The Tumbling Turner Sisters

by Juliette Fay

  I couldn’t always judge Mother as harshly as I fully meant to, though. After all, it was a question I asked myself every day. What was I willing to do to have a bigger, better life—to avoid my mother’s lot, captive in a boring little town, scraping for every mouthful?

  I’d been planning my escape as long as I could remember. What wouldn’t I do to be free?

  The next night was Friday, and I worked my usual closing shift at J. J. Wiley’s Pub and Cafe.

  “Thirsty?” said Roy, the bartender, and slid over a glass of Coca-Cola as we waited for the last customers to toddle on home.

  “Thanks.” I took a sip and leaned on the bar, looking out over the dining room. I set the glass back down. “It’s missing something.” The glass was lifted from my hand. When it returned, I took another sip. There it was, a splash of rum. I turned to Roy and smiled.

  He was twenty-eight, and it was a relief to smile at a man old enough not to blush over a silly facial expression. There were a lot of things I liked about Roy. He worked hard, saving up for a restaurant of his own one day. His good looks were subtle: medium height, not overly muscular, but with a strong jaw and powerful hands. A good kisser, too.

  “Someday, Gert,” he would whisper against my cheek when we necked. “Someday.”

  I liked a man who could wait, who didn’t try and paw his way to what he wanted. We’d been quietly seeing each other for six months, and finally his wait had been over. He’d been as gentle as such things can be, I suppose. Afterward, I’d smiled sweetly and reassured him it was nice. But honestly, I just didn’t get the appeal.

  Roy was a very happy man, and now “someday” meant something else entirely. Something more public, and more permanent.

  But I wasn’t so sure about that.

  I’ll admit being a restaurant owner’s wife was a step up, but in some way, wasn’t it all the same? Working hard, day in and day out, stuck in the same place with more or less the same people?

  “With your looks and charm,” he’d say, “you’ll be the perfect restaurant hostess, Gert.”

  I could be good at a lot of things, I thought.

  And I’d barely begun to imagine them all.

  3

  WINNIE

  You are all you will ever have for certain.

  —June Havoc, actress and dancer

  We first saw the boy acrobats in September 1918. I remember because school had begun, and I was worried that I wouldn’t get all of my advanced math homework done.

  “Advanced math,” Gert had sneered. “As if slaving over regular old math isn’t odd enough.”

  I didn’t dignify it with a response. She could flunk out and end up a washerwoman, for all I cared. Except it was Gert. She’d probably end up marrying Douglas Fairbanks. (That is, if his high-flying career ever brought him to Johnson City, New York, which I found dubious in the extreme.)

  We were up in the gallery again, as Mother had finally realized that front-row seats equaled bare cupboards. The seats were wooden and the floor was scattered with cigarette and cigar butts. But we didn’t mind so much. It was still a thrill to be in a fancy theatre, even if most of the fancy was far below us.

  Our oldest sister, Nell, was with us that night. She had grown increasingly anxious as she waited for her husband, Harry, to return home from the Great War, and we didn’t like to leave her alone too long. The anxiety mirrored the depth of her love and longing, which was understandable given its object.

  Harry was a sandy-haired boy we’d all had a crush on at one time or another, he was just that universally lovable. Funny when you wanted to laugh, serious as a priest when you needed advice, he didn’t have much in the way of answers so much as an appearance of deep interest in the questions. He made me feel fascinating, not like some quirky girl who thinks too much.

  As Harry’s return drew closer, we began collecting Nell and the baby on our way home from school, so she could sit at our house and be distracted by the comforting reliability of our family’s contentiousness. It had been sad enough for her to bring Harry’s son into the world without him near—even worse to know he was dodging bullets and mustard gas somewhere in the midst of the greatest war of all time. Her worry could not be contained for long within the four walls of her tiny apartment, and she preferred to be with us. Baby Harry napped among the nightgowns in the bottom drawer of Gert’s dresser, when he wasn’t exercising his lungs from colic.

