by Lesley Kagen
“I enjoyed the fire-eater and that cow with two heads,” Bigger told us as we strolled down the midway, “but a word to the wise, girls: you can’t trust a magician named Randy who pulls somethin’ outta his pants. And when you’re up here the next few days without me, I want you to avoid Giggles the Clown, too. No man in his right mind would enjoy making balloon animals that much.”
We caught another glimpse of Uncle Walt and Aunt Jane May as we were preparing to call it a night, but this time they were standing in front of the cotton candy booth and acting like they barely knew each other.
When Viv sighed and repeated something she must’ve read in one of the ladies’ magazines, “Secret love is so romantic,” Frankie, who I thought knew more about that kind of love than Viv might ever realize, threw up the two corn dogs she’d eaten earlier.
My father was sitting on the front porch swing when we got home, and after the girls and I thanked Bigger for taking us to the fair, he took his watch out of his pocket, thumbed it open, and said, “Gettin’ late, Dolores. May I give you a ride home?”
“No, thank you, Doc. I need to walk off some of what I ate tonight if I’m gonna fit into the dress I bought for the wedding. See y’all tomorrow, with bells on.”
I told the girls that I needed to talk to my father and to go out to the hideout without me. When I sat down beside him, I could smell his Old Spice aftershave, and he looked dapper in a white shirt and vest, because no matter how hot it got, he felt it was important for a doctor to project an air of professionalism. His pocket watch was still open and I caught a glimpse of my mother before he snapped it shut.
“Did you and your friends enjoy yourselves this evening?” he asked me.
“Yes, sir. Aunt Jane May did, too. She won four blue ribbons for her pies and cookies.”
“You don’t say.”
I sat there with the man of so few words for a while longer listening to the night sounds before I got up enough nerve to ask him what had been on my mind. “Mister Wilkes wrote in the newspaper that you knew what Doctor Cruikshank was doing at the hospital. Is that true?”
I’d taken him by surprise, and it took a bit before he said, “I felt the procedures were arcane, and I didn’t consider what he was trying to cure to be an illness, but I’m just a small-town doctor.” The permanent furrow in his forehead deepened. “I was impressed by Doctor Cruikshank’s explanations and bowed to his greater knowledge, but I should have fought harder for my patients. Let my mistake be a lesson to you, Elizabeth. ‘To thine own self be true.’”
I could see how much it pained him to tell me that and I wanted to tell him that nothing he could do would make me love him any less, but I’d had so little practice talking to him that I didn’t know how to get what was in my heart into words. All I could do was put my head down in his lap and let him rock us on that swing and hope that he knew.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dell’s and Sally’s backyard second wedding ceremony the following afternoon was just close friends and family. After Reverend Archie prompted them to say their “I do’s” beneath the boughs of the hideout tree, we cried and dug into the sumptuous supper Sophia Maniachi provided. Afterward we danced into the night to Sinatra songs—turned out that Frankie had been named after him because he was Sally’s favorite singer—and the rhythm and blues records playing on the hi-fi that Doc had moved to the back porch.
Dell was radiant in a pink dress trimmed with lace, and Uncle Sally—he told us that it was just fine if we kept calling him that—looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly—or a gangster movie—in a pin-striped gray suit when he spun his bride around on the grass. Aunt Jane May and Uncle Walt tripped the light fantastic barefoot, too, alongside Jimbo and Bigger, who were doing a more interesting dance called “The Jack.” So Doc didn’t feel left out, I asked him to waltz with me and was surprised by what a fine dancer he was.
When the festivities began to wind down and the fireflies showed up, the girls and I wished everyone a good night and climbed the steps up to the hideout. School would start the following morning, so we would sleep together for the last time that night in our summer home away from home, our inner sanctum, and our repository of secrets of all kinds.
After we shucked off our party dresses and got down to our underwear, Viv summed up how all three of us were feeling when she said, “We’re gonna remember this summer for as long as we live.”
And we have.
We’d been exposed to unspeakable evil and it had taken something from us that we’d never get back. Frankie limps when it rains, Viv has nightmares, I cannot wear anything around my neck, and our memories of that long ago summer haunt us. For time does not heal all wounds and you cannot always let bygones be bygones, and maybe that’s all right. Could be that all any of us can hope for is that when we look back on our lives, we’ll find the good outshone the bad, and we had the strength we needed to endure the unendurable. And I like to think that has held true over the years for the girls and me.
The once-bulls-eye-red hideout has faded to a baby-blanket pink, and the ancient oak that cradles it has lost some of its bulk, but here I am, almost sixty years after the summer that changed our lives forever, smelling the lingering scent of peonies, listening to the crickets call to one another as Grand Creek tumbles over the stepping stones, and wishing that my arthritic hips could get me out of this back porch glider and up those ten wooden steps. There’s just about nothing I’d rather do more than go back into the house and wake up the girls so we could light the train lantern, lie on our feathered cotton mats, and tell tales of how it used to be and in many ways still is.
