The Sisters (25 page)

“That’s slippery, Lynn!” Daddy panted out. “Lynney,
STOP!
”

But she was too giggly and ran on. She did slide a little on the dock, and her foot scraped a nail. She started to cry, but the pain didn’t last more than a second. It vanished when Daddy scooped her up. He shook her a little and said, “You have to mind,” and then they were both laughing and he held her tightly under her arms and swung her from side to side. “So, you want to be a rotten girl?” he said. “You know what happens to rotten girls?” He swung her high to the right and even higher to the left. She was scared. She yelled, “Too high, Daddy! No! Daddy! Don’t let go!” But Daddy was still laughing. He didn’t hear her. He swung her higher still, laughing. “Rotten girls go in the lake!” And he let go.

She could remember a big smack, then darkness, then a second when she opened her eyes and saw the turtle paddle over her head. Then she was cold and there were people shouting at her and something pushing on her chest and something wet on her mouth and she choked and the air inside stung so much she opened her eyes and saw a big black bear on top of her. After that, she didn’t remember anything else until she woke up in her own bed, with Mother wiping her legs with a cold washrag.

“Festus is coming on,” Grandma said, fussing with the covers again. “I’ll raise up the bed so you can see.”

While Grandma rooted around for the switch, Lynn thought about how her Sunday school teacher once told her she could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, so she concentrated on making her voice sweet. “Please, Grandma,” she said. “Can’t I call Daddy?”

“Don’t start working yourself up again,” Grandma said.

Lynn felt her eyes getting wet. She mustn’t cry. She mustn’t cry. “Please,” she said, “I won’t say anything to Mother. Please, Grandma. Let me call Daddy?”

Grandma’s voice was vinegar. “I’ve told you and told you, child. You’re to forget about that man.”

There was a little buzz and Lynn felt the bed raising her head and shoulders up. Now she could just see the outline of a telephone on a table past the foot of the bed. Beside the telephone was a vase with a single white rose, glowing blue from the light of the television, which hung from the wall above.

Lynn didn’t care now how sour her voice sounded. “I’m gonna call him! You can’t stop me.” She couldn’t remember Daddy’s telephone number, but she knew she could dial zero. The operator would help her. She struggled to pull herself out of the bed, but her arms and legs were stuck. She pulled and pulled, so hard she was starting to lose her breath. Grandma was scurrying around the side of the bed, saying, “Stop that! Lynn, settle down right now!”

Lynn lurched forward as far as she could. The pillow slipped to the middle of her back, and the last of the covers dropped from her shoulders to her lap. Thick straps were pulled tight across her arms, and now that she saw them, she could feel the same straps across her legs. “Let me go! Let me go!” she screamed. “I want Daddy! Let me go!”

From somewhere outside her she heard Grandma calling for help. The white form of a nurse appeared, her shoes squeaking across the floor. The nurse would help her. “Please let me go,” Lynn whimpered. “Please.”

“I’m going to put you back down, honey,” the nurse said, and the bed grumbled its way flat again. “Just a little stick.”

It wasn’t a little stick at all, and Lynn tried to roll away from it, but the straps stopped her. She tried to think about how she could get away. Maybe like Houdini. But she couldn’t think how to begin. If only Daddy knew where she was. If only Daddy would come for her.

The heaviness settled over her, pushing, pushing. Pushing her down like before. Down and down, under the water.

T
HIRTEEN

Upheaval

February 1966

Indianapolis, Indiana

MABEL

O
NCE AGAIN, VIETNAM HAD MADE
the cover of
Life
. A pair of soldiers in a trench—one, in spite of the great dirty bandage covering his eyes, looked up at the sky, perhaps hoping for a helicopter, while on his leg he cradled the other soldier, whose wounded head was mummy-wrapped, with only a triangle of face left free.

Though it was much too cold, especially since she hadn’t put on a coat when she stepped outside to get the mail, Mabel sat down on the porch swing and opened the magazine. Inside, there were five more full spreads of photographs. She studied them, trembling. Though none of the faces was familiar to her, every one of them called up the faces of her boys—the seventy-two soldiers she had photographed in the last three months.