  The evening we saw the acrobats, Nell had laid him to sleep, leaving Dad to listen for his cry. Dad didn’t mind. He’d just turn up the volume on his phonograph and walk the squalling baby around the living room, as he’d done with us when we were little.

  There were four young men in the acrobat troupe, all dressed in black tights and red satin tops. One had thighs and a neck the girth of a telephone pole. He served as the foundation for the amazing acts of strength and agility, casually flipping another man up and into the air or over his shoulder. Two were of middling size, while the last was small and lithe. He was the ball with which they played, curling his head tightly into his bent knees as they tossed him around the stage. I stared in wonder, imagining how exhilarating it must feel to sail through the air like that. As a tiny girl I had always loved when Dad had swung me around, grasping one ankle and wrist, while the rest of me pretended to fly.

  For the finale, the strong one lifted the medium-sized men onto his shoulders, the two gripping each other as they stood, outer legs extended. The opera house piano player banged out a staccato rhythm, notes climbing steadily higher to match the ascent of the acrobats. The small one climbed like a monkey up the tree of his comrades, and in a feat of true daring and skill, tightrope-walked back and forth across the clasped hands of the middle two. Then he faced the audience and held his arms outstretched, and the piano banged out a full-throated ta-da!

  We were becoming attuned to the range of audience reaction: groans, boos, and extended trips to the lavatories; listless, tepid clapping; respectable applause; and finally booming ovations accompanied by hoots and cheers. The rafters practically shook for these acrobat boys as the audience clapped and stomped their approval.

  I glanced to Gert, knowing her veto would carry the day. At the same moment, she glanced to me and raised an eyebrow in question.

  Oh yes, I thought with a quick nod, absolutely yes!

  Mother leaned toward Gert and me. “Think how that would go over with girls in pretty costumes.”

  At eighteen, Gert was built like a roller coaster: all curves, and just as exciting, if men’s wolfish looks were any indication. Her blue gemstone eyes flashed as she considered those outfits—the satiny snugness, the brevity. Oh how her womanly features would shine.

  “You’d be perfect as the small one,” she said to me. “And Kit would be the strong one at the bottom.”

  And you would be the pretty one in the center of it all, I thought. As usual.

  After school the next day, I trod my well-worn path to the Johnson City Public Library and asked Miss Sneeden, the librarian, where I might find a book on acrobatics.

  “My goodness, Winnie,” she said with a little smile. “That’s quite a departure from your usual fare.”

  “Yes . . . well,” I stammered. “It’s good to broaden one’s horizons.”

  My horizons were approaching the width of the Adirondacks, I giggled to myself, as I pored through tomes on gymnastics, tumbling and acrobatics, studying scantily clad athletes in wondrous feats of coordination. I chose two books that seemed to be the most instructive.

  “Where’ve you been?” whined Kit when I arrived home. “I had to do your chores and mine!” But when I showed her the books, she sat right down on the floor to page through them.

  “Books? You’ve got to be kidding,” Gert muttered as she peered over Kit’s shoulder, but she studied the pictures just as intently.

  The next day, we began our first faltering steps toward becoming the Tumbling Turner Sisters. We started with simple childish moves in our tiny backyard
, our muscles seeming somehow to remember the hours we’d spent as little girls practicing handstands, cartwheels, and somersaults. We returned to the books again and again for instruction and inspiration.

  “Look at Kit,” Mother said as our youngest sister cartwheeled over and over around the backyard. “Maybe she’ll be our star.”

  Gert stiffened, then affected a careless shrug. “Maybe.”

  Oh, Gertie, I thought, stifling a grin, she’s playing you like a piano.

  Gert had always been the most coordinated of the three of us—and the most tenacious. She soon taught herself to handspring, flipping over from a handstand and, with one of us “spotting” her with an arm under her back, as the books indicated, nudging her back to her feet. Neither Kit nor I could manage it, and I worried that Gert’s natural competitiveness would be satisfied and she’d get bored. Happily, this was not to be the case.