Of course, at some point Viv would suggest we grab the rolls of Charmin we keep stocked on a shelf in the garage, toss them into the back of our yellow pickup truck, and drive over to the toothachingly adorable gingerbread house owned by Mayor Brenda Mulrooney—or, as Viv likes to call her, “BM.” We’ve had a lot of practice toilet-papering her place over the years, so we’d be long gone by the time Brenda woke up to a yard that looked less like it belonged in Victorian England and more like something from ancient Egypt. (Mummification is a lost art.)
After we returned to the hideout, shiny with victory, Frankie would goad Viv into arm wrestling, just so she could hold her hand. To outsiders, Viv’s and her relationship has always appeared to be built on a shared enjoyment of torturing one another, but I’ve witnessed the yearning in Frankie’s eyes for many years. And how tenderly she still looks at Viv when she’s sleeping and how gently she presses her cheek against hers to inhale her exhales, and how happy she is when the two of them go at each other and I make them hug it out. Frankie and I have not once had a conversation about her feelings because there’s no need to. She knows that I know and that her secret is safe with me. What she doesn’t know is that Viv came to me many years ago and confessed with more than a few tears that she knew “Frankenstein” was in love with her and she loved her, too, just “not that way.”
And after our wrinkled lids grew heavy, the girls would set their gnarled hands atop mine and we’d no longer feel our parchment skin or the crooked bends to our fingers. When we whispered to one another, “All for one and one for all,” the border between now and then would crumble, and for that sweet moment in time, it would be as it always had been, and always will be, for love knows no bounds.
Epilogue
I’ve visited hundreds of book clubs and attended events at bookstores countless times over the years and, according to Frankie, who keeps track of these sorts of things, the most often asked question is, “What happened to the characters after the story ended?”
As previously mentioned, thanks to Wally Hopper, my voice can give out if I talk too long, so Viv, who has experience in this area, suggested that I share in these pages some of what the girls and I got ourselves into after the summer of ’60 in case you invite me to one of your gatherings to speak and I run out of steam.
Eight years to the day af
ter the emergency meeting to discuss Wally Hopper’s transfer to Broadhurst, Frankie delivered her valedictorian speech on the town hall stage and surprised no one when she was voted Most Likely to Succeed; Viv claimed the Best Smile and Most Talented accolades; and under my picture in the 1967 Summit High yearbook it said: “Winner of the Willa Cather Award for Excellence in Writing and President of Key Club.”
Frankie departed for Yale to study law on a full scholarship and Viv took off to New York City to fulfill her acting dreams. Not nearly as adventurous or as certain what fate had in store for me as the girls were, I applied to the school where my father met my mother—the University of Chicago.
I was still passionate about getting my stories down on paper, but my experiences at Broadhurst had stoked my already profound interest in the workings of the human mind, so when I was instructed to choose one or the other in my junior year of college it felt like I was being asked to pick who I loved the most—Viv or Frankie, Doc or Aunt Jane May. But thanks to the good Lord, my “little voice,” and my father’s reminder—“To thine own self be true”—I managed to double-major in both English and psychology, went on to achieve graduate degrees in both, and ended up writing books that I’ve been told touch peoples’ lives, just the way Florence had predicted.
“Another remarkably insightful coming-of-age story by Elizabeth Buchanan.”
—New York Times Book Review
“An outstanding character-driven blend of historical fiction, mystery, and commentary of the times. Ms. Buchanan is a wonderful storyteller. Perfect for book clubs!”
—Jill Miner, Saturn Booksellers
“Nostalgic and poignant with the author’s trademark humor and astute observations sprinkled throughout, Elizabeth Buchanan’s newest novel might be her best.”
—American Booksellers Association
Thanks to dedicated booksellers, librarians, and faithful readers, most of my novels have garnered good reviews and sold surprisingly well over the years. As a result of the royalties I receive and the hefty inheritance left to me by my father and uncle; Viv’s success as an actress—her heyday has long past, but our four-time Emmy winner and Academy Award nominee still flies to New York and Los Angeles to guest star in a TV show or movie as a feisty, foul-mouthed granny; and Frankie’s outstanding legal career—no longer one of the busiest civil rights litigators in the country, she now does outstanding work with The Innocence Project—the Tree Musketeers are sitting on, forgive the pun, quite the nest egg.
Our beloved Aunt Jane May remained full of piss and vinegar into her eighties. She and Uncle Walt did eventually tie the knot and move into his bungalow, but after he died from a heart attack, she moved back in with us. When she failed to come barging out of her bedroom one morning to holler, “Up and at ’em, girls. Tempus fugit,” we buried her a few days later next to her sister and her husband. Still, to this day, her presence remains a guiding light. No exaggeration, we could almost see her giving us the thumbs-up when we’d do something that we knew she’d be proud of. And Viv swears that she heard Aunt Jane May say, “What took you so long?” the night we had a powwow and voted unanimously to share some of our enormous wealth.
We got the ball rolling by contributing to architectural restorations and other worthy causes throughout town. When the volunteer fire department needed a new engine we rose to the occasion. We funded an addition to the library that we named the Edith Dirk’s Children’s Museum and filled it with those touchy, feely activities. But our most important contribution has been our purchase of Broadhurst. It was left abandoned after the summer of ’60 and the girls and I are working diligently to restore its crumbling structure so that someday it might provide hope and help to those among us who are battling with inner demons.
