when I was growing up.
Why, then, am I ticking off my blessings as though each one was a superstitious knock on wood? Why do I feel so unsatisfied, so trapped? My children are women. Not even young women. And for the first time in nearly thirty years they’re all sleeping safely under one roof. My worrying days should be over. All the things that hurt so much when they happened are far behind me. Sam and I got through them together. No, not really together. We suffered them independently, though we pretended otherwise. All that trouble with Alice and Frances. Even Barbara’s departure was a reproach, though she didn’t intend it to be. But that’s all in the past. The scars have healed. Or have they? Has each of us come to terms with what had to be? I don’t know. I don’t know my children any more. Or my husband. Or myself. Perhaps I never did. Never will.
All I know is that, all things considered, I’ve had a good life. A good marriage.
Day after tomorrow I’ll prove that by accepting congratulations for having lived through eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty days of being Mrs. Samuel Dalton of Denver.
Sam stirred. “What time is it?”
“Six-thirty.”
He grunted, sat up in the double bed and scratched his head in that irritating way she’d hated for fifty years. Why did he start every morning by scratching his head? To make sure the thick mane of hair, now so handsomely white, had not disappeared while he slept? Laura smiled, thinking what a ridiculous little thing it was to object to. But that’s what marriage was about: loving so many important things about a man and hating so many trivial ones.
“Why do you always scratch your head when you wake up?” She wondered why she’d blurted that out after all these mornings.
“What?”
“For fifty years you’ve awakened, asked me what time it is and then scratched your head.”
He looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. “What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense.”
“I know, dear. It just occurred to me that we all have funny little habits that never vary from year to year.” She smiled at him. “What do I do that irritates you, Sam? I’d like to know.”
He climbed out of bed, hitching up his pajamas at the waist.
“That, too,” Laura said. “You always hitch up your pajamas that way. What do I do that’s exactly the same every morning?”
He glanced at her over his shoulder as he headed for the bedroom door. “I never thought about it. I don’t know what’s gotten into you this morning, Laura. You don’t sound like yourself.”
She sat propped up in bed, the pink nylon nightgown with the fake lace discreetly covering her shoulders. The shoulders that, like her arms, were better hidden these days. She used to be so proud of her arms and shoulders and her long, unlined neck. No more. I may not feel my years, Laura thought, but once in a while the mirror reminds me. No, she didn’t sound like herself this morning. Sam was right about that. She didn’t feel like herself, either. She supposed it was the awareness of the oncoming golden anniversary. Or the fact that the girls were home and there’d be such a fuss going on in the next few days. Sam thought she was crazy with all this talk about sameness. He probably was right about that, too. He hadn’t answered her question. Surely she must have habits that drove him mad. Or maybe not. Maybe he never noticed any more.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just spouting nonsense. You’d better get into the bathroom if you want it first.”
Sam shook his head as he left the room. Another timeworn gesture, that half-annoyed, half-indifferent motion he made when things puzzled him. The little shake of his head that clearly said, “I’ll never understand women.” Or, for that matter, present-day politics, sexual mores, taxes, the tactics of the Denver Broncos, the “young squirt” who replaced him in his old job at the telephone company. A long list of non-understandables. There was so much he refused to understand. He was a kind man at heart. A good man. But uncompromising and becoming more rigid every day, more narrow in his interests, less tolerant of a changing world. In the eight years since his retirement he’d become old. At seventy-three he was a being with no purpose, no aspirations, no particular interest in anything. It’s no good for a man like Sam to retire, Laura thought for the hundredth time. On Sam’s pension we’re too poor to travel, too inflexible to move out of this dreary old house to some nice “Sun Belt Community” where we could make new friends, too bored with each other after fifty years to even try to communicate.
But we’ve never communicated. The realization was like a new thought. We’ve talked and argued and made love, but we’ve never spoken as one voice. Not when the children were growing up. Not when they needed the solid support and comfort we should have given them. If only Sam hadn’t been such a biblical patriarch when Alice got into trouble. If I’d been more aware of Frances’ restlessness. If both of us had discouraged Barbara’s interest in politics. If only we’d broadened our horizons early on, been adventurous enough to see the world or even widen our circle of friends here, or if we
If. What a useless word. And what ridiculous thoughts plagued her these days. If only I had someone to talk to. There I go with my “ifs.” There was no one. Not even the children. I don’t understand my girls. I know so very little about the way they think, even the way they live. Don’t even know whether they’re happy or miserable, whether they love us or hate us, whether they’re here out of desire or duty.
What on earth is happening to me?
She watched the light slowly sneaking through the window. Another day. More exciting than most because of the preparations for the party. But it was only a brief respite from sameness. It would soon be over, and within a week her daughters would be gone and the predictable way of life would return.
She sighed heavily.
It all seemed so pointless.
Frances opened her eyes and felt the old, familiar wave of apprehension waiting. The nonspecific, ugly one that greeted her every morning. It was always the same. Her first conscious moments were filled with unfocused fear, a suffocating depression she privately called her “insecurity blanket.” She dreaded each new day and at the same time feared it might be her last. She’d tried everything—from tranquilizers to TM. Nothing helped. Not even geography. Denver or Deauville, anxiety claimed no nationality. She was as frightened coming back to life in her old room in her parents’ house as she was in any apartment or hotel suite or chateau or manor house in the world. Why did she think it might be different here? I’m no different, she thought. I’m still Frances Dalton Mills Stanton de St. Déspres. Madame Dalton-Déspres. Social figure. Thrice divorced. Pointed, reluctantly, toward my fiftieth birthday. Sophisticate and super-failure. The prodigal returned for the celebration of Sam and Laura Dalton’s golden wedding anniversary. She was back in the bed she’d left nearly thirty years before. Back in body, but not in spirit. The spirit, if she had one, was someplace else.