  “Come on, now, no time for rest,” she chided us, pushing a golden lock off her sweaty cheek. “We’ve got to learn that leapfrogging thing.” This involved running up behind the first girl, jumping up and pushing off her shoulders, while she ducked down just enough to allow the leap. Then that second girl stood still while the third girl performed two leaps over the first two. The first girl would then become the leaper, and so on.

  It was impossible to do in our calf-length skirts, so we took them off and practiced in our drawers between the sheets on the clothesline, lest we be spotted by a nosy neighbor. Even then it was hard. We weren’t always ladylike, yelling things like “Son of a gun!” and “Get your darn armpit out of my face!”

  Day after day, we practiced, adding the simpler stunts from the book. We were terrible at first, but Mother’s prodding and Gert’s ambition inspired a level of perseverance that produced results. After six weeks, we had an act of five minutes in duration. It was far from smooth, but at least we knew what it was supposed to look like if it were ever to be performed by real acrobats.

  The whole effort stalled out in October of that year, 1918, a particularly somber time for the world. I guess it’s safe to say that at any given moment it’s a somber time for somebody. In 1906, there was that big earthquake out in San Francisco, and that put everyone in a fright. The rest of the country had a sympathy response, of course—there but for the grace of God goes my own city—but then the whole thing passed from consciousness relatively quickly. Of course, I was only two at the time, so it didn’t pass through my consciousness at all.

  The fall of 1918 was different. There wasn’t a corner of the world that hadn’t felt the doubled and tripled efforts of Death’s collection department. The Spanish flu launched its worldwide attack, carrying off somewhere on the order of fifty million souls, many of them young and healthy. The Great War caused the death or wounding of another thirty-seven million. It was hard to fathom, and I wondered if God might just have become fed up with the lot of us.

  We Turners were surprised by our own uncharacteristic good luck. None of us had caught the Spanish flu, and Nell’s husband, Harry, had survived the war, despite the terrifying atrocities of mustard gas and trench warfare. We felt uncommonly blessed.

  Nell received word that he would return in mid-October, and from then on, she refused to leave her little apartment even for a walk in the crisp fall air. “I just want his homecoming to be perfect,” she insisted. “He’s been in a war, for goodness’ sake. Living in filthy trenches with only rations to eat, men blown to bits right in front of him. Is it so much to ask that his loving wife is here to greet him?”

  Kit, Gert, and I took turns running her errands, keeping her company, and begging her to relax. It was my turn that day.

  We sat on the sofa, two-month-old Harry Jr. snoozing in her lap, his tiny baby snores like the purr of a content kitten. Nell started in on one of her repetitive habits. “Won’t he just love the baby?” she asked. It was her personal incantation, as if that one phrase uttered at least five times a day would bring her husband home safe.

  I forced a smile. “I can’t wait to see the look on his face.”

  There was a knock at the door and we both jumped up, Nell jostling the baby so he woke squalling. “Oh!” Nell panted. She handed him to me, then took him back. Handed him over again, smoothed her disheveled hair to no noticeable effect, then took him again.

  “Should I leave?” I whispered frantically, my heart pounding with excitement.

  “No! Yes! No!” She jiggled the baby wildly and his bawling quieted to a confused, slightly dizzy blubbering. “Well, maybe after a minute.”

  She hurried to the door and opened it wide, her body expanding with breath to issue the happiest possible welcome to her beloved and long-awaited husband, and to proudly introduce him to his son.

  A man in uniform stood on the doorstep.

  It was not Harry. And the uniform was not military.

  “Oh . . . ,” Nell said, deflating in bewilderment. “Are you . . . are you lost?”

  He was young, the skin on his face an angry pink color from the newness of shaving. Or possibly it was the shame of knowing his job involved being the wrongest possible person to knock on anyone’s door.

  “Mrs. Herkimer?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  He handed her the telegram. That’s when I knew for sure. Dread crashed into me like a bomber shot out of the sky.

  “Thank you,” she said, searching the pocket of her skirt for a coin to give him.