The project had come to her one day on her lunch hour, when she was on her way into Fleming & Sons to pick up some stockings. A display of official military portraits filled the store’s front window, lined up by the dozens, as if in regiments. By design, the portraits all looked the same—crisp uniform, rigid posture, staring, absent eyes. And terrifying youth—they all had that in common. But there was nothing, not so much as a wrinkle of a lip, to say that
this
boy is not the same as that one, or that one, or that one. Seeing the photographs, Mabel forgot entirely about the stockings and walked straight back to the desk she shared with three other photographers at the
Indianapolis Star
. A few moments later, she had scratched out an advertisement offering a free photo session to any serviceman with orders for Vietnam, in exchange for his agreement to let her photograph him once more when his tour of duty had ended. She had meant the ad to run in ten consecutive issues, but by the third day, she was so overwhelmed with calls, she canceled it. Since then, word of mouth had taken care of the rest.

“Mama!” Daisy called from the kitchen. “What do you want to do with all these jars on the top shelf?”

Mabel sighed and went back into the house. The whole idea of this move—an idea Daisy and Barry had cooked up, apparently when they were on their honeymoon—was to make Mabel’s life easier, get her into a place small enough to keep clean, a place with an efficient kitchen, where everything was in easy reach, a place where she didn’t have to face stairs when she wanted to get into her studio and darkroom. So what if her knee gave out a little? she argued. Using the stairs was probably the only thing that had kept the knee from locking up altogether. Besides, she was settled. She liked her neighbors, and the people who worked at the small local grocery all greeted her by name. But then, after Daisy and Barry had shown Mabel the house they’d found for her, two blocks from their own, pointing out how the spare bedroom and bath could easily be converted for her work, her daughter had clinched the deal by saying, “You don’t want to have to come all the way across town every time you want to hold your grandchild, do you?” Before Mabel knew it, she was nodding agreement through her tears and the house was bought.

“Daisy, get down from there!” Mabel dropped the mail on the kitchen table and lifted her hands to urge Daisy off the chair she was standing on. She had set all the jars on the counter and was now stretching to reach the far corners of the shelf with a cloth.

“Let Barry do that,” Mabel said. “You’re nearly five months. You’re liable to fall.”

When Daisy turned to look at her mother, her gaze shifted to the copy of
Life,
which had landed faceup on the table. “I’ll get down if you promise me you won’t look at that magazine. You know how upset you get.” Daisy did not approve of Mabel’s project, and each time she saw a new set of photographs, she said, “Please be careful, Mama. Don’t get too involved with these guys. Think how terrible it will be for you if you find out any of them have been—”

“You can’t protect yourself from loss,” Mabel said. “You know that as well as anybody.” Still, she understood what Daisy was really afraid of. In the last twelve years, ever since her breakdown in the Juniper cemetery, Mabel had fought through three or four bouts of depression—weeks at a time, when she was incapable of pulling out from under black despair. The last one had been set off in late summer by a report on the news showing American soldiers burning a village in Vietnam. Mabel couldn’t take her eyes off the television—the flames, the smoke, and the masses of terrified people, Morley Safer talking through it all. For days afterward, she refused to miss the news, read every newspaper and magazine story about that terrible act, haunted by the way Safer had put the fire in context: “A man lives with his family on ancestral land. His parents are buried nearby.” And as if she had seen it all, Mabel imagined those people, suddenly homeless, displaced from families, wandering in desperate search of one another. As a girl, she had believed she would live out her life in Juniper, tending the graves of her parents, and one day marry and have children who would tend her grave. Before long, though she knew she should be concentrating her sympathy on those poor Vietnamese, her mind locked on Juniper and the way it was when she had last seen it—nothing but charred shells of places she had known—and then her mind slipped to why she had gone there, and how she had failed. The next morning, she just couldn’t get up, though Daisy called her and called her and finally came in to lean over the bed, saying, “Mama-bel. Please.
Please,
Mama.” Mabel could see the pain of it in her daughter’s eyes—another round—but she just couldn’t help it.