The house was very quiet. Alice glanced over at the other twin bed, half-expecting in this first waking moment to see Spencer and momentarily surprised to see, instead, the peacefully sleeping figure of her younger sister. Barbara still looks like a young girl, Alice thought, though she’s forty. And Fran, in her own room next door, was a cleverly face-lifted forty-nine. And I’m a year younger and look old enough to be their mother. Especially in this unflattering half-light.
It wasn’t true, of course. Alice Dalton Winters, like most middle-aged women in 1976, could have lied by ten years about her age and gotten away with it. Provided one didn’t know she had a twenty-three-year-old son and a twenty-one-year-old daughter. But everyone did know, back in Boston where she lived and here in Denver where she’d come for the celebration. What most of them didn’t know was about the other one. The one born in 1946. Johnny, she’d called him. The baby she’d given away.
She didn’t want to think about him now. Didn’t want to wonder where he was and what his life was like. And whether he was as curious about her as she was about him. She didn’t want to think about any of her children, legitimate or otherwise. Or her husband or her home or her life back East. She wanted to be a girl again, a seventeen-year-old girl with everything to live for and nothing to hide.
It was strange to wake up in her old room. Stranger still to realize there was someone else there. Most mornings Barbara was alone, except when Charles could stay the night. And those sweet awakenings were rare and special occasions, moments when she could pretend that she, not Andrea, was Mrs. Charles Tallent.
She lay very still in the narrow twin bed, trying not to disturb Alice. Her big sister. She could still remember sharing this room in the little Denver house with a young, popular, pretty Alice Dalton. How she’d envied her, back in the mid-forties. How she’d envied both Alice and Frances, her “grown-up” sisters. It had made her angry to have arrived so late in her parents’ life. At least it had seemed late. Eight and nine years, respectively, after Allie and Fran. She was still a “baby” when they were dating, and they treated her as a little pest, ignoring her adoration, blind to her desire to be not only a sister but a peer. Time had narrowed the distance. The three of them seemed of an age, now that they’d all crossed forty. But their worlds were as far apart as ever. Farther, really. Incredible they’d had no “reunion” in thirty years. Astonishing how little she knew of their lives, or they of hers. Sisters and strangers. We might as well be three uneasy house guests visiting two people we barely know.
Chapter 2
“I wish you and Daddy had agreed to let us give you a party in some snappy place.”
Laura looked at her eldest daughter who was smoking her fourth cigarette over her second cup of coffee at the big old oak table in the dining room. Frances looked, well, dissipated, her mother thought. For all the creaminess of her silk robe, the sleek cut of her hair, the carefully applied make-up (imagine doing one’s face at eight in the morning!) she seemed like some world-weary visitor from a debauched realm beyond Laura’s imagination. What kind of life must she lead? All those marriages and divorces, all that flitting around the world since she was nineteen. What has it done to my firstborn? Terrible things I’d guess, from the look of her.
“Your father and I thought it would be much nicer to have a little party at home. You girls were sweet to offer, but all our friends do it this way. It may not be grand, but it’s suitable for us.”
Fran shrugged. If that was meant as a reprimand for her own extravagant way of life, she chose to ignore it. She could afford to give parties, big, lavish ones with orchestras and French champagne and clever, expensive florists’ creations on small, chic tables set for ten. Not that one probably could produce such splendor in a Denver hotel, but surely the Brown Palace could turn out a smarter background than this shabby old house where nothing had changed in nearly thirty years. The party will be a middle-class horror, Fran thought, but that’s the way they want it: dull, stolid and boring. She wished she hadn’t come home. Memory was kinder to the scene of her youth than reality. She wondered how Alice and Barbara felt. Of course, they’d been back to visit and she never had. Probably the whole dreary little house wasn’t such a total shock to them. And certainly their basis of comparison was less drastic. They’d “kept in touch.” She hadn’t. She wrote rarely, sent birthday gifts from Cartier in Paris and Christmas presents from Gucci in Rome. But she’d not come back since the night she eloped (what an extraordinarily old-fashioned word!) with that stupid young actor, Stuart Mills. She regretted many things about that first marriage, but she was grateful for one: It had gotten her out of this house and this town and this stultifying atmosphere of respectability.
“It’s nice, the four of us sitting around the table like this.” Alice smiled at them. “Can you believe how long it’s been since we all had breakfast together?”
“If you can call it breakfast,” Laura said. ‘“You girls don’t eat a thing! I’m glad your father was fed and out in the yard before you all came down. He’d have a fit, seeing you have nothing but coffee and juice. You know how he is.”
Barbara laughed. “I can still hear him. The voice from our childhood. ‘You girls eat your breakfast! Most important meal of the day. Got to stoke up after fasting all night.’ Does he still feel that way, Mother? Does he still have his fruit and cereal and eggs and bacon and all those things?”
“You know he does. You saw him last year when you came out at Christmas. And he’s right. The body can’t go from dinner to lunch on nothing but caffeine and nicotine.”
“This one can,” Fran said. “The only eggs I’ve been able to face in years are oeufs en gelée at lunch.”
“Fran, you really are a pain in the behind,” Barbara said suddenly.
“Beg pardon?”
“Oh, come on! You’re home, remember? You’re just Frances Dalton around here. Not Madame Dalton-Déspres! Get off our backs with that ‘snappy party’ stuff and your damned ‘oeufs en gelée’. For God’s sake, look at you! The rest of us are in bathrobes and curlers, and you look like you’re about to be photographed for Town and Country!”
“My, my!” Fran’s voice was coldly amused. “Will you listen to the baby! The little kitten has grown up into a snarling pussycat. What’s the matter, darling? You sound like a frustrated old maid. And I’m sure you’re not frustrated.”