  “That’s okay, ma’am. No need.” He glanced to me, then quickly retreated.

  Nell stood at the door, the whimpering baby on her hip, the telegram in her hand.

  I knew she knew. She had to know.

  But I also knew that she was trying mightily not to know, to elongate those last few moments of her life before she would know for deadly certain that she was now a twenty-two-year-old widow.

  “Take the baby,” she whispered.

  I got hold of him just before she crumpled to her knees.

  Harry had died of Spanish flu on the train home. Two days later Nell received a letter dated from the week before. “The next time you hear from me, it will be with my own voice, sweetheart!” he wrote. He’d made it through the war without a scratch. “Not so much as a bug bite!”

  A happy letter never made a family cry so hard in the history of the world. In a way, he’d belonged to all of us, and we all wept at the loss, our hearts breaking anew with every smile from baby Harry. Even Gert.

  Nell gave up the little apartment on Floral Avenue. She couldn’t afford it, and couldn’t stand to be there alone anyway. She moved back in with us, back to sharing a small, slope-ceilinged room with Gert, back to life as one of the Turner girls. Her escape had been short-lived.

  In November baby Harry’s colic seemed to get worse, not better, and his sobbing made it harder to keep our own in check. Nell could barely stand it for more than a few minutes, so the rest of us passed him around like a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Even a saint can only hold a squalling baby for so long, never mind a brokenhearted one.

  December 25, 1918, went right by as if it were any other day. Dad never got around to hauling in a tree, and no one asked why not. There were no gifts except a toy or two for the baby, and these were handed over unwrapped, almost apologetically. The poor child’s first Christmas should have been brimming with joy and excitement—our very own live infant with whom to celebrate the birth of Mary’s Child, the Christian world’s collective baby.

  But it was just too sad. And that’s all.

  4

  GERT

  It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.

  —Eddie Cantor, singer, comedian, and minstrel

  I spent New Year’s Eve with Roy, but not out putting on the ritz or anything. We worked the late shift at J. J. Wiley’s, then we drove down to Quaker Lake with a bottle of hooch and watched the sun come up.

  It’s 1919, I thought as the sky grew pink. A brand-new year. And it damned well better be an improvement over the last one. />
  Three weeks later, as we waited for Mother, Winnie, and Dad to get back from the hospital with his mangled hand, I watched the sky go from gray to pink again, and thought what an idiot I’d been even to hope for better days.

  After Mother made her pronouncement about resurrecting the act, Winnie, Kit, and I went to school, since we couldn’t think of what else to do. School, of all the useless things.

  Dad went to work to tell them he wouldn’t be back for a while. And that was that.

  No money—even less than the no money we were used to. I figured we’d all end up at the cigar factory, working twelve-hour shifts, coming home smelling like dead weeds. Of course Mother would’ve had us laying railroad track with the Chinese before letting us work in a factory. After the Binghamton Clothing Factory fire, she thought every mill was a haystack waiting for a lit match. All those poor dead girls. I was fourteen at the time, and knew three girls with older sisters who’d never made it out. There were so many dead they’d held the funeral service in the Stone Opera House.

  “Nell should get a job,” I said as we walked home from school that afternoon.

  “She’s nursing,” said Winnie. “How’s she going to feed the baby and work all day?”

  “Well, we’ve all got part-time jobs except her. And she’s got two mouths to feed, not just one.” I’ll admit I was never one to coat a sour subject like a candy apple.

  “He’s five months old, for goodness’ sake! All he eats is a little mashed banana and oatmeal. And how can you talk about him that way? He’s not just hers—he’s ours.”

  “Yes, well, what’s our baby going to eat when we’re all living at the Broome County Poor Farm, I’d like to know!”

  When we got home, Mother sat at her usual perch on the end of the sofa, her mending laid out like the train of a ball gown. She took in odd sewing jobs, and I wondered who in our neighborhood even owned a black satin gown, much less one that had been worn so often it needed fixing.