At the time, Daisy had just begun rehearsals to play Nora in
A Doll’s House,
so their darling Nick, whose talents made him the staple of the playhouse’s musical-theater productions, moved in to see Mabel through her bad time, as he had done so often before. No natural son could have loved her more than Nick did. She’d been so happy over the friendship that had burst into being when, barely out of high school, Daisy and Nick met in summer stock, but Mabel had never expected she would be the beneficiary of Nick’s seemingly endless store of devoted affection.

“C’mon, give me your hand,” Mabel now said to Daisy, but her daughter waved off the help, steadying herself with one hand on the back of the chair and the other braced on the counter.

“See there,” Mabel said, noting Daisy’s bright red cheeks, “you’ve gotten yourself overheated.”

“Well, it’s hot. What’s the thermostat set on?”

Mabel rolled her eyes, and when she caught Daisy doing the same, they both laughed. Not once in all the years they’d been together had they ever agreed on temperature: Daisy was always too hot, and Mabel was always too cold.

Mabel took a clean dish towel from the stack waiting to be packed, ran it under cold water and dabbed Daisy’s face with it. “The doctor said you have to be careful. It’s not usual to have a first baby so old.”

“I just saw him on Monday,” Daisy said, “and he told me he wished his eighteen-year-old mothers-to-be were all as healthy as I am.” She rinsed the towel under the faucet and wrung it out. “Do you hear me? Healthier than girls half my age.”

“Still,” Mabel said, dragging the chair back to its place at the table, “even healthy people can fall off chairs. If there’s any more climbing to do, let Barry do it.”

“What am I being elected for now?” Barry came in, arms full of empty boxes.

“You,” Daisy said, kissing him over the boxes and taking them from him, “are just in time to take another load to the car.” She pointed to one of the packed boxes and said, “I’ll be right behind you with another one.”

“Not too heavy,” Mabel said, but Daisy told her she worried too much, and then picked up a box marked
Plates.

Mabel still missed having Daisy in the house. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to living alone—she hadn’t liked it before, those years in Indianapolis, and really for most of them, it felt like she wasn’t alone. Up until Paul died, she’d spent nearly all her time with him in the studio, going back to her rented room only to sleep. After Chicago, in their early years together, Mabel had savored Daisy’s company, expecting that someday her girl would move out on her own, get married, and then Daisy started high school—a beautiful copper-haired girl who attracted the notice of boys but wouldn’t let any of them near her. When she finished school, Daisy put all her energy into acting, working part-time and taking whatever roles she could get, until finally—the same year as Nick—she was asked to join the repertory theater as a resident player. Over the years, Daisy had rebuffed and ignored dozens of admirers, and so naturally Mabel had come to accept that her daughter, like she, wanted nothing to do with men and would always remain single. She could see herself going on and on with Daisy—and with Nick, who did like men but was terrified of being found out. A misfit bachelor trio, they were, content with one another. But then last summer, Nick met Ted, who wouldn’t let him hide, and only a few weeks later, Daisy unaccountably allowed a balding, thick-waisted insurance salesman to come into her dressing room to present her with an immense bouquet of pink roses. That was Barry. By the first of October, after a four-day engagement, they were married, onstage, not ten minutes after the curtain had come down on the final ovation for Daisy’s last performance in
A Doll’s House.

What a happy night that had been. After everyone pitched in to clear the set—the cast, crew, a few dozen friends, and Ted, of course—they all danced, swirling in ever-changing and varied pairs against a backdrop of ornate nineteenth-century wallpaper. Mabel grew faint as the playhouse’s young lighting director twirled her across the floor, but Nick cut in and saved her, dancing her backstage to the brocade sofa, where she accepted the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. “Now, this is just a breather, Belle,” he said, fanning her with a playbill. “Daisy will miss you if you’re gone too long.” From the wings, they watched Daisy laughing with her head back as she and Barry danced. Daisy could glide across a floor like vapor, but it pleased Mabel to see how her daughter matched herself to Barry’s gluey steps, as if being in his arms was the surest thing she’d ever known.