But as rewarding as all that was, and remains so, Frankie, Viv, and I found ourselves growing tired of the accolades and attending tribute dinners. What we really wanted to do was to lighten the load of the good people of our town who worked their tail feathers off from dawn to dusk and still came up short every month—without all the attendant hoopla.
Of course, it was Viv’s idea to don dark clothing and sneak around town after the sidewalks had been rolled up to slip a cashier’s check with a lot of zeros in the mailbox of Bill Ellis, who’d lost his job at Camp’s Dairy because of cutbacks. The following night, we stuck an envelope bulging with bills under the flower pot on Meghan Harris’s front porch so she could replace that beater car she drives with a new Subaru. If heavy lifting was called for, say, if boxes of state of the art lap top computers needed to be delivered to the entrances of Mud Town Elementary and St. Thomas Aquinas School in the middle of the night, the girls and I relied on our aide-de-camp Ray-Ray Martin—Jimbo and Bigger’s gigantic fifteen-year-old grandson—to lend a helping hand.
I cannot tell you what a charge we got out of secretly throwing our money around and watching folks spend it, and we hated to think that it’d come to an end. But other than occasionally finding a book in the refrigerator, or forgetting which letter of the alphabet we parked under at the new shopping mall on Route 4, the girls and I have managed to retain most of our wits. We knew in a town the size of ours that it’d be hard to keep what we were doing under wraps for long. Especially after Summit Courier editor-in-chief and great admirer of Woodward and Bernstein, Norman “Norma” Wilkes offered a substantial reward for any information about the “Summit Santa Clause” in a series of articles he’d entitled—“Giftgate.”
Sure enough, our fun came crashing to an end the night we tried to covertly thank our longtime gardener and maintenance man, Scotty Jorgenson. He’d always tell us, “Just doin’ my job,” and refuse bonuses for the outstanding work he’s put into the grounds and our home, so we went behind his back. We crept into his yard and pinned a hefty gift certificate to Hanson’s Hardware on the door of his tool shed, which went smoothly enough, but our getaway was straight out of a Three Stooges movie.
Viv, who was breaking in a new pair of high top sneakers at the time, took a bad step and landed on her derrière in Scotty’s fish pond, which was, unfortunately, situated within hearing distance of his next door neighbor’s open window. I hoped the obscenities she yelled would get lost in the sound of machine gun fire in the old war movie Norman “Norma” Wilkes was watching on the TV in his den, but Viv used her booming theatrical voice when she screamed, “Fuck … fuck … fuck!”
Seconds later, Norman popped up from his recliner, switched the flood lights on in his yard, stuck his head out his back door, and called out, “Halt or I’ll shoot!”
We were pretty sure he meant a picture, but he did have that deer head hanging over his fireplace. And Frankie had saddled him with that nickname after she threatened to punch him in the throat if he told anyone that Viv kissed him during The Incredible Shrinking Man, so he’d been nursing a grudge against us for many years.
After Norman came hobbling out of his house, he quickly put two and two together and told us, “Well, if it isn’t the Summit Santa and a couple of her elves.”
“And if it isn’t Tiny Tim,” Viv muttered because he’d been in such a hurry to catch us that he hadn’t slipped on his special shoe that corrected his shorter by two inches leg.
“Knew it was you three!” Norman gloated.
He had not been an attractive child and things hadn’t improved as he aged, but Viv sighed and gamely muttered, “The show must go on.” If he’d forget he’d seen us at Scotty’s place, she told him she’d go on a date with him.
Frankie went legal beagle and mentioned filing an injunction.
My attempt to buy Norman’s silence came in the form of an introduction to my literary agent. I knew that publishing a book about what’d transpired in Summit during the summer of ’60 was something he’d always aspired to, and he couldn’t agree fast enough.
I’m not a monster so, of course, I felt bad about making him that offer when I knew darn well that the book you’re holding in your hands would be released before h
e even came close to finishing his. But, you know, I just couldn’t bear him ruining our fun and listening to some vengeance plan Viv would come up with on the walk home that might include a meeting of Norman’s normal-sized leg and the chainsaw she bought last week at Hanson’s Hardware.
And then she and Frankie would start bickering and I’d end up spending the rest of the night referring an arm-wrestling contest at the pine table in the kitchen instead of quietly sitting on the back porch of the house reading and putting a dent in a bottle of wine, and after all … it wasn’t his story to tell, was it.
Also available by Lesley Kagen
Whistling in the Dark
Land of a Hundred Wonders
Tomorrow River
Good Graces
Mare’s Nest
The Resurrection of Tess Blessing
The Undertaking of Tess
The Mutual Admiration Society
Author Biography
Lesley Kagen is a multi-award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of nine previous novels, an actress, voice-over-talent, sought-after speaker, child advocate, student storyteller, and writing instructor. The mother of two and grandmother of two, she lives in a hundred and fifty year old farmhouse in a small town in Wisconsin.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Lesley Kagen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alcove Press, